Zoica Ghiţan

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

 

The Metamorphosis of Marquezian Nights in

One Hundred Years of Solitude

 

 

Abstract: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, has focused his unusual way of exploration into the inner side of literature on simultaneous realities. As a result of this new and catchy way of writing about life and death, Marquez has become a notorious name in literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, surely one of the most entertaining books ever written, does not surrender all its meaning in the first reading; rather, it demands a second reading which is in effect the real one. After having done this, you, as a reader, have the tremendous feeling that life has changed, that death is getting closer, that night is falling apart. This paper aims to identify the less known part of this novel. I focused on the Metamorphosis of Marquezian Nights. There are six important nights in this novel and each of them tries to emphasize those steps from life to death (the Night of Beginning-Utopia and Magic Places, the Night of Dream and Memory, the Magic Night-Remedios’ Death, the Night of Insufficient Physiologies, the Night of Splitting Up the Universal Spirit and the Night of Mirrors).

Keywords: Argentinian Literature; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Metamorphosis; Death; Destiny.

 

 

Motto: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to always tell the difference”. (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5)

 

 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel of extraordinary destinies, of a psychological war, of powerful characters which have the strength to face fierce forces. It’s the novel of Ursula and Buendia family, of decline and guilt. It’s also an epic of life and death, of desperate perpetuation and the need to recover. But, probably, one of the most important ways to read One Hundred Years of Solitude is through the magic of nights. It’s a novel about day and night, about sunrise and sunset, about never ending nights, and never coming days. It’s a novel which extraordinarily resembles life through the light of sunset which might seem to make things, people and places -everlasting. In order to identify and decipher the key of Buendia family, we have to get familiarized with the labyrinth of the novel. Buendia family lives the absurd game of darkness. In the heart of darkness its destiny turns into a continuous failure and into a struggle within itself and the others. Between the two principles, the one of life and the one of darkness, evil forces and dark seem to be always on the first place. A destiny which is going to be forgotten, which fights to keep memory alive, a destiny which was lost before it began to start, a hide and seek game between negative meanings and metamorphoses of night.

Metamorphosis, as a concept, has to be defined taking into account all those terms used to define change. In Physics, Aristotle tries to define metamorphosis, using the pair of movement and change, the contradiction principle and the intermediate category. Movement is defined as being something which has to do with a change from one subject to the other one, whereas change has to do with passing from one subject to a non-subject or from one non-subject to a subject, meaning both generation and destruction. Aristotle makes use of three different pairs which are also very important in defining the nowadays metamorphosis. The first dichotomy which is used by Aristotle draws the distinction between the thing which moves, the thing to which it moves and the thing from which it moves. Aristotle seems to focus on, specifically, the thing to which it moves and the thing from which it moves, defining change “the thing to which it moves rather than the thing from which it moves”[1]. The second dichotomy which is used by Aristotle has to do with the relationship between subject and non-subject. If the first pair emphasises those changes that might appear according to substance, quantity, quality, place, time and relation, all these being called changes by accident or by mistake, because they are “a part of all things, anytime and anywhere”[2], the second pair has to do with those changes which take place “not anywhere, just in opposite things, the intermediate ones, the contradictory ones”[3].

Reading carefully Aristotle’s Physics we can draw the conclusion that there are two main types of changes: the first one is the change from a subject to a non-subject which is called destruction or change from existence to non-existence and also a change from a non-subject to a subject which is called by Aristotle “generating through contradiction”[4], for example the way in which non-white turns into white, or non-existence turns into existence. These are the most important pairs which are mainly used to describe the nowadays metamorphosis. According to Aristotle there are two main changes, but we have only one shape, this belongs to a thing which is created through the initial chaos, because of all those essential changes. We haven’t mentioned all these pairs at random; all of them have to do with the main topic of this paper. They have an impact on the magic of marquezian nights, because all of them are built up using the relationships between change and movement. But, besides mimesis, which means of course copying reality, Gabriel Garcia Marquez also makes use of the art of revealing and creating through imagination, simultaneous realities. The traditional psychological analysis is replaced by illogic, discontinuity and incoherence and all these happen because of metamorphosis. Sartre stated the idea that we have to face “the maiming of time”, as an immediate result of the way in which metamorphosis functions in a novel.

Under the labyrinth’s wings we are witnessing the birth of a new world which is going to fight for more than one hundred years with the continuous timeless presence. As related to the destruction and disfigurement of time, Emil Cioran said the following:

” Time has just become inaccessible to me. Without being able to follow it, I just have to hang up on it or just watch it, but I can never find out myself in it: it’s not my element. My impotence to catch a little bit from the time which is open to everybody is useless”[5].

We are introduced to a world where absurd and unusual create the continuous crisis, a crisis which is also determined by the metamorphosis of nights. This typical crisis spreads itself not just on the physical and material level of society, but it’s also a crisis on the spiritual level. Each character is guilty because they are not able to fulfil their own existence in the immediate reality. Each character, except Ursula, lives the drama of his or her own existence. They have the consciousness of their own self destruction. They do not live in truth because they cannot find their own equilibrium and all the necessary answers to all their questions which seem to tighten them as in circle of fatality; they cannot explain their own destiny: Why do they live? What do they live for? What do they have to do to find the real balance needed for their life? Where are they going to?

The solitude becomes more and more powerful during all these nights. The twentieth century novel brought up two great solitary writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka. Both of them struggled with solitude which turned into an evil power, condemning characters and placing them into an unwelcoming world, a world of absurd instances. Kafka is the one who proved this solitude in the pages of his Journal, saying the following:

” I have been invaded by the sufferance of my solitude, so deeply that I have felt that all my power that I gain when writing, scatters, that power which, to be honest, I have never wanted being pointed this way”[6].

Solitude – for both of them – becomes smothering, making the characters to act in a crazy way. Solitude brings fear, concern, anxiety and desperate efforts. Both marquezian and kafkian characters are trying to escape from this world full of evil sources. These characters are working desperately and hopelessly. Both characters are products of destinies lived boundlessly as a painful tearing, between vaguely perceptible things and obsessive dilemmas.

Between solitude and metamorphosis, Marquez placed the image of the dirty man, of that man who won’t recover anymore, of that man who is continually crawling. Those pages in which Aureliano Buendia is described as a man who is afraid of fighting against life are very important. Colonel Buendia, the one who was almost intangible all his life can no longer escape. His fears are the result of not being able to live authentically. He hasn’t managed to find out the real sense of life, that’s why he dies in such a tremendous way, in a state of almost complete madness. The hero, the one who was awarded so many prizes, the one who died and resurrected when people needed him, the one surrounded by too many people, dies because he realized that life can no longer deserve to be lived because he was born from the very beginning with the desire to feel free, with the eyes open wide, with the strength of powerful characters and now he is enhanced forever. But in a solitary world you cannot live if you don’t accept the fact that you have to surrender when necessary. This is what Aureliano Buendia hasn’t managed to understand; the hero, the conqueror dies as a victim, as a punished man who gave up fighting with all those fierce forces of evil. It’s a strange and cold world which denies everything and is continually hiding the very basics of life. The one who is part of this world is a solitary person, abandoned by everybody. His scream is a scream of powerlessness, of impossibility of setting yourself free; it’s a scream against the world’s absurdity. In such a world, metamorphosis will function in an irreversible way; it’s a mortal perspective which fascinates all the novel’s characters. The character is not just a part; it’s an outcrop of all those parts, which exist in a totality. It has to do with the so-called: homo omnis creatura.

The mechanical part is also added to all these incomplete physiologies, but at the same time it turns into a powerful tool which might be used to dominate from beyond the external limits. Each character in One Hundred Years of Solitude wants to be free, that’s why all of them make use of mechanical: making gold fishes, the flying carpet and the daguerreotype laboratory. The characters cannot be free because their freedom does not exist authentically; they are set free but just into death. The characters turn into living corpses who are given just a chance: to commit suicide or to disappear without any explanations. Their death is rarely a tragic one; it’s an exhaustion state that is shared by Jose Arcadio, by Aureliano Buendia, by Ursula and Amaranta.

This novel exists because there is the heart of writing which is supported by the magic of the six nights we are going to talk about. Each of these magic nights designs existential destructions which bring the imminent failure and death:

1. The night of beginning-Utopia and magic places
2. The night of dream and memory
3. “This is happening: flowers rain from the heavens”
4. The night of insufficient physiologies
5. The night of splitting up the universal spirit
6. The night of mirrors

 

The Night of Beginning. Utopia and Magic Places

 

One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with the magic night of beginning. Darkness turns into the light of foundations, when human beings are born, the worlds split up, the limits disappear and the magic appears.

Macondo has its own world; it’s a crepuscular world which fights within itself and with the boundless limits in order to be given the right to exist. Macondo is more than a real world; it’s a world which seems to refuse the dark side of life. It’s a place bathed in light and warmth, an island in which the common representations and imagination are melting together. Magic is not just the environment of Macondo but also the lack of consistency of the name of Macondo. Macondo, product of Jose Arcadio’s imagination or not, because the text does not specify exactly, has the resonance of beginning but also of the imminent end and death. We are invited to suppose that Macondo is on an island, surrounded by waters, so that’s why all those plans to set up Macondo in a more suitable place, the lack of dead people, the unusual inventions, the alchemy laboratory, the making of gold fishes, too much light and the richness which cannot be explained, make us to believe that Macondo is a place where Utopia is at home.

And as it happens with places surrounded by utopia, Macondo has to die one day. The foundation of Macondo is done during night, as something unusual, following Jose Arcadio’s dream between the limits of deep sleep and wakefulness, when the human beings are senseless:

” the night on which they camped beside the river, his father’s host had the look of shipwrecked people with no escape, but their number had grown during the crossing and they were all prepared (and they succeeded) to die of old age. Jose Arcadio Buendia dreamed that night that right there is a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day, he convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot pot on the bank, and there they founded the village”[7].

The night of Macondo’s foundation is the night of the metamorphosis of a dream into an ultimate reality.

There are two places where Marquez emphasizes the role played by metamorphosis in the inner structure of the novel: the mirrors and the dream. All those houses with walls made up of mirrors send to the imminent death of characters. As it usually happens with all the mirrors which split up into thousands of pieces, the same happens with Buendia family’s destiny. The night of beginning is a night in which metamorphosis turns into a willing entity which creates worlds, unites destinies and opens new ways. The rapport between seeing and being is given birth, grows up, ceasing the place to the double-faced nights of life.

According to the Dictionary of Symbols, the mirror is an object which helps you to get to the real knowledge which best reflects ”the truth, the sincerity, the inner side of heart and consciousness”[8], but, at the same time, the mirror helps you to play with metamorphosis, with opposite images of immediate reality. At the beginning of the novel Jose Arcadio Buendia has a dream, those houses with walls made of mirrors symbolize two things: first of all, the darkness of the material world, the one which was created in immemorial times from the word’s chaos, and secondly, the birth of a new world which is going to reflect the purity of soul in darkness. The dream with these houses is in fact the first metamorphosis which is going to be spread all over the novel. The inhabitants of all these houses are going to die. They are going to be lost in the continuous game of life and death, playing the last tricks with the destiny. The metamorphosis of the very beginning is the one of a world which has just lost its identity because everything came up as a result of an immaterial, spontaneous and hysterical dream. Each dream has a meaning and a final goal, and in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the final goal has to do with extreme solitude and death, beyond the bearable limits, eternal deaths which happen again and again.

The night of beginning is in fact the metamorphosis of a dream, the only one which is quite real in the novel, which is trying to be recognized in a world which has nothing else than one hundred acts and one hundred characters who suffer and die because of loneliness.

 

The Night of Dream and Memory

 

In the eternal course of nights which are going to be lost and die in the eddy of the time, the second night is the one of dream and memory. With this night we are invited to get to the second stage from where the drama of Buendia family starts. It’s in fact the first real night which brings metamorphosis into reality as related to marquezian destinies.

All their dramas and their inexorable way to death start to appear as soon as the night of dream and memory is getting closer. As soon as insomnia appears, the memory starts to play games, to change the real into dream and the dream into real existence, thing which mainly determines the blending between different plans and the impossibility of finding out:

”Jose Arcadio Buendia found himself rolling over in bed, unable to fall asleep… they did not sleep a minute, but the following day they felt so rested that they forgot about the bad night…They did not become alarmed until the third day, when no one felt sleepy at bedtime and they realized that they had gone more than fifty hours without sleeping… In that state of hallucinated lucidity, not only did they see the images of their own dreams, but some saw the images dreamed by the others”[9].

Insomnia is going to be spread and turns into a plague and you cannot fight against it; it’s difficult, if not even impossible. All those unusual ways used by Aureliano Buendia to keep memory alive are useless. He is playing with words, but the magic of words will soon disappear. The fight to keep memory alive is a tiring one, because the immediate reality is replaced gradually by simulacra of action and thinking, by an imaginary reality in which characters have nothing else to do than to give way to.

Insomnia freezes memory and stops the access to the spiritual side of life. The only element which is going to help them to recover, although temporarily, is Melquiades. He is the one who plays the game of life and death on the chess table. Memory wants to fight against being forgotten, but this is not possible. It’s trying to recapture the past, but the limits of present don’t allow this. Everything is useless if the last stage is nothing else than death. There is fragment in a novel written by Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities, which best reflects this point of view mentioned above, the continuous search, the hopeless one during a lifetime, by the end of which you are able to realize that you have just lost the bet with life:

”the hell of the living ones is not a thing which is going to be; if there is one, then it is the one which is already here, the hell we are living in nowadays, the one which is being built up by our joining forces. There are two ways to avoid sufferance. The first one is at everybody’s hand: to accept the hell and be a part of it, until you won’t see it anymore. The second one is uncertain and requires attention and untiring learning: to look for and know how to recognize who and what, in the middle of hell, is not hell and to make it live forever”[10].

The text suggests that the best way is the second one, the continuous search in this game with the essences of life. We might assume that Melquiades is Pablo, the main character in one of Hesse’s novels? Character and stage manager at the same time, he is the one who initiates in the magic theatre so that his world might turn into a visible one. Melquiades might be considered a wanderer; we should say that he is the one who brings the invisible into visible and perceivable. At this point we could ask ourselves: isn’t the insane state of mind the beginning of wisdom?

Melquiades sees and knows everything, gives without asking for anything back, his only desire is to keep secret the parchments which seem to be intangible. He is acting in the novel as a shaman who directs a world which has no longer any other determinants. He is the one who brings inventions and alchemy, the secret drink which saves memory and the necessary skills for Aureliano Jose in order to decipher the secrets of the parchments.

There are two main characters in the novel who don’t suffer of solitude: Melquiades and Ursula. Whereas Melquiades’ greatest achievement is that he has managed to be a winner in his fight with solitude, Ursula Iguaran de Buendia is the invincible heart of the novel. Both of them seem to be crazy a little bit because their behaviour gives you the feeling that something is going wrong with them. In the order of the actual they seem to be crazy and insane but in the order of the possible, they are just acting as they should, because the freeing of imagination can lead to unusual meaning. But, nevertheless, nothing seems crazier than the wisdom for the one who doesn’t know any other rules except the good sense.

 

“This is Happening: Flowers Rain from the Heavens”

 

Too many postponements, a place without a cemetery, a society in which the patterns and those too many voices determine the absurd, all of them had to be shaken by something terrible indeed: the first real death. Until Remedios’ death, the novel had its own linearity, without too many events; with her death, the novel, with places, characters and destinies, is moving, step by step, to the imminent death. Time is lost and is no longer patient with neither places nor people. Time is demanding for its own existence as a real time, in which the fatality circle is getting stronger and stronger and the demonic magic of nights doesn’t pardon anyone.

According to the Dictionary of Symbols, night has created sleep, death, dreams and fears, kindness and cheating. One Hundred Years of Solitude seems to be an invitation to a demonic fairy tale in which we, as readers, are sent back in those immemorial times when the initial chaos was melted with monsters and nightmares. Usually night renders two main meanings: the first one has to do with darkness, with the dark side of life and the other one with preparing for the coming of dawn, when the light of life is going to appear. From this point of view metamorphosis might be: ascendant and descendant according to the way in which it’s used as a reward or as a punishment or according to the final goals. In the case of our novel there are descendant metamorphoses of nights because all of them seem to be ruled by an unseen hand which is trying to punish each generation for Ursula and Jose Arcadio’s mistake of getting married (they were cousins). Remedios’ death is a magic one which happens late, in the middle of the night. She is the only character who has unusual mortal powers. She dies in an unusual way, through levitation, an unusual death which is specific to saints:

” Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her”[11].

