Gabriel García Márquez

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‘Searching for the Route of Inventions’: Retracing the Renaissance Discovery Narrative in Gabriel García Márquez

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In the following essay, Spiller examines the “mythic and historical” aspects of One Hundred Years of Solitude, arguing that the novel “emerges out of a Renaissance genre which used myth to create what then became history while it also transformed existing history into a form of myth.”
SOURCE: Spiller, Elizabeth A. “‘Searching for the Route of Inventions’: Retracing the Renaissance Discovery Narrative in Gabriel García Márquez.” CLIO 28, no. 4 (summer 1999): 375-98.

If, as Harold Bloom suggests, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a “supreme fiction,” it achieves that status as it reformulates early modern narratives of self-discovery and dominion.1 García Márquez signals his intention of rewriting the great Renaissance narratives of discovery when he begins his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech with an account of Antonio Pigafetta's Viaggio attorno al mondo (1522). As a navigator aboard Magellan's 1519-21 voyage around the world, Pigafetta kept a log that García Márquez categorizes as an ancestor “of our contemporary novels.”2 Where many Latin American writers might describe their work as postcolonial, García Márquez here suggests that his writing is post-Columbian. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez defines for his reader what it means to experience the world from the perspective of post-Columbian Europe as much as he does from post-Columbian America. Thus, the voyage of discovery into Latin America that is One Hundred Years cannot but begin with the Renaissance narratives that created a real story that is not yet finished. Over and over, García Márquez dramatizes how Latin America is known—created—through these ways of seeing that have been inherited from the European Renaissance. Where revisionist histories focus primarily on what stories have been told, García Márquez invokes these narratives of discovery to force us to rethink what kinds of stories can get told. Thus, this “epic” of the New World, as it is sometimes called, can be told only through the forms which it has inherited. As we shall see, these forms have invented not only García Márquez but a culture, America, that, in the end, has become not what the Europeans imagined but what their imagining has wrought.

Critical responses to García Márquez's work have, in part, been determined by the demands that magical realism makes on its readers to accommodate both fantasy and reality within a single narrative structure. As Mario Vargas Llosa remarks, García Márquez's novel is plural in “being at one time things which we thought to be opposites: traditional and modern; regional and universal; imaginary and realistic.”3 This essay will expand on this observation by considering why García Márquez insists on this plurality, that is, why the book complicates the binary oppositions that Vargas Llosa correctly sees as hopelessly entangled. García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is not just the product—the culmination—of three centuries of post-Conquest history. Rather, taking the intermixture of cultures in the Conquest as a point of origin, One Hundred Years of Solitude responds to and critiques the European narratives of discovery that as much created the Conquest as they retell it. Writing on Renaissance discovery narratives, Humberto Robles has shown us how accounts such as Pigafetta's need to be re-interpreted in a Latin American context.4 Not a conventional revisionist history attempting to correct facts, offer new perspectives, or give voice to previously unheard testimony, García Márquez's great work rewrites the narratives that were most important during the “Age of Discovery” as western Europeans defined themselves in relation to the rest of the world. One Hundred Years of Solitude is at once both mythic and historical because it emerges out of a Renaissance genre which used myth to create what then became history while it also transformed existing history into a form of myth.

García Márquez invokes Pigafetta in his Nobel speech to extend and redefine Alejo Carpentier's classic definition of “lo real maravilloso.” Carpentier first introduced the term “marvelous real” to distinguish what he saw as the artificiality of European surrealism from the essential truth of his own writing about Latin America.

I found myself in daily contact with something which might be called marvelous reality. I was treading on land where thousands of men anxious for freedom had believed in the lycanthropic powers of Macandal, to the point where this collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution. … I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a monarch of incredible exploits, far more astonishing than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists. … At every step I encountered this marvelous reality.5

For Carpentier, what separates the kinds of stories he wants to tell from those written by Europeans are differences in political experience. European writers were forced to rely on “conjuring tricks” to “invoke the marvelous.” Latin America, by contrast, had experienced the unimaginable as a reality, which meant that Carpentier could tell unimaginable stories as a realist.

Carpentier's definition of the marvelous real has been integral to critical identifications of this genre as inherently postcolonial. Wendy Faris, while herself arguing for a broader category of the “marvelous real,” delineates the way that, for Carpentier, this kind of writing was a specifically American and specifically postcolonial form:

this magical supplement to realism may have flourished in Latin America not only because it suits the climate there, as Alejo Carpentier has argued … but because in dismantling the imported code of realism “proper” it enabled a broader transculturation process to take place, a process within which postcolonial Latin America established its identity.6

The model formulated by Carpentier, though, relies on metaphors of growth to naturalize Latin American literature: as an indigenous product, Latin American literature springs up from the land itself. Because the literature is produced by the land of Latin America, it is uniquely Latin American and inherently postcolonial: a break in every way with Europe. García Márquez, however, encourages us to take a longer historical perspective. Where Carpentier refers to Bernal Díaz's Chronicle as the one real book of chivalry in which “the evil doers are lords one could see and touch, where unknown animals are real, unknown cities are discovered,” García Márquez redefines the basis for that opposition between real and imaginary by reminding us that what Europeans such as Bernal Díaz did was re-enact originally aesthetic experiences as political ones. As a result, the “reality” that is America is for García Márquez never separable from its inherently fictive moment of European origin.7

