SOURCE: Cohn, Deborah. “‘The Paralysis of the Instant’: The Stagnation of History and the Stylistic Suspension of Time in Gabriel García Márquez's La hojarasca.” College Literature 26, no. 2 (spring 1999): 59-78.

Gabriel García Márquez's first novel, La hojarasca (1955), has often been deemed “too Faulknerian,” and García Márquez himself criticized for not yet having developed a voice of his own, differentiated from that of the southerner.¹ To be sure, García Márquez's early journalistic writings clearly reflect his fascination with Faulkner: in April of 1950, he called the southerner “lo más extraordinario que tiene la novela del mundo moderno” [the most extraordinary thing that the novel of the modern world offers],² and predicted that the Nobel Prize Selection Committee would, lamentably, bypass Faulkner and choose instead to honor the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos that year, in the same way that it had previously overlooked James Joyce in favor of Pearl S. Buck, and for the same presumably shortsighted reasons that it had withheld the honor from Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Happily, several months later García Márquez was proven incorrect, and in an article commemorating the choice of Faulkner, he essentially congratulated the Committee for having chosen “el novelista más grande del mundo actual y uno de los más interesantes de todos los tiempos” (1980, 494; the greatest modern novelist and one of the most interesting of all times).

As should already be apparent, though, these same essays also express García Márquez's keen interest in other modern writers, most frequently the aforementioned Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, as well as Kafka. He saw in their works and techniques the potential to renovate Colombian literature. “Todavía no se ha escrito en Colombia la novela que esté indudable y afortunadamente influida por los Joyce, por Faulkner o por Virginia Woolf” (A novel unmistakably and fortunately influenced by Joyce, Faulkner or Virginia Woolf has yet to be written in Colombia), he wrote in another article that year. He continues:

Y he dicho “afortunadamente,” porque no creo que podríamos los colombianos ser, por el momento, una excepción al juego de las influencias. … Faulkner mismo no podría negar la que ha ejercido sobre él, el mismo Joyce. Algo hay—sobre todo en el manejo del tiempo—entre Huxley y otra vez Virginia Wolf [sic]. Franz Kafka y Proust andan sueltos por la literatura del mundo moderno. Si los colombianos hemos de decidirnos acertadamente, tendríamos que caer irremediablemente en esta corriente. Lo lamentable es que ello no haya acontecido aún. (1980, 269; I say “fortunately” because I don't think that Colombians can, at this time, be exceptions to the game of influence. … Faulkner himself would not be able to deny Joyce's influence in his work. There is something—especially in the use of time—between Huxley and, again, Virginia Woolf. Franz Kafka and Proust have been let loose in the literature of the modern world. If Colombians are to decide, we will have to fall into this current. It's simply a pity that this has not yet happened.)

He further deems these authors' lack of influence “una de las mayores fallas de nuestra novela” (1980, 269; one of the greatest flaws of our novel).

In this essay, I plan to explore how in his first novel García Márquez undertakes the task of steering the Colombian novel in a new direction through his experimentation with one of the fundamental underpinnings of the realist novel: linear time. I will show how he suspends the forward movement of time in La hojarasca in the experiences of the individual characters and of the town of Macondo, and how his treatment of time reduplicates at the level of form the historical and social circumstances of a town in which the passage of time no longer has any significance. I will begin this project with a brief overview of García Márquez's relationship to the Euro-American modernists,³ and, especially, to Faulkner and his vision of history, thereby situating him within his international literary context. Subsequently, I will establish points of contact between La hojarasca and works by Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf,⁴ with the ultimate goal of demonstrating how García Márquez incorporates, transforms, and, on occasion, undermines, stylistic innovations associated with modernism.

Numerous studies have been written on the influence of the modernists on the development of contemporary Latin American fiction. Comparisons to Joyce are relatively infrequent and tend to focus on his technical influence,⁵ whereas studies of the influence of Woolf⁶ and Faulkner address these authors' stylistic and thematic appeal to Latin American writers. Faulkner's legacy to and appropriation by the latter has been the central focus of the majority of these essays,⁷ for reasons that will now be sketched briefly. Despite Faulkner's assertion that there is “no such thing as a regional writer, the writer simply uses the terms he is familiar with best” (1959, 95), the southerner can hardly be said to have cast his homeland as a simple bridge between regional reality and universal truths. Faulkner may well have invoked the world outside of the South, but the tales of Yoknapatawpha County simply cannot be reduced to a microcosm of the general upheavals of recent world history, for the author relied on history's traditional role as magistra vitae to draw attention to subjects of vital importance to the South. The universalizing humanist of later speeches and interviews is belied, then, by the “regional writer” whose concern with race, miscegenation, and prejudice, with the aftermath of the Civil War and the emergence of the New South, and with the divergent perspectives vying to be recognized as proffering the definitive version of the South's history, responds directly to social and political issues plaguing the “postage stamp of native soil” from whence he hailed (1956b, 255).⁸

I have argued elsewhere that the technical innovations of literary modernism provided Latin American authors with instruments that they felt allowed them to forge a style that they could consider their own (Cohn 1997). Above all, though, it was the symbiosis of subject and style that they perceived in Faulkner—in the Faulkner who was both modernist and southerner, in his carefully negotiated dialectic of the universal and the regional, in the acute consciousness of the South's past in its present that was rendered grammatically in sentences which encompass past, present, and future—that they found particularly pertinent to their efforts to describe the traumatic histories of their own nations. Indeed, García Márquez himself has rendered homage to Faulkner for precisely this concordance of form and content, and for its appropriateness to his own project:

El método “faulkneriano” es muy eficaz para contar la realidad latinoamericana. Inconscientemente fue eso lo que descubrimos en Faulkner. Es decir, nosotros estábamos viendo esta realidad y queríamos contarla y sabíamos que el método de los europeos no servía, ni el método tradicional español; y de pronto encontramos el método faulkneriano adecuadísimo para contar esta realidad. (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa 1968, 52-53; The “Faulknerian” method is very effective in describing Latin American reality. Unconsciously, that was what we discovered in Faulkner. That is, we were seeing this reality and wanted to tell it, and we knew that the method of the Europeans didn't work, nor did the traditional Spanish method; and suddenly we found the Faulknerian method extremely accurate for describing this reality.)

