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On Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
[The following is the full text of a lecture delivered, in part,
in Liberal Studies 402 at Malaspina University College (now Vancouver Island
University), on Tuesday, March 28, 1995 by Ian Johnston. This text is in the
public domain, released May, 1999; the text was edited slightly on April 11,
2000]
For comments or questions, please contact Ian Johnston
[For Belorussian translation of this lecture, click here]
Introduction
In this lecture I would like to start with an initial question and
then suggest some possible directions one might like to explore in answering
it. We can all agree, I think, that this novel is amazingly
rich, so I don't propose anything like a last word. However, by examining some
patterns in the novel, we can perhaps help to shape some potentially
illuminating observations.
So I propose to deal with the novel in the following stages:
First, I want to consider One Hundred Years of Solitude as
an epic, in the traditional sense of the word, and from that consideration to
frame an interpretative question.
Second, I propose to look at the complex effects this novel
creates: a wonderfully comic sense combined with an overall tragic irony
underlying the remarkably energetic and entertaining inventiveness in the plot
and the characters.
Thirdly, by way of accounting, at least in part, for these complex
effects, I wish to look at two particular aspects: the double sense of time in
the novel and the style of magical realism.
Finally, putting all these elements together, I shall address the
question posed at the start. I would like to suggest that this novel does, in
fact, have something very insightful and important to reveal about the social
and political realities of the world it depicts and that this theme may be
difficult for North Americans fully to recognize.
One Hundred Years of Solitude as an Epic
It seems clear to me that, in any conventional sense of the
literary term, we are dealing here with an epic work: a long narrative fiction
with a huge scope which holds up for our inspection a particular cultural
moment in the history of a people. The novel is the history of the founding,
development, and death of a human settlement, Macondo,
and of the most important family in that town, the Buendias.
In following the historical narrative of these two elements we are confronted,
as we are in any great epic, with a picture of how at a particular moment in
human civilization a unique group of people has organized its life (just as we
are confronted with the same issue, for example, in the other great epic we
have studied, The Odyssey).
Like many other epics, this novel has connections with a
particular people's historical reality, in this case the development of the
Latin American country of Colombia since its independence from Spain in the
early nineteenth century (1810 to 1825). The seemingly endless civil war
portrayed in the novel one can see as directly based on the civil wars in
Columbia from 1885 to 1902, and the character of Colonel Aureliano
has many affinities with General Rafael Uribe Uribe, under whom the grandfather of the author fought. Uribe's struggles ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Neerlandia, an event in the novel. The years 1900 to 1928
saw the take over of Colombia by the united Fruit Company of Boston. The
ensuing labour trouble culminated on October 7, 1928, in a mass strike of
32,000 workers. The government later sent out the troops to fight the workers,
and a massacre took place in Cienaga on December 5,
1928. In addition of course, and most importantly for an understanding of the
novel, is the presence in it of the author's family and of the author himself.
This point, as I shall argue later, is a key point in understanding what the
political point of this epic might be.
I mention this history, not because I think one needs to know the
historical facts in order to appreciate the novel, but simply to point out that
One Hundred Years of Solitude, like so many other great epics, like Moby
Dick, The Song of Roland, and War and Peace, takes its origin
in the history, real or imagined, of a particular people.
Given this epic quality of the novel, the initial question I would
like to pose is this: What qualities of life does this novel celebrate? What is
the nature of the social-political vision held up here for our inspection? How
are we intended to judge the people and the society of Macondo?
This, I would claim, is a fairly obvious question which the novel pressures any
reader to ask, as a number of critics have pointed out:
One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . can justly lay claim to being, perhaps, the greatest of all Latin American novels, appropriately enough, since the story of the Buendia family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is, for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American history. (Martin 97)
I do not believe any other novelist has so acutely, so truthfully seen the intimate relationship between the socio political structure of a given country and the behaviour of his characters. (Angle Rama, qu. Martin 107)
So what are meant to derive about the experience of the
civilization depicted in the novel?