In Carpentier's account, the history of Latin American fiction is a reaction against a repressive aesthetics imposed during the Colonial period. As Irving Leonard has demonstrated, Latin American literary critics and historians through the nineteenth century argued that Spanish authorities prohibited the reading and circulation of imaginative literature. Carpentier's claims about the impact of authoritarian politics in Latin American thus accord with arguments about equally authoritarian aesthetic policing. As one prominent literary scholar argued, “No books except of a certain kind ever came to the colonies which were so jealously guarded; they wanted to make us a race of hermits and they made us a race of revolutionists.”8 Leonard's analysis of the colonial book trade in Latin America makes clear, though, that these accounts do not adequately represent the historical reality: despite being officially prohibited, romances of chivalry and other “marvelous histories” nonetheless remained widely available.9 While Carpentier's arguments about the “marvelous real” as a reaction against an externally imposed “realism” reflect the literary history of the colonial and postcolonial period, García Márquez's work implicitly recognizes what Leonard's larger historical analysis confirms. That is, the Conquistadors who carried Amadís de Gaula, Don Quixote, and other fabulous tales in cargo holds filled with books just off the presses in Seville almost certainly imposed not the rigors of realism but rather the marvels of fictive romance onto the New World.

By suggesting that marvelous realism begins in the Renaissance with Antonio Pigafetta, García Márquez thus transforms what is for Carpentier a thirty-year literary history into a four-hundred-year one:

[Pigafetta] kept a meticulous log on his journey through our Southern American continent, which, nevertheless, also seems to be an adventure into the imagination. He related that he had seen pigs with umbilicus on their backs and birds without feet, the females of the species of which would brood their eggs on the backs of the males, as well as others like gannets without tongues whose beaks looked like a spoon. He wrote that he had seen a monstrosity of an animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the hooves of a deer and the neigh of a horse. … [in this] short and fascinating book … we can perceive the germs of our contemporary novels.

García Márquez insists that the marvelous real way of writing originated with Pigafetta and other early European “Chroniclers of the Indies.”10 The “marvelous real” that Carpentier experiences as a distinctly Latin American response to the world is for García Márquez more specifically a consequence of the first European responses to America. What is “imported” from Europe is thus not its comparatively recent realism but its sense of what constitutes the marvelous.

As Stephen Greenblatt points out, the marvel is a prominent component of the European discovery narrative: “the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New World is at the very center of virtually all of Columbus's writings about his discoveries.”11 Writers such as Columbus, Vespucci, and Pigafetta use the term “marvel” to describe phenomena which they cannot explain: the abundance of gold, the size of the trees, and the nakedness of the people all fill observers with wonder. Where ordinarily passions stand in opposition to reason, marveling is an epistemological passion that exists in the interval between ignorance and knowing. For Albertus Magnus, men wonder in “the desire to know the cause of that which appears portentous and unusual. … wonder is the movement of the man who does not know on his way to finding out.”12 While an integral part of the discovery narrative, the marvel is often at odds with its claims to knowledge. Thus, when Amerigo Vespucci finds that he cannot be the “author” of the southern pole star as he had hoped, he instead offers Lorenzo de' Medici a narrative of the “marvels” he has discovered.13 Yet, at the same time, the marvel can also serve paradoxically to validate the truth of the rest of the narrative precisely because of its own unverifiability. As Theodore Cachey notes, the marvel of the birds with no feet that García Márquez mentions are, in fact, the most conventional part of the Viaggio and “serve as an authorizing frame for what's new and most true in Pigafetta's narrative.”14 Although the unknowable marvelous may seem to threaten the epistemological plot of the discovery narrative, it finally becomes an essential part of what makes narratives like Pigafetta's successful.

When Europeans like Columbus went to the New World, they were searching for an Arcadia. Whether in Virgil, Sannazarro, Lope de Vega, or Sidney, arcadias exist as ideal and imaginary places from which characters in exile or retreat comment on the national and imperial politics of the central court. As a genre, the arcadia is probably the most prominent European literary form that at least seems to write from the periphery of the dispossessed “other” in response to the dominant center of the culture being critiqued. If narratives of discovery in some sense involve the self-idealizing “invention” of an “other,” García Márquez constructs Macondo as a form of arcadia in order to demonstrate how the “other” imagined by arriving Europeans was from its origin a way of telling a story of the European “self.”15 Thus, Macondo initially exemplifies not so much a New World as it does the return to the lost Golden Age that Renaissance explorers thought they had found in America. A model of the Golden Age “commonwealth,” Macondo is a place, as Shakespeare expresses it, with “no kind of traffic / … no name of magistrate / … but nature should bring forth, / Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance.”16 Macondo was “a village that was more orderly and hard-working than any known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died.”17 The town exemplifies the “social initiative” promoted by José Arcadio: every house receives equal access to the water from the river and equal protection from the sun in the streets (9-10). When the outsider Don Apolinar Moscote testifies to his belief in the name of magistrate by hanging a sign that reads “Magistrate” on his door, José Arcadio explains that laws are not needed in Macondo: “In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper … we don't need any judges here because there's nothing that needs judging” (57).

