Macondo by the Colombian García Márquez is one of the quintessential imaginary places in world literature. According to the author “Macondo is not a place, but a state of mind that allows one to see what they want to see and see it how they want…”
Located in a terrestrial triangle of the Colombian Caribbean Coast, between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the sea of Barranquilla linked to the Ciénaga Grande and the savannah of Aracataca, the author places his characters in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “ The funerals of Big Mama”, “The leaf storm” or “The colonel has no one to write to him”.
“He asked what city that was, and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning, but that had a supernatural resonance in his dream: Macondo.” (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Comala de Juan Rulfo is a ghostly place in western Mexico, more than a thousand kilometers from the capital, in a geographical quadrant that goes from southern Jalisco to southern Nayarit, which includes western Michoacán and the entire state of Colima. , where there are beautiful landscapes, pre-Hispanic ruins, colonial buildings and whose characters move in a green municipality with winding cobbled streets and houses with whitewashed walls and red clay tiles.
There are “El llano en llamas” “El gallo de oro” or “Pedro Páramo”, where each reader who enters its pages follows the route of Juan Preciado in search of his father, in the heart of an imagined region.
“I came to Comala because they told me that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo…”
William Faulkner is the “sole proprietor and owner” of Yoknapatawpha, according to his signature on the manuscript map of his apocryphal county, located in northwestern Mississippi, flanked to the north by the Tallahatchie River and to the south by the Yaknapatawpha. The dimensions of the county, according to this map, included in his novel “Absalom, Absalom”, are 2,400 square miles and its population is 15,611, of whom 6,298 are white and 9,313 black.
According to the author, who sets several of his novels there, Yoknapatawpha means “the water that flows slowly across the flat land”, it was the original name of the Yocona River, a tributary of the Tallahatchie, which crosses the southern part of Lafayette County. , covered with pine forests, the author’s homeland. His name actually derives from two Indian words: Yokoma and petopha meaning “Cracked Earth”.
The Juan Benet region is also reflected in a map drawn by the author himself and included in his novel “Herrumbrosas Lanzas”, on a scale of 1:150,000, with rivers, roads, mountains, heights and towns whose names are a clear tribute to his friends. : Ortillano, Salinas de don Pedro, Casaldáliga, El Carandell… Mentioned for the first time in the story “Baalbec, a stain”, the imaginary territory would be located in the north of the province of León, probably in the vicinity of the Porma river, where the writer practiced his profession as an engineer in the sixties.
The physical map showed what nature had given him before the arrival of man. The political map showed what man had done with Nature’s legacy. That is the reality, the political map represents what is first and close and the physical map is what is distant and little less than unattainable, according to the words of the author from Madrid.
Region is mapped and narrated, drawn and narrated, thought and built under a single creative impulse of time and space or, as Sánchez Ferlosio said, “under a sky that is not of the sun but of the wind”.
“It is true, the traveler who, leaving Region intends to reach his mountains following the old royal road -because the modern one has ceased to be so- is forced to cross a small and high desert that seems endless” (You will return to Region).
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