Defamiliarization in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' S One Hundred Years of Solitude
DEFAMILIARIZATION IN GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ’ S ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
STEPHANIE HARSINTO RUKMI
Student Number: 014214104
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2008 2
DEFAMILIARIZATION IN GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ’ S ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
STEPHANIE HARSINTO RUKMI
Student Number: 014214104
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2008
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Fernanda, TTHHEE other hand, looked for it vain ALONG the paths of her Every Day without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by ROUTINE habits and that IS it is so difficult to find them (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1998: 265)
How Long Before I Get In? Before It Starts, Before I Begin? How Long Before You Decid
? Before I Know What It Feels Like? Where To, Where Do I Go? All That Noise, And All That Sound, If You Never Try, Then You’ll Never Know. All Those Places I Got Found. How Long Do I have To Climb, And Birds Go Flying At The Speed Of Sound, Up On The Side Of This Mountain of Mine? To Show You How It All Began. Birds Came Flying From The Underground, Lo If You Could See It Then You’d Understand, k Up, I Look Up at Night, When You See It Then You’ll Understand. Planets Are Moving At The Speed of Light. Climb Up, Up In The Trees, All Those Signs, I Knew What They Meant. Every Chance That You Get, Some Things You Can Not Invent. Is A Chance You Seize. Some Get Made, And Some Get Sent. How Long Am I Gonna Stand, Birds Go Flying At The Speed Of Sound, With My Head Stuck Under The Sand? To Show You How It All began. I’ll Start Before I can Stop, Birds Came Flying At Before I See Things The Right Way Up. he Underground, If You Could See It Then You’d Understand, Ideas That You’ll Never Find, When You See It Then You’ll Understand. All The Inventors Could Never Design. The Buildings That You Put Up, Japan And China All Lit Up. The Sign That I Could Not Read, Or A Light That I Could Not See,(Speed of Sound by Chriss Martin from ColdPlay)
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This Undergraduate Thesis is dedicated to
My beloved Parents, Grandma, & My dear sister, Ck
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My greatest gratitude goes to my Lord, Jesus Christ, and to His mother,
Virgin Mary, for the health and spirit. I thank for the Lord’s support through the great concerns shown by my beloved family: my father, Martoyo Marcus, my mother, Vincentia Sonny, and my dear sister, Fransiska Jayanti M.A.R. I thank them for the prayers, supports, cares, and the motivation that keep me going on.
I am greatly indebted to my advisor, Dra. Agatha Bernadetha Sri Mulyani
M. A., for her corrections, helpful suggestion, and attention. An enormous gratitude goes to my co-advisor Gabriel Fajar Sasmita Aji S.S, M. Hum for the corrections, sugestions, and especially for the time. My gratitude goes also to E.
Arti Wulandari, M.A., my previous advisor, whose advice has helped me in finding my topic, to Drs. Hirmawan Wijanarka, M. Hum., for his assistance on behalf of miss Sri, and to Dra. Theresia Enny Anggraini, M.A., my examiner, thank you for the helpfull corrections and suggestions.
Life in Santa Dharma has united me with friends, whose supports have accompanied me throughout my study. Therefore, I thank my dear friends: X- antie, Imel, Lia, Petriza, Fonny (dear stranger), Deny, Monda, Kristin O2m,
Kristin Goprek, Lilian, and to my overseas friends: Desi Mulyani, Fransiska Ika,
Lio, and Monique, for the supports, and to my relatives: My Grandmother, Mb
Lastri, and cheery Hanol. Last but not least to the generation 2001 of English
Letters Department and all the staff at the secretariat and library.
Stephanie Harsinto Rukmi
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE...... …. i APPROVAL PAGE……………………………………………………………… ii ACCEPTANCE PAGE...... iii MOTTO PAGE……...... ……………………………………………….… iv DEDICATION PAGE…………...…………………………………………….... v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………..... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………….. vii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...... ix ABSTRAK……………………………………………………………………..... x
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION……………………………………………… 1 A. Background of the Study…………………………………………………... 1 B. Problem Formulation………………………………………………………. 6 C. Objectives of the Study………………………………………………...... 7 D. Definition of Terms…………………………………………………...... 7
CHAPTER II THEORETICAL REVIEW…………………………………... 9 A. Review of Related Studies...……………………………………………….. 9 B. Review of Related Theories…………………………………………….…. 11 1. Theory on Form………………………………………………...……… 11 2. Theory on Defamiliarization……………………………………..……. 12 a. Defamiliarization at the Level of Perception…………………….... 13 b. Defamiliarization at the Level of Language……………………..... 14 i. Metaphor…………………………………………………….… 17 ii. Simile……………………………………………………….…. 19 iii. Parallelism……………………………………………….….… 19 c. Defamiliarization at the Level of Narrative Structure..…….……... 19 i. Foreshadowing..……………………………………………...... 21 ii. Flashback……………………………………………………..... 21 d. Defamiliarization at the Level of Literary Genre………………..... 21 i. Theory on Convention …………………………………….…... 22 ii. Theory on the Convention of Realism……………………….... 23 3. Theory on Literariness…………………………………………….…... 25 4. Theory on Aesthetic....…………………………………………….…... 26 C. Theoretical Framework…………………………………………….……... 28
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY…………………………………….……. 29 A. Object of the Study………………………………………………….……. 29 B. Approach of the Study……………………………………………….….... 30 C. Method of the Study………………………………………………….…… 31
CHAPTER IV ANALYSIS……………………………………………….….. 33 A. The Form of OHYoS………………………………………………….…... 33
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1. Defamiliarization at the Level of Perception…………….………….... 33 2. Defamiliarization at the Level of Language.………………….….…... 37 a. Metaphor………………………………………………….…...... 38 b. Simile…………………………………………….……….…...... 53 c. Parallelism……………………………………….……………... 57 3. Defamiliarization at the Level of Narrative Structure……..…….….... 59 a. Foreshadow……………………………………………………... 61 b. Flashback…………………………………………………….…. 67 4. Defamiliarization at the Level of Literary Genre…………………….. 71 B. Literariness and Aesthetic Quality of OHYoS…………………….……... 76
CHAPTER V CONCLUSION……………………………………..………... 94
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………..…….. 99
APPENDICES…………………………………………………………..…… 102 1. The Buendia’s Family Tree…………………………………………...... 102 2. Summary of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude……..…. 102
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ABSTRACT
STEPHANIE HARSINTO RUKMI (2008). Defamiliarization in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yogyakarta: Department of English Letters, Faculty of Letters, Sanata Dharma University.
This undergraduate thesis studies the effects of defamiliarization in the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (OHYoS) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to reveal the novel’s literariness and aesthetic quality. This novel, written in 1967, offers new genre of magic realism, in which OHYoS is recognized as pioneer of such genre. This best-selling novel even succeeded in introducing and popularizing the genre of magic realism throughout the world. Being inspired by the prominence received by OHYoS with its use of new genre of magic realism and by previous related studies found in some books and Internet Websites, the writer arranged the problem formulations. The first study is conducted to reveal the effects of defamiliarization on such aspects as perception, language, narrative structure, and genre by focusing on the novel’s form and, particularly, on its constituent devices and conventions. The second analysis is conducted to establish OHYoS’ aesthetic quality and distinctive features as literary text, or its literariness, as produced by the text’s effects of defamiliarization. Library research and Internet Media are used to help the writer answering the problem formulations. The methods that are applied in analyzing the novel are reading the novel intensively, formulating the problems, finding the appropriate theories and approach to be applied, answering the problem formulations and composing conclusions. The approach used in this thesis is a formalistic approach of the Russian Formalism. Thus, the focus of study is placed on the novel’s form, especially on the use of literary devices and conventions. In sum, this approach will enable the writer to study OHYoS’ distinctive quality or its literariness. The result of study on defamiliarization reveals that in its language use, OHYoS employs devices like: parallelism, metaphor, and simile. The use of metaphor and simile in OHYoS may defamiliarize ordinary use of word, familiar perception, and usual expression by deviating from the literal and the straightforward. In its narrative structure, OHYoS employs devices like flashback and foreshadowing that may highlight the plot as construction by disturbing linear chronology of story as material. OHYoS reflects the effect of defamiliarization most prominently with its use of new genre, magic realism, which makes strange traditional realism. With its new genre, OHYoS challenges the established way of representing reality in realism and presents new manner of constructing reality. Thus, OHYoS restores reader’s artistic perception and presents stronger impression of the world and reality that is lost in traditional realism as caused by over-familiarity. The result of the second study exhibits how OHYoS’ distinctive quality, or its literariness, and aesthetic value as a literary text are established from the novel’s genre. As an automatized genre, realism becomes the mark of nonliterary. By defamiliarizing realism, magic realism reveals its literariness as a literary text and reestablishes the standard of the literary, in which sense, OHYoS renews literature.
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ABSTRAK
STEPHANIE HARSINTO RUKMI (2008). Defamiliarization in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yogyakarta: Jurusan Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma.
Skripsi ini mempelajari efek-efek defamiliarisasi pada novel OHYoS karangan Gabriel Garcia Marquez, untuk memperlihatkan ke-sastra-an dan aspek estetis dari novel ini. Novel ini, yang ditulis pada tahun 1967, memperkenalkan aliran sastra baru yaitu realisme magis, dimana OHYoS dianggap sebagai pelopor dari aliran sastra tersebut. Novel yang sangat laris ini bahkan berhasil memperkenalkan dan mempopulerkan realisme magis ke seluruh dunia. Terinspirasi dari keberhasilan novel ini melalui aliran sastra realisme magis dan dari studi-studi sebelumnya yang ditemukan di berbagai buku dan website internet, penulis merumuskan permasalahan. Analisis pertama dilakukan untuk mengungkapkan efek-efek defamiliarisasi pada aspek-aspek seperti penglihatan, bahasa, struktur narasi, dan aliran sastra dengan memfokuskan pada bentuk novel ini dan, khususnya, pada penggunaan alat-alat dan konvensi- konvensi sastra. Analisis kedua dilakukan untuk menentukan ke-sastra-an dan kualitas estetis karya sastra ini yang dihasilkan efek-efek defamiliarisasi novel ini. Studi perpustakaan dan media Internet digunakan untuk membantu penulis menjawab permasalahan. Metode yang digunakan dalam menganalisa novel adalah dengan membaca novel secara intensif, membuat dua permasalahan, menemukan teori dan pendekatan sastra yang tepat untuk diterapkan, menjawab permasalahan, dan membuat kesimpulan. Pendekatan yang digunakan adalah pendekatan formalistik yang berasal dari Formalisme di Russia. Demikian, fokus dari analisis diletakan pada bentuk novel, terutama pada penggunaan alat-alat dan konvensi-konvensi sastra. Singkatnya, pendekatan ini memungkinkan penulis untuk mempelajari OHYoS dari kualitas khususnya atau ke-sastra-annya. Hasil analisis tentang efek-efek defamiliarisasi menunjukkan bahwa pada penggunaan bahasa, OHYoS menggunakan alat-alat sastra seperti paralelisme, metafora, dan simile. Penggunaan metafora dan simile dapat memberi efek defamiliarisasi pada pandangan, penggunaan kata, dan ekspresi yang biasa dengan mengalihkan dari pengenalan yang mudah dan langsung. Pada struktur narasinya, OHYoS menggunakan alat-alat seperti pemberi pertanda dan sorot balik yang dapat memperlihatkan plot sebagai konstruksi dengan mengganggu kronologi cerita. OHYoS memperlihatkan defamiliarisasi yang menonjol pada penggunaan aliran sastra baru yaitu realisme magis yang men-defamiliarisasi realisme. Dengan aliran sastra ini, OHYoS menentang penggambaran realita dari realisme dan mempersembahkan cara baru dalam pembentukan realita. Demikian, OHYoS mengembalikan pandangan artistik pembaca dan memperlihatkan kesan yang lebih mendalam tentang dunia dan realita, yang telah hilang pada realisme akibat kebiasaan. Hasil analisis kedua menunjukkan OHYoS memperlihatkan kualitas khususnya, atau ke-sastra-annya, dan kualitas estetisnya sebagai sebuah karya sastra dari aliran sastra novel ini. Sebagai sebuah aliran sastra yang telah menjadi
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otomatis, realisme menjadi sebuah tanda ketidak-sastraan. Dengan men- defamiliarisasi realism, realisme magis menampakkan ke-sastra-annya dan menetapkan kembali standard bagi kesusasteraan, yang mana ini juga berarti OHYoS memperbaharui kesusasteraan.
xi CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Each day, people usually do things regularly that become a routine.
Activities like reading, speaking, seeing rosebushes in the garden and many other things that are performed regularly can be regarded as normal or usual in people’s life. Nevertheless, repeated or habitual activities may retreat into an area of “the unconsciously automatic”; in other words, as action or perception becomes normal or usual, it also becomes automatic or can be performed with less conscious control (Rice, 1996: 17). The working of this principle can be sensed, for example, if one compares the feelings that occur as one holds or sees an object, such as a bar of gold, for the first time and for the hundredth time. The sensation evoked by first-time experience is sensation with mixed feelings like wonder, curiosity, or even surprise that may grip one’s awareness or attention instantly. However, as first experience becomes second, third, or even hundreds, those feelings will fade (Collier, 1992: 129). Thus, the negative consequence of automatization lays in its effect when people begin to lose their impression on objects or when people respond automatically by only recognizing main characteristics of the objects and stop noticing the full details (Rice, 1996: 17-19).
Taking the principle of automatization into account, Viktor Shklovsky, a
Russian scholar from a movement and a school of literary theory and analysis called Russian Formalism, introduced his view of art:
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…art exists that one may recover the sensation of life, it exists to make one feels things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important (Rice: 1996: 18-19).
According to the Russian Formalist, as different from routines of everyday experience that may offer automatized perception, art exists in order that one may recover the sensation of life (Baldick, 1996: 54). Moreover, this purpose can be achieved if familiar object becomes unfamiliar. Thus, as automatized perception is hindered, people will retrieve the sensation of the object as it is perceived and not as it is recognized. The object itself, however, should not be considered important since the object is not the one that changes but rather its way of perceiving or its mode of perception (Rice, 1996: 17-18). In short, art, according to Shklovsky, is capable of introducing renewed attentiveness to objects and so refreshing our capacities to see the world (Bennett, 1979: 31; Ritcher, 1998: 700).
Based on his view of art, Viktor Shklovsky introduced a technical term, ostranenie; where, in English, it is usually translated as “defamiliarization” or
“making strange”. This term is used to refer to the tendency, effect, or process in which familiar objects are perceived as unfamiliar or strange, which, consequently, challenging and restoring automatized perceptions of the world
(Rice, 1996: 18). Concerning literature, this term is applied if literary work achieves or exhibits a distinctive effect in disturbing habitual view in the world and in literature by making strange the usual and the familiar that will freshen reader’s perception. In the study of literature, Shklovsky specified the removal of 3
objects, ideas, or experiences from the realm of automatized perception to be accomplished especially by the functioning of literary devices (Baldick, 1996: 53-
54). Moreover, the effects of defamiliarization achieved in literary texts are established to occur most possibly on such aspects as perception of everyday reality, language, narrative structure, or genre (Cook, 1995: 138).
Being the members of a school of literary theory and analysis called
Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian scholars like Roman
Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, etc. were actually come from 2 groups, the Moscow
Linguistic Circle and the Opojaz. These groups shared a common concern of focusing the study of literature on the distinguishing features of literature
(Makaryk, 1993: 53). The Russian Formalists then established the importance of
“literariness” by stating: “the object of literary science is not literature, but literariness, that is, which makes a given work a literary work” (Baldick, 1996:
123). Thus, it can be inferred that for the Russian Formalists, it is not the text itself, or the text as totality, which establishes the field of literary study but certain techniques used in the text (Makaryk, 1993: 53). Moreover, by focusing on literariness, these scholars were trying to establish the study of literature as autonomous science or upon its own methods and procedures, in which these scholars were focusing the study especially on the formal and linguistic properties of literary text (Bennett, 1979: 19). In short, the focus on literariness is used in their insistent to distinguish the study of literature not only from such studies as history, psychology, philosophy, etc. but also from the study of other art-forms, upon literature’s specificity and distinctiveness (Hawthorn, 1997: 92). 4
According to Shklovsky, literariness may be understood in terms of defamiliarization, where language and automatized perceptions are made strange
(Selden, 1997: 33). Shklovsky then perceived this ability of literature in making strange habitual ways of perceiving the world by the functioning of literary devices as which may uniquely establish the literary qualities of the text (Bennett,
1979: 20). Moreover, besides defining literariness, defamiliarization also becomes the basis for the establishment of aesthetic quality of literary texts:
This process of defamiliarization becomes a formalist measure of aesthetic value. Defamiliarization is achieved by making word, image, or event seem strange, thus countering habituated perception of automatism; and provoking renewed aesthetic response (Leitch, 2001: 1070).
In literature, defamiliarization is recognized as everyday words, images, or events are portrayed in new and different light that may provoke aesthetic value. In sum, by centering the study on literariness and aesthetic quality, or by taking a formalistic approach from the Russian Formalism, the study of literature in this undergraduate thesis can be specified by taking as the focus on the distinctive qualities of literary text, or on the formal properties that produce the effects of defamiliarization.
In this undergraduate thesis, the writer takes the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (afterward will be abbreviated as OHYoS) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that was written in 1967 as the object of analysis. This novel tells about the life of
Buendia family in Macondo. In span of a hundred years, the Buendias and the inhabitants of Macondo must face series of developments and changes, starting from its innocence state up to its demise. In everyday life, the people of Macondo live in unusual rhythm of life where fantastical and mythical events, like levitated 5
priest, girl ascending to heaven, and storm of yellow flowers, exist side by side with realistic happenings (Maynard, 1985: 2090). By the critics, this novel is labeled as a magic realist text, in which this literary genre is known for its technique on the incorporation of strong elements of bizarre, supernatural, mythical, and fantastical into realistic account (Baldick, 1996: 128).
OHYoS, which was published in 1967 in Argentina and in 1970 in United
Sates, is considered as leading example and foremost practitioner of such genre as magic realism (Baldick, 1996: 28). The use of magic realism in this novel may also be considered as new creation of writing due to its tendency for not merely following the existing convention of previous literary form (Bassnett, 1993: 87).
In deviating from prior literary form, magic realism is regarded as a genre that violates standard novelistic expectation of traditional genre of realism with its use of shifting context between the realistic and the fantastic (Waugh, 1996: 37).
Moreover, besides its genre, OHYoS is also praised as a novel that transforms and interprets events depicted inside artistic fiction and language by experimenting with many forms (Maynard, 1985: 2089). Thus, OHYoS may be viewed as a literary text that offers novelty in rendering reality from the artistic portrayal and the new literary genre employed in this novel.
