Insomnia Plague and Loss of Memory in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Insomnia Plague and Loss of Memory in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez¹, in his One Hundred Years of Solitude² (1967), narrates the story of José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of the city of Mocondo, and of the following seven generations of his family. The novel describes the misfortunes of the Buendía family, in a town in which everything extraordinary happens. Márquez makes readers feel they are part of this city, living personally everything that occurs, and when at the end of the novel Mocondo is destroyed by a hurricane, readers are left alone to think about what is hidden behind this story.

There are many purposes of this. One is to introduce the reader to Marquez's Colombia, where myths, portents, and legends exist side by side with technology and modernity. Another reason for this leads the reader to question what is real and what is fantastic, especially in the realm of politics. It is to force to question the absurdity of our everyday lives. (Geetha 346)

This novel is not a typical narration of the lives of a normal family; readers are introduced to bizarre events and peculiar characters, but they believe what is happening because of the technique of magical realism³ used by Márquez.

These magical elements are presented in a straightforward manner with no effort made to explain how they could be occurring in the “real” world. In García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, bizarre things like ghosts, heavenly ascensions, insomnia plagues, telekinesis, prophecies and family members returning from the dead are mentioned without consequence or special significance. (Selene, “Magical Realism or Fantasy?”)

“Magic realism is the opposite of the "once-upon-a-time" style of story-telling in which the author emphasizes the fantastic quality of imaginary events. In the world of magic realism, the narrator speaks of the surreal so naturally it becomes real. (Geetha 345) This technique “restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the novel; however, it also causes the reader to call into question the limits of reality. Furthermore, maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and makes the reader to become accustomed to the extraordinary events in the novel. (Geetha 347)

Literary speaking, this novel is part of the Latin American Boom, a literary movement which flourished in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, in which the authors experiment new writing techniques in order to be recognized by the rest of the world, and to document what is happening in their countries.

In such a “disorderly reality,” García Márquez explained, the “poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, soldiers and scoundrels” of Colombia had been forced to respond to one of the saddest and most productive challenges in modern literature: “the want of conventional resources to make our life credible”. Fortunately, conventional resources were not everything. So, according to conventional wisdom, “magical realism” was born, offering the type of hope that García Márquez tried to provide, in that famous speech [“Solitude of Latin America”], when he said that the writer can somehow “bring light to this very chamber with his words”. (Conniff 26)

Therefore, the technique which gave importance to One Hundred Years of Solitude is magical realism, and this is proven also by White in his article “Others Had Used Magic Realism. García Márquez Made the Technique His Own”, claiming that “[t]his became a famous novel throughout the world because it was the first celebrated text that employed magical realism, the technique by which certain details in an otherwise normal world operate according to exceptional principles.”

This technique is not used up hazard, but it has a specific purpose. According to Geetha, in his “Magic Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude”,

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, through the arsenal of magic realism, deals with war, suffering, and death in the mid-1960 of Colombia which had witnessed two hundred thousand politically motivated deaths. The purpose behind portraying the politics of the region is to comment on how the nature of Latin American politics is towards absurdity, denial, and never - ending repetitions of tragedy. His magical flair is to merge fantastic with reality by introducing to the reader his Colombia, where myths, portents, and legends exist side by side with technology and modernity. These myths, along with other elements and events in the novel recount a large portion of Colombian history. (345)

Consequently, Mocondo is a metaphor for Colombia, and this justifies the importance this work of fiction has in Latin American literature, since it makes readers understand Latin American culture, with all its aspects. “In criticism of the Latin American novel, “magical realism” has typically been described as an impulse to create a fictive world that can somehow compete with the “insatiable fount of creation” that is Latin America’s actual history” (Conniff 25)

As a result, magical realism is a very effective technique, and it is what gives originality to this story. However, despite this positive aspect of magical realism, “there is another side of [it], just as there is another side of magic… García Márquez also sensed this darker side of magical realism, [for in] the disorderly modern world, magical realism is not merely an expression of hope. (Conniff 26) The dark side of magical realism is expressed in the novel by events such as the insomnia plague, a real calamity which caused forgetfulness and solitude to the inhabitants of Mocondo.

Readers are introduced to the insomnia plague by the following words:

One night about the time that Rebecca was cured of the vice of eating earth…[The Indian woman] saw Rebeca in the rocker, sucking her finger and with her eyes lighted up in the darkness like those of a cat. Terrified, exhausted by her fate, Visitación recognized in those eyes the symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her brother to exile themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess. It was the insomnia plague. (Márquez 38)

Rebecca is a girl whose origins are unknown, who comes to the Buendía’s house from an unheard-of town, and is welcomed to live with them. She brought with her the insomnia plague, and the family is unaware of the fact that they are being infected by her presence in their home. After few weeks the entire family is infected by Rebecca, one after the other start catching the insomnia plague, and they are unable to sleep.

After several weeks, when Visitación’s terror seemed to have died down, José Arcadio Buendía found himself rolling over in bed, unable to fall asleep. Úrsula, who had also awakened, asked him what was wrong, and he answered: “I’m thinking about Prudencio Aguilar again.” They did not sleep a minute, but the following day they felt so rested that they forgot about the bad night. Aureliano commented with surprise at lunchtime that he felt very well in spite of the fact that he had spent the whole night in the laboratory gilding a brooch that he planned to give to Úrsula for her birthday. They did not become alarmed until the third day, when no one felt sleepy at bedtime and they realized that they had gone more than fifty hours without sleeping. “The children are awake too,” the Indian said with her fatalistic conviction. “Once it gets into a house no one can escape the plague.” (Márquez 38)

At the beginning none of them feels this is something to be scared of; they do not understand that this lethal sickness is totally devastating, and that “its most fearsome part was not the impossibility of sleeping but its inexorable evolution toward a loss of memory in which the sick person ‘sinks in a kind of idiocy that had no past’”. (Sghirlanzoni & Carella 251)

No one understood Visitación’s alarm. “If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” José Arcadio Buendía said in good humor. “That way we can get more out of life.” But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. (Márquez 38)

However, the infection does not stop here. José Arcadio Buendía does not realize that the candy animals they make and sell in the town’s market are also infected by the insomnia plague, and since people buy them and bring them to their houses, the entire Mocondo is getting infected by the this disease.

In the meantime, through an oversight that José Arcadio Buendía never forgave himself for, the candy animals made in the house were still being sold in the town. Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake. No one was alarmed at first. On the contrary, they were happy at not sleeping because there was so much to do in Macondo in those days that there was barely enough time. They worked so hard that soon they had nothing else to do and they could be found at three o’clock in the morning with their arms crossed, counting the notes in the waltz of the clock. Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia for dreams, tried all kinds of methods of exhausting themselves. (Márquez 39)

Subsequently, in order not to infect other towns, they decide to forbid any people from entering Mocondo. However, since many do not listen to the advice and insist on visiting the town, the people of Mocondo decide to put bells at the entrance of the city in order to know when people are coming, and take care not to allow them to eat or drink anything, because food and drink are contaminated by the insomnia plague. In this way they keep the pestilence limited to the inhabitants of the town.

            With the passing of time, this lack of sleeping becomes part of their everyday life; they adapt to it and try to find solutions to their loss of memory, which makes them forget even the names of the objects surrounding them. One day

Aureliano discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory. Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and José Arcadio Buendía put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. (Márquez 40)

The inscriptions were used not only to make them remember the name of things, but also to make them realize their usage. “This represents a desperate attempt to preserve the old values that gave life a meaning, to cling to a coherent vision of an ordered world.” (Higgins 77) An example of this kind of inscriptions is 

[t]his is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters. (Márquez 41)

This shows how difficult life has become after the insomnia plague, and how lost the characters are. People do not remember the names of the objects they use in their everyday life, and they have to read the inscriptions in order to understand how to use them. It is as if they are robots taking instructions, and this shows how inhuman their life has become. They are no more able to take actions, to plan for their future, to decide what to do and what not to do; there is no past to learn from, and there is only a present full of routine, lacking any kind of meaning. 

