Christy Forshaw, June 2023
Latin America has seen a prevalence of violent political instability in the past century. Coinciding with this, the past century has also been a time of literary growth in the region, most commonly as a result of the ‘boom’ of the 1960s and 1970s.[1] As a result, analysis of Latin American literature as inseparable from its political context is not a new development. As Miguel Ángel Asturias suggested in his Nobel Lecture (1967):
‘All the great literature is one of testimony and vindication.’[2]
The redemptive tendency of the Latin American oeuvre becomes particularly interesting when examined against the readily growing critical field of ‘Peace Literature’, defined by Laurence Lerner as the analysis of literature undertaken from ‘the view that war is an evil which we are trying to learn how to eradicate.’[3] He suggests its primary goal is to identify subversions of war or war-like images in texts. Anthony Adolf expands upon this methodology of peace studies to focus on what Peace Literature ‘can do, rather than what it is’,[4] expanding it into a field of action. Specifically, he submits that ‘behaviour based on the understanding of texts as peace literature can serve as a bridge’[5] to other domains of peace research, such as conflict resolution and geopolitical and security studies.
With this critical school in mind, I will examine Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982) from an anglophonic perspective. Both journalists by trade, and often compared with each other, they are larger than life figures in their activism outside of their literature. For Márquez, this stems from the critical reception to his literature; and for Allende, from its widespread popularity. Therefore, I would suggest they demonstrate the potential of violent political literature to be criticized from a lens of peace-building, as opposed to simply examining the destruction in the text, and as a result of their own activism demonstrate this bridge from literature to pacifism.
In Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a critique of violence can be uncovered in the way war is portrayed as a lengthy, unavoidable and incomprehensible entity that weaves in and out of the town of Macondo in which the novel is set. The novel starts with the line:
‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’[6]
Even though the novel then reverts back to a time when Aureliano was a child, Márquez situates the novel in the context of impending war through the ‘firing squad’, lending it an omnipresence. The conflicts themselves are portrayed as meaningless and generally distant to the town. Márquez’s narrator makes the assertion that ‘Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all (p. 113).’ The prolepsis here gives the war an impersonal and futile nature; the reader has been told the conflicts will all fail, meaning they are less invested in them, since there is no suspense.
This is compounded by the constant narrative that the war is simply causing a meaningless cycle of destruction, as Father Nicanor illustrates:
‘the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt (p. 147).’
This creates a visual representation of pointless destruction by suggesting the war has become so confused in its motivations those who are meant to be defending the church end up destroying it just for it to be built again. When Colonel Aureliano Buendía asks Colonel Gerineldo Márquez why he is fighting, the answer he gives is ‘for the great Liberal party (p. 148).’ However, the narrator has given the reader no context of what the ‘Liberal party’ means, as is emphasized when Aureliano replies that it is ‘something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone (p. 149).’ This sense of the war as tedious and futile is then further highlighted as it drags on and becomes characterized by an ‘emptiness (p. 175).’ Having argued earlier that he was fighting ‘’for the great Liberal party’, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez becomes confused by his own cause as Colonel Aureliano’s words no longer make sense to him; he feels they ‘were gradually losing all meaning (p. 175).’ The fact that the reader is not told what these words are, simply that they mean nothing, makes the reader complicit in this lack of concrete understanding of the point of the war. They are not given the opportunity to judge Aureliano’s words for themselves, but simply told they have no meaning for Márquez, meaning they cannot have a significance for the reader, either.
By midway through the novel, Aureliano has signed a peace treaty that is essentially a resignation, and he slowly retreats into a disillusionment with reality, realized through the repetitive act of making and selling tiny gold fish. This trade of gold fish mimics the use of gold fish earlier on in the novel as a way of communication between liberals (p. 141), subverting this symbol of resistance into a symbol of its failure. The cycle of selling fishes for coins and then converting the coins back into gold seems to mimic the previous exasperation at the cyclical nature of the war, as it is characterized as a similar ‘exasperating vicious cycle (p. 215).’ Aureliano’s seventeen sons conceived during the war are killed (p. 258), symbolically ending the legacy of his rebellion, and his life culminates in deep dissatisfaction in a self-inflicted ‘imprisonment (p. 282).’ Therefore, there is a clear critique of war as pointless by Márquez; it lacks meaning in the novel, beyond being a source of confusion, discontent and violence.
The critique of war in this text, therefore, is highly cynical. However, due to the vibrant description of a fantastical culture within the novel, when examined against its cultural impact the novel transforms into one of active peace-building. In 1982, when Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he gave his Nobel Lecture on the struggles Latin America has faced and in the speech gave One Hundred Years of Solitude, which rarely offers specific dates or locations, a clear context.. He listed statistics of the state of affairs in Latin America: ‘there have been five wars and seventeen military coups.’[7] This echoes the statement ‘Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings’, except this time the statistic is real, linking his text explicitly to contemporary history. He then, unlike in the novel, turns this directly into a plea for social change, manipulating his own title to advocate that ‘the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.’[8] Therefore, Márquez’s text creates a mouthpiece for him as he advocates for social change.
