Magical Realism and Defamiliarisation in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) is probably the most successful magical realist text ever written. Estimated to have sold more than 30 million copies in 37 languages, the novel continues to attract a startlingly diverse range of readers from around the world.1 It appeals to Marxist critics, to literary aristocrats and Aquarian baby-boomers, to theorists of the postcolonial condition and to the Californian “stay-at-home moms” book group selected by Oprah Winfrey in 2004, who discuss it over margaritas while their kids play in McDonalds. The many reasons for the novel’s popularity can best be seen in its capacity to resolve antimonies and to integrate into apparent harmony a great number of diverse concepts and ideas: most obviously — and seductively — reality and fantasy, but also serious and humorous, myth and history, epic and quotidian, psychological and transcendental, continental, national and familial. For the ordinary reader, this effortless abandonment of established categories may come as balm for the fatigue of living in the secular, disenchanted, “bewildering empirical” modern world. For the critic it poses a series of intriguing hermeneutic puzzles to do with the relationships between writing and ideology, centre and margin, form and content, and, above all, with the cultural politics of utilising a mode of representation that appears to repudiate the key epistemological premises of the modern world view.KeywordsMental RealityMaterialist ReadingCuban RevolutionImplied ReaderMarxist CriticThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.