100 years of solitude - class comment

In response to Becca's post, I suppose it could be relevant to the death of Macondo as it was and as it came to be??

But in terms of communication, I think Ursula is interesting to focus on. I think we discussed in class how Ursula serves as a bridge between the old and new world. She is the person who spans across all of the generations and has accumulated a lot of knowledge about Macondo, it's past, and it's people. In chapter 16 & 17 as she withers away and eventually dies once the rainfall stops, I think it is supposed to signify the rebirth of Macondo. We talked about how the rainfall is an allusion to the flood and plague in the bible, but in the book, it is cleaning Macondo's slate so it can start anew. This relates to communication in that Urusla was the towns communication with it's past. Aside from giving people who were going to die letters to give to other dead people (also a form of communication with their past), people used Ursula to understand their past and the past of the city. She was the correspondent to the people for the history of Macondo, and now she's dead. I think her death, as I've said, signifies rebirth and a chance to forget their past to start anew. They could have a new Ursula who could become the communicator for the vast amount of generations, then, once the town has once more been violated by infiltrators of some sort, another form of the great flood may come again to start the process again. Ursula's death signifies the end of the old Macondo.

Death and Language

From what I understand of our class discussion today, we were supposed to blog about the idea of communication (letters, writing, language, etc.), which was so prevalent in chapters 16-18 (and the entire book) and the huge amount of death in this section. If that's not what we were supposed to talk about, I guess it is now...

So I think one of the most interesting mentions of language is with Fernanda and her letters. She writes to her children of her fabulous life in Macondo and the wealth and abundance she experiences, when in reality the house is falling apart, the town in ruins, and life just sucks in general. The incongruity between what Fernanda writes in her letters and the truth of her situation contributes to a fundamental lack of communication. When Amaranta Ursula comes back to Macondo, she expects the city to be as thriving as her mother described. In some ways, the lack of communication does not exist naturally; rather, it is forced on the characters because of their misconceptions of reality.

Not really sure how this relates to death at all.... So any ideas?

Where's the Magic?

This section of the novel revealed a SIGNIFICANT amount of information regarding the Buendía family line. We saw countless deaths and births, which simultaneously expanded and diminished the Buendía family line. We continue to learn and delve into the story about the establishment of Macondo and its inhabitants, and as a result, we are seeing a bigger, more enigmatic story with a crucial political context unfold. However, most importantly, we see García Márquez's successful integration and imposition of magic realism within the text. In class, we defined and explained magic realism, which prepared us, as readers, for what to expect in One Hundred Years of Solitude. We defined magic realism in literature as a contemporary narrative in which the magical and mundane are mixed in an overall context of realistic storytelling; a combination of external factors of human existence with the internal, resulting in a blend of physical reality with a human psychological reality. In this novel, we have the setting of Macondo, layered with historical and geographical context, in which the human experience is paramount to relaying the story and in which the characters accept the magic without question. Furthermore, because we know that Márquez's story contains pervasive fantastic elements which the reader is forced to accept, my question is this: Where in this section of the text does the magic come alive for you, as the reader? For me (as I'm sure all of us will agree), the magic truly came alive when Remedios the Beauty was folding sheets with Amaranta and the others in the garden and suddenly, she rises to the sky "in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her" and is "lost forever in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her." Here, I was dumbfounded as the reader, because even though I had seen innumerable elements of magic realism in the story, up until now, I never really stepped back and let myself comprehend exactly what I was reading. For that reason, I found this event in the novel to be the ultimate manifestation of magic realism, for I now have become a character who must accept the magic without question.