The supposition that Remedios the Beauty possessed powers of death was then borne out by four irrefutable events: four men died because of her magic beauty and power. Her death is the result of the way in which number four resonates in the novel’s structure. Number four suggests according to the Dictionary of Symbols, the initial chaos, the dark side of life. Number four designs those special steps you should follow in order to initiate yourself into the deepest meaning of life. She has managed to identify these special steps; probably that’s why she is saved from a common death. She has risked everything, without knowing that she will be the chosen one and Ursula, the most lucid character in the novel, was the first one who realized that. The strange beauty, the shining light from her eyes, her demonic innocence made her the best representation of alienation in the twentieth century novel. Metamorphosis fails as related to Remedios because she is already under the metamorphosis’s impact; she is a fabulous character, a composite one who combines mechanic, human, animal and vegetal into a single unit. As Carlos Fuentes has pointed out in the Introduction stage of this novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the perfect combination between Utopia, Epic and Myth. The three of them emphasize a special time. As we all know Utopia focuses on the nostalgic time of the very beginning, when everything was in a perfect harmony, when everything might have happened, Epic, generally speaking, focuses on the things that really happened whereas Myth is born, after the other two die and time is focused on this is happening. And related to Remedios’ death: she died in Utopia, she also died in Epic, but moreover, she is dying in Myth because, as we all know, the characters who were born in mythic times have the tendency to act unusually: Remedios dies on simultaneous realities because this is the main reason of acting mythically; her character will not be made clear until the final part of the novel when we are allowed to discover the real meaning of Melquiades’ parchments; the city of mirrors turned into a city of nightmares, and the chronological time is replaced by the instant, as it happens in Kierkegaard’s writings.

 

The Night of Insufficient Physiologies

 

Aureliano Buendia is the exceptional character in the novel. Designed from the very beginning for the tragic side of life, Aureliano is desperately looking for an escape from time and space. He has the power to be conscious that in such a world he won’t be allowed to find the real way of freedom .That’s why he is going to be stuck and trapped. The marquezian character is a wanderer who is struggling with himself on the unknown road of life, but he cannot move on because he has the feeling of a complete paralysis. He doesn’t understand the mechanism of reality. Although the characters are capable to rationalize till excess, their conclusions are most of the time irrational. He cannot find his own place and because his solitude is getting worse and worse, the marquezian character fails into a dirty state and then into a metamorphic state of mind and body.

Aureliano Buendia lives the absurdity of life, from birth to death. The destiny of a man, whose life has been built up of illusions and who, because of the impossibility of finding a real place in the world, is lost in the eddy of the inexorable time.

Colonel Aureliano Buendia is the character born to be in a continuous fight with life. He is both executioner and victim of a sombre destiny which brought him to the final failure. Aureliano Buendia will die, but not because of his seventeen sons who had been killed, not because that absurd war that cannot be won, not because of those dead people who were asking for revenge, he dies because he wasn’t able to find out the real meaning of his life: Why did he live for? Why did he have to fight? Why was his life so unfair with him? He dies in the way he lived, without being able to explain the reasons of his existence:” he did not have a feeling of sorrow but a blind and directionless rage, a broad feeling of impotence”[12].

Chimerical nature, Colonel Aureliano Buendia suffers of persecution mania. He is the one who fails from the moment of his birth; the image with the amazed child who has the eyes open wide, intangible, questioning about the world is meaningful:

” He was silent and withdrawn. He had wept in his mother’s womb and had been born with his eyes open. As they were cutting the umbilical cord, he moved his head from side to side, taking in the things in the room and examining the faces of the people with a fearless curiosity. Then, indifferent to those who came close to look at him, he kept his attention concentrated on the palm roof, which looked as if it were about to collapse under the tremendous pressure of the rain”[13].

He seems to be one of Kafka’s characters who lose everything in their life; he is no longer that famous colonel appreciated for his deeds, awarded many decorations for his courage; he is forgotten and he has to step backward in a lonely place, his father’s atelier, where he is looking forward his death. His life is that one lived beyond the bearable limits. Aureliano Buendia suffers of a consciousness metamorphosis, he is stray and strong headed and also refractory to all that comes from the other ones. Aureliano Buendia lives the end of his life by being alone, incapable of love. He realizes he is a stranger in this world and this revelation takes place in an endless night when he has the perception of his own absurdity as a human being:

” He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dung heap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years later”[14].

