Dude. Gross.

Wow. I have just experienced one of the most disturbingly grotesque sentences in my literary lifetime, detailing a father(Aureliano) looking over his garden while searching for his newborn son: “ …he admired the persistence of the spiderwebs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn. And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden” (445). The mental image of a dead newborn baby being dragged by ants into their holes stuck with me throughout the rest of the book, leading me to gloss over the last several pages. Long after I put the book down, still sitting on my sofa, a chill ran down my spine to my feet, then back up again to my stomach. But somehow, I wasn’t exactly surprised.

Such is the power of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His imagery goes from beautiful to utterly horrific in the width of a period; his writing reflects the sudden, awful aspects of his characters’ lives. For instance, the happy promise found in the arrival of Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s seventeen sons is sharply contrasted with the eventual murder of all of them. The exhilaration of the workers’ strike is followed by the horrendous massacre of thousands of the same workers and their families. The gorgeous Remedios the Beauty, whose very presence horribly kills her suitors. In my opinion, the most horribly cruel event in the novel was the shooting and subsequent paralysis of Mauricio Babilonia, Meme’s lover, who is “mistaken” for a chicken thief: “He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies, who did not give him a moment’s peace, and ostracized as a chicken thief” (313). The novel merely cycles the same effective plot device: a good episode, shortly followed by a disastrous event that eclipses the previous good episode and must be followed by another good incident. In this way, reading the novel becomes reminiscent of drowning in a depressing, melancholic ocean that is occasionally interrupted by a frantic gasp for redeeming air. Just when the reader thinks that the novel couldn’t be any darker, a someone else suddenly dies. It is a relentless, harsh novel detailing the rises and falls of one extremely unlucky family.

In making his novel an unending deluge of misfortune and sorrow, Marquez achieves several remarkable effects on the reader. For one, he made me glad that I’m not a Buendia. Secondly, in dehumanizing us through such unremitting catastrophe and really weird, incestual relations(!), Marquez shows us just how lucky we are, and even made this reader grateful for all that has not befallen him. And by the end of the novel, this makes us even more human: call it a humble pie made up of death, insanity, and a big slice of sexual perversion. (514)

Seeing as how I will be in Bowdoin and Cornell all weekend visiting the campuses with no access to a computer, and the fact that I haven’t read enough more of my book to constitute another blog entry, I figured I would just post some Jstor articles I found that might be useful. I’ll write the blog when I return and have read more.
Thanks!
· Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez & the Lost Art of Storytelling
· Ricardo Gullon
· Diacritics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 27-32
· Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

· The Necessity of the Literary Tradition: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One-Hundred Years of Solitude"
· James C. Jupp
· The English Journal, Vol. 89, No. 3, Our History, Ourselves (Jan., 2000), pp. 113-115
· Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

· Play and Playfulness in Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
· Enrique A. Giordano
· Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4 (1988), pp. 217-229
· Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

Bill is Too Harsh With Us

“The World is Too Much With Us”, by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, deals with man’s self-absorption and resulting disregard of nature in the early nineteenth century. The poem reads much like a pastor preaching from his pulpit; there is very little humility in the way Wordsworth scolds the reader for turning his or her back on Mother Nature’s gifts. Using both a threatening and frustrated tone along with a smattering of vivid imagery and metaphors, Wordsworth tries to warn his audience of an imminent threat before it becomes too late for mankind to redeem itself.

The first four lines of the sonnet address Wordsworth’s critical point: that the world is “too much with us”; in other words, that we dwell too much on our “material world”. In saying this, Wordsworth is not just talking about the material-capitalistic aspect of our lives. He is also referring to the rapid modernization and urbanization of his time. In doing so, Wordsworth argues that we have forgotten about the pure, simple joys to be found in Nature. When talking about “[g]etting and spending”, he bemoans the fact that we “lay waste our powers” by taking our world’s natural wonders for granted. These wonders are represented by our “hearts” which are, paradoxically, the very things that make us human.

