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Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
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Welcome everyone to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series. I'm Paul Vogelthang, and today we're stepping into the mesmerizing kaleidoscopic world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's literary masterpiece, 100 Years of Solitude, with our guest author, academic presenter, and Smithsonian Associate, Dr. Joseph Lutzi. Dr. Lutzi will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our website for more details, but we have Dr. Lutzi today. We will be discussing winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 100 Years of Solitude. This isn't just a novel, it's a phenomenon, with its spellbinding blend of magic and reality, the epic tale when Dia family and their fabled fictional town of Macondo has touched millions of readers around the globe. It's a story about family. love, history, and the haunting legacy of colonialism told through the extraordinary lens of Garcia Marquez's imagination. Guiding us through this literary treasure is none other than Smithsonian Associate Dr. Joseph Lutze, an acclaimed professor of literature at Bard College, a Yale PhD, and an expert on world literature. Dr. Lutze will help us uncover the secrets behind the novel's universal appeal. its innovative use of magical realism, something we're going to come to understand today, and the way it redefines the idea of an epic for the modern age. We'll also dive into the life of Garcia Marquez from his humble beginnings as a journalist to becoming the first Colombian author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Dr. Luzzi will take us chapter by chapter revealing the golden age of Meccano, the intertwining of magic and the apocalyptic finale that still leaves readers awestruck. Whether you're discovering 100 years of solitude for the first time or revisiting it with fresh eyes, today's discussion promises to inspire, enlighten, and perhaps even rekindle your love for one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. So please sit back, relax, and join me as we welcome Smithsonian Associate Dr. Joseph Lutzky. the not old better show smithsonian associates interview series let's just dive right into the world of macondo and celebrate the brilliance of gabrielle garcia marquez dr joseph lucy welcome to the program it's wonderful to be here thank you so much for inviting me well thank you so much for joining us it's a holiday time certainly around here i hope all's well for you i know you're going to be presenting at smithsonian associates coming up we're going to have dates and details for all of the particulars about dr lucy's seminar coming up at Smithsonian Associates. It'll be in our show notes. Please check all of that out. Dr. Lucy, why don't we just start and maybe tell us about what you'll be presenting. I use the word seminar, so it's a little bit longer a Smithsonian presentation than our audience is used to.
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So it's been really wonderful the past few years. I've done a number of events for Smithsonian online events, and they kind of come in two categories. One is Say we have a high school classics revisited series now that's about an hour and a half. That's usually on a weeknight. That's when we go back to a book that, say, we read in ninth, tenth, or eleventh grade and didn't fully grasp or even...
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Catch her in the rye.
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Catch her in the rye. That's one of the first books that we did. We actually started with a book that really confounded me when I read it in high school, The Scarlet Letter, which I think is... outside of the range of experience of most high school students in the sense that it's this remote world, this colonial world of harsh judgment, Hester Prynne. And I really think it's a book that resonates more with us as we age and live a bit. And so going back to these books is always fascinating because for many of our participants, it's a reread because they reread them once early on and then going back to it. And even for myself, it's been thrilling to revisit some of these works and see just how fascinating and incredibly well-written and textured in a way that I just couldn't have grasped all those years ago. The Saturday seminars are different. You use the word seminar, which I think is really the right word because that's a full day. We'll start at 10 a.m. and we finish at 3 p.m. So we have four sessions and we have a short break for lunch. And in those four sessions, we cover a broad topic. The High School Classics for Business Series is one book. In the Saturday seminars, we'll do something more in peace, which enormously long book or Middlemarch or in this one coming up. we're going to do Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, because I think there's certain works that are by virtue of their length, but more importantly, by virtue of their complexity, just can't be dealt with in a single hour, hour and a half session. So it's sort of a learning day, I like to think of them as.
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Thank you for that. Yeah, we're looking forward to this. Absolutely. It gives us this real nice deep dive, especially into a book like A Hundred Years of Solitude. Why does it rank so highly on so many lists of best books of our time?
