Reconstructing the Past: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children

Abstract

The highlight of magic realism is that it is a narrative mode with a critical perception that illustrates socially or politically turbulent historical events. After the 1960s, it has become storytelling for the periphery of Western cultures like Latin America, India, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as well as subordinated communities by the privileged and dominant discourses. The transgressive and subversive narrative technique creates a liminal space of realistic and supernatural elements coexisting together. In this dissertation, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cien años de soledad in its original Spanish title by Gabriel García Márquez and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie are analysed as magic realist novels.

In the first chapter, the evolvement of magic realism as a literary genre is illustrated and its reflections are briefly analysed to demonstrate that this narrative technique has a critical perspective. In the second chapter, the prominent figure of the Boom writers, Gabriel García Márquez is briefly introduced to further explain his semi-autobiographic contributions to the creative process of his novel. A close relationship between the writer’s individual experiences with the Latin American landscape is in correspondence with the further socio-political analysis of the text. In the third chapter, following the effects of the previous text, Salman Rushdie and his novel Midnight’s Children are analysed to define India as a multicultural space. The final chapter briefly compares novels to explain how they share thematic concerns and narrative techniques. This thesis aims to highlight that magic realism is used as a literary technique to redefine the history of Colombia and India. This study concentrates on two pieces of literature encapsulating the Latin American and Indian experiences. The socio-political unrest in these countries is expressed through a magic realist perspective to provide storytelling as an opportunity to reconstruct the past.

Keywords: history, politics, magic(al) realism, historiographic metafiction, rewriting, multiculturalism