Hence García Márquez joined with many of his fellow Latin American authors in embracing Faulkner as one of their own: “El Condado Yoknapatawpha tiene riberas en el Mar Caribe, así que de alguna manera Faulkner es un escritor del Caribe, de alguna manera es un escritor latinoamericano” (1968, 52-53; Yoknapatawpha County has banks on the Caribbean Sea; so in some way Faulkner is a writer of the Caribbean, in some way he is a Latin American writer).

Faulkner's influence on García Márquez in particular has been by far the favorite topic of this branch of inter-American comparative studies.⁹ The parallels between the lives and works of the two Nobel Prize laureates are varied and intriguing: both were raised in traditional rural communities, impoverished and ravaged by war, and consumed by nostalgia for the past and its lost prosperity; the experiences of these communities, in turn, serve as the models for Yoknapatawpha county and Macondo, respectively, and for the changing orders which beset them; both often construct their narratives as family sagas; both address problems of innocence, honor, and guilt, of prejudice and violence, racial tensions and incest. Critics have focused on these similarities, but many also foreground the common attitudes towards time, history, and historical consciousness that pervade their works.¹⁰ García Márquez's debt to Faulkner's treatment of time is evident both at the level of style and in the very stories he tells of people and towns struggling under the weight of their pasts and of issues that have continued to affect them into the present (Cohn 1997, 159-60).

Bearing these issues in mind, I would like to explore the levels at which the influence of Faulkner and other modernists operates in La hojarasca and, in particular, in the novel's representation of time and history.¹¹ From the use of multiple narrators to the italics which denote the embedding of a character's words in the thoughts of another, or (more important to a discussion of similarities in the two authors' treatment of time) which signal the flashbacks indicating the shifting of a character's thoughts from the present to the past, Faulkner's influence pervades the novel's form. La hojarasca is most frequently compared to As I Lay Dying (1930), for both novels center on a dead figure (the doctor and Addie Bundren, respectively) and the difficulties incurred while honoring a promise made to the deceased concerning their burial. There is also the undeniable (but less frequently noted) Faulkner of Absalom, Absalom! (1936): both novels are set against an historical backdrop of civil war and cycles of prosperity and decline; both rely on the same non-linear narrative strategy of delaying the disclosure of critical information to the reader, impeding the reconstruction of events both private and historical; the questionable and enigmatic financial transaction between Mr. Coldfield and Colonel Sutpen, of which marriage to the daughter is a by-product, is reduplicated in García Márquez's Colonel's similarly unexplained deal with his future son-in-law; and the wisteria which signals the transitions from past to present in Miss Rosa's sections has its counterpart in the jasmine plant which is a living reminder of Isabel's dead mother.

Several even more critical parallels are to be found with The Sound and the Fury (1929). The perspective of the youngest narrator of La hojarasca is, like that of Benjy Compson, severely limited: Isabel's ten-year-old son is able to understand only what he can see, hear, smell, and touch, and his comprehension of time is similarly limited to that which is most immediate, that is, to the hours of the day and the days of the week. García Márquez's text also exhibits a view of humankind and, more importantly, an obsession with time that are strikingly similar to those of Quentin Compson. In the first place, Quentin's observation that “Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away” (1956a, 137) exactly encapsulates the description of Macondo given in the preface of La hojarasca: “En menos de un año [la hojarasca] arrojó sobre el pueblo los escombros de numerosas catástrofes anteriores a ella misma, esparció en las calles su confusa carga de desperdicios. Y esos desperdicios … [transformaron a Macondo] en un pueblo diferente y complicado, hecho con los desperdicios de los otros pueblos” (1986, 7; “In less than a year it sowed over the town the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it, scattering its mixed cargo of rubbish in the streets. And all of a sudden that rubbish … changed [Macondo] into a different and more complex town, created out of the rubbish of other towns” [1972, 1]). Second, in the same way that time pursues Quentin—from the ticking of the clock (the “mausoleum of all hope and desire” [Faulkner 1956a, 59]) which opens his section to the final interior monologue which is sand-wiched in between the tolling of bells on the three-quarter hour—determining the course of his section and day alike, La hojarasca, as I shall discuss in greater detail presently, begins and ends with references to the hour, is punctuated throughout by queries about the time, and similarly juxtaposes clock time with the interior time that strives to sidestep it.

The situation of the frame tale of La hojarasca on a specific day and date, and the use of multiple narrators, might on the surface also seem indebted to the structure of The Sound and the Fury, which is divided into four sections, each of which takes place on a different day and has a different narrator.¹² The restriction of the duration of García Márquez's novel to a single day, however, inscribes it in another tradition, one that Faulkner himself had drawn on: that of the novel-in-a-day, exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which takes place on June 16, 1904, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), set on a day in mid-June soon after the end of World War I. In this genre, the action of the frame tale takes place within the formal unity of time marked by one calendar day. However, in keeping with modernist explorations of alternative modes of representing time, these novels encode a deliberate refutation of linear chronological time, for the psychological time of memory and speculation extracts the individual from clock time and injects years of experiences—past, present, and future—into the frame. All time (including, according to some interpretations, the rise and fall of humanity) is thus condensed into a single day through the experiential and extended present of the narrative focalizer. The frame of La hojarasca is even narrower than this: it takes place between 2:30 and 3 p.m. (the hour noted by several of the Gospels as that of the death of Christ) on Wednesday, September 12, 1928. Even this extreme brevity, however, does not impose any limits on the contents: García Márquez condenses approximately forty years of events (fabula)—from 1885, the beginning of the liberal wars in Colombia and the foundation of Macondo, through the arrival of the Colonel and his family and, later, the doctor, in the town, to the prosperity and decline ushered in by the banana company, the prohibition against the burial of the doctor, and the novel's narrative present—into thirty minutes of sujet. This of course anticipates the concentration of one hundred years into a single instant in Melquíades's manuscript in Cien años de soledad.

