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 Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

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

Childhood

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where

Trump in Indian Media

Aroon Purie, editor of India Today , thinks that Trump owes his victory to such issues as price rise, housing crisis, influx of immigrants, and the conservative rebellion against elite wokeism. Trump presidency portends populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism, says Purie quoting Condoleeza Rice. The world may not be a happier place with Trump leading America. “What is the world according to Trump?” India Today ’s senior journalist Raj Chengappa asks. His answer: “… it is ensuring America’s interests first with those of every other nation coming a very distant second.” Trump thinks that hitherto the other nations were eating America’s lunch. The allusion is not only to the immigrants but also to America “paying everyone else’s bills to maintain the global order.” Though Trump would like to play a key role in bringing the two wars [Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza] to an end, he will not do anything that will involve a price tag that the US has to pay for. Chengappa worri

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand