Economic and Political Satire in One Hundred Years of Solitude Robert Mercier Throughout the ages, writers, painters, orators, and other talented individuals have sought to make their voice heard. Some strive to raise awareness of certain causes or ideas; others outright reject and mock the ones already in place. The ones who scorn make use of a literary genre called satire, which is the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice. Quite simply, it is the practice of making fun of some aspect of society. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was such an individual; recognizing the flaws within his world and exposing them in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story closely parallels the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America, all the while mocking specific events and aspects of Columbian history and the American economic influence. To those who are unfamiliar with Columbia’s past, it would be hard to recognize the absurdities within the novel. Yet, underneath the tapestry of a woven fairytale, the darker, uglier of society is exposed and the shared pointlessness of culture, religion, war, politics and economic expansion are revealed. The period that One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays is the 1800s and 1900s, a time as turbulent and treacherous in Macondo as it was during the growth of Columbia. In his book on the political and cultural tradition of Latin America, Howard Wiarda illustrates the turbulent growth in the following passage: “During this period the population of Latin America began to increase and settlers moved into the vast empty spaces. Immigration brought more people from Europe, many of whom had commercial and entrepreneurial skills that the area lacked. New banks and financial institutions were chartered, providing economic infrastructure and reflecting the economic quickening. Foreign capital, chiefly British initially but over time including American investment as well, began to

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come in, serving as a further stimulus to the economy. With the foreign capital, new roads, railroads, port facilities, and telephone and telegraph capabilities were built, providing additional infrastructure, knitting the Latin American countries together as real nation-states for the first time, and stimulating exports. New lands were opened up for cultivation and the increased production of export crops brought Latin America into the world economy for the first time.” (145-146) Before this point Columbia lacked public works, money, and educated individuals to manage the area as a country. In a very similar way, Macondo is founded as the Americas had been by nomads and explorers. It is a small town with no infrastructure, but over time it would acquire a church, red light district, train station, a banana company, electricity, and a movie theater. Each new development the result of foreigners adding a piece to the patchwork of the town. Originally only the natives to the region come to the area, but Europeans, Americans, and their corruptive ways follow. As a tribute to the multinational influence, the Buendia house is filled with fine crystals, velvet, sheets, vases, and other expensive foreign items, most of them from Europe. Over time, Colombia would find itself filled with many foreign items, some not as pleasant as others. Politically speaking, there is no country in the world that can compare to Columbia. The disagreements between Conservatives and Liberals have been the cause of over seventy uprisings, wars and outbreaks over a one hundred year period. Marquez uses this tension to mock the two political parties and their perceived lack of ideology, especially given the contradictory nature of some of their actions. “[Colonel Aureliano Buendia] had the feeling of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a situation that was so confused that when he ordered the restoration of the church steeple, which had been knocked down by army cannon fire, Father

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Nicanor commented from his sickbed: ‘This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt” (Marquez 134). A similar situation occurs between Amaranta and the Colonel in which, “He brought her a prayer book bound in mother-of-pearl. ‘How strange men are,’ she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. ‘They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayer books as gifts” (Marquez 162). In comparison, the two parties are fairly similar, but possess a profound desire to be in constant conflict with the other. The American and European political systems are less radical and usually able to reconcile through legislation, but Colombians are content with brutal fighting to the point where they cease to fight for something. Unfortunately for Columbia, political fights and stubbornness have kept the country in a state of instability for over one hundred years, merely because of identification with a political party. For Macondo the results are disastrous, and while Marquez may point out flaws in the political machine, Colombians would benefit from looking at their political machine with unclouded eyes. To do otherwise would certainly mean destruction. One of the most important aspects of the novel is the creation of the banana republic, marked by the arrivals of Mr. Herbert and Mr. Brown to Macondo. Both are abject foreigners who only see the town in terms of reducing costs and maximizing profitability. The whole of Macondo is radically changed by the arrival of the banana company, the influx of the gringos (which, ironically, is a term Americans associate with illegal Mexican immigrants) and the rise of the capitalist system. In Colombia, foreign banana and coffee farmers were able to maximize profit through subjugation of the workers. “The period was a boom period, but the position of the workers was not altogether advantageous. For the most part, they were not employed directly under the

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company or by individual growers, but worked under foremen-contractors and migrated from one plantation to another. The system of contract labor allowed native growers and United Fruit to evade the provisions of Colombian law intended to protect the workers by requiring employers to provide medical care, sanitary dwellings, collective and accident insurance. Since the contractors lacked capital, they were not legally required to provide those benefits; since the growers did not employ the workers directly, neither were they” (Janes 141). While the town expands under the new banana republic, there are several aspects about the new town that are inherent flaws with the machine of unfettered big business. The people who work for the company are paid in scrip, which can only be redeemed at the company commissary for Virginia ham, and live in terrible living quarters. “The company workers were crowded together in miserable barracks. The engineers, instead of putting in toilets, had a portable latrine for every fifty people brought to the camps at Christmastime and they held public demonstrations of how to use them so that they would last longer” (300-301). Marquez reveals that capitalism is not a very hospitable economic policy, given that the technology exists to make life better. Unfortunately, only the people in a position of power within company can enjoy the luxuries of corporatism. The idea of enjoying modern conveniences such as toilets and large houses is held as a perpetual carrot for the rabbit of a worker, always held just out of reach but tempting enough for them to continue working and living in the same manner. Ironically, this is a part of socialism as well, since the only way to prevent uprising is by providing only the minimum necessities to everyone. Another part of the economic system is the influence of Marxism, both in Columbia and Macondo. “A principle of Marx is evident in One Hundred Years of Solitude: Inevitable

