The Magical Reality of Dreamstag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez/2352007-06-05T06:38:08ZhereMovable Type Enterprise 1.02Considering Dreams in One Hundred Years of Solitudetag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22512007-04-23T06:39:08Z2007-06-05T06:38:08ZThe reality you are dealing with in a novel is different from real life, although it is rooted in it. The same is true of dreams. --Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982 For a minute, let’s try to imagine a place of...annie hall
It’s people are both Christian and “savage,” angry and peaceful, marked by tragedy but still filled with beauty. This place is America, but it is not the United States. The place we are trying to imagine is Latin America, and the contradictions we attempt to entertain are those engendered by a long history of colonialism.
This world may or may not be difficult to envision. It is certainly not for the millions of Latin Americans whom, whether living in their country or not, carry its legacy within them. The colonization and subsequent liberation from European control have given Latinos, (the indigenous, black, white, and Mestizo people of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean) the consciousness in which such clashes exist. But what about everyone else? Is it possible to understand this reality when it’s so different from their own?
The answer can be found in Gabriel Garcia’s Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We know that literature in general has the ability to bring us into worlds we are unable to access by ourselves. Simply by using our imaginations, we can take a step closer to the lives the author presents to us. However, the bridging of consciousness attempted in Marquez’ novel, I argue, has a more profound affect. This is because the narrative mode he uses to depict the conflicting reality of Latin America is magical realism, and magical realism, in turn, garners its power through its use of the language and structure of dreams.
Magical realism, the term a contradiction itself, is the weaving of the bizarre and the realistic in an otherwise normal plot. The characters which observe various fantastic events do not question them, but simply accept them as a part of their material reality. The same happens when we dream. No matter how strange or illogical our dreams may be, we, for the most part, do not question the experience. The dreamer, the characters of Solitude and the real people it represents, accept the logical inconsistencies they face because this bizarreness is their reality.
Very rarely have literary critics included the dream structure in their analyses of Solitude or magical realism. Considering all their similarities, we may wonder why they are not more fundamental in their understanding. As we noted above, both narratives allow for realistic/fantastic occurrences, but they also allow for leaps in time, the surfacing of archetypes, and most importantly, the conceptual space in which all these dreamlike elements can exist and create meaning where they may not have in traditional narratives or our normal waking reality.
In the same manner that dreams are revelatory of the hidden parts of our psyches, the use of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude allows the reader a specifically Latin American experience, one not easily accessible through the ordinary "realistic" novel.
Upper right: William Blake, Europe Supported By Africa & America, Engraving
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Fictional Spacetag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22502007-04-23T06:38:28Z2007-06-05T06:38:57Z The initial way that dreams help illuminate magical realism and its use in Solitude is by helping the reader understand the place that the magical realist narrative occupies in our mind while reading. This is what literary critic Rawdon...annie hall
The initial way that dreams help illuminate magical realism and its use in Solitude is by helping the reader understand the place that the magical realist narrative occupies in our mind while reading. This is what literary critic Rawdon Wilson in “Metamorphoses in Fictional Space” refers to as “fictional space”(210). He describes this concept as “the sense of direction and distance, the sheer up and downness and back and forthness, the scale” that is imagined “when reading or viewing a fictional world” (Wilson 210). We can think of it as the imagined stage upon which the various textual dreamlike aspects can play out and make sense for the reader.
Critics consider the conceptualizing of space problematic for magical realism because the reality that magical realism creates is not like our normal waking reality. It encompasses the “copresence of oddities, the interaction of the bizarre with the entirely ordinary, and the doubleness conceptual codes” (Wilson 210). This is in contrast with “the space in a ‘realistic’ novel.” In these novels we find the “the representation of space [we] take for granted, and in which [we] walk and move about in” (Wilson 210).
Because realistic novels involve a space that “[we] can easily see right that through” and magical realism does not, Wilson argues that “what reading magical realism requires [is] a faculty for boundary-skipping between worlds” (210). In this claim lies the implication that the reader is without or is not immediately aware of this certain faculty. For this reason he offers us magical realism’s parallels to the mathematical concept of geometry. Similarly, critic Shanin Schroeder offers the analogy of alchemy. Both are meant to serve the same purpose: to provide a structure for imagining the realm of the magical realist story. But are these particular structures all that necessary?
If you’re Wilson, the answer would probably be yes, that we are in need of some kind of “boundary skipping faculty.” But if we are to understand “faculty” as an inherent power or ability, or any of the powers or capacities possessed by the human mind, it becomes increasingly evident that we already posses it when thinking about the dream narrative. Tropes aren’t necessary when this understanding is a part of us already.
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Dreams and Narrativetag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22492007-04-23T06:37:51Z2007-05-08T22:27:45ZEveryone dreams. It’s a fact. As such, the dreamer many times takes for granted the fact their dream narratives are sometimes weird. After years of having them, one is not surprised at their structure, or lack thereof. The first time...annie hall
The first time reader of magical realism, however, may be set aback by its inconsistencies: in the world of the novel time is fluid, people live to well over 100, and young girls can levitate. For this reason it can be useful to think about the novel from the standpoint of the dream structure. Dreams, too, can be strange, mundane, blissful, or even shocking, but rarely are they a problem to conceptualize.
As leading scientist in dream biology J. Allan Hobson notes in The Dream Drugstore, we realize that “dreaming…is an altered state of consciousness” because the “unique features of waking consciousness are lost” (7). He adds that There is little confusion when recalling them upon waking, even though when we are in our own dream “stories” we
Delusionally believe that we are awake when we are in fact asleep; we delusionally believe that we are perceiving a real outside world, whereas we are actually creating that world without the benefit of external stimuli; and we are not capable of critically observing, assessing and appreciating our delusional and confabulatory awareness (8).
It is not usually a problem to see ourselves in these sometimes nonsensical story lines, and still have the awareness of ourselves recounting them in “real life.” Not only that, the experience of the dream is so powerful that sometimes we even confuse them with reality. This is, ideally, what we are to experience when reading Solitude. The world presented to us is strange and magical, we are to accept them with the same understanding that we have about dreams.
But even if we become convinced of the efficiency of the dream narrative over other models to describe fictional spaces, we still may ask “So what?” Well, as Wilson claims, “space is invariably present in fiction though never precisely so. It is very much an aspect of the experience of reading, and without it a fictional world would be (I think) hard to imagine” (216). He reinforces this argument when he later states that in the conception of the fictional world, “signification generates the experience of the bulk” (217). If one is to ascribe to this belief, as I am apt to, the importance of the guiding structure becomes clear. Fictional space is important because it establishes in our minds the reality of world the author sets out to create. Wilson quotes literary critic Ricardo Gullon’s argument, that “the effective test of narrative…is whether it affects the reader and makes him or her feel and ‘understand the meaning of space in which the characters exist’” (216). The space in which Marquez’s characters exist is Macondo, a town in postcolonial Latin America. As in many other postcolonial narratives, we ultimately see a challenging of the narrow ideology and institutions that were superimposed on the population after the conquest. The strange reality of these two cultures intermingling is what Marquez wants us to experience, for after all, he believes that “Macondo is a state of mind” (Mendoza 77). For this reason it makes more sense to employ the framework of dreams, as they are organic to us all, rather than those of science or mathematics, (as offered by other critics) two institutions whose authority has been traditionally centered in the world of the colonizer.
Upper right: Frida Kahlo, The Dream, 1940
Bottom left: Marc Cohen, Cathleen Toelke, Book Cover, 1998
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Magical Realism: The World of Macondotag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22482007-04-23T06:35:43Z2007-05-07T02:25:21ZA very basic reading will give the impression that One Hundred Years of Solitude is simply the story of the history of the Buendia family. They are the founders of Macondo, the fictional town that has many times appeared in...annie hall
One Hundred Years of Solitude is simply the story of the history of the Buendia family. They are the founders of Macondo, the fictional town that has many times appeared in Marquez’s other works. On a basic level, this is true. Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran are cousins who marry and with twenty other families move out of their native village to found a town near the ocean. What starts as a family of five grows into a long lineage spanning more than one hundred years. The plot of the novel revolves around the interactions of the Buendias and the various personages of what is at first a small town. This is not the whole story, however.
It has been said that Solitude is a retelling of Latin American history. It begins with allusions to the Spanish and English conquest as we are told of an attack by Sir Francis Drake on the town of Ursula’s great-great-grandmother. We later see the transition of Macondo from an isolated, sovereign town to one racked with civil war brought upon the conflicting politics of an intruding federal government. The once united and peaceful citizens of Macondo begin to divide according to the arbitrary labels of “Liberals” and “Conservatives.” Macondo in its last stages finds its demise after its exploitation and ensuing chaos caused by an American transnational corporation.
The inhabitants of Macondo change as continuously as the society’s politics. Adding to the few founding families, its people are made of native Indians, visiting by gypsies, those from the Caribbean, Europeans, and Americans. Each of these people bring to Macondo a piece of their own culture making it a vast manage of the traditional and modern, domestic and exotic, the “rational” and the mystic. Because of this blending, magical realism, and by extension dream narratives, are effective in capturing this seemingly contradictory world.
