![]() ![]() Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory. It did not occur to him that this was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object had a difficult name to remember. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future. Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the small anvil: stake. ![]() One day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating metals and he could not remember its name. Aureliano Buendía was the first to notice this troubling symptom: ![]() The first and most devastating aspect of this memory loss was the loss of ‘the name and notion of things’. The novel also provides an inspiring and human account of one town's fight against ‘the quicksand of forgetfulness’. Remarkably, García Márquez created a striking literary depiction of collective semantic dementia before the syndrome was recognized in neurology. ![]() He further speculates on ways to cope with this dissolution of meaning, ranging from ‘the spell of an imaginary reality’ to José Arcadio's ‘memory machine’, strategies that resonate with attempts by semantic dementia patients to cope with their disease. Writing within the realm of magical realism and investigating the power of language as a form of communication, García Márquez provides beautiful descriptions of the loss of ‘the name and notion of things’ typical of the syndrome. First recognized in 1975, it is now considered one of the main variants of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. The cognitive impairments experienced by Macondo's inhabitants are remarkably similar to those observed in SD, a clinical syndrome characterized by a progressive breakdown of conceptual knowledge (semantic memory) in the context of relatively preserved day-to-day (episodic) memory. ‘Studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use’. In an effort to combat this insidious loss of knowledge, the protagonist, José Arcadio Buendía, ‘marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan’. The most devastating symptom of the plague is not the impossibility of sleep, but rather the loss of ‘the name and notion of things’. In his renowned novel, García Márquez depicts the plight of Macondo, a town struck by the dreaded insomnia plague. This multidisciplinary article compares the pattern of memory loss described in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to that exhibited by patients with semantic dementia (SD). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |