Text 1: Critic Ortiz argues that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is a political novel disguised as fantasy. The cyclical violence, the foreign banana company, the massacre erased from official memory — all reflect the actual history of Colombia and Latin America. Magical realism, in Ortiz's reading, is a strategy for telling political truths the state would suppress.
Text 2: Critic Singh agrees that the novel is rooted in Latin American history but resists the political reduction. Garcia Marquez's magic, she argues, exceeds any political function: the levitating priests, the rain of yellow flowers, the gypsy Melquiades returning from death. To read every wonder as political allegory, Singh contends, flattens a novel whose imagination cannot be fully contained by politics.
The authors most clearly disagree about
- A
whether the novel reflects Latin American history.
- B
whether magical realism appears in the novel.
- Ccheck_circle
whether the novel's magical elements should be read as primarily political.
- D
whether One Hundred Years of Solitude is fictional.
Explanation
Both authors connect the novel to Latin American history and accept magical realism as central. They disagree on whether the magic is primarily political. C captures the disagreement.