García Márquez carries out his distortion of linear historical time through the interior monologues that record the narrators' thoughts, and through the composite effect of the many monologues. The extent of the narrators' frames of social and historical reference differs significantly, and is almost immediately delimited by their reactions to the first chronological indicator, the sound of the train's horn, which marks 2:30. Isabel's young son, who remembers only the most recent past, thinks of his friends at the schoolyard and their daily rituals. Isabel, whose scope includes her personal and family history and the town's social codes, but who is only able to identify events as having taken place before or after one another (Ashok 1988, 18),¹³ thinks that “a esta hora todo Macondo está pendiente de lo que hacemos en esta casa” (García Márquez 1986, 20; “at this moment all of Macondo is wondering what we're doing in this house” [1972, 9]). Finally, the Colonel, whose active participation in the doctor's and Macondo's past grants him the broadest temporal range (Sims 1976, 813), responds by explicitly situating the novel's events in historical time for the first time: “‘Son las dos y media’, pienso. Las dos y media del 12 de setiembre de 1928; cast la misma hora de ese día de 1903 en que este hombre se sentó por primera vez a nuestra mesa y pidiõ hierba para comer” (1986, 32; “‘It's two-thirty,’ I think. Two-thirty on September 12, 1928; almost the same hour of that day in 1903 when this man sat down for the first time at our table and asked for some grass to eat” [1972, 17]).¹⁴ The Colonel's nothing of the hour problematizes linear narrative time by establishing the simultaneity of his monologue with those of his daughter and grandson, effectively collapsing all of them into the same brief moment which ends at the sound of the horn. Moreover, through his reference to the past, the character with the broadest historical perspective paradoxically expands the narrative's temporal scope to condense even more time into that single instant. Also, the italicized identification of a moment of contact between the past and the present precipitates a flashback in which the Colonel relives the past, extending the present backwards, and making it seem as if time has not passed. By the end of the first chapter, then, the sense of time as a continuous present which is the setting for the rest of the novel has been established.

The repeated references to the hour which open and close the novel—a similar exchange is recorded in the final monologues of mother and son at 3 p.m.¹⁵—correspond to another narrative strategy that García Márquez employs to subvert the passage of time at the level of the novel's structure. Like refrains, the repetition of a thought or dialogue or the repeated narration of the same scene both prevents the narrative from advancing and precludes a linear reading of the text: the reader must read backwards and forwards at once in order to locate all of the iterations of a refrain and establish the relative chronological order (or contemporaneity) of the monologues in which they appear. While examples of this technique abound,¹⁶ the descriptions of Adelaida (the Colonel's wife and Isabel's stepmother) seem to best exemplify the novel's correlation of theme and style. Adelaida's resentment of the doctor demonstrates that she continues to dwell on his affront, obsessing about the past rather than engaging with her present reality. After he leaves the house, she prohibits anyone from ever entering his room again, as if she were trying to stop time in it at the moment of the insult; paradoxically, this has the effect of reifying the memory of the doctor rather than eradicating it for, as Isabel observes, the room “seguía siendo como algo suyo, como un fragmento de su personalidad que no podía ser desvinculado de nuestra casa mientras viviera en ella alguien que pudiera recordarlo” (1986, 88; “was still like something of his, a fragment of his personality which could not be detached from our house while anyone who might have remembered him still lived in it” [1972, 50]). Also, in her narration of the events precipitating the doctor's departure, Adelaida refers eight times to the eight-year period that the doctor had enjoyed her hospitality, reflecting her inability to let go of his unpaid debt (1986, 99-105; 57-62); moreover, Isabel describes her stepmother's attitude while recounting the events as if she were “viviendo de nuevo los episodios de aquella noche remota en que el doctor rehusó atender a Meme” (1986, 103; reliving the events of that remote night when the doctor refused to attend to Meme [translation mine]). Finally, both the Colonel and Isabel offer the same final image of a disillusioned, demoralized, and defeatist woman—the emblem of Macondo as a whole, as we shall see—who has given up fighting and hoping, and declared that “‘Me quedaré aqui, aplanada hasta la hora del Juicio’” (1986, 143, 152; “‘I'll stay collapsed here until Judgment Day’”; [1972, 86, 92]). By impeding the forward movement in the story, these textual repetitions can be understood as functioning as narrative correlatives to Macondo's stagnation, and to the emotional paralysis of its inhabitants.¹⁷