The next three lines describe some of Nature’s awe-inspiring qualities, such as the sea that “bares her bosom to the moon” and the “howling” winds. Ironically, Wordsworth uses personification to describe such an inhuman force. Despite the awful magnificence of this apparent storm, Wordsworth exclaims that it “moves us not”. In being focused on our own selfish pursuits and material objectives, our eyes have become blind and our ears deaf to the natural world around us— even towards something so brutally powerful as a rampaging tempest.

The most interesting aspect of the poem begins halfway through the ninth line with the exclamation “Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn”. Wordsworth is basically saying that he would rather be a pagan who is able to glean some joy from nature than belong to the materialistic 19th century society that he is surrounded by. The references to Greek mythology (Proteus and Triton, two sea gods) evoke a wistful longing for a return to an ancient world where Nature is revered. Wordsworth undoubtedly intended to shake pre-Victorian era England by renouncing both his society and his religion in the hopes of getting his point across.

Starting out as a gentle admonition, climaxing as a hopeless revelation, and ending with a pensive yet dramatic reflection, “The World Is Too Much With Us” uses many different styles of tone to guilt, teach, and shock the audience into realizing what they have become. While nineteenth century Englishmen thought they were becoming more and more “civilized” and “human”, Wordsworth argues that they are only reverting more and more to the base human tendencies of greed and egotism. In this desperate, apocalyptic plea for change, Wordsworth implicitly and explicitly states that the only hope for mankind lies in drastic action being taken to reverse such an unnatural course.

Discussion Questions:

1) Does anyone disagree with my interpretation of the poem? If so, please elaborate.

2) What is the significance of the “pagan” references in the poem?

3) Is the world too much with us? In other words, does this poem bring up an important issue in today’s society?

4) Why do you think Wordsworth is so upset about our growing insensitivity towards Nature?

100 Pages of Solitude

While reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, this reader found himself asking whether or not the book transcends the normal realm of rational human thought and action and takes place in some sort of magical world. Of course, some of it is clearly seen through the eyes of an uneducated third-person narrator; for instance, the magnets and magnifying glass that are thought to be magical. On the other hand, the appearance of Prudencio Aguilar’s ghost (Who was killed by Jose Arcadio Buendia in a duel) is wholly unsurprising, even expected: “ Ursula…saw Prudencio Aguilar by the water jar…It did not bring on fear in hear, but pity. She told her husband what she had seen, but he did not think much of it”(24).The beauty of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing, however, is that he manages to portray everyday events and items as fantastic while supernatural events are described as if they were an everyday occurrence. In this way, Marquez captures the reader in a spell-binding place that leaves my head spinning long after I put the book down. I half-expected a unicorn to be sitting on my living room couch when I walked out of my room, yet I found the ice in my refrigerator to be wholly awe-inspiring. In creating a world that walks the line between reality and fantasy, Marquez creates a Harry Potter-like effect in that Marquez’s world is related to ours but is much, much better.

The characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude only add to the mystique. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the ranting lunatic; Rebeca, the orphan who eats dirt and whitewash; Melquiades, the leader of the gypsies who possesses many strange and seemingly devilish powers; Jose Arcadio, the tattooed giant; and many, many more exotic and intriguing characters. Another important facet of the novel is its preoccupation with death. When the line between life and death is blurred so indiscriminately, Macondo (the village) becomes either a heaven or a hell in the eyes of the reader. To me, there is certainly something satanic about the village, especially once strange things start happening, such as the inability of the villagers to sleep and retain memories for awhile.

By juxtaposing realistic, everyday life with the magical, supernatural events that give Macondo an eerie sort of zest, Marquez allowed me to relate character’s lives. Using intense, descriptive realism— and, might I add, overly sexual language that forms a gritty, genuine undertone— Marquez has written another masterful novel. In addition, I must say that I prefer this novel over Love in the Time of Cholera because although Love in the Time of Cholera deals with the tortured existence of one man, One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays the tortured existence of an entire family. And that, my friends, is tragic realism at its best. Now excuse me; I have to go feed that unicorn. (496)