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I'd give it a five plus. I really think it's one of the greatest novels of all time. It always routinely makes the list of the top 100 novels, and in many instances, way, way higher than that. And I would be one of the people that would rate it in that really upper echelon because it's not that old of a novel. It was written first in 1967. That's when it was originally published in Spanish. The English edition comes out, and I believe it's 1976. So you're talking about just over 50 years, but it has the kind of heft and weight and resonance that I think the very greatest novels have. It's not an easy read. I mean, a lot of people are seduced by Garcia Marquez's unbelievably gorgeous and rich poetic prose to thinking that I'll settle into this book. It'll be a challenging read, but a thoroughly enjoyable read. It's more challenging than many people think because there's so much going on. I mean, it's a work of history. It's a work of sort of commentary. It's a work that looks at a lot of issues from a journalistic perspective, which was Garcia Marquez's original training. And it's all kind of held together by his unusually beautiful poetic language. There's a kind of sensuality to his language and a richness. But there's also that rigor that goes along with the poetic beauty that is quite challenging. So I do think it is one of the all-time great novels. And it's also interesting because it's not a European novel. which, when we think of the great 19th century novels, we think of the greatest novels of all time, we tend to go back to that 19th century list, which I'm in full agreement in. The great Russian novelists, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, a lot of these writers are 19th century authors. As we get into the 20th century, of course, we have the great works of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf's work, and James Joyce, Marcel Kruse. a writing also around that time. What's nice about Garcia Marquez is that it sort of enters into that conversation and it's closer to home. And by world literature, I don't mean just the fact that he's a Latin American writer, you know, he was born in Colombia. It's because it puts on the table different elements than those 19th century novels. You get into issues of colonialism, you get into encounters between Europe and the areas that it explored, that it had economic interest in, that it had political interest and sovereignty in. So it raises the kind of questions that works like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Amban Rushdie's Midnight's Children, these works that sort of expand and build on that horizon of the great 19th century novel to deal with issues closer to today.
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That's an interesting point to make. Then I thought I'd even ask you about issues of today, because really, at the time, some of this was even going on in the world. You mentioned Garcia Marquez's history as a journalist. Is he writing about some of those things that are going on, the social unrest, the war that's raging? Those are all themes.
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It's really interesting. It's an example of what I always call poetic history. By that, I mean Yes, he's influenced by real events, directly and indirectly, but more importantly, going back to Aristotle and his poetics, he talked about the relationship between fiction or poetry, we'll call it for Aristotle, it was poetry and history. And I'm paraphrasing, but gives us the specific, the contingent, and poetry gives us these imaginative universals. For that reason, Aristotle said poetry is more philosophic than history. That's a controversial point. We don't have to get into that. But what I want to emphasize is that by writing about these invented fictional issues in this town of Macondo, he's taking on what are real issues, just filtered through the fictional. And I think a lot of that has to do with his background as a journalist. He had an interview with the Paris Review where he once said, I've always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. And he goes on to say, what I didn't like about journalism before were the working conditions. Besides, I had to condition my thoughts and ideas to the interest of the newspaper. As an artist, he wanted more. He wanted more freedom. But there's a whole line of writers who had that strong journalistic impulse. Emile Zola in France, Hemingway in the United States. And Garcia Marquez is another one of those writers that really builds on his training as a journalism to use fiction to create situations while invented resonates so much with actual things that have happened.
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Well, and you mentioned Macondo and certainly the fictionalized utopia that's painted this wonderful, this beautiful picture. Tell us a little bit about Macondo and what that really represents in the book. And it changes a bit.
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So one of the reasons why I think Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude is such an extraordinary novel is I think it has a lot in common with the epic. It's not an epic poem, okay? But epic poetry, you think of the great works like Virgil, Homer, Milton, Dante, a lot of times they're works about the founding, origins, the founding of Rome and the Aeneid, the way in which… epic poetry. It's the kind of story that a culture tells itself to understand itself. And in Garcia Marquez's Hundreds of Solitude, I think it's not any specific European. There's a lot of Garcia Marquez's hometown in Colombia, in Macondo. So there are specific coordinates. But I think of it as a kind of universal history, as it were, of so many of these Latin American towns, because you get the settlement, you get the growth, you get the encounter with European culture, you get issues in war and corruption, so many things that happen in so many different nations. And Macondo is one prototype of that epic cycle, if you could call it. And the book starts out with a golden age, where there's reciprocity and there's community and there's a robustness. the life in Macondo when it's a simple village and then it devolves into corruption, inbreeding, endless war, and ultimately you have the famous apocalyptic ending where the Buendia family and everything surrounding it is destroyed. The Golden Age is a trope in epic literature. The Golden Age, for example, in the Aeneid and in Don Quixote is also Jeff's choices. for some reason in golden ages it was a simple time where people loved to eat acorns now why eating acorns is a sign of cultural pushing is beyond me but i think it's meant to indicate a simplicity a vigor and robustness that then becomes compromised as the community the country the settlement the city becomes wealthier more sophisticated and loses touch with what made it come together as a community in the first place.
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The other thing that I found attributed to the book and to your work and review of the book as well is this idea of magical realism. And I wonder if you'd touch on that and tell us how that applies to this particular book.
