Edith Gelu

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

 

 

Macondo – El ombligo del mundo /

Macondo / The Navel of the Earth

 

 

Abstract: This article attempts to reverse the critical perspective of Macondo as a paradisiacal place that goes through a slow, inevitable process of decay. I suggest that Macondo is an ambivalent place, both a Garden of Eden and a Garden of Evil, presented as such from the very beginning of the novel. The first part of the article offers a very brief excursus into a few Postcolonial terms to show that the critically perceived inadequacy of terms that deal with the Postcolonial realities seems to make Gayatri Spivak’s theory a more plausible approach albeit a pessimistic one: “the subaltern cannot speak.” García Márquez knows that the subaltern cannot speak – but he wants the subaltern and the reader to know that as well. In the following two thirds of the article I try to show that García Márquez’s intention for his characters is simply to trade the solitude of oblivion with the solitude of awareness. The journey has to be made in time (a hundred years) not in space – all that enters or leaves Macondo is not meant to destroy directly but to shed light on the ongoing destruction.

Keywords: Latin-American Literature; Gabriel García Márquez; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Self-awareness; Solitude; Ambivalence.

 

 

The richness of critical texts written on One Hundred Years of Solitude is nearly as overwhelming as the novel itself. While the narrative seems to lend itself to numerous diverging hypotheses, there seems to be a consensus as far as the character of Melquíades is concerned. He facilitates access to history and story. His participation in the narrative is that of a benevolent character who mirrors the very narrator of the novel not only in the craft of writing but also in the attitude towards the protagonist, the Buendía family, as well. “… Melquíades’s parchments are a history of the family, (and) they are also its prophecy; they predate the actions they describe. Melquíades is seen at intervals working on them, but more often giving certain members of the family clues to their interpretation.” (Mcnerney, 20) Kathleen Mcnerney reads further a comparison between “Melquíades’s creation and that of García Márquez.”(21). However, she is not the only one making this connection. In the collection of essays edited by Harold Bloom, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, several authors consider the parchments as “an alternative novel to the one we are reading… but also an alternative history”(Spiller, 62); a “metafiction” (Landau,119) or a labyrinthine symbol for the effort of reaching a place of harmony and escaping solitude (Hall qtd. in Hedeen, 71). Ultimately, the characters involved in the deciphering of the parchments are “much like the reader of Cien años, also, no doubt, sitting in an isolated chamber, busily deciphering this manuscript of García Márquez’s that for many readers might as well have been written in Sanskrit…” (Baldo, 107).

In reading the parchments as a dynamic between recording history and prophesying story, critics seems to overlook that the clairvoyance does not belong to Melquíades, but to Nostradamus and to José Arcadio Buendía. Melquíades finds the prophecy in the work of Nostradamus and José Arcadio Buendía dreams about “a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. “ (26)[1] Melquíades is then only the instrument of introducing this prophecy in Macondo. My contention is that Melquíades, far from aiding the Buendía family in their search for the antidote of solitude, is an agent of a fatal awareness. Macondo is a paradisiacal place and a real place at once and Melquíades is a Lucifer-type character, who, in Romantic tradition, is the agent of knowledge who destroys the Garden of Eden, but brings about the knowledge and with it, truth and solitude. My reading is framed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak explains any attempt to give voice to a “subaltern group” as re-inscribing the very oppressing move that formed the category of the subaltern in the first place, since the only language and methodology available are structured by oppressive categories. “Knowledge of the other subject is theoretically impossible…. Part of our “unlearning” project is to articulate our participation in that formation – by measuring silences, if necessary – into the object of investigation” (2204). Eventually, regardless of particular categories- women, colonized people, the subaltern cannot speak.

I suggest that García Márquez deliberately invests Melquíades with the power of destruction, or deconstruction rather- he wants to replace the solitude of oblivion with the solitude of awareness or lucidity. García Márquez knows that the subaltern cannot speak- but he wants the subaltern and the reader to know that as well. His interviews and his Nobel Prize lecture attest for García Márquez’s need of awareness for the raw realism where the First World reader sees magical realism.

“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask 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.”