Seen from the new literary genre used in this novel, defamiliarization in literature may be achieved. This consideration is based on Shklovsky’s belief that regarded literature to be as vulnerable as anything else to the force of automatization. In this manner, defamiliarization in literature could be achieved not only from disruption of common perceptual habits so as to induce fresh 6
perception with the functioning of literary devices, but also from the renewal of old literary forms with new ones, in which defamiliarization works in provoking one’s perception afresh inside the scope of literary writing (Makaryk, 1993: 528).
In sum, the writer of this undergraduate thesis believes that it is appropriate to relate Shklovsky’s theory on defamiliarization in the discussion of the artistic portrayal and the use of new literary genre of the magic realism in OHYoS.
In studying the literary text, OHYoS, this undergraduate thesis raises the topic of defamiliarization. Thus, the writer will center the analysis in trying to reveal the effects of defamiliarization in OHYoS by focusing on the form and, particularly, on its constituent devices and conventions, based on a formalistic approach of the Russian Formalism applied. Besides identifying and studying the functioning of devices that may exhibit defamiliarizing tendency on such aspects as perception, language, and narrative structure, the writer also aims to reveal how
OHYoS as literary writing may offer novelty in literature with its use of new genre of magic realism. Moreover, the analysis on defamiliarization will then contribute to the establishment of literariness and aesthetic quality of OHYoS as a literary text.
B. Problem Formulation
The writer formulates two problems in the analysis of Garcia Marquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude as follows:
a. How are the effects of defamiliarization achieved in OHYoS?
b. How do the effects of defamiliarization found in OHYoS establish the
literariness and aesthetic quality of the novel? 7
C. Objective of the Study
The object of this study is the novel OHYoS by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which the study raises the topic of defamiliarization. There are two objectives of this study. The first is to identify the effects of defamiliarization in OHYoS, in which the study is focused on the use of devices and genre that give account in defamiliarizing familiar perceptions in the world and in literature. The second objective is answered to establish the literariness and aesthetic quality of OHYoS as a literary text based on the novel’s effects of defamiliarization.
D. Definition of Terms
To avoid misunderstanding or confusion on certain terms, this undergraduate study makes use of several key terms that are needed to be defined.
1. Defamiliarization
From Russian term ostranenie, formulated by Viktor Shklovsky, to call a distinctive effect of literature in disturbing habitual and automatized perception in order to restore freshness to perception (Rice, 1996: 19). In literature, defamiliarization may possibly occur at the level of perception of everyday reality, language, narrative structure, and/or genre (Cook, 1995: 138).
2. Literariness
A term formulated by Roman Jakobson in which literariness is seen as
“the verbal strategies that make it literary, the foregrounding of language itself, and the making strange of experience that they accomplish” (Culler, 1997: 118). 8
3. Aesthetic
Branch of philosophy that concerns with the idea of the beautiful, in which it attempts to establish the criteria for beauty in work of art (Bressler, 1999: 10).
4. Literary Device
The definition of device used here is from Formalist technical term, priyom, to call for “any of the basic elements that have function in artistic composition” (Leitch, 2001: footnote 5, 1071).
According to Chris Baldick this term is identified as an “all-purpose term” to mention the technique employed in presenting and arranging the details of story in an attempt to form specific effect (1996: 55).
5. Genre
Can be defined as “a recognizable and established category of written work” (Baldick, 1996: 90). This concept is used for classification in literature. In its application, genre can be specified into general and specific term. Genre, in its broadest definition, signifies literature’s “category of composition” like poetry, prose, and drama, while in its specific definition, it is used in classification of fiction, such as science fiction, romance, gothic, etc. (this categorization may also be called as sub-genre).
6. Magic Realism
According to Nigel Wheale, magic realism can be identified as fiction that
“conspicuously mixes generic effects, laying an apparently sound basis in reality verisimilitude and then wrapping the reader’s expectations by moving into fantastic events” (Waugh, 1995: 194). 9
CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL REVIEW
A. Review of Related Studies
This chapter presents information on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his fiction, One Hundreds Years of Solitude, especially on the style that Garcia
Marquez used in this literary text. The information is obtained from the studies conducted previously by literary critics, the one available in masterpiece, and
Internet findings. This review of related studies serves the function to deepen writer’s knowledge in understanding Garcia Marquez and his works.
Garcia Marquez can be considered as one of the great novelists and prose stylists of the twentieth century (Maynard, 1985: 2088). This Colombian-born author is especially famous for using the style called magic realism. Moreover, the reason why Garcia Marquez used this kind of genre was the need for a creation of new writing (Bassnett, 1993: 87). Garcia Marquez’s novels, such as Cien Años de
Soledad, La Hojarasca, Los Funerales de La Mama Grande, La Mala Hora, Leaf
Storm, etc. are some examples of the style called magic realism. Nevertheless, it is his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has deservedly become an all time best-seller and is considered as Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece and foremost example of his style of magic realism
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude).
The conspicuous trait of magic realism is the juxtaposition of the fantastic, the magical, and the mythical with the realistic. Thus, according to Linda
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Hutcheon, magic realism can be defined as a genre that challenges conventional realism and genre distinction, between the fantastic and the realistic (Ashcroft,
1997: 131). This manner of blending in magic realism is also viewed to offer something different, as noted in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, how this novel serves:
…to engage the reader in a new way, by refusing to provide even the first stage of an interpretation of reality, and offering instead a collection of ambiguously related fragments… The burden, in fact, is placed squarely and openly on the reader to construct a meaning in full awareness of the reading process itself…(Maynard: 1958, 1909).
Moreover, besides from its genre, Garcia Marquez’s OHYoS is also praised as novel that presents its story as artistically arranged:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fiction achieves its impact not because of it base in real events but because these events are transformed and interpreted inside artistic fiction and language which-experimenting with many forms-creates fictional universe all its own (Maynard, 1985: 2089).
In relation to Linda Hutcheon’s view that magic realism challenges the genre of realism, the writer looks at this view as supporting her assumption on the effect of defamiliarization achieved by OHYoS with its use of new genre. In considering OHYoS with its magic realism reflects defamiliarization, the writer uses Hutcheon’s view to place realism as point of departure in the discussion in which magic realism may exhibit defamiliarizing tendency at the level of literary genre. In trying to confirm this opinion, the writer analyzes OHYoS by applying a formalistic approach of the Russian Formalism. In sum, this undergraduate thesis studies the effects of defamiliarization reside in OHYoS by seeing through the formal properties of the novel, or not only from the genre used. Moreover, what differentiates this undergraduate thesis with other studies conducted previously 11
resides in the attempt to define literariness and aesthetic quality of OHYoS based on the effects of defamiliarization achieved.
B. Review of Related Theories
In analyzing the literary text, OHYoS, by Garcia Marquez, the writer makes use of the theory on form, theory on defamiliarization, theory on literariness, and theory on aesthetic.
1. Theory on Form
In regarding form, Russian Formalists rejected the traditional concept of form and content that existed as a separable level in literary work; in which in this traditional notion, a work of art can be divided into 2 halves, “a crude content and a superimposed, purely external form” (Wellek, 1976: 140). Russian Formalists then offered a new concept that views content to appear only through the medium of form and so content cannot be usefully discussed or conceived of separately from its artistic embodiment (Makaryk, 1993: 54). In short, content can be considered as an element of form, in which the inseparability of form and content can be seen as: “form in fact embraces and penetrates message in a way that constitutes a deeper and more substantial meaning than either abstract message or separable ornament” (Wellek, 1976: 55; 67).
Along with their view of the inseparability of form and content, Russian
Formalists proposed the concept of “material and device”. Material is defined as
“raw stuff of literature” that can be employed by writer, like facts of everyday life, literary convention, words, ideas, etc., while device is understood as the aesthetic principle that transforms “extra-aesthetic material” into work of art by giving it 12
form. This is because, according to Shklovsky, literature has the ability to transform materials to be experienced artistically with the use of various compositional devices, like plot, rhythm, phonetics, etc. (Makaryk, 1993: 54-55).
In sum, the focus placed on the use of devices then may draw attention on how something is said rather than what is said (Baldick, 1996: 44).
2. Theory on Defamiliarization
According to Viktor Shklovsky, essential function of literature is to negate the process of automatization stimulated by routines of everyday modes of perception. To support this view, in 1916, Shklovsky introduced the term ostranenie, frequently translated as “defamiliarization” or “making strange”, as a distinctive effect of literature that is achieved if the usual is seen to be creatively distorted and the overly familiar is perceived as strange. Thus, defamiliarization may present restoration on automatized perceptions by breaking away from routine or jaded habits of perception (Hawkes, 1977: 62-67).
In literature, according to Shklovsky, it is the functioning of literary devices that would cause the increasing of difficulty and length of perception:
In literature, the removal of the object from the sphere of automatized perception may be accomplished with the use of literary devices and technique. The key to defamiliarization is the literary device, for the “device” impedes perception, draws attention to the artifice of the text, and dehabituates automatized perception (Leitch: 1996: 17).
In short, defamiliarization in literary texts does not rest solely on the appearance of literary device as such, but on “the use to which it is put” or its functioning in the text (Bennet, 1979: 50-51). Moreover, in giving renewal mode of perception, at the same time, defamiliarization may also uncover and reveal “the habitual and 13
the conventional”, as defamiliarization could be identified only against a background of familiarity (Waugh, 1996: 194). In other words, according to
Shklovsky, by performing a study of defamiliarization, two classifications can be felt in literary text, that is the familiar, the conventional, or the “canon” and its artistic newness as the result of estrangement from the canon (Bennett, 1979:
128). Besides implanting fresh perception and revealing the habitual, defamiliarization may also draw reader’s attention to the fictionality of the literary text. This effect, by the Russian Formalists, is called as “self-reflexivity” or
“bared form”. Self-reflexivity is recognized in writing which consciously exposes
“its own fictionality and the processes, conventions, and illusions of its own genre” (Cook, 1995: 133).
Applied specifically to literature, defamiliarization may possibly occur at the level of perception, language, narrative structure, or literary genre (Cook,
1995: 181). a. Defamiliarization at the Level of Perception
At first, the concept of defamiliarization is applied to the way a literary work may restore automatized perception caused by everyday habits. Instead of
“recognizing” an object, defamiliarization enables us to “see” the object:
A phenomenon, perceived many times, and no longer perceivable, or rather, the method of such dimmed perception, is what I call “recognition” as opposed to “seeing”. …the aim of creating new art is to return the object from “recognition” to “seeing” (Bennett, 1979: 53-54).
According to Shklovsky, if a person sees an object for several times, he will develop familiarity with the object and will automatically recognize the object in a 14
way that he called as “dimmed perception” or a manner of perception where the full details are no longer noticed and the sensation or impression no longer present. Moreover, by defamiliarizing or making strange the habitual and the usual, the sensation of objects and reality can be restored as this technique returns or brings awareness back to jaded perception of objects.
In literature, defamiliarization at the level of perception is achieved with the making strange of subject matter, ideas, or concepts and the estrangement of familiar aspects of the world in order to present the world in creative and newly figured way (Bennett, 1979: 21). Through defamiliarization, literature may hinder automatization in perception in several ways, for instance by creating unusual approach and unexpected ways of seeing so as to make the object as renewed attentiveness (Harland, 1999: 150). In giving example of defamiliarization at the level of perception, Shklovsky tended to cite Tolstoy’s devices and techniques in making strange familiar objects or ideas by means of taking an unfamiliar viewpoint of a horse to explain ideas or describing object without naming it (50).
Thus, reader’s perception is heightened by drawing and prolonging it. b. Defamiliarization at the Level of Language
At the level of language, defamiliarization is considered to occur specifically in poetry where the everyday language is made strange and deliberately hindered, in which automatized use of language in everyday bases is located in its regular structure and meaning (Abrams, 1993: 66). Russian
Formalists then treated as special kind language that deviates or deforms 15
“practical or everyday language” and labeled it as “literary or poetic language”
(Widdowson, 1999: 116).
According to Jakobson, poetic language, or the “foregrounding and estranging language and meaning consciously and creatively”, is said to be different from everyday language from its use of such devices as repetition, parallelism, striking metaphor, unusual collocations, irregular words order, rhyme, metre, metonymy, alliteration, etc. (Wales, 2001: 303; 237; Pope, 2002: 89). Such devices are viewed by the Russian Formalists as focusing attention on the formal and aesthetic qualities of language. Moreover, Russian Formalists regarded the use of such devices as able to “defamiliarize the normal relation between language and reality, word and world”, which consequently may compel to disruption of automatized perception (Head, 2006: 400). In sum, at one level, the presence of language used poetically draws attention to itself as language, in which reader will attend to language’s materiality or where the focus is immediately on “the interrelationship among the linguistic signs themselves” (Abrams, 1993: 273). At the other end, this language enhances state of perception, where new and unexpected view of reality and things is presented. In other words, the world represented becomes “vividly renewed” (Eagleton, 1996: 3).
It could not be denied, however, that devices which defamiliarize ordinary language can also be found in daily bases and other kinds of writings.
Nevertheless, according to Jakobson, the use of poetic language in literary texts is eminent in its poetic function: 16
In literature, the dominant function is the poetic. Meaning is carried not by the relations of signs to the world, but rather by the relation of signs with each other, either inside or outside a text—by, in other words, the specific linguistic choices, their deviations from the norm, and the patterns which they create (Cook, 1995: 153).
Instead of merely communicating message or representing objects in reality, dominant function of language in literature is poetic, where word is felt as word.
In addition, regarding the emotive use of poetic language, Russian Formalists viewed this quality to occur with the use of imagery, symbolism, rhythm, etc. that may rouse feelings (Wales, 2001: 304).
It is easier then to recognize language used poetically in literary texts, in which it can be seen from the different treatment applied on familiar device like metaphor. In defining metaphor as a device of poetic language, it does not mean that Russian Formalists denied the existence of metaphor in ordinary language.
Instead, they considered the distinction as located in the different functioning. In daily bases, the use of (dead) metaphor functions to make the hearer understands better or easier on the subject talked about, while active metaphor, usually found in literary texts, makes strange familiar perception or easy comprehension by representing it in new light (Bennet, 1979: 51).
Although devices of poetic language may also be found in everyday language, the term poetic language is maintained for the reason that the analysis also covers discussion on literariness of a literary text. Thus, this term is applied for the fact that this undergraduate thesis takes a literary work as object of discussion, or where the discussion is placed in its context as literary work: 17
So that while we accept that there is no such things as a specifically “literary”, or “peculiar”, language, we nevertheless regard the language of a text as “literary”, rather than as an ordinary act of communication, because we read it as a “literary” work—the “external” competence of the reader will indeed make the text readable, but it is the text own “internal” textual strategies which summon and confirm that competence (Widdowson, 1999: 97).
This is perhaps the wisest way of defining poetic language that actually does not exist and especially prominent in poetry. Moreover, in the analysis of poetic language in OHYoS, which is classified as prose writing or novel, devices that are going to be analyzed are metaphor, simile, and parallelism. i. Metaphor
Metaphor is identified when a word or phrase, literally denoting an object or idea, is applied to signify another object or idea that suggests analogy between them, with reference to one or two qualities (Holman, 1986: 298). A metaphor may consist of 2 levels, tenor, or its literal level, and vehicle, to mention its figurative level. In other words, tenor is a concept that is trying to be explained through metaphor while vehicle is the source used in order to create metaphorical constructions (Simpson, 2004: 41). Tenor usually includes abstract ideas like life, love, or death while vehicle consists of concrete things, like rose or moon (Klarer,
1999: 34). These levels can be understood if there is link of similarity between the context of words that is normally used and the new context where it is applied.
This link, properties, or common association of a vehicle and tenor (specified or implicit) is called as the ground (Montgomery, 1993: 130). 18
As a literary device, metaphor may exhibit defamiliarization by reinforcing or challenging familiar images. With metaphor, reader is brought to perceive the offered new context that may work against familiar conceptualization or the established way of seeing:
Far from representing “what oft was thought”, poetic metaphor “disorganizes” conventional analogies in order to reveal relations, which were “unapprehended” beforehand. As such, metaphor can be seen as an agency through which it becomes possible significantly to transform our perception of the world (Montgomery, 1993: 134-135).
With metaphor, habitual perceptions are renewed. However, the use of metaphor in literary works somehow may also involve dead metaphors which meaning could be grasped easily because of familiarity or common use in nonliterary writings and daily life. The dead metaphor found in literary texts is said to have lost its aesthetic value (Goatly, 1997: 31-33). Quite similar to dead metaphor is inactive metaphor; yet, this metaphor may still offer aesthetic quality although reader may easily grasp the meaning. Contrary to these is active metaphor, which offers unusual manner of expression and unique ground of similarities, or where the ground is not too obvious between tenor and vehicle (Simpson, 2004: 92).
In this undergraduate thesis, types of metaphor that may be found in the analysis will include concretive metaphor, personification, and pathetic fallacy.
Concretive metaphor is identified if abstract object is addressed using concrete term (Montgomery, 1992: 132). Personification is defined when “inanimate object, animate non-human, or abstract quality” is referred to as if it was human, while pathetic fallacy is described as the ascription of human emotions or feelings 19
to inanimate nature (Wales, 1989: 349). Moreover, in practicing metaphor towards imagery, metaphor usually works by defining abstraction or emotional or psychological state with sensory comparison (611). ii. Simile
Simile refers to a category of metaphor that explicitly compares two unlikely things with the use of explicit signal such as like or as (Montgomery,
1993: 129). iii. Parallelism
Parallelism is described as the repetition of similar structural pattern, like phrases or clauses, which suggests some correspondence of the repeated units.
Parallelism may also occur between groups of words, character, plots, images, etc.
Main function of parallelism is seen at the level of the formal (add to the sound and look) and the semantic (add to the meaning) of the text (Montgomery, 2001:
103). Moreover, although this device does not deviate from the rule established in practical language, parallelism, as a device of poetic language, may still draw reader’s attention from its “foregrounded regularity” (Wales, 2001: 283). c. Defamiliarization at the Level of Narrative Structure
At the level of narrative structure of prose fiction, defamiliarization is considered to occur in the arrangement of story (fabula) into its plot (sjuzet; pronounced as soojay). In postulating the theory on narrative structure, Shklovsky differentiated between fabula (Latin) and sjuzet (Russian), where plot is no longer synonymous with story. Instead, story is defined as “the full sequence of events as 20
we imagine them to have taken place in their natural order and duration”, while plot is defined as the arrangement of narrated events as presented to the reader
(Baldick, 1996: 170; 206). In the arrangement of plot, story is made strange, creatively deformed and defamiliarized by devices that constitute sjuzet. In short, fabula provides material for sjuzet (Collier, 1992: 130-131). Moreover, as fabula can be seen merely as “the unformed clay”, it is viewed to have no aesthetic value in its own nature. In short, the construction of plot signifies the specific quality of narrative art, which becomes the subject of formalist study (Leitch, 2001: 1072).