Adelaida's attitude is shared by other characters who are similarly unable to extricate themselves from the past or for whom the future only holds death. This fatalism, and the sense of predetermination that it complements, also presupposes a concept of time which is not linear: foreknowledge of the future requires that it somehow be present and identifiable in the present which, as a result, either offers premonitions of death or, conversely, appears to be the inevitable fulfillment of a fate determined in the past. On the one hand, on viewing the doctor's body, the boy first becomes aware of his own mortality. Moreover, his mother fears that heredity will determine the course of her son's life, that his physical resemblance to his father foreshadows a shared fate: “Mi hijo va a disolverse en el aire abrasante de este miércoles como le ocurrió a Martín. … Serán vanos todos mis sacrificios por este hijo si continúa pareciéndose a su padre” (1986, 137-38; “My son's going to dissolve in the boiling air of this Wednesday just as it happened to Martín. … All my sacrifices for this son will be in vain if he keeps on looking like his father” [1972, 82-83]). Also, Isabel is frequently told that she resembles her dead mother, who herself had been “martirizada por la ocupación de una muerte que se había compenetrado con ella en nueve meses de silencioso padecimiento” (1986, 48; “martyrized by the occupation of a death that had taken her over during nine months of silent suffering” [1972, 28]). The mother's embodiment of the principles of life and death further threatens to infect Isabel, who, when trying on her wedding dress, glimpses her own death: “Y ahora, viéndome en el espejo, yo veía los huesos de mi madre cubiertos por el verdín sepulcral. … Yo estaba fuera del espejo. Adentro estaba mi madre, mirándome, extendiendo los brazos desde su espacio helado, tratando de tocar la muerte que prendía los primeros alfileres de mi corona de novia” (1986, 108; “And now, looking at myself in the mirror, I saw my mother's bones covered by the mold of the tomb. … I was outside of the mirror. Inside was my mother, alive again, looking at me, stretching her arms out from her frozen space, trying to touch the death that was held together by the first pins of my bridal veil” [1972, 63]). The premonition is so strong that she later comments that the wedding dress could serve her as a shroud, in the same way that her mother had been buried in her gown. On the other hand, the death of the doctor is described variously as the predetermined culmination of the twenty-five years since his arrival at Macondo and as the event that the town had been awaiting for ten years. Isabel and the Colonel also view their—and the town's—present predicament as similarly pre-ordained: they characterize it as “una tarea largamente premeditada” (1986, 18; a chore long since prepared for [translation mine]), a “castigo … escrito desde antes de mi nacimiento” (1986, 22; “punishment … written down from before my birth” [1972, 11]), the “eslabonado cumplimiento de una profecía” (1986, 121; “linked fulfillment of a prophecy” [1972, 71]), and “la fatalidad [que] había empezado a cumplirse” (1986, 123; “fate [that] had begun to be fulfilled” [1972, 72]). Because the townspeople's lives are oriented towards the realization of what is already a foregone conclusion, and not towards effecting change, the time between beginning and end is effectively obviated before an action even starts because it is of no consequence to the outcome.

García Márquez uses two additional related mechanisms to collapse all time into a continuous present. This first is what Mario Vargas Llosa, in his early work, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, labels “hyperbaton,” the inversion of the order of disclosure of cause and effect, which grants the novel “su transcurrir circular de realidad donde el tiempo se halla suspendido o aun abolido” (1971, 284; its circular course, belonging to a reality in which time is suspended or even abolished). Hence the event which precipitates the injunction against the doctor's burial is alluded to three times in the Colonel's first monologue, but not explained until his last monologue. The disclosure clarifies the present predicament, but does not change it; also, rather than moving the narrative action any further into the future, it only expands the past, expounding upon what is already known, what has already happened. Second, García Márquez casts events which were recent in relation to the narrative present as meant to have taken place long before, and whose deferral had prolonged a period of time which should have ended. The Colonel, for example, claims that in 1918, the doctor was already “un cadáver al que todavía no se le han muerto los ojos” (1986, 135; “a corpse whose eyes still haven't died” [1972, 80]), and reiterates after his death that “este hombre había empezado a morir desde mucho tiempo atrás, aunque habían de transcurrir aún tres años antes de que esa muerte aplazada y defectuosa se realizara por completo” (1986, 151; “this man had begun to die a long time back, even though three years would pass before that postponed and defective death would [take place] completely” [1972, 91]). The doctor's death can be seen as analogous to the town's own situation, which essentially consists of waiting for its destiny to catch up to it. As Isabel comments, “Sacudida por el soplo invisible de la destrucción, también [nuestra casa] está en víspera de un silencioso y definitivo derrumbamiento. Todo Macondo está así desde cuando lo exprimió la compañía bananera” (1986, 153-54; “Shaken by the invisible breath of destruction, [our house] too is on the eve of a silent and final collapse. All of Macondo has been like that ever since it was squeezed by the banana company” [1972, 93]). Moreover, the doctor's death had now deprived the town of the only event that it still looked forward to.

The fatalism which leaves the townspeople passively awaiting their obliteration is the obverse of the nostalgia which has prevented them from ever fully letting go of the past to live in the present. When the Colonel and his family first moved to Macondo, then a burgeoning town, they were, Meme claims, unable to let go of the past that they had (not) left behind: “la llegada … fue la de una familia devastada, aferrada todavía a un reciente pasado esplendoroso” (1986, 44; “Their arrival … was that of a devastated family, still bound to a recent splendid past” [1972, 25]). Like Aeneas carrying his household gods with him as he fled Troy, the Colonel's family traveled with trunks “llenos con la ropa de los muertos anteriores al nacimiento de ellos mismos, de los antepasados que no podrían encontrarse a veinte brazas bajo la tierra … y hasta un baúl lleno de santos con los que reconstruían el altar doméstico en cada lugar que visitaban” (1986, 44; “full of clothing of people who had died before they'd been on earth, ancestors who couldn't have been found twenty fathoms under the earth … and even a trunk filled with the images of saints, which they used to reconstruct their family altar everywhere they stopped” [1972, 25]). But whereas Aeneas transported the gods to Rome to establish continuity between the world that he had left and the new community that he was to lead into the future, once settled in Macondo, the family's saints and luggage only served as anchors which kept them focused on the past, denied them a present, and further prevented them from leaving Macondo even after the town died. “Estamos atados a este suelo por un cuarto lleno de baúles,” Isabel explains, “estamos sembrados a este suelo por el recuerdo de los muertos remotos cuyos huesos ya no podrían encontrarse a veinte brazas bajo la tierra” (1986, 155; “We're tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks. … We've been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth” [1972, 94]).