Consequently, the first part of my essay will set up a dialogue with Post-Colonial critics who analyze García Márquez, and not only him, in the larger context of Latin American efforts to dismantle the imperialist oppression. The key terms of my inquiry are truth, reality and history within the magical realism cultural movement. The first part of my essay will show that García Márquez’s underlying agenda in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the pessimistic rendition of the Latin American solitude as the acknowledgment of the impossibility to avoid an on going imperialism. Then, I will look at the novel itself in the following two parts of my essay. First, I read Macondo in the light of the bakhtinian chronotope as a space where people are trying to escape time and reality, seeking oblivion, a Garden of Eden but a fake one, rather, a Garden of Evil described as such from the very beginning of the novel. The village is at the center of the narrative -only two short episodes take place outside its borders- but its borders both physical and immaterial are heavily pervious. The entities going out and the ones coming in establish reciprocal relationships. Most of the time, the ones either returning or entering first time are perceived negatively and they do contaminate the place, but I suggest they infect Macondo with reality. The second part of my reading approaches the novel from the perspective of family with its correlatives-community, nation, and solitude with its correlatives amnesia/ oblivion and awareness by looking closer at the trajectory of a few representative characters: Úrsula and Melquíades, and, briefly Colonel Aureliano Buendía Aureliano Babilonia and the last few pages of the novel.

 

Context: Essentialism vs. Heteroglossia[2] in Post-Colonial Studies

 

The hypotheses advanced by the critical corpus that revolves around García Márquez grapple with a structural contradiction- as long as he is perceived as an author who gives voice to Latin American cultures then specificity falls victim to essentialism. If he is rather the Colombian writer and the specific detail serves to concretely rebel against imperialism then some oh his tremendous power is lost. A rather compelling metaphor synthesizes the contradictory trends in critical studies- hybridity. My purpose in the following theoretical excursus is to show how struggle for the appropriate metaphor for the Post- colonial writing demonstrates that “the subaltern cannot speak.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude is the writing of a homogenized Latin American cultural space- a kind of a representational defense against the colossus from the North- even if the unified, criollo subjectivity García Márquez presents nearly erases the Native American and African presence throughout the region.”(Johnson, 388)

This type of assertion is predominantly present in the critical corpus written on García Márquez. While, acknowledging the absence of other identities, critics still vote for his representativity, the main argument consisting in his inverting the hierarchy of oppressor (Imperialist discourse) and oppressed (the subaltern’s discourse). In the same article, Johnson continues,

“García Márquez plays with many of the typical North- South stereotypes in part by turning center-periphery models inside out, with Macondo becoming the center of the universe around which the rest of the world- even Sir Francis Drake- revolves.”(389) [3]

Furthermore, García Márquez operates within the larger move of “decolonization” which entails “instances of reconfiguration and relocation of cultural and critical energy, reversal of center and margin, production and consumption, dominant and emergent forces…” (Mitchell, 13) Seductively appropriate for One Hundred Years of Solitude, the center- periphery discussion illuminates García Márquez’s emancipating project for many commentators. In his article “Culture and Colonization: The Imperial Imperatives of the Centered Circle”, William V. Spanos employs Enrique Dussel’s ideas of the “decentered periphery [which] becomes the condition for the possibility of an authentic philosophy of liberation.” He highlights the “indissoluble link between ‘ontological imperialism’ and ‘territorial imperialism’” (141). Failing to recognize the former in the “knowledge production” deems futile any emancipating attempt.

The famous essay, “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America”, informs most of the critical debate revolving around this type of dichotomy. Josefina Saldaña builds part of her own argument on Fernandez Retamar’s suggestion “that the entire history of Latin American cultural production can be viewed through the lens of these binary forms of consciousness. Rather than subvert this binary construction, however, he replicates it by simply inverting the hierarchy of its terms…” (Saldaña, 87). Retamar’s essay has engendered long lasting critical discussions since 1971. Despite his still fascinating metaphor, the more recent arguments have moved away from his formula of the reversed power dynamics. Moreover, the geography of the debate has been dislodged. The South becomes the U.S. southern regions and Latin America, for instance in Look Away! The U.S. South in the New World Studies, with a unique distinctiveness that “consists in what might be called the South’s literally uncanny (unheimlich) hybridity.” Taking into account the differences that do not simply allow the “assimilation of the U.S. South into the Caribbean”, Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn introduce the anthology claiming, “Rather, what generates the South’s peculiar cultural tension is its position as a space of degrees of overlap between…” (8) the new metaphor is extremely beneficial since

