Society and Politics in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract

Ever since One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published the purpose and rationale of the work has been a subject of intense critical reflection. There seems to be a general agreement that the novel is best understood as Marquez’s humorous take on the quintessential Latin American reality. The fictional town of Macondo, its inhabitants and the whole atmosphere of One Hundred Years are so essentially Latin American that the whole continent appears to have erupted in speech in this novel. Yet, this is so evident a preoccupation of the novel that to stress it further runs the risk of labouring the obvious. Having reached a dead end these ‘totalistic’ readings have given way to more focussed and pointed discussions on different thematic concerns of the work. There are now excellent studies of One Hundred Years ranging from desire and feminism to a purely humanist reading (Prieto, Spiller). This paper proposes to offer a reading of One Hundred Years in its social and political context and in the way explore some of the personal political convictions of its author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.