How many years does it take for something to finally be viewed as fantastic? Five? Twenty? One hundred? I found myself pondering this as I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. As the years go by, we see bits and pieces of the modern world beginning to make their way into the isolated Macondo—the railroad, the cinema, the banana plantation, and the Conservative government of Colombia, to name a few. Ursula, Jose Arcadio, and other natives of Macondo all end up living long enough to witness the coming of these modern inventions, and numerous times, they express disbelief and even distrust over these unfamiliar creations. The younger generations of Buendias, however, simply accept these things as normal aspects of everyday life, going to movies and concerts and partaking in politics with great enthusiasm.
Of course, there have been plenty of individuals in real life who have lived exceptionally long lives, and in interviews, they are often asked for their opinions on the modern world; in an interview from 1977, a 108-year-old woman named Florence Pannell talked about how strange it was that women were now able to work certain jobs, show more skin, and go to college instead of getting married as soon as possible. She also talked about how, when air travel was first invented, she was too afraid to fly, but nowadays she felt more comfortable with the idea. “Nothing is the same,” she stated after being asked what she felt was the biggest change in the world since the 1800s. “Everything has changed.”
In this class, we have been taught that, at a certain point, you just have to accept the fantastic for what it is and keep moving forward; the same thing seems to be true for the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and also for many elderly people in real life. Our grandparents probably never imagined that one day we would have things like the internet and email and social media, and yet I constantly see people in their seventies and eighties taking full advantage of these modern inventions. At what point did they decide to make that leap, to fully embrace all of the conveniences of modern life? At what point did it start to become normal for them—or at least as normal as it can be for someone who has lived most of their life in a time when those things didn’t even exist? When exactly does the novelty—the fantastic-ness—of something so groundbreaking start to wear off?
*I kind of hated this book when I first read it, but lately, it’s really started to grow on me; cue JGB’s triumphant laughter.
I hope you can hear it from wherever you are…
One of the scenes I was really intrigued by in this novel was the one about the introduction of movies. “They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats” (223). This section in particular reminded me of a class I took my sophomore year called The Uncanny in Literature and Film. We talked about the first films (which were simple things like a train pulling into a station, nothing like the blockbusters we have today) and how some people were frightened by them and their black and white coloring. It’s interesting to think how something that seems so normal to us could have once seemed frightening or fantastic.
You made a good point with that they are modernizing throughout the novel. It was something I didn’t realize until I read your post. But now that I am thinking about it I definitely agree with what you are saying! They are constantly changing how they are living and it is really resembling how we live today!
I like that you mention the older people living long enough to experience new inventions in a different manner than the younger people. The concept of modernizing has been a common theme in the book, such as when the gypsy man brings the magnifying glass and everyone is skeptical of it. The reality of modernizing is very interesting as it happens in everyday life.
I agree, when does the fantastic become “normal”? For example, with our current situation will we go back to the way of life we lived before? What things will change if and when there is a cure for the virus? The Memory Police comes to mind, how the people just accepted their memories being taken from them-along with the object or part. It became normal. How long will we practice social distancing? is this our new “normal”? We talked in class about the cats and when it becomes fantastic 50 cats-500 cats? We never talked about how the fantastic changes and becomes accepted as normal.