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Fiction as History: The bananeras and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 1998

Abstract

This article, inspired by a TV interview with the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, revises the ways that the fiction in One Hundred Years of Solitude has been accepted as history. In particular, it raises some questions about how literary critics and historians have accepted as history García Márquez's rendition of the events during the strike that took place in Colombia in 1928. It examines the repressive nature of the Colombian regime and of the strike itself; it also examines the idea that following the strike there was a sort of ‘conspiracy of silence’ to erase the truth from the nation's history.

Type
Commentary
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

An original version of this article was first presented at the Anglo–Colombian Society in Canning House in February 1997, and at St Antony's College, Oxford, in May 1997, where I received very useful and encouraging comments. I wish to thank the three anonymous JLAS referees for their constructive criticism and suggestions. Gilma Rodríguez, at the Banco de la República in Bogotá, Malcolm Deas, at Oxford, and Ramón Illán Bacca, at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, provided me with helpful material. They of course do not bear any responsibility for the views expressed in this article.