As different from informative prose, narrative fiction with the analysis of fabula and sjuzet may help in making sense or understanding the “underlying logic of action” as presented in the progression of events in sjuzet (Wales, 2001:
146). The arrangement of fabula into sjuzet then may become one of dominant criterions of literariness, since, according to Shklovsky, what is essentially foregrounded in prose is not language but form itself, where defamiliarization may be evident in plot (Collier, 1992: 131). In short, defamiliarization at the level of narrative structure can be defined as:
An author is said to transform the raw material of a story into a literary plot by the use of variety of devices that violates sequence and deform and defamiliarized the story elements; the effect is to foreground the narrative medium and devices themselves, and in this way to disrupt what had been our standard response to the subject matter (Abrams, 1993: 274).
In literary text, the study of sjuzet is focused on devices like flashback, foreshadowing, changes in sequence, incidental comments, displacement of chronology, digression, taking up special point of view, creating effects of mystery and suspense, random jumping backwards and forwards in time, etc. 21
(Wales, 2001: 360; 357; Barry, 2002: 223; Montgomery, 1992: 184). Moreover, devices that are going to be analyzed in this undergraduate thesis are foreshadowing and flashback, based on the devices’ prominence in the novel. i. Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing or anticipation is defined as the narration of event of future occurrence, or prior than its supposed chronological place. This device functions to give hint at events that will happen afterward. Thus, foreshadowing may interrupt present time of the narration or its chronological order. With foreshadowing, prior events are usually “subtly hinted at” or indicated with clues which will be re-examine afterward. In its appearance, this device may be introduced with the use of auxiliary verb “will” (or in any means of expressing future time) and in form of “explicit prophecy”. In hinting at future events, this device may offer suspense and resolution for reader (Wales, 2001: 25). Moreover, in provoking suspense, foreshadowing changes the questioning of “what will happen next” to “how is it going to happen” (Rimmon-Kenan, 1994: 48). ii. Flashback
Flashback can be defined as the insertion of narration that signifies events happened at earlier occurrence. Flashback brings the narration to a point in the past. This device is usually employed in the form of memory, reverie, or confession in justified or naturalized manner (Abrams, 1993: 161). d. Defamiliarization at the Level of Literary Genre
In addition to the three levels of defamiliarization above, Shklovsky also admitted that literary convention and devices are necessarily as open as anything 22
else to the force of automatization. The once defamiliarizing convention may become cliché and may cause numbness in perception (Bennett, 19789: 55).
Russian Formalists also recognized that same device, in different works, may have different functions or may become cliché. If device becomes automatized, it is no longer felt as “functional element”, where reader may undervalue it (Selden,
1997: 39-40). In sum, because of formulaic repetition and over-familiarity, literary devices and genre may lose their potency and stop to be perceived as artistic entities (Duff, 2000: x).
Automatization, caused by what is previously unfamiliar to be familiar, requires literature to turn against itself in order to encounter this process (Collier,
1992: 130-131). Thus, Shklovsky saw the need for literary convention to defamiliarize itself by breaking with “dominant artistic canon” or by deviating from some literary sub-genres to establish new literary form (Makaryk, 1993:
427). Different term of seeing is then introduced against the old way of seeing proposed in previous genre. In short, new form is created when author is capable of identifying the cliché and then defamiliarizing its way of representing reality
(Bennett, 1979: 55). Considering this phenomenon, Russian Formalist regarded this as part of literature’s dynamicity (Selden, 1997: 39-40). Moreover, in this undergraduate thesis, this theory is used along with the theory on convention and, more specifically, the theory on the convention of realism. i. Theory on Convention
Convention is understood as “conspicuous features of subject matter, form, or technique that occur repeatedly in works of literature”. All literary forms 23
are considered to be constituted with conventions, like recurrent types of character, plot, rhyme, etc, in which these are then regarded by audience of particular time and space as commonly accepted (Abrams, 1993: 37). Thus, convention becomes the unwritten rule in reader’s comprehension in identifying and differentiating a genre, in which genre then can be defined as “interrelated set of convention in both form and content”. In short, the point that differentiates between genres is not the accurate definition but its conventional agreement, in which convention will create expectations that govern how a text is supposedly be understood, read or even constructed (Baldick, 1996: 45).
In this undergraduate thesis, this theory is used, besides to give brief review about convention and its relation to genre, to make the discussion on defamiliarization at the level of literary genre more elaborate. ii. Theory on the Convention of Realism
As stated by Shklovsky, the process of automatization could also occur in literature, in which convention can become to seem tired. When it happens, convention becomes cliché, no longer effective, futile as ways of calling up expected responses, and fails to deliver strong literary impact (Beaty, 1989: 1162;
Ritcher, 1998: 703). The more lasting conventions in particular genre, the result will be automatization of artistic perception (Hawthorn, 1987: 50). In short, when an entire genre becomes automatized, according to Shklovsky, it becomes the mark of nonliterary (Ritcher, 1998: 703). Moreover, in identifying defamiliarization at the level of genre, the strange or the unusual can be 24
recognized if only against a norm of familiarity or against previous known genre, as no literary works can exist in isolation:
But the significant point is that, whatever the level of abstraction, no literary work exists in isolation: it is related to other texts, belongs to an intertextual ‘system’, and so cannot properly be understood except in relation to its place in that system (Wales, 2001: 177).
Thus, this undergraduate thesis uses realism as point of departure in the discussion for the reason that OHYoS is regarded to deviate from this genre.
Realism manifests in literary texts where the relationship between the external world and the portrayed reality as presented in the text is felt in direct and immediate sense (Montgomery, 1994: 211). According to Russian Formalists, this sense of realness or directness with reality is produced with the use of convention:
The term “realism”, they argued, could only be of value if, shorn of its literalness, it were used to refer to those conventionalized system of literary representation—notably the 19th century novel-which generates the illusion that they are transcriptions of reality, forms in which the real appears to “write itself” (Bennett, 1979:66).
In generating illusion of reflecting reality, realism uses “re-cycling of habitual language and process of perception” (Belsey, 1990: 38). Moreover, in its manner of presentation, realism is able to distract reader from its use of devices, in which reader tends to naturalize them, as devices are employed in subtle manner
(Abrams, 1993: 174).
The convention of realism that works as the basis for the construction of realist text generates the story to be felt as real by: taking as subject matter around the domestic sphere (centers on events at home with ordinary people and their feelings, relationship, and problems), arranging events in chronological order, creating round or developed characters that are presented in complex and 25
moralistic term, having certain type of ending that reach to clear conclusion, giving verisimilitude of details, presenting the narrator that does not draw attention to its presence, and giving the illusion of formlessness by minimizing coincidence and manipulations of plot (Montgomery, 1994: 213-218).
3. Theory on Literariness
The central concern of Russian Formalists’ study is literariness, or the special properties which make a particular work a literary work instead of literature by itself (Rice, 1996: 16-17). In sum, Russian Formalists defined literariness as “the proper object for literary critical science upon their wish to isolate a pure element for study, free from all admixture and adjuncts”.
As literariness becomes the primary concern, Russian Formalists placed this concept as “working definition” or as the base for their argument on literature’s distinctiveness that will limit the field of study in their attempt to separate the study of literary from nonliterary (Bennet, 1979: 49). Thus, Russian
Formalists attempted to draw literary study away from such studies as historical, psychological, philosophical, etc. (Harland, 1999: 255). More according to
Shklovsky, literariness can be determined if defamiliarization takes place, or where practical language and automatized perceptions are foregrounded as these are made strange by the functioning of literary devices (Selden, 1997: 33).
Moreover, the functioning of devices and manipulation of material, like ideas, ideology, language, or even pervious literary technique, which may differentiate literature from other discourses. 26
Russian Formalists also proposed that in defining literariness, it is not enough just to consider the text’s formal properties only, but also from the text’s position in relation to other texts or from the function of defamiliarization it fulfills. This view is based on the manner in which the effects of defamiliarization may occur if only against an established norm of familiarity, where there will always be process of renewal of old literary forms with new ones. Thus, literariness can be identified as resided “within and between the text” (Bennett,
1976: 55-56; 59). Moreover, in the manner that literature can come in various shapes and sizes and can be composed of various kinds of writing, technique, or device that are to be found in various places outside literature, Russian Formalists then regarded literariness not as eternally and universally given property (Belsey,
1990: 38). In short, literature should not be considered as constant body of text but to be seen as dynamic concept (Bennett, 1976: 59).
In this undergraduate thesis, the theory of literariness is used to limit the study on distinctive quality of literature, whether on literature’s formal and linguistic properties, like plot arrangement and language use, or the function of defamiliarization a text fulfilled based on its position in relation to other text, as represented in genre.
4. Theory on Aesthetic
Besides defining literariness of literary text, defamiliarization also becomes the base for the establishment of the aesthetic quality of literary texts:
This process of defamiliarization becomes a formalist measure of aesthetic value. Defamiliarization is achieved by making word, image, or event seem strange, thus countering habituated perception of automatism; and provoking renewed aesthetic response (Leitch, 2001: 1070). 27
In literature, defamiliarization is recognized as familiar objects are portrayed in new and different light that may provoke aesthetic value. Thus, the objects may become renewed attentiveness (Bennett, 1979: 31). According to Shklovsky, defamiliarization may also produce the effect of prolonging one’s perception, as form is made difficult and objects are perceived unfamiliar by the techniques and devices used. This extending of perception is considered as evoking aesthetic value since Shklovsky regarded the process of perception as “an aesthetic end in itself” (Rice: 1996: 18-19).
Russian Formalists’ idea of the aesthetic as produced by defamiliarization were actually influenced by Immanuel Kant’s “art for art’s sake” where Kant formulated that the aesthetic dimension as produced in art is disinterested for the reason that this idea pays no attention to the state of the object’s utility or existence and where the usual personal interests and purposes should be detached for the sake of the object itself (Harland, 1999: 68). In his book, Literary Theory:
An Introduction, Eagleton saw a correlation between Kantian aesthetic with defamiliarization that. Eagleton viewed that the process of aesthetic may enable readers to turn round upon themselves, to place themselves a little apart from their own point of view, and to start to comprehend “the relation of our capacities to reality, in a moment of wondering self-estrangement that is to be found in poetics by the Russian formalists”. Thus, the wonder caused by the effects of defamiliarization may refresh automatized perception, where aesthetic experience is evoked as reader’s faculties or senses are foregrounded (Eagleton, 2001: 89).
Moreover, Kantian “art for art’s sake” is especially prominent in Russian 28
Formalists’ concept of “baring the device” or “self-reflexivity” which refers to work of literary that does not conceal or seems to flaunt its use of devices or the working of formal properties (Bennett, 1979: 25).
C. Theoretical Framework
The main theory used in this undergraduate thesis is the theory of defamiliarization. This theory will be used to give illustration in revealing the effects of defamiliarization that are to be found in literary writing. The theory on form is going to be used to specify the analysis of defamiliarization on the literary devices and genre, instead of the content. Further, by applying the theory on poetic use of language, literary devices that may defamiliarize everyday language are identified. In revealing the effects of defamiliarization in prose narrative, the theory on story and plot is employed to show how story is defamiliarized into artistic plot. Moreover, the theory on the convention realism will be used as a point of departure in the discussion of defamiliarization in literary genre. Next, the theory of literariness is going to be used to lead the writer on what to be seen in literary text in order to analyze literature’s distinctiveness. Last, the theory of aesthetic will be employed to explain the condition that may evoke aesthetic value. 29
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
The object of study in this undergraduate thesis is the novel One Hundred
Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Garcia Marquez first published this novel originally in Spanish through Editorial Sudamericanos, S.A., under the title
Cien Años de Soledad in Argentina, in June 1967. The book used in this undergraduate thesis is the English translated book by Gregory Rabassa that was published as First Perennial Classics edition in 1998. The English edition originally appeared in 1970 and was published by Harper & Row in United States and England. The novel itself consists of 448 pages and is divided into 20 chapters. Moreover, the style used in this novel is the style that is famous in Latin
American literature, that is magic realism.
The publication of OHYoS immediately established Garcia Marquez as major world author, based on the fact that this novel achieved success in the international world. This first of Latin America’s international bestsellers was translated into more than 30 languages and has sold more than 20 millions copies worldwide. In 1982, Garcia Marquez was awarded with Nobel Prize for
Literature, which is the highest achievement in literary world. This Latin
American writer also received awards from Colombian Association of Writers and
Artists Award, Premo Literario Esso (Colombia), Chianiciano Award (Italy), Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger (France), Romulo Gallegos Prize (Venezuela), Books
29 30
Abroad or Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and Los Angels Times
Book Prize for Fiction in 1988 (Solmon, 1992: 467).
Garcia Marquez’s OHYoS recounts the life of the Buendias in Macondo. In span of a hundred years, inhabitants of Macondo must face series of developments and changes. In everyday life, the people of Macondo live in a universe where fantastical and mythical events exist side by side with realistic happenings. At the end, the Buendias are doomed in repeated history and incestuous relationships.
B. Approach of the Study
This undergraduate thesis will use a formalistic approach that came from a school of literary theory and analysis in Russia that is known as Russian
Formalism. This school appeared from 2 groups of scholars, the Moscow
Linguistic Circle (1915) and the Opojaz or The Society for the Study of Poetic
Language (1916). The major figures of the movement, or known as Russian
Formalists, were Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris
Tomashevsky, and Boris Eichenbaum.
Although came from a different group, Russian Formalists were like- mindedness scholars that were trying to establish the study of literature as an autonomous science by “defining its object and establishing its own methods and procedures” (Makaryk, 1993: 53). For Russian Formalists, literature can then be defined as: “…the concept of a special and privileged set of fictional, imaginative, or creative form of writing which… exhibit certain specific properties that require special methods of analysis if they are to be understood properly” (Bennett, 1979:
6). In sum, the study of literature should not be established on methods of study 31
from other disciplines than from literature itself, where the focus should be directed on how literary writings worked (Eagleton, 1996: 2).
Russian Formalists then concerned themselves with “literariness” of literature or where the focus of study is placed on the verbal strategy that makes it literary, which are on the making strange of experience and the foregrounding of language and formal devices (Culler, 1997: 118). In simplifying manner, Russian
Formalists refocused the study of literature concerning form and devices where the effects of defamiliarization may be attained. Moreover, literariness may be established not from formal properties only but also from the text’s position in relation to other texts or from the function of defamiliarization it fulfills.
The writer chooses a formalistic approach of the Russian Formalism because it allows her to study the formal properties of OHYoS, in which the focus is centered on the novel’s form and, particularly, on its constituent devices and conventions. Applying this approach, the writer will try to reveal the effects of defamiliarization in OHYoS by identifying and analyzing the devices and genre employed. The discussion will also lead to the attempt to establish the literariness and aesthetic quality of the literary text.
C. Method of the Study
This study on Garcia Marquez’s OHYoS will employ library research method, in which the writer develops the analysis by reviewing the novel and by using some guiding books.
The main sources used in this undergraduate thesis are Garcia Marquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Shklovsky’s article “Art as Technique” in Rice’s 32
Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, Selden’s A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary
Literary Theory, Hawkes’s New Accents: Structuralism and Semiotics¸ Leitch’s
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Cook’s Discourse and Literature:
The Interplay of Form and Mind, Bennett’s Formalism and Marxism,
Montgomery’s Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English
Literature, Wales’ A Dictionary of Stylistic, Collier’s Literary theory Today, and
Harland’s Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes: An Introductory History.
The study was performed firstly by reading the novel intensively and focusing on the novel’s formal properties, or on the literary devices and conventions, to reveal the effects of defamiliarization. The second step was formulating the problems as the focus of analysis. The third was to look for secondary sources for the analysis of the problem formulations. The next step was to answer the problems by applying the theories. The first problem formulation was answered by analyzing the effects of defamiliarization found in the novel, in which the focus is centered on the uses of devices and conventions that exhibit defamiliarizing tendency on such aspects as perception, language, narrative structure, and literary genre. The answer for the second problem formulation was based on the analysis of the first problem by studying how the effects of defamiliarization may establish the literariness and aesthetic dimension of the novel. The last step was to draw conclusions based on the analysis of the problem formulations. 33
CHAPTER IV
ANALYSIS
This chapter will answer the problems formulated in previous chapter. The study will start by analysing the novel’s form, particularly on the use of literary devices and genre, in order to reveal the effects of defamiliarization. The analysis on defamiliarization will then contribute to the establishment of literariness and aesthetic quality of OHYoS as a literary text in the second study.
A. The Form of OHYoS
In revealing the effects of defamiliarization, OHYoS is approached with a formalistic method from Russian Formalism, which focus is placed heavily on the form or how something is said rather than what is said. Thus, the analysis is focused on elements of form like literary devices and conventions that may exhibit defamiliarizing tendency on such aspects as perception, language, narrative structure, and literary genre.
1. Defamiliarization at the Level of Perception
The basic principle of defamiliarization resides in the renewal sense as what has become familiar or conventional is felt to be uncommon or strange.
Defamiliarization at the level of perception is achieved when literary text exhibits things, ideas, or experience in unfamiliar and refreshing light that may arrest one’s attention and may provoke to new attentiveness.
The effect of defamiliarization in OHYoS is achieved with distortion of familiar images through uncommon associations and through the representation of
33 34
familiar things as seen from the perspective of first-time experience. In describing familiar item like ice, as seen for the first time by Jose Arcadio Buendia, ice is spoken as new and strange:
…an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, Jose Arcadio Buendia ventured in a murmur: “It’s the largest diamond in the world.” (Marquez, 1998: 18)
From the description of the character, the image of familiar and commonplace object like ice is defamiliarized. Familiar idea of ice as something cold and solid is transformed into something that is beautifully appreciated by referring it with the quality of diamond. Thus, in describing ice, defamiliarization is achieved by not identifying the thing and by describing it from the character’s impression of the ice’s appearance. This manner of presentation may cause brief suspense and curiosity for it temporarily blocks instantaneous recognition.
In creating unfamiliar perspective, euphemism is used in OHYoS to illustrate the effect of incestuous relationship by using terms like “animal feature, iguanas, and pig’s tail” (“a cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the tip). Instead of presenting it from moral and religious perspective, incest is described from its strange effect, its genetic defect. Even, the term incest is never mentioned. These expressions may also be taken to have comic effect, especially in the description of pig’s tail with a realistic description.
