Postmodernism in literature

Postmodernism in literature

Barbara Potyka, DTFO 2

 

“ (...) races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

With this short sentence has been ended one of the most beautiful stories of a post-modern literature, a novel that I fell in love with as a fourteen years old girl and to which I go back regularly, with the same disturbing reverie and constant fascination. “One hundred years of solitude” of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a book that I would love to read once again and research to verify its proper place in post-modern literature.

What actually is the post-modern literature? What meaning does it have for me as a receiver? What I actually did expect while taking a decision to read a post-modern book? The most important motive of picking out “One hundred years of solitude” from the whole bunch of similar in genre books was I suppose, the willingness of confrontation with other works of the classic literature, the magical whiff of freshness yet absent in hackneyed but excellent works of the authors writing before postmodernism. I guess that we already got used to it, that a novel renounces more and more the traditional plot or does create fiction which is just a pretext for a consideration about the peculiarities of a genre or disclosure the verbal characteristic of a work, and the antipathy to raising global issues and problems, banality of a subject area, inclination to summoning the occult science and different kind of mystifications, the pursuit of sensations, the courage in drawing from autobiographical facts, the neglect of the originality rule or conscious reference to well-known conventions and genres are just few from the wide-comprehensive characteristic of the post-modern trend. One of the most interesting attributes of postmodernism is definitely the play of an author with a reader and so is the room, that the first one leaves to the receiver on his own interpretation and confrontation of a message with the reality surrounding him, with his own life.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” Beginning from this point, the narrator takes us to the land of dream and magic, telling the very well known to him story passionless and on a very natural way, apparently because he is not connected to any of the personages. He relates the progress of al incidents without judging or highlighting the difference between reality and fiction. The distance to al happenings let him keep objectivity from the beginning till the end of the mentioned work. The narrator describes very accurately al struggles of the personages having place within Macondo (the fictional village) and everything what is happening out of the place is less clear or coherent. I find it very important to mention also the rhythm of the story (close to the speak tradition) that gives dynamics to the novel and extraordinary character of a mystical myth. The narrator is able to tell a lot of events in very few words, condensing information and presenting the details only, which have essential significance for the presented story.

Becoming absorbed by the novel I did notice a lot of references to the Bible, beginning from the social, economical and political development of the town (Genesis) till its destruction (Exodus), through comparison the punishment threatened for incest to the Original Sin (“(...) they were joined till death by a bond that was more solid than love: a common prick of conscience. They were cousins.”), a reference to de Exodus of Israelites in a vision of the journey of the founded families from Guajira, across the mountains till the quagmires (“In his youth, Jose Arcadio Buendia and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back.”), a comparison of the insomnia plague and amnesia to the Egyptian Plagues (insomnia: “Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake.” an amnesia: “Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.”), an analogy of the ascension of Remedios the Beauty to Assumption ((“Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an and, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.”) until the rains that lasted almost five years referred to the Biblical Deluge (“It had not rained for three months and there had been a drought. But when Mr. Brown announced his decision a torrential downpour spread over the whole banana region. It was the one that caught Jose Arcadio Segundo on his way to Macondo. A week later it was still raining. (...) it rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.”)

Intertextuality of the novel is also visible in borrowing personages from the novel of Carlos Fuentes “The death of Artemio Cruz” (“Taken among them were Jose Arcadio Segundo and Lorenzo Gavilan, a colonel in the Mexican revolution, exiled in Macondo, who said that he had been witness to the heroism of his comrade Artemio Cruz. (...) He had taken part in a meeting of union leaders and had been commissioned, along with Colonel Gavilan, to mingle in the crowd and orient it according to how things went.”) what does make the text less original. The story does not have a plot in the conventional sense of this word but describes the foundation and fall of Macondo and the lots of each member of the Buendia family. The time of the presented story has a cyclic structure – all incidents within the village and family Buendia, and names of the most important personages repeats over and over, combining fancy with reality. And this cyclicity is perfect visible in the names (Jose Arcadio, Ursula, Aureliano, Amaranta, Remedios), which displays certain repeating qualities, look and mistakes made by the personages time and again.

As I already mentioned before, the novel does remind me a night dream. The author does use a vocabulary from fairy-tales and combine cleverly the historical facts with fiction. The reality of the novel is based on the most important events of the history of Columbia, somewhere between the half of XIX and half of XX century, when the country had been harassed by civil wars caused by formation of two parties: liberal and conservative (“The war, which until then had been only a word to designate a vague and remote circumstance, became a concrete and dramatic reality.”), the railway had been built (“But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late. The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo.”) and the bloodbath of the workers of banana plantation had been placed (“Trying to flee from the nightmare, Jose Arcadio Segundo dragged himself from one car to another in the direction in which the train was heading, and in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.”). And fiction does create the reality of the novel, based on the mentioned facts, and is told so well that even the most unrealistic subjects, events, situations seem to be real and natural, and so are for example the Gypsies with al their inventions (“(...) parrots painted all colours reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who reads minds, and the multiple-use machine that could be used at the same time to se won buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time, and a thousand more inventions.”), and emerging of the dead (Prudencio Aguilar: “He was tormented by the immense desolation with which the dead man had looked at him through the rain, his deep nostalgia as he yearned for living people, the anxiety with which he searched through the house looking for some more water with which to soak his esparto plug. “He must be suffering a great deal,” he said to Ursula. “You can see that he’s so very lonely.” and Melquiades: “The gypsy was inclined to stay in the town. He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude. Repudiated by his tribe, having lost all of his supernatural faculties because of his faithfulness to life, he decided to take refuge in that corner of the world which had still not been discovered by death, dedicated to the operation of a daguerreotype laboratory.”), and the insomnia plague, and the mysterious parchments of Melquiades, and the death of Aureliano, and the levitation of the father Nicanor, and a lot of more which I won’t cite. All of the story personages make storylines, crossing with each other over and over destroying the chronology, albeit it does not stay in the way and the reader is able to “keep his eye on the ball”. And so is the whole novel, can be read many times all over again and will always be different in reception, rich in interpretations and a huge source of inspirations. There are of course readers who don’t like the story, but these who have ever finished it will return to this book, just to make sure it’s real and discover it over again…