This is the moment when he realizes that it’s the time to withdraw; he has the same fate as the one shared by Gregor Samsa, the main character in Metamorphosis written by Franz Kafka, in the shell of his life, realizing amazed that neither war nor life has brought him any satisfaction. He is alone and incapable of offering love. He is fighting against unseen forces, makes mechanic gestures and listens to imaginary orders, because war destroyed his last shivers of love. He turns into a living corpse when he signed that truce, which would have never been signed otherwise, but, now, having the proof of his own uselessness, a simple signature is no longer valuable. He hasn’t managed to live authentically, his sons were killed one by one and his memory has been destroyed. So, Aureliano Buendia dies in a night, after confessing the other ones who were trying to praise him for his courageous and brave actions that he was just a simple manufacturer, whose only dream was to die of tiredness and in the misery of making the gold fishes. The grieved desert of the glory he had one day brings him in front of death. He is melting himself, as it happened to Gregor Samsa, in a house which becomes stranger and stranger, further and further. He dies in a cold night in October, understood by Ursula, who, no matter her age, is the only one who remains lucid till the end of the novel. He has the fate of his father’s, dying under the same chestnut tree, not before being attracted by the circus which just appeared in Macondo. Similar to the circus’ world which creates the illusion of happiness and good will, the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendia has been an absurd game in which he, the main character, has been played by destiny in a perfect combination between lights and shadows.

 

The Night of Splitting Up the Universal Spirit

 

Ursula Iguaran de Buendia is the most lucid character in the novel. She had to face for more than one hundred years death, life, children with all their problems, Jose Arcadio’s insane and all the other things which turned her into the strongest woman of the novel. She is the only character who doesn’t cry: she does not cry when her child is killed, she does not cry when her family is almost in ruins, she does not even cry when she had to face the cruel destiny, she does not cry when she has to face death. She seems to be everything in the novel because she is always there when you need her; powerful, a woman of unbreakable nerves who never says no who ever gives up, she is the strongest character in the novel. If she had been killed as a character by Marquez from the moment when it started to rain and all that came after, such as flood and all the other ruins, this novel wouldn’t have been a masterpiece today. Her strong capacity of work, the fact that she was always active and severe made her the universal spirit of the novel.

As long as she lives and she is a part of her family, everything around her goes according to the plan; after dying everything changes into a metaphor of imminent ending. The first symbol which shows us that Ursula is going to die has to do with rain. After raining for more than “four years, eleven months and two days”[15], Macondo turns into a shambles, just ruins, remains of furniture, animal skeletons, and abandoned houses. Blind and in a terrible state of confusion, Ursula recovers perfectly, after being almost dead during the season of rains, after loosing almost all her senses, being just a living body which no longer reacts to any stimulus that come from outside. She was used as the most amusing plaything by her nephews: Amaranta Ursula and little Aureliano. As I have already mentioned she is the most lucid character in the novel, although she gives us the feeling that she is just a wanderer. She tried to recapture the most important events of her life but in such a way that we, as readers, have the feeling that everything has to do with simultaneous realities; time changes all its perspectives and the absolute present time of the myth is born – this is happening. She confuses things, events and deeds, present times with remote periods in her life, she also thought that little Aureliano was her son; she invented imaginary visits “with beings who had not only been dead for a long time, but who had existed at different times”[16].

But her madness is just a trick because she seemed to preserve enough of a margin of lucidity, to keep one of the most important secrets of the novel till the end of her life; the real owner of the buried gold.

Ursula Iguaran de Buendia was a strong woman, the strongest of all; none of her descendants had inherited her strength; all her life she planned carefully the most important things, all of them into details and she has also planned her own death. After the rain stopped, she recovered unusually and the fever of restoration finally brought her to life again. But it was just temporarily because she was too old to keep in touch with the chronological time of the novel. She dies on a morning of Good Friday, in silence, after playing for the last time the endless game with life and death. The permanence of the cosmos was the most important thing that she wanted to share her family. She dies but her spirit never leaves this world, because the power of memory repeats the models and everything is continually reborn.

 

The Night of Mirrors

 

This is the night when utopia, epic and myth turn into a single reality, the one of Buendia’s family final destruction. It’s the moment when, for more that one hundred years, finally, the mystery of those parchments is deciphered for the first time, but this time in the real world. This is the moment when we are given the proof that we are in front of a simultaneist novel when everything seems to reshape again and again as in a continuous circle of life and death. Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano are the last exponents of a family whose destiny seemed to be cursed by an unknown entity that was just looking for the right moment to catch and destroy them.

