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One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

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Layers of Meaning in One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College. In the following essay, she explores the layers of meaning in the novel, noting the ways in which Garcia Marquez intertwines myth, history, and literary theory to create a work that is at once readable and complex.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, Cien anos de soledad was published in Buenos Aires in 1967. The English translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude, prepared for Harper and Row by Gregory Rabassa, appeared in 1970. Several noted Latin American writers applauded the book even before its publication, and post-publication response was universally positive. The novel has been translated into twenty-six languages and continues to enjoy both popular and critical acclaim.

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1928. For the first eight years of his life, he lived with his grandparents. He credits his grandmother for his ability to tell stories, and for giving him the narrative voice he needed to write One Hundred Years of Solitude.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel that is at once easily accessible to the reader and, at the same time, very difficult to analyze. The book has an effective plot that propels the reader forward. Simultaneously, the book functions on no less than five or six different levels. Any reading concentrating on one level may not do justice to the others. Consequently, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that demands careful and multiple readings.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, calls One Hundred Years of Solitude a "'total' novel, in the tradition of those insanely ambitious creations which aspire to compete with reality on an equal basis, confronting it with an image and qualitatively matching it in vitality, vastness and complexity." Other critics have commented on the multi-layered nature of the book, noting that Garcia Marquez intertwines myth, history, ideology, social commentary, and literary theory to produce this "total" novel. Although the book needs to be considered as a whole creation, it may also be helpful to examine a few of these layers individually in order to deepen appreciation for the whole.

One of the most common ways of viewing the novel is through myth. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez weaves references to classical and Biblical myths. Myths are important stories that develop in a culture to help the culture understand itself and its relationship to the world. For example, nearly every culture has a myth concerning the origin of the world and of the culture. In addition, myths often contain elements of the supernatural to help explain the natural world. One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with the creation story of Macondo. Certainly, there are echoes of the Biblical Garden of Eden in the opening lines: "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." In addition, the years of rain that fall on Macondo and the washing away of the village recall myths of the great flood, when all civilization was swept away.

Scholars who study myth have identified characters who fulfill certain functions in myths across cultures. These character-types are often called "archetypes" because they seem to present a pattern. For example, the patriarch is a male character who often leads his family to a new home and who is responsible for the welfare of his people. Jose Arcadio Buendia is a representative of this type. Other archetypal characters in the novel include the matriarch, represented by Ursula, and the virgin, represented by Remedios the Beauty. Petra Cotes and Pilar Ternera,...

(This entire section contains 2076 words.)

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with their blatant sexuality and fertility as well as their connection to fortune-telling, serve as archetypal witches.

Further, many myths have patterns that repeat themselves over and over. Likewise, the novel presents pattern after pattern, from the language Garcia Marquez uses to the repetitive nature of the battles fought by Colonel Aureliano Buendia, to the naming of the characters. Indeed, the repetitions form the structure of the book.

Finally, many myths take as their starting point violence and/or the breaking of an important taboo. Certainly, the novel does both. The town of Macondo is founded, and the history of the Buendias, launched as the result of violence and incest. When Jose Arcadio and Ursula Iguaran marry, she refuses to allow the marriage to be consummated because they are cousins. She fears that she will give birth to a child with the tail of a pig. Prudencio Aguilar makes jokes about Jose Arcadio's manhood and as a result, Jose Arcadio kills Prudencio, an act that finally forces Jose Arcadio and Ursula to leave their town and found Macondo.

Garcia Marquez also incorporates personal, local, national, and continental history into his novel. The village of Macondo is clearly modeled on the village of his childhood, Aracataca. Indeed, the name of the banana plantation just outside of Aracataca was Macondo. In addition, many of the episodes of the novel are based on events from Garcia Marquez's life with his grandparents. For example, the opening episode of Jose Arcadio taking his sons to see ice is certainly modeled on a similar incident in young Garcia Marquez's life, when his grandfather took him to see ice for the first time.