Founded through José Arcadio's self-imposed exile, Macondo takes shape as a geographical expression of his separation from the world. Like Thomas More's Utopia, Macondo is situated in a mysterious no-place, somewhere in South America, that defies rational explanation. Bounded by an “enchanted region,” Macondo is an uncharted site that does not even appear on the maps of the dead (336, 80). As a utopia, Macondo is a place that is in some sense created rather than founded because it is a physical realization of the idea of isolation. In a project of incredible labor, the founders of Utopia dig their island out of what was originally a peninsula in order to distance themselves from the problems of the mainland.18 José Arcadio, in the same way if less consciously, reshapes the land of Macondo in the image of his ideals. In his case, however, although José Arcadio becomes convinced that Macondo is a utopian isle, “surrounded by water on all sides” (13), he never reaches the sea that was his initial goal. He thus constructs Macondo as a peninsula, not through physical labor as the Utopians do, but through an act of imagination and self-representation: “The idea of a peninsular Macondo prevailed for a long time, inspired by the arbitrary map that José Arcadio Buendía sketched on his return from the expedition” (13).

García Márquez imagines Macondo as a kind of arcadia to comment on Latin America's relationship to European narratives of self-knowledge and empire. If the marvelous real is a product of America's difference from Europe, it is so in the sense that it contains that cultural difference within itself. García Márquez's arcadia emerges from Pigafetta's Viaggio in that it is both a “meticulous log” and “an adventure into the imagination”: a world that already contains within it the divergent qualities that Carpentier used to distinguish European and American writing. I am not suggesting here that García Márquez be seen as a kind of colonial apologist who regards Latin American writing as a derivative, a hybrid of European writing. Rather, García Márquez invokes these prior European literary forms to make an argument more politically radical than Carpentier's. For Carpentier, experience is responsible for the kind of art a culture produces; for García Márquez, art—how Europeans imagined America—becomes responsible for political reality. Pigafetta's images of birds without feet and pigs with umbilical cords on their backs lead to a world in which twenty million children die before their second birthday and the population of whole villages disappears. García Márquez demands that, if we ask if Latin American writing is the ultimate product of a European response to America, are those representations not also responsible for the unimaginable reality of contemporary Latin America?

Reinventing the early modern narrative of discovery as the point of origin for One Hundred Years, García Márquez portrays how these narratives of discovery continue to shape representations of America. Úrsula and José Arcadio decide to leave their native village to found Macondo because their families fear that they will breed a race of pig-tailed descendants (20). The race of pig-tailed humans, born with a “cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the tip” (20) that Úrsula and José Arcadio's family fear is a marvel first told of in Columbus's 1493 Letter to Luis de Santangel.19 As one of the few “marvels” that Columbus never himself sees, the “pig-tailed” men become a future that García Márquez imagines as a consequence of those first encounters between Columbus and the Indians. Even earlier, the meeting of Úrsula and José Arcadio can be traced back, however indirectly and comically, to what might be called a misadventure of discovery: Úrsula's great-great-grandmother first moves to the Indian village in the mountains after she sits on a lighted stove in panic during Sir Francis Drake's attack on Rio Hacha (19). Just as Amerigo Vespucci's ship follows the singing of “countless birds of various sorts” as they search for land in the New World, Melquíades's gypsies subsequently find Macondo by following the singing of José Arcadio's parrots.20

Once “discovered,” Macondo is bounded by the early voyages of discovery and conquest. José Arcadio thus attempts to reverse the trajectory of the narratives of discovery when he sets out on an exploration of the outside world in order to find out not what is out “there,” but to discover the “here” where he is. After weeks of expedition whose ardors match the deadly travels reported by Pigafetta or Ralegh, all José Arcadio and his men find is “an enormous Spanish galleon”:

Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the mist of its rigging, which was adorned with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.

(12)

This Spanish galleon becomes the outer boundary of Macondo: at the edge of the “enchanted region,” it is what finally causes José Arcadio to admit defeat and return to Macondo. José Arcadio cannot get beyond the galleon, which “lay across his path like an insurmountable object,” because in some sense there is nothing before or beyond the originary voyages of discovery that it represents. In this moment, we must recognize how the original sea-going voyages of discovery have, like the galleon, literally become grounded in Macondo. The people of Macondo have become the new “expeditionaries,” continuing those original sea-going voyages in the land of Macondo.

The “truth” of One Hundred Years of Solitude consists equally in magnets and magic carpets, butterflies and cameras. While critics are correct to attribute this combination of science and magic to García Márquez's “magical realism,” I would extend that argument by suggesting that what García Márquez has done is transform the organizing epistemological structure of the discovery narrative.21 As a genre, the discovery narrative tells a story of intellectual dominion: where Caesar's imperial epigram was “I came, I saw, I conquered,” early modern discovery narratives write a new nationalist identity in the terms “I came, I knew, I conquered.” Yet discovery narratives are also moments of epistemological challenge in that they achieve intellectual dominion through stories they tell of confrontation with the unknown. In this context, marvels are isolated interludes which appear within and contribute to a larger narrative of progress and truth. By virtue of its familiar inexplicability, the marvel functions to confirm the truths of the narrative as a whole. García Márquez, by contrast, asks us to imagine a world in which the balance between knowing and marveling has been reversed: the marvel is no longer a brief interlude but a rather a three-hundred-year experience that overtakes the novel as a whole. In doing so, One Hundred Years of Solitude, explores the tension between the teleological plot of knowing and the interludes of marvelous unknowing that characterize early discovery narratives.

