By: Jane Tabet-Kirkpatrick
Like many students in the United States, my first introduction to an epic literary work occurred in ninth-grade English class. This study almost exclusively covered two of the most influential European epic poems: the Odyssey and Iliad by the Greek poet Homer. There is no wonder that this literary breakthrough, among all the rest, has transcended other works as the predominant epic poem. Its transcendence can also lend credit to the text’s useful teaching points: the mythological subject matter is immediately engaging to students, and it fits neatly into an overarching theme of high school English which, from my recollection, placed a focus on the motif of the “hero’s journey”. The Iliad and Odyssey sit atop of the pristine Euro-literature pedagogical paradigm. Although I can sympathize and understand why my English teachers chose these epics, and no matter how diligent they were about teaching the subject matter– I never fully grasped their functional message in my day to day life. From my perspective, the fantastical world of gods, giants, and monsters was largely uninspirational and detached from reality. Slaying beasts and outsmarting cyclops did not provoke any larger thought about society. Further, from a slightly more feminist approach, I struggled to retain an appreciation for the literature where the women were all witches, temptresses, sirens, or patiently pining for their husband to return. Now, this is not an invitation for free critique from the Greek classics majors, but rather my honest, reflective recount of learning about the epic poems from a cream-color cemented block classroom.
My appreciation for large, epic style literature stayed largely subdued until I studied Spanish in college. There I was introduced to Latin American writers and fell in love with their style of storytelling, concretely magical realism, always cemented in reality but retaining a twang of mysticism and magic. In these texts, the unexplainable is used to prop up a larger retelling of a multi-generational family. The most epic of this body of work I would argue is the novel Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabríel Garcia Marquez. Recently, Cien Anos has been made into an authorized Netflix series adaptation which I have been binging over holiday break.
The novel is a masterclass in magical realism. The first epic novel by Marquez spans several generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macdona. The novel is set in the backdrop of Latin America over the span of the 1820-1920s. As husband and wife, the first generation of Buendías are forced to flee after they are being haunted by a man that Jose Arcadio Buendía killed for suggesting he was impotent. This suggestion came because Ursula, Jose’s wife, refused to have sex for fear that the resulting child would be born with a pig’s tail. Eventually that myth is dispelled as they go on to successfully have three tailless children in Macdona, a town they established with several others. The epic ends when the seventh and final generation of the Buendía line is born with a pig’s tail. The father and mother (aunt and nephew) had never heard the superstition. The baby then dies after being eaten by ants. Upon the fulfillment of the prophecy, the last remaining member of the Buendía family, Aureliano, decodes an encrypted manuscript left to the family generations ago, revealing that the Buendía family was doomed from the inception of Macdona. At that moment, the village and the last remaining Buendía is reduced to dust.
Literary tradition holds a mirror to culture. My two semi-limited exposure to epics juxtapose each other in this exemplary way. In my recollecting of both English and Spanish epic literature tradition and generational storytelling, I have reinforced my own awareness of my chapter in a rather larger family epic. As Homer is firmly planted in European literary tradition, it highlights the importance of individual journey and struggle. Marquez, from a Latin American literary tradition, chooses to narrate an entire community and family history through fantastical storytelling. As I have grown up I have graciously shifted my mindset away from a self centered tradition and have oriented my ethos towards a more communal mindset. I’ve wondered about what it means to be a possibly small chapter in an epic that has been ongoing for centuries? Shedding my individualism to perceive myself as a single leaf from the family tree, I’ve tried to take a more holistic view of the forest, placing myself within a larger context. This history has helped me break through the increasing anxiety of routine life.
There is a particular beauty in being able to capture the arc of someone’s life. It is an even more impressive feat to capture the arc of the entire life of a family lineage. As I zoom out on my family tree, the granular imperfections of my own life become smoother. The mistakes of everyday life round out and become miniscular with further abstraction. When you have a history to review and reflect on, it can appear perfect –not in the traditional sense, where everything turned out with a story book ending– but perfect in the sense that everything turned out as it should have been. Perfect as if it was always written that way. After all, being able to review a family history at least implies that from a biological perspective everything up until that point has worked out.
As I have become more sensitive to the impermanence of my individual life and journey, I have become more aware of my permanence to a larger community and generational tapestry. This has made me more engaged with the overlapping lives that I share with my ancestors. For those of us so fortunate to live out part of our lives with them, even fewer are fortunate to be living out similar chapters in those overlapping lives. An illustrative example of this comes from my own life with my grandmother Carolyn.
My grandmother married my grandfather, John, when she was 18 years old. They were married for 60 years. By the time my grandmother was 22 years old (three years younger than I am now), she had given birth and was raising two toddlers. People described my grandparents’ relationship as “inseparable.” They were constantly planning a vacation or RV trip across the country to see some friends in California or Colorado or Arizona or Nebraska. They grocery shopped, worked out, and went to doctors appointments together. My grandfather was a forest ranger, so their family moved across the country about every two years. That kind of lifestyle forms an impermeable relationship of trust. It is no wonder then that when my grandfather passed away two years ago, it was completely destabilizing. My family had lost its steady and central patriarchal figure and had thrust upon my grandmother a new reality, one that she admits to never contemplating.
Death is heartbreak. It may feel a bit insensitive to compare my grandfather's death to a breakup, but in essence, the emotions are largely the same, albeit being different in scale. In conjunction with the grief and stress of a family death, my grandmother was also about to partake on a new journey: learning how to be alone. My grandmother went from being an only child living with her parents to a wife virtually overnight. Her biography is not unique for the average American woman's life in the 1950s and 60s, a contrast with the expectations and experiences placed on us in this day and age. In my particular case, I am living outside of the home, on my own in my twenties; my cohort and I are experiencing the trials and tribulations of that life. It’s a classic joke running rampant on the internet about the shitstorm that is the early twenties. The overwhelming responsibility of reality –and the slow but sinking realization that it's slipping out of our control and somehow it's our responsibility to fix it. It is often the point where many of us are finding our footing in a much larger world away from the comforts of academia: our purpose is neither to be a student or daughter, nor to be a wife. We are getting our first apartments and becoming acquainted with the real world in the form of jaw-dropping prices for health insurance premiums and vehicle registrations. We are learning how to occupy our days in a fulfilling way. We are learning more about ourselves. Each generation eventually learns the same lessons, just not always in identical chronological manner.
About a year after my grandfather died, my grandmother and I went out for dinner and returned to her house for some “cocktails and conversation,” a phrase we have used since I was seven and the cocktails were blood orange seltzer with a lime wedge. We spent the night talking about law school, what the dating scene was like, and how much she missed my Grandpa John. Through the night she talked about drifting: she described a state of being lost and wandering without purpose. The absence of such a strong figure in her life was surely partly to blame. My grandfather was a central support structure and once this structure was absent life for my grandmother became disorganized and purposeless. She felt simply present, detached from the motions she was going through– clearly lost with no place to go home. This depiction wasn’t too far off from how my friends and I have described our twenties.
Obviously, in technical terms, my grandmother had lived through her twenties, but in a more traditional sense: she was married with kids, stayed at home and raised them, and supported her husband. However, as she works through her grief from the loss of my grandfather, she is also experiencing this new chapter alongside her twenty-five year old granddaughter. You wouldn’t think that at the surface level there would be much similarity between my grandmother and I. And yet, our corresponding chapters struck me as paralleled when after going to dinner, we polished off a cool bottle of wine and my grandmother indulged me in her reflections. She began by detailing the increasingly exhaustive list of things to do with little energy to do them. She mentioned how difficult it was to grocery shop and cook for one person. It seemed impossible to know what to do to occupy her time. Then she uttered a familiar phrase, “I just want someone to tell me what to do.” I beamed and replied, “Grandma, you need to watch Fleabag.”
