Macondo - El ombligo del mundo
Macondo / The Navel of the Earth

Summary/Abstract: This article attempts to reverse the critical perspective of Macondo as a paradisiacal place that goes through a slow, inevitable process of decay. I suggest that Macondo is an ambivalent place, both a Garden of Eden and a Garden of Evil, presented as such from the very beginning of the novel. The first part of the article offers a very brief excursus into a few Postcolonial terms to show that the critically perceived inadequacy of terms that deal with the Postcolonial realities seems to make Gayatri Spivak’s theory a more plausible approach albeit a pessimistic one: “the subaltern cannot speak.” García Márquez knows that the subaltern cannot speak – but he wants the subaltern and the reader to know that as well. In the following two thirds of the article I try to show that García Márquez’s intention for his characters is simply to trade the solitude of oblivion with the solitude of awareness. The journey has to be made in time (a hundred years) not in space – all that enters or leaves Macondo is not meant to destroy directly but to shed light on the ongoing destruction.

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