The history of José Arcadio's interaction with the gypsy Melquíades illustrates the historical and narrative consequences of rewriting the epistemology that characterizes European narratives of discovery. Just as Pigafetta uses marvels to establish the “truth” of his narrative, García Márquez begins with the marvels of Melquíades as a way of establishing his novel's concern with “truth.” The treasures that Melquíades first brings to Macondo—the magnet, the telescope, magnifying glass, maps and charts, astrolabes, and sextants—are icons of discovery. On the one hand, such objects are wonders to be shown to natives as evidence of the divinity of the Europeans. Thomas Hariot, for example, records that the natives responded to compasses, magnifying glasses, and other European inventions with wonder, “so strange … that they thought they were rather the workes of gods then of men.”22 At the same time, such instruments also represent the progress of knowledge that characterizes the age. One of the most popular and widely reproduced representations of the “progress of knowledge” in the Renaissance was thus Johannes Stradanus's Nova Reperta, a series of engravings featuring the age's new inventions—magnet, telescope, printing press.23 Constantly reappearing in the discovery narrative, these inventions are figures of the production of wonder in the Indian and of knowledge for the European. Simultaneously illustrating both the marvel and the knowledge, these inventions typify the epistemological doubleness of the act of “discovery.”

Conscious of this duality, García Márquez uses Melquíades's marvels to imagine a rediscovery narrative in which the discoverers and the discovered have become one and the same just as the Europeans and the Americans now coexist in the inhabitants of Macondo. When Melquíades and the gypsies first arrive in Macondo they bring magnets, invented by the “learned alchemists of Macedonia” (2). The magnet is the first invention that Melquíades brings to Macondo because, as an instrument of navigation in the compass, it was what enabled sailors like Columbus to discover places like Macondo. Yet, it is not the gypsies who are directed by the magnet for they have been led to Macondo by the singing of José Arcadio's parrots. Rather, it is José Arcadio Buendía himself who seeks to follow the science of the magnet. In proposing to use the magnet to discover gold—in what is the first of his expeditions of and from Macondo—he acts like the Conquistadors who followed their compasses across the Atlantic with the hope of finding gold. What José Arcadio finds, however, is not gold but the Conquistadors themselves: “The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. … [which contained] a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck” (2). In this initial “discovery,” José Arcadio finds not new land, people, or knowledge; instead, he finds the past as he himself reenacts it.

While the past that consists of the lived experience shared by the characters within the novel is highly complex, the historical past that predates that experience is reductively simple: it is the Conquest. In juxtaposing these two different expressions of the past, I do not mean to suggest that the “Conquest,” as a historic phenomenon, occurred as a single event: obviously, Columbus departs on his voyage to the New World in 1492, Drake attacks Rio Hacha in 1565-66, while Sir Walter Ralegh published his account of his explorations in 1596. Yet, that historic complexity disappears in the novel as such events are largely reduced to material artifacts which seem to exist in a single, undifferentiated past. The land becomes a kind of repository of the colonial past: whenever characters dig up the land, they unearth the past as artifacts of that past. Thus, José Arcadio first uses the magnet to “unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor … soldered together with rust”; his subsequent “expedition” finds the half-buried Spanish galleon, “covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss” (12); the coins that Úrsula digs up from under the house to give to her husband for his alchemy experiments are “colonial” doubloons, a legacy from her father's family (8, 3). Even when José Arcadio's son seems to escape from Macondo and its history, he does not really get beyond this history but instead only discovers alternative versions of it. Thus, for example, José Arcadio returns from his voyages and tells of killing a sea dragon, “in the stomach of which they found the helmet, the buckles, and the weapons of a Crusader” (94). The Crusader does not so much represent a different history—or a different future for José Arcadio—but rather a transposed version of the same history of discovery and conquest that is encrusted in the Spanish galleon and Úrsula's gold coins. It is not the land, but the acts of discovery and conquest, which produce the marvelousness of Latin America.

In this context, it is appropriate that the inhabitants of Macondo receive news of the outside world through the medium of the past. Francisco the Man sings his news using his “old out-of-tune voice” and plays on “the same archaic accordion that Sir Walter Ralegh had given him in the Guianas” (52). Macondo learns what is new in this way because whatever future they have comes from and is determined by that point of origin represented by Ralegh's songs and stories. In some sense, before Macondo, there is only a myth of discovery.

As the narrative progresses, however, the arcadian nature of Macondo alters as a result of the town's changing relationship with the outside world. The event that precipitates this fundamental change in Macondo is the death of Melquíades. Before Melquíades's death, Macondo is a naive utopia—the utopia that we approach nostalgically as a lost, idealized place; afterwards, it remains utopian as an expression of the death and destruction that is always present in Arcady. As a death that has already occurred once and that Melquíades will overcome through an act of resurrection that allows him to continue visiting Macondo as he has always done, this event is less about the mortality of Melquíades than it is about the mortality of Macondo. In making Melquíades's death the event that transforms Macondo, García Márquez critiques the dangerous nostalgia of Renaissance representations of the New World as a utopian paradise. At the same time, he also suggests that modern recollections of the Conquest participate in an equally nostalgic and thus equally inadequate relationship to the past. By placing death at the center of Macondo's transformation, García Márquez allows us to realize, in the Virgilian phrase, “Et in Arcadia Ego” (Even in Arcadia, there I am [Death]). When Renaissance writers such as Columbus transported Arcady from northern Greece to South America, they did so in a gesture of nostalgia: Columbus, for example, thought he had rediscovered a “lost Paradise” and perhaps even Eden itself. Yet, as Erwin Panofsky suggests, the sort of Renaissance arcadia that Macondo looks back to is not just a “retrospective vision of an unsurpassable happiness. … a happiness ended by death”; it cannot simply be a nostalgic “meditation” on “the idea of mortality.” Rather, death is always present within Arcady in a way that transforms nostalgia for the past into an ominous morality lesson which “warn[s] of an implacable future.”24