“As Yeager puts it in her introduction to The Geography of Identity, ’social geography’s insistence on the interstitial, hybrid nature of place- its refusal to conceptualize location as either ethnically or ideologically bounded- also offers an important antidote to some of the dead-end binarisms within cultural studies.’” (12)

Nevertheless, the hybrid metaphor does not dissipate completely the compelling inherent tension of resisting the colonizer that often takes shelter in a “strategic essentialism”.[4] I find a slightly more productive trope in Brett Levinson’s discussion on ‘undecidability’. “between global capital and local politics, state and people, cultural representation and hard reality, text and fact, displacement and place, transnationalism and nationalism, and deconstruction and other methods, no choice is just right or plain wrong. What is right is structurally undecidable.” (185) An implicit contradictory quality makes ‘undecidability’ a more comprehensive metaphor in my view- “Things are [also] undecidable because one has already decided. The very making of the categories such as deconstruction/ nation or local/ global, about which one is making a decision, already constitute a decision, an institutional marking out of the range of possibilities.” (Levinson, 186) This intense search for new and “better” terms intended for unbiased discussions of Latin American literature seems symptomatic for the acute consciousness that Spivak may be right. What if the subaltern cannot speak? Then indeed “the current international application of the term postmodernism to Latin American fiction represents a type of discursive recolonization.” (Irvine, 127)

 

Space, Time- Chronotope. Transgressing the Borders of Macondo.

 

The overwhelming majority of critical texts on One Hundred Years of Solitude seem to operate under the assumption that Macondo undergoes a slow decay; that there is a progressively dismantling of the pure Macondo revealed in the very first pages of the novel and recurrently referred back to as pure in the beginning. The reader implicitly associates the beginning of Macondo with the beginning of Buendía family and the end of the village with the end of the family. Consequently, the degenerative process disperses over the destiny of the family too.

“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” (1)

The very first page of the novel resembles a maze and the reader is bound to confide in the authorial voice that seems omniscient and reliable. Macondo is revealed as being at the crossing of the perfect space and the perfect time- the inceptive, mythical time; in other words a privileged chronotope. Bakhtin’s description of the term fits Macondo perfectly.

“The chronotope is where the knots of narrative are tied and untied… // Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins…. Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novel’s abstract elements – philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect – gravitate towards the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work.” (250)

The abundance of distortions in García Márquez’s novel conceals a crucial misrepresentation of Macondo. I suggest that the narrator purposefully deceives the reader into perceiving a progressive decay of the village. Macondo displayed as a Garden of Eden inhabits the most valuable location in the book from a narrative perspective: the first page. Recurrently, this paradisiacal construction is convoluted in later pages. José Arcadio Buendía “discovered, without ever revealing it, a way to make them live forever.”(43) His resemblance to God in his patriarchal image is subtly inserted when Melquíades tells him about the prediction of a Macondo “where no trace remaining of the race of Buendía” will be left. José Arcadio Buendía thunders his reply as a churchly dictum: “and there will always be a Buendía, per omnia secula seculorum.” (58)

Furthermore, the most accurate description of Macondo as paradisiacal utopia occurs over a few paragraphs within the first ten pages of the novel. José Arcadio Buendía is undoubtedly the center of the community who gives “advice for the raising of the children and animals, who collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community.” The biblical metaphor becomes conspicuous when people are building their homes. “Since his house from the very first had been the best in the village, the others had been built in its image and likeness.”(9, emphasis added) But most importantly, in Macondo there is no death. “It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died.” (10) A few other instances perpetuate this image of Macondo as the perfectly harmonious place still untouched by evil. Don Apolinar Moscote is received suspiciously and José Arcadio Buendía explains that in Macondo “…we don’t need any judges here because there’s nothing that needs judging… We are so peaceful that none of us has even died of a natural death.” (61)

