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In her article, "Memory and the Quest for Family History in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon," Susana Vega-González explores similarities between the novels of García Márquez and Morrison with a special focus on the use of memory and imagination. Based on theoretical models, Vega-Gonzálezas proposes that fictional representations are a means of rewriting history, a particular aspect of literay discourse. The texts under scrutiny constitute true quest stories of characters who search for their family history along their own identity amidst the dangers of capitalism and its excessive desire for progress and class ascendance. The break with narrative linearity through such recollections of things past, the reliance on the supernatural and the advocacy of hybridity are some of the features that link Morrison ad García Márquez with magic realism, a literary mode that contributes to their rewriting of a history peopled with the ghosts of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Susana Vega-González, "Memory and the Quest for Family History in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.1 (2001):  Susana VEGA-GONZÁLEZ Memory and the Quest for Family History in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon Pierre Nora proposes that "the quest for memory is the search for one's history" (289). In their attempt to reconstruct the communal histories of their people, Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez rely heavily on the use of memory as a means to rewrite the history of those oppressed because of race, class and/or gender in a world where historiography has been dominated by the white man. Memory is closely related to the reclamation of identity and history -both personal and collective. Both memory and history dominate Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) from the very beginning, where the character Aureliano Buendía is introduced through his own recollections: "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo" (9) / "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" (9). Like García Márquez, Toni Morrison claims memory -as well as imagination -as an essential part of the narrative act: "The act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: Remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory -what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our 'flooding'" (Morrison, "Site" 119). The use of memory and imagination reaches the realm of myth and fantasy of both authors, whose novels are peopled with the living dead, superstitions and beliefs, folk wisdom, oral tradition, dreams, and fantastic elements. These two writers also share a historical past marked by the oppression, violence, and exploitation engendered either by colonialism or slavery, racial marginalization and the consequences of technological progress and industrialization. As Lois Parkinson Zamora aptly states when referring to the similarities between García Márquez and William Faulkner, "contemporary Latin American writers have found in the literature of the South elements akin to their own national experiences: colonial appropriation of land and culture, a decadent aristocracy, injustice and racial cruelty, belated modernization and industrial development" ("One Hundred" 28). Although she was born in Ohio, Morrison is heir not only to a family past in Alabama but also to the African American beginnings and trajectory of her people in the South of the United States, which she consciously portrays in her novels. Likewise, if "precisely because it is unresolved, history has provided the tensions and ironies of much of the best of recent Latin American fiction" as Parkinson Zamora argues ("Usable Past" 13), the African American unresolved past has too encouraged contemporary African American writers such as Morrison to engage in the task of revising and rewriting that past. It is the aim of this paper to suggest a comparative analysis of Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which share not only their thematic concerns but also diverse narrative techniques. Notwithstanding Morrison's admiration for García Márquez, she has denied any conscious allusion to his fiction in her novels (see Watkins 50). There are, however, numerous connections between both writers which we shall attempt to expose here, with a special focus on the interaction between memory and history as well as its role in the characters' quest for lineage and family history. The links between Morrison and García Márquez go beyond the literary discourse to reach even their personal lives. Born in Aracataca, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, García Márquez acknowledges traces left in his fiction from the mixture of the different cultures he grew up in -pre-Colombian, Spanish and African: "In the Caribbean, to which I belong, the overflowing imagination of the black African slaves was mixed with that of the pre-Colombian natives and then with the fantasies of Andalusians and the Galicians' worship of the supernatural. ... I believe the Susana Vega-González, "Memory and the Quest for Family History in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon" page 3 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.1 (2001):  Caribbean taught me to see reality in a different way, to accept supernatural elements as something that forms part of our daily life" (qtd. in Pierce 67). The Colombian author also feels indebted to the stories told by his grandparents, with whom he lived until the age of eight: Unbelievable stories his grandmother narrated with the utmost naturalness together with war adventures related by his grandfather, the Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Iguarán. In a similar manner, Morrison's narrative feeds on the ghost stories her mother used to tell her during her childhood in what Paule Marshall calls "the wordshop of the kitchen" (35). Like García Márquez, Morrison grew up in a family whose members talked about dreams, superstitions, omens, visions, and the ancestors with the same certainty as they talked about daily matters (Davis 144), to the extent of confessing her intimacy with the supernatural (Strouse 54). On the other hand, both authors take from their families the name of a character in these two novels. The presence of the ancestor Solomon is based on the oral tradition of Morrison's family, her grandfather being John Solomon Willis (Strouse 54). Furthermore, the autobiographical component of Song of Solomon is acknowledged by the writer herself when she refers to her relatives in Alabama (Jones 130). Similarly, García Márquez recreates the figure of his grandfather in the character Coronel Gerineldo Márquez, recalling episodes from his life such as the murder his grandfather had committed when young, his ensuing escape and his foundation of a village (García Márquez, qtd. in Coser 199), as José Arcadio Buendía does in Cien Años de Soledad. Finally, the family name Iguarán is transposed from the writer's own life to his work in the character Ursula Iguarán, who marries her cousin, as García Márquez's maternal grandmother had done. Both Cien Años de Soledad and Song of Solomon constitute quest stories since they enclose the development of a character's search for his family history, which culminates in his solving an enigma, be it enclosed in a song or in some parchments written in a foreign language. Macon Dead III, the protagonist of Song of Solomon, is born in a home that could be described precisely as dead. As a matter of fact, the family name is highly symptomatic of the Dead family's lack of identity and its spiritual death. The Dead are a well-off African American family whose determination to ascend in the social ladder of a capitalist system has worked to the detriment of their ethnic values and identity. However, they are accepted by whites only in an economic sense but not on a social and communitarian level while they are completely detached from low-class African Americans. This isolation is also reflected on the Dead's home, characterized by its coldness, lack of vitality and human values which have given place to selfish materialism and pride. The ritual parade on Sundays in the Packard has as a main goal to expose the whole family and its halo of successful progress: "These rides that the family took on Sunday afternoons had become rituals and much too important for Macon to enjoy. For him it was a way to satisfy himself that he was indeed a successful man. It was a less ambitious ritual for Ruth, but a way, nevertheless, for her to display her family" (31). The education Milkman receives from his parents determines his confusion, his lack of identity and disconnection from his ancestors. The only legacy he inherits from the past is the idea of a materialistic progress and a name, Macon Dead, whose very origin entails the dispossession of an identity, since it had been mistakenly assigned to Milkman's grandfather by a drunk white officer during the Reconstruction. When he asked him about his birthplace and his father's name, the officer wrote the answers -Macon and dead -in the gaps corresponding to the name and family name. This is one more example of the inadequa