Macondo's future is engraved on the faces and packed in the trunks of the members of the Colonel's household, foreshadowed from the town's earliest days. Thus does Isabel's description of Meme several years after she had moved in with the doctor echo the latter's own previous description of the family: “Nuestras vidas habían cambiado, los tiempos eran buenos … pero Meme vivía aferrada a un pasado mejor” (1986, 46; Our lives had changed, the times were good … but Meme lived bound to a past that had been better [my translation]). And this attitude is generalized throughout the town after the departure of the banana company: “Aquí quedaba una aldea arruinada … ocupada por gente cesante y rencorosa, a quien atormentaban el recuerdo de un pasado próspero y la amargura de un presente agobiado y estático” (1986, 132; “A ruined village was left here … occupied by unemployed and angry people who were tormented by a prosperous past and the bitterness of an overwhelm[ed] and static present” [1972, 79]). Macondo clings to the past in the face of a desolate present and thus also forfeits its future. Here, too, García Márquez's description of a region with a history of war and devastation, and of the paralysis wrought by memory may be partly indebted to his fascination with Faulkner's depictions of characters oppressed and suppressed by the past. Like Quentin Compson, whose “very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; [who] was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth … a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts” (Faulkner 1972, 12), the inhabitants of Macondo are “gente … devastada por los recuerdos” (García Márquez 1986, 155; “people devastated by memories” [1972, 94]), held in place by their ancestors' trunks, and one step away from the jasmine plant—the reification of memory—whose perfume continues to pervade the house nine years after it is uprooted. As Ada remarks, “‘con los jazmines sucede lo mismo que con las personas que salen a vagar de noche después de muertas’” (1986, 80; “‘The same thing happens with jasmines as with people who come out and wander through the night after they're dead’” [1972, 46]).

In La hojarasca, then, García Márquez replaces chronological progression—both narrative and experiential—with “la parálisis del instante” (1986, 77; “the paralysis of the instant” [1972, 44]), the prolongation of a moment which stretches to encompass the minute, lifetime, or novel separating cause and effect. This sense of time finds its counterpart in the boy's perception of “el minuto que no transcurre” (1986, 24; “the minute that doesn't pass” [1972, 12]), and in the “tiempo … de afuera” (1986, 73), the external time that Isabel distinguishes from interior, subjective time, and which, because she explicitly equates it with movement, she claims has stopped. “Mientras se mueva algo,” she thinks, “puede saberse que el tiempo ha transcurrido. Antes no. Antes de que algo se mueva es el tiempo eterno” (1986, 77; “When something moves you can tell that time has passed. Not till then. Until something moves time is eternal” [1972, 43]). And almost nothing in the novel, from the corpse to the narrators who sit still and wait, to the dust that covers the room and the ruined town, moves. And this stagnation is rendered as eternity, which is thereby deprived of its transcendence. Herein lies the key to deciphering the novel: Isabel's understanding of objective time is reduplicated structurally in the refrains and duplicate descriptions that hinder the forward movement of the narrative. Vargas Llosa establishes the link between repetition, movement, and time beautifully. “El uso repetido de imágenes o de adjetivos en torno a cada personaje,” he writes,

representa formalmente lo que para el coronel y los suyos es la naturaleza humana: repetición eterna. En este mundo donde nada cambia-ni el individuo, ni las clases, ni las relaciones-, donde no hay libertad, no existe, propiamente hablando, un transcurrir … ¿Cómo se puede entender el tiempo en esta realidad? Como algo circular: cada minuto contiene a los otros, el final está en el principio y viceversa. Así lo intuye el coronel: el destino final de Macondo está escrito en su origen. El tiempo, desde el punto de vista de la historia social o individual, no es retroceso ni avance, sino movimiento en redondo. … Hay una circulación que se parece al estatismo, en la que presente—los tres personajes, quietos en torno al cadáver—y pasado—todos los antecedentes de esa situación—se confunden: el pasado no precede al presente en la ficción, coexiste con él, mana de él mismo. La hojarasca comienza y termina en la inmovilidad. (Vargas Llosa 1971, 273-74; The repetition of images or adjectives to describe each character represents formally what human nature is to the colonel and his family: eternal repetition. In this world where nothing changes—not the individual, nor classes, nor relations—where there is no liberty, the passage of time does not, properly speaking, exist. … How can time be understood in this reality? As something circular: each minute contains the others, the end is in the beginning, and vice versa. That's how the colonel understands it: Macondo's final destiny is written in its origin. Time, from the point of view of social or individual history, does not move forwards or backwards but, rather, in a circle. … There is a certain circular movement that appears static, in which the present—the three characters, sitting still by the cadaver—and the past—all that had led up to this situation—merge: the past does not precede the present in this fiction, it coexists with it, it emanates from it. La hojarasca begins and ends with immobility.)

Repetition is not progress. By continuously returning to a point in the past, then, the textual repetitions hold the narrative steady at a single moment, entrenching it in a time that is already paralyzed.