One possible source of information, the author, has remained
stubbornly silent on this question, refusing to debate whether or not there is
a political "message" in his novel. His roots with the civilization
are obvious enough, for he spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a "steamy banana town not far from the
Colombian coast." But he has commented "Nothing interesting has
happened to me since." "He also tells the story that his grandmother
invented fantasies so that he wouldn't be saddened by the truth of things"
(James 66). We will be coming back to this latter comment later on. When
pressed on the subject of this novel, Marquez has said that he really wanted to
write a book about incest.
If a number of readers have seen considerable political
significance in the novel, there has been no agreement about what that
political "message" might be. For the novel has attracted all sorts
of conflicting political interpretation. One writer has remarked, with good
justification, that there is something here for every political view:
"[The novel's] appeal is to all ideologies: leftists like its dealing with
social struggles and its portraits of imperialism; conservatives are heartened
by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and with the sustaining
role of the family; nihilists and quietists find their pessimism reconfirmed;
and the apolitical hedonists find solace in all the sex and swashbuckling"
(Bell-Villada 93).
To all of these we might add those readers who decline to see any
social-political themes in the novel and who like it because it's a great
escapist read. And whatever I might like to claim for its wider implications,
One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly a wonderful and popular read,
which one can enjoy without having any particular awareness of its historical
roots or its political implications. That may be the main reason why it has
been such a phenomenally popular book outside Latin America: "The first
truly international best-seller in Latin American publishing history"
(Martin 98), for which the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1982.
The Magic Realism of the Novel
By way of explaining my answer to that question I posed about
what, if anything, this novel celebrates, I would like to point to two very
obvious facts of the novel and then move on to construct some interpretative
possibilities from those two facts. In offering this initial interpretative
possibility I'm trying to remain true to my experience of reading this novel,
an experience which features a curious mixture. On the one hand I find this a
wonderfully diverting comic novel, full of the most unexpected and delightful
incidents and characters, and thus an extraordinarily uplifting experience. On
the other hand, pervading this novel for me there is a strong sense of irony, a
powerful undertone of prevailing sadness and a sense of tragic futility. I
want, in the following remarks to try to link these emotional reactions to
features of the novel.
I suppose one must first observe that here there is an amazingly
fecund imagination at work in the characters and incidents of this
novel--extraordinary people and intriguing incidents. This novel never loses
its capacity to surprise and delight. No matter whom we meet, we quickly learn
to expect the unexpected, the colourful, the
original--from moments of evocative beauty, like the trail of butterflies, to
the satiric, like the priest levitating to chocolate, to erotic scene of bawdy
and prodigious sex, like characters whose farts are so strong they kill all the
flowers in the house or man who runs through the house balancing beer bottles
on his penis. The comic energy here is justly famous. The characters, for the
most part, may be two-dimensional, and we may meet some of them only for a
couple of pages, but there is throughout a sense of vitality and wonder at the
world which makes this story hard to put down.
A good deal of this quality comes from the style, the "magic
realism," which strikes at our traditional sense of naturalistic fiction.
There is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo;
it is a state of mind as much as, or even more than, a real geographical place
(we learn very little about its actual physical layout, for example). And once
in it, we must be prepared to meet whatever the imagination of the author
presents to us.
[Note that the term "magic realism" was coined by the
German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe
"a magic insight into reality. For Roh it was
synonymous with the post expressionist painting (1920-1925) because it revealed
the mysterious elements hidden in everyday reality. Magic realism expressed
man's astonishment before the wonders of the real world" (Williams 77).]
The intermingling of the fantastic and the factual throughout the
novel keeps us always on edge, always in a state of imaginative anticipation,
particularly in the story of the Buendia men, whose
imaginations are repeatedly going off in various directions, in schemes which
are the constant source of amusement, novelty, and delight.
I take it that this quality of the novel is clear to anyone who
reads it, so I don't propose to discuss it here. Some readers addicted to
psychological naturalism may well find the fantasy interferes with their
demands for a more "realistic" engagement with the imagined world of
the fiction. As I shall mention before the end of this lecture, however, I
think there is an important connection between the fantasy and the reality in
the novel; in other words they are not two separate elements. In fact, a
particularly important point of this novel is that in many respects the
civilization depicted here too often confronts the reality of life with
fantasy, because it experiences life as fantasy rather than as historical fact.
