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“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel
Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon
when his father took him to discover ice.”
The high
note with which Gabriel García Márquez began One
Hundred Years of Solitude juxtaposes a sense of doom
with a remembrance of an idyllic past. The captivated
reader naturally wants to know what will happen to Colonel
Aureliano Buendia and how his fate connects with the
discovery of ice, “the greatest invention of our time,”
according to his father Jose Arcadio Buendia. Instead what
he gets is an account of the founding of Macondo, the
arrival of gypsies led by the mysterious Melquiades, the
marriage of Ursula Iguaran and his father, a mighty man
with an uncontrollable passion for inventions, the
harbingers of progress, a union that is futilely opposed
by their parents and relations who feared that their
offspring might have the tail of a pig. For a year, Ursula
remained in a virginal marital state until one day, a man
by the name of Prudencio Aguilar, having lost his fighting
cock to the cock of Jose Arcadio, insulted the latter, who
immediately speared him on the throat, and then walked
back to his wife and ordered her to undress. To her
warning that he would be responsible for what could
happen, Jose Arcadio said, “If you bear iguanas, we’ll
bear iguanas, but there will be no more killings in this
town because of you.” (He also said earlier he didn’t care
if his offspring had the tail of a pig as long they could
talk.) Haunted by the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, Jose
Arcadio led a group of intrepid young men to found the
town of
Macondo.
Aureliano is the second son of Jose Arcadio Buendia, born
with his eyes wide open and, like his well-endowed elder
brother, Jose Arcadio, “without a cartilaginous tail in
the shape of a corkscrew with a small tuff of hair on the
tip.” It was only after 129 pages later that we learn that
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was saved from the firing squad
by his brother, after a series of extraordinary events,
among which was the ravaging of Macondo’s citizens by a
mysterious plague of insomnia followed by an epidemic of
amnesia, so much so that signs had to be made for
everything—including the reminder that God exists—and they
were saved from this epidemic by an aged Melquiades, who
returned from the dead for he couldn’t bear its solitude.
Is that
the way to treat a reader? Is this the way to write a
novel? Is this the method—for method it is—madness in
method—that’s taught in today’s creative-writing classes?
The novels
we are familiar with proceed in orderly fashion like a
marching army in peacetime, and even when they shift time
and points of view do so with proper markers, but One
Hundred Years of Solitude, after the first sentence,
omnisciently romps from character to character, incident
to incident, without losing its hold on us because we are
overwhelmed, mesmerized and enchanted. We couldn’t let go
as we can let go of War and Peace, Brothers
Karamazov or Ulysses, if only to pause to
contemplate and savor, but with One Hundred Years of
Solitude, we devour the way the Buendias ravage and
are ravaged by life, we just go on and on, riveted, on
edge, driven not by suspense but seduced, transported and,
yes, enchanted by a “natural phenomenon, earthquake and
maelstrom.”
Literary
critics have called Gabriel García Márquez the foremost
exponent of magic realism.
According
to literary historians, the term was coined by Franz Roh
in 1925 in his book Nach-expressionismus, magischer
Realismus, Probleme der neusten europischer Malerei
for the Munch painters whose subjects were imaginary,
outlandish and fantastic. It was associated with the
Italian movement called stracitta (“over or across the
city”); the idea reappeared in the 1940s, again as an
artists’ movement until it gradually became associated
with certain kinds of fiction, beginning with the Austrian
novelist George Saiko. By the 1980s, 20 years after One
Hundred Years of Solitude, it became an established
label, applied to the work of Luis Borges, whose
Historia universal de la infamia was regarded as the
first work of magic realism, and yet, admitting that it
was not easy to define the genre; critics saw “plentiful
instances” of magic realism in the fiction of Kleist,
E.T.A. Hoffman, Prosper Merimee, Kafka and Edward Upward.
And what about the “gothic novels” of Isak Dinesen,
Charlotte Brontë (Vilette), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe or Mary Shelley, and even some plays of
Shakespeare? Most Gothic novels are tales of mystery and
horror, intended to “chill the spine and curdle the
blood,” telling of things “wild, bloody and barbarous.”
It would
be more enlightening, however, to consider Pablo Neruda’s
judgment that One Hundred Years of Solitude “is the
greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don
Quixote of Cervantes,” one more instance of magic realism.