That statement is something I and certainly others can certainly resonate with. It is daunting to be fully responsible for your own life. Interestingly, while my grandmother was responsible at a very young age for three other people’s lives, it is still markedly different to be responsible for your own. The hallmark of the solo twenties is about growing more confident in the decisions that you make independently of anyone else. As I still master this skill, I find myself constantly looking for some affirmation that I am doing any of this correctly. Nothing feels right, but also nothing is technically wrong. We are following all the steps, even if haphazardly. Yet, there is a profound missing– a longing for guidance, a craving for the gentle head nod of approval from God. It is an affliction that would make an atheist get on their knees and beg a hot priest for a reckoning (no really, you gotta watch Fleabag). If I’ve learned anything in my shallow twenties, it's that if anything these years are an exercise in discretion and confidence.
In the early days of my grandfather's passing, my grandmother called me to explain all the new financial decisions she would have to make. Would she sell the house? What does she do with the trailer? The truck? The tractor? The list continued. I’m not sure if it's why there are so few people who actually stay single their whole life, but I do imagine that it has something to do with decision making. I remember offering meager words of encouragement: “You have earned the right to make your own decisions.” Although, I know that if it were me who received this advice, my immediate thoughts would spiral into, “What have I done right? I’ve done nothing and know nothing.” Again: how effective can these words of encouragement even be, if the person hearing them doesn’t believe in themself yet?
As my grandmother and I both experience the trials and tribulations of learning to trust ourselves it is worthy to note that these feelings of insecurity are highly motivated by our shared gender.. There is an element in both of us that is seeking out some sort of need to be told that the path we are charting for ourselves is the correct one. There is no question that imposter syndrome contributes to this, with women more likely than men to experience it. While it may be difficult to adjust to the instability and constant decision demand, women are often able to achieve and maintain it successfully. Whereas alternatively, as my grandmother often points out, men are more likely to remarry after the death of a partner than women.
History and its lessons are largely repeating and only semi-evolving. Telling generational stories against the backdrop of history exposes our human predilection for patterns. We may become more advanced than previous generations, but we are largely faced with the same challenges. One Hundred Years of Soledad ties the idea of these repeating patterns in a familial history as a curse that dooms the Buendía family from their inception. However, challenging this, I see these repeating patterns as rather a chance for the generations to connect with each other on similar journeys: suffering the same afflictions can bring us closer as we attempt to wade through the increasing uneasiness of life.
One obvious departure from the analog between epic novels and true stories of families is our unfortunate confines to reality. We are beyond the reaches of magical realism and have the added burden of cutting our narrative from whole cloth. However, at least our future is not yet written. There is no prophecy to be fulfilled and only an opportunity to get better. There are fortunately large chapters of our epic left to the author and co-author.
Granted, there are often chapters in our lives that we don’t want to write out. There are many chapters that are uncomfortable at their least and debilitatingly depressing at their best. As alluded to in One Hundred Years, what connects the generations isn’t necessarily that we pass down all the knowledge and wisdom and actually implement the lessons of our previous generations, but rather that we simply share in the repeated learning of the same lessons.
To this point, I have enjoyed living out part of my twenties alongside my grandmother. For her 80th birthday a couple weekends ago, we had a sleepover. We went out to look at Christmas lights with my friend. When we fell asleep, we were watching a bad Lindsay Lohan movie (no disrespect to Lindsay). Then we got ready for her birthday brunch together in the morning. It is fortunate that through this chapter I can learn alongside my grandmother.
My grandmother let me borrow a book that was gifted to her by her first cousin Frey Angelico Chavez. He was a novelist, a historian, and the first native New Mexican to become a priest. In his career he wrote both fiction and non-fiction largely motivated by New Mexico’s rich history, landscape, and culture. He was also the prominent authority on the first New Mexican families. The book he gave my grandmother, Origins of New Mexico Families, is signed and inscribed, “to my cousin Carolyn, on her wedding day.”
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