Marquez's Politics of Memory

In one sense, Macondo is a exemplary community representing all Latin American nations and their habitual failure to bring a good breeding to their slew in the century covered. Garcia Marquez focuses not on one reference but on the Buendia family through the generations, although the Colonel certainly emerges as a major point of study.

Garcia Marquez creates the world of the Buendias in the evolving realm of Macondo in the light of magical naive realism, an approach which often gives the reader an uneasy, unsteady, in time dizzying sensation of "reality." The issue of memory in this magical realism brings to mind a kind of twilight "reality" in between sleep and wakefulness, or in between remember and forgetting. The difficulties the char guessers experience in simply deciphering reality in the middle of the chaos of their lives gives them a reason to yield to their powerful adversaries by modal value of forgetting.

Macondo is populated by poor people, but the life of the village is itself rich with events, relationships, and, at least at the beginning, most measure of hope for change politically and economically. The failure of the acknowledgework forcet of hope, justice and freedom is another reason the people melt down to choose forgetting rather than remembering. The act of forgetting in such a world of suffering and disappointment is in part an act of survival, an act of adaptation and coping with that great pain.

Macondo in Garcia Marquez is a mixture of African and Spanish cultures which includes parts of both old traditional societies and parts of advance(a) society. Garcia Marquez begins his novel with one of the Buendia family facing a firing police squad and reflecting back on what seems to be an Eden-like Macondo, a Macondo which will last be revealed as an illusion, an ideal, a community of unrealized hope. However, as the reader begins the novel and is led into the past by way of the future, he or she does not know that what has begun is a butt of forgetting, or at least a process in which the past is idealized in part in cast to allow the idealizer to live.

The fact that the Colonel is facing the firing squad is symbolic of the death of the body, mind and soul which all the denizens of Macondo face, whatever small-scale power they might have:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,

In spite of his lordly return, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was not enthusiastic over the looks of things. The government troops habituated their positions without resistance and that aroused an illusion of victory among the Liberal existence that it was not right to destroy, but the revolutionaries knew the truth, Colonel Aureliano Buendia better than any of them. Although at that moment he had more than five thousand men under his command and held two coastal states, he had the whim of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a situation that was . . . confused. . . . (137).

This sense of uncertainty, of the unpredictable mutability of "facts," is present not completely in the mind of the reader, but also in the minds and memories of the characters who dwell in such a world. The question of memory in the book, then, is confused by the dream-like nature of much of the work. How apace are dreams forgotten? How difficult it is sometimes to remember the details of a dream which one was having only moments before waking? How quickly the waking person becomes grateful wh
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