A figure of the arcadian quality of Macondo, Melquíades himself warns against nostalgia and prophesies an equally “implacable future” for Macondo. As readers, our initial response to Macondo mirrors Columbus's first response to the New World—it is an ideal, if inaccessible, place to which we stand in a relation of nostalgia and desire. While the first section of the book, dealing with the generation that founded Macondo, reads quickly, the remainder of the book becomes entropic: repetition replaces progress and personal nostalgia competes with collective forgetfulness. We read and reread different versions of the same events: when the gypsies ultimately return to Macondo with the magnet, people are just as surprised as ever (351). History is not just cyclical but regressive. The death of Melquíades thus asks us to recognize the limitations and self-indulgence of our attraction to and for this type of naive arcadia. García Márquez offers us an allegory of the self-delusion involved in some of the histories we tell ourselves: we are living out an arcadian narrative without recognizing that living in Arcady means death.

After Melquíades's death, his study becomes the new arcadian space in Macondo. The study is both the representation of the histories we tell and the place where we see what happens to history. In some respects, Melquíades's study exists outside of time and death: books that were from the beginning “almost destroyed by dust and moths” and manuscripts made of a material that “crumpled like puff paste” nonetheless remain intact a century later (73), the room never needs cleaning (188), and it is “always March there and always Monday” (355). Yet, at the same time, the study is also the site of the decay and death that destroy Macondo. Many of the characters who enter Melquíades's study can see it only as a place of death, full of “rubble, trash, piles of waste”: the army officer searching for José Arcadio Segundo after the massacre simply does not see José Arcadio sitting on the bed because he cannot see any life in the room. At the end, the nostalgia for a timeless arcadian past finally coincides with the death it seeks to avoid. For Aureliano Babilonia, nostalgia becomes a form of death at the moment when understanding his past entails recognizing that he will die and “never leave that room” (422).

Where the swamps around Macondo were for José Arcadio once an “enchanted region,” the gypsy's study now becomes a magical center of the Buendía world. Carefully built “far from the noise and bustle of the house,” this study becomes an architectural realization of the same combination of isolation and knowledge that originally defined the arcadian character of Macondo (73). By that I mean that the male descendants of José Arcadio—Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio Segundo, and Aureliano—retreat from the outside world into the study where they undertake utopian quests for knowledge. José Arcadio had, in his way, followed the paths of Columbus and Vespucci when he set out on “expeditions” in “searching for the route of inventions” (335). The last of his descendants, Aureliano, has never gone anywhere but has nonetheless acquired a more than encyclopedia knowledge of the world in the space of Melquíades's study (379, 388). The originary act of discovery in which knowledge was “found” by a search of and through the world has turned inward, has retreated, in textual exploration. Discovery is no longer a voyage in the land but in books. By supplanting physical acts of discovery with textual ones, however, Melquíades's study makes it possible to understand what happens to the discovery narrative as it is subsequently transformed into a model for writing history. That is, José Arcadio's descendants try to read Melquíades's manuscripts by adhering to different understandings of what history is and where it comes from. Where José Arcadio writes and lives a version of the originary discovery narrative, his descendants are essentially post-Columbian historians: their historiography is a post-Columbian adaptation and transformation of the discovery narrative.

José Arcadio's affiliation with Columbian understandings of historical knowledge can be seen in the way he educates his children. Having been chastised by Úrsula for letting the children run wild, José Arcadio transforms his laboratory into a schoolroom. Like José Arcadio's search for alchemical knowledge, these educational enterprises are pursued with the pre-lapsarian innocence that pervades Macondo before Melquíades's death:

In the small separate room, where the walls were gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous drawings, he taught them to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them about the wonders of the world [maravillas del mundo] … the boys ended up learning that in the southern extremes of Africa there were men so intelligent and peaceful that their only pastime was to sit and think, and that it was possible to cross the Aegean Sea on foot from island to island all the way to the port of Salonika.

(16)

Covering the walls with “strange maps and fabulous drawings,” José Arcadio transforms the room into a graphic rendering of the marvel-filled Renaissance discovery narrative. If José Arcadio's drawings look back to the engravings of Theodore de Bry and Johannes Strandanus, his fabulous histories recreate Prester John and Mandeville. For Columbus, the marvelous literature of such writers provided an imaginative, if not necessarily a navigational, guide to the New World. What begins as the marvelous thus becomes a form of truth insofar as it takes a man beyond “where his learning had extended, but forc[ed] the limits of his imagination to extremes” (16).

Once Macondo no longer exists in the arcadian world of the initial discovery, however, this kind of history becomes impossible. When Aureliano Segundo first explores Melquíades's study, he reads stories of fish with diamonds in their stomachs, magic lamps, and flying carpets (189). This Arabian Nights compendium becomes, for Aureliano, the true history of Macondo. Just as Melquíades's manuscripts write the future of Macondo, his books narrate its past. The way that life in Macondo is created in and through texts is thus appropriately suggested in the format of Melquíades's books: as artifacts of the cultural cannibalism implicit in the history that they tell, they are bound in a material as pale as “tanned human skin” (188). García Márquez here represents the long-term consequences of that textualization of life and history. That is, the correspondence between the magic carpets brought by the gypsies and the magic carpets of Melquíades's storybooks should not simply suggest to us that Macondo is a fictional construct that exists only as a result of the imposition of another culture's fears and fantasies. Writing from a European perspective, Tzvetan Todorov thus argues that “the Conquest of America heralds and establishes our present identity. … we are all direct descendants of Columbus, it is with him that our genealogy begins.” While it is true that the Conquest was for the Europeans largely a discovery that “the self makes of the other,” García Márquez suggests that we also need to recognize how Aureliano Segundo participates in that act of cultural imposition.25 What Aureliano has done here is to take a myth, a literary fiction, and use it to create a historical narrative. Aureliano Segundo differs from both Columbus and his great-grandfather, however, in that he does this to himself: he allows someone else's fable to become his history. The discovery narrative may be an act of cultural exogamy; Aureliano Segundo's history is an act of cultural cannibalism.

