6 - The humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Summary

It is the fate of fine comic writers to be taken seriously. Masters of entertainment like Cervantes and Molière have been woefully misused by those who consider humour and the spinning of a good tale to be worthy of a distinguished artist only when a vehicle for something else. Reappraisals of these two writers have, however, helped to rescue them from critics intent on extracting complex philosophies or literary theories from their comic works. Such reappraisals suggest that García Márquez might similarly be examined with profit first and foremost as a humorist, for there are already clear signs that he is not to escape the fate of his predecessors. One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel which brought him fame and on which his reputation still largely rests, has been called a work of ‘deep pessimism’, ‘an interpretative meditation’ upon the literature of the sub-continent, or an analysis of ‘the failure of Latin-American history’. Isolated passages of the novel could, at a pinch, be made to support such assertions, but these interpretations will not help us to understand it as a whole nor to account for its remarkable popularity among a heterogeneous readership which has scant knowledge of the history of Colombia or of the recent literary production of Spanish America. Humour, however, can cut across cultural and even linguistic boundaries, appealing to the least and most sophisticated and knowledgeable readers.