But more of that later.
Along with all this delight, however, as I mentioned above, I
sense a strong underlying irony, a mixture of sadness, anger, and tragic
fatality. For this is a story about the failure of the town
and the family, which, for all their amazing vitality are finally and
irrevocably wiped off the face of the earth. Amid all the delightful
fantasy is a great deal of violence, cruelty, and despair--the central
ingredient in the "solitude" each of the characters finally becomes
immersed in. And this establishes itself as a strong qualification to the comic
delight one takes in so much of the novel.
It is important, I think, not to sentimentalize the violence and
the despair, as those of us who do not sense these qualities in our own
communities are likely to do. In this novel, cruelty, failure, acute despair,
and suddenly destructive irrational and inexplicable violence are always
present. And however we interpret the story, we need to take those fully into
account, and not minimize their impact in order to enjoy the comic
inventiveness and the fantasy without any serious ironic qualifications.
Time as Linear History in the Novel
By way of exploring this dual response further, I would like to
point to one very marked feature of the novel, the working throughout of two
senses of time, linear and circular. The interplay between these two senses
creates some of the novel's most important effects.
In the first place, we see that there is a strong sense of a
linear development to the history of the town of Macondo.
We follow the story from its founding, through various stages up to a
flourishing modern town, to its decline and eventual and irrevocable
annihilation. In general, the linear history of the town falls into four
sections: (a) utopian innocence and social harmony, in which Macondo exists like an early Eden, its inhabitants so
innocent that no one has yet died and they don't even have names for things,
the world "was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to
indicate them it was necessary to point" (11). This section takes up the
first five chapters of the book. The story then moves on to the military
struggle in the various civil wars and revolutions (Chapters 6 to 9), then into
a period of economic prosperity and spiritual decline (Chapters 10 to 15); and
finally to decadence and physical destruction (Chapters 16 to 20).
The narrative is given to us, for the most part, following this
linear sense of time, so that we always know roughly where we are in this
linear story. And we know because of the nature of the various
"invasions" which occur. Usually outsiders arrive bringing the latest
in technology or bureaucracy: gypsies, government officials, priests, various
military forces, the ubiquitous lawyers, the railway, the American capitalists,
the European with the bicycle and the passion for airplanes, and so on.
We repeatedly experience these invasions as something over which
the town has no control and which have come with no previous warning. And in
most cases the people have no immediate sense of how to react. The reactions we
do witness, from Jose Arcadio's response to the
gypsies to the reaction of the citizens to the telephone and movies, are often
amusingly eccentric and unpredictable, but they point to a constant in the
world of Macondo: the powerlessness of the people to
take charge of the invasions which arrive from outside.
Macondo, you will recall, is founded initially almost
by accident. It just happens to be where the Buendia
expedition decides to stop. There is no particular reason for stopping there,
and no one has a very clear idea of where they are, except that they are in the
middle of a number of natural barriers, for all they know cut off from all
contact with civilization. And so they found Macondo,
the city of mirrors or mirages, an innocent and idyllic community, with no
sense of history or no particular political reason for being there. It is an
expression of the imaginative desires of Jose Arcadio,
who has sought to flee his past and is incapable, because of his overheated
imagination, of creating a political future for his community.
The development of the Buendia family in
a sense underscores this linear sense of time, for they form a series of figures
who, in part, symbolize the particular historical period of which they are a
part. The patriarch Jose Arcadio is, in some sense, a
Renaissance man of many interests and with pioneering ambitions and energies;
his son Aureliano becomes a great military leader, a
main participant in the civil wars; in turn, he is succeeded by a bourgeois
farmer-entrepreneur, family man, Aureliano Segundo
and by the twin Jose Arcadio Segundo, who works for
the American capitalists and becomes the radical labour organizer. And so on.
So as we move from generation to generation, we sense a strong linear force,
usually imposed from outside, driving events in Macondo.