The insomnia plague should be felt as something unreal, but despite the bizarre details of this calamity, through the use of magical realism, readers feel everything is real; they believe that people could live without sleeping, that they could remember things by inscriptions, and that they could infect each other by drinking or eating the same food. Readers do not question whether an entire town could survive after this plague, or how people are not feeling tired after all these days without sleeping. Everything is narrated in a way that makes readers not only adapt to the situation, but also feel what these people are experiencing.

García Márquez deliberately prevents the reader from taking up an outsider/insider or Us/Them attitude towards the world of the magical. By using one paradigm, and then reversing it, García Márquez makes sure that the reader is unable to escape from a sense of the world as containing a magical dimension. Macondo does not offer a place to which the reader can retreat, a world that is either just real or just magical. The realism of the real is permeated by magic just as the world of the magical is underpinned by the real. (Hart & Ouyang 4)

            Since they are not able to sleep, and they are deprived of their dreams, their obsessions are no more manifested in dreams but in their everyday life. Reality and dream become one thing, and

[it] is significant that during the memory sickness, before the people recover their capacity to function, at least apparently, in the world of daily consciousness, the underlying obsessions of the major characters are overtly dominant. José Arcadio thinks remorsefully of Prudencio Aguilar; Aureliano makes a precious object in his workshop, and Rebeca dreams of her parents. (Bell 105)

Moreover, these sickness increases their sense of solitude, because by losing their memory, they start losing any link to their past, and also any contact with other people. Suddenly, everything starts losing meaning; nobody recognizes the other, and everything is uncertain.

By means of that recourse the insomniacs began to live in a world built on the uncertain alternatives of the cards, where a father was remembered faintly as the dark man who had arrived at the beginning of April and a mother was remembered only as the dark woman who wore a gold ring on her left hand, and where a birth date was reduced to the last Tuesday on which a lark sang in the laurel tree. (Márquez 41)

Memory is not only related to everyday life, or to the function of things, but it is also a proof that people exist. People’s memory is what defines them, what makes them sure they are alive, what makes them willing to improve themselves and succeed, since without memory there would be no past to compare with the present. Once people forget their past, they start losing importance, and they are also unable to find a real purpose for their lives. Human memory is like a recording of everything that happened, “driven by emotional self-interest, [it] goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have”. (Shields 32)

By losing memory, the people of Mocondo are left alone. They are lost, have no real purpose in life, and they are invaded by solitude. In order to live, to be active and to be surrounded by people, one has to have a past. Without memories people are like objects, lifeless and purposeless. They “[lapse] into a kind of idiocy in which they cease to know the function of things and the identity of people and are no longer aware even of their own being, [they] are cast adrift in a world bereft of order and coherence. (Higgins 77)

Despite all these negative sides of the insomnia plague, there are also positive aspects of it. This illness is what makes the Mocondo people think, act and try to find solutions to their situation. They do not surrender to it; they write inscriptions, take care not to infect others, and make use of the extra time they have to work and better their town. Furthermore, in their sickness they experience the same calamity, they feel the same feelings and they act the same. The insomnia plague is what makes the people of Mocondo equal, it is what stops them from declaring war on each others, and it is what makes them focus more on the self than on materialistic aims.

Since the memory of everyone’s past is afflicted in the same manner, and there is no question of erasing a specifically chosen individual’s or group’s identity, any mention of struggle during the insomnia plague amounts to the entire Macondones population’s being against something that threatens all of it, not one or more Macondones against others in internecine conflict devolving on class, ethnicity, race, religion, etc. (Krapp 173)

Disease can sometimes be redemptive, making people realize they are on the wrong track, and that they have to change their way of living. While suffering together, people are concerned for each other, they are human, and they are not selfish, but instead they think for the collective wellbeing. It is through the insomnia plague that readers discover the human side of these characters, whose actions are bizarre and illogical. It is after the insomnia plague that readers feel the real solitude the characters are experiencing, a solitude which will characterize each and every character for a very long time. When people are sick, they tend to be alone, because they are not satisfied with their present life, but in the case of the people of Mocondo the situation is worse, because they have no memories that could help them overcome their solitude. It is as if they are no more the same people, as if they have to start all over again, from scratch, without any help, and without anything to take inspiration from. Their minds are blank, and they have to fill them with new experiences and with new concepts of life.

