SOURCE: “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Modern Fiction Studies, John Hopkins University Press, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 167-79.

In the following essay, Conniff explores the use of magic realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude to describe and interpret many of the dark events in Latin-American history.

In criticism of the Latin American novel, “magical realism” has typically been described as an impulse to create a fictive world that can somehow compete with the “insatiable fount of creation” that is Latin America's actual history.¹ This concept of magical realism received perhaps its most influential endorsement in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Gabriel García Márquez. The famous Colombian novelist began this speech, suggestively enough, with an account of the “meticulous log” kept by Magellan's navigator, Antonia Pigafetta. In the course of this fateful exploration...