Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Grotesque Magical Realist Text

Year 2015, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 489 - 496, 01.04.2015

Hatice Elif Diler

https://doi.org/10.24289/ijsser.106442

Abstract

Since the 1960s magical realism has been a significant narrative mode used by postmodernist and postcolonial authors all over the world. Disregarding the conventional classical realism and its techniques, magical realist authors have used postmodernist techniques to achieve their postcolonial aims. Their attempts to find innovative techniques have resulted in embracing the Rabelaisian aesthetics and Bakthinian concerns in their works. Grotesque realism is considered a type of magical realism. Thanks to the embrace of the magical, the improbable and the profane, grotesque magical realist texts reflect a strong regenerative carnivalesque spirit and a general worldview in popular carnival forms.

The most renowned exponent of magical realism from Latin America is Gabriel García Márquez, the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian author García Márquez’s magnum opus, is generally regarded as the masterpiece of magical realism. One Hundred Years of Solitude employs carnivalesque-grotesque features and stands out for its carnivalesque spirit. To convey his message, García Márquez mostly relies on Bakhtinian concerns such as folklore, folk laughter and carnivalesque. The aim of this study is to analyze the carnivalesque-grotesque features used in the novel and their contribution to García Márquez’s meaning. Thus, this paper attempts to scrutinize One Hundred Years of Solitude as a grotesque magical realist text.

 

Keywords: Gabriel García Márquez; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Grotesque Magical Realism; Carnivalesque-grotesque; Postcolonialism.

Keywords

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Grotesque Magical Realism, Carnivalesque-grotesque, postcolonialism

References

• Award Ceremony Speech: Presentation speech by L. Gyllensten (1982). Retrieved from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/presentation-speech.html
• Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Bell-Villada, G. H. (1990). García Márquez: The man and his work. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
• Bell-Villada, G. H. (2002). Introduction. In G. H. Bell-Villada (ed.), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A casebook (pp. 3-16). New York: Oxford University Press.
• -
• Cooper, B. (2004) Magical realism in West African fiction: Seeing with a third eye. London & New York: Routledge.
• Danow, D. K. (1995). The spirit of carnival: Magical realism and the grotesque. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky.
• Darraj, S. M. (2006). The great Hispanic heritage: Gabriel García Márquez. New York, NY: Chelsea House Publishers.
• Delbaere-Garant, J. (1995). Psychic realism, mythic realism, grotesque realism: Variations on magic realism in contemporary literature in English. In L. P. Zamora & W. B. Faris (Eds.), Magical realism: Theory, history, community (pp. 249-263). Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press.
• García Márquez, G. (2006). One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
• Gutiérrez Mouat, R. (1988). The economy of the narrative sign in No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour. In J. Ortega (ed.), Gabriel García Márquez and the power of fiction (pp. 17-33). Texas: The University of Texas Press.
• -
• Higgins, J. (2002). Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad. In G. H. Bell-Villada (ed.), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A casebook (pp. 33-51). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Irvine, D. J. (1998). Fables of the plague years: Postcolonialism, postmodernism, and magic realism in Cien años de soledad. ARIEL, 29 (4), 53-80. Retrieved from: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420031435&v=2.1&u=dumlu&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
• Jameson, F. (1986). On magical realism in film. Critical Inquiry 12 (2), 301-325. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343476
• Martin, G. (2008). Gabriel García Márquez: A life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Pelayo, R. (2009). Gabriel García Márquez: A biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Swanson, P. (1995). The new novel in Latin America: Politics and popular culture after the Boom. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Zamora, L. P., & Faris, W. B. (1995). Daiquiri birds and Flaubertian parrot(ie)s. In L. P. Zamora & W. B. Faris (Eds.), Magical realism: Theory, history, community (pp. 1-11). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.