You may remember that I asked you to attempt to keep track, as you made your way through One Hundred Years of Solitude, of the varieties of the fantastic that appear in the novel. I’d like to identify a few here as a means of spurring an even greater list:
- Exaggeration. As we’ve discussed in class, exaggeration becomes fantastic when it exceeds the bounds of — well, probability? possibility? belief? How many cats is fantastic? How many consecutive days of rain? How many children named Aureliano?
- Ghosts and Specters. “One night, when she could not sleep, Ursula went out into the courtyard to get some water and saw Prudencio Aguilar by the water jar. He was livid, a sad expression his face, trying to cover the hole in his throat with a plug made of esparto grass.”
- Telekenisis. “The child, perplexed, said from the doorway, ‘It’s going to spill.’ The pot was firmly placed in the centre of the table, but just as soon as the child made his announcement, it began an unmistakable movement towards the edge, as if impelled by some inner dynamism, and it fell and broke on the floor.” (Or perhaps this isn’t telekinesis at all and merely the young Aureliano’s Clairvoyance. Of course, that would mean that inanimate objects can animate themselves — “Ursula, alarmed, told her husband about the episode, but he interpreted it as a natural phenomenon” — which itself seems another variety of the fantastic, not exactly anthropomorphism, since that is merely the attribution of animate qualities to the inanimate, but the inanimate actually possessing the qualities of the animate.
- Reanimation. Revival of the dead. Consider Melquíades.
- Elasticity of time. Consider Melquíades.
There’s plenty more, of course — flying carpets, sirens, children with pigs’ tails — so I’d like to see your lists or, at the very least, one or two additions to mine.
Another variety of the fantastic in this novel might be how certain inventions (the railroad, the cinema, and the concerts, to name a few) make their way into Macondo over time. The fantastic part of this comes not so much from the fact that Macondo is so isolated from the world, but because the residents of Macondo are all so old that these things appear fantastic to them even though they aren’t really. If this story was told solely from the perspective of Ursula, or perhaps Jose Arcadio Buendia, this would surely feel even more fantastical since we would be able to see more deeply how the world as they know it is starting to leave them behind. One Hundred Years of Solitude feels similar to The Memory Police in that, as time goes on, everything that these characters know and love is becoming erased, leaving them to navigate a world that they don’t yet fully understand.
One element of this story that interested me in terms of whether or not to consider it fantastic was Rebeca eating dirt and whitewash. There is a medical condition, Pica, where people eat things they aren’t supposed to, so in that way, it isn’t necessarily fantastic. However, if we consider our many discussions on scale, how much dirt has to be eaten in order for it to be considered fantastic? I’m interested to see what other people think about this.