Drama ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ – Comparison of the original novel
Macondo, a small town in Colombia. Thousands of yellow flowers slowly fall from the sky. The streets are full of yellow flowers. Flowers are piled up on the streets so that people’s feet are completely covered. The village people hold a funeral for the village founder, Buendia, buried in yellow flowers.
Part 1 of the Netflix drama ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, which was released on December 11 last year, filled the screen with thousands of real yellow flowers in the famous ‘Flower Rain’ funeral scene. This is to visually show the scene from the original novel in which flowers rained “as if the street was covered with a soft mattress.” The novel also states, “People removed the flowers with shovels and rakes so the funeral procession could pass.”However, the drama changes it to show a procession passing over yellow flowers. It is a more striking expression of the original novel’s ‘magical realism’ (a literary technique that mixes reality and facts).
![‘Flower rain’ falls in Macondo… Visual beauty that brings to life magical realism[선넘는 콘텐츠]](https://dimg.donga.com/wps/NEWS/IMAGE/2025/01/09/130828690.1.jpg "‘Flower rain’ falls in Macondo… Visual beauty that brings to life magical realism[선넘는 콘텐츠]")
● Fill the floor with yellow flowers and bring long sentences to life by looking at the camera.
The drama minimized computer graphics (CG) to preserve the magical realism of the original full-length novel of the same name published in 1967 by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). A real city was built on a huge field to represent the imaginary city of Macondo. They actually created a village where nests were built in trees and dogs roamed the streets. Also, Buendia’s house was built inside an airplane hangar. Lights were hung on the hangar ceiling to express Buendia’s house, where time passes quickly, with light and darkness changing frequently.
In order to reproduce the strange phenomenon, I chose ‘staring’. For example, after the death of Buendia’s first son, a stream of blood leaked out from under the door in the bedroom and snaked through the wooden floor and dirt road to announce the news of the death to his mother, Ursula. The camera quietly followed the scene for about 40 seconds. . In the novel, the scene where a ray of blood passes through 15 locations was depicted with a camera, depicting Marquez’s breathing in a long sentence of about 420 characters.
“A stream of blood seeped out from under the door, across the living room, out into the street, and continued straight through the bumpy sidewalk… (syncopation)… “Ursula appeared in the kitchen where she was preparing to break thirty-six eggs to make bread.”
The moment when the people of Macondo first see ‘ice’ was portrayed in the drama with natural light reflecting off the ice, emphasizing its mystery. The ice, which is described in the novel as ‘the world’s largest diamond,’ was emphasized through the contrast of light and shadow, and the feelings of the people of Macondo, who felt a religious experience, were well expressed.
The ‘ghosts’ in the novel were also not expressed using translucent CG like usual dramas. This ghost is an old villager whom Buendia killed in a duel for insulting him in his youth. In dramas, actors follow people around while wearing make-up dripping with blood. Thanks to this, it effectively evoked the horror of the murder.
During his lifetime, Marquez opposed the filmization of this work. This is because he believes that it is difficult to properly implement the magical realism that he has drawn. However, more than 10 years after Marquez passed away, the bereaved family agreed to film the film. This is because many Colombian actors will participate and the promise is to contain a vast narrative by making it a 16-episode drama rather than a movie. The New York Times in the US “After Netflix proved the global appeal of Latin American content with hits like ‘Narcos’ and ‘Roma,’ they were able to offer (to the bereaved family) a large-scale adaptation of the novel in Spanish rather than English.”He said.
● Is Han Kang’s literature also ‘magical realism’?
‘Magical realism’ is often called a characteristic of South American literature. However, recently, Korean literature has also been read as magical realism by Western critics.
In particular, the British Booker Prize judging committee used the word magical realism every time it selected a Korean work as a finalist in the international category for the past three consecutive years. The Booker Prize judging committee said of the 2022 finalist Jeong Bo-ra’s short story collection ‘The Cursed Rabbit’, “It transcended the boundaries of magical realism, horror, and science fiction (SF).” Regarding the 2023 finalist Cheon Myeong-gwan’s full-length novel ‘Whale’, an overseas review was quoted as saying, “It gives hidden meaning to simple events through magical realism.” Last year’s finalist, Hwang Seok-young’s full-length novel ‘Three Generations of Railroad Workers’, received international reviews calling it “magical realism that reflects the lives of modern industrial workers.”
Writer Han Kang, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was also influenced by ‘magical realism.’ Author Han Seung-won, the father of author Han Kang, distinguishes between the ‘realism’ generation, which directly experienced the democratization movement in Korea, and the ‘fantastic realism’ generation, which is the generation below that. It is said that Han River was influenced by South American literature, starting with ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.
Author Han Seung-won explained the world of Han Kang’s works as follows at a press conference right after the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in October last year.
“(Broadly speaking, literature) can be broadly divided into Anglo-American culture and South American culture. South American culture is represented by ‘Don Quixote’ and Anglo-American culture is represented by ‘Hamlet’. However, around the 1980s, a novel written with ‘fantastic realism’ called ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ from South American culture was introduced, and young novelists began to reflect. … (syncopation)… The question is whether the literary attitude of the ‘4th generation literary figures’ to which Han Kang belongs is influenced by ‘fantastic realism’ or whether it has a mythological flavor. … (syncopation)… “With elements of mythology and ‘fantastic realism,’ the writer Han Kang wrote literature more beautifully.”
In fact, ghosts appear in both ‘The Boy Is Coming’, which deals with the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, and ‘No Goodbye’, which deals with the Jeju April 3 Incident. Just as Marquez interpreted the tragic history of South America invaded by the West through ‘magical realism,’ I think Han Kang could also be seen as interpreting the sadness of Korean society through ‘fantastic realism.’
