There are books that one reads and remembers. There are others that one rereads many years later and discovers that, in reality, one never really finished reading or fully understanding them. That is what happened to me with One Hundred Years of Solitude. As often happens with books we read at different moments in our lives, some images remained in my memory while others faded away. But the arrival of the adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to Netflix brought me back to Macondo.
And revisiting Macondo forced me to stop and reflect on its genealogy, its generations; I began to see things I hadn’t noticed before, the names that return, the connections that change faces but retain some of their structure, in their secrets, the children, the absent parents, the impossible loves, death, the mourning and guilt, in the stories that seem to repeat, in their loyalties, losses, contradictions. And, above all, a family that seems to move toward the future while continuing to dialogue with everything that happened before.
And a question arose that seemed even more interesting to me:
What can we discover about families when we observe the history of the Buendías with a Transgenerational perspective?
Does fiction imitate family reality? Does family reality surpass fiction?
Sometimes a movie shows us a family. A song talks to us about a father. A novel presents us with three generations. A series reveals a secret and suddenly we recognize something, not necessarily the same story but a dynamic, a question, a repetition, an absence, a way of belonging.
And then fiction can become a door to look at reality. And reality can help us look back at fiction. The genealogy of the Buendía family is excellent narrative material to observe how certain phenomena that occur in families work, which speak of deep patterns and repetitions and can be analyzed from the perspective of evolutionary Transgenerational analysis.
One of the first phenomena that can be observed is the repetition of the names: José Arcadio, Aureliano, José Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano Segundo, Remedios, Amarantha, Amarantha Úrsula and so on, generation after generation, the names return.
But they do not return alone; with them certain characteristics, ways of relating, conflicts, ways of experiencing love, loneliness, authority, adventure, introspection, and isolation seem to return.
They are not the same people, but they also do not seem to be completely independent of those who came before. And here arises a very relevant question for Transgenerational analysis: What can it mean to carry a name that once belonged to someone in our family?
A name can simply be a name. But it can also be memory, it can be homage, it can be belonging, it can be an expectation, it can represent an identification, it can keep a story alive, it can even become a question that a person must answer throughout their own life:
Who am I and who do they expect me to be?
In the Buendías, names seem to form one of the threads that run through generations. And this will be just one of the themes we are going to explore.
What repeats does not always begin with the one who lives it.
When we study a family history, one of the most important questions is not just: What is happening to this person today?
Many times the next question is:
What was happening in both parents' lives before this person was born and how were they received at birth?
This question changes the perspective and leads us to the sense project. Because a family does not begin with us. We arrive at a story that was already in motion. Our parents had a story and a life before being our parents. Our grandparents had a story before being our grandparents. There were losses, loves, wars, migrations, separations, secrets, successes, failures, people who were forgotten, people who were idealized, others that no one talks about. And there were also events that forever changed the course of a family.
When we look from this perspective, the question stops being just: Why is this person like this or living this at this moment? And it begins to become:
What family story could help us understand the place this person occupies in their environment and the role they have within their own family?
It is also important to observe what happens when someone tries to do something different with what they have received.
Macondo allows us to ask and answer those questions in an extraordinarily powerful way with its characters.
The dead do not completely disappear
Death does not always mean absence. The dead remain in memory, in spaces, in conversations, in memories, in stories, in silences, in dreams, in what the living continue to do after someone is no longer there. And that leads us to another Transgenerational question:
What happens when a death continues to occupy a place in the lives of those who come after?
Not all losses have the same meaning. Not all deaths generate the same consequences. But a family can continue to organize itself around a loss for a long time. And sometimes a later generation may grow up knowing that something happened, even if they do not fully understand what it was that happened. Or they may grow up without knowing it. But feel, in some way, that there is a story behind the story and above all feel that something is incomplete or pending.
The secrets
What is most repeated not only throughout the history of the Buendía family but also in all families. There are things that are known, there are things that are told, there are things that are hidden, and there are things that simply stop being questioned. In the history of the Buendía family, there are filiations, forbidden relationships, adoptions, unknown stories, children raised by others, and family events that are not always known in the same way by all its members.
When we observe a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude, we can think that all of that is imagination. And, of course, it is, it is literature, it is creation, it is fiction. But fiction does not arise in a vacuum. Writers observe the world, observe people, observe relationships, observe families, their own families, observe history, observe the way humans love, lose, remember, forget, and repeat. And then they transform all of that into a story. It is known that there is much of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's own family history in the characters of Macondo.
Something I can't stop asking myself: Did Gabriel García Márquez get to know Anne Ancelin Schützenberger? she was a psychologist, psychotherapist, and French academic who developed a fundamental part of her work in the 1950s around psychogenealogy and the Transgenerational approach. While García Márquez spent an important stage of his life in Europe and also lived in France during the same period. The temporal and geographical coincidence sparked my curiosity but the truth is, there is no indication.
And what do you think of the story of the Buendía?