SOURCE: Olsen, Lance. “Misfires in Eden: García Márquez and Narrative Frustration.” In Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, pp. 85-100. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Olsen focuses on the narrative frustration commented upon by many critics of García Márquez's work, noting that the uncertainty and nebulous nature of the writer's work is intentional, and very much in line with many other works of postmodern fantasy which resist the idea of closure or completeness.]

These are not the times to go around thinking about weddings.

García Márquez (One Hundred Years, 98)

Gabriel García Márquez' projects approach the conventionally improbable and impossible as though they were mimetic, as though they were just “everyday” happenings, so that José Arcadio commits suicide and a trickle of blood from his wounds winds its way across town, down steps and over curbs, around corners and under closed doors, hugging walls so as not to damage the rugs, all the way to Úrsula's feet, as she stands in the kitchen preparing to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. And his projects approach the conventionally mimetic and “everyday” as though they were sparkling with mystery and magic, to the point where ice is not ice, but the “enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars” (One Hundred Years, 18). That is, García Márquez confounds the marvelous with the mimetic modes of discourse, wrenches conventional perception, and charges his texts with an absurd humor, so that in his universe an angel can plunge out of the sky and thwack face down in the mud, mumbling in what may be Norwegian, toothless, bald, lousy, even unable to get a simple miracle right: blind men grow teeth, a paralytic almost wins a lottery, a leper sprouts sunflowers out of his sores.

The subtexts of these hyperbolic narratives display despair and frustration. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, for instance, leaves off making his little gold fish at ten after four one afternoon because he hears a parade; he walks out of his room and strolls to the street door, mingling with the bystanders that have gathered there. He watches the parade pass, and then “once more he saw the face of the miserable solitude when everything had passed by and there was nothing but the bright expanse of the street and the air full of flying ants with a few onlookers peering into the precipice of uncertainty” (272-73). He wanders over to the chestnut tree and leans against it, and when his family finds him the next morning he is dead.

The colonel searches for distraction from his solitude in a parade of laughter, and at first the universe seems full with events, with things, and with life. But at its center beats an absence registered by the plod of the language—the redundancy of sentence structure, the announcement of void in the string of conjunctions without complexity or vitality—where the very syntax bespeaks a vacuum, a “miserable solitude” that floats back into place just under the frolic. All that remains for the colonel in this passage, which could serve as an emblem for the whole of García Márquez' fictional complex, is a vacant expanse of street, flying ants, uncertainty, and withdrawal. The passage begins with life and ends with death; begins with action and ends with entropy; begins with noise and ends with silence. It announces the inability to create supraworlds, wonderlands, Edens of compensation and redemption that shine forth in the universe of marvelous discourse.

A number of critics have faulted García Márquez for his tendency toward this kind of narrative frustration. Often they have confused narrative failure with failure of narrative. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, for instance, say that the result of the “interwoven plots and subplots, overlappings and backtrackings, [and] involuted time play” in Leaf Storm, comprised of monologues of a woman, her son, and her father attending a wake for a reclusive doctor, “is not density but monotony.” And Harss and Dohmann go on to complain that “there are cryptic references, suppressions, blanks, blind spots. We often seem to be on the verge of a revelation that never comes” (323). Even a good deal more rigorous critic like George McMurray finds problems with a story such as “One Day After Saturday”—a tale about how hundreds of birds begin flying through screens in Macando one day—because “the result is … an overall impression of needless obscurity” (59). Regina Janes trips up “The Night of the Curlews”—a story about three nameless men blinded by curlews, who sit in a courtyard and talk about nothing special—because it “reverts to deliberate uncertainties” (22).

Once again, then, we come across a cluster of critics who judge one set of conventions by another. What they imply is that all narrative should be limpid, compensatory, certain, complete, easy-to-follow, stable, and simply understood. Their comments also point to the frustration, and hence serve as a springboard for my own discussion of what García Márquez calls the “lost chord” (Harss and Dohmann, 337), in his writing—that nameless thing that drifts up continually, causing the narrative to decenter and jam.

