When I condense it all down like this, it sounds pretty nutso.

I've been thinking about how to sum up the "big" ideas of my project, and I think it would be a good exercise for me to try to explain them all. Here is what I think some of them are:

"Magical realism" is not a term we should be applying to One Hundred Years of Solitude, since that's not how García Márquez wrote it (among other reasons, such as, it's a colonizer's term imposed on the colonized culture, but that's a separate "big" idea). The narrator of the novel is disembodied, and his/her/its opinions are almost impossible to discern. The typical reader has a hard time distinguishing between what the narrator presents as reality, because it combines what we normally see as "real" and what we see as "magical". The narrator presents both elements in the same way, and even sometimes hints that the real elements are fantastical. Ultimately it's useless to try and distinguish between the real and the magical, because the narrator is not operating under the same constraints as the typical modern novel narrator. Instead, he/she/it is more like an oral storyteller.

For the oral storyteller, anything is possible, things are not classified as unreal and real; therefore, the expectations that the reader has one way or the other are wrong, because one should not be expecting anything — or, if we want to get a little more cosmic, one should be expecting everything. What we see as García Márquez’s incoherence, the changes from real and unreal, the blending of unreal and real, is actually one coherent thing.

The narrator takes on a role as the collective memory of Macondo's culture. Collective memory is multiplicitous, with many different (seemingly-at-odds) things combining to make one cohesive whole. Throughout the novel we get these many perspectives, but it is only at the end of the novel that we understand the idea of cohesive collective memory through the reading of Melquíades's prophetic parchments. (Interestingly, once we reach this point, the town disappears, the last Buendía dies, and the novel ends. Don't really know what that's all about yet.)

Basically, García Márquez sets up expectations for the reader; for example, for the first 50 pages we expect that the narrator will be removed from the characters, that the novel will unfold episodically, that Macondo is a paradise, that knowledge is dangerous and superstition is silly, etc. Eventually all of these expectations are shattered and the opposite expectations are set up. But at the end we find that all of these opposing expectations were not opposing each other at all, that they are two sides of the same coin, they were all part of the same expectation-less Macondo world, where nothing and everything happens.

Phew.

I also have some fragments of crazy "big" ideas that probably won't find their way into my paper because they don't really fit (such as, the many allusions to past events and future events are actually not allusions to past and future events, but rather these events are constantly taking place, are constantly "present" — I get this idea from the end of the novel, when the last Buendía is translating Melquíades's prophecies: "Melquíades had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.").

But that's roughly it.

Now back to work for another hour before the library closes, then home to work some more, then ??? for dinner, then probably some more work.