The Buendía house: from the “primitiva construcción” to the “crisis de senilidad”

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i8.11499

Keywords:

One Hundred Years of Solitude, home theme, obsolete objects, civilization vs nature, compromise-formation

Abstract

Starting from Orland’s theory of compromise-formation, the essay investigates Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece by articulating it in four narrative phases, all gathered around the Buendías’ house as the gravitational space of the novel. The analysis explores the different functions, and the refunctionalizations, that the house of the Buendía acquires over time, with the succession of the different generations of its inhabitants, also due to the evolutionary processes that affect the historical dimension of the text. Contrary to what one might expect, the dialectic of civilization vs. nature that permeates the narrative is not resolved in the direction of a nostalgia for the state of nature, dating back to the most primitive phase of the ‘home’, but in its opposite, in the desire and nostalgia, in the historically closer and apparently advanced present, of a primitive civilization that only the category of compromise formation can bring to the surface.

This article was originally published in the volume Le configurazioni dello spazio nel romanzo del ’900, edited by Paolo Amalfitano, Rome, Bulzoni, 1998, pp. 123-156 («I libri dell’Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta. Studi di letteratura comparata e teatro», 11).

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Author Biography

Antonio Gargano, Federico II University of Naples

Antonio Gargano, Professor Emeritus of Spanish Literature at the University of Naples Federico II, was academic correspondent of the Real Academia Española and the Reial Acadèmia de les Bones Lletres. He was Coordinator of the Doctorate in Modern Philology, then of the Doctorate in Philology at the same University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universidad de Salamanca and the Sorbonne-Paris III. He was co-director of the “Rivista di Filologia e Letterature Ispaniche” and of the literary studies collection “Sestante” at Salerno editrice. Author of about two hundred works, his studies privileged medieval and modern Spanish literature, with monographs, editions and essays on medieval epics, the fifteenth-century sentimental novel, the literature of the Catholic Monarchs and, in particular, the Celestina, Renaissance and Baroque poetry and, in particular, Garcilaso de la Vega, the picaresque novel with studies and editions of the Lazarillo and Buscón by Quevedo. More marginally, he has dealt with nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and novels. He has recently published the following volumes: La ley universal de la vida. Desorden y modernidad en «La Celestina» de Fernando de Rojas (2020), Del Lazarillo a Alberti. Ensayos de literatura, entre tradición e interpretación (2023), Con aprendido canto. Tradiciones poéticas y perspectivas ideológicas en el cancionero amoroso de Garcilaso de la Vega (2023).

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Published

2024-12-28

How to Cite

Gargano, A. (2024). The Buendía house: from the “primitiva construcción” to the “crisis de senilidad”. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (8), 482–513. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i8.11499

Issue

No. 8 (2024): Simultaneity and polyphony. Choir voices in contemporary drama and the arts

Section

Dalla Biblioteca Malatesta

License

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