Paintings: Pinturas de Castas, Miguel Cabrera, 18th Century
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Meaningful Bizarrenesstag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22472007-04-23T06:34:10Z2007-05-08T22:32:27ZFlocks of yellow butterflies that appear when two lovers have their trysts, the trail of a man’s blood that finds its way home at the moment of his death, and zoological brothels with crocodiles, snakes and an artificial ocean are...annie hall
Solitude magical realist. We see the same irrational occurrences in dreams. In “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions” literary critic Bert O. States tells us that “the assumption that dreams are bizarre, or contain extraordinary images that are inconsistent with realities in the waking world, is perhaps the most universal point of agreement among people who study or think about dreams” (13). This similarity is taken a step further when he points out that “where dreams are concerned, we are attaching the words ‘bizarre’ and ‘distorted’ to a form of mental experience that strikes us as perfectly normal while we are having it” (“Bizarreness” 14). Not only are elements of the bizarre prominent in both narratives, there are clear similarities in their representations. In both cases, the bizarreness of the narrative plots are only considered as such when taken outside the context of the novel or dream and applied to our own waking reality.
The connection between dreams narratives and magical realism is not only limited to the occurrence of the bizarre. Just a little information about how the brain works when we dream illuminates the ways in which we can understand how the bizarre is created in magical realism. Though there is little consensus among theorists and scientists as to what dreams are meant to do, there is an interesting, though not explicit, agreement among States and neurobiologists like Ernest Hartmann which is similar to how magical realism works; during sleep the neural nets of the mind are hyperconnective, resulting in the creation of metaphor. These metaphors, however, aren’t verbal, as in the traditional sense. They are pictorial.
In Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams, Hartmann posits that “dreaming makes connections more broadly and widely than does waking” (18). He adds that these connections, ones which we probably would not make in waking reality, are driven by the emotion of the dreamer. He adds that dreaming “find[s] a picture that provides a context for the emotion” (18). These contextualizations are what he calls metaphors.
Though not nearly as scientific, States also discusses the creation of metaphor in dreams in “Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor.” Metaphors are produced because dreams engage in the “collision of images” (“Metaphor” 105). The metaphors are therefore “nothing more than a highly specialized case of what we might call infra association…a process that makes connections among units of thought for which there is no visible or logical evidence of likeness” (“Metaphor” 112). As when yellow flowers rain, priests levitate after drinking hot chocolate, and ancient forgotten rooms are clean, the combination of realistic and illogical images occurs throughout Solitude. The images created by the magical realist mode are metaphors themselves. The mode combines two disparate images or ideas to form a new reality, and the poignancy arises from their deliberate opposition.
What is important to note is that both Hartmann and States believe that these metaphors serve a practical purpose. Hartmann claims that the possibilities that metaphors create can help with problem solving. He believes that dreaming is a way to experience emotions in a safe environment, and that this act may prepare us for similar situations in waking life. States does not give any specific function that dreams have, but says that their metaphors can be seen as “a basic strategy for getting at certain kinds of fuzzy truth” (“Metaphor” 104). In dreams we are not limited by the rationalism of waking reality. While asleep we have the ability to explore impossible possibilities. Upon waking, we can see how the metaphors made can engender new ways in which we understand our psyche; there is a deeper reality to our inner selves than what is evident through waking consciousness alone. In the same way, Marquez makes connections between the fantastic and the ordinary as a way to explore the reality of the everyday people of Latin America: “You only have to open to newspapers to see that extraordinary things happen to us every day” (Mendoza 36). Marquez claims that everything he writes in Solitude is true. Because not all of Marquez’s readers are Latin American, and cannot personally relate to such a society, that employing metaphor useful: “the frequent confusion of the concrete and abstract heightens psychic tension and emotional impact by creating ambiguity and jarring the reader onto new levels of awareness” (Williams 103). Hopefully, this new awareness will allow for a loosening of the perception of Latin America since most traditional histories stem from a European or American view.
Center: Frida Kahlo: The Little Deer, 1946
Bottom: Frida Kahlo: What the Water Gave Me, 1938
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Marquez and Jungtag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22462007-04-23T06:33:05Z2007-05-07T02:36:27Z 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...annie hallOne 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.
