Chapter 19 Explication

“Those fickle tricks of memory were even more critical when the killing of the workers was brought up. Every time that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed. So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained (390).”

As the novel draws to a close, Gabriel García Márquez focuses the reader’s attention on two opposing uses of memory in the human experience. First he characterizes memory as “fickle,” basically an unreliable depository of knowledge. Those who cannot face the truth, or the pain that it causes, employ the “tricks” of memory by simply choosing not to recall the horrific events of the past. Like those among us who deny that the Jewish holocaust ever occurred in Nazi Germany, the proprietress and people older than she “repudiate[d] the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station (390).” Notice how GGM pairs repudiate (to deny the truth or validity of) with myth (widely held but false belief)–– thereby emphasizing the intense need of the survivors to refrain from acknowledging the Macondo massacre, even decades after its occurrence. Denial is the initial response to traumatic events and a selective memory is a key element of this protective layer that allows healing to begin. Indeed, the need for denial is so strong that the survivors cite the elementary school textbook’s assertion “that the banana company … never existed” as proof that the massacre did not occur. This begs the question that if the banana company had not existed why is its alleged nonexistence covered in a textbook? Against this backdrop, Márquez juxtaposes the frustration of Aureliano and Gabriel who are compromised by their awareness of the truth in that they are crippled by the lie as much as those who believe it. Their quest to validate what happened locks them in “a world that had ended” and paralyzes them in a concentric pattern of swimming “off course [against] the tide.” Both approaches produce stagnation. Those who refuse to recognize the truths of the past cannot learn from them while those who cannot move beyond the tragedy of past horrors cannot hope for a future. The combination proves lethal to the town of Macondo.