Other critics have noted the ways in which the founding of Macondo mirrors Colombian settlement by Europeans. Just as the early residents of Macondo are cut off from the rest of the world, the early colonists were also extremely isolated. In addition, the institutions of civilization, such as the government and the church, moved slowly, but inexorably, into Colombia, just as they do into Macondo. Apolinar Moscote and Father Nicanor Reyna are recognizable representatives of these institutions; their appearance in Macondo signals a shift from the Edenic, Arcadian days of the founding.

The middle part of the novel traces the course of a long civil war, fought between the Liberals and Conservatives. Colonel Aureliano Buendia is one of the leaders of the Liberal cause. The civil war in the novel follows closely the long years of civil war in Colombia, when the Liberals and Conservatives battled for control of the country. Many critics have pointed out the parallels between the fictional Aureliano Buendia and the historical General Rafael Uribe Uribe, the military leader of the Colombian Liberals.

Finally, Garcia Marquez incorporates into his novel the American intervention into Latin America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United Fruit Company, an American concern, began operating large scale banana plantations throughout Latin America. In 1928, a strike by workers over living conditions and contract violations led to a massive massacre. Newspapers differ in their accounts and it is difficult to arrive at a final figure for the number killed. Further, the governmental bureaucracy, intent on maintaining the flow of American dollars into Colombia, covered up the massacre. The fictional account of the slaying of the strikers in One Hundred Years of Solitude reads remarkably like the accounts of the historical 1928 Cienaga strike.

Finally, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel written within a particular literary context. Three important literary terms are often used in discussion of the novel: magic (or magical) realism; intertextuality; and metafiction. Knowing something about each of these devices is important for an understanding of the literary task Garcia Marquez set for himself in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Magic realism is a term first used to describe the surreal images of painters in the 1920s and 1930s. Defining the term in literature has caused some controversy among literary scholars. However, according to Regina James in her One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading, "In current Anglo-American usage, magic realism is a narrative technique that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality." Certainly, One Hundred Years of Solitude offers many examples of magic realism according to this definition, although not all critics would agree with the definition. Part of the effect of magic realism is created by the completely neutral tone of the narrator. He reports such things as gypsies on flying carpets, the insomnia plague, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, and the levitation of Father Nicanor with no indication that these occurrences are the least bit out of the ordinary, just as the inhabitants of Macondo respond to the events. On the other hand, the residents of Macondo respond to items such as magnets and ice with great wonder, as if these were the stuff of fantasy. Garcia Marquez himself argues that the reality of South America is more fantastic than anything "magical" in his writing. Further, as he writes in his Nobel acceptance speech, "The Solitude of Latin America,"

Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imaginations, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. That is the crux of our solitude.

Another important term for the study of One Hundred Years of Solitude is intertextuality. Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher, created this term to describe the way that every text refers to and changes previous texts. Most obviously, a text can do this through allusion, by directly referring to a previous text through names of characters, incidents in the plot, or language, for example. As Regina Janes points out in her book, One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading, the novel "adopts the narrative frame of the Bible and the plot devices of Oedipus Tyrannos and parodies both." That is, One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the structure of the Bible: it begins with an idyllic creation in a garden-like setting, where all the people are innocent. The movement of the plot is away from the moment of creation and toward the moment of Apocalypse, when all of Macondo is swept away. Second, in Oedipus the King, the entire tragedy is foretold by the oracle at Delphi, which tells Oedipus's parents that their son will murder his father and marry his mother. While the characters in the play take actions to prevent this, each action they take merely ensures that it will happen. Likewise, the fate of the Buendia family is sealed with the incestuous marriage between Jose Arcadio and Ursula. What Ursula fears most occurs in the closing pages of the book: the last Buendia child is born with the tail of a pig, the result of the marriage of Aureliano Babilonia (who does not know his parentage) to his aunt, Amaranta Ursula.

Finally, One Hundred Years of Solitude is an excellent example of metafiction, a work of fiction that takes as its subject the creation and reading of texts From the moment that Melquiades presents JosS Arcadio with the manuscript, members of the Buendia family attempt to decipher it. These attempts parallel the attempts of the reader to decipher the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Further, during the insomnia epidemic, Jose Arca-dio's labels illustrate the metafictional quality of the novel: "Thus they went on living m a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters." As readers, we participate in the creation of a fictional reality, in this sentence, Garcia Marquez reminds us that the "reality" of the Buendias is no more than "momentarily captured" words. The "reality" of the Buendias ends when the reader closes the book.

