Alchemical images in One Hundred Years of Solitude

This essay explores the symbolic perspectives in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, as an accounting for the complexities of Latin America; a reality that resists Western utopias, or that resists the West as utopia. In this sense, alchemy is considered, not as a dimension of the novel, but as its central theme and as an exercise of the author’s active imagination. Through alchemy, Márquez succeeds in transforming his life, his literature, and the way Latin America is understood. Based on the symbolic hermeneutics Jung introduced, we enter into the nexus between the novelist’s individual psychological reality and the reality of his family history, his country, Colombia, and Latin America, while the author elaborates and transforms the principal Latin American and Western complexes. This enhances our understanding of our local realities beyond conventional historical and sociological data. In this perspective, the author departs from the anticolonialist vision derived from Marxist historicism, to describe the myth of the everlasting encounter between two worlds, between mankind and nature, between the man and his repressed femininity, and between the man and himself. It is the founding myth of a cosmos where various people meet each other, fight, love, interbreed, and engender demons. Macondo becomes the point in the collective imagination where everything collides: the real and the imaginary, the individual and the collective, linear historical time and cyclical time; the place where the West meets its shadow.