Defamiliarization in OHYoS is also recognized in the making strange of norms, convention, and civilized society through a means of Remedios the
Beauty’s character, who is believed to be retarded: 35
She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities. She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only descend way to be when at home. They bothered her so much to cut the rain of hair that already reached to her thighs and to make rolls with combs and braids with red ribbons that she simply shaved her head... The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she became… (248).
These quotations exhibit a defamiliarized perspective on rules, convention, and culture, like dressing and combing one’s hair, by describing them in reverse standpoint and by picturing them as routines that only complicate life itself. Why bother obeying rules if in simplicity and spontaneity a person can find comfort.
In the real world, the social construction made by human will eventually govern human himself because of its characteristic as socially accepted convention that would become the standard for normality. Remedios, by refusing to follow social construction, becomes human according to her own standard of being, an innocent, free, and happy human being.
Based on its genre, OHYoS employs new writing style that is labeled as magic realism. This genre may be viewed as offering estranged perception by treating the fantastic as realistic while the familiar is portrayed, somehow, in fantastical way, in which it can be seen from the different level of response shown by the people of Macondo. Thus, a contrasting reaction occurs as the people of Macondo are depicted to be more surprised in reacting against familiar 36
objects with such response as “eye popping in disbelief” as a reaction of seeing
“a log raft drawn by a thick ropes pulled by 20 men who walked along the bank
(211)”. This kind of reaction may be felt as rather excessive if it is compared to the calm reaction, where sometimes no reaction is shown, in facing fantastic occurrences. Similar response is also shown in experiencing the coming of what is considered as new invention by the people of Macondo like phonograph, hand organs, and theater. The people of Macondo, who perceive fantastic or illogical things as normal, accept these things as strange and so reacted as:
It was as if God has decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no know for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages… (242).
The state of sudden change and unfamiliarity made the people of Macondo question where the limits of reality lay, implying that there is no absolute way in defining a limit while there will always be changes. In this manner, OHYoS seems to present a differing perspective, the absurd realism and realistic fantasy. In short, OHYoS seems to offer defamiliarized perception how sometime realism may cause uncertainty because of its incredibility and the fantastic and the magical may seem very reasonable and tolerable.
Overall, defamiliarization at the level of perception in OHYoS is achieved as familiar ideology, perspective, and objects are viewed in new, unfamiliar, and reverse standpoint that may refresh familiar perception. Moreover, the visions portrayed by innocence characters may defamiliarize aspects of life and familiar things that have already become commonplace or no longer noticed. Based on 37
Shklovsky’s saying, this kind of description makes familiar object to be “seen” again instead of automatically “recognized”, in a manner that reader’s previous perspective and perception are reconstructed.
2. Defamiliarization at the Level of Language
Because of its familiarity and closeness to people’s life, the working of language is so subtle. People tend to pass their attention from the materiality of language and, instead, pay attention straightly toward the content. Terry Eagleton analogizes this subtle working of language with the air, where mostly we breathe the air without being conscious about its presence until it gets thickened and we are forced to take notice on our breathing and the air (Eagleton, 1996: 4). In order that language draws attention to itself as language, Roman Jakobson proposed distortion on the everyday language. By Russian Formalists, this kind of language is labeled as poetic or literary language. Thus, poetic language can be identified when it estranges and foregrounds features of ordinary language (Wales, 2001:
303). Considered to be different from the everyday language, but without denying the possibility that particular devices of poetic language may also be found and used in everyday language, the language situated in literary writing is seen to be evident in poetic function, as illustrated by Harvey Birenbaum:
The closer writing is to practical, informative use, the more naturally we read transparently to see what’s on the other side, as though we were looking through clear glass. The more poetic writing is, on the other hand, the more it stops our vision, like stained glass, so that we are struck by the light-transfigured colors that form the patterned picture-shapes (1997: 57).
By giving distortion to the way language is usually used, language will become and will be felt more perceptible and so offering to fresh perception. However, 38
this effect of defamiliarization is said to occur particularly in poetry, in which, in regarding prose fiction, its language may not be notably deviant or unusual. Based on this view, as this undergraduate thesis analyzes a prose fiction, it is possible that the language of OHYoS may not be deviant and the devices may not be many or striking. Thus, in analyzing defamiliarization on language level, this undergraduate thesis will study such devices as metaphor, simile, and parallelism based on devices’ prominence and occurrence in OHYoS. a. Metaphor
As literary device, metaphor is good example of defamiliarization because it gives new context towards familiar use of words, expressions, and conceptualization (Wales, 2001: 250). Thus, metaphor may modify the old way of seeing by placing the description not from familiar angle. In literature, this metaphor is regarded as active metaphor, in which such metaphor can be considered different from (dead) metaphors commonly found in everyday language. Dead metaphor has meaning that is already known and which effect is no longer able to capture one’s attention or to offer aesthetic experience because of familiarity. Based on this knowledge, the study of metaphor in OHYoS will be centered on metaphors that can be counted as active and striking. In literary text, active metaphor is recognized if the manner of expression is unusual and the ground of similarity is not too obvious between the tenor and vehicle. In short, active metaphor is metaphor that exhibits novelty and defamiliarizing tendency on familiar words or conception and so has the effect of prolonging one’s perception. 39
As prose fiction, the occurrences of metaphor in OHYoS are not too conspicuous. This can be considered common, since according to Andrew Goatly in The Language of Metaphors, a novel would employ metaphor approximately for 28% only (1997: 14-15). Although not many, the presence of metaphor in
OHYoS is especially felt with words like solitude, memory, and nostalgia, in which these words are also frequently mentioned. Thus, in this novel, these words are felt to be striking. In OHYoS, the significance of solitude is made clear by placing solitude as the identifiable trait of the Buendias:
…old woman who guarded the entrance… felt that time was turning back to its earliest origin when she saw a bony, jaundiced man with Tartar cheekbones, marked forever and from the beginning of the world with the pox of solitude (424).
This passage describes how Pilar Ternera is able to recognize Aureliano as a
Buendia from his physical characteristics and solitude. Aureliano especially inherits these characteristics from his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Aureliano
Buendia, which are lean, bitter, and marked with “the pox of solitude”, which serves as metaphorical expression. The tenor “solitude”, refers to withdrawnness or psychological solitude, is addressed as a “pox”, contagious disease caused by virus. The ground of analogy for this metaphor is of unwanted disease, implying solitude as a curse for the family, and of contagious diseases, since most of the
Buendias are marked with this trait.
As solitude becomes congenital trait for the Buendias, each Buendia has his or her own cause of solitude, like the withdrawn Aureliano Buendia that felt most lonely after his involvement in war and after becoming chief commander: 40
The same night that his authority was recognized by all rebel commands, he woke up in fright, calling for a blanket. An inner coldness which shattered his bones and tortured him even in the heat of sun would not let him sleep for several months [1], until it became a habit. The intoxication of power began to break apart under waves of discomfort…[2] Lost in solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction [3] (180-181).
This passage describes the Colonel’s disillusionment after giving command to kill his opponent in order to guarantee his power and chief position in the army.
Realizing his own cruelty, the Colonel is tortured by “inner coldness which shattered his bones”, which serves as a metaphor. This metaphor, which can be counted dead, serves to intensify the Colonel’s lack of compassion or cruelty that makes him troubled and frightened. The second metaphor, also can be counted dead, enhances the Colonel’s harsh realization and guilty feelings for being blinded by power. Instead of being authoritative, the Colonel’s immense power only sinks him deeper into his solitude. The next metaphorical statement [3] places “solitude”, refers to the state of being alone or lonesome, as the tenor for the vehicle “lost” or to miss in one’s way. This metaphor works to depict how the colonel is trapped in his own solitude or a condition where even the Colonel himself could not understand why or how he lets himself be driven by power.
Besides the male members, the female of the Buendias are also marked with solitude:
… the squalid woman, still dressed in clothing of the past century, with a few yellow threads on her bald head, and with two large eyes, still beautiful, in which the last stars of hope had gone out [1], and the skin of her face was wrinkled by the aridity of solitude [2] (235). 41
This passage describes Rebeca’s condition after years of isolating herself. After her husband’s death, Rebeca secluded herself and never showed any interest to the world outside. The presence of metaphor is identified in clause 1 and 2 because the passage is not literally making sense. The first metaphor, which is a dead one, works by analogizing Rebeca’s loss of hope with fading stars. The second metaphor consists of the noun “aridity”, stands for dryness, as the vehicle for the tenor “solitude”, which refers to her seclusion. Thus, Rebeca’s psychological and physical solitude act as the cause of her wrinkles. The possible interpretation for these metaphors is how Rebeca in her seclusion had lost all her vigor, and so, she simply surrenders to old age due to her despair towards life.
Different with Rebecca who secluded herself after her husband’s death, single and aging Amaranta, in her old days, lives in solitude by consecrating her life as a virgin and by keeping her hatred towards Rebeca, her own sister:
She thought of her at dawn, when the ice of her heart awakened her [1] in her solitary bed, and she thought of her… Always, at every moment…Amaranta thought about Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones [2] (236).
The presence of metaphor is felt as the verbal “awakened” is placed to predicate noun phrase, “ice of her heart”, which also serves as metaphor. The tenor “heart”, place of the innermost feelings, and the vehicle “ice”, stands for coldness or frozen condition, may share the ground of solidity and lack of warmth to express
Amaranta’s hatred. While verbal, “awakened”, implies how in her life, Amaranta always remembers Rebecca and her impenetrable hatred. In the next metaphor 42
[2], the tenor “solitude” is predicated with the verb “made selection”, “burned”,
“purified”, “magnified”, and “eternalized”. In this metaphor, another metaphor is also recognized, “the dimming piles of nostalgic waste”, which implies unwanted nostalgia. These metaphorical expressions may be interpreted inside the context of Amaranta’s feeling where, as she becomes old, Amaranta keeps alive the memories that evoke hatred and bitterness. By keeping her bitter memories and by discarding or forgetting memories that evoke nostalgia of happy past, it allows
Amaranta to keep remembering Rebeca.
As a Buendia, Remedios the Beauty is a happy simple person who is at ease in her own world and who is unburdened with day-to-day problem:
“Remedios the Beauty stayed there wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares…
(254).” In this passage, Remedios’ solitude is heightened with the noun “desert”, in which this metaphorical expression may be interpreted as a condition where no one is present to understand Remedios, as her own family misunderstands her innocence and simplicity view of life as simplemindedness.
As striking words in OHYoS, memory and nostalgia, in the context of the novel, help to stress the significance of solitude as one of the themes of the novel.
In OHYoS, the characters, who are marked with solitude, keep clinging to their past memories as in solitude they adopt pessimistic view of life by centering their live in the past. “Memory”, which stands for the power of the mind in remembering, is mostly treated as concrete object. In OHYoS, the metaphors 43
expressing memory also involve dead metaphors like “he sought a last refuge in
Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories (181)” and “in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house, an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated (206)”. These metaphors concretize “memory” by assigning it with thermal and olfactory qualities. The first metaphorical expression suggests happy memory, while the second suggests its opposition, unpleasant memory.
Despites its known meaning, the second metaphor may be considered inactive as it is used in comparison with imagery that describes the condition of the air.
Besides using dead metaphors, OHYoS also describes “memory” with metaphor that can be considered new as in: “Amaranta was too wrapped up in the eggplant patch of her memories… She had reached old age with all of her nostalgias intact” (297). In this metaphorical expression, the tenor, Amaranta’s memories, is concretized with the noun phrase “eggplant patch”, a small piece of land that grows eggplant or cultivated herb that presents in all season. The ground of analogy for the metaphor is how Amaranta keeps her memories fertile, constant, and intact throughout her life. Although the ground of analogy is easy, the unusual comparison makes this metaphor striking.
In the midst of Macondo’s destruction after the prolonged rain stops, memory is described as the factor that burdened the inhabitants of Macondo because of their refusal to keep moving forward:
He went through the dusty and solitary street, examining with scientific interest the inside of houses in ruin, the metal screens on the windows 44
broken by rust and the dying birds, and the inhabitants bowed down by memories (413).
This metaphor, which consists of tenor, “memory”, and verbal “bowed down”, refers to the bending of body or head in submission, illustrates the submission of the people in Macondo as they refuse to move forward by keep remembering the splendor past period at the time of the banana company. This act of surrendering is sourced in the uncertainty of the future, which causes them to seek comfort by looking into the past. Thus, this makes the people in Macondo to live in solitude.
As the people of Macondo and the Buendias rely themselves in the past, the yearning for past life is strong. Nostalgia, stands for sentimental yearning for periods in the past, is also found quite frequently in this novel. Frequent metaphorical expression used to describe nostalgia is the noun “trap”, such as:
“for the first time since his youth he knowingly fell into a trap of nostalgia and relived that prodigious afternoon (286)” and “any of the insidious traps that nostalgia offered him (154)”. The metaphorical expression “trap” suggests the unpredictability and inevitability nature of nostalgia in its evocation, whether it is wanted or not and weather it reveals good memory or not. Similar with this metaphor is the metaphorical expression that makes vivid Aureliano’s misery after the death of Amaranta Ursula and their son:
… he became aware that he was unbearable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. Wounded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persistence of the spider webs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn (445). 45
A metaphor and parallelism is felt in this passage. Metaphorical expression is felt as “nostalgia” is concretized as “lances”, which may be interpreted as surge of feelings brought by nostalgia that only hurts Aureliano’s feeling, saddening him.
Parallelism is sensed on the recurrence of the initial “p”, noun phrase with preposition of, and repetition of meaning that signifies determination. This parallelism is best to suggest ruination of the Buendia’s house, its inevitability.
In OHYoS, the use of metaphor and imagery are effective to describe the effect of nostalgia: “sometimes, over a watercolor of Venice, nostalgia would transform the smell of mud and putrefying shellfish of the canals into the warm aroma of flowers (118)”. This metaphor is used to heighten Pietro Crespi’s homesickness. The tenor “nostalgia” is predicated with the verb “transform”, the act of changing composition. This metaphor, which can be sensed as having hyperbolic appearance as well, heightens the feeling of nostalgia with the use of imagery with olfactory quality.
In expressing solitude, memory, and nostalgia, metaphors in OHYoS may be recognized mostly as dead and inactive, with few active metaphors. It would not be difficult then to bridge the gap between vehicle and tenor to grasp the meaning. However, with its recurrent employment with certain words, reader may take notice of this device’s presence, as metaphor may offer multiple significations on these words. In OHYoS, solitude is represented as something that does not only mean physical aloneness but psychological as well. Thus, solitude, which becomes the defining trait for the Buendias, may affect the way the characters live their lives. In addition, in setting up solitude as prominent, 46
memory and nostalgia become the supporting images, in which these abstract concepts, described as if having physical effect, become the essential factors, and also painful factor, for characters that live in solitude. The prominence of solitude, memory, and nostalgia in OHYoS may also help to set the tone of the novel, of solitude, in which this word may suggest the condition of withdrawal, loneliness, isolation, and seclusion. Moreover, as the people of Macondo and the
Buendias keep clinging themselves strongly toward the splendor past instead of doing something to repair the grim, but true, reality for the better future, solitude in OHYoS also implies a sense of hopelessness or pessimistic view of life.
As seen, the metaphors in OHYoS are recognized with certain words, in which the metaphors may vary from dead, inactive, and active metaphors. Since this undergraduate thesis discusses the effect of defamiliarization in which it may be sensed in active metaphors, in the following passages, the writer will discuss examples of metaphor that can be considered as active. In OHYoS, although love in literary writing is commonly expressed using metaphor, in describing
Amaranta’s futile love, an active metaphor is sensed: “…but what pained her most and enraged her most and made her most bitter was the fragrant and wormy guava grove of love that was dragging her toward death” (298). In this metaphorical expression, tenor, “love”, besides being concretized as “guava grove” or planting of guava fruit, is also heightened with the adjectives “wormy”, damaged by worm, and “fragrant”, sweet and delicate odor, which is an imagery with olfactory quality. This metaphor may be interpreted in the situational context of Amaranta’s illusive love, love which appears to be delightful, sweet, 47
and pleasing but hiding decay or pain inside, since her lover, Pietro Crespi, committed suicide because of Amaranta’s rejection. Moreover, the clause “that was dragging her toward death”, which is felt as hyperbolic, implies the persistent and intense hurt caused by Amaranta’s illusive and futile love.
Although the ground of analogy is not difficult, this metaphor can be considered active because of its unusual expression for describing love.
In OHYoS, with the use of metaphors, in describing soldiers, the illustration is enhanced or made vivid:
There were three regiments, whose march in time to a galley drum made the earth tremble. Their snorting of a many-headed dragon filled the glow of noon with a pestilential vapor [1]. They were short, stocky, and smell of suntanned hide and the taciturn and impenetrable perseverance of men from the uplands. …because they were identical, sons of the same bitch, and with the same solidity they all bore the weight of their packs and canteens, the shame of their rifles with fixed bayonets [2], and the chancre of blind obedience [3] and a sense of honor (325).
In this passage, a hyperbolic description is sensed in the predicate: “...made the earth tremble” that enhances the greatness of the soldiers in number and power.
Besides hyperbole, metaphorical expressions like “many headed dragon”, or animal characterized with monstrous wings and enormous claws, and
“pestilential vapor” make vivid the deadly nature of the soldiers that are ready to fight in war, to kill and be killed. The second metaphor is a personification with the tenor, rifle, a shoulder weapon, which is attributed with human feeling by the noun “shame”, loss of honour or respect because of wrongdoing, as its vehicle.
This personification may offer fresh perception and ironic effect, where the rifle with securely placed bayonet only worth the feel of disrespect for its use to take 48
life, instead of symbolizing power or authority. The third metaphor uses concrete terms “chancre” and “blind”, to talk about “obedience”, act to carry out what one is told to. The phrase “blind obedience” itself is dead metaphor that means unquestioning obedience. However, this dead metaphor is used along with new vehicle “chancre”, primary sore or ulcer at the site of entry of pathogen, that adds to its familiar meaning that this willingness to unquestioning or to act without judgment will only cause destruction and damage.
The use of metaphor in OHYoS may also help to establish the intended atmosphere on the topic of violence, as seen in the description of massacre that is heightened with metaphorical expressions:
Intoxicated by the tension, by the miraculous depth of the silence, and furthermore conceived that nothing could move that crowd held tight in a fascination with death [1]… The captain gave the order to fire and 14 machine guns answered at once... Suddenly, on one side of the station, a cry of death tore open the enchantment: “Aaaagh, Mother”. A seismic voice, a volcanic breath, and the roar of cataclysm [2] broke out in the center of the crowd with a great potential expansion (328).