This bridge between Márquez as a writer and Márquez as an activist was explored by Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker in 1999, a time of political instability for Colombia. He examined the political nature of Márquez’s career, not shying away from the times it has garnered controversy, such as his friendship with Fidel Castro. However, he also provides evidence for the amplifying effect that Márquez’s literature has had in making him a symbol of community for a divided Colombia; Márquez is commonly referred to as ‘el maestro (the master)’ or ‘Nuestro Nobel (our Nobel Prize winner)’, being considered by many the only Nobel Prize winner in the way his win has been seen as ‘a vindication of Colombian culture.’[9] Anderson’s article highlights how Márquez can be seen as a literal bridge between literature and action, since he has since served as an orchestrator of talks between the United States and dictators, but also in a cultural sense, as he has become a symbol of Colombian identity and culture. Adolf highlighted how literature can be ‘cathartic’[10] in provoking realization of self-knowledge and the Colombian response to Márquez, in the extreme respect they have for him, highlights how he has given them this by producing a Colombian identity story that has garnered critical success. Even the medium of The New Yorker illustrates this bridge, as it shows Márquez sparking discussion of Latin American politics in American culture but stemming from his Colombian voice. Therefore, the text can be analysed as criticizing war, but can also then be analysed in terms of how this critique of war allows Márquez to promote peace-building activism, becoming more than just a criticism of war but a bridge to peace.
Allende’s most successful novel, The House of the Spirits, is often widely considered to be inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude in that it similarly follows the experience of one family over many generations, utilizing prolepsis and magical realism. Her novel is more overtly political than Márquez’s in that it narrates a version of the 1973 coup d’état that led to Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s dictatorship in Chile. The House of the Spirits critiques civil war by demonstrating the destructive impacts on a singular family unit. It is not until halfway through the novel and after the death of the matriarch, Clara, who as a clairvoyant is a driver of magical realism in the text, that the coup is introduced as a plot point. The coup is distinctly lacking in fantasy. Things that seem fantastical to the characters are actually now a part of reality, showing bleak realism replacing the magical. Following the coup, luxuries begin to appear in the shops ‘as if by magic’[11] but the reader, who has been observing the economic sabotage by the right of the left-wing government, knows this is not actual magic but simply an end to the sabotage, contrasting real fantastical elements earlier in the novel, such as when only Clara knows where her mother’s head has been left. When Alba is taken prisoner, the narrator says:
‘she invoked the spirits of the days of the three-legged table and her grandmother’s restless sugar bowl.. but they appear to have abandoned her (p. 459).’
Therefore, Alba tries to cling onto the magic of the past, but it has disappeared in the violence of the dictatorship. When Alba is harbouring fugitives in the house, the patriarch Esteban Trueba assumes it is his wife’s ghost (p. 449), showing again how things that were once explained by magic have been usurped by harsh reality.
The violence inflicted upon Allende’s most sympathetic characters, namely Alba and Jaime, as a result of the coup rpovide a pointed criticism of violence as both are subjected to horrific torture. When Alba and Jaime discover their father is harbouring weapons in preparation for military action, they go to the comical extreme of drilling a hole in the wall to remove the weapons, building a pacifist narrative. Alba initially wants to give the weapons to her revolutionary boyfriend, but Jaime convinces her ‘Miguel was no less a terrorist (p. 402)’ and instead they bury them in the mountains. Therefore, like Márquez’s novel, Allende’s can be analysed as a pacifist criticism of war.
However, unlike Márquez’s novel, Allende’s ends with a hopeful message of solidarity in the face of mass violence, as Alba – whose name means ‘dawn’ – is returned home to her grandfather and vows ‘not to prolong hatred (p. 490).’ Whilst One Hundred Years of Solitude ends with the death of a bloodline, as the last of the Buendías die out, Alba is pregnant at the novel’s culmination (p. 491), suggesting future hope. It is precisely peace-minded narratives such as this that have meant the dialogue surrounding Allende’s place in Latin American literary tradition has been defensive; she has been forced to defend the integrity of her novels as more than ‘literary soap operas’[12], as if their popular tropes, such as romance and reconciliation, detract from their potency. However, from a Peace Literature perspective, the commercial appeal of The House of the Spirits, akin to that of a soap opera, allows it to become a bridging text.
As the critic Stephen Hart emphasizes, Allende differs from Márquez in that, due to the slightly less abstract and more traditionally uplifting tropes of her novel, she reaches a popular audience that gives her the ability to sell out the Royal Albert Hall, for example.[13] Allende’s literature can be seen as a ‘bridge’ to active peace-building through the fact that she writes novels of hope, which makes them popular with the masses, and then this popularity allows her to spread these messages of hope to the audience she has garnered. For example, on the international stage, she has used her popularity to present viewpoints of hope coming out of political crisis; in a New York Times article published a decade after the dictatorship entitled ‘Pinochet without Hatred’, she explores his bloody legacy and how to move past it with justice but without resentment, asking for him to reveal where the bodies of his victims are buried, bringing the redemptive hope from her novel into her political output.[14]
In an article for the Peace Review, Allende also illustrates Adolf’s concept of catharsis as she describes her novel as a ‘valve’[15] from which her roots could be recovered, not just for her but for Chileans in general, like Márquez does for Colombians. She has spoken on the responsibility she feels to lecture on Chile in America[16], showing her using her literary popularity to spread her political message, like Márquez has been able to do with his critical popularity, such as through his Nobel Lecture. Therefore, both authors seem to understand their own literature as peace-building, as they self-create this bridge from their texts to activism.