Time as Circular History
But for all this strong linear sense of history, the response of
the people in Macondo, and particularly of the Buendia family, to this linear march creates a second sense
of time: history as almost obsessively circular. For all the apparent changes
in their main occupations, their personalities constantly repeat the experience
of earlier generations.
There's a strong sense of fate about this obsessive repetition.
Once a person has been named then the major characteristics of his or her life
have been determined, and the person is doomed to repeat the events of the
lives of their ancestors. As Ursula remarks:
While the Aurelianos were withdrawn but with lucid minds, the Jose Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but marked with a tragic sign.
Even their deaths are, in a sense preordained. The Jose Arcadios suffer as victims of murder or disease; all three Aurelianos die with their eyes open and their mental powers
intact. And they all succumb to a self-imposed exile in a solitude which can
last for decades.
Out of this sense of repetition, the comic energies which the
sexual prowess and the visionary schemes constantly celebrate are always
undercut by the irony of "inevitable repetition of probably futile
previous actions" (Williams 80), as one of the most important images in
the book makes clear:
There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for [Pilar Ternera] because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle. (402)
We take great delight in watching the generally erratic spinning
of the wheel, but we are increasingly aware of the wearing of the axle and
eventually see it snap.
Another way of saying this perhaps is to see that the people of Macondo and the Buendias often
have a vital and amusing present, but their lives sooner or later lose meaning
because they are incapable of seizing control of their own history. Their past
is largely unknown to them, except as nostalgia, their present, if active, is
obsessive, and their future non-existent.
The Buendias: Men and Women
The characters in the novel's main family tend to be organized
schematically (as in the Jose Arcadios and the Aurelianos). This is not a psychological novel in the sense
that its chief interest does not arise from the inner drama of particular
characters (as, say, in Virginia Woolf). We are dealing here, for the most
part, with two-dimensional comic creations organized in order to make certain
thematic points.
The men, I have observed, are characterized by an obsessive
repetitiveness to their lives. Full of amazing energies and intelligence, which
generate ambitious projects or passionate sexuality, they are unable to realize
any long-term success, and are prone to fits of extreme anger against their
earlier projects or else their lives are overtaken by the irrational violence
which keeps intruding in their lives.
The women, too, tend to fall into types. The common sense energy
and determination of the Ursulas, particularly of the
stern, unmusical matriarchal will of the founding woman, play off against the
enduring erotic figures outside the family: Pilar Ternera and Petra Cotes. Those called Remedios
remain immature and either die young or disappear.
The women, for the most part, are firmly anchored in daily
reality, as obsessed as the men, but with the routines of daily living. Ursula
fights all her life against the incest taboo, and Fernanda
devotes her life to imposing the rigorous order of high Spanish Catholicism on
an unruly home. They have no interest in speculative imaginative ventures. The
centre of their lives is the home or erotic attachments. Simply put, one might
observe that in this novel the men suffer from an enduring lack of the reality
principle; whereas, the women are encased in it.
What seems to be missing is any consistent ability to find a
middle ground between the impossible delusions of weak and unstable men and the
down-to-earth home-bound order and stability of the women. And this inability
points to what both the men and women seem to lack here, an ability to orient themselves with the wider developing world in which they
live and to take some control of their own historical destiny. They are, as
residents of Macondo, victims of an illusion in the
city of mirages, and the personal constructions they erect in the course of
living all fail and plunge them into a cruel and lasting solitude.
In that sense, the "magic realism" of the novel is a
good deal more than a stylistic device to lure North American readers tired of
naturalism. The fantasy is a central part of the way these people, especially
the men, experience their own history, and because such fantasy is no match
against outside invaders or the effects of time on such projects, they all
fail. And this may, indeed, be one of the main points Marquez is
"celebrating" (if that is the right word) in this epic novel of his
people.
So What Is the Novel Saying About Latin America?
As North Americans, we are far more accustomed to thinking of our
own history (personal and national) as something of an encounter with destiny:
we have confidence that we can take charge of our lives, construct a
project-based life, and carry it through, so that in a way the world we have
acted in will be transformed from the world into which we are born. The history
of our country and often of our families is full of examples of such an
authentic life choice undertaken in the confidence that we have a strong sense
of a meaningful direction and the means to move there.