Nevertheless, a closer look at the sequence of events reveals insidious discrepancies among what the reader is led to believe is a chronological change and what the narrator actually presents from the very beginning: Macondo is an ambivalent village. The very first image of the novel is the firing squad- death and the second is the remembrance of ice- brought in by the gypsies who will later be clearly associated with infecting the atemporal village with products of the outside world and with historical time. These two images occur before the paradisiacal descriptions of the village. Similarly, José Arcadio Buendía’s change is almost immediate. On the same page of the novel he is first the emanating living center of this paradise and a few paragraphs later, the one whose “spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets… There were many who considered him the victim of a strange spell.” (10) Already in Chapter 3 the narrator confesses, “Macondo had changed.”

Consistent with the heavenly image of the village is the journey undertaken by José Arcadio Buendía and his fellows in search for “civilization”. Time and space beautifully wrought together again in perfect example of the “a center for concretizing representation,” deny the patriarch the possibility of transgressing. They proceed north, since the east “can only lead to the past”. Their journey becomes allegorical; they travel “before the original sin” through a “universe of grief.” (11) Transgressing the borders of the mythical Macondo means becoming aware- of their “most ancient memories” and the pain of the world. José Arcadio Buendía desires to escape, but he does not know how. When he decides to move “Macondo to a better place” he literally wants to move the privileged space instead of following through with the inner journey he has started in the jungle. On the other hand, Úrsula moves easily across the border. Her purpose is what decides the difference between the two. She is a mother searching for her son. She is aware; she does not want to escape reality, but to reinstate it.

The ambivalent Macondo, both Garden of Eden and Garden of Evil, is described as such from the very beginning of the novel, which supports my contention of the mythical perspective on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Among many other critics, Roberto Gonzáles Echevarría claims, “The blend of mythic elements and Latin American history in Cien años de soledad reveals a desire to found an American myth.” (23) Although the mythological elements are undeniably fecund in discussing this particular novel, I read the Janus-faced Macondo as the chronotope of failing awareness. García Márquez premeditatedly presents Macondo as a chimerical nostalgic picture of the village in the perception of the Buendía family- and, at the same time, as the place that goes through harsh realities. Nevertheless, with the exception of the few characters aforementioned, the Buendía family, and thus the reader experience these harsh realities somehow assuaged. The author’s objective is to lead this family to the awareness of their own condition.

Macondo is not the Garden of Eden; it is rather the Garden of Evil. The illusion of paradise is the founders’ construction in their attempt to eschew reality. Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía are involved knowingly in an incestuous relationship that leads to a cold-blooded murder that keeps haunting them. The final pair to repeat this scenario, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula, is usually considered responsible for bringing the bloodline and Macondo to an end. However, the child with the pigtail at the end of the novel, the grotesque symbol of the apocalyptical end of the family and of the village, is but a repetition of another Buendía born with the tail of a pig, who would have lived a long life, had somebody not tried to rid him of the tail. The Buendía family founds Macondo on the illusion of escaping reality and the microbe of oblivion is passed on genetically, as is their obsession with leaving, escaping, crossing the borders of the village outwards.

Thus, the concatenations of events that seem to bring Macondo down are actually meant to raise the Buendías’ awareness about their own desperate condition. The gypsies bring in marvelous inventions from all over the world, but most importantly, they bring in Melquíades. The symbolism of the objects infiltrating Macondo is by itself a completely new chapter of discussion within the frame I am trying to set up for this essay. They all connect to the idea of chronotope and broaching lucidity. For instance, one of the first things they bring in are maps (Portuguese to be noted – as a colonizing allusion) and navigation instruments – that end up leading José Arcadio Buendía to wander in time rather than space (he finds the Spanish galleon). The astrolabe exasperates him into concluding, “The earth is round, like an orange” (5) -a sentence usually associated with heresy. Objects mesmerize José Arcadio Buendía and he is acting contrary to what a god like figure should. In arguing with Úrsula about moving Macondo entirely, she uses the life argument- their son was born in the village, but José Arcadio Buendía replies, “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” (14)

