Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography “Living to Tell the Tale” (2002) begins with an anecdote from his youth. One day his mother asks him to assist her on a journey back to the world of his grandparents, Aracataca, the place where Garcia Marquez grew up. The grandparents have passed away, and their house is about to be sold. The house, however, turns out to be worthless, too old and damaged.

In fact, the whole town has turned into a withering memory of bygone days, a place living in the past rather than the present. Nothing, it seems, has survived the brutal passage of time. It is during the journey back to Aracataca that Garcia Marquez discovers his vocation as a writer, or more specifically as a messenger of an old world of stories, hovering on the edge of oblivion: “Neither my mother nor I, of course, could even have imagined that this simple two-day trip would be so decisive that the longest and most diligent of lives would not be enough for me to finish recounting it.”

“Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation,” Walter Benjamin observes in “The Storyteller” (1936), an essay which charts the gradual disappearance of the ancient art of storytelling, and the emergence of the aesthetic form of modernity par excellence: the novel.

The tradition of storytelling declines in the modern age, Benjamin argues, because generations are increasingly unable to exchange experiences. The novel, by contrast, is a dialogue with the self. “The novelist has isolated himself,” Benjamin writes; he “is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.”

One of the 20th century’s most celebrated novelists, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is acutely aware of the solipsism of the novel form. It is a problem that he addresses most directly in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), a novel that revolves around the illustrious place Macondo. In the autobiography “Living to Tell the Tale,” Garcia Marquez describes Aracataca as a place “located on the banks of a river of transparent water that raced over a bed of polished stones as huge and white as pre-historic eggs.”

Aracataca was the place after which Garcia Marquez modeled Macondo. In the novel, Macondo is described as a village “built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like pre-historic eggs.” By using almost identical words to describe the two places, Garca Marquez suggests not merely that Macondo is modeled on Aracataca, but also that the memory of Aracataca is only retained in the literary imagination of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

As the title indicates, solitude is the main theme of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” At one point in the novel we are told that all the novel’s central characters ― the members of the Buenda family ― are marked by an expression of solitude. At the same time, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is about people, communities; human lives interacting. The novel is an extended chronicle of successive generations from time immemorial to the modern age.

Each generation, however, is cut off from previous generations, unable to retain or preserve the wisdom and counsel of ancestors. As the novel progresses, family members increasingly echo and reiterate the gestures and habits of past relatives, albeit unknowingly ― until one of the characters realizes that “every member of the family … repeated the same path every day, the same actions, and almost repeated the same words at the same hour.”

In “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Garcia Marquez explores the gap that separates us from past generations. The novel asks how we remember the “other” past; not the official, public past ― but the private, intimate past, the lives of our ancestors. How is it possible to preserve personal experiences from one generation to the next? Conversely, the novel explores how this other past survives in the lives of those who inhabit the present; how we might escape the clutches of our ancestors?

“The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual,” Benjamin observes; the novel is the genre of individualism, the individual’s claim to particularity in a secular world where birth right and family history mean less than individual competence and capability. The genre of the novel captures a uniquely modern experience, distinct from collective forms of experiences in pre-modern societies.

Modernity turns the repetitive, cyclical lives of our ancestors into negative signs of emptiness, stagnation, and ultimately distress and torment. Individualism is the art of ridding oneself of the influence of predecessors; the avoidance of living in the shadows of one’s progenitors ― so that we may create our own lives, our own individual personalities.

The genre of the novel emerges in a world in which stable hierarchies collapse, in which no one has a fixed place or rank, no authentic belonging ― a world in which we must carve out our own territory of recognition. This is the central question every novel implicitly asks: who is this nameless, anonymous individual? One might say that every novel is comparable to a monstrous dictionary defining a single word: the name by which the main character, the anonymous individual, becomes recognizable. It is thus we recognize the great novelistic heroes, from Don Quixote, Captain Ahab, to Josef K ― all of whom undergo a transformation from being utterly anonymous to being absolutely recognizable.

The price for this excessive individual recognition, as Benjamin argues, is the severance of the organic connection between generations; the novel may discover who the anonymous individual is but only by insulating him or her from the past. As Edward Said points out in the book “Beginnings” (1975), this explains why the novel’s main characters are often to be found among “orphans, outcasts, parvenus, emanations, solitaries and deranged types whose background is either rejected, mysterious, or unknown.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” explores this issue of the novel form’s inherent insularity, its radical individualism, and its rejection of ancestral influence. It does so by replacing the life of the individual with that of an entire family’s genealogy.

It is in this way that Garcia Marquez both preserves the perspective of individual insularity, and the perspective of a collective identity preserved throughout one hundred years. The novel narrates the lives of individuals as fragments of one life ― the life of a family. In itself, each life remains meaningless, purposeless and insignificant: Jose Arcadio Buenda spends all his time on imaginative projects leading nowhere; Colonel Aureliano Buenda starts 32 rebellions but ends up fighting against his own men; and Amaranta Ursula obsessively arranges her possessions only to rearrange them all the following day.

From a different perspective, it is precisely this excessive individual purposelessness and insignificance which manifests the presence of a collective identity ― an identity which retrospectively endows these ill-fated, forgettable attempts to claim particularity with an overall meaning worth preserving. As a whole, the history of the Buenda family makes each individual experience memorable, and ultimately transferable.

While journeying back to Aracataca with his mother, Garcia Marquez discovers that he is the last descendant of the family to whom the stories of this place have been transferred. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Garcia Marquez hands over these stories to us, the readers, so that we in a certain sense become the last members of the solitary Buenda family; in each reader’s solitary imagination, the experiences of the past generations live on. 

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.