José Arcadio inverts the Columbian discovery narrative by making physical retreat—to Macondo and then to his laboratory—a means of intellectual exploration. For José Arcadio Segundo, by contrast, physical isolation leads not to eccentric escapism but rather to a truly dangerous intellectual retreat into madness and self-imposed ignorance. José Arcadio Segundo initially hides himself in Melquíades's study to escape from the military police after the banana strike massacre (316-19). As time goes on, however, he remains in the study in order to flee from his own knowledge of the massacre. José Arcadio Segundo's problem is not simply that he saw the massacre, but that no one will believe what he saw. Ironically echoing the utopian description that José Arcadio gives when the first government representatives arrive in Macondo, government military forces now respond to questions about the massacre victims by insisting “You must have been dreaming … Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing will ever happen. This is a happy town” (57-58, 316). For José Arcadio Segundo, the denial of a truth he experienced only too fully forces him to retreat into madness. Having found that a history which is only too real has been made into a myth, José Arcadio Segundo seeks refuge in Melquíades's manuscripts precisely because he cannot understand them: “José Arcadio Segundo dedicated himself then to peruse the manuscripts of Melquíades many times, and with so much more pleasure when he could not understand them” (318). Because the massacre that he understood is no longer true, the manuscripts that he does not comprehend provide an alternative “truth” for his madness. With Aureliano Segundo, Melquíades's texts innocently allow historical fact to be replaced with myth. Yet, while it may not seem to matter whether or not there were magic carpets, that precedent leads to a more dangerous situation in which the inhabitants of Macondo become complicit in the revisionist history practiced by their own totalitarian government. In some sense, having once believed in the arcadian myth that nothing ever happens in Macondo, the inhabitants must now accept that same argument when it is used as a repressive history. As the culmination to this sequence, Melquíades's prophetic manuscripts represent not just, as critics have demonstrated, an alternative novel to the one we are reading, but also an alternative history to the one we are experiencing, to the one we have been telling.26

García Márquez dramatizes how intimately connected the New World's birth is with the Old World's imagining of it through interbreeding that takes place between the Europeans and the Native Americans. If European representations of the “discovery” are structured on an initial perception of “otherness” that becomes an image of the “self,” García Márquez recognizes that this narrative contains within it a genealogy of Latin America in which fear of radical exogamy alternates with and gives way to fear of incest. The family narrative that García Márquez tells, not just of José Arcadio and Úrsula, but of all Latin America, thus takes Columbus's account of a race of pig-tailed men as its moment of origin. Columbus first mentions the pig-tailed men in his 1493 Letter to Luis de Santangel when he discusses some of the further provinces he has not yet reached, including one “they call ‘Avan,’ and there the people are born with tails.”27 In this first letter, the pig-tailed man appears as a figure of radical and monstrous otherness. Despite what Greenblatt has identified as the pervasive rhetoric of the marvelous in this letter, the pig-tailed men are the only truly supernatural phenomenon mentioned by Columbus.28 Indeed, Columbus admits that he is surprised at the absence of human marvels: “In these islands I have so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected, but on the contrary the whole population is very well-formed” (1.14). As a point of departure for Columbus's definition of the New World “marvel,” this monstrosity thus appears as a paradoxically familiar image of otherness.

The pig-tailed men are again mentioned in Columbus's second voyage. In his account of this voyage, Andres Bernaldez recounts how Columbus received reports of people inhabiting the region of Magón: “all the people had tails, like beasts or small animals, and that for this reason they would find them clothed.” Bernaldez doubts the veracity of this story and concludes that “This was not so, but it seems that among them it is believed from hearsay and the foolish among them think that it is so in their simplicity … it seems that it was first told as a jest, in mockery of those who went clothed” (1.138). This second, more elaborate, version of the tailed men has an obviously different conclusion. Whatever this story may say about native attitudes toward clothing, Bernaldez's interpretation reveals much about changes in the Europeans' attitudes toward the peoples they have met. Where the humans with tails are in some sense expected, what comes as more of a surprise ultimately are the tribes that wear clothing. Clothing becomes a cultural mark of the apparently natural differences that seem to separate the Europeans from the natives. In its subsequent reinterpretation, then, this story is no longer about otherness; rather, it suggests the more threatening possibility of a tribe which, in wearing clothing, may violate what the Europeans had come to see as a fundamental difference that separated them from these peoples. That is, the people of Magón represent the possibility of a kind of “mixed breed.” They are not the familiar myth of otherness, but a tale of something too close to the Europeans themselves.

