The humour of <i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i>

Griffin, Clive

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511898006.008

Cited by 6 publications

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“…The few critics who have analysed the use of comedy in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad ([1967] 2000) have tackled it from two general perspectives. 1 Carmelo Gariano (1978), Clive Griffin (1987), André Jansen (1992) and Paul Dixon (1986) focus principally on the type and techniques of comedy employed by GGM. Most other critics (Penuel 1994;Parrilla;Sotomayor 2002;Paoli 1984;Rodríguez Vergara 1991) explore the carnivalesque characteristics of the novel, emphasising its subversive potential in response to the oppressive dogma of Colombia and Latin America, whether that be religious, patriarchal, literary or neocolonial in form.…”

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The perils of parody: joking with stereotypes in a postcolonial context inCien años de soledad

McAleer

2015

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies

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This article examines the comic treatment of the characters in Cien años de soledad. It challenges the previous studies of the novel's comedy, which have tended to conclude that its comic formulas are necessarily subversive and carnivalesque. Employing Susan Purdie's theory of comedy and Edward Said's, Homi Bhabha's and Walter Mignolo's postcolonial theorisation of othering, the article analyses the ways in which Gabriel García Márquez's comic depictions function as parodic exaggerations of certain stereotypical representations of the Latin American "other." However, it is also argued that the diffuse nature of parody and of the technique of exaggeration open up these jokes to multiple readings. Moreover, according to Stuart Hall's and Richard Dyer's work on stereotypes, references to the "other" in jokes or in other types of narratives inevitably enter into an intertextual dialogue with established discourses, over which the author or text has little control. In this respect, the article aims to map the possible meanings of these jokes within the context of the novel's global popularity. It investigates the possibility that certain comic representations of the "other" in Cien años de soledad run the risk of confirming certain discourses just as much as they have the potential to subvert them.

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confidence: 99%