These two last characters who seem to reiterate a little bit the destinies of the ones whom they borrowed their names, or at least, as far as we are concerned with Amaranta Ursula, she borrowed the strength of the first Ursula, the power of character, and also the strong sense of reality and the margins of lucidity, whereas Aureliano is a strong character from the point of view of his unusual skills:“ His gift for languages, his encyclopaedic knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering all the details of remote deeds and places without having been there”[17]. But, step by step, as the end of Buendia’s family is getting to an end, both of them lost their sense of reality, the notion of time and also all the rhythm of their daily habits. Everything turns into an unusual and strange way of living life in such a way as if the world were repeating itself, were continually reborn, again and again till the end.

The time of epic and the time of utopia mix together into a continuous combination of strong forces which are going to change the time of “this really happened” with “this might have happened” into the time of myth – this is really happening, right now, when Amaranta Ursula is giving birth to her son and when Aureliano is deciphering the real meaning of all those parchments. The curse is going to be fulfilled because their son has a pig’s tail. From now on, Aureliano turned into a state of mixture between madness and lucidity when he saw the child:

” And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging towards their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralysed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquiades’ final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space: the first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants”[18].

This is the moment when he realises that he will be allowed to decipher the parchments. The first of the line who was tied to a tree is in fact the first Jose Arcadio, one of the most enterprising people in Macondo at the very beginning, who dies in a strange way, his presence being noticed for more than one hundred years, he is turning into a shaman who sees, perceives and understands everything although he is dead; the last is being eaten by the ants is the new born baby who is killed by ants because the curse had to be fulfilled and accomplished. As soon as he realized this, Aureliano deciphers the parchments and enters the myth which is best expressed in these lines:” Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes, in such a way that they coexisted in the instant”[19].

The terror of giving birth to a child with pig’s tail turned into reality, the terrible rain from the very beginning of the novel which determined the failure of Buendia family is replaced by that terrible wind which was first of all warm and full of voices from the past but which suddenly turns into a tremendous force which destroys everything around it:

”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”[20].

The fact that the second opportunity is refused to all those who had nothing else to do than fighting with solitude is mainly related to the fact that the time of myth can not be repeated. The chronological time of the epic really existed in the novel, these things really happened, in the way in which they are recorded by Melquiades in writing, the nostalgic time of the utopia with the things that might have happened disappear, everything is given in return to myth. When Melquiades stopped recording, Macondo and its people disappear. Myths can no longer record deeds that happened or are going to happen: just things which are happening now. So the mirror is broken by the fact that too much solitude was being taken into account, that the curse fulfilled, that Melquiades really died in the chronological time, that the original flood and wind and chaos after all emerged into myth.

 

***

 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel of a brilliant mind who probably wanted much more than just writing. It’s the result of an unusual way of thinking and living. Marquez’s destiny is similar to that of Tagore’s, the famous Indian poet. Both of them recognized the fact that they were meant neither winning nor leaving the game of life. But they were meant to play the game of their own destruction. That’s why they sacrificed everything and if they were going to lose the last coin, they did it because they wanted to sacrifice themselves; and this is the moment when they were both winners; to be a winner throughout your final destruction in writing.

 

 

References

Aristotel, Fizica.Traducere şi note de N.I.Barbu. Studiu introductiv, note, indice tematic şi terminologic de Paul Apostol. Studiu analitic asupra Fizicii lui Aristotel şi note de Alexandru Posescu (Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1966)

Emil Cioran, Silogismele amărăciunii (Bucureşti: Humanitas 1992)

Franz Kafka, Pagini de jurnal şi corespondenţă. În româneşte de Mircea Ivănescu cu o prefaţă de Alexandru Al. Şahighian ( Bucureşti: Editura Univers 1984)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. With an introduction by Carlos Fuentes (Everyman’s Library 1998)

Italo Calvino, Oraşele invizibile. În româneşte de Sanda Şora (Bucureşti: Editura Univers 1979)

Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, Dicţionar de simboluri (Bucureşti: Editura Artemis)

 

 

Notes