10/23/08 One Hundred Years of Solitude

So much for progress. I said I wanted to write from the text-world stage. I said I felt myself growing as far as responses are concerned. I said I didn’t want to write about intertextuality or how much the text reminds me of something I already know. To hell with it, I suppose—there’s time for progress next week.

Lately I have been in a habit of linking texts with pieces of music, starting with the reading of A Wild Sheep Chase, finding literary comparisons to bebop (Murakami), zombie rock (World War Z), shoe gaze/trip hop (Mr. Vertigo), post rock (Krapp’s Last Tape), and drone( Can you guess? I’m going somewhere with this! I can only hope.)---to think, some people listen to only one genre of music!

I sprawled out on my couch Wednesday afternoon to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and found myself playing “Even If You’re Never Awake” by Stars of the Lid on my iPod. The combination of the two art forms took me completely by surprise. There has been something about the track—and the entirety of And Their Refinement of the Decline for that matter—that fits One Hundred Years of Solitude so beautifully. I believe it was the constant death in Solitude that first drew the comparisons for me, matched with the ambiguity of both One Hundred Years of Solitude and the drone music of Stars of the Lid. As evidenced already in the readings, characters die, simply put. What I find interesting about the concept of death in this book is the naming of children. The Arcadio’s, the Aureliano’s, and the Remidios’ all serve as memorials to the deceased (or soon to be) named before them. For the most part, they are featureless: they are relatively flat characters, sharing nothing in common with their namesake except for their name. However, it seems to be a way of carrying on a legacy, ensuring the dead are not forgotten: even if you are dead, you are not dead. “Even If You’re Never Awake”, your name is never sleeping.

I thought of this as my term paper subject, but narrowing it down to ten pages seems like a daunting task. I have read all but the first 64 pages of Solitude with the guide of “Even If You’re Never Awake”, and I have found the two to sync up at any given page. Worth looking into, I suppose.