The Politics of “La siesta del martes”: A Phenomenology of Boredom and Suspended Time in Gabriel García Márquez

Abstract

This article offers a phenomenological reading of boredom as a social and political experience in Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “La siesta del martes” (1962). Previous criticism has examined the story’s narrative economy, its representation of poverty and class antagonism, and the dignity of the grieving mother. This article shifts attention to the atmospheric organization of boredom. The siesta appears as the form through which an exhausted social order suspends response, preserves hierarchy, and turns a mother’s mourning into a public event. Drawing on Josefa Ros Velasco’s conception of boredom as a damaged relation to the present, and in dialogue with phenomenological theories of emotional atmosphere, the article shows how García Márquez distributes boredom through heat, silence, institutional delay, spatial thresholds, and the public gaze. The town’s status as a former banana enclave is central to this reading, since its torpor belongs to the afterlife of an extractive economy whose routines and hierarchies remain after its purpose has faded. Against this atmosphere, the mother’s composure and refusal to delay enact a form of temporal resistance. The article contributes to boredom studies by showing how literary narrative can present boredom as an environmental, moral, and public condition before it appears as a matter of private psychology.