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Concluding Thoughts tag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22452007-04-23T06:32:14Z2007-06-05T06:41:14ZMost of us are limited to the singular reality of the societies we live in. After one reads One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, it is clear that this singular reality is not the case for everyone. Marquez exposes to...annie hall
One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, it is clear that this singular reality is not the case for everyone. Marquez exposes to his reader that “reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs,” that in some places, the magical does exist (Mendoza 35). But he isn’t suggesting a saw-a-woman-in-half kind of magic. It is a Latin American kind, one which is produced when diverse peoples and cultures rub together, spark, and form something different. Though the world he represents does not put preference on rationality over fantasy, it is not idealized: it has as much pain and frustration as it has joy and beauty. What is portrayed, however, is almost an ultimate reality. The truth does not come from textbook only, but from the stories of the lives of regular people. The use of dreams as a framework to magical realism allows us to see and feel the truth latent within the narrative. It is a gift to those of us who’d like to see beyond the confines of a regular reality.
Frida Kahlo, Moses 1945
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Further Readingtag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22932007-04-22T02:24:46Z2007-05-07T20:41:52ZWorks Cited Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Faris, Zamora, ed. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duhram: Duke University Press, 1995. Faris, Wendy B. “Scheherezade’s Children.” Faris 163-190. Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” Faris...annie hall
Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Faris, Zamora, ed. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duhram: Duke
University Press, 1995.
Faris, Wendy B. “Scheherezade’s Children.” Faris 163-190.
Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” Faris 119-120.
Slemon, Stephen. “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse.” Faris 407- 426.
Wilson, Rawdon. “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism.”
Hartmann, Ernest. Dreams and Nightmares: The Origins and Meanings of Dreams.
Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2001.
Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. New York: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
“The Concept of the Collective Unconscious.” New York: Princeton University Press, 1936.
“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” New York: Princeton University Press,
1954.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Perennial Classics, 1970.
Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo. The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.
Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the America. Westport: Praeger
Publishers, 2004.
States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays
in Language and Literature. Ed. Carol S. Rupprecht. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993, pp. 6-31.
States, Bert O. “Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor.” SubStance 94/95 (2001):104- 117.
Online Sources:
Site about Gabriel Garcia MarquezMarquez' Nobel Prize Acceptance SpeechFrida Kahlo Gallery
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About the Authortag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/snunez//235.22942007-04-21T02:25:49Z2007-06-05T06:40:16ZSylvia Nunez is an English and Political Science major graduating this May, 2007. She plans on taking the year off, traveling the world for a while, and returning home where she will attend graduate school the following fall....annie hall
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Magical realism, the term a contradiction itself, is the weaving of the bizarre and the realistic in an otherwise normal plot. The characters which observe various fantastic events do not question them, but simply accept them as a part of their material reality. The same happens when we dream. No matter how strange or illogical our dreams may be, we, for the most part, do not question the experience. The dreamer, the characters of Solitude and the real people it represents, accept the logical inconsistencies they face because this bizarreness is their reality.
Very rarely have literary critics included the dream structure in their analyses of Solitude or magical realism. Considering all their similarities, we may wonder why they are not more fundamental in their understanding. As we noted above, both narratives allow for realistic/fantastic occurrences, but they also allow for leaps in time, the surfacing of archetypes, and most importantly, the conceptual space in which all these dreamlike elements can exist and create meaning where they may not have in traditional narratives or our normal waking reality.
In the same manner that dreams are revelatory of the hidden parts of our psyches, the use of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude allows the reader a specifically Latin American experience, one not easily accessible through the ordinary "realistic" novel.
Upper right: William Blake, Europe Supported By Africa & America, Engraving
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The first time reader of magical realism, however, may be set aback by its inconsistencies: in the world of the novel time is fluid, people live to well over 100, and young girls can levitate. For this reason it can be useful to think about the novel from the standpoint of the dream structure. Dreams, too, can be strange, mundane, blissful, or even shocking, but rarely are they a problem to conceptualize.
As leading scientist in dream biology J. Allan Hobson notes in The Dream Drugstore, we realize that “dreaming…is an altered state of consciousness” because the “unique features of waking consciousness are lost” (7). He adds that There is little confusion when recalling them upon waking, even though when we are in our own dream “stories” we
Delusionally believe that we are awake when we are in fact asleep; we delusionally believe that we are perceiving a real outside world, whereas we are actually creating that world without the benefit of external stimuli; and we are not capable of critically observing, assessing and appreciating our delusional and confabulatory awareness (8).
It is not usually a problem to see ourselves in these sometimes nonsensical story lines, and still have the awareness of ourselves recounting them in “real life.” 
Not only that, the experience of the dream is so powerful that sometimes we even confuse them with reality. This is, ideally, what we are to experience when reading Solitude. The world presented to us is strange and magical, we are to accept them with the same understanding that we have about dreams.
