Marquez and Jung
One Hundred Years of Solitude also makes use of a rather ambiguous dream element: the collective unconscious. Carl Jung suggests in “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” that the collective unconscious is a “deeper layer” of consciousness. It is somewhere beneath the personal unconscious, the place we find our emotions, neurosis, etc. (Archetypes 2). This part of our psyche is “not individual, but universal,” and “has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals” (Archetypes 3-4). Keeping all this in mind, what concerns us is once again the idea of conceptual space. Where we looked at the dream framework as a space for which to understand the magical realism of the novel, we can Marquez’s novel as a place of the collective unconscious, and in turn, will be able to compare its characters to those “universal primordial forms,” that appear in our dreams, the archetypes (Archetypes 5).
Collective Unconsciousness
It is not a stretch that we are likening Solitude to the collective unconscious, because as Wendy B. Faris in “Scheherezade’s Children” observes, Jungian psychology is “a perspective common in magical realist texts… the magic may be attributed to a mysterious sense of collective relatedness rather than to individual memories or dreams or visions” (183). 
If we believe as Jung does that the “collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited,” and that its “contents… owe their existence exclusively to heredity,” then we can see how the collective unconscious works within the novel (42). Heredity plays a tremendous role in the novel. Generation after generation of Buendias take on the names of their predecessors. Though this is a customary practice in Latin America, the names carry with them “inherited memory” (Marquez 200). As if they are following a model they are unaware of, the characters behave in the same ways the originators of the names did.
This repetition of names and consequently the persistence of the paradigms throughout the length of the novel also denote a kind of stagnation similar to the circularity of time addressed so many times in the narrative. This is addressed most poignantly at the end of the novel when Aureliano, the last member of the Buendias, manages to decipher the scroll given to the family by the gypsy Melquiades. This scroll retells the exact unfolding of the history of the family line (it is actually the entire novel of One Hundred Years of Solitude itself.) “Melquiades had not put the events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant” (Marquez 447). Because in terms of the collective unconscious one unknowingly experiences the manifestations of paradigms that have existed “since the remotest of times,” Aureliano experiences the past, and the present as simultaneously (Unconscious 5). For us, reading Marquez’s novel is like experiencing the collective unconscious, for as we hold the book in our hands, we hold a physical manifestation of the instantaneousness of the Buendia’s history.
Archetypes:
If we grant that the text of the novel offers a kind of collective unconscious, then it gives us a place in which to situate its archetypes. Archetypes refer not to the actual manifested content, but to a basic form that recurs mainly in dreams. According to Jung, they are “in no sense allegories,” but “symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by ways of projection” (6 Archetypes). The “inner drama” itself takes different shapes and for this reason the forms of the archetypes depend on the context of one’s culture.
Though it is not one of Jung’s major archetypes and today it is more attributed to literature, it is useful to examine the archetype of the Wise Old Man as he appears in Solitude. He is a kind of mentor and source of authority in the novel. From the very beginning we see Melquiades as having vast knowledge, more so than anyone else in Macondo. He eventually moves into the Buendia household and brings with him a huge collection of books and encoded manuscripts which, as we have seen, is most fundamental to the development of the family and the story as a whole. Melquiades is also depicted as otherworldly, ubiquitous, and almost immortal. In a way he does live on as his ghost appears to various members of the family, continuously transmitting his knowledge of the world.
Melquiades as a character serves not only to help provide the magical context of the novel as whole, but serves to challenge the authority of what can be known in the novel. Though he is a gypsy, a person usually relegated to the margins of a society, it is his scrolls which we see in the end hold all the knowledge about the destiny of we Macondo and its inhabitants. The character of Melquiades reveals something about who Marquez believes has the authority over truth. The highest authority is not the traditional (European) historian, but a wandering gypsy.
Read more:
Considering Dreams in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Fictional Space
Dreams and Narrative
Magical Realism: The World of Macondo
Meaningful Bizarreness
Marquez and Jung
Concluding Thoughts
Further Reading
About the Author