Power, Trauma And Collective Amnesia In One Hundred Years Of Solitude: Parallels In The Real World

Abstract

As history deconstructs itself at the conclusion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a number of questions tend to surface out of the detritus of Macondo — questions that bear a direct relevance not only to the historical context of Latin America, but to the history of political and economic repression that has shaped human history as well. The novel chronicles the creation of repressive power structures and their recurring reduplication on various levels, ending with the apocalyptic destruction of Macondo. These power based discourse structures find direct parallels in the world’s colonial history. If Macondo’s symbolic range is expanded to incorporate those Third World countries that have endured colonial and dictatorial trauma, the canvas of One Hundred Years of Solitude proportionately finds allegorical parallels in the context of global colonial history. The pivotal question that arises here is whether the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude implies that repressive mechanisms and the resulting traumas would only end with the annihilation of humanity. Is the novel a pessimistic view of humanity? In order to analyse One Hundred Years of Solitude from this angle, I have employed the interdiscursive method of research as posited by Critical Discourse Analysis to unravel the hierarchical structures interwoven within the novel. The text-context model has been utilised to delineate the reinstatement of domination in Macondo and its symbolic global counterparts by analysing the political discrimination and its traumatic outcomes for the residents of Macondo.