But, as many interpreters of Marquez have pointed out, such may
not be the case in Latin America, in whose culture there is
. . . a haunting theme . . . a familiar and lasting concern of Latin Americans: their fear that they are not quite real people, that their world is not entirely a real world. This is not a metaphysical or epistemological problem, it is not the European anguish of Kafka or Beckett, and it is not the uneasiness of North Americans faced with a fast-changing social and physical landscape. It is an old and intimate feeling, an actor's weariness with a never-ending career, a feeling that what is happening cannot really be happening, that it is all too fantastic or too cruel to be true, that history cannot be the farce it appears to be, that a daily life cannot be merely this losing battle with dust or insects, that this round of diseases, drink, ceremonies, sadness, and sudden death cannot be all there is. (Wood 37)
It is necessary to stress this point, this sense that history is a
cruel farce, experienced as fantasy and forgotten quickly, because it may well
be the case that, in writing this novel, one of Marquez's main points is to
leave his readers with a strong sense of the tragic futility of such an
attitude. We have to remember, close the chapter on Macondo,
and get on with constructing a new history for ourselves.
It might be worth remembering that, if we find this attitude too
serious and difficult to grasp, that in Buenos Aires last weekend the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo are still demanding from the authorities an acknowledgment
of the thousands of people arbitrarily tortured and killed in the civil wars in
Argentina in the 1970's. These people, called "those who have
disappeared" have, it seems, for a long time simply vanished without
acknowledgment that anything took place. That they are dead few will dispute.
How or why or, in some cases, whether it happened is still under review. In the
face of events like this, we might observe that what takes place in the pages
of Marquez's "magic realism" is in many places not so far from the
cruel fantasies of killing and forgetfulness still, for example, pictured on
the front pages of the Globe and Mail (see the edition for Saturday,
March 25, 1995, A1).
This point about experiencing one's history as fantasy has been
stressed also by Marxist critics, who insist that, since the rules which govern
a society are those of the ruling class, those places which have no control
over their own destiny live without such rational guidelines. Thus, they argue,
Marquez's novel is not saying that life is a dream but rather that Latin
American life is a dream--"the unreality and unauthenticity
imposed by almost five hundred years of colonialism--and that when a dream
becomes a permanent living nightmare it is probably time to wake up"
(Martin 104).
The endless repetition of useless actions are an idologeme for a capitalist society without social or economic vitality. In this sense the colonel's endless battles are the same as his repetitive creation of little gold fish: they both resent a paradigm of action for the sake of action (or production for the sake of production, with no worthwhile return) [note also his production of sons]. Macondo never functions as an authentic participant in the political and economic processes of the nation. It is always marginal at best. Even after establishing his government position in Macondo, Moscote is nothing more than an "ornamental" authority, as he is described in the text. National politics are more a matter of disruption or confusion than an integral part of Macondo's life. After painting and repainting their homes the colors of both the Liberals and the Conservatives, Macondo's citizens eventually have houses of an undefined color, a sign of the failure, in effect, of both traditional parties. (Williams 85)
The same point is emphasized by Gerald Martin:
In One Hundred Years of Solitude nothing ever turns out as people expect; everything surprises them; all of them fail; all are frustrated; few achieve communion with others for more than a fleeting moment, and the majority not at all. Most of their actions--at first sight like the structure of the novel as a whole--are circular. . . . Ploughers of the sea, they are unable to make their lives purposive, achieve productiveness, break out of the vicious circle of their fate. In short, they fail to become agents of history for themselves. . . . The only explanation possible is that they are living out their lives in the name of someone else's values. Hence the solitude, central theme (together with the quest) of Latin American history: it is their abandonment in an empty continent, a vast cultural vacuum, marooned thousands of miles away from their true home. Conceived by Spain in the sixteenth century . . . the characters awaken in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment . . . but are entirely unable to bring themselves into focus in a world they have not made. Influences from outside (the gypsies) are sporadic, piecemeal, throughout the notional hundred years of the novel, which is the span from the Independence era to the early 1960's. . . . Seen in this light, the novel seems less concerned with any "magical" reality than with the general effect of a colonial history upon individual relationships: hence the themes of circularity, irrationality, fatalism, isolation, superstition, fanaticism, corruption, and violence. The judgment as to whether these traits are inherent or produced by history is a much a political as a philosophical or scientific determination. (106)
If one looks briefly at the life of Jose Arcadio
Buendia, the patriarch, one can see these basic
points being brought out in the rhythm of the narrative. His story begins with
an apparently incestuous marriage and his erotic passions and sense of macho
pride, which result in a quick violent murder. This forces him and his wife to
move away into the interior. They found Macondo, as I
have observed, more or less by accident.