To conclude, Márquez and Allende serve as only a very small example of a host of redemptive literature across Latin America. However, these two texts highlight how important it is to examine literature with peace-building in mind because understanding the autobiographical link between political novels and their purpose then means they can be used more widely as peace-building education; the novels of Márquez and Allende are both violent and conflict stricken, yet by examining them in terms of what they have achieved through their criticism of conflict the dialogue around the texts becomes one of construction, as opposed to simply analysing the violence present.
Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Bogin, Magda, trans. The House of the Spirits (London: Vintage, 2011)
Rabassa, Gregory, trans. One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper & Row, 1970)
Secondary Sources:
Adolf, Antony, ‘What Does Peace Literature Do? An Introduction to the Genre and its Criticism’, Peace Research, Vol. 42: No. 1 (2010)
Allende, Isabel, ‘Writing as an Act of Hope’, Peace Review, Vol. 5: No. 2 (1993), pp. 165-172
Allende, Isabel, ‘Pinochet Without Hatred’, The New York Times Magazine, < https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/17/magazine/pinochet-without-hatred.html> [18/04/2023]
Anderson, Jon Lee, ‘The Power of García Márquez’, The New Yorker, < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/27/the-power-of-garcia-marquez> [18/04/2023]
Asturias, Miguel Angel, ‘The Latin American Novel Testimony of an Epoch’, The Nobel Prize, < https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1967/asturias/lecture/> [18/04/2023]
Hart, Stephen, ‘The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, E. Kristal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 270-282
Lerner, Laurence, ‘Peace Studies: A Proposal’, New Literary History, Vol. 26: No. 3 (1995), <https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/assets/university/schools/school-of-english/documents/staff-students/ug/essay-style-sheet.pdf>,
Márquez, Gabriel García, ‘The solitude of Latin America’, The Nobel Prize, < https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/ > [18/04/2023]
Rodden, John, and Allende, Isabel, ‘”The Responsibility to Tell You”: An Interview with Isabel Allende’, The Kenyon Review, Vol. 13: No. 1 (1991) pp. 113-123
Boom & Post-Boom: Latin American Literature since the 1960’s’, Boston College Libraries, < https://libguides.bc.edu/virtual-book-display/latin-american-literature> [18/04/2023]
[1] ‘Boom & Post-Boom: Latin American Literature since the 1960’s’, Boston College Libraries, < https://libguides.bc.edu/virtual-book-display/latin-american-literature> [18/04/2023]
[2] Miguel Angel Asturias, ‘The Latin American Novel Testimony of an Epoch’, The Nobel Prize, < https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1967/asturias/lecture/> [18/04/2023]
[3] Laurence Lerner, ‘Peace Studies: A Proposal’, New Literary History, Vol. 26: No. 3 (1995), <https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/assets/university/schools/school-of-english/documents/staff-students/ug/essay-style-sheet.pdf>, p. 643
[4] Antony Adolf, ‘What Does Peace Literature Do? An Introduction to the Genre and its Criticism’, Peace Research, Vol. 42: No. 1 (2010), <https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23607874.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ade8a51dd8a4359ed3b052e81fae34e04&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1>, p. 10
[5] Ibid., p. 11
[6] All quotations from One Hundred Years of Solitude in this essay are taken from Gregory Rabassa, trans. One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 1
[7] Gabriel García Márquez, ‘The solitude of Latin America’, The Nobel Prize, <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/ > [18/04/2023]
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jon Lee Anderson, ‘The Power of García Márquez’, The New Yorker, < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/27/the-power-of-garcia-marquez> [18/04/2023]
[10] Adolf (2010), p. 13
[11] All quotations from The House of the Spirits in this essay are taken from Magda Bogin, trans. The House of the Spirits (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 424
[12] John Rodden and Isabel Allende, ‘”The Responsibility to Tell You”: An Interview with Isabel Allende’, The Kenyon Review, Vol. 13: No. 1 (1991) pp. 113-123
[13] Stephen Hart, ‘The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, E. Kristal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 270-282
[14] Isabel Allende ‘Pinochet Without Hatred’, The New York Times Magazine, < https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/17/magazine/pinochet-without-hatred.html> [18/04/2023]
[15] Isabel Allende, ‘Writing as an Act of Hope’, Peace Review, Vol. 5: No. 2 (1993), pp. 165-172
[16] Allende, ‘The Responsibility to Tell You’, p. 120