[In the following essay, Clark provides a critical interpretation of the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude.]

—it shall pass, however, for wondrous Deep,
                    upon no wiser a Reason than because
                                                                      it is wondrous Dark—

—Jonathan Swift

Concerning the catastrophic finale in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), these are the cues we are given: we read that Melquiades has left an obscure “prophecy” about the Buendia family. We are informed that three sets of Buendias have engaged in deliberate acts of incest, one couple most recently, and that two of these pairs of sinners have as a consequence produced deformed children—infants with a pig's tail, stigmatized with what José Arcadio euphemistically calls “animal features.”¹ Now we learn at the conclusion of the novel, as the entirety of Macondo is being ravaged and literally blown away in a cyclone, that this is a “biblical hurricane” (383). I am afraid that that is all most readers need to induce them to leap to the conclusion that here is God's just, Old Testament vengeance come again. Such readers are further prompted to infer that “poetic justice” is being administered to dreadful sinners. If we hesitate a bit, wondering why everybody in Macondo has to be eliminated so rashly, perhaps we might, after a little reflection, remind ourselves that the Lord visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. …”² Still, however small Macondo happens to be, it was all that its inhabitants had—and it is wiped up and washed completely away. That dark perspective has even caused one recent critic to muse grimly about this novel's utilization of “apocalypse.”³

The “cues” I have been talking about include our familiarity with the jealous and vengeful deity of the Hebrews. It was He who perpetrated the notorious fire-storm that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah;⁴ He who prophesied famine and plague for the Egyptians who would not “let His people go;”⁵ He who, to punish sin, inflicted the Babylonian Captivity upon the Chosen People;⁶ and He who inscribed MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN upon the palace wall—and who initiated the sudden collapse of the Babylonian Empire.⁷ Such events tend to function like little tinkling bells that trigger in us a Pavlovian response; bar-pressings that “re-enforce” our dutiful and psychological reactions and expectations. Crime and punishment. Sin and retribution.

On the other hand, Márquez also gives us a considerable number of confusing counter-signals too, so that we can hardly help but be ambivalent about this “judgment” in Márquez's novel. For one thing, the “prophet” Melquiades (who is said to possess the “keys of Nostradamus” [15]) is nonetheless a little peculiar in the role of seer. He does all in his power to encode and obfuscate his prophecy—it is done in garbled bits of Sanskrit, Spartan Greek, and Augustan Latin (382)—so that hardly anyone on earth will be able to read it. How can it be righteous and informative if it is as cryptic as the oracles of Cassandra, hidden and concealed? Furthermore, it is no earth-shaking series of revelations about major forces on the planet, but only the sordid account of an isolated lunatic South American family. It is a trifling biography of skeleton-key to a little man's closet; it scales only a stunted family tree. Melquiades himself is suspect as well. Although he can “chant encyclicals” (382), he is hardly your average priest. For what we see of him, he is more a State Fair barker, quack, and con-man—hawking magnets, compasses, blocks of ice, magnifying glasses and all the paraphernalia of alchemy. We clearly are not very well motivated to take him seriously in the religious line. There's more the aura about him of Carnival and Chautauqua than Cathedral or Temple.

In addition, his secret encoded text is supposedly scrambled in an unbelievable way, for it is so composed that its author

… 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 one instant.

(382)

Surely a prophecy should be more circumspect than to include everything in daily detail. And we are blissfully uncertain how to go about reading one hundred years of family history where every single minute has been simultaneously coagulated with every other; that would generate a babble of proses collapsed like a star into a single chaotic point, with temporal and linear sequence and order destroyed. However, this fact is belied by Aureliano the translator, for he deciphers the text in good old chronological order, advancing in his reading from the earliest years to his own time. Again, why should some religious “prediction” only become known when the events were over or achieving completion and fulfilment as one reads? The very concept of foresight and augury is destroyed. Then, too, this “sacred text” is apparently meant only for the eyes of Aurelian—and is comprehended only as he himself is demolished by the storm. Since no one will ever know this miraculous oracle, it can serve no religious, didactic, or exemplary purpose whatsoever. It is a self-destructing sermon, a cauterizing lesson—that will never reach anyone's eyes or ears. What sort of religious or poetical instruction is this? No one survives to be instructed!