In the first metaphor, the noun “death” is made as if concrete or animate object that enables people to see, feel, and be attracted with the noun “fascination” and verbal “held tight”. This metaphor, along with such hyperbolic expressions as
“intoxicated by the tension, by the miraculous depth of the silence…”, work to heighten the perplexing and inescapable state of the people in Macondo at the strike that ends up with massacre. The next metaphor uses metaphorical adjectives “seismic”, of earthquake, “volcanic”, of volcano, and noun 49
“cataclysm” to heighten the dramatic and terrifying effects of the shooting of the machine guns that also imply violent and widespread demolition.
In OHYoS, the use of metaphorical expression is also effective in broadening or heightening intended meaning and defamiliarizing familiar concept:
With them he waged the sad war of daily humiliation, of entreaties and petitions, of come-back-tomorrow, of any-time-now, of we’re-studying- your-case-with-the–proper-attention; the war of hopelessly lost against the many ours-most-trulys who would have signed and would never sign the lifetime pensions. The other war, the bloody one of twenty years, did not cause them as much damage as the corrosive war of eternal postponements. Even Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, who escaped three attempts on his life, survived five wounds… succumbed to that atrocious siege of waiting and sank into the miserable defeat of old age… the others, more honorable, were still waiting for a letter on the shadow of public charity, dying of hunger, living through rage, rotting of old age amid the exquisite shit of glory (261-262).
In describing the effort to receive pension, defamiliarized perception is achieved from the unusual comparison between the actual war fought by soldier like
Gerineldo Marquez with the nonphysical war in fighting for pension. The veterans’ struggle to receive their rights for pensions is analogized figuratively with war that is corrosive, or war that causes slow destruction, where the destruction is on the veterans’ pride. Thus, instead of costing their lives, the veterans must sacrifice their pride to beg so that they can receive their pension.
Moreover, the veterans’ state of powerlessness is emphasized by equating waiting with “atrocious siege” and by identifying becoming old as “miserable defeat”.
These phrases also suggest ironic tone as these expressions are usually applied to describe condition in which someone involves in real war or combat. In fighting a sad war, the only reward that the veterans received for serving their country is 50
expressed metaphorically as “exquisite shit of glory”, which stands for valueless glory, as the veterans were disregarded by same people who gave them medals as sign of honor. In this manner of presentation, reader can be brought into higher level of comprehension and possible aesthetic experience by the arousing of rich impression. Moreover, parallelism also occurs with the use of hyphen, a mark used to divide or compound words, in which it is used to join the words to highlight and emphasize the rejection. The hyphen also works as ironic marker of rejection that disguises itself in language of courtesy. This way, with the use of literary devices like metaphor and parallelism, the content represented, as the material, is transformed artistically instead of crudely presented.
Besides creating unfamiliar perspective, metaphor is also used in the construction of foreshadowing, as seen in the revelation of the Buendia’s destiny:
When Aureliano told her, Pilar Ternera let out a deep laugh… There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with an unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle (425).
This description is taken from the point of view of Pilar Ternera, a fortune-teller.
Besides explaining the Buendias’ trait, this passage contains a foreshadowing on the future destiny of the Buendias, which is presented by means of metaphorical expressions. The presence of metaphor is felt as the history of the Buendias is analogized as a machine, implying the repetitive or habitual traits of the family.
This metaphor depicts the Buendias’ history as consisting of repetitions, as can be seen from the repetition of names, characteristic, and destiny. In the next 51
metaphorical expression, which acts as a foreshadowing, the machine is specified as “a turning wheel…progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle”, that reveals the nearness and inevitability of the Buendias’ ending as the axle is wearing and so will cause the turning wheel to stop spinning. This foreshadowing functions to hint the reader on the coming end of the Buendias, as Aureliano is about to confess his love for his own aunt, Amaranta Ursula, which will end in incestuous relationship that will finish the family’s line. Thus, by using metaphor, foreshadowing is rendered differently, as can also be seen in:
The stranger’s letter, which no one read, was left in the mercy of the moths on the self… and there it remained, consuming itself in the inner fire of its bad news as the solitary lovers sailed against the tide of those days of the last stages, those impenitent and ill-fated times which were squandered on the useless effort of making them drift toward the desert of disenchantment and oblivion. Aware of that menace… (441).
The letter is, presumably, it never clears up in the novel, the informing of Renata
Remedios’s death that would reveal the secret of Aureliano’s birth, status, and his incestuous relationship with his aunt, Amaranta Ursula. Besides metaphor, hyperboles are felt: “in the mercy of the moths” and “consuming itself in the inner fire”, in which the second hyperbolic expression is used to heighten the horror of the news that caused the letter to be destroyed by itself. The predicate
“sailed against the tide” implies the couple’s denial or pretension not to admit the knowledge of their true relationship. Moreover, the phrase “of the last stages” indicates more clearly of the nearness of end, where their time or “impenitent and ill-fated times” is wasted with the effort to seek for their true status that would only bring them into “the desert of disenchantment and oblivion”. Thus, the 52
desert of disillusionment and forgetfulness stresses the couple’s attempt to embrace and then forget the knowledge of their true relationship. In this manner of presentation, the use of metaphor may enhance the description and heighten the meaning and so evoking to rich feel.
In general, the metaphors found in OHYoS can be categorized as concretive metaphor, personification, and pathetic fallacy. These metaphors may be identified as metaphor because of their deviance from the norm, especially in selection restriction rule, where particular verb requires particular subject or object, in which this rule can be applied not only to verbs. Deviation in concretive metaphors is recognized as abstract object is treated as concrete thing.
In OHYoS, concretization of abstract concepts like love, nostalgia, solitude, etc. may bring the intended meaning to be easily understood. In personification, anomaly occurs as human emotion is applied to inanimate object: “the shame of their rifles with fixed bayonets”, while in pathetic fallacy, human trait or feeling is assigned to inanimate nature: “the world became eternally sad“ or “the silent morning lights”.
Overall, although there are not many metaphors in OHYoS, in which the metaphors are usually short metaphorical phrase or clause, the occurrences of this device can be considered effective to economize the page of the text but enlarges its given picture in reader’s comprehension. In other words, the metaphors employed in OHYoS are largely placed to heighten, express, or give visualization to feelings, objects, and conditions. Thus, readers’ understanding is enhanced by 53
making them able to visualize and feel the action, by means of using imagery, personification, and concretive metaphor. Although there are dead and inactive metaphors, active metaphors are also found, though not many. In OHYoS, the metaphors, especially the active one, exhibit defamiliarizing tendency on usual meaning of words and familiar perspectives or expressions with the creation of new analogy, in which, consequently, new meaning is achieved and automatized perceptions are disrupted. In sum, active and inactive metaphors may defamiliarize the usual way of seeing, of the literal and the straightforward. b. Simile
Simile works like metaphor but in explicit manner of comparison with the use of explicit sign: “like” or “as”. The similes found in OHYoS, besides function to make the description more vivid, work also like metaphor to enhance and defamiliarize familiar perception or way of seeing.
Besides metaphor, simile is also found in OHYoS, in which this device is employed to make the description more vivid by creating an explicit comparison.
Thus, the comparison presented by simile may enhance and refresh familiar perception, as in describing chatter or fast talk:
Fernanda’s indignation also grew, until her eventual protests, her infrequent outbursts came forth in an uncontained, unchained torrent that began one morning like the monotonous drone of a guitar and as the day advanced rose in pitch, richer and more splendid (347).
One day, Fernanda, a character that is rarely described in terms of inner feelings, complains, as she could no longer contain her repressed anger over her husband’s laziness. In heightening Fernanda’s annoying and long chatter, the description is 54
heightened with the use of simile and metaphor. Thus, simile works by comparing Fernanda’s outburst with a guitar that lets out monotonous and boring sound to illustrate how irritating Fernanda’s chatter is. The chatter is also concretized with the noun “torrent” that signifies her violent burst. When
Fernanda could not stop complaining, her chatter is rising in loudness and so making it impressive. In OHYoS, with the employment of simile, the description can evoke richer image from the different analogy or different way of perceiving.
Moreover, as different with metaphor, simile is not linguistically deviant with its use of explicit comparison sign, such as like and as.
The use of simile in the description of strong Jose Arcadio: “his hair was short and straight like the mane of a mule, his jaws were of iron” (97). This use of simile offers a cliché expression in describing Jose Arcadio’s characteristic by comparing him with the appearance of mule and the hardness of iron, creating vivid the description of Jose Arcadio as strong and macho character.
Besides cliché simile, fresh use of simile is sensed in the description
Amaranta’s romantic relationship with her nephew, Aureliano Jose: “…and then he felt the hand without the black bandage diving like a blind shellfish into the algae of his anxiety” (156). This simile works by comparing Amaranta’s hand with “blind shellfish”, an aquatic invertebrate animal with shell, which dives into
Jose Arcadio’s algae of anxiety, which is a concretive metaphor. This metaphor consists of the vehicle “algae”, simple plants with no true stem that can be found mostly in water, and the tenor “anxiety”, refers to nervous feeling caused by fear 55
or strong wish. The possible ground for these metaphorical expressions is that the blind shellfish hides or takes comfort inside the algae. Moreover, the blindness of the shellfish signifies Amaranta’s unwillingness to discern the moral corruption behind her romantic relationship with her nephew. This metaphor and simile imply Amaranta’s escape from solitude by seeking comfort from Aureliano
Jose’s anxiety, as he, turning adolescence, desires her as a woman. Thus, the use of simile works to lessen the immoral aspect by giving new standpoint, where a two-sided perspective is introduced, how both desires are fulfilled as Amaranta and Aureliano Jose are taking advantages upon each other. This simile can be counted active as it creates unfamiliar expression, in which, as a result, it introduces new way of perceiving and new meaning as well.
In OHYoS, the use of simile is effective in creating sensuous imagination if it is employed with imagery, as can be found in the description of Pilar
Ternera’s laugh, “the woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass (28)”. In the quotation, the loudness of the laugh, which overwhelms the house with its sound, is compared to the loudness of broken glass, thus, intensifying reader’s visualization with the use of imagery on auditory quality. Similar with this simile, which creates different analogy of things with the use of imagery, can be seen in the descriptions of weather condition in Macondo:
…when the sun came out with such strength that the light creaked like a fishing boat (286). 56
One Friday at two in the afternoon, the world lighted up with crazy crimson sun as harsh as brick dust and almost as cool as water, and it did not rain again for ten years (355).
The first quotation describes Macondo‘s weather condition after 3 days of prolonged drizzle. The simile offers new perception as the noun “light”, which is usually associated with seeing, is employed with hearing sense, thus, creating fusion of senses where vision is combined with sound. In the second passage, the use of simile makes vivid the description of weather condition in Macondo after
4 years of prolonged rain by comparing the effects of the sun with the irritating effect caused by brick dust and the comfortable effect caused by the coolness of water’s temperature.
In sum, although not many, similes in OHYoS are applied to make rich and vivid description, in which this device may present reader with sensuous impression. The comparison presented by simile may also enhance and refresh familiar perception by creating different analogy or new way of perceiving. c. Parallelism
As prose fiction, OHYoS employs few parallelisms. In its use, parallelism may function to add to the look and sound of the sentence and to heighten the implied meaning, as can be seen in:
Seeing him work that way, Fernanda thought that his stubbornness was diligence, his greed abnegation, and his thickheadedness perseverance, and her insides tightened with remorse over the virulence with which she had attacked his idleness (355). 57
This description is taken from Fernanda’s viewpoint, how she viewed her idle husband, Aureliano, works hard for the first time. She describes her husband by putting in comparison her old view, which emphasizes his laziness, with the new one. Parallelism is identified on the that-clause in which the repetition is felt as
(possessive pronoun “his” + noun + be “was”), in which in the second and third clause be is omitted. Parallelism can also be felt in the word’s meaning that reflects Fernanda’s prejudice and what she then finally notices in her husband’s traits. The presence of parallelism may enhance how Aureliano Segundo is capable of changing his idleness into laboriousness, which also functions to emphasize the Buendias strong determination. In OHYoS, a structural parallelism is also recognized in the description of dying Jose Arcadio Buendia who exhaled smell of fungus because of his prolonged stay in open-air, after being tied in years under a chestnut tree: “A smell of tender mushrooms, of wood-flower fungus, of old and concentrated outdoors impregnated the air of the bedroom as it was breathed by the colossal old man weatherbeaten by the sun and the rain
(152)”. The parallelism occurs with repetition of same phrase structure on prepositional phrase of, as the modifier for the noun phrase with the noun head
“smell”. This repetition may enhance the smell breathed by Jose Arcadio.
In OHYoS, parallelism may be consider effective in stressing the implied meaning and also may please the eye:
With her waiting, she had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, and the habit of her tenderness, but she kept the madness of her hearth intact (31). 58
During the wait her skin had become wrinkled, her breast had withered, the coals of her heart had gone out (74).
These quotations describe Pilar Ternera’s waiting for the man who will truly and faithfully love her. The first quotation describes her condition after she was being cast off by her lover and then involved in romantic relationship with Jose
Arcadio, who is younger than her. Parallelism occurs in repeated noun phrase that suggests her degradation. Nevertheless, with her relationship with Jose
Arcadio, she has not lost her passion yet. The second quotation shows parallelism of clause that reflects the inevitable loss of Pilar’s vigor and her passion because of her continuous disappointments with men in her life, including Jose Arcadio who left her after finding out that she is pregnant with his child. The presence of metaphorical expression “the coals of her heart had gone out” also strengthens her surrender. This metaphor implies how the fuel or the hope that kept burning
Pilar’s passion had gone out.
In stressing similar ideas, parallelism may present concise description that can be easily recognized by reader but still has possible effect of pleasing the eye:
With the fierce temerity with which Jose Arcadio Buendia had crossed the mountains to found Macondo, with the blind pride with which Colonel Aureliano Buendia had undertaken his fruitless wars, with the mad tenacity with which Ursula watched over the survival of the line…(224).
Structural parallelism is reflected in repetition of preposition with + noun phrase that expresses manner and with which + clause. Besides giving unity and adding the look and sound of the passage, this parallelism also stresses parallel ideas of the Buendias’ strong character and unbridled passion. Similar parallelism is also 59
recognized, where it is used to emphasize Aguilar’s ghost’s pressing need for company in death that caused him to love the enemy who killed him:
After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his worst enemy (84).
Structural parallelism is presented in three clauses, in which in the second clause there is an ellipsis and the third clause is the inverted form of the second clause, which is called as chiasmus. The pattern of the repeated structure is [S + (noun phrase with prepositional for) + V + (be was (omitted in the next 2 clause) + O
(adjective phrase = adverb so + adjective as the head)] while in the third clause the pattern becomes [S (adjective phrase) + (omitted be) + O (noun phrase with prepositional for and Wh-clause].
In OHYoS, the presence of parallelism is especially sensed in repetition of structure and meaning. This use of parallelism then may enhance the intended meaning of the text. Although parallelism is identified in this novel, reader may not notice it well and further to appreciate its presence, unlike parallelism found in poetry. Moreover, though this device does not seem to deviate from everyday language, the arrangement of similar or distinct ideas into parallel construction may please the eye or evoke aesthetic value by making sentences more elaborate.
3. Defamiliarization at the Level of Narrative Structure
According to Shklovsky, in prose fiction, defamiliarization may occur from the arrangement of fabula (story) into its sjuzet (plot). As the material for 60
plot construction, fabula is the full sequence of events in chronological order. The fabula or the story of OHYoS is centered on the lives of the Buendia family in
Macondo in a hundred years of time. The story, chronologically speaking, starts with the incident that brings the Buendia family to meet the Iguaran family. After generations of friendships and marriages, it comes to the marriage between Jose
Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, despite their relationship as cousin. After the marriage, Jose Arcadio, his wife, and friends leave their hometown and settle in a free land, which is named Macondo. From here, the story revolves around the
Buendia family’s life in Macondo up until the family demise as a result of incestuous relationship between an aunt and her nephew, since the written destiny of the family is to meet its end in circular fate of incestuous relationships. The end is established as last member of the Buendias, Aureliano Babilonia, is succeeded in deciphering Melquiades’ parchments that contain his family’s destiny. The act of reading becomes the end of the story, of the Buendia’s family line, and of the town, Macondo, as the manuscript reveals the end (see appendices for full understanding on the story). This story, according to Shklovsky, becomes the material to be transformed artistically into its plot arrangement.
As a novel, OHYoS has plot that encompasses large actions or events as six generations of Buendias become the protagonists. If story is the arrangement of events in chronological order or in the order in which it would occur, plot
(sjuzet) is how story is selected, arranged, and narrated by employing devices that may defamiliarize story. Plot arrangement may not necessarily follow chronology of story and may distort the order, and so creating different perspective in 61
rendering the story. Further, the analysis on the construction of plot in OHYoS is done by studying devices like foreshadowing and flashback. a. Foreshadowing
In plot, the arrangement of events does not necessarily correspond to the chronological order of occurrence. Plot may interrupt chronology of story by inserting events of future occurrence. This kind of interruption is called as foreshadowing. In the plot of OHYoS, this device occurs rather frequently, even, the beginning of the novel makes use of a foreshadowing:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water…(Marquez, 1998: 1).
This device points to an event happens in the future time of the narration’s time where a character named Colonel Aureliano Buendia will face a firing squad and will remember about his past. The foreshadowing is indicated with the use of future tense in the past, where the future is seen from a viewpoint in the past, [(be)
“was” and (to + infinitive) “to remember”] and the noun phrase, “many years later”, that express predestined future of the Colonel.
In literary writings, foreshadowing commonly works by subtly hinting at later event so reader can anticipate its future occurrence. However, in this novel, this device is employed rather obvious with its repeated and frequent use, thus, making foreshadowing to be felt as prominent device. In OHYoS, foreshadowing on the Colonel is repeated for 8 times, informing how he will later face a firing squad and become military man. Foreshadowing on the Colonel when he is about to be executed is repeated more than once. Unlike the first, the second 62
foreshadowing is directly related to present events of the narration when the gypsies that bring ice come to Macondo:
Those hallucinating sessions remained printed on the memories of the boys in such a way that many years later, a second before the regular army officer gave the firing squad the command to fire, Colonel Aureliano Buendia saw once more the warm March afternoon… listening to the distant pipes, drums, and jingles of the gypsies, who were coming to the village once more, announcing the latest and most startling discovery of the sages of Memphis (16-17).
The next foreshadowing is still hinting how the Colonel will later face a firing squad, but serves also in giving information on the Colonel’s present characteristic that he will still have at wartime:
He had the same languor and the same clairvoyance look that he would have years later as he faced the firing squad. But he still had not sensed the premonition of his fate (55). Aureliano, dressed in black, wearing the same patent leather boots with metal fasteners that he would have on a few years later as he faced the firing squad…(88).
