Secondary source, Dissertations and Theses on Gabriel García Márquez
Publication Date:
2003
Published:
Miami, FL : University of Miami
Location:
Library, University of Illinois
Notes:
"In this study, I explore how three texts from the Colombian Caribbean challenge the notion of a consolidated nation-state and its rhetoric of complete mestizaje, late into the 20th century. With 'Cien años de soledad' by Gabriel García Márquez as the backdrop of my analysis, I unveil the treatment of race, myth and history respectively in three novels, and how violence shapes the meanings of these categories. The first chapter focuses on 'Chambácu, corral de negros' (1967) by Manuel Zapata Olivella. In this chapter, I define this novel as a depository of the memory of slavery in Colombia that asserts an African heritage in the Northern Coast. At the aesthetic level, I discuss Zapata Olivella's use of a social realist narrative style to articulate the identity and history of Afro-Colombians. The second chapter examines Alvaro Ceped Samudio's 'La casa grande' (1962) to explore the strategies he employs to recover and revise the events of the massacre of the Banana Workers in 1928. In my reading, the massacre emerges as the first wound that causes the disarticulation of the consolidation process of the modern Colombian nation-state. The last chapter centers on 'Los Pañamanes' (1979) by Fanny Buitrago. I define the legend of the Spanish Man, the foundational legend of the island and the text's organizing element, as a myth of origins that delineates the novel's space as a product of violence and penetration. I establish the use of myth as anti-myth to separate and divide, and to mark the difference that separates the insular space and the continental nation-state. In my conclusion, I return to 'Cien años de soledad' to explore how processes of reception and canonization in the symbolic market are 'produced' following strategies derived from the failed encounter between cultural modernism and social modernization. I argue that this process consists in eliminating the discrepancy between these two aspects to attain an abstract state of modernity."