We have
forgotten that 14th-century Spain was ahead of the rest of
Europe in the development of the novel form, after which
it declined in the 19th century, giving way to the French,
Russian, German and English novels. Its crowning glory is,
of course, Don Quixote. And that’s why Márquez’s
masterpiece is also regarded as “the great novel of the
Americas.”
To regard it as simply the highest point of magic realism
is misguided unless we accept that reality, with all its
light and darkness, is magical.
In the
world that is Macondo, in the lives of six generations of
Buendias, there are also the struggles between liberals
and conservatives and the civil war of 1899-1902, the
takeover of much of Colombia by the United Fruit Company
of Boston, and the ensuing labor unrest culminating in the
massacre of workers at Cienaga railway station on December
5, 1928. In the novel, Jose Arcadio Segundo witnesses the
massacre, which the authorities try to erase from public
memory. This is the fictional part, but from the modern
experience of oppression and suppression, is this really
fictional? Fiction and truth are no strangers to each
other.
Márquez
said in one interview that in
Latin America, the distinction between reality and fiction has never
been a clear one, and that it is very difficult to find
anything in his novels which is not anchored on reality.
A
distinguished reviewer asserted that the solitude of the
novel’s title is closely related to death. He rightly
pointed out that Melquiades returns to life because he
could not stand the loneliness of death, that the Buendia
men are driven, by some inner madness, to choose a life of
solitude and, as an example, when Aureliano returns home
one night he gives strict orders that everyone should keep
at least 10 feet away from him. We should add that Jose
Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch, and Aureliano died alone.
Although
death is the ultimate solitude, solitude has other kin.
In our
younger days (at least in mine), there was a popular song,
“In My Solitude,” which goes, “In my solitude, you haunt
me.” It’s addressed to a woman, a romantic song that
recalls Robert Louis Stevenson’s musings in “Monasterie”
in his travels with a donkey. He said he discovered a new
pleasure for himself in the arms of nature, where God kept
an open house. But then, while he was exulting in his
solitude, he became aware of a “strange lack.”
He wrote:
“I wished a companion near me in the starlight, silent and
not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a
fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which,
rightly understood, in solitude made perfect. And to live
out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives
the most complete and free.” This is solitude in the sense
of “two against the world.”
In the
last days of his crazed life, Jose Arcadio Buendia was
tied to a tree to prevent him from harming himself,
holding nightly talks with the man he had killed out of
offended honor, but in himself complete and free. Freedom
is solitude.
What this
means above the popular song is that it’s solitude that
haunts us. The Buendias are haunted by solitude, for the
truth in the romance we call life is that solitude haunts
us.
A hundred
times Márquez used the word “solitude”—the pox of
solitude, the solitude of love and death in the women of
Macondo (recall Clotilde’s words in A Chronicle of
Death Foretold: “That day I realized just how alone we
women are in the world,” the solitude in the desolation of
glory that haunted Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima
Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios in the labyrinth of his exile
of disillusionment is the same desolation that haunted
Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the surly one who led 32 armed
uprisings and lost them all, had 17 male children from 17
different women, survived 14 attempts on his life, 70
ambushes and a firing squad, attempted suicide after an
onerous treaty between conservatives and liberals when the
bullet went through his chest without damaging any vital
organ, and the autumnal patriarch who made up for his
solitude by a savage cruelty he mistook for political
astuteness, the solitude of men and women in the throes of
passion. . . the solitude of the world in which everything
is foretold, but always surprising us because we either do
not know what is foretold or, knowing it, choose to defy
it.
It’s
difficult to disagree with the unsung reviewer who, after
observing that One Hundred Years of Solitude has
influenced nearly every important novelist around the
word, wrote: “The rise and fall, birth and death of the
mythical but intensely real Macondo and the glories and
disasters of the wonderful Buendia family make up an
intensely brilliant chronicle of humankind’s comedies and
tragedies. All the many varieties of life are captured
here: inventively, amusingly, magnetically, sadly,
humorously, luminously, truthfully. One Hundred Years
of Solitude is one of the hallmarks of 20th-century
literature.”
