Skip to main content

Sound and Fury of Life

 


One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez [1967] is an epic that tells the story of six generations. It is a kaleidoscopic novel that blends myth and philosophy, history and magic, humour and grief so seamlessly that it defies classification. Literary critics have given the label of ‘magical realism’ to Marquez’s style. His books lie beyond any facile label, however.

It is difficult to interpret Marquez’s novels for the same reason. Layers of meaning emerge as we read them. The more you read, the profounder the meanings appear. Profoundly complex.

One Hundred Years of Solitude transcends any simple interpretations. This post looks at just one character: Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The novel begins with him and ends with him, so to say. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” That is the opening sentence of the novel. Towards the end of the novel, the parish priest of Macondo – the place discovered and developed by the Buendias – says that “there used to be a street here with that name (Colonel Aureliano Buendia) and in those days people had the custom of naming their children after streets.”

Colonel Aureliano is one of the protagonists of this epic. Yet he ends up without even a public remembrance. He is not even a memory, let alone part of history.

What is human life but a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury but signifying nothing? Marquez reminds us of that Shakespearean wisdom again and again. Colonel Aureliano is the best example for that, perhaps.

The Colonel was a Liberal rebel who led no less than 32 armed uprisings against the Conservative government and lost each one of them. He was such a national hero that women came to have sex with him in order to bear his son. Thus he begot 18 sons all of whom were named Aureliano in his honour. Yet this man would die alone without offspring of his own. Without even being remembered by anyone. A sad, mad end leaning against the same chestnut tree to which his insane father was tied in the last many years of his life. This man who survived 14 attempts on his life by rivals, 73 ambushes, and a firing-squad, dies an ignoble death. He was already forgotten by the people even before his death. No wonder, his every existence is in doubt a few decades later. “There used to be a street here by that name…”!

That is what human life is. A walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. Sound and fury that lead to nothing in the end. Lead to degeneration, in fact.

“The world must be all fucked up,” says one of the minor characters of the novel, towards the end, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.” Macondo’s history of one hundred years shows that evil is an integral part of human life. Macondo is paradisaical when it is founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia, Colonel Aureliano’s father. Like every paradise, Macondo is destined to lose its pristine innocence sooner than later.

Politics enters Macondo from outside like a plague. Plague too enters from outside, in fact. Religion too. Politics destroys the pristineness of the place altogether. Religion is no less degenerative. Look at what Father Petronio does to Jose Arcadio Segundo, Colonel Aureliano’s brother’s grandson. As a boy he goes to a priest for his first confession and the priest questions him whether he has committed any sexual act with any animal. “There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys,” says Father Petronio whom the boy approaches for more information. The boy becomes more curious and the old, sickly priest is finally forced to say, “I go Tuesday nights. If you promise not to tell anyone I’ll take you next Tuesday.” Thus the boy is initiated to sex with a donkey by none less than a priest of the Church and the boy soon becomes addicted to it.

It is indeed a fucked-up world. The Conservative government proves to be a bunch of hypocrites who preach one thing and do the opposite. They can take away your kitchen tools and then arrest you for keeping deadly weapons to fight in the civil war against the government.

But a rebellion doesn’t solve anything. The world is doomed to be evil. There’s no escape. No redemption. History is not progressive. It is cyclical. It is a vicious cycle. The sound and fury are real. They are the only reality perhaps.

 

Related Post: Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

 

 

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...