In Columbus, a monster of racial otherness (unnatural tails) becomes a monster of self-reflection (unnatural clothing); here, interbreeding produces inbreeding. As Claude Levi-Strauss argues in his classic analysis of the Oedipus story, myths work through conflicting and unresolvable cultural beliefs. For Levi-Strauss, the Oedipus myth is characterized by both an overrating of family relationships (incest) and an underrating of them (patricide, fratricide, genocide) because it attempts to reconcile the theological belief in the autochthonous origin of man with the conflicting experiential knowledge “that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman.”29 Columbus's myth of a race of pig-tailed men becomes, in García Márquez, a similar story of origin for Latin America. García Márquez's One Hundred Years thus tells a myth about the birth, not of man as a biological being, but of Latin America as a culture. In this cultural birth narrative, we see Carpentier's belief that Latin America is born, Spartoi-like, out of the land competing with a recognition that it is instead created out of the union of two peoples and their cultures.

As Roberto González Echevarría has demonstrated, the work of Levi-Strauss has been a key influence on contemporary Latin American novelists. Adopting the language of anthropology that has been a “mediating element” between European science and Latin American experience, writers tell the story of Latin America in “the language of myth because it is always conceived of as the history of the other.”30 García Márquez follows this tradition, but also demands that we recognize how, in Latin America objectivity, the separation of the observing (European) “self” from the observed (native) “other” that anthropology aspires to is perhaps even more unattainable than is ordinarily the case. For García Márquez, the history of Latin America begins through a confounding of the categories of self and other.

If the people of Columbus's Magón are thus the symbolic ancestors of the inhabitants of García Márquez's Macondo, they are so in the sense that García Márquez uses the pig-tailed men to show his readers this link between the threat of otherness and the threat of the self.31 Identifying incest as the “motivating theme” of the novel, Edwin Williamson argues that incest becomes a “symbolic equivalent” to the way that the Buendías read and understand history.32 Just as Aureliano Babilonia succumbs to incest, he also gives in to a solipsistic and self-annihilating reading of history. Williamson suggests that the reader is able to move outside the self-enclosed fantasy of Macondo and is thus ultimately capable of an objective, distanced view of the history that is One Hundred Years. While our position as readers is partly modelled by the character named Gabriel García Márquez, I would suggest that because the kind of incestuous history that Williamson identifies is at the same time a consequence of racial and cultural exogamy, García Márquez gives us a perspective from which there is no truly objective stance. While the character Gabriel does manage to leave Macondo for Paris, as the history of Latin America attests, there has been no leaving this story, perhaps because the only forms in which the story can be told are ones that are themselves the products of cultural intermixture.

While critics have noted that this marriage violates incest taboos, what needs to be recognized is that it also breaks taboos against intermarriage. The marriage of José Arcadio to Úrsula Iguarán is initially described as the culmination of a partnership that unites these two families and the “two healthy races” they represent: “the great-great grandson of the native-born planter married the great-great-grand-daughter of the Aragonese” (20). Yet, at the same time, in a way that the narrative does not detail, the two families have already been united in the intervening three generations: while from different ethnic backgrounds, Úrsula and José Arcadio are nonetheless also “cousins.” Incest is presented as the ultimate consequence not so much of inbreeding within the family as it is of interbreeding between races: The people “were afraid that those two healthy products of two races [salubales cabos de dos razas] that had interbred [entrecruzadas] over the centuries would suffer the shame of breeding iguanas” (20). In stressing that Úrsula and José Arcadio are, at once, of different racial descent and yet also cousins, García Márquez suggests that interbreeding between races leads to and culminates in inbreeding within a family; incest appears as a threat, a desire, and an ultimately unavoidable fate.

In the Buendía family and the cultural history it represents, the threat of incest appears as a consequence of overrating of family relations: incest seems to occur through failure either to recognize or make distinctions that need to be made to preserve the family. At the same time, the history of the Buendías is also characterized by an underrating of family relations in acts, real and imagined, of genocide, fratricide, infanticide, and suicide. In this lineage, Aureliano Babilonia becomes the conclusion to the inability to recognize family and community: in his case, failure to recognize how he is related to the rest of the world becomes figures as a form of “cannibalism.” When Aureliano Segundo discovers the existence of his grandson Aureliano Babilonia, he sees in the last generation of his family what Columbus saw when he first arrived in Caribe islands: his grandson stands “naked, with matted hair, and with an impressive sex organ that was like a turkey's wattles, as if he were not a human child but the encyclopedia definition of a cannibal” (299). Amaranta Úrsula likewise recognizes Aureliano as a cannibal when she greets him, “Hello, cannibal” (397). Later, after she falls in love with Aureliano, she jokes that they have “end[ed] up living like cannibals” and predicts that their son will be “a real cannibal” (416-17). Although incest and cannibalism may both end in forms of self-annihilation, One Hundred Years demands that we recognize how they conflict with one another. Cannibalism is a cultural taboo—at least from the perspective of the Europeans—because it involves not a failure to make a distinction between self and other as incest does (shared family), but rather a failure to see a fundamental identity between self and other (shared humanness).33 In this combination we see the culmination of the history of self and other that has created Latin America when incest and exogamy come together, however apocalyptically, in Aureliano Babilonia.

Considered from this perspective, it becomes clear why the pig-tailed progeny frame the narrative of Macondo, why the threat that initiates the founding of Macondo becomes its symbolic end when the “cousins” Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano give birth to a pig-tailed child (417, 420). In the six intervening generations, the thematic tensions between incest and exogamy—the simultaneous threats of breeding too closely together and breeding too far apart—reappear in narrative form in a corresponding tension between a forward-moving epic teleology and a regressive romance cycle of repetition. The occurrence of incest, between Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, involves then an act of repetition by which the narrative closes down on itself and time essentially stops. Just as Pigafetta's Viaggio used familiar marvels in some sense to discover an unknown self, so does García Márquez end this family narrative at the point where the self and other, cultural discovery and incestuous cannibalism, finally converge. García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude enacts both the Conquest and our endless repetitions of it, histories we cannot help retelling as if we had found at last the birth that initiates not our own history but the new one that invents the we who never arrive.