García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, with an umbilical cord around his neck, in Aracataca, a small town near the Atlantic coast of Colombia. He was the oldest of sixteen children, the son of a telegraph operator and a well-to-do woman whose family opposed the match. His maternal grandparents raised him for his first eight years. His grandfather, whom he has called the most important figure in his life, used to tell him stories about Colombia's civil wars (there were sixty-five to eighty of them between 1820 and 1903) and of nearby towns, one of which was named Macando, a banana plantation whose heyday occurred from 1915 to 1918. His grandmother told him stories of supernatural worlds in a perfectly natural way—of the ghosts who inhabited their house, of an aunt who wove her own funeral shroud, of a neighbor who claimed her daughter had not eloped but ascended to heaven.

When nineteen, García Márquez began studying law at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and the same year (1947) he published his first short stories in a local newspaper. A year after that he began a career in journalism, writing film criticism and editorials. In 1955, at twenty-seven, he published his first novel, Leaf Storm, and the idea originally surfaced of writing a chronicle about a town named Macando and a colonel named Aureliano Buendía. As a correspondent he traveled widely in Europe, and in 1958 married his Colombian sweetheart. In the early 1960's he settled in Mexico, had two sons, began working as a journalist, public-relations agent, and movie-script writer, while writing a number of novels on the side. In 1982 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

García Márquez, like Pynchon, despises ceremony and public speaking, and has said that he became a writer “out of timidity. My real inclination is to be a conjuror, but I get so confused when I try to perform a trick that I've had to take refuge in the solitude of literature.” His intelligence is antiabstract and antiacademic. “It's as though,” he has said, “they gave the Nobel Prize to a bullfighter” (Guibert, 320 and 336).

In his 1973 study of Latin American literature, D. P. Gallagher comments: “Most contemporary Latin American writing is indeed about failure of some kind or another, failure to materialize a glimpsed idea” (90). He does not go on to explore this idea fully, but it seems another way of saying it is that the primary concern of the Latin American novel is frustration.

To a certain extent, of course, the same could be said about any kind of novel, and narrative, since every narrative to some degree challenges reader-expectations, continually decenters its possibilities, keeps the reader guessing, and keeps on thwarting those guesses. That is how a text generates narrative tension and interest. Only the least complex narrative forms deliver exactly what they say they will deliver. Most narratives employ conventions to subvert them in some way or another. For many, the narrative that lacks all frustration—the Harlequin Romance, for instance—lacks all interest. In this way, Gallagher's statement is accurate but obvious.

But there is a second way to take his claim. When he mentions contemporary Latin American writing, he has in mind the fictions of Borges, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez and Cabrera Infante—four postmodern fantasts by my definition. Seen in this light, Gallagher's comment becomes more interesting, for while almost any narrative carries with it a charge of frustration on some stratum, postmodern fantasy carries with it a terrific charge of frustration on every stratum. In the fantastic mode, and particularly the mode as it functions in postmodern texts, anything can happen. And if that is the case, then everything can happen. And consequently every sentence contains so many possibilities that the reader's expectations are necessarily blocked. Hence, the fantastic text forces her to float in a freeplay of potentialities, unable to imagine a consistent narrative future.

Frustration arises for a number of reasons. It results from an inability to bounce back after a number of setbacks in narrative expectations, from a sense that one can no longer master one's fictional environment, no longer clearly decode the system of conventions the writer is employing. It results from the disjunction between the narrative goal the reader imagines and the narrative goal the text produces. And the intensity of that frustration is a function of how much the reader wants the goal he has imagined, to what extent the narrative delegitimizes the goal, and how many times the reader's imagination has been devalued by the textual imagination. It results at moments when the reader experiences unrelieved defeat, the inability to believe he can do anything to improve incomprehensible conditions, the inability to imagine a compensatory and stable narrative future.

Consequently, the reader finds herself befuddled before a narrative like The Unnamable or Gravity's Rainbow. But compared to these difficult texts, the projects of García Márquez at first glance seem exceptions to the rule—particularly with a work like One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet on closer examination, one finds this is not the case. Alongside apparently “easy” texts like One Hundred Years, García Márquez has also produced such “hard” ones as Leaf Storm, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and “Nabo” (1951), the last of which is a Faulknerian tale that employs temporal involutions and unstable points-of-view to explore the relationship between a delirious man and a mute girl. And even One Hundred Years, as we shall see, breeds frustration at various textual strata.

My students delight in García Márquez' imagination, in the wild events he conjures, in his dazzling disruption of logic, and in his hilariously playful plots. They delight, that is, until pressed for specifics, for exactly what has happened and when and to whom. Then the idea of narrative frustration surfaces, discomfort announces itself, and it soon becomes apparent that García Márquez' projects dismantle Balzacian conventions concerning storytelling. His plots may appear linear—after all, One Hundred Years has a beginning, middle, and end, and The Autumn of the Patriarch clearly describes the youth, rise to power, middle-age, slip in power, and old age of a Caribbean dictator—but on closer inspection they reveal themselves as spirals of digressions, digressions within digressions, clarifications and reclarifications to the point where nothing is clear, data upon data until one can hardly remember a thing.

One Hundred Years, for instance, begins with the now-famous line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And so, it would appear, a narrative has begun. A tale is being told. What a reader used to the Balzacian mode should expect is a recounting of that distant afternoon, a description of the father perhaps, a memory about the discovery of ice. Or perhaps already she is slightly shaken, placed slightly off balance, as she senses the sentence's dislocation of time in the phrase “many years later” (many years later than what? when is all this happening?), or the destabilization of the mimetic in the last words of the sentence (the discovery of ice? since when is ice treated as a scientific discovery?).

With the second sentence (“At that time”—again, when?—“Macando was a village of twenty adobe houses …”) the spiral begins turning, and the narrative digresses into the first days of Macando; into the arrival of the gypsies in March; into a description of Melquíades, José Arcadio Buendía, Úrsula Iguarán; into an account of José Arcadio's romp with magnets, telescopes, and magnifying glasses, and his eventual setting out along the northern route into the jungles; and into the discovery (and the center of the first chapter are the ideas of discovery and unveiling) of the galleon. This continues for fifteen pages, until the digressions within digressions finally end for a brief moment, and the initial narrative resurfaces: “Those hallucinating sessions remained printed on the memories of the boys in such a way that many years later, a second before the regular army officer gave the firing squad the command to fire …” (16). Then, for two short pages, the discovery of ice is recounted. Afterwards, it sinks back into the text, not to rise again for another sixty-five pages (83). In other fictions, such as “Nabo,” Leaf Storm, or The Autumn of the Patriarch (which García Márquez calls “really an extremely long poem” [Guibert, 328]), he abandons any sense of conventional plot altogether, and forces narrative from a horizontal to a vertical plane, thereby creating a lyrical parody of the Balzacian mode.

A much less obvious way by which García Márquez generates narrative frustration is his frequent use of doubles. This device signals a literal split in personality, psychological misdevelopment, self-fragmentation, and the blurring and decomposition of the ego; a dislocation in personhood that is antithetical to conventional notions of character. In Leaf Storm, for instance, when the priest walks into the room where the old doctor who will soon hang himself is lying, he notices “the extraordinary resemblance between the two men. They weren't exact, but they looked like brothers. … there was a community of features between them that exists between two brothers” (121). In the story “Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles” (1968), about a picaro who recounts his bizarre adventures with his cruel charlatan of a boss, Blacaman the Good and Blacaman the Bad are mirror images of each other. An earlier tale, “The Other Side of Death” (1948), in which a dead man describes his old body, a linguistic split in pronouns between “he” and “I” signals a doubling of personality, a questioning of subject-object relations. In One Hundred Years, sets of characters represent the matter and antimatter of being: the José Arcadios are impulsive, enterprising, and often scientists, while the Aurelianos are lucid, withdrawn, and often poets. Melquíades is the perfect writer, while Aureliano the perfect reader. Úrsula holds the Latin American house of Atreus together, while Amaranta finally destroys it. Patricío Aragonés doubles the despot in The Autumn of the Patriarch, and the despot's sadistic right-hand man, José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, creates “a secret empire within his own private empire, an invisible service of repression and extermination” (195), a double of the original one. The dictator himself recognizes the “very ancient certainty that the most feared enemy is within oneself in the confidence of the heart” (109)—that the other is the dark double of the self.

Doubling questions ontology and epistemology. It produces textual schizophrenia. This frustration of the Balzacian character arises appropriately in Leaf Storm, where there is a gap reminiscent of Sutpen's in Absalom, Absalom!:

I've never been able to find out whether his papers were really in order or not. I couldn't find out if he was French, as we supposed, or if he had any remembrance of a family, which he must have had but about which he never said a word. … That day—after five years of living in the same house—I suddenly realized that we didn't even know his name.

(78)

Early in The Autumn of the Patriarch, the townspeople enter the presidential palace and find the body of the solitary despot: “Only when we turned him over to look at his face did we realize that it was impossible to recognize him, even though his face had not been pecked away by vultures, because none of us had ever seen him” (10).

A passage that could serve as an emblem of the problem appears in One Hundred Years, when the narrator discusses the characters of José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo:

They were so much alike and so mischievous during childhood that not even Santa Sofía de la Piedad could tell them apart. On the day of the christening Amaranta put bracelets on them with their respective names and dressed them in different colored clothing marked with each one's initials, but when they began to go to school they decided to exchange clothing and bracelets and call each other by opposite names. The teacher, Melchor Excalona, used to knowing José Arcadio Segundo by his green shirt, went out of his mind when he discovered that the latter was wearing Aureliano Segundo's bracelet. … From then on he was never sure who was who. Even when they grew up and life made them different, Úrsula still wondered if they themselves might not have made a mistake in some moment of their intricate game of confusion and had become changed forever.

(187)

This registers the relationship between reader and character in the text. Here, Santa Sofía de la Piedad, Melchor Excalona, and Úrsula function as befuddled students of literature, struggling to find out some core identity, “never sure who [is] who,” blocked at every moment by the characters themselves. Because of the elfish repetition of names in the text, the book is accompanied by a diagram carefully plotting out the family line. What soon becomes apparent is that the diagram hinders far more than it helps. It announces the complexity and inevitable frustration of the book. It transforms text into test, reading into a problematics of mnemonics, and love of the text into desire. Character becomes opaque, and human actions become incomprehensible.

In his Labyrinth of Solitude—a phrase that could serve as an alternate title to many of García Márquez' works—Octavio Paz argues that “self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall—that of our consciousness—between the world and ourselves” (9). More, “man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude” (195). This poetics of isolation throbs at the center of all that García Márquez has produced. “It's the only subject I've written about” (Guibert, 314), he says. His texts are writings of radical separation.

Monologic structures, indications of this labyrinth of solitude, abound in García Márquez' work. In his first novel, three consciousnesses are isolated from each other and from the rest of the community in a hot, oppressive, bad-smelling room, the center of which is filled by a coffin (a register of the absence at the center of the text, a reminder of the final and complete isolation of death) of the doctor who has committed suicide after living alone in the house for years. In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968), the tale of the angel who falls from the sky, the protagonist is locked away in a chicken coop in the same way Kafka's Hunger Artist is locked away in his cage. The couple keeping him there, Pelayo and Elisenda, come out of their house one morning to find “the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal” (Leaf Storm, 159). The angel is not only isolated physically from the community, but also linguistically. He is shut off in a “hermetic language” (Leaf Storm, 162), and sometimes falls delirious “with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian” (Leaf Storm, 166). “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship” (1968) consists of one sentence that stretches for eight pages, a monologue by a boy whose tone oscillates between self-assertion and self-repudiation as he dreams of a large ocean liner which continually veers toward invisible shoals, runs aground, and sinks. García Márquez carries the same linguistic structure into The Autumn of the Patriarch, a structure that echoes the life of “the most solitary man on earth” (30). The whole of the text is a kind of running monologue, or system of intersecting monologues by voices unaware of each other. It is divided into six circular configurations, each of which begins with the dictator's death, then digresses, and finally ends up with a major event in his life.

Very few characters actually speak to each other in García Márquez' narratives. Little dialogue—the sign of communication and communion—occurs. No one breaks through his Samsalike “hard shell of … solitude” (One Hundred Years, 174). In fact, often no one speaks but the narrator, who does so from the seemingly omniscient point-of-view of God. But this deity-narrator is an absurd divinity, like that angel who falls from the sky, since all he really knows about are actions, not thoughts. Nor is he omnipotent. All he can do is stand back and watch the world decompose, unable to reverse the entropic movement of the cosmos, and unable to free himself from his own isolation.