In keeping with the modernist search for the universal, the eternal, and the constants in human experience across time, Robert Sims has argued that García Márquez sets the stories of the doctor and Macondo in a “continuous present that becomes timeless … which dissociates them from past, present and future, plac[ing] them in an ahistorical context” (1976, 812). Moreover, he avers that what he identifies as circular time, in contrast to that discussed by Vargas Llosa, “allows Macondo to exist as a place without beginning or end … [and] adds a vital, temporal dimension to the creation of the myth of Macondo that becomes a place where [in the words of Carlos Fuentes] ‘todo puede recomenzar’” (1976, 816-17; “everything can begin anew”). Quite to the contrary. The structuralist approach that Sims takes here is simply untenable. The atemporality that he describes does not affirm the viability of myth but, rather, is only the sense that time has ceased to be important precisely because history has already happened in and to Macondo, and that the only possible change left is for the apocalyptic wind to raze a town that has already been set aside with all the others “que han dejado de prestar servicio a la creación” (García Márquez 1986, 153; “that have stopped being of any service to creation” [1972, 93]). The tragedy of Macondo is, after all, determined by a historically-specific force: it is not Fortune but, rather, the fortune brought and taken away from Macondo by the banana company that brought about the town's ultimate downfall. One might argue that García Márquez ascribes to la hojarasca—also called el ventisquero, la tempestad and la avalancha [the blizzard, tempest, and avalanche]—the generic qualities of a Fate which is unstoppable, and whose effects are compounded by the decline brought about by the passage of time. Certainly his characterization of the leaf storm as a world-upside-down deliberately inscribes it within the classical tradition of the plague, from Sophocles' Oedipus the King to Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (both favorite works of García Márquez), and thus enhances its almost mythical status, while the constancy of the force that recreates Macondo in the image and likeness of the towns that it has already destroyed likewise allows it to be viewed as an atemporal phenomenon. But it is ludicrous to attempt to reduce Macondo to an abstract mythical essence by distilling it from its historical context. The timeless and the timely are inextricable here: the chronological specificity of the novel, its situation in 1928, the same year as the strike and massacre of United Fruit Company workers in Colombia which plays such an important role in Cien años de soledad, rejects any attempt to dehistoricize the banana company and the ravages that it effected.¹⁸ And, as García Márquez has commented on numerous occasions, Macondo is in many respects a fictionalized representation of a geographic and historical reality. Thus, the leaf storm remains—at least in part—the historically-based cipher of imperialism and neocolonialism. The repeated exercise of its powers stops time from progressing in Macondo, in the same way that the repetition of a phrase or scene detains the forward movement of the narrative, but it hardly grants the town the possibility of regeneration or vitality. Moreover, it further dooms the townspeople by infecting them with an attitude towards time that deprives them of the belief in a future in which their efforts would bear fruit and, by extension, of the will to rebuild.

“Hace diez años, cuando sobrevino la ruina,” the Colonel avers, “el esfuerzo colectivo de quienes aspiraban a recuperarse habría sido suficiente para la reconstrucción. Habría bastado … comenzar otra vez por el principio. Pero a la hojarasca la habían enseñado a ser impaciente; a no creer en el pasado ni en el futuro. Le habían enseñado a creer en el momento actual y a saciar en él la voracidad de sus apetitos” (1986, 147; “Ten years ago, when ruin came down upon us, the collective strength of those who looked for recovery might have been enough for reconstruction. All that was needed was to … start again from scratch. But they'd trained the leaf storm to be impatient, not to believe in either past or future. They'd trained it to believe in the moment and to sate the voracity of its appetite in it.”)

[1972, 89]

In the end, Macondo remains enslaved to its belief in a fate that it has in part invented for itself, and which it uses to justify its continued failure to move from paralysis into the future.

The sense of confinement by history and time constitutes one of the most significant differences between the novel-in-a-day as practiced by Joyce and Woolf on the one hand and García Márquez on the other, even as if reaffirms the affinities in the world views of the Colombian and Faulkner. Joyce and Woolf used the genre to demonstrate how psychological time was able to transcend the strictures imposed by the clock, while mythical and biblical references similarly connoted the continuity of cultural paradigms over and despite the passage of time. García Márquez's recourse to the Antigone legend (in the epigraph) and to the plague motif do situate La hojarasca within a long-standing cultural tradition. However, the novel's limited temporal frame rejects a sense of freedom from time by underscoring the entrapment of its subjects in the present. The narrators' attention wanders to the past, but repeatedly returns to the point of departure; all describe the same scene, and recount the events of the same half-hour. The narrative present is further deprived of a future: except for the boy's thoughts of going out with his friends after leaving the doctor's house, reflecting a limited ability to conceive of the immediate future, all of the monologues are retrospective, only able to recall the past. Also, rather than extend the narrative frame beyond its 3 o'clock endpoint, they only describe actions which have already been narrated, or which are long completed. The backward movement of interior time eludes the limits of chronological time, then, intertwining past and present, but only to enclose both characters and collectivity in a time which is static, and to prolong interminably the (objectively) brief period spent waiting. As we have seen, the narrative is repeatedly dragged back to the same point, suspending the diachronic action in the framing story. In the end, the narrators have yet to leave the house which, like the man who had inhabited it, had for years been closed off from the town and fresh air alike. They, like Macondo and the novel itself, have no future.

Critics often compare García Márquez's notions of time to those of Henri Bergson. Like the French philosopher, he depicts time not as a continuum, but, rather, as duration, as a past which creeps up on and encompasses the present and future. This understanding of time is also found in Faulkner, who admitted to having picked and chosen from Bergson's ideas. But we also find in Faulkner a view of time diametrically opposed to that of Bergson which may well have appealed to García Márquez. Where Bergson held that life is flux, a process of constant change and becoming, a never-completed movement towards the realization of potential, Faulkner time and again creates characters who are paralyzed in historical time, unable to move beyond the trauma of the South's defeat in the Civil War, and who spend their lives reenacting the past.¹⁹ In La hojarasca, clock time does give way to a continuous present: the past invades the present, rendering it stagnant, too, while the future is either obviated or telescoped into the past through fatalism and foreshadowing. And the fatalism is at least partly self-inflicted and therefore self-fulfilling: Macondo moves teleologically and inexorably towards its doom, and at the same time becomes increasingly entrenched in its impotence. The townspeople have neither hope nor the possibility of change, that is, of a future that is anything other than an extension of the present. Their destinies become fixed and immutable; their lives are arrested partway through their development, placed on hold while they wait for their fates to catch up to them. And yet, the gradual putrefaction of the cadaver belies their belief in a continuous present and serves as a reminder that exterior time does still exist, and that change over time, even if it does only take the form of rot and decay, is still possible.