Notes

  1. Harold Bloom, Introduction to Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García Márquez (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 2. On writing as an act of conquest, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (1982; New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 54, 77-81, and Irving Albert Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (1949; New York: Gordian P, 1964).

  2. Gabriel García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America, Nobel Address 1982,” in Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, eds., Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 207. For earlier comments that anticipate the Nobel Prize address, see Gabriel García Márquez, “Fantasía y creación artística en América Latina y el Caribe,” Texto Crítico 5 (1979): 4.

  3. Mario Vargas Llosa, “García Márquez: From Aracataca to Macondo,” in Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views, 5.

  4. Humberto E. Robles, “The First Voyage around the World: From Pigafetta to García Márquez,” History of European Ideas 6.4 (1985): 388.

  5. Alejo Carpentier, “Prologue,” The Kingdom of this World (1949); cited in Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), 234. For the full text of the expanded version of this essay which was published in the same year as Cien años, see Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), 75-88.

  6. Wendy B. Faris, “Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Zamora and Faris, eds., Magical Realism, 165.

  7. Carpentier, “Marvelous Real in America,” in Zamora and Faris, eds., Magical Realism, 83. In the 1967 version of his essay, from which this passage is taken, Carpentier does discuss the Conquest but nonetheless continues to emphasize what are, for him, the fundamental differences between European and Latin American experiences. In doing so, Carpentier repeats arguments that he used in distinguishing European surrealists from the new Latin American “realists,” so that what is merely aesthetic for Europeans is real with him. This argument thus supports Carpentier's larger claim that a Latin American culture and aesthetic predates Europe's: with a “legacy of thirty centuries … our style is reaffirmed throughout our history” (“Marvelous Real in America,” 83).

  8. José María Vergara y Vergara, Historia de la literatura en Nueva Granada; cited in Leonard, Books of the Brave, 79.

  9. Leonard, Books of the Brave, 75-90.

  10. García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” in Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, eds., Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 207. García Márquez elsewhere identifies Christopher Columbus's Diary as “the first masterwork of the literature of magical realism” and, as Michael Palencia-Roth demonstrates, García Márquez's knowledge of Columbus is “extensive and largely accurate” (“‘The New Worlds’ of Columbus and García Márquez” in Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views, 251).

  11. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 73; see also, 52-53, 72-85.

  12. Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia (1890), 6:30; cited in J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: the Emotional Effect of Shakespearian Tragedy (Denver: U of Denver P, 1951), 79-80. See further Peter Platt, “‘Not Before Either Known of Dreamt of’: Francesco Patrizi and the Power of Wonder in Renaissance Poetics,” RES, New Series, 43:171 (1992): 387-94.

  13. Amerigo Vespucci, Letters from a New World, ed. Luciano Formisano, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 3-8.

  14. Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., ed. and trans., The First Voyage Around the World, 1512-1522 (New York: Marsilio, 1995), xxviii.

  15. Although critics have commented on the idyllic and paradisal qualities of José Arcadio's Macondo, what has not been recognized is how García Márquez uses the conventions of early modern utopia so that his readers reenact the same moment of aesthetic nostalgia experienced by explorers such as Columbus. See, for example, Stephen Minta, Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Columbia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 149-50.

  16. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 2.1.149-65.

  17. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1967; New York: Harper, 1970), 9. All further references are given parenthetically in the text.

  18. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1964), 60.

  19. Cecil Jane, trans. and ed., The Four Voyages of Columbus, 2 vols. (1930, 1933; New York: Dover, 1988), 1.12, 138.

  20. Vespucci, Letters from a New World, 37.

  21. On the role of science and pseudo-science in Macondo, see Brian Conniff, “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude,Modern Fiction Studies 36.2 (1990): 167-79, and Floyd Merrell, “José Arcadio Buendía's Scientific Paradigms: Man in Search of Himself,” Latin American Literary Review 2.4 (1974): 59-70.

  22. Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588), cited in William M. Hamlin, “Attributions of Divinity in Renaissance Ethnography and Romance; or, Making Religion of Wonder,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24.3 (1994): 429.

  23. For a modern edition, see Jan van der Straet, New Discoveries, ed. Martha Teach Gnudi et al. (Norwalk, Conn.: The Burndy Library, 1953), np.

  24. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 296, 313.

  25. Todorov, Conquest of America, 5, 3.

  26. Scott Simpkins, “Magical Strategies: The Supplement of Realism,” Twentieth Century Literature 34.2 (1988): 152.

  27. Columbus, Four Voyages, 1.12.

  28. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 72-85.

  29. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 216.

  30. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Fiction (1990; Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998), 13, 21.

  31. Magón is “in reality” the name of a banana plantation near García Márquez's birthplace in Aracataca; see Minta, Gabriel García Márquez, 144-45.

  32. Edwin Williamson, “Magical Realism and Incest: One Hundred Years,” in McGuirk and Cardwell, eds., Gabriel García Márquez, 47.

  33. For compelling accounts of how Renaissance Europe's understanding—or misunderstanding—of cannibalism arose out of both the fear and the rejection of identity with native Americans, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14-17, 33-41, and Stephen Greenblatt, “Eating of the Soul,” Representations 48 (1994): 97-116.

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