But even if we become convinced of the efficiency of the dream narrative over other models to describe fictional spaces, we still may ask “So what?” Well, as Wilson claims, “space is invariably present in fiction though never precisely so. It is very much an aspect of the experience of reading, and without it a fictional world would be (I think) hard to imagine” (216). He reinforces this argument when he later states that in the conception of the fictional world, “signification generates the experience of the bulk” (217). If one is to ascribe to this belief, as I am apt to, the importance of the guiding structure becomes clear. Fictional space is important because it establishes in our minds the reality of world the author sets out to create. Wilson quotes literary critic Ricardo Gullon’s argument, that “the effective test of narrative…is whether it affects the reader and makes him or her feel and ‘understand the meaning of space in which the characters exist’” (216). The space in which Marquez’s characters exist is Macondo, a town in postcolonial Latin America. As in many other postcolonial narratives, we ultimately see a challenging of the narrow ideology and institutions that were superimposed on the population after the conquest. The strange reality of these two cultures intermingling is what Marquez wants us to experience, for after all, he believes that “Macondo is a state of mind” (Mendoza 77). For this reason it makes more sense to employ the framework of dreams, as they are organic to us all, rather than those of science or mathematics, (as offered by other critics) two institutions whose authority has been traditionally centered in the world of the colonizer.
Upper right: Frida Kahlo, The Dream, 1940
Bottom left: Marc Cohen, Cathleen Toelke, Book Cover, 1998
It has been said that Solitude is a retelling of Latin American history. It begins with allusions to the Spanish and English conquest as we are told of an attack by Sir Francis Drake on the town of Ursula’s great-great-grandmother. We later see the transition of Macondo from an isolated, sovereign town to one racked with civil war brought upon the conflicting politics of an intruding federal government. The once united and peaceful citizens of Macondo begin to divide according to the arbitrary labels of “Liberals” and “Conservatives.” Macondo in its last stages finds its demise after its exploitation and ensuing chaos caused by an American transnational corporation.
The inhabitants of Macondo change as continuously as the society’s politics. Adding to the few founding families, its people are made of native Indians, visiting by gypsies, those from the Caribbean, Europeans, and Americans. Each of these people bring to Macondo a piece of their own culture making it a vast manage of the traditional and modern, domestic and exotic, the “rational” and the mystic. Because of this blending, magical realism, and by extension dream narratives, are effective in capturing this seemingly contradictory world.
Paintings: Pinturas de Castas, Miguel Cabrera, 18th Century
In “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions” literary critic Bert O. States tells us that “the assumption that dreams are bizarre, or contain extraordinary images that are inconsistent with realities in the waking world, is perhaps the most universal point of agreement among people who study or think about dreams” (13). This similarity is taken a step further when he points out that “where dreams are concerned, we are attaching the words ‘bizarre’ and ‘distorted’ to a form of mental experience that strikes us as perfectly normal while we are having it” (“Bizarreness” 14). Not only are elements of the bizarre prominent in both narratives, there are clear similarities in their representations. In both cases, the bizarreness of the narrative plots are only considered as such when taken outside the context of the novel or dream and applied to our own waking reality.
The connection between dreams narratives and magical realism is not only limited to the occurrence of the bizarre. Just a little information about how the brain works when we dream illuminates the ways in which we can understand how the bizarre is created in magical realism. Though there is little consensus among theorists and scientists as to what dreams are meant to do, there is an interesting, though not explicit, agreement among States and neurobiologists like Ernest Hartmann which is similar to how magical realism works; during sleep the neural nets of the mind are hyperconnective, resulting in the creation of metaphor. These metaphors, however, aren’t verbal, as in the traditional sense. They are pictorial.
In Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams, Hartmann posits that “dreaming makes connections more broadly and widely than does waking” (18). He adds that these connections, ones which we probably would not make in waking reality, are driven by the emotion of the dreamer. He adds 
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.
the case for everyone. Marquez exposes to his reader that “reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs,” that in some places, the magical does exist (Mendoza 35). But he isn’t suggesting a saw-a-woman-in-half kind of magic. It is a Latin American kind, one which is produced when diverse peoples and cultures rub together, spark, and form something different. Though the world he represents does not put preference on rationality over fantasy, it is not idealized: it has as much pain and frustration as it has joy and beauty. What is portrayed, however, is almost an ultimate reality. The truth does not come from textbook only, but from the stories of the lives of regular people. The use of dreams as a framework to magical realism allows us to see and feel the truth latent within the narrative. It is a gift to those of us who’d like to see beyond the confines of a regular reality.
Frida Kahlo, Moses 1945