These foreshadowings are marked with auxiliary verb construction “would” to describe repeated actions or habits. Another foreshadowing that also serves to describe the Colonel’s characteristics at wartime: “about that time, he had begun to cultivate the black mustache with waxed tips and the somewhat stentorian voice that would characterize him in the war (63)”. These foreshadowings then become anticipation for reader on the coming destiny of the Colonel as soldier in war. The last foreshadowing on the Colonel facing firing squad is when the narration reaches the point when the Colonel is about to join the liberal party to start a revolution: “he himself, facing a firing squad, would not understand too well the concatenation of the series of subtle but irrevocable accidents that brought him to that point (103).” In the narration, this foreshadowing acts as kind of topic 63
sentence for the following narration or as a kind of prologue for the narration that recounts the causes why and how the Colonel joins the war. In sum, as similar foreshadowing is repeated again and again, this then makes definite and immediate the event described, even when it is yet to happen.
Similar with the foreshadowing on Colonel Aureliano Buendia, this device is also used to hint at Arcadio’s future execution by a firing squad:
Years later, facing the firing squad, Arcadio would remember the trembling with which Melquiades made him listen to several pages of his impenetrable writing, which when read aloud were like encyclical being enchanted (78). She (Remedios Mascote) was the last person Arcadio thought about a few years later when he faced the firing squad (96). A few months later, facing the firing squad, Arcadio would revive the wandering steps in the classroom, the stumbling against benches, and finally the bulk of a body in the shadows of the room and the breathing of air that was pumped by a heart that was not his (122-123)
As seen in the quotations, the narrator places the use of foreshadowings to relate present action with certain condition in the future, where present event would become memorable memory in the future. This then defines typical foreshadowing in OHYoS as device that introduces and emphasizes significant present events of the character. Thus, in Arcadio’s future execution, he will remember present events described. The first quotation shows how Arcadio will remember the trembling after hearing Melquiades’ writing. Later on, it is revealed what was heard by Arcadio is actually the reading of his own fate that has been foreseen by Melquiades, which will be confirmed at the end of the novel. In short, besides hinting at future event, foreshadowing is also used to emphasize the significance of memory, exhibited by the manner in which this device exists side by side with the act of remembering impressive past event. 64
In OHYoS, the prominence of foreshadowing is also felt as this device is commonly placed at the opening of chapter, or employed to begin a new chapter, as can be seen in the opening of chapter 10, in which the technique used is similar with that of the first chapter:
Years later on his deathbed Aureliano Segundo would remember the rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son. Even though the child was languid and weep, with no mark of a Buendia, he did not have to think twice about naming him. “We’ll call him Jose Arcadio,“ he said. Fernanda Del Caprio, the beautiful woman he had married the year before, agreed… Throughout the long history of the family insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn… the Jose Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising… The only cases that were impossible to classify were those of Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Segundo. They were so much alike and so mischievous during childhood… (197).
This passage shows how, similar with the Colonel, at the nearness of death,
Aureliano Segundo remembers his past event, the day of his son birth. As seen, obvious jumping backward and forward in time may be felt with the presence of foreshadowing and flashback. In the passage, foreshadowing is marked with noun phrase “years later" that informs future event of dying Aureliano and uninformed
(past) events of his son’s birth and his wife, Fernanda, who is never mentioned before. This foreshadowing is similar with the foreshadowing in the first chapter where this device does not function to hint at future events only. This device, which interrupts present narration, is also employed to bring the narration backward to recount Aureliano’s childhood that is uninformed before and which, based on the linearity of narration, had passed. Following this foreshadowing, the narration is taken to recount as if in flashback manner, but in its way, it resumes itself as the present time of the narration. 65
In OHYoS, foreshadowing is also introduced in the form of prophecy produced by characters like Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Melquiades, and Pilar
Ternera who have psychic power. The Colonel’s ability in prophesying helps him to survive the war and murder attempts. Pilar Ternera is able to see the future using tarot cards. The gypsy, Melquiades, writes about the destiny of the Buendias in parchments coded in Sanskrit. Moreover, the foreshadowings in the form of prophecy work also to enhance the magical aspects of the novel. Thus, however, the presence of foreshadowing, as a device, may be naturalized by reader.
In OHYoS, the fate of the Buendias and of Macondo is also foreshadowed for several times in different ways:
Many years later, when Macondo was a field of wooden houses with zinc roofs, the broken and dusty almond tress still stood on the oldest streets, although no one knew who had planted them (43). The wooden houses, the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons, seemed to have been blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth (356)
In the first quotation, a foreshadowing is inserted in present narration, which is about the almond trees planted by Jose Arcadio Buendia. This device hints at the condition of the almond trees in years to come and of future Macondo that will become modern in comparison to old Macondo with 20 adobe houses at the beginning of the novel. The statement “although no one knew who had planted them” implied to the forgotten Buendias or that the family will lose its splendor.
The second quotation is about the destroyed condition of the banana company’s owner’s house after 4 years of prolonged rain stops. The present condition serves as the visualization on future annihilation of Macondo. Besides directly presented by narrator, which appear as insertion in present narration, foreshadowings of the 66
final state of Macondo and the Buendias also take the form of prophecy. The prediction is written by Melquiades in parchments coded in Sanskrit:
Melquiades got deeper into his interpretations of Nostradamus… One night he thought he had found a prediction of the future of Macondo. It was to be a luminous city with great glass houses where there was no trace remaining of the race of the Buendias (58).
The parchments that contain the fate of the Buendias in a hundred years of time will become obsession for male members of the Buendias as they try to decipher it
Even the ghost of Melquiades foresees that his parchments will only be successfully deciphered after they have reached one hundred years of age:
“Melquiades …refused to translate the manuscripts, No one must know their meaning until he has reached one hundred years of age (200-201).” At the end, the revealing of the parchments juxtaposes with the end of the Buendias, Macondo, and the novel.
Foreshadowing, which is typically hinted device, becomes conspicuous device in OHYoS with its repetitive occurrences. Besides hinting what will happen next, this device also defamiliarizes the building block of suspense by reversing the curiosity or by changing the possible questioning of what happens next into the questioning of how will it happen, how come, or to what extent does the prophecy work, in which it no longer implies chronological story. In plot, suspense acts as an element that keeps reader continues reading a novel, just like being said by Wilkie Collins, “make them laugh, make them cry--make them wait” (Barry, 2002: 225). On the contrary, the plot of OHYoS seems to present quite the opposite by giving reader the final fate of the characters and the end of the story beforehand with the use of foreshadowing. This, however, does not 67
make OHYoS suddenly loses its sense of making reader attracted, for reader may question the validity of the foreshadowing. In short, foreshadowing may still keep reader in suspense.
In seeing the use of foreshadowing in OHYoS, it may be said that different techniques are applied. Foreshadowing may occur as insertion, in which it appears in the middle of present narration that draws as its basis the correlation of the present action with the future events, where the present becomes memory in the future. This device also takes the form of prophesying made by the characters themselves, which occurs frequently. In sum, foreshadowings in OHYoS are presented by the narrator and the characters themselves. Although foreshadowings may be placed as insertions to present narration, this device is made significant and prominent by frequent and repeated mentioning. In sum, foreshadowings in
OHYoS are seen as interrupting present time of the narration, or the smoothness of linear chronology, and disturbing the plot’s traits in creating suspense with the revelation of the characters’ and the book’s end in advance. b. Flashback
Different with foreshadowing, flashback is identified when narrator inserts narration that happens in the past or when the narrator shifts the narration of the story backward from its chronological sequence. In OHYoS, the use of flashback is most prominent in the first two chapters of the novel, in which there is frequent move backward and forward in narration time. In the first chapter or the beginning of the novel, the setting of place and time is established, Macondo is introduced as a village of 20 adobe houses that has frequently visited by the gypsy. The 68
characters are also introduced, Jose Arcadio Buendia, his wife Ursula Iguaran, their children Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Buendia, and the gypsy, Melquiades. At first, Jose Arcadio Buendia is introduced as character with unbridled imagination and burning passion for science and invention after the coming of the gypsy. For his passion in science, he neglects his domestic obligation. After he becomes a character that seems to attract antipathy, the plot employs flashback to inform how Jose Arcadio Buendia was at the founding of Macondo, before the coming of the gypsy, how he took the role as leader for his fellow friends after deciding to settle and to name the place Macondo:
Those who had known him since the foundation of Macondo were startled at how much he had changed under Melquiades’ influence. (Change of paragraph) At first Jose Arcadio Buendia had been a kind of youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the rising of children and animals, and who collaborated with everyone… (9).
This flashback may be considered conventional with its appearance as memory.
The recounting then shifts again to the novel’s presents time, towards the condition after the coming of the gypsy. Because of the overflowing of marvelous stuff, Jose Arcadio tries to open Macondo for contact with other places. This then leads the narration to the introduction of Macondo’s geography that is followed again with flashback how Jose Arcadio, his wife, and friends tried to find an outlet to the sea after leaving their hometown, before they found Macondo:
In his youth, Jose Arcadio Buendia and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months, they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo (11).
The first chapter is closed with Jose Arcadio’s amazement in seeing ice brought by the second group of gypsy, after Melquiades is pronounced dead. 69
If in the first chapter reader is given pieces of information on the founding of Macondo, how Jose Arcadio left with his wife and friends to search for an outlet to the sea then given up the expedition and founded Macondo, the second chapter is opened with the recounting of past events on how Ursula and Jose
Arcadio Buendia met. This flashback is placed at the opening of second chapters:
Several centuries later, the great-great-grandson of the native-born planter married the great-great-granddaughter of the Aragonese. Therefore, every time that Ursula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three hundred years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha (22).
The quotation also marks the changing of narration from past narration to the present time of the novel, which is then followed again to a narration in the past with a flashback that informs on the complete reason why the couple undertakes the journey to search an outlet to the sea and found Macondo. This flashback also answers the unexplained condition at the first chapter about the animal feature that frightens Ursula and why she is glad seeing Jose Arcadio to be born normal.
In the last page is a diagram that may represent the time line of the plot in chapter 1 and 2. The diagram gives illustration on the arrangement of plot in
OHYoS and its story material at the first 2 chapters of the novel. As seen, in introducing the background of the Buendias, the plot arranges the events as if in backwards. As the starting point or beginning of the novel, the plot chooses the time where the first gypsy, led by Melquiades, comes to Macondo in which this is then continued with the plot recounts events prior to this starting point, to explain how the Buendias are before the coming of gypsy and how the Buendias come to found Macondo. 1 70
The plot arrangement on Chapter 1 and 2:
1 2 3 4 5 6
The novel is Macondo is A flashback by the Back to the novel’s present After the failure of Chapter 2 opens with a opened with a introduced as people of Macondo time, Jose Arcadio, inspired his undertaking, Jose flashback with a narration on foreshadowin consisting of 20 on how Jose by the gypsy, tries to put Arcadio finds peace Ursula’s great-great- g on Colonel adobe houses, which Arcadio is before Macondo in contact with by teaching his grandmother fear with the Aureliano has been frequently greats inventions by children alchemy. attack of Sir Francis Drake, the gypsy comes to which would determine on Buendia as he visited by the gypsy undertaking an expedition. The story then takes a Macondo: a good how Ursula would meet Jose remembers of Melquiades’s tribe A flashback is then inserted straight plot to the (not the one that will leader and patriarch on how in the past Jose coming of the second Arcadio and marry him. The his past bring the ice). Jose for his friends when Arcadio, his wife and his generation of gypsy, flashback also recounts the experience of Arcadio Buendia is they just founded friends undertake an after Melquiades is complete story on why the first-seen ice. introduced as man Macondo. This all expedition to find an outlet pronounced dead. couple and their friends leave who is deeply changes after the to the sea, and how they Chapter 1 is closed their hometown and undertake interested in science coming of the give up and founded by Jose Arcadio the journey in search for an and so he neglects his gypsy, Jose Arcadio Macondo instead. This Buendia’s outlet to the sea, how they role as head of the becomes a changed flashback parallels with amazement after would give up and settle family. man and Macondo Jose Arcadio’s similar seeing the ice brought down, and why they name the place Macondo. The is no longer felt as a failure in his present by the gypsy. expedition in trying to open flashback also explains the peaceful place. the road to and from reason why Ursula is afraid Macondo. that her children would be born with animal feature.
While the Chronology of Story as material places the linear arrangement as follows:
6 3 2 4 5 1 71
This graphic also illustrates how flashback may defamiliarize story by prolonging the perception of story, instead of creating easy linear chronology.
Although flashback is common device used in literary texts, this device may disrupt linear chronological of story as material with frequent interjection of past events. Moreover, the use of flashback in OHYoS, for most part, is integrated naturally in its form as memory.
4. Defamiliarization at the Level of Literary Genre
In classifying literature or categorizing a literary text, the concept of genre is applied. In its broadest definition, genre is used to define literature’s category of composition or to establish whether a literary work falls into the category of poetry, prose fiction, or drama. As seen from its formal arrangement, constructed in narrative form and consisted of 448 pages, OHYoS can be defined as a prose fiction or a novel. In its specific concept, genre is used in the classification of fiction, such as science fiction, romance, gothic, etc. Moreover, in defining what genre a literary text falls into, it can be determined from its conventional agreements, rather than from its accurate definition, like recurrent types of character, plot, rhyme, etc. In other words, conventions become the unwritten rule in reader’s comprehension to be able to identify and differentiate a genre
(Montgomery, 1994: 211). Thus, in analysing a literary text, the knowledge of a text’s genre can help reader on how the text is supposedly be understood or read
(Abrams, 1993: 37). By the critics, OHYoS, written in 1967, is classified as a magic realist text. Magic realism is a genre that blends meticulous realism, in depicting ordinary events and descriptive details, together with fantastic and 72
mythic elements, in a manner of ever-shifting pattern (Abrams, 1993: 135). In short, this kind of genre is viewed to juxtapose the realist with the fantastical and the magical (Ashcroft, 1997: 131).
According to Shklovsky, the shocking value or defamiliarizing tendency that may be offered by a novel form, besides from its plot arrangement, may also come from its genre. In prose fiction, defamiliarization can be recognized from the renewal of previously known genre, which already shapes reading manner and understanding, with the new one. However, in order that defamiliarization can be defined, the discussion should be established against a norm of familiarity.
Deriving from this belief, OHYoS is worth studying under the topic of defamiliarization at level of literary genre because this text, which is accounted as pioneer of such genre as magic realism, is considered as challenging traditional genre of realism. Moreover, it can be inferred that as defamiliarization is recognized in literary text, at the same time, the familiarity is also uncovered and revealed. In other words, new form is created when clichés are identified and its way of representing reality is defamiliarized (Bennett, 1979: 55). In sum, since this undergraduate thesis analyzes the effect of defamiliarization that may refresh perception through new genre, the analysis is conducted not from the analysis of magic realism only but also from its deviation from traditional realism.
At its first appearance in 19th century, realism was a new form that estranged traditional romance by its impulse to portray a world that could be easily recognized by reader (Eastman, 1965: 104). Although from Shklovsky’s point of view or from his concept “baring the device” or “self-reflexivity” realism 73
does not seem to exhibit defamiliarizing tendency as this genre is viewed to conceal its use of devices in order to create the illusion of reflecting reality, the emergence of realism as new literary form can still be viewed to offer the effect of defamiliarization, in terms of estranging old genre of romance. Moreover, in regarding realism, M. H. Abrams stated that realism may be identify in relation to its effect on reader, how it gives the illusion that it represents real life and social world by giving the sense that it really happens and the characters really exist
(1993: 174). This effect, which is called as “suspension of disbelief” (Harland,
1999: 133) occurs when reader is willing to suspend his disbelief as the story presented is believable. In achieving such effect, author is likely to choose subject matter of the commonplace and the everyday over rare aspects of life (Abrams,
1993: 174).
To create the illusion of realistic representation, realism usually adopts domestic sphere as its subject matter. OHYoS, as well, centers its story on the ordinary life of the Buendias, in which the setting largely placed inside the
Buendias’ house in Macondo. The story also recounts how the Buendias have to face daily problems like the arrangement of household’s economy, increasing of coffee’s price, the need for daily necessities, sister’s rivalry, love, death, etc.:
…and that would be for Amaranta Ursula’s shoes, and that other one for Santa Sofia de la Piedad, who had not had a new dress since the time of the noise, and this to order the coffin if Úrsula died, and this for the coffee which was going up a cent a pound in price every three months, and this for the sugar which sweetened less everyday, and this for the lumber which was still wet from the rains… (364).
In much complex social issue, with historical and social resonance, OHYoS raises the topic on capitalism, election, civil war, prostitution, religion, and invasion of 74
outside culture and power. By raising these matters, the characters can be portrayed more objectively, as reader would recognize people bound within realistic limitations of economic and social aspect as generally found in life
(Birenbaum, 1997: 141). Thus, these aspects of reality serve to establish, as the basis, how this novel may be counted realist in terms of subject matters presented.
In creating the sense of realness, OHYoS presents a world that may be easily recognized for the reason that it pays attention to details that may support the vividness of the text. As instances, OHYoS mentions real places, like
Riohacha, real character, like Sir Francis Drake (English navigator that circumnavigated the globe), and real name-calling like gringo and mulatto, which may act as authentic details. These facts then may support a recognizable background of society and culture, in which OHYoS can be identified as having
Latin America’s background. This identifiable setting is part of the convention to create likeness with the external world or what is called as verisimilitude. This convention of realism then serves as the basis for the illusion of portraying everyday world with possible recognition from readers.
In the story, the Buendias are depicted to live a normal life in normal town, with problems faced by ordinary family that may reflect realistic convention, even when fantastical happenings occurred. At this point, realistic representation is distorted with the juxtaposition of fantastic elements, such as ghost story, fairy tales, mythical creatures, folktale, and absurd occurrences into a realistic background. In OHYoS, fantastic occurrences are smoothly inserted into the middle of realistic narration, giving brief sense of surprise and wonder: 75
Then they went into Jose Arcadio Buendia’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, …they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers feel from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by (153).
On the day of Jose Arcadio’s death, storm of tiny yellow flowers occurred in
Macondo. This may create unfamiliar sense of death, where death may cause fantastical happening. This impossible occurrence, however, does not seem to distract the characters. Thus, the fantastic should be regarded as part of the reality of the novel. By using the logic that the flowers should be removed so the procession could pass, the narrator removes the logic of the real world that such impossible phenomena like storm of flowers will cause commotion or confusion.
In OHYoS, fantastical incidents also occur as the characters suddenly do fantastical things, like a priest that suddenly levitates 6 inches above the ground after drinking chocolate. Moreover, besides creating imaginable fantastic events, the novel also uses familiar myth that appears in Catholic mythology. The conviction existed among Catholic congregation declares that Virgin Mary never dies, that she is simply called to heaven in body and soul by being raised from earth. In OHYoS, the myth is applied to a character with startling beauty but with simple mind, Remedios the Beauty, where she ascends to the sky while hanging bedsheet:
Amaranta felt mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the beauty begun to rise. …Remedios the beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing 76
through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon come to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere… (255).