Not surprisingly, Úrsula is resolute in keeping Macondo where it is. “If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die.” (14) Her purpose seems to be again, awareness. She diverts her husband’s attention from the idea of leaving to his own sons- to reality. José Arcadio Buendía’s former oblivion is transparent in his looking at the children with

“the impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Úrsula’s spell. Something occurred inside of him then, something mysterious and definitive that uprooted him from his own time and carried him adrift through an unexplored region of his memory.” (15, emphasis added)

Indeed, under her spell, he becomes fleetingly aware, but then the next step he takes is to pass down his passion for “the world out there” to his sons.

Actually, the novel is strewn with people and entities permeating Macondo’s borders. A close reading reveals crossing in or out every other page, with the exception of the last third of the novel. The constant bustling in and out consistently molds the village and its inhabitants through the means of a trade not always material, but at all times affecting specifically the Buendía family in terms of solitude, oblivion and awareness. Whenever the gypsies come in they transform the village and the people are fascinated and seem to respond to other types of reality than the one they have before the gypsies. “In an instant they transformed the village. The inhabitants of Macondo found themselves lost in their own streets, confused by the crowded fair.” (17) When Mr. Herbert brings in the hot air balloon, the people are not impressed at all “because they considered that invention backward after having seen and tried the gypsies’ flying carpets.” (243).

Invariably, the entities that come in cause confusion and oblivion, loss of memory or of sense of reality. The center of awareness is Macondo, but the trip to the center has to be done in time- it takes a hundred years for the Buendía race to become aware in the person of Aureliano Buendía. In a similar manner to his father’s, José Arcadio leaves Macondo to avoid reality- he does not want to be a father. When he comes back, he is completely changed and he “did not succeed in becoming incorporated into the family.”(99) Most importantly, when his brother fails to reestablish his connection with José Arcadio Buendía “life at the sea had saturated his memory with too many things to remember.”(100) Visitación tries to escape the insomnia plague, which is later associated with Rebeca, but the old Indian woman knows that the plague actually followed her into Macondo. Prudencio Aguillar manages to find the “town unknown to the dead until Melquíades arrived and marked it with a small black dot on the motley map of death.”(84). He brings to Macondo madness for José Arcadio Buendía. Later on, Cataure, whom Úrsula mistakes for Melquíades, brings death.

Indeed, the prevalent visitor of Macondo is death. Death comes in, mysteriously, in the shape of the three life-size saints filled with gold- and it waits patiently until José Arcadio, Fernanda’s son comes back from abroad entirely corrupted and then kills him. When Fernanda di Carpio comes in as a mock queen, she immediately associated with “The rifle shots [that] drowned out the splendor of the fireworks and the cries of terror drowned out the music and joy turned into panic…. There were many dead and wounded lying in the square…” (218) Later, Fernanda’s father comes in as a mock gift- he sends his own corpse through the mail in a coffin for Fernando’s children to open for Christmas. Death is personified as an old woman whom only Amaranta can see. The seventeen Aurelianos come in Macondo only to die a brutal common death. Ghosts, invisible doctors, “the traffic of the dead” affect the people in Macondo tangibly. Immaterial Melquíades concretely facilitates the process of the deciphering of the parchments, and the invisible doctors leave an ugly scar on Fernanda’s stomach. The list can become overwhelmingly lengthy. My emphasis is on death – because I see it as an agent of reality, a transmitter of the disease of lucidity carried in by Melquíades. The technological intruders are also much commented upon. The foreignness of things – the train, the banana company, the English language, the pianola and Pietro Crespi – is not to be ignored as another agent of reality, rather than evil in themselves. They are unavoidable evils; integral parts of reality that the Buendías seem to be doomed to ignore.

