APHASIA|Memory, Language, and Pandemic in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude

In Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, there’s a period when the entire village of Macondo suffers from a strange condition that causes insomnia in the population, and eventually memory loss: they start by forgetting words, moving on to forgetting memories, and eventually all sense of self.

Initially, the insomnia was received positively because of how it enabled the inhabitants to get more of their days, but gradually, they began to feel its downsides. As their insomnia deprives them of their memory, they begin to attempt to remember the names of everyday objects by writing them down, but realise that one they lose their grasp of language, even this method would not work anymore. Here, one observes the intricate relationship between language and memory, for without memory, it is difficult to communicate in a way that everyone in the community would understand, and without language, it is difficult to keep memories or even a sense of self alive.

Crucially, the insomnia plague in Macondo explores the importance of documented human history and memory, and how these two are important to an individual as well as collective sense of who we are. Without a documented history, a nation would find it difficult to forge and maintain an identity based on commonality, just as without our memories, human beings would lose their sense of identity. If memories are lost at the collective level, as it happened in Macondo, it becomes a pandemic of forgetting and leaves the entire community paralysed, without any means to recover a sense of the past or the present.