First is
the math. Except for Francisco the Man, who lived 200
years, and Melquiades, who lived for centuries (having
been stricken in Singapore and gone through all four
continents), the memorable women are centenarians. Pilar
Ternera, the epitome of hospitality, who gave birth to the
sons of two brothers, lives up to 145 years, Ursula
Iguaran more than a hundred. They need to live long
enough to witness the births and deaths of many Buendia
men. They also have to take care of numerous Buendia
children born in and out of wedlock, of stray girls, one
of whom eats dirt and another who levitates. Then why 100
years, that’s probably a Spanish traditional reckoning, as
I recall that Rizal’s essay is The Philippines A
Century Hence. Then there’s the saying “Not in a
hundred years!” the kind of vow Amaranta made because of
love’s frustrations. She never looked at her face for 40
years, and when proposed marriage to, she put her hand to
the fire. All these women are alone, haunted by solitude,
the men live their lives and they watch and suffer. But
they aren’t meek, neither are they prudish, only stiff and
proper like some women we know.
Numbers
are the obsession of the Buendia men: inventions, crafts,
women, children, days. Probably, if you count them, the
words solitude, desolation and glory come up a hundred
times. There are also a hundred incidents of love, of
fidelity to a code that compels betrayal of friendship,
for which Colonel Aureliano Buendia was damned by his
mother. There are a hundred tales, stories, chronicles, a
hundred novels hovering in Macondo, which is why another
reviewer said that Márquez’s previous works were warming
exercises for One Hundred Year of Solitude.
I cannot
resist digressing with the ecstasy of Rebecca when her
intimacy was despoiled by the enormous Jose Arcadio
Buendia, “she managed to thank God for having been born
before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of
that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of
the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a
blotter.” I mention this because modern novels, including
the best ones, can’t seem to describe lovemaking without
mentioning the vital organs. It’s the literature of the
glands, as Faulkner said.
You will
notice that I am rambling. We can only ramble through a
life magical because there’s no clear dividing line
between reality and fiction—not between fact and fiction,
because fiction is fact.
As for the
architecture, we note the marriage of Ursula Iguaran and
Jose Arcadio was foreordained. Melquiades, the mystic who
returned from the grave, lived as a dear friend with the
Buendias and died after Jose Arcadio’s death, is the key.
Unraveling One Hundred Years of Solitude in our
minds is like going through an archive of many corridors.
We can only do this when after several rereadings, we try
to break the book’s spell so we can apply the analytical
mind which, however, is an obscene assault on great
literature. Only bad works submit to analysis.
There is
an untranslatable Spanish word ENSIMISMAMIENTO—roughly
“within-oneselfness—ensimismarse—to be inside one’s
self. If you want to end a discussion of One Hundred
Years of Solitude without being rude, just say, of
course, the book is the world in ensimismamiento.
In his
Nobel Prize speech, Gabriel García Márquez after
describing the wonders seen by Pigafetta, said: “Our
independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond
the reach of madness.”
These are
just some of the unimaginable horrors in the history of
Latin America: Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santana, three times
dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the
right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. Gen.
Gabriel Garcia Moreno ruled
Ecuador
for 16 years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the
corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in
full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. Gen.
Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, the theosophical despot of
El Salvador who had 30,000 peasants slaughtered in a
savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in
his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to
defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to Gen.
Francisco Moraz’n erected in the main square of
Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a
Paris warehouse of secondhand sculptures.
“I dare to
think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its
literary expression, that has deserved the attention of
the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper,
but one that lives within us and determines each instant
of our countless daily deaths, and that nourish our source
of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of
which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one
cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars,
musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all
creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to
acquire but little of imagination, for our crucial problem
has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives
believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our
solitude.”
“…to
oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with
life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms,
nor even the eternal wars of this century, have been able
to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.”
At this
juncture, we come to the ending of One Hundred Years of
Solitude.
The last
paragraph of the book goes:
“Before
reaching the final line, however, he had already
understood that he would never leave that room, 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.”
No second
opportunity on earth? Gabriel García Márquez, it seems to
me, answered our question in his Nobel Prize speech: on
December 8, 1982, he told his audience that, like his
master William Faulkner, he declined to accept the end of
man.
“Faced
with the awesome reality that must have seemed a mere
utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of
tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe
that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of
the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life,
where one will not be able to decide for others how to
die, where love will prove true and happiness possible,
and where the races condemned to one hundred years of
solitude will have, at last and forever, a second
opportunity on earth.”
Our lust
for life, our sublime sense of beauty will now and forever
resist the beast of terror within us. |