Even more explicitly metafictional is the conclusion. In the last three pages, Aureliano finally deciphers the manuscript left by Melquiades, and suddenly understands that he is reading the history of his family. As he reads, he catches up to the present and then reads himself into the future at the moment Macondo is destroyed. At the same instant, readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude realize that Melquiades' manuscript is the novel they are reading themselves. The wind that wipes out the "city of mirrors (or mirages)" is the turning of the final page. At that moment, the reader participates in the destruction of Macondo.

As should be obvious, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that changes with reading; a second or third reading will be very different from the first. The multiple paths a reader takes through the novel, reading it as myth, as history, as metafiction, provide a rich and complicated stew, one that can be savored again and again.

Source: Diane Andrews Henmngfeld, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999

Jungle Gothic Science, Myth, and Reality in One Hundred Years of Solitude

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In the following excerpt, Stevens and Vela discuss how Marquez deals with the problem of "distinguishing between illusion and reality" by fusing the two, instead of treating them as separate entities.

The technical difficulty of distinguishing between illusion and reality is one of the oldest and most important problems faced by the novelist, in particular, and by mankind in general. In art, philosophy, or politics, western man has traditionally made great conscious efforts to keep illusion separated from fact, while admiring and longing (at least superficially) for a transcendental way of life. The irony of this longing resides in the fact that western man's scientific and technological achievements are in great part due to his ability to separate fact from fiction, myth from science, and illusion from reality. It is a paradox of western culture that it draws its psychological strength from a spiritual-mythical well, while its muscle is drawn largely from science and technology.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez deals with the paradox very successfully by not trying to solve it at all. That is to say, the perceptions of reality which appear in the novel are all prima facie perceptions and, as a consequence, become indistinguishable from reality. For example, when Meme falls in love with Mauricio Babilonia she finds herself attended ever after by a swarm of yellow butterflies. The question whether they are real or imaginary butterflies is the wrong question. Marquez makes it evident that he places little value on such questions and that there is, in a way, no inherent value in real butterflies as opposed to imaginary butterflies in the world which he describes and, by extension, perhaps in our world as well.

The butterflies are there, prima facie, and the distinction between symbol and actuality is broken down and declared void by the lyrical fiat of his style. The technical result of this method and the value of this view is that the conventional distinction between figurative and literal language is impossible to make, and pointless beside. Conventional literary terms are inadequate to describe this fusion of both literal and metaphorical language. We who are trained to compartmentalize our minds into fact and fancy, business and God, myth and science, are prone to wonder over the nature of these butterflies, their origin, and their significance. In reality, however, the question is presumptuous and has validity only in our narrow-minded world with its forty-hour work week and our constant, energy-consuming, watchful stand to keep fancy and reality separated in our minds.

When we are told that it rained for four years, eleven months, and two days, we need not ask ourselves whether this could be so; rather we soon come to accept it as a given quantity and eventually, through the art of Garcia Marquez, we come to accept all things in the novel as they are. This, we are soon convinced, is also a workable view of reality. Multiplying such details with profound ingenuity, Marquez gradually brings the reader's skeptical biases into harmony with the spiritual and intellectual life of his townsfolk. When Jose Arcadio is shot,

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread

There is no question as to how this episode is to be taken, only the simple declaration that it happened. This blood which defies the laws of physics is neither symbolical, miraculous, nor scientifically credible. It is simply a fiat of reality in Macondo. Are such events also possible in our own world? Perhaps they are more real in the Colombian cienega grande, yet, on the other hand, people who believe in the day of judgment and the resurrection of the dead, except for a certain narrowness of mind, should have little trouble with a stream of blood that does not coagulate in one minute and that travels uphill.

One of the elements constituting this poetic vision of things is the mythopoetic. The village of Macondo is a microcosm and the one hundred years recounted in the novel is a compression of