The limits of reality

Situated somewhere between thematic and formal concerns is the question of how we are to take what is offered to us as ‘reality’ in One Hundred Years of Solitude. When García Márquez insists that everything in his novel is ‘based on reality’, he seems in practice to mean two things, although not always both of them at once. First, that the most fantastic things have actually been believed or asserted by live people somewhere, and often in Latin America. This doesn't make these things true but it may make them real, and they are undoubtedly part of what George Eliot called the scenery of events, both in and out of novels. The yellow butterflies which trail after one of his characters were suggested, García Márquez says, by a remark of his grandmother's about a butterfly following a man. Remedios, the beautiful girl who takes off into the sky and vanishes, is a deadpan rendering of an excuse García Márquez once heard for a girl who had suddenly left home, probably in some sort of disgrace: she hadn't run off, it was said, she had ascended into heaven. He borrows this dizzying excuse as his fictional reality and then puts the literal truth into his novel as an idle, misplaced speculation, what foreigners wrongly think must have happened: ‘the family was trying to save its honour with the wild tale of levitation’ [208: 223].