Notes

1. In their extremely important 1967 collection of interviews with and essays on the authors who were at that very moment defining the course of Latin American fiction, Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann wrote that “If La hojarasca is a failure, it is largely because it is written in a borrowed idiom that never becomes a personal language. Its interwoven plots and subplots, overlappings and backtrackings, its involuted time play, are all more or less perfunctory devices that defeat the purpose they might be expected to serve” (1967, 233). Similarly, Michael Palencia-Roth has more recently written, “La hojarasca is the work of an insecure writer. … It is the work of a novice, written under the influence of other styles and other novelists. One of these styles, and the most influential, belongs to William Faulkner” (1987, 33; qtd. in Márquez 1995-1996, 94).

2. García Márquez (1980, 247). Except for the quotes from Leaf Storm, all translations are mine.

3. I speak here of Euro-American modernism to avoid confusion with the turn-of-the-century Latin American literary movement also known as modernism, or modernismo. Henceforth I will refer to the movement represented by William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, simply as “modernism.”

4. The influence of Proust and, specifically, of his representation of time on García Márquez lies outside of the scope of this essay; however, for more information on this topic, consult McGowan (1982-83) and Craig (1990).

5. An exception to this tendency is to be found in Martin (1989) which identifies two stages in modern Latin American fiction: the 1920s through the early 1960s, which he sees as being dominated by Faulkner, and the years following the publication of Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963), in which he considers Joyce to be the dominant model. This division ultimately seems forced, though, rather than offering significant insights into the development of the modern Latin American narrative.

6. E.g., Coleman (1985) and Levine (1975).

7. See, for example, works by Bessière (1995-96), Davis (1985, 1979), Faris (1990), Fayen (1995), Frisch (1990), Irby (1956), Kulin (1975, 1979), Ludmer (1975), MacAdam (1983), Márquez (1995-96), Pothier (1995-96), Shapiro (1979), and Vargas Saavedra (1974). It is interesting to note that this subject has been almost exclusively the domain of scholars in the field of Latin American literature; the fact that an entire recent (double) issue of The Faulkner Journal was dedicated to the subject of “The Latin American Faulkner” (Vol. XI, 1 and 2, Fall 1995/Spring 1996) seems to indicate a growing reciprocal interest on the part of Faulknerists.

8. There are numerous important works which address various aspects of the role played by history, as well as by contemporary social and racial issues, in Yoknapatawpha County; many of these raise issues which dovetail with and may therefore also be used to elucidate the markedly historical orientation of recent Latin American fiction. I refer the reader to the following (limited) selection of works related to these topics for further investigation: for revisionist studies of patriarchy, authority, and the decline of the Old Order, see Dale (1992) and Porter (1995, 1987); for discussions of race, miscegenation, and the threat of social disorder, see Sherry (1989; this article also offers strong discussions of other modes of dispossession and dehumanization), and Snead (1986); on the relationship of the reconstruction of history, narrative form and meaning, and the past's pervading of the present, see Brooks' chapter, “Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!” (1984) and Donnelly (1991); for more general discussions of Faulkner, southern history, and historiography, consult Lester (1995), Matthews (1989), Millgate (1977), Parker (1986), Rollyson (1984), and recent historical and intellectual biographies by Singal (1997) and Williamson (1993).

9. See, for example, works by Christie (1993), Corvalán (1981), Delay and de Labriolle (1973), Fields (1987), Levine (1975), Oberhelman (1975, 1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1987), Ramos Escobar (1985), Snell (1985), Tobin (1978), and Zamora (1982, 1989).

10. See especially works by Fields (1987), Tobin (1978), and Zamora (1982, 1989).

11. It is interesting to note the development of García Márquez's reworking of Faulkner's techniques by comparing his first novel (which often seems heavy-handed, mechanical, and even programmatic) to El otoño del patriarca, published twenty years later. The latter novel employs many of the same techniques as La hojarasca, including shifting perspectives, seemingly interminable sentences, the repetition and reworking of scenes, and narrative withholding and delayed disclosure of information (Vargas Llosa's “hyperbaton”). Also, in the same way that Faulkner traced the genesis of The Sound and the Fury to the single image of a little girl (Caddy Compson) with muddy drawers climbing a tree to look into the room where her dead grandmother was laid to rest (Faulkner 1959, 1, 17, 31), García Márquez has claimed that El otoño del patriarca began with the image of the solitary patriarch wandering through his palace, an image that the text begins and ends with, and returns to on numerous occasions throughout. And yet, while some critics might accuse El otoño del patriarca of being Faulknerian to a fault, it is nevertheless far from being derivative. There is no doubt but that García Márquez is speaking with his own voice here: this novel is a deliberately and self-consciously stylized, virtuoso performance in which the author emulates and acknowledges his models with a vengeance, and in which everything from his signature sense of humor to the images and episodes of Latin American history that he parodies and rewrites reflects an author much more at home with his originality and the creative process. The Colombian both accomplishes and, to a degree, spoofs Faulkner's desire to condense “everything into one sentence—not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present” (qtd. in Cowley 1966, 115), in the many sentences that run on for pages, literally encompassing the events of numerous centuries, and, in particular, in the final chapter, some seventy pages long, which consists of a single sentence and which narrates the rise and fall of the empire, beginning and ending with the death of the patriarch who was considered immortal, and whose reign was thought to be eternal. This condensation of time is, moreover, complemented formally by García Márquez's recourse, once again, to the structure of the novel-in-a-day.

