One Political Theme in the Novel

Oren R writes: I also have a question: is the novel in fact one huge metaphor for the exploitation of South American resources?

This is a serious question about the novel which requires a great deal of thought from its readers. There is much about the historical and amply documented exploitation of South and Central American resources in Márquez’ novel: both human resources as well as material resources. In particular the novel refers to the depredations of the United Fruit Company in Columbia. It would, however, be a mistake to think that this is Márquez’ only interest in writing One Hundred Years. An interpretation that focused only on this issue would be limited in a way that Márquez himself warns us against (see previous postings). So the problem becomes, what is the role of this exploitation, and how does it sit among the many other issues in this complex novel?

One way of dealing with this issue is by looking at the novel’s status as an example of postcolonial fiction. The postcolonial novel tends to focus on the effects of having been a colony on the minds and experiences of the people of a colonized nation. It is generally not a political tract, but a work of art that functions by allusion, imagery, and sometimes even allegory to examine the human cost of colonialism. But most postcolonial fiction tends to work with the colonial past in oblique ways that mobilize all of the resources of the art of fiction in order primarily to create a work of art which functions artistically despite the terrible details of the colonized past.

If you think of how densely the layers of colonization accumulate in Columbia, you will realize how complex this picture becomes. First there is the colonization by Spain, referred to very obliquely in the story of the origins of Fernanda del Carpio (who first appears on page 200 of our edition of One Hundred Years). Fernanda’s home city, and her “royal” background, is transparently a satirical representation of the most ‘antique’ layer of Columbia’s colonial past: notice that her appearance alone precipitates a massacre of Macondo’s citizens as well as the numerous ways she influences and ‘inflects’ the Buendía family once she joins up with them. Then there is the overthrow of the Spanish colonial masters by the Bolivarian Revolution which swept South America’s Spanish colonies. Next there follows the exploitation of the native population by the heirs of the Spanish who manage to take control of the government out of which grew one of the longest wars in history between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ elements within Colombian society.

This struggle, with many interruptions and interpolations of hostilities between Columbia and its neighbors is mixed in with the efforts of the United States to interfere in many ways with Columbia’s situation which start with the suborning of rebels in Panama, once a part of Columbia, to rebel and separate from the ‘mother country,’ through the years of supporting United Fruit Company (now rebranded as Chiquita Banana Co.) which resulted in bloody and violent repressions, repeatedly all the way up to the present day, of efforts of Columbians to control their own national destiny (see the links on Columbian History to the right of this page). This exploitation by Chiquita Banana, portrayed in the novel in the story of the banana wars, continues to this day according to many supporters of trades unions worldwide, who claim that hundreds of union organizers and workers have been murdered to support the hold of the US fruit companies to this day.

This complex and layered history, to get back to Oren’s question, is not directly portrayed in One Hundred Years, but it is definitely present and poetically portrayed. Think of how TS Eliot portrayed the destruction of European culture at the end of the First World War in The Wasteland. (If you haven’t read The Wasteland yet, read it; no educated person should be unfamiliar with it.) The danger is to treat the history as the key to understanding the novel. It is no such thing. Think about this, what does an artist do with his or her art? Do they turn their work into journalism? The direct and most honest answer is, No.

To shift ground a little, take a major work of literary art such as Homer’s Iliad. Is it about the causes of the Trojan War? Does its value derive from its relationship to the Trojan War? The answer to both of these questions would be no. In fact, the poem is entirely independent of the Trojan War and gives us much more than a metaphor for a particular war. It is a work of art, with rhythms, images, characters, conflicts, and beauty all its own. The Iliad talks about all wars everywhere and the impact of wars upon human beings in all their complexities: how war affects friendships, marriages, families, kingdoms, the victors and the defeated as well as the survivors of wars, and a host of other issues. It is valuable as a work of art partly because it is generalizable: touching on universal issues common to all of humanity. The interpreter’s task then becomes not to trace the relationship to an actual war, but to work out just what the poem says about these universal things. So a good paper on Homer’s Iliad might focus on “The Theme of Loss in the Iliad,” or “Familial Bonds in the Iliad,” or “Friendship in Homer’s War Poem” or any number of things that don’t directly have to do with the actual Trojan War, in part because the poem is more about its own universal and generalizable contents than it is about an actual war.

This is true also of Picasso’s Guernica, which was inspired by a specific air raid, but which achieves greatness as a work of art, not just because of its beauty, but also because of the universality of its portrayal of human suffering and loss in time of war. The most difficult thing for beginning students of literature is to draw a line between literature and reality and to understand the relationship between the two. Specifics of history may inspire a work of art. Historical events may even heavily inflect works of art, adding the atmosphere and charge of real events to the artworks’ impact. But works of art are not documentaries: if artworks don’t function on their own, they fail as artworks. When you look at One Hundred Years look at such things as its universality, its portrayal of truths about such universal things as human suffering, love, death, loss, the impact of exploitation, technology, the experience of time and isolation and more.