One Hundred Years of Solitude

In a television interview in 1990, Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes some of the reasons, motivations, and consequences of writing and publishing his book One Hundred Years of Soitude. In the interview, he says “ The banana events are perhaps my earliest memory. They were so legendary that when I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude I wanted to know the real facts and the true number of deaths. It was a problem for me…when I discovered it wasn’t a spectacular slaughter….I couldn’t stick to historical reality…The legend has now been adopted as history.”

Only a dozen or so people really died in the historically true strike, which took place in Colombia in 1928. As I am not at all familiar with Colombian labor history, I at first reading, took Marquez for his word that the crimes of American greed were just as destructive and apocalyptic as Marquez describes it. Perhaps because the image of trucks full of dead bodies has been a sad and tragic motif throughout the 20^th century.  But the characters in the book itself have not lived through world war two and have not been exposed to images of mass execution like those of us today. To those in the book who did not bear first hand witness to the events, it seemed incomprehensible and ludicrous that so many could die. And in some ways this is quite true. It is ludicrous that so many could be murdered but also disturbingly and tragically possible. 

            But why did Marquez lie about the events and inflate their magnitude? As Marquez himself said, when he first grew up the events were already legendary. The cultural memory of the event described it as just so horrible. It is not necessarily that Marquez is lying, as much as it is him telling his cultural point-of-view of the events. Of course, the banana massacre is not the only event in the novel which is based on historical evidence but at the same time is exaggerated.  Aureliano Buendia goes off on 77 wars which seems like quite the exaggeration. Ursula appears to be one hundred and fifty years old at least by the time she dies. Many of the events that seem grand, biblical, magical are perhaps that way in the book because that is how the culture of Colombia and Marquez’s family remember the events.