Reversely, the crossing of the borders from the inside out, most of the time motivated by the fascination of the world out there, where science happens, and ‘wonderful things’ and the miraculous adventures of Jose Arcadio that sound like romance quests and fairytales; is almost exclusively not narrated. When Úrsula wants to deflate the drama sparked by the perceived rivalry between Amaranta and Rebeca, she takes Amaranta on a trip – and there are no details concerning that trip. Jose Arcadio Segundo leaves and without any account of his experience outside the borders of Macondo, he comes back with the only boat to dock on the river in the village and with the matrons. Meme and José Arcadio leave for school all the way to Europe. The explanations for what is going on with them come from the letters that keep going back and forth, but the reader has access to them in Macondo and we know they are a collection of lies. Towards the end of the novel, again, we have limited access to Europe and America through the entire collection of postcards sent in by the wise Catalonian and by Aureliano Babilonia’s friends.

Besides, the people who leave Macondo and do not come back, actually die outside its borders without our having access to what happens to them “out there”. Again, death is the agent crossing the borders of the village back and forth. Once Melquíades infects the town, death infiltrates every crease. Remedios the Beauty leaves Macondo in a flutter of expensive sheets in what everybody seems to accept as her assumption to heaven, since she “was not of this world”. Meme leaves and dies in silence in Europe. Melquíades dies his first death out of Macondo. Colonel Aureliano Buendía shoots himself. And Amaranta calmly uses the opportunity of her leaving the village to take letters and messages for the other world.

 

Family, Community, Nation. The Solitude of Amnesia and the Solitude of Lucidity

 

Returning to the theoretical discussions of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the context of Post-Colonial Studies, I connect the motif of transgressing the borders of Macondo to the idea of nation. Critics recurrently consider García Márquez’s work as representative for any Latin American nation. Clearly, one cannot avoid but read his novels as telling a relatable story, beyond variants, just as we read any other masterpiece in terms of universalities. Nevertheless, I wan to suggest that García Márquez embedded ambivalence in the construction of the Buendía family as representative for the small rural community and as representative for the process of coagulating the Latin American nation. Choosing to escape reality (be it murder, incest or other conjectural phenomena) and choosing to live in a closed circle (be it Macondo or the limits of one family) doom one to tragic failure, to amnesia and solitude and “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” (448)

Particularly in the context of efforts for decolonizing the nations of Latin America, the idea of nation and national identity is compellingly powerful. The newly decolonized nations have developed the narratives of overthrowing the hegemonic discourses of the oppressor; narratives “which became disseminated through ‘imagined communities’ of speakers and listeners (or writers and readers)” (Anderson 1983, qtd. in Ashcroft, 152). Walter D. Mignolo provides an engaging discussion on “community building discourses” in his dense article “Afterword: Human Understanding and (Latin) American Interests–The Politics and Sensibilities of Geocultural Locations”. Responding to Spivak’s question “why is magic realism the third world style?”, Mignolo describes magic realism as an ontology rather than a style: “Latin America is magic-realistic.” (207) Mignolo’s article makes a potent connection that informs the cluster of terms I am using in my reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “geocultural locations are not necessarily bound to given theoretical practices… the place one is from and the place one is in are part and parcel of what one imagines and constructs.” (171)

Considering Mignolo’s concept ‘loci of enunciation’ as structuring one’s identification process, I read Macondo as metaphorical locus where García Márquez is trying to dismantle the binary of center and periphery, and where he admits that it cannot be done. The Buendía family constructs its identity through a long process of accepting reality, of becoming aware that the image and the identity of a family, and further of a community, or a nation is bound to collapse if its only means of resisting outside pressure is self-preservation. The recurrent invasions of outside elements that occur in Macondo are undoubtedly malignant most of the times. The banana company ruthlessly devastates the village –the physical space mutates into desolation; the weather eerily manifests the volition of the oppressive class of foreigners; the people working for the company and their families are killed in a massive attack, but most importantly, it affects the lucidity of the community- three thousand people disappear on the train of oblivion.