12. Quentin's section is the day of his suicide, June 2, 1910; Jason Compson's is dated April 6, 1928; Benjy Compson's is April 7, 1928; and an unidentified third person narrator describes the events of Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928.

13. The only absolute date that she mentions, 1885, is an indirect quote of her father's delirious ramblings during his illness (García Márquez 1986, 145; 1972, 87).

14. Interestingly enough, while various critics have noted this distribution of historical perspective, none has addressed the fact that the story of the family's arrival in Macondo is not narrated by the Colonel, but, rather, by a multiply-marginalized character: Meme, the Indian servant who was cast out of the family's home and later socially ostracized, and who had simply disappeared from Macondo without a trace several years prior to the beginning of the novel, provides the first and most complete rendition of the family's odyssey, which is indirectly transcribed in one of Isabel's monologues.

15. Isabel observes that “El niño … levanta de pronto la cabeza, concentrado, atento, y me pregunta: ‘¿Lo oyes?’ Sólo entonces caigo en la cuenta de que en uno de los patios vecinos está dando la hora un alcaraván. ‘Sí’, digo. ‘Ya deben ser las tres’, casi en el preciso instante en que suena el primer golpe del martillo en el clavo” (García Márquez 1986, 153; “The child … raises his head suddenly, concentrated, intent, and he asks me: ‘Did you hear it?’ Only then do I realize that in some neighboring courtyard a curlew is telling the time. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘It must be three o'clock already,’ and almost at that precise moment the first hammer blow sounds on the nail” [1972, 93]). Her son, in turn, states that “Oigo otra vez el alcaraván y digo a mamá: ‘¿Lo oyes?’ Y ella dice que sí, que deben ser las tres. Pero Ada me ha dicho que los alcaravanes cantan cuando sienten el olor a muerto. Voy a decírselo a mi madre en el preciso instante en que oigo ruido intenso del martillo en la cabeza del primer clavo” (1986, 158; “I hear the curlew again and I say to Mama: ‘Did you hear it?’ And she says yes, it must be three o'clock. But Ada told me that curlews sing when they get the smell of a dead man. I'm about to tell my mother just at the moment when I hear the sharp sound of the hammer on the head of the first nail” [1972, 96]).

16. See, for example, the following utterances in the narrative present, whose repetition indicates simultaneous monologues: the Colonel's comment that “‘El Cachorro los habría hecho venir a correazos’” (“‘The Pup would have made them come even if he had to whip them’”; narrated by the boy [García Márquez 1986, 132; 1972, 78], Isabel [1986, 137; 1972, 82], and the Colonel [1986, 146; 1972, 88]); the Colonel's declaration that “‘De todos modos, lo que suceda tenía que suceder. Es como si lo hubiera anunciado el almanaque’” (“‘In any case, whatever happens, it had to happen. It's as if it had been announced in the almanac’”; by the Colonel [1986, 150; 1972, 91] and quoted by Isabel [1986, 152; 1972, 92] and the boy [1986, 157; 1972, 95]); and the final entrance of the justice of the peace and his startling of the Colonel (by Isabel [1986, 142 and 144; 1972, 84 and 86], the Colonel [1986, 149; 1972, 90], and the boy [1986, 156; 1972, 94]). Examples of repeated flashbacks are as follows: the first supper with the doctor, when Adelaida asks the doctor “‘¿Qué clase de hierba, doctor?’ Y él, con su parsimoniosa voz de rumiante … : ‘Hierba común, señora. De esa que comen los burros’” (“‘What kind of grass, doctor?’ And he in his parsimonious ruminant voice. … : ‘Ordinary grass, ma'am. The kind that donkeys eat’”; by the Colonel [32 and 71; 1972, 17 and 41]); Meme's announcement of the arrival of the doctor (quoted by Isabel [1986, 49; 1972, 28] and the Colonel [1986, 56; 1972, 32]); and the townspeople's request that the doctor help the wounded on election night in 1918 (by the Colonel [1986, 27 and 148; 1972, 14 and 90]).

17. Vargas Llosa further observes that a limited number of formulae is repeatedly used to describe the characters' physical attributes, so that their outward appearances are, like their emotional states, reduced to the most basic and invariable qualities (1971, 273).

18. Root (1988) identifies the same historical and political principles as governing the structure of Cien años de soledad. He claims that critics who cast García Márquez as a “mythmaker” do so primarily on the basis that “his world is opposed to linear and conventional time.” But, he continues, “myth itself does not adequately explain the use of time; even recurring time cannot free itself from history” (1988, 4)—an observation which applies equally to La hojarasca.

19. See Porter (1987) for a discussion of a parallel phenomenon in Absalom, Absalom! Essentially, Porter argues that characters such as Sutpen and Miss Rosa are associated with “a vertical transcendence of time” (1987, 64) whereby the former strives to extricate himself from history as a series of events and changes and instead seeks to make experience conform to an atemporal structure—the design—that he imposes on it, while the latter (like García Márquez's Adelaida) has been removed from the flow of linear time and immobilized in the past as a result of the affront inflicted on her by this same design (Judith, in contrast, is described as immersed in the horizontal movement of time precisely because she gives Bon's letter to Quentin's grandmother, hoping in that way to have her memory preserved by the community as it moves into the future). In the same way that Sutpen's “transcendence” of time fails to grant him access to the immortality that he so desired (through the perpetuation of either his name or of his lineage) while Miss Rosa remains trapped forever in that day forty-three years prior to her meeting with Quentin, as we have seen in La hojarasca, eternity—that is, exemption from the passage of time—is equated with stagnation and paralysis, and thereby similarly proves intranscendent.

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