What makes the fantastic in OHYoS seems acceptable is in its manner of presentation. In the passage, the fantastic is presented from the narrating of omniscient third person point of view that provides reader consistently with sense of truthfulness and naturalness, which, subsequently, may eliminate questioning and perplexing atmosphere. Although this incident is taken as tale of levitation by some people in Macondo, miracle by most, and is celebrated by novenas, these all are obscured with Fernanda’s ironic and humorous reaction: “Fernanda, burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle, and for a long time she kept on praying to
God to send her back her sheets” (255). Moreover, by juxtaposing the fantastic into realistic background, OHYoS seems to make strange familiar reality by depicting it as if to be distorted reality, which consequently, creates an unfamiliar sense towards the everyday world.
If it placed against familiar genre of realism, magic realism employed in
OHYoS, with its manipulation of realistic convention, may be considered as creating ambiguous reading manner. It is because what is written appears very realistic, but at the same time, its realness is destroyed by the insertion of absurd occurrences. Nevertheless, the important thing to note is that this new genre may refresh one’s perception and may bring new experience in reading activity, in which consequently different comprehension is also introduced.
B. Literariness and Aesthetic Quality of OHYoS
In this section, the study is focused on the aesthetic value and distinctive quality of OHYoS as a literary text, or its literariness. As the idea of the literary 77
becomes an important feature for the Russian Formalists, literariness is defined as the quality that makes a specific work a “literary” work. In other words, the study of literariness is conducted to define the peculiarity of literature. In sum, by focusing on literariness, Russian Formalists were trying to establish the study of literature as autonomous science or upon its own methods and procedures, in which these scholars were focusing the study especially on the formal and linguistic properties of literary text (Bennett, 1979: 19).
According to Shklovsky, literariness of a literary text can be established if the text exhibits defamiliarization on ordinary language and promotes fresh perception on familiar things and experiences by the functioning of devices. This is because in defamiliarization, reader is drawn to feel or to take notice of the devices, where devices are foregrounded, and thus, literariness is made visible. It can be summed up then that literariness is defined in literature, or when literariness becomes the quality that distinguishes literature from other discourses, if: “there is awareness of language and medium that is not so significant in other types of discourse” (Wales, 2001: 414).
Seeing that literariness is defined on the basis of defamiliarization, it is not enough then just to consider the text’s formal properties, since devices and conventions may become automatized as well. Thus, according to Shklovsky, literariness can be established not from the formal properties only but also from the text’s position in relation to other texts or from the function of defamiliarization it fulfills. In sum, literariness can be identified as resided “within and between the text” or where literariness of a text is also established from its 78
value and function (Bennett, 1976: 59). In this manner, literariness is defined as having a relational nature, since literature tends to renew itself (66):
The Formalists contended that literary forms tended to change and develop simply as a result of the passage of time itself. New literary forms are called into being, they argued, by the need to challenge and disrupt those forms and conventions, innovative and defamiliarizing in their own day, whose cutting edge has been dulled through overuse (34).
Furthermore, besides defining literariness, the effects of defamiliarization also become the standard to define the aesthetic quality of a literary text.
For Russian Formalists, the focus of literary study, or its literariness, besides establishing the peculiarity of literature, rests also on the attempt to establish how the literary is differentiated from nonliterary. In other words, literariness is defined in order to distinguish literary texts from other discourses.
However, this attempt has been viewed futile by many literary critics, saying that devices and techniques found in literature are also common to nonliterary (Culler,
1997: 19). In this undergraduate thesis, which clearly takes a literary text as the object of study, the attempt to differentiate the literary with the nonliterary can be considered as pointless. Acknowledging this, instead of taking a broad study by comparing the literary with other discourses, this study is specified with the attempt to establish literariness of OHYoS by seeing from its position inside the literary system or against other (previous) literary texts inside the body of literature itself. In sum, this undergraduate thesis tries to analyze the aesthetic value and distinctive quality of OHYoS as a literary text, as produced especially by the text’s genre or from the text’s function and value in relation to other texts. 79
Moreover, in this section, the analysis of plot arrangement and poetic language will not be discussed particularly, except to support analysis on the genre used.
In revealing the effects of defamiliarization, which become the standard to define literariness, besides can be investigated from language use and plot,
Russian Formalists also recognized literature’s capacity to renew itself in terms of literary conventions and devices. As stated by Shklovsky, conventions and devices could become tired, in which they become automatized, cliché, no longer effective, futile as ways of calling up expected responses, may be passed unnoticed, and fail to deliver stronger literary impact (Beaty, 1989: 1162; Ritcher,
1998: 703). Thus, there should be renewal, in which, for instance, it can be done by making devices used in prior literary writing to function differently.
To define defamiliarization in a literary work, it is obvious that defamiliarization can be identified only against an established norm of familiarity.
In other words, in order that defamiliarization can be spotted, the norm from which it swerves should be identified first. In this undergraduate thesis, the norm of familiarity, or background of knowledge of known genre, acts as point of departure. Thus, the focus of this section is to study new genre of magic realism that is considered to defamiliarize previous genre of traditional realism, which becomes the background of renewal in the discussion.
As literature is also inescapable from automatization, OHYoS, written in
1967, may be regarded as offering new writing style in literature with the genre of magic realism. At first, the term, magic realism, that was coined by a German critic, Frank Roh, is used to call a school of painting in 1920s for paintings styled 80
with the depiction of realistic images or scenes in somehow fantastic manner. In the development of literary writing, the term, magic realism or magical realism, is employed to label literary texts that conspicuously mingle meticulous realism, in depicting ordinary events and descriptive details, together with fantastic and mythic elements in ever-shifting pattern (Abrams, 1993: 135).
To describe magic realism in OHYoS, the writer uses this following illustration. If a novel recounts a story about an ambitious priest begs for donation to build the largest church in the world for impious inhabitants, in trying to comprehend it, this story would likely be considered as belonging to the genre of realism. This consideration is based on the conventionality of realism, in which, in presenting the portrayed reality in direct and immediate sense, this genre would employ characters and subject matters that may correspond to the external world such as ordinary people, their day-to-day problems, or social issues. Thus, realism affects an illusion of reality for reader with its imaginative imitation of reality or by presenting something that can be easily imagined as actuality. However, in
OHYoS, this realistic story is disrupted with the priest performing levitation 6 inches above the ground after drinking chocolate. Surely, the expectation may be shifted towards categorizing the story as belonging to the genre of fantasy, that is to say literary text that is not chiefly dedicated to realistic representation of the familiar world, in order to describe imaginary world where magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted (Baldick, 1991: 81). This expectation that governs how a text may be understood is sourced in the use of convention, in which the story of OHYoS evokes familiarity of the realistic and the fantastic. 81
Moreover, similar consideration also occurs when a beautiful girl with innocence personality ascends to the sky in body and soul while hanging bedsheet or a colonel from Liberal party has psychic power that helps him survived numerous wars and murder attempts. The occurrence of this double expectation is what is presented in OHYoS with its genre, magic realism. With this literary genre,
OHYoS presents familiarity, as recognized in its realistic background, that becomes strange with the incorporation of fantastic elements.
Typically, realism, or a text with realistic conventions, would offer an illusion of accurate reflection of reality, in which it is resulted form habitual use of language and habitual process of perception. This genre also creates its illusion by concealing its artificiality or by obscuring its use of devices. Thus, realism can be seen as a construct, though not so conspicuously (Belsey, 1990: 38). By creating the illusion, realism would then engage reader into a suspension of disbelief, in which this effect occurs if reader readily accepts the world presented in the text as believable or corresponding to the world outside the page. In short, reader would notice certain quality of lifelikeness, instead of regarding the text as artificial literary construction.
In creating a realistic background, the story of OHYoS revolves around the domestic life of the Buendias and their day-to-day problems, in which some events are also recognized to be set in historical past (fictional history):
The Liberals were determined to go to war… to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, …proposed the establishment of public order and family morality … and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities (104). 82
This passage offers realistic description of the Liberal party and its opponent, the
Conservative, which highlights the background of a civil war in Macondo. From this realistic background, OHYoS, as a magic realist’s text, seems to preserve the logic of the external world by presenting credible depiction of a society or social structure. In short, a world where reader can still relate or recognize and where fantastical or impossible happenings are inserted into this realistic background. As a result, this magic realist text may destroy reader’s existing perception and so may bring reader into a state of in-between, in denying and maintaining their expectation based on facts of everyday existence or experience. In other words, although OHYoS seems to base itself in realistic ground, with Latin American setting, this novel refers not quite to the familiar world, where the distortion would make reader to be both distanced and connected, or making him to be in a state of uncertainty. In this manner, magic realism as presented in OHYoS may be regarded as making strange realism by diminishing realist’s attempt for easy suspension of disbelief, as the occurrences of fantastic elements would only disturb the illusion of realistic representation.
In denying realist’s easy suspension of disbelief in magic realist texts, this can also be seen from the language use. As seen in previous discussion, OHYoS makes use of devices of poetic language like metaphor and simile. Thus, by employing the genre of magic realism, passages or sentences in OHYoS that may be considered as having metaphorical sense, on the contrary, should be treated as having literal sense or material existence, despite the impossibility of the events 83
described, as can be seen from following passages describing Remedios the
Beauty’s effect on men:
…the stranger did no take long to realize that Remedios the beauty gave off a breath of perturbation, a tormenting breeze that was still perceptible several hours after she had passed by (249).
… he creaked his skull and was killed outright on the cement floor. The foreigners who… removed the body noticed the suffocating odor of Remedios the beauty on his skin. It was so deep in his body that the cracks in his skull did not give off blood but an amber-colored oil that was impregnated with the secret perfume, and then they understood that the smell of Remedios the beauty kept on tormenting men beyond death, right down to the dust of their bones (252).
These passages describe Remedios the Beauty’s effect on men. In regarding the first quotation, it will be best to understand this passage as having not literal sense but figurative one for the reason that it is taken from the point of view of those who are mesmerized and affected by Remedios’ intense beauty. Thus, the description is felt as emotional portrayal of the men that is heightened with the use of metaphorical expressions, which also has hyperbolic quality. It rejects literal sense where someone may actually able to breathe out perturbation. Reader then may interpret the passage as consisting of concretive metaphors that are used to heighten or make vivid the effects of Remedios that caused mental disturbance on men. In the second quotation, however, the effect of Remedios on men, as she is pronounced most beautiful woman, is described as real and causing physical effect. At first, reader may assume the existence of metaphor, where the description of the man’s blood and Remedios’s odor seem to be heightened with the use of metaphor or hyperbole to enhance her effect on men. However, this 84
description could not be understood figuratively because it is impossible to interpret it as having figurative sense.
Since OHYoS also employs metaphor and simile with figurative meaning, in describing the fantastic, events depicted may appear or seem to be materialization of figurative expressions like hyperbole or metaphor. OHYoS then seems to highlight language’s duality that is metaphorically and literally speaking. Thus, OHYoS highlights its own language and how it works, whether to signify objects or to make possible object or occurrence that is impossible in its material existence in the external world, in which this last characteristic stresses on language’s imaginative or fictive nature. In sum, instead of representing or symbolizing object and having figurative meaning, the language of OHYoS creates its own reality that may not correspond to the reality of the external world. Thus, OHYoS makes the familiar world to appear strange.
Moreover, besides appealing to the aesthetic aspect of OHYoS, this obvious duality of language may also emphasize the literary sense of the text as verbal representation or verbal art. In short, this use of language may call attention to the fictionality of the novel, where literariness is made visible.
As magic realist text, it may be inferred that OHYoS employs elements of the fantastic like ghost story, fairy tale, myth, folklore, etc., freshly as these elements do not seem to evoke the sense of suspense or horror, as different from what is usually found in fantastic stories: 85
Against the light from the window, sitting with his hand on his knees, was Melquiades. He was under forty years of age… He was wearing the same old-fashioned vast and the hat that looked like a raven’s wings, and across his pale temples there flowed grease from his hair that had been melted by the heat…Aureliano Segundo recognized him at once... “Hello,” Aureliano Segundo said. “Hello, young man”, said Melquiades (200).
This passage describes Aureliano encounter with Melquiades’ ghost. In creating realistic tone, besides from its visual details that may help to de-emphasize the strange occurrence, this novel consistently uses conventional omniscient third person narrator to render the fantastic as natural, since this narrator is believed to report objectively. The narrator seems to describe normal occurrence by escaping the attempt to explain the cause for the impossible event and by not showing any sign of surprise or fear from the character. This then may cause reader to assume its naturalness as the narrator describes the meeting in a matter-of-fact, straightforward, and unemotional manner, as if the strange event is an everyday mode of experience.
Besides deriving from familiar myth, ghost story, or folktale, the fantastic in OHYoS also feels like the result of exaggeration, or having hyperbolic quality, in which it is created to highlight the outcome of cultural integration, economical exploitation, and modernization that must be faced by Macondo and its people. In other words, the magical is functioned to highlight the tragedy, where Macondo undergoes progressive deterioration, from its purest or innocence state to its destruction, as illustrated in such tragic condition or ending that happened to characters like Remedios the Beauty, Jose Arcadio Buendia, and the town itself.
Remedios the Beauty, who personifies innocence and purity, ascends to the sky 86
because of her unfitness in modern and corrupt world, Jose Arcadio Buendia, whose death causes storms of yellow flowers, signifies a great man who falls victimized by unfulfilling passion for science, imagination beyond the power of knowledge that only leads to insanity, while the town, Macondo, must suffer prolonged rain that lasts for 4 years, which may also personify the impact of corruption and economic exploitation by the banana company that causes physical destruction and powerlessness on the town and its people. Thus, OHYoS with its magic realism seems to dramatize, in poetic way, the damage that must be endured by Macondo. Thus, magic realism can be considered as poetic representation of reality that offers reader possible aesthetic experience.
Moreover, as the magical is used to heighten the impression of the inevitable loss as caused by capitalism and modernization, this reflects a defamiliarizing technique. In short, the element of unfamiliarity and strangeness in OHYoS is employed to affect stronger impact or impression for reader in describing reality.
It can be inferred then that the fantastic in OHYoS is made to function differently.
As seen, instead of creating air of mystery, wonder, or suspense, the fantastic in OHYoS can also be regarded as being used to reveal the limitation sets in realism or to uncover how this genre may set a limit on how the world or reality gets represented in literary text. This consideration is based on the manner in which realism would deny elements like the fantastic and the absurd in its attempt to create the illusion of real representation of reality, which may also imply realism’s insistence on commonsense or logic of accepting things that are especially perceptible to the senses, reason, or understanding. Regarding this, it 87
can be inferred that in defamiliarizing realism, magic realism also presents an insight into the construction of reality in realist texts. In other words, as reader is distanced from the usual way of perceiving, as a result, reader may take notice how reality is usually represented or constructed.
In OHYoS, the Buendias and the people of Macondo seem to exhibit contradictory commonsense or logic in dealing with their reality. While the fantastic appears real and is accepted as natural, everyday reality for them sometimes resembles wildest imagination or even feels like incredible or magical experiences, as seen in the description of magnet:
He went from house to house dragging 2 mental ingots and everybody was amazed to see pot, pans, tongs, and braziers tumbled down from their places and beams crack from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquiades’s magical irons. “Things have a life of their own… It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls” (1-2).
In the passage, magnet is perceived as magical object by the people of Macondo, as they first see the magnet. With the lack of knowledge, ordinary object like magnet is easily imagined and presumed magical, as first seeing or experiencing may evoke imagination or fanciful assumption. A different commonsense is also shown by the people of Macondo in regarding new stuffs, such as phonograph and theater, as useless and deceived devices that only complicate life itself. Even, these stuffs make them question God where the limits of reality lay. It is as if in
OHYoS, the familiar or the real is rendered to appear magical, strange, and even unacceptable at times. It can be summed up then that magic realism in OHYoS, 88
by challenging the logic established in realism and by juxtaposing magical elements into realistic background, seems to blur the familiar distinction or the fixed division between fantasy and reality. Thus, OHYoS may direct reader to perceive the vagueness of this binary opposition, implying how at times reality may be perceived as multifarious, incredible, absurd, and so cannot be absolutely defined. This may also imply reality as a matter of perspective, where there is no single version of reality according to different people or different standpoint.
By employing and distorting the conventions of realism, by denying easy suspension of disbelief and by disrupting the illusion of real imitation of reality, magic realism may be considered as challenging the established way of constructing reality in realism. In other words, magic realism as employed in
OHYoS distorts the familiar vision or conceptualization of reality as commonly offered by realist texts that may have caused habituation or numbness in reader’s artistic perception. As a result, OHYoS with its magic realism may present the world to be “seen” again instead of merely “recognized”, where in recognition, the world is perceived in some definite way. Thus, the world is “seen” since the way of perceiving the world is changed, in which, in OHYoS, reality is described in a new vision, that is more indefinite, unfixed, broad, and loose. In other words,
OHYoS implies how reality needs not to be something rational and definite.
Moreover, this defamiliarization may also compel reader to re-imagine the familiar world with different judgment or review, as it appears strange and new.
In sum, OHYoS with its magic realism presents the world in new way, where the world receives renewed attentiveness. 89
Familiarity, according Shklovsky will only lead to passivity, as habitual and repeated perceptions will only cause automatic tendency that eventually blinded us. In the same manner, familiar and automatic genre would seem to offer no aftereffect or impression. The fantastic in magic realism then made the familiar world seems to be distorted world, and so, without the cover of familiarity, the world may be seen again, where reader may take notice of aspects of life or reality that previously seem unseen. Thus, the magical and the fantastic in OHYoS make possible or tolerable the fundamental absurdity, incredibility, and incongruity of the world. Moreover, as there is different attitude in presenting reality, consequently, different comprehension is offered as different genre is introduced.
It can be inferred then that although the fantastic or magical aspects in OHYoS may be considered absurd, illogical, and may frustrate reader’s expectation, magic realism, in its presence as a new genre, may still compel reader to think or to be critical in every process of comprehension, instead of nurturing passive acceptance caused by the comfort of familiarity. Thus, instead of recognizing, or thinking that we really know the world and automatically repeating one’s perception, reaction, and judgment, by making strange the world and the traditional manner of perceiving the world, OHYoS breaks away from the stereotyped way of presentation and so offering to new reading experience.
The magic realism in OHYoS, with its strong realistic background and fictional history juxtaposed with magical aspects, may imply that in order to present reality, one can or is able to not merely follow or accurately copy reality so as to talk about it. In other words, the occurrence of magic realism breaks the 90
notion that emphasizes mirroring or copying as the only truest way of presenting or signifying reality. Thus, the occurrence of magic realism may highlight realism only as a mode of representation. It can be summed up then that a different presentation of reality from the traditional realism is introduced as magic realism welcomes magical experience, allowing for reality that is more diverse and unlimited than a single rational, logical, and plausible mode of experiencing.
Moreover, the important point to note is that the effect of defamiliarization in
OHYoS with its magic realism is identified not only on the technique used, where this genre employs and destroy realistic conventions, but also on its way of perceiving or talking, where reality is rendered and perceived differently. In short, the world is experienced differently in OHYoS.
Besides being viewed insignificant in realist text, the fantastic may also be associated as a form of escapism. In other words, the fantastic in OHYoS can be considered merely as a factor of entertainment that is employed to escape, change, or forget unpleasant reality or routine, and so should not be taken seriously. In placing the fantastic into realistic background, however, magic realism is not trying to deny true reality. By creating distortions on the illusion of realistic representation, magic realism may be viewed as a genre that highlights its own presence as a literary form that signifies or represents reality, instead of crudely mirroring reality or insisting itself as a genre that accurately reflects reality.
Moreover, as OHYoS is viewed as literary mode where reality gets represented, this novel may be said as revealing self-reflexivity. 91
Besides from the manner in which magic realism defines itself as representation of reality, self-reflexivity of OHYoS may also be seen from the construction of ending, where this novel reveals the illusion of its own genre. As the end, OHYoS is closed with the act of deciphering the parchments, which contain the entire history of the Buendias, while the town’s destruction is taking place. The revelation marks also the end of the Buendias, after Aureliano’s son is consumed by red ants and Aureliano realizes that he will never leave the house:
Macondo was already fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano… began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into speaking mirror …Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave the room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have second opportunity on earth (448).
At the end, Macondo is symbolizes as city of mirrors. Mirror is a device that produces image of an object by reflection. In other words, a tool that presents true representation. Thus, this may be interpreted that Macondo reflects or represents real depiction of a nation or society in the external world. However, the word in bracket “mirages” is used as if to give more precise term than the word mirror could represent. In its denotative meaning, mirage refers to illusion as produced by hot air condition in the form of image that is not actually there or reflection that is inverted. In the context of the novel, the word mirage may imply how the novel reveals its construction, which is not as an entirely real and perfect representation of reality, as mirage produces image that is not actually there. 92
The symbolization may also imply how the novel is actually written, in which it reveals the technique of writing or the genre used, the magic realism.
With this genre, OHYoS may be seen as still conforming to the conventions of realism, which supports the illusion that this novel gives a real reflection of reality as if a mirror is being put against reality. In other words, it highlights the realistic background of OHYoS that may be recognized by reader as real representation.
Nevertheless, to signify Macondo as city of mirrors that reflects reality would not be enough. The word in bracket or the other analogy is used to emphasize how mirage may signify the magical aspect of the novel, since this word implies something illusory or hallucinatory. In short, the correction is used to indicate how OHYoS presents, on the one hand, real representation of historical records or real description of society and, on the other hand, its reverse side as reflected in the novel’s magical or imaginary aspect. This symbolization may also exhibit how
OHYoS modifies conventional ending, not only to end at the last page, but also to expose its construction, where reader is reminded that a novel is being read instead of reality. Thus, the end becomes a device for OHYoS to highlight its own style, magic realism, in short, revealing self-reflexivity.
As a genre that has become automatized and fails to deliver strong impression and literary impact, realism becomes the mark of nonliterary according to Shklovsky (Ritcher, 1998: 703). Besides establishing a new standard of the literary, by the creation of new genre of magic realism, reader’s artistic perception and perceptibility is also sharpened and freshened from the dullness in traditional realism as caused by repetition and familiarity. In other words, reader’s perception 93
is heightened as reader’s habitual way of perceiving is distanced. Therefore, with its occurrence, magic realism may be said as renewing realism, in which, consequently, it renews literature as well. In sum, in its occurrence as a new genre, magic realism exhibits the effect of defamiliarization, restores reader’s artistic perception, brings back the sensation of life, and presents stronger impression of the world and reality.
Magic realism, which may be considered as offering new mode of perceiving the world or new manner of signifying reality, may then introduce renewed attentiveness to reality and to the presentation of reality in literature.
This finding can be considered as being in conformity or relevant with Russian
Formalists’ view that literature cannot be universally and fixedly defined because, according to them, literature needs to turn against itself to oppose the process of automatization inside its own body. However, as magic realism renews realism, it does not mean that if new genre appears, the old one would necessarily disappear. In sum, it is not a matter of replacement but more of giving new form or renewal, which reflects the dynamicity of literariness.
In sum, OHYoS with its use of literary technique of the magic realism may be said as exhibiting literariness in a way that it employs cliché or commonplace mimesis in manner that is different from realist texts. The literariness of OHYoS is also established from the genre’s value and function, in which this can be seen from the manner where magic realism restores the artistic value or in genre and fulfills the function of defamiliarization by breaking away from the familiar in 94
traditional realism and by employing elements of the fantastic with different function. Moreover, since magic realism in OHYoS evokes a sense of unfamiliarity, reader may found the style of this novel as different. In dealing with new style, reader’s attention or focus may be directed to its form or how something is said, as different if reader is faced with familiar style, which focus is placed directly to its content. For the same reason, aesthetic quality is evoked, since reader no longer directs his attention to the content only, but to its form as well, which also means that reader’s perception is prolonged. In short, the impeded form of magic realism lays in the way that this genre offers not easy recognition or comfortable acceptance as offered by realism, just like stated by
Shklovsky:
The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged (Rice: 1996: 18-19). 95
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
In studying the literary text, OHYoS, this undergraduate thesis raises the topic of defamiliarization, in which the discussion is formulated in 2 problem formulations. In the analysis, the writer applies formalistic approach of Russian
Formalism, where the focus is placed on the form, or on how something is said rather than what is said. In revealing the effects of defamiliarization in OHYoS, the first study is focused on elements of form like literary conventions and devices that may exhibit defamiliarizing tendency on such aspects as perception, language, narrative structure, and genre. The second analysis is conducted to establish OHYoS’ aesthetic quality and distinctive features as literary text, or its literariness, as produced by the text’s effects of defamiliarization.
At the level of perception, OHYoS may be said as restoring the innocence or naïve view as familiar perspective and objects are perceived in new or reverse standpoint. If because of routine, peculiarity of familiar objects is diminished in perception, the visions portrayed by innocence characters may defamiliarize familiar things and aspects of life that have become commonplace or no longer noticed. With this manner of description, sensation of life may be restored. In sum, instead of spontaneously experienced, objects, ideas, and ideology can be
“seen” again or become perceptible again, instead of automatically “recognized”, in a manner that reader’s previous perspectives and perceptions are reconstructed.
In its language use, OHYoS employs devices like parallelism, simile, and metaphor, in which these devices become evidence for the poetic exercise and tool
95 96
for the aesthetic quality exhibited by OHYoS. Although not many and striking, parallelism in OHYoS, which is mainly felt in repetition of structure, may please the eye by giving unity and adding to the look, sound, and meaning of the passage, in short, making the sentences more elaborate. Simile in OHYoS works like metaphor but with the creation of different analogy from the explicit comparison. Thus, this device may make richer the description. Most prominent device in OHYoS that reflects poetic use of language and the effect of defamiliarization is metaphor, although its occurrences are not many. The metaphors in OHYoS exhibit defamiliarizing tendency on ordinary use of words or usual meaning of words and familiar expressions with the creation of new analogy and fresh construction of meaning. This device, which rejects literal sense and deviates from selection restriction rule, creates multiple significations on concepts like solitude, memory, and nostalgia and presents fresh manner of expression in aspects of life like war, massacre, love, and in the construction of foreshadowing.
In short, poeticity of language in OHYoS is recognized as devices like metaphor and simile make strange or defamiliarize familiar perception, habitual manner of expression, and usual way of seeing, of the literal and the straightforward.
As a prose fiction, OHYoS does not seem to exhibit striking tendency of defamiliarization in its plot arrangement. Besides still using conventional device like omniscient third person point of view, OHYoS employs devices like flashback and foreshadowing. In this novel, foreshadowing is utilized with several functions.
Besides hinting at future event, which enables reader to anticipate its later occurrence, this device is also used to highlight the magical aspect of the novel in 97
its form as prophecy. With the revelation of the characters’ and book’s end in advance, foreshadowing disrupts the element of suspense in plot by changing reader’s curiosity or the questioning of what happens next into how come or how will it happen, where it no longer implies chronological story. Moreover, flashback in OHYoS is used conventionally to reveal essential past events so reader can get profound understanding. By employing flashback, the linearity of story is disrupted, in which, as a result, it may prolong reader’s perception on the story.
In OHYoS, most significant defamiliarization is exhibited by the novel’s genre, the magic realism. With the incorporation of fantastic elements in realistic background, magic realism defamiliarizes realism by employing and distorting the conventions of realism, by disturbing the illusion of real representation of reality, and by denying the realist’s easy suspension of disbelief. In sum, the scope taken by magic realism in defamiliarizing realism is centered on how familiar perceptions of the world and reality are distorted, how new vision of the world is introduced, how the established way of constructing reality in realism is challenged, how old way of representing reality is renewed, and how new manner of constructing reality is presented, in which these, consequently, may introduce renewed attentiveness to reality and to the presentation of reality in literature.
Moreover, as magic realism welcomes magical experience, this genre allows reality that is more diverse and unlimited than a single rational and plausible mode of experiencing. By making strange realism, magic realism may compel reader to re-imagine the familiar world with different judgment or review, as the world 98
appears strange and new. It can be inferred then that the effect of defamiliarization in OHYoS with its magic realism is identified not only on the technique used, where this genre employs and destroy realistic conventions, but also on its way of perceiving or talking, where reality is rendered and perceived differently. In general, in its occurrence as a new genre, magic realism in OHYoS exhibits the effect of defamiliarization, in which sense this genre also restores reader’s artistic perception, brings back the sensation of life, and presents stronger impression of the world and reality that is lost in traditional realism as caused by over- familiarity.
In defining literariness and aesthetic quality of OHYoS, the standard is based on the effects of defamiliarization achieved in the text. Nevertheless, in this undergraduate thesis, instead of determining the literary quality of the text in comparison with other discourses outside the body of literature, the attempt is centered on the establishment of the literary inside the body of literature by focusing on the genre used. In other words, literariness and aesthetic quality of
OHYoS is defined from its genre or from the function of defamiliarization it fulfills based on the relationship it sets up with other texts.
As a genre that has become automatized and fails to deliver strong impression and literary impact, realism becomes the mark of nonliterary according to Shklovsky. OHYoS with its use of new literary technique of the magic realism, in which this use of genre may affect its language and plot arrangement, exhibits literariness and aesthetic quality in a way that it employs cliché or commonplace 99
mimesis in manner that is different from realist texts. The literariness of OHYoS is also established from the genre’s value and function, in which this can be seen from the manner where magic realism restores the artistic value in genre and fulfills the function of defamiliarization by breaking away from the familiar in traditional realism and by employing elements of the fantastic with different function. Moreover, as a new genre, instead of replacing realism in which sense realism would stop existing, magic realism may be viewed as renewing realism and literature as well. In other words, it is not a matter of replacement but more of giving new form or renewal, which reflects the dynamicity of literariness. 100
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Online References:
One Hundred Years of Solitude:
APPENDICES
Appendix 1: The Buendia’s Family tree. Jose Arcadio Buendia M. to Ursula Iguaran (Cousins)
Colonel Aureliano Buendia Jose Arcadio M. to M. to Remedios Moscote Amaranta Rebeca (relative Rebeca who is raised as the daughter of the family)
Arcadio (mother: Pilar Aureliano Jose (mother: 17 Aurelianos Ternera) Pilar Ternera) (From 17 different women) M. to Santa Sofia de la Piedad
Remedios the Aureliano Segundo Jose Arcadio Beauty M. to Fernanda del Carpio Twin Segundo
Renata Remedios Jose Arcadio Amaranta Ursula M. to Gaston Aureliano Babilonia (father: Mauricio Babilonia). Aureliano (son of Aureliano Babilonia As last remaining and Amaranta Ursula). Buendia
Appendix 2: Summary of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
OHYoS is a story about the Buendia family in a town called Macondo. The
story, chronologically speaking, begins with the attack by Sir Francis Drake that
makes Ursula’s great-great-grandfather moves his family to peaceful Indian
settlement, where they meet the Buendia’s family and build on good relationship
in business and marriage. Ursula Iguaran and Jose Arcadio Buendia, who are 104
cousins, then are matched up to be married. Ursula, afraid that marriage between cousins will cause the offspring to have pigtail, refuses to consummate with his husband. The gossip starts in Macondo that Jose Arcadio is impotent. Angry for the gossip, Jose Arcadio involves in a duel with Prudencio Aguilar that ends up with Aguilar’s death. Haunted by Aguilar’s ghost, Jose Arcadio, his wife, and friends leave the town in search for a place near the ocean. In the journey, Ursula gives birth to José Arcadio, the couple’s first son. Convinced that they cannot find the ocean, Jose Arcadio decides to settle in a place he names Macondo.
Macondo becomes peaceful state, where the Buendias develop peaceful rhythm of daily life. The couple’s second son, Aureliano Buendia, is the first child to be born in Macondo. The peacefulness of this small town is disturbed by the coming of the gypsies led by Melquiades. The gypsies introduce discoveries unknown previously in Macondo, like magnet, and magnifying glass. This changes Jose Arcadio to be irresponsible man for his family’s needs except to pursue his passion in science, even when his third child is born, Amaranta
Buendia. After Melquiades is renounced dead, then comes second gypsy group that causes Macondo to be overflowed with outsiders, in which one of them is
Pilar Ternera. Pilar then becomes young Jose Arcadio’s secret lover. When she is pregnant, Jose Arcadio gets scared and he flees with the gypsy. When Jose
Arcadio’s son is born, he is raised by the Buendia and named Arcadio. Then comes Rebecca in the Buendias house. This orphanage girl is the far cousin of
Ursula and Jose Arcadio who is adopted as the second daughter of the Buendias.
As an outsider, Rebeca infected the Buendias and entire town with plague of 105
insomnia. The plague makes people unable to sleep and, slowly, erases the memory until people gone into idiocy. Then comes Melquiades, still alive, and he heals the people of Macondo. For this, he is welcomed to stay with the Buendias.
He introduces the family with daguerreotype that amazes Jose Arcadio. He then becomes obsessed to use it to prove the existence of God. When he fails, he becomes withdrawn and then gone into insanity.
After the town regains its peacefulness, the Buendias is also in peaceful state as Aureliano, Rebeca, Arcadio, and Amaranta come into adolescences.
Seeing this, Ursula decides to enlarge the house. To celebrate the house, she buys a pianola, which is assembled in the house by dandy Bulgarian, Pietro Crespi.
Rebeca and Amaranta immediately fall in love with him but Pietro loves Rebeca and wants to marry her. This envied Amaranta and makes the two sisters hate each other, even until their death. The other family member that has love problem is
Aureliano Buendia. He falls in love with the Mascote’s younger daughter,
Remedios Mascote, who is still a child. After she reaches puberty, Aureliano marries Remedios. She is welcomed to the family and becomes the family’s favorite. She is even willing to take Aureliano and Petra’s son, Aureliano Jose, as her own. However, she dies young, as she is pregnant with a twin.
Jose Arcadio, the lost son that flees with the gypsy, comes back as a strong man. Despites their relationship as brothers, Rebeca falls in love with Jose
Arcadio and marries him after canceled her engagement. Pietro Crespi’s love then shifted for Amaranta but she rejects him and this makes him committing suicide.
Amaranta then declares her life as virgin until death. After the death of Remedios, 106
Aureliano joins the war and is given the title Colonel. While the Colonel leaves
Macondo, Arcadio is given the task to head Macondo. Instead, he becomes a tyrant and so he is sentenced to death by the conservative army. Arcadio leaves wife, Santa Sofia de la Piedad, a daughter, Remedios the Beauty, and male twin,
Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Segundo, who then live in the Buendias’ house. In the house, the aging Melquiades, before his dead, has managed to finish writing a prophecy on the history of the Buendia family in a hundred years ahead in parchments coded in Sanskrit. In war, the Colonel becomes man most feared by the government. During the war, the colonel has 17 sons from 17 different women, in which all will die at adolescent by being shoot in the forehead. As he feels only fighting futile war, he then rebels from his Liberal party and forces peace agreement. He retires as soldier and back to Macondo and die of old age.
The treaty, however, does not bring absolute peace to Macondo as the Banana
Company comes to Macondo.
As adult, Jose Arcadio Segundo becomes priest and his twin brother marries Fernanda Del Caprio and has three children: Renata Remedios (Meme),
Arcadio, and Amaranta Ursula. Their sister, Remedios the Beauty turns adult as a beautiful and provocative girl but mentally retarded. At her death, she ascends bodily to heaven. Because of her rigidness, Fernanda refuses to give consent to
Meme’s relationship with Mauricio Babilonia, with whom Meme becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. Meme’s son is then brought to the Buendia’s house. Ashamed for this, the baby is denied by Fernanda and is kept hidden from the rest of the family until her husband finds him and named him Aureliano. 107
Macondo, after the coming of the banana company, develops into a prosperous city with the overflow of people and innovative things. However, the people of Macondo are still poor because the banana company uses them as cheap labors. Jose Arcadio Segundo then leads a demonstration against the company’s policies. This leads to a riot and ends with the massacre of 2000 workers. Jose
Arcadio Segundo, who survives the massacre, isolates himself in Buendia’s house.
After the massacre, Macondo is slowly destroyed by a prolonged rain that last for
4 years. After the rain stops, in the midst of the banana company’s destruction, the twin dies at the exact same time.
Aureliano Babilonia then becomes the only member that lives in the house after the death of Fernanda. In his solitude, Aureliano tries to decipher
Melquiades’s parchments. Amaranta Úrsula then comes back after finishing her study in Brussels with her husband, Gaston. Aureliano, without knowing their true relationship, falls in love with her and they involve in an incestuous relationship.
After Amaranta Ursula’s husband departed, she becomes pregnant and dies at labor. Frustrated Aureliano leaves his son after birth and this causes his baby to be consumed by red ants. Shocked, Aureliano locks himself up and dedicates himself to decipher the parchments, in which he succeeded. Aureliano then discovers that the parchments contain the written destiny of his family. He reveals that he had committed incestuous relationship with his aunt because at the very beginning it had been destined. Aureliano also realizes that he would never leave the house because at the same time of reading, Macondo is being destructed by whirlwind and that the Buendias are condemned to have not the second opportunity in life.