Violence of the Marvelous Order: One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Law of Massacre in Banana Plantations

Abstract

This essay reads One Hundred Years of Solitude as the progression of time, a series of territorial orders, each violently superimposing upon the next. It proposes that the novel too imposes itself as an order on Colombian reality, with its own violence of the marvelous. In considering the episode of the resistance and massacre of the banana workers, it suggests that the text, like the law that permitted the massacre to actually occur, eliminates that which is heterogeneous to the order of capital accumulation, and silences the horror upon which the nation is built.