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Such an important point. I'm glad you asked me about this because it's the first thing people say about Garcia Marquez. And understandably, there's characters in A Hundred Years of Solitude that eat mud that are... prodigious, physically prodigious, strong, or sexually potent, you name it. The list goes on and on. There's larger-than-life figures in this book, not people one runs into in the street or everyday life. There seems to be that element of make-believe of magic. And it's part of Garcia Marquez's brilliance because a lot of the book takes place in that dialogue between the magical the fantastic and the more grounded. What's always fascinated me about this, and I think is the DNA of his magical realism, is a quote that he once said about magical realism, where he said, Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality. We have had to ask but little of imagination, for a crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. In other words, it was the raw material of his youth, the stories he heard, the folklore, the received wisdom. He was surrounded by the magical. So for him, it wasn't. the fantastic. It wasn't the artificial, if you know what I mean. It was part of his cultural experience, this idea of being surrounded by this extravagance, by these legends, by this larger-than-life thing. So, in a really interesting way, I think for García Márquez, that the magically real and the culturally real, there's a lot of overlap. In a way, it's his personal folkloric. intimate history to be connected with that. And I think that's really important because it makes magical realism not a willful invention, but something that really springs out of personal and organic cultural experience. I think that's what makes it dumb. I mean, it's what gives it that grounding in reality. I always tell my students, fables are at their best when they come in and out of reality. when if they just all make believe you enjoy them but that's fine but if you watch a fellini film and you see these circus-like figures that's wrong and he's in love with jill sumina this young nighting girl that he works with in that complicated relationship at one point there's sort of two-dimensional circus figures but then they also become real people italo calvino's writing is like that as well i think they're kindred spirits too Garci Marcus, where the magical, remember that phrase, it's magical realism. I think that gets forgotten a lot, is that element of the real, broadly defined, but there it is.
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Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a nonprofit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate guest speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody. Dr. Joseph Lucey has been our guest today. Dr. Lucey will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our notes today so that you can find out more information about Dr. Lucey and his work, 100 Years of Solitude, in this fantastic seminar that's coming up. I wonder if you just answer one final question for us and maybe tell us about the legacy of 100 years of solitude, of what it represents beyond Latin America to cultures throughout the world, because I think it's got this powerful impact. And certainly, I think that's going to become very apparent in your seminar.
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So I've stopped by saying that, of course, Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982. And the Nobel Prize can be quite controversial. I mean, when the Nobel Prize was first awarded in the early 1900s. Tolstoy was alive. Tolstoy had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. And instead, the award went to a now forgotten writer, the French writer, Sully Proudhomme, of whom a lot of people have now heard. This isn't a judgment of him and his work. It's more of a sense that sometimes the really great writers don't get it. Sometimes they do. William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize. Ernest Hemingway. tony morrison sometimes there are slam dunk winners and garcia marquez was one of those slam dunk winners because by 1982 his work 100 years solitude from 1967 had already had a cataclysmically powerful effect i say cataclysmic in the sense something powerful and positive because he ended up being instrumental in what we call the latin american boom in literature with so many writers like Carlos Fuentes in Mexico, Vargas Llosa in Peru. Fuentes said that Garcia Marquez was the most important writer in Spanish since Cervantes. Cervantes is the founder of the modern novel in the early 1600s. And when Garcia Marquez died, the Columbia president, said he was the greatest Colombian who had ever lived. And so you're talking about someone who his book not only had a critical impact by creating this masterpiece in world literature, by helping to inspire a whole new generation of writers throughout the world, but especially in Latin American countries, and especially in, say, non-European countries that were increasingly being heard internationally. You also had someone who was a bestseller. It wasn't that his works were just for those in the few. It wasn't just studied in academia. He was widely read and very prolific. He has some other wonderful novels. I would say my second favorite novel by him is Love in the Time of Cholera, which is a beautiful story from the 1980s. It's certainly got a lot of the other historical elements of a hundred years of solitude, but it's more of a love story, I would say. That was it. Andres Salas's family chronicle against its big political historical backdrop. So he has a robust and wide range of work. He had such an influence on so many different writers. And he was that rare thing. He was both a kind of critical success and commercial success. I'll never forget when I read Thomas Pynchon's another legendary writer. He reviewed Love in the Time of Cholera in the New York Times. I wish I had the review in front of me. It was remarkable because it was two giants, one reviewing the other. At one point, he said something like, oh boy, does he write well. What's amazing about Garcia Marquez, he became a living legend. That's not easy. He was writing in the public. A Hundred Years of really his first major book. That was written in 1967. I think he died in 2014. He lived a long time afterwards and he was in the public eye and very generous with his thoughts and ideas and a kind of literary legend because of this work written more than 50 years ago.
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Well, thank you so much, Dr. Joseph Lutzi. He's been our guest today. We will again have notes that will have links so that you can find out more information about Dr. Lutzi's seminar. at Smithsonian Associates. 100 years of solitude. It's just been an honor talking to you, Dr. Lucey. This is going to be a fascinating seminar. I just really encourage our audience to check it out. Be something to really learn from. But thank you for your time. Happy holiday to you and yours. And we will be following up.
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Happy holidays. This has been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
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My thanks to Smithsonian Associate, Dr. Joseph Lucey. Dr. Lucy will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our website for more detail. My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks to executive producer Sam Hanegar. My thanks to you, our wonderful Smithsonian Associates audience here on radio and podcast. Please be well, be safe, and let's talk about better. The Not All Better Show, a Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next. week.
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Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about Better, the Not Old Better Show.
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Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better 2. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS. studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better, the not old better show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
