Creation: Political Economy Group of the Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association
ㅤㅤOn December 11th, the first series adapted from “One Hundred Years of Solitude” premiered on Netflix, consisting of 16 episodes. This is the first time that the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism novel has been adapted for the screen after more than 50 years since its publication.
ㅤㅤThe series version of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has received good reviews in mainstream media, earning a 100% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 88 on Metacritic. Why has both the original novel and the adaptation garnered so much attention and praise? Amid the hype, phrases like “magical realism” and “the Bible of Latin American history” are often heard. Márquez’s works are written in Spanish, and he and his descendants have always hoped that if adapted into film or TV, the dialogue should be in Spanish, filmed in Latin American countries, and feature local actors. According to his wishes, the adaptation will mainly be shot in Colombia, his homeland. The bourgeois literary critics claim that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” uses a complex and obscure family saga to reflect the historical changes in Latin America through the lives of seven generations. The author uses this book to try to reclaim Latin America’s “stolen memory,” as a passionate writer committed to Latin American development. Among petty-bourgeois circles, there’s a phenomenon where everyone has a copy of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” on their bookshelf, yet few can truly understand it. So, what is this book really about? On the surface, it is filled with supernatural perceptions and behaviors: the ghosts of the dead wander the house; Remedios emits a scent that constantly harasses men sexually, and eventually she ascends to heaven…
ㅤㅤIn reality, a major theme promoted in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is — forgetting. At the start, when insomnia spreads, people forget everything, forget what they are supposed to do; after the banana company withholds wages and the workers revolt and are slaughtered, a rainstorm occurs, and people forget the company and the dead workers; at the end, after interpreting the prophecy on the sheepskin scroll, all traces are erased by the fierce wind. “…The family destined to endure a hundred years of solitude will have no second chance to appear on earth.” From the description of forgetting, we see Márquez’s image of the “stupid masses.” No matter how much he claims to care about Latin America’s development, it cannot hide his view that Latin American people are a rabble; his so-called “forgetting” is a slander against the revolutionary people of Latin America. In reality, the banana company has a real prototype — the United Fruit Company, a monopoly that once seized large tracts of land and railways, forcing workers to grow bananas. Its brutal oppression caused many workers to lose their lives and violently suppressed their strikes. However, the workers’ struggles in reality were not washed away by “rainstorms”; they exposed hidden truths, established the Banana Massacre Memorial Day, and further recognized the nature of U.S. imperialism. The failure of Latin American workers’ struggles was not because they forgot past lessons, but because they had not yet become a conscious class and needed Marxism to guide their struggle goals. Márquez attributes the failure to the people’s forgetting everything, aiming to hide the crimes of imperialist states suppressing people’s revolutions, shifting blame onto the people. This way, he can claim that “revolution will inevitably fail” as an unchangeable outcome, further erasing the revolutionary struggle of Latin American people from the roots.
ㅤㅤIn class society, everything bears the mark of class. Art is also class-conscious. The so-called “magical realism” is actually a tool for reversing black and white, distorting facts. To defend the bourgeoisie, to portray the strength of the capitalist system and the people’s “forgetting everything,” Márquez uses mystical methods to exaggerate the power of capitalist lifestyles, making the capitalist system seem very strong and unresistible. The harmful influence of Márquez is evident. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for works including “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In China, during the “golden age” of bourgeois literary revival in the 1980s, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and the “Latin American Literary Explosion” also shocked a generation of writers including Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei. Mo Yan commented: “Reading this book was shocking; I realized novels could be written like this, and I felt regret that I didn’t know earlier that novels could be written like this.” Yu Hua said: “I read this book three times; it is a work of genius.” These “scar literature” writers’ praise for “One Hundred Years of Solitude” demonstrates that all these writers are the same—blackening the people’s revolutionary struggle, viewing the people as a rabble, and extolling the “freedom” lifestyle of capitalism. They fear that the people’s revolution might again threaten their bourgeois exploitation and hope that socialism in China “will not have a second chance to appear on earth,” but they will not succeed. The restoration of capitalism is unpopular, and no matter how much they disguise with words, the wheels of history cannot be reversed.
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It turns out this book is of this nature; I had read an excerpt from it in the middle school Chinese textbook before, but I couldn’t understand what it meant at all.
If it does not align with bourgeois interests, the bourgeoisie will not remake it either.
From the plot described in the text, it doesn’t seem to have anything particularly clever compared to the already clichéd bourgeois art. However, if there is time, it seems that the entire content of the book should be distilled and subjected to criticism or similar analysis.
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@Hughes Please create a new folder
In fact, just the literary style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is deliberately obscure, already indicates that he cannot be serving the working people. People’s literature must be close to the people, not floating above them. If the people can’t understand it, how can it be called people’s literature?
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