BEYOND HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM: POSTHUMANISM AND MAGICAL REALISM IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

Abstract

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez has been extensively examined as a work of magical realism, and for its depiction of Latin American history and memory, political violence, cultural identity. But this novel's questioning of humanistic perceptions of life is relatively under-exploited. This article takes a posthumanist approach to García Márquez's story, looking at how it undermines the idea of human exceptionalism by its depictions of human and non-human relationships. The analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude is based on critical posthumanist theories of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Bruno Latour and Karen Barad which propose a relational ontology where human beings cohabit with animals, natural forces, material objects, ghosts, and other agents of agency. García Márquez's use of the magical realist approach to writing suggests that reality and fantasy, human and nonhuman, life and death, and subject and object are not mutually exclusive. In the novel, Macondo is described as a network of ecological and material relations, casting light on the fallacy of anthropocentric assumptions as well as on current discussions about posthumanism with its focus on agency, embodiment and interdependence. This article attempts to analyze magical realism as a more than narrative technique, as a philosophical mode which poses questions to human dominance and imagines other modes of being. The study brings a contribution to García Márquez scholarship: the re-positioning of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the current discussions on posthumanism and more than human world.