SOURCE: Irvine, Dean J. “Fables of the Plague Years: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and Magic Realism in Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude].” ARIEL 29, no. 4 (October 1998): 53-80.

In the following essay, Irvine discusses One Hundred Years of Solitude as a work of magical realism and places the novel within the context of Latin American postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Akin to the strain of poststructuralist theory Jacques Derrida practices in his essay “The Law of Genre,” governed by “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” and initiated as “a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of” (59), the diagnostic method of this paper purports to enchain strains of postcolonialism and postmodernism as a model for the theory and practice of magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude].¹ The...