  It is through this sickness that readers return to reality to think a bit about the human situation. They start thinking about how it could be a life without memories, and how they personally could bear something like this. It is because of magical realism that readers believe that this plague is real, and start reflecting on it as if it could happen to them a day or another.  They start thinking about it in universal matters, relating it to the situation of modern man in general. This man lives in a world which is hostile to him, where there is no real place for him, and where he is alone. As in The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, modern man lives in a waste land, where everything is dead and fruitless; he is a man whose life is a mixture of "memory and desire", because he is destined to live in a land that gives him no hope and no way out, and it is when he loses even this “memory” that he becomes morally dead. Since there is no past on which to base one’s expectations and dreams, frustration and alienation prevail, and life becomes meaningless. 

Through the insomnia plague which leads to their solitude and alienation, the characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude become the symbol of modern men in general, in the sense that their lives symbolize what all modern men experience. These people are not perfect, are full of contradictions, as a consequence of the hostile world in which they live, and they try to overcome the obstacles they find in the best way possible. This novel documents modern life with all its struggles, bizarre events and lack of hope. “Indeed, the book’s heroes, Aurelianos or Arcadios, men of reason or men of passion, militarists or pacifists, portray the same contradictions in the human condition. It is perhaps this all too human quality which accounts for the magnetic force this narrative exerts upon its readers and which may guarantee its international success.” (Carrillo 189)

Notes

¹           A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez's masterpiece was "One Hundred Years of Solitude," a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as "Leaf Storm" and "No One Writes to the Colonel" in the 1950s and early 1960s, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist. But he then found it in dramatic fashion with "One Hundred Years of Solitude," an instant success on publication in 1967. (Rama, “Nobel winner Garcia Marquez, master of magical realism, dies at 87”)

²           It sold over 30 million copies, was published in dozens of languages and helped fuel a boom in Latin American fiction. (Rama, “Nobel winner Garcia Marquez, master of magical realism, dies at 87”)

³           From a term used in 1925 by a German art critic, Franz Roh, to indicate the demise of Expressionism, magical realism grew to become an important feature of the Boom literature of the 1960s in Latin America. (Hart & Ouyang 1)

Works Cited

Bell, M. “The Cervantean Turn: One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 99-126. Print.

Carillo, G.D. “Lyrical Solitudes”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Vol 4. No 2 (1971): 187-189.JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2014.  <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345156>

Conniff, B. “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude”.  Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 25-37. Print.

Geetha, B.J. “Magic Realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rupkatha Journal. Vol 2. No 3 (2010): 346-349. Web. 22 April 2014.

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Hart, S.M. & Ouyang, W. A Companion to Magical Realism. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005. Print.

Higgins, J. “Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de Soledad”. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 63-80. Print.

Krapp, J. “Apathy and the Politics of Identity: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Contemporary Cultural Criticism”. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 169-191. Print.

Márquez, G.G. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Avon Books, 1970. Print.

Selene, L. “Magical Realism or Fantasy?”. Spellbound Scribes, 03 March 2014. Web. 23 April 2014.  <http://spellboundscribes.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/magical-realism-or-fantasy/>

Sghirlanzoni, A. & Carella, F. “The Insomnia Plague: A Gabriel García Márquez Story”. Spinger-Verlag (2000): 251-253. Web. 22 April 2014. <http://www.apandmemgm.com/uploads/5/3/8/2/5382273/insomnia_plague.pdf>

Shields, D. “Memory”. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. No 46 (2009): 32-36. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2014. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/41807718>

White, E. “Others Had Used Magic Realism. García Márquez Made the Technique His Own”. The Guardian, 18 April 2014. Web. 23 April 2014.

 < http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/17/gabriel-garcia-marquez-appreciation-edmund-white>