He's a man of great energy, ambition, talent, and imaginative
vision, and at first his efforts are remarkable. He wants to find knowledge and
make use of it, specifically science, because that will free him from his
geographic imprisonment and the town's captivity to magic.
But Jose Arcadio is incapable of sorting
out magic from knowledge. He knows nothing about geography and, although he has
a sextant, a compass, and maps, he gets physically lost, defeated by the nature
which surrounds them. His imagination is always racing ahead of the business at
hand. Thus, he is continually defeated. His desires and talents are huge; he
is, however, incapable of directing them purposefully with any firm sense of
the reality of his situation.
Thus, he, like so many of his descendants, eventually resigns
himself: "We shall never get anywhere. . . . We'll rot
our lives away here without the benefits of science" (19). His
descendants all inherit the same difficulty, and thus all eventually succumb to
the power of nostalgia, to opting out of their historical reality, which they
have never really understood clearly. They cope with their failure by an inner
withdrawal. This act of resignation, one interpreter has remarked, is the key
decision, for "it condemns the Buendias to a
life without science, to a state of mind, that is, which cannot make firm
distinctions between objective fact and the subjective projections of
desire" (Williamson 49). It also leaves him incapable of dealing with
time, mired in historical immobility. Initially he becomes haunted with
memories (especially of Prudencio Aguilar, the man he
killed in the quarrel over his wife), and eventually he smashes his laboratory
and abandons himself to his mad nostalgia (just as the Colonel later destroys
the revolution for the same reason). The difficulties of his life he finally
deals with by opting out of history and settling for the uncertain territory,
not of history, but of nostalgic solitude, a "magic" reality in which
he might as well be tied up to a tree, because he is wholly alien to anything
real in the world.
This pattern is repeated over and over in the novel, especially
with the men. They strive for active fulfillment as young men but become
frustrated and end up withdrawing. Incapable of dealing with actual conditions
effectively, they opt finally for a frustrated solitude:
Loneliness in Macondo and among the Buendias is not an accidental condition, something that could be alleviated by better communications or more friends, and it is not the metaphysical loneliness of existentialists, a stage shared by all men. It is a particular vocation, a shape of character that is inherited, certainly, but also chosen, a doom that looks inevitable but is freely endorsed. The Buendias seek out their solitude, enclose themselves in it as if it were their shroud. As a result they become yet another emblem of the unreality. . . (Wood 40)
To the extent that Ursula is the guardian of the family and the
constant presence in the house, she embodies a value system that contributes to
this self-perpetuation of futility. Her overwhelming concern is the honour of
the family and the avoidance of incest. In spite of her concerns, however,
incest is always present. Children of the family are produced, not by mutual
love but through surrogates--some partner, who may be a wife or someone who is
standing in for someone else (especially by Pilar Ternera).
Genuine desire is not rewarded by legitimate issue; as a rule, children are born either to undesired wives, or to women who have been used vicariously to discharge an unconfessed desire for a family relation. (Williamson 51).
The result is an extraordinarily tangled family tree that leaves
the final two able to commit incest without really knowing that they are so
closely related. In that sense, the final generation of Buendias
indicate that they are so out of touch with their own immediate past that they
don't know where they stand in relation to each other, and thus have nothing to
oppose to the passionately irrational erotic desires that make them an easy
prey for the destructive forces of nature (the ants) that wait always on the
edges of the community and the home.