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revolution. The transition from one stage to the next, Marx thought, would always occur through violent revolution. That is because the owners of the means of production and distribution in each stage would not give up their control without a struggle. Their wealth or capital would have to be seized from them by violent means” (Wiarda 215). The banana worker’s strike in Macondo is an ideal reflection of the transition from one stage to another. The violent and brutal slaughter of hundreds of citizens in the town serves to show that the owners of the banana company do not want to yield any of their power to making life more comfortable for the workers. Marquez mocks this part of the capitalist system because it has all the means to house the workers comfortably and pay them decent wages, but profitability is always the goal of expanding business. So capitalism, always trying to move the world forward, keeps a portion of the population living a substandard lifestyle. The Macondo banana worker’s strike is based off an actual event in Columbia in the 1920s, when workers went on strike and were shot at. That event, however, was thoroughly investigated, documented, and publicized by a one Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (Hylton 29). In the Columbia of the early twentieth century, foreign interests, especially American, overtook the country. “US corporation controlled bananas, gold, and petroleum; control was exercised by US import firms, US government policy, and the US coffee consumers” (Hylton 29). A deeper reading of the passage would show that America had a significant interest in the regions of Central and South America for bananas, coffee, and oil, and especially for influencing Latin America towards democracy. It is a mindset that Marquez would have on the idea of Americans being involved in foreign affairs, but at the same time maintaining an isolationist practice to only benefit itself. One of the facets of politics is conflict, which almost always inevitably leads to war. There is no other major character so suited for war than that of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who:

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“…Organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse…The only thing left of all that was a street that bore his name in Macondo.” (103). The Colonel, to say in the least, is a man whom could not be killed by conventional means other than the hands of time. His wars prove to almost all be fruitful, since he rarely wins any battles. Many of the battles in Colombia at the same time ended in stalemate and served no real purpose other than to agitate the opposing party. The sheer number of uprisings is staggering since, “Between 1821 and 1930 there were between 70-80 major uprisings, averaging a war every year and-a-half” (Janes 130). At one point in the book, the Colonel is signing the papers to the Treaty of Neerlandia and is conferring with his aides; he resembles Stalin or Franklin Roosevelt. “He sat in a chair between his political advisers and, wrapper in his woolen blanket, he listened in silence to the brief proposals of the emissaries. ‘That means,’ Colonel Aureliano Buendia said, smiling when the reading was over, ‘that all we’re fighting for is power” (Marquez 167-168). Through a twist in the powers that be the Colonel Buendia goes from being a despised man to a hero simply because of a trivial reason with the treaty. It could be seen as a symbol of Marquez mocking the effectiveness of treaties in keeping peace and order, or just simply that people will believe a man is a hero for the most obscure of reasons. Satire would not be a genre unless a group of people was ridiculed. Marquez does not take to the American influence lightly and points out their numerous absurdities. One such

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instance is the arrival of Mr. Herbert at the house and his examination of the bananas during lunch. “With the suspicious attention of a diamond merchant he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist’s scale, and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith’s calipers” (Garcia 225). Americans are renowned for scrutinizing the most trivial things, for whom else but an American would interrupt a meal to examine and record the dimensions of a piece of food. In the novel, Ursula also notes that the town has become concerned with trivial matters and has fallen victim to outside changes. “… Even feelings developed in a different way. No sooner had Remedios the Beauty ascended to heaven in body and soul than the inconsiderate Fernanda was going about mumbling to herself because her sheets had been carried off. The bodies of the Aurelianos were no sooner cold in their graves than Aureliano Segundo had the house lighted up again, filled with drunkards playing the accordion and dousing themselves in champagne, as if dogs and not Christians had died” (251). Some satiric moments of the novel are especially amusing. “This novel never loses its capacity to surprise and delight…like the priest levitating to chocolate, to the erotic scene of bawdry and prodigious sex, like characters whose farts are so strong they kill all the flowers in the house or man who runs through the house balancing beer bottles on his penis” (Johnston 3). Though highly amusing, these events reveal that the increasing population brings the negative parts of society as well. Colombia was a fairly stable country until it was flooded with immigrants and large business. On a further note, the United States was a similar place, is now the country it is because of immigrants, although there are still aspects left to be desired. Overall, One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with moments of satire and is meant to humor many subjects: capitalism, Marxism, democracy, diplomacy, politics, war, and religion. It mocks convention and points out the absurdities of conflict, at the same time stripping economic

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growth of its innocent façade and revealing the true nature of corporatism that lies within. Marquez even reveals that immigration, to an extent, is corruptive. The pandemonium of the Buendia house is not only the result of the individuals who reside there, but of the people who are foreigners to the town. The infamous “Street of Turks” within the town is the culmination of numerous negative aspects in society, including prostitution, gambling, drinking, gluttony, and fighting. Not all parts of satire in the novel are meant to be serious; some are humorous. Jose Arcadio’s farts wilt all the flowers in the house and the visiting priest promises to display miracles of God for chocolate. What Marquez is trying to convey is that political arguments can be trivial and purposeless, and that capitalism is not always the answer to the world’s problems, far from it. Capitalism creates more problems than it solves. More importantly, Marquez is showing Colombia how petty its troubles are, and that if it cannot face them it will lead to its ultimate ruin. Bibliography Hylton, Forrest. Evil Hour in Colombia. Verso. New York: 2006 Janes, Regina. “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez”. Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chelsea House Publishers. Philadelphia: 1989, 1999. Johnston, Ian. “On Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Liberal Studies 402, 28 March 1995. Google. 14 March 2009. http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/marquez.htm. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper and Row. New York: 1970. Wiarda, Howard J. The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition. Yale University Press. New York: 2001.

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