Moreover, there is the question of moral and historical significance. Macondo is no Jerusalem or Rome or World City—its overthrow by fire or flood is hardly a cataclysmic or earth-shaking event. For Macondo is no more than a rural village in the obscure wilds; it is virtually unheard of in the nation's capital and is clearly situated in what we would term the “boondocks.” Any heavenly punishment, insofar as the world is concerned, will escape our notice and fall upon deaf ears. Moreover, why destroy everyone in the village? In Sodom, fifty or forty or thirty—or even ten righteous men could not be found,⁸ but how are we to know that everybody in Macondo merited instantaneous termination?—Is not this a clear and disturbing case of “overkill”?

And lastly, we must return to the explicit phrase, “biblical hurricane” (383). We are familiar with the trumpeted collapse of the walls of Jericho, the sensational parting of the Red Sea, the fire and brimstone that consumed the Cities of the Plain, and the most monumental exhibition of them all, the Flood. But what is a Biblical wind-storm? One recent critic has linked this windy puffery in the novel with a jesting about of hot air,⁹ and there is some rationale behind such a reading. Clearly we encounter here some kind of over-reaction on the part of the Deity, an effect in excess of the cause, a response wildly overreaching the stimulus. In short, here is a species of melodrama, where the excessive and the histrionic prevail.

But a case too can be made for undercutting. After all, whoever heard of the World Lost for a Pig-tail Peccadillo? Of a hamlet exterminated for adultery? Cause and effect, finally, are at perpetual fisticuffs. We are closer in One Hundred Years of Solitude to well-known satiric finales that run at cross-purposes with cause and effect, presenting us with Bang and Whimper¹⁰ at one and the same time. Such is the conclusion of Dryden's “MacFlecknoe” (c. 1682), where Shadwell the declaiming oracular bard, though compared with Elijah who ascends to heaven, merely falls down through a gimmick trapdoor, and is whisked away by a “subterranean wind.”¹¹ Or the end of life for Seneca's divine Emperor Claudius, who expires and commences his trajectory heavenward with a diarrheotic fart.¹² Even more à propos is the absurdity at the conclusion of Pope's Dunciad (1745), when Dulness, Ennui, and Tedium is enabled by a yawn to swallow up the entirety of Creation. And last of all, I recommend that we recollect Swift's “Description of a City Shower” (1710), where “devoted” and filthy London is subjected to a Flood of Rain. Cataclysmic? Hardly. But at least, what is generated, as we know all too well about tainted modern cities, is at least a generous portion of weltering filth and mud:

                    NOW from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seems to tell
What Street they sail'd from, by their Sight and Smell.
… … … … … … … … …
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.(13)

Perhaps epic mockery is the only kind of authenticity we have left. Post-modern authors in particular seem to think so. For alas, vice isn't going to go away, and man doubtless will not learn his lesson (if indeed there is any lesson to learn). Hence, we encounter a great deal of parody and noise, and lots of creative vigor and excitement. Sound, however, without the fury. And, most typical of all his techniques, the artist provides us with gross hyperbole and anticlimax. That's precisely the strategy deployed at the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Perhaps we might well label all such pyrotechnics “prosaic justice.” Given our fallen world, who can justly argue that we deserve something better or more?

Notes

1. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon Books, 1971), p. 23. Hereafter, all page references will be to this edition and will be included, within parentheses, in the body of this essay.

2. Exodus 20:5.

3. Consult Brian Conniff, “The Dark Side of Magic Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” MFS 36 (1990), 167-79.

4. Genesis 18 and 19.

5. Exodus 7:1 ff.

6. II Kings 23:27; Jeremiah 36:4, 37:8-10.

7. Daniel 5.

8. Genesis 18:26-33.

9. Rita Bergenholtz, “One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Finale,” International Fiction Review 20 (1993), 17-21.

10. “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925), Pt. V, lines 96-97.

11. “MacFlecknoe,” line 215.

12. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Apocolocyntosis (A.D. 54), sec. 4.

13. Lines 53-56, 61-63, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed. 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 1.139.