Aside ephemeral instances of awareness, towards which the characters named Aureliano seem to be more particularly prone, two characters stand out as the closest to lucidity and truth: Úrsula and Melquíades. They also live the longest (if we consider Melquíades’ postponing the moment when he has to go to his “final death”) and are involved with all the successive generations. For both of them Macondo is a circle of influence on the family as long as they are in it. They are the agents of change from the solitude of oblivion- for the characters who chose to identify self- reflexively against outside pressure/ the hegemonic colonizer- to the solitude of lucidity – for those who chose to self-identify as hybrids. The latter category is living at the spaces in between, representing the community and the nation partially and being aware that it is impossible to do it otherwise. The subaltern cannot speak- the language he decides to use for rebellion is structured with binary oppositions. Power is at the center and decentering means lack of power for everyone. Only now I can assent to equating Melquíades’ creation and project with the García Márquez’s and add Úrsula in the same category- as the only lucid characters of Macondo.

However, their roles are complementary. Úrsula reads reality non- mediated. She represents oral culture, which she opposes to Melquiades’ manuscripts, and his foreign written, complicated culture. “When the gypsies came back, Úrsula had turned the whole population of the village against them. But curiosity was greater than fear…” (8) She represents the notion of nation as Homi K. Bhabha is proposing it in his article “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”. He links the emergence of the nation to mass migration “The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of the communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor.” He focuses on the “nation as a form of living the locality of culture.” His quoting Lyotard allows me to read the character of Úrsula as disseminating

“the social narrative… [defined] as the privileged pole of the narrated, ‘where the one doing the speaking speaks from the place of the referent. As narrator she is narrated as well. And in a ways she is already told.’ The subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else’, and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject.” (Bhabha, 301)

This ingenious perspective resonates with my reading of Úrsula not only as one of the few characters that are aware of reality, but as the built- in first critic and interpreter of the novel, of the narrative that describes the life of her family. Chapter 10 opens with the birth of Jose Arcadio, Aureliano Segundo’s son. The choice of name has Úrsula meditating on the typology of characters in the novel/ in her family, although her voice blends with the narrator’s voice.

“Úrsula, on the other hand could not conceal a vague feeling of doubt. Throughout the long history of the family, the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign.” (197)

Concomitantly, the ghost of Melquíades reappears. While Úrsula does the hermeneutics internally, Melquíades “tried to infuse him [José Arcadio Segundo] with his old wisdom.” (200)

Melquíades secretively and selectively imparts his knowledge, while Úrsula embraces others into the family. She raises Rebeca as her own daughter. She takes in Visitación and Cataure, Santa Sofia dela Piedad. She gets excited when people come in the house and disturb Fernanda’s strict coded order. She goes outside Macondo without coming back infected with oblivion although moving further away physically from this place, means forgetting and being lost. When she starts her search for José Arcadio, “She kept getting farther away from the village until she felt so far away that she did not think about returning” (37). Similarly, José Arcadio cannot be reintegrated in the family after “He had been around the world sixty-five times, enlisted in a crew of sailors without a country.” (99)

While Melquíades writes and teaches the Buendías how to read the text as reality, Úrsula reads reality as a text. The trickle of blood that comes to “tell” Úrsula that her son, José Arcadio, died or the pot of worms that tells her of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s suicide attempt reflect in a mirror image “the letters [that] looked like clothes hung out to dry on a line and they looked more like musical notation than writing” (200) read by Aureliano Segundo in Melquíades’ room. Ursula reads through the haze of oblivion to reality that seems to follow her family. One of the numerous times when Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves Macondo, Arcadio his nephew is left in charge with the well being of the town, but he proves to be a cruel and despotic ruler. For a while, his actions have a serious impact on the people of the village, but when Úrsula gets mad, she overthrows him as if he had been playing a childish game and he had been a naughty child. The seriousness of reality narrated up to that point is humorously subverted. “Whipping him without mercy, she chased him to the back of the courtyard, where Arcadio curled up like a snail in its shell.” and “The boys in the squad scattered, fearful that Úrsula would go after them too.” (115)

García Márquez supplies the first critical interpretation of his novel in Úrsula’s eight page reflective musings that open chapter 13. She summarizes and explicates the events through “a progressive breakdown of time” (263) She loses her sight and gains vision- learns to read reality again in new ways, by odors and by the position of the sun. García Márquez literally writes her as the only one being aware of her (im)mediate surroundings. “But that day she began to realize something that no one had noticed and it was that with the passage of the year the sun imperceptibly changed position and those who sat on the porch had to change their position little by little without being aware of it.“ (266) Úrsula’s genuine connection with reality and her constant intention of influencing her family into being lucid is visible again when she manages to get José Arcadio Segundo out of Melquíades’ room in spite of him and she realizes that “he was in a world of shadows more impenetrable than hers, as unreachable and solitary as that of his great-grandfather.” (362). Moreover, her death disturbs reality like an earthquake- birds die and the monstrous creature of the Wandering Jew is sacrificed- in a sort of craze.

On the other hand, when Melquíades dies for the first time he is “wiped off the face of the earth” together with the entire tribe “because they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge” (43). This is a conspicuous allusion to Melquíades inheriting something of the tradition of Lucifer from Milton and Goethe- the fallen angel, the evil but sympathetic character whose major sin is knowledge beyond the limits he permitted. The beginning of the novel sees him as “a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind… That prodigious creature, said to posses the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with spread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of centuries had skated.” (6)

His consistent influence on the male members of the Buendía family seems ambivalent. On the one hand, he is always bringing in apparent decline and secrecy- the Buendías seem to cross the borders of Macondo with his aid, but the journeys are not in physical space. José Arcadio Buendía

“When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion f space that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study.”(4)

On the other hand, although his presence in the novel is not as pregnant as Úrsula’s, his influence is constantly reverberating lucidity or awareness (through the Buendías who enter his room and approach the parchments). His knowledge of the end of the race of the Buendías is rooted beyond time. I read his role in the narrative within the frame of subalternity. He knows from the beginning that in the city of mirages the Buendía’s no longer exist. He tries to warn them, to make them become aware of their own fate, even to help them avoid the prophecy but he fails. The Buendías are enmeshed in the mythical Macondo- the space supposed to protect them of themselves; the space that allows the solitude of the oblivion to overtake everything.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía is the one that embodies the struggle to become aware the most. He starts in the laboratory and then becomes active in the reality – but he loses all the uprisings. He goes physically too far from the village-, his mother believes they lost him forever as does his sister, Amaranta. Only Aureliano Babilonia will become fully aware of everything. He is the one that lives through the complete change – from the solitude of the oblivion to the solitude of lucidity. Thus, I concur with Hedeen’s opinion that

“Ultimately One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revolutionary novel.” García Márquez pushes the solitude of the individual to the “solitude of a culture, of striving humanity.” Hedeen also fittingly quotes Paz “solitude, and still later it becomes awareness.” (72)

García Márquez’s project with One Hundred Years of Solitude is to reveal, “the subaltern cannot speak”, at least not if his actions are self-reflective and to reveal that the oppressor cannot listen but in English. If the Latin American writers take shelter in a “strategic essentialism” (Spivak) in order to make the subaltern voice more powerful, they also need to acknowledge that the language available is the language of the imperialist, the colonizer. Thus, accepting Postmodernism and magic realism as valid tools in interpreting the Latin American novel is “a type of discursive recolonization” (Irvine, 127). A true displacement of the language of the empire happens, as Mignolo suggests, in Gloria Anzaldua’s work “To read her Borderland/ La Frontera is to read three languages and three literatures at the same time, in the same book- a book that is not only trilingual (Spanish, English, Nahuatl), but also, of course, tricultural.” (189)

Gene H. Bell-Villada, among other critics, emphasizes for instance “the chaotic warfare of chapters 5-9 is, by admission of the author, based concretely on Colombia’s nineteenth- century conflicts.”(103) The purpose of One Hundred Years of Solitude as “truth bearing document” (Echevarria, 15) is not emphasized enough. Especially since García Márquez himself gives the key to “The whole disaster of Macondo- which is a telluric disaster as well- comes from this lack of solidarity- the solitude which results when everyone is acting for himself alone. That’s then a political concept, and interests me as such- to give solitude a political connotation I believe it should have. “ (qtd in Hedeen, 80)

García Márquez’s narrative of the family who took too long to become aware of their own condition is also an allegory for the First World community. Reality is still absurd and magic in Third World Macondo. If the powerful choose the solitude of oblivion, for a hundred years, they might not get “a second opportunity on earth.”

 

 

Notes: