October 16, 2008
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, &
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Nobel Prize Lecture

In in his Nobel Prize Lecture, Garcia Marquez refers to "all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world." I'm trying to figure out what he meant by this. Are our lives not our own? And if not, to whom do our lives belong? Perhaps each of our lives belongs to everyone, or everyone we encounter. This seems to make sense, since our culture so heavily influences us. We adopt certain beliefs and practices of that culture that we take for granted. Considering that we cannot help the culture into which we were born, nor the family, city, and numerous other circumstances, and all of these circumstances shape our attitudes, beliefs, demeanor, etc., it seems as though we cannot even help who we are. We owe a large part of our identity to the circumstances of our life, and the people involved in those circumstances. So in a way, our lives do seem to belong to other people, and even to the environment and earth itself. Perhaps our lives belong also to the time period into which we are born--the people we study in our history classes, and any person we study in the academic setting, or any setting really, is tied to the time period they came from, and the way we talk about it, such as referring to "the eighteenth century," "the 60s," etc, the time period seems to be the dominant force that holds all the people involved in it.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, I also see this at play with the repetition of behavior patterns between generations. Ursula noted that all the "Jose Arcadios" seemed to be alike--something along the lines of bawdy and aggressive, and all the "Aurelianos" seemed alike as well, more contemplative and withdrawn, if I remember correctly. This lends support to Garcia Marquez's statement that believing you have a life of your own is an illusion. If each Jose Arcadio and each Aureliano repeats the actions and mimics the demeanor, behavior, and even physical appearance of those before them, then they're not really unique individuals acting freely. Its a bit fatalistic, in that it seems they can't help who they become. Our lives belong to our ancestors and the overriding force of fate. However, I feel at some point, with the twins Aureliano and Jose Arcadio, they may have disproved Ursula's observation. I know she was speculating that they might be contradicting her observation, but I can't remember the conclusion of this situation. It was confusing, because Ursula wasn't sure if each twin was really the twin they said they were.
Reading over the quote I started the blog with and the context, I think Garcia Marquez may have been referring to people in Latin America. He says many European leaders act as though "it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world," which I think are Europe and the US. Latin America is not granted sovereignty: they're denied originality in their "difficult attempts at social change" and "the social justice sought by progressive Europeans...cannot also be a goal for Latin America." Garcia Marquez may be saying that Latin Americans live under the illusion that their lives are their own, when in fact their not because the ruling countries deny them autonomy.