The Conclusion of the Novel
Taking this line as an interpretative possibility permits us to
make some sense of the curious ending of the novel--the fated destruction of
the family and the community. Here there are two particular
facts I would like to comment upon.
First, the community is fated to end as soon as someone in it
fully deciphers Melquiades's manuscript, when, that
is, someone fully understands the history of Macondo.
For a community and a family that have so committed themselves
to solitude are engaged in an enterprise fated to fail and never to be
repeated:
. . . for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. (422)
The town and the family are fated to die because they do not have
what is required to continue. Their solitude, their commitment to withdrawal,
fantasy, and subjective desires has doomed them.
But the ending is more complex than that because, in a sense, Macondo does survive in this book. It is particularly
significant that one of those who takes the advice of the Catalan bookseller to
leave the town before its destruction is the author himself, Gabriel Marquez,
descendant of the Marquez who fought alongside Colonel Buendia.
Hence, what does survive is a testimony to the life that has been lived there,
a story which will remain as a guide to the construction of a better
civilization.
If one of the main problems of the Buendias
and Macondo was an inability to generate a realistic
sense of themselves out of their own history, then this book may help to make
sure such a narrative does not happen again. Just as Melquiades,
a writer, helped to overcome the plague of insomnia and collective amnesia when
that disease infected Macondo from the Indians, so
this book, produced by a writer and magician may restore historical memory: the
strike and the war will be remembered, as will be the futile fantasies of a
civilization which could not incorporate those into its political and
historical realities.
It may be significant that, although we learn little about Gabriel
Marquez in the novel, we do know that he escapes Macondo
with the complete works of Rabelais (409). The mention here of one of the
supremely comic geniuses of world literature may be an important reminder of
what the main function of this novel is: to celebrate the tragi-comic
history of Macondo in a way that people can learn
from it. For if one of the great imaginative purposes of the best comedies,
like the Odyssey, is, in the words of William Faulkner's Nobel laureate
speech, to celebrate the ability of human beings not only to survive but also
to prevail, then the comic purposes of One Hundred Years of Solitude may
well be to make sure that the full educational influences of comedy are
delivered to the people.
This point has a certain resonance for me when I reflect upon the
fact that one way of looking at the Buendias is to
see that, although they are frequently the sources of a hugely vital and erotic
sense of fantasy and fun, they are not themselves capable of laughing at
themselves, learning from their mistakes, and moving on, so that their
characters are educated into a new awareness of what their situation requires.
When we discussed the Odyssey, we talked about how such a process of
transformation is one of the major points of the epic, so that Odysseus is not
the same person he was when he first departed from Troy: he has become aware of
a new and transforming set of values. Such a development, one might argue, is
something the Buendias cannot undergo, and their fate
may well be linked to this failure of their comic imaginations.
At any rate, the self-referential quality of the ending of the
novel, when it, in effect, writes its own conclusion and points to a world
beyond Macondo from which the author, Marquez, is
telling the story, offers a final insight that whatever life is to be lived in
Latin America it is not to be the magic but ultimately self-defeating
experience of the Buendias and Macondo.
In that sense, "the destruction of Macondo,
rather than the end of a delightful world of magical realism, points to the
foreseeable end of the cultural and ideological heritage of Spain in the New
World. The novel is revolutionary in a profound sense" (Incledon 52).
Select Bibliography
Bell-Villada, Gene H. Garcia Marquez:
The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1990.
Gonzalez, Anibal. "Translation and
genealogy: One Hundred Years of Solitude." In McGuirk
and Cardwell, 65-79.
Griffin, Clive. "The Humour
of One Hundred Years of Solitude." In McGuirk
and Cardwell, 81-94.
James, Regina. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Revolutions in
Wonderland. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981.
McGuirk, Bernard and Richard Cardwell, edd. Gabriel
Garcia Marquez: New Readings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Martin, Gerald. "On 'magical' and social
realism in Garcia Marquez." In McGuirk
and Cardwell, 95-116.
Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Williamson, Edwin. "Magical Realism and the
Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude." In McGuirk and Cardwell. 45-63.
Wood, Michael. "Review of One Hundred Years
of Solitude." In Critical Essays on Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. McMurray, George R., ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
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