Perhaps the most well-known monologic structure in García Márquez' output is the image of incest in One Hundred Years. It is an image of solitude, of exclusion from community, of the impossibility of diversity and change, of autistic single-mindedness, of the limited capacity for love and the infinite capacity for desire, of egocentricity, of introspection decayed into a disease of consciousness. Paz writes:

In archaic societies, a complex and rigid system of prohibitions, rules and rituals protects the individual from solitude. The group is the only source of health. The solitary man is the invalid, a dead branch that must be lopped off and burned, for society as a whole is endangered if one of its components becomes ill.

(205)

Consequently, societies place rigid restrictions on incest and extreme solitude. In Macando, the original sin appears in the form of a boy with a pig's tail born to Úrsula's aunt and José Arcadio Buendía's uncle. For seven generations the family lives in terror of a recurrence of the pig's tail, a recurrence that inevitably occurs when the last of the Buendías—Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt Amaranta Úrsula—perform incest.

The result of incest, the pig's tail, has a number of psychological implications. Bettelheim tells the story of “Hans, My Hedgehog,” wherein a man frustrated by his wife's inability to produce children comments one day: “I want a child, even if it should be a hedgehog.” Soon thereafter his wish is granted—in full. His wife gives birth to a child whose upper torso is that of a hedgehog, and whose lower is that of a boy. Bettelheim goes on to interpret: “The psychological wisdom of these tales is remarkable: lack of control over emotions on the part of the parent creates a child who is a misfit. In fairy tales and dream, physical malformation often stands for psychological misdevelopment” (70). And physical malformation is everywhere in García Márquez' texts: women turned into spiders or cats, men who become snakes or jelly or suddenly blossom the wings of bats. Such miscreations point to emotional malfunctioning, perverted desire, and frustrated procreation.

Another source of misfires has to do with the notion of time in García Márquez' projects. In the Balzacian mode, time is chronology, sequence, order, progression, unfolding, revealing, continuity, and a change of state. In the projects of García Márquez, on the other hand, time is stalled, decreated, made to repeat itself again and again, the highlight of a failed hope for past or future. Among the moderns such as Yeats, Proust, or Eliot, the artist through art can transcend time into a beatific realm of timeless perfection. Among the postmoderns such as Kafka, Beckett, or Pynchon, time goes nowhere but in circles, or does nothing but run down. Transcendence becomes unimaginable. In the texts of García Márquez, postmodern time has affinities with that of Nietzsche. For him, if the universe is finite and the structure of matter discrete, then there are only a finite number of possible successive configurations to the universe. Given enough time, then, all the atoms of the universe will eventually return to the configuration they had at a previous time, and the universe will live again exactly as it had before. For García Márquez, of course, the situation is not so technical. Perhaps the universe will not repeat itself again and again exactly the way it has done before, but the same patterns will emerge, the same hoped-for futures and the same failed futures, the same kinds of characters and the same kinds of frustrations.

In his projects, there exist cyclical recurrences, archetypal patterns, Borgesian structures that give the lie to compensatory time and to hope for learning from the past. “The notion of time” in his work “disappeared completely” (Leaf Storm, 205). The mayor in In Evil Hour is struck by “the impression that time had stopped” (142), and at the end of that text the reader realizes she is really back to where she began. Úrsula “confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle” (226). In The Autumn of the Patriarch a pattern of infinite circularity emerges. A continual swinging back to the death of the despot takes place so that there is never a sense of forward progress. The same holds true with Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the story of an innocent dandy who is murdered for deflowering a macho's bride and of the town who allows the murder to happen, where the narrative continually circles back to the moment of the death, a few minutes one morning.

Narrative frustration also arises from the reader's inability to know, to locate the center of meaning in a text, or to perceive the textual universe clearly. Even in terms of categorizing a given text, of plugging it into a larger grid, it is difficult to stabilize García Márquez' projects. While one can talk about affinities between Kafka's work and Expressionism, Borges' and Conceptual Art, Robbe-Grillet's and New Realism, Beckett's and Minimalism, Fuentes' and Op Art, Pynchon's and Pop Art, the very act of categorization of text like One Hundred Years causes frustration. It continually floats and remains unfastened.

García Márquez' works register this sense of uncertainty in another way as well. In his universe, man is scientist, a detective of ontology, who, like José Arcadio with his magnets, ice, sextant, and so forth, searches for understanding. Yet he is forever thwarted by its absence. In Evil Hour, for instance, is a detective story about an unnamed town in the midst of The Violence, a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals in Colombia that lasted from the late forties into the sixties, causing the death of several hundred thousand people, where suddenly one day anonymous notes revealing personal secrets and accusing various townspeople of wrongdoing appear tacked on doors and walls. The characters search for some sort of clue that will point to the perpetrator or perpetrators who are originating this “terrorism in the moral order” (115). In pursuit of answers, the town mayor goes to a fortune teller, Casandra—whose predictions in Greek myth were never believed—to ask her who the culprit or culprits are. After studying her cards for quite a while, she announces her conclusion: “It's the whole town and it's nobody” (133). The Other is everywhere. Even though the guards walk the streets at night, and a host of people are questioned, the town slips into mass paranoia, and the mystery is never solved. A scapegoat is finally killed, but the reader is not sure whether that has in fact changed anything or not.

“An atmosphere of uncertainty” (41)—and the word “uncertainty” appears often in the text—pervades One Hundred Years. Characters are difficult to tell apart, the geography remains vague, the time frame is confused. In Autumn of the Patriarch indeterminacy even slips into the linguistic level of the book. A “tremor of uncertainty” (105) flickers in the language. Every sentence is unsure of itself, entropic, apocalyptic, its syntax collapsing and drifting toward the void. Every sentence is jammed with catalogs, sense impressions, plot details, to the point where it becomes unwieldy, tumbling in on itself, becoming a parody of Balzacian faith in language, always announcing, like the despot's government, that “there was always another truth behind the truth” (45). And the same notion of a decentered truth arises in Chronicle, where the townspeople cannot even be sure of the weather (“Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze coming in through the banana groves. … But most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters” [4]), let alone who deflowered Angela:

she would recount [the story] in all its details to anyone who wanted to hear it, except for one item that would never be cleared up: who was the real cause of her damage, and how and why, because no one believed that it had really been Santiago Nasar.

(89)

Last, I should like to approach narrative frustration in García Márquez' projects from the angle of endings: the emblem of closure, completion, wholeness, symmetry, conclusion, final understanding, harmony, and order. Every piece of art must end in some way. Music finishes—Cage's begins—in silence. Every painting ends in the frame or the blankness that comes after it. Every piece of writing ends in the lack that appears after the covers are closed. Ending in the Balzacian and marvelous modes is an impulse toward enclosure, pattern, and fulfillment. As Frank Kermode suggests, there exists a deep need in bourgeois consciousness to believe it belongs to things around it, that it is related to a “world” that forms a narrative with a beginning and end. It needs to believe in an aesthetic of an end, The End, the ultimate gathering together, and hence throughout history it has been marking off Ends (chapter one).

Postmodern fantasy, however, resists the idea of closure and wholeness. It subverts the notion of endings, casts it into a state of peripeteia, denies its redemption. Although their texts must physically end, postmodern fantasts strive against conclusion. Kafka will not finish his larger projects. Robbe-Grillet's fantasies spin around and around, repeating themselves forever. Beckett's run down, move toward entropy, but will not conclude. Pynchon's promise closure but deliver deferredness.

García Márquez works against Balzacian closure in another way. His texts, as Allen Thiher argues, are

the defeat of the Hegelian logos, the fall of logos, with an unsurpassed rage. The fall into silence at the end of [One Hundred Years], the coming of exile from the memory of men, is an anti-eschatology that undoes Western historiography from its biblical sources through Marx. … there is no sign of redemption. History is reduced to the paradoxical record of its own fall.

(207)

The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle end so many times that finally the idea is placed in brackets. Always his texts end in some sort of failure—in storms, decompositions, in running downs—that serves as an emblem for the failure of the text to attain compensation and progress. The result is what Thiher calls “texticide”—a notion that “is at one with the anti-theological gestures that characterize postmodern thought and fiction” (209). The transcendental signified is decomposed. Consequently, Leaf Storm ends in stasis, with an eleven-year-old boy following a coffin out of a house, thinking about curlews, waiting for something to happen. In Evil Hour ends with a malicious government taking the place of a malicious government, as the mayor has a young man tortured to death, hence launching an authoritarian regime. The Autumn of the Patriarch ends with the despot in a state of entropy, where nothing has been learned, nothing has been fulfilled, nothing has been made whole except for absence—that which lies at the core of J. M. Coetzee's project.