Suárez, Juan Luis

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Western University Scholarship@Western CulturePlex Lab DataPoints CulturePlex Lab 4-2019 MACONDO: THE DENSITY OF TIME Juan Luis Suárez Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cultureplex_datapoints  Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Citation of this paper: Suárez, Juan Luis, "MACONDO: THE DENSITY OF TIME" (2019). CulturePlex Lab DataPoints. 17. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cultureplex_datapoints/17 CulturePlex Data Points VOL 2  l  ISSUE 5 l  APR 2019 l  ISSN 2561-5211MACONDO: THE DENSITY OF TIME The repetition of names and surnames in One Hundred Years of  Solitude.Authors:   Juan Luis Suárez Antonio Jiménez-Mavillard                                                                                     1REPEATED NAMES u To differentiate characters such as the José Arcadios and the Aurelianos, we took into account the context giv-en by the other characters with whom they frequently interact.Time can be cut with a knife in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Critics and readers have referred to the  density of time in this world created by Marquez. In light of this density, is One Hundred Years of Solitude based on a cyclical narrative?A data analysis based on the interrelations between the characters, whose names and surnames compete with their uniqueness, shows precisely the opposite. García Márquez’s narrative is especially linear. To reach this conclusion, we examined all the characters throughout the twenty chapters. Characters with unique names are easy to situate in their respective narrative. Whereas repetitive names, which are some of the most important characters, are based on the nar-rative context. For example, we know that the only José Arcadio that travels to Rome is of the fifth generation.The main result of the analysis is a flow diagram that represents the number of times characters appear with other characters, and the number of mentions of each character in each chapter. The linear family saga is not the only structural feature that contributes to the temporal density of the work. This plot develops as new characters appear on the scene, and more Figure 1. Flow diagram of the Buendía family members. The characters appear in the vertical axis and the chapters are represented as bars placed along the horizontal axis.]]Arcadio Buendía [3]Aureliano José [3]Santa Sofía de la Piedad [3]Fernando del Carpio [3]Renata Argote [3]José Arcadio Segundo [4]Aureliano Segundo [4]Remedios, the Beauty [4]Petra Cotes [4]Fernanda del Carpio [4]José Arcadio [5]Amaranta Úrsula [5]Renata Remedios (Meme) [5]Gastón [5]Mauricio Babilonia [5]Aureliano Babilonia [6]Aureliano / Rodrigo [7]IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIV XVXVI XVIIXVIIIXIXXXJosé Arcadio Buendía [1]Úrsula Iguarán [1]Colonel Aureliano [2José Arcadio [2]Rebeca Buendía [2]Pilar Ternera [2Remedios Moscote [2]Amaranta [2]FLOW DIAGRAM u The width of the path enter-ing a chapter’s bar rep-resents the number of times the character is mentioned. Zoom in to see the diagram in detail. CulturePlex Data Points I VOL 2 I ISSUE 5 I APR 2019                                               2so, as they relate to their own generation and family dynasty. This demonstrates the dy-namic of their collective beyond their own personhood. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a narrative of the cohort of characters that inhabit and give life to Macondo. The characters make many appearances, and never disappear completely from the nar-rative. Starting from the first chapter, more characters appear in the text, and in some chapters, there are more than sixteen. There are many references to deceased characters through their personal possessions, which have been inherited by their descendants, or by remembrance.This can be seen when Fernanda realizes that her son Aureliano Segundo resembles his kin in having the habit of disassembling and assembling objects: “Watching him putting in latches and repairing clocks, Fernanda wondered whether or not he too might be falling into the vice of building so that he could take apart like Colonel Aure-liano Buendia and his little gold fishes, Amaranta and her shroud and her buttons, Jose Arcadio and the parchments, and Ursula and her memories” (García Márquez, 154). Why, then, the allusion about the cyclical narrative? It can be said it is due to the repe-tition of the names. Numerous characters share names and/or surnames, which provide a feeling of incomplete repetition and this, in turn, provoke the feeling that we already know some of them in the land of Macondo.García Márquez’s uses his literary devices to exploit the linearity of the saga, and later to expand it thanks to the repetition of names. The result is a masterful densification of time, which endowed the story with as many dimensions as those projected by the vital vicissitudes of the characters in Macondo. The craftsmanship of Gabo’s writing shows his genius, specially when the biographical profiles of each of his characters appear clearly through the design of his temporal space. A space that simultaneously contains life and death, through the mastery of Marquez.This is the last issue of the volume on Gabriel García Márquez. It is a modest tribute from the Cultureplex Lab to the author on the fifth anniversary of his death. Gabo not only demonstrated his genius through the greatness and versatility of his work, but also CHARACTERS’ GENERATIONS u The characters appear more frequently among others in the same genera-tional cohort.Figure 2. Path of mentions of Coronel Aureliano Buendía.FOLLOW THE PATH u The purple path represents the appearance and men-tions of Coronel Aureliano Buendía.Colonel Aureliano [2] IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIV XVXVI XVIIXVIIIXIXXXCOLONEL AURELIANO’S DEATH“He pulled his head in between his shoulders like a baby chick and remained motionless with his fore-head against the trunk of the chest-nut tree.”.MENTION OF THE COLONEL AURELIANO’S GOLD FISHES“They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to main-tain the line, and Jose Arcadio Bu-endia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Au-reliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes ... ”. CONSTRUCTION OF THE TIME uBy computing the appear-ance and mentions of each character, we can under-stand the construction of the narrative and identify the succession of the Buendias family. CulturePlex Data Points I VOL 2 I ISSUE 5 I APR 2019                                               3METHODOLOGYFirst, we downloaded the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude from Internet Archive. Then, we split the text of the novel into its twenty chapters. Next, we tracked every main character of the novel and counted the number of times that each character appeared in each chapter. Finally, we represented the main characters and their frequencies per chapter in a flow diagram (Sankey diagram) through the tool Plotly. www.cultureplex.ca EDITION Emilio Calderón Zeina DghaimDESIGN Ana Ruiz SegarraCOORDINATIONYadira Lizama-MuéCOLLABORATORSBárbara Romero Daniel Varona Cordero          @cultureplex    cultureplex@gmail.comLondon, Ontario, CanadaThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. lt r l  t  i t  I   I I   I                                                  SEE PREVIOUS DATAPOINTS uGabo’s global network: Issue 1, issue 2Gabo’s journalistic phe-nomenon: Issue 3, issue 4through his life.  In the first two issues of this volume we showed the importance of his global network, not only due to its geographic dispersion, but also for its scope from the intellectual, literary, political and cultural point of view. In the third and fourth publications, the data led us to the journalistic phenomenon in which Gabo became, determined by his impact on the English-speaking media around the world, especially after winning the Nobel Prize. In this last issue of the volume, we focused on an analysis of data that reflects the archi-tecture of his characters and the greatness of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This whole volume is our tribute to the universal Gabo that transcends time and space.WORKS CITEDGarcía Márquez, Gabriel (1970). One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York City: Avon Bard Books.

MACONDO: THE DENSITY OF TIME

https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=cultureplex_datapoints

MACONDO: THE DENSITY OF TIME

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