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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
id like to but im swamped with work these days
maybe some day over beers and your californian pakalolo
GGM rules
i can almost hear demonrail scream magical realism!
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There are several major motifs regarding modernism and the urbanization experience in Latin America that underline One Hundred Years of Solitude. The major characters, the Buendia family, can represent the different countries and their primate cities in South America, each suffering from various passions, triumphs and downfalls in their pursuit of modernization. Initially, modernization is portrayed from a fanciful child-like perspective. This interpretation gives a glimpse into the bizarreness of the experience of modernizing for Latin Americans, just as the experience of children can be like an unexplainable fantasy. Everything had to be explained, as it does with a child looking through fresh and inexperienced eyes. For Garcia-Marquez, the people of Macondo are often bewildered at the experience of change and development as their world became modern. He himself claimed that he never learned anything after the age of eight. He uses wondrous and stupefying imagery while often portraying his characters with the whimsical temperaments of children. the sources of modernization are portrayed as savage gypsies to take away from the dignity and seriousness of the process. Further, indigenousness and primitivism is deeply romanticized through out the novel, from the maddening of Jose Arcadio Buendia until his body emitted the smell of mushrooms and the forest, the abnormal extraordinariness of the Buendia descendents in relation to their inbreeding of indigenous stock, and especially the more distantly related and earth eating Rebecca. Rebecca’s experience through out the novel is a personification of the Latin American mestizo experience of mix-race identity, attempting to merge indigenous culture with European customs. As Macondo modernizes into the Victorian era, she becomes a proper socialite, however secretly she continues to fight her addiction to the earth. Her soil eating addiction is symbolic of the modernizing Latin American’s desire to return to the past, to the indigenous, to the primordial sources of humanity juxtapose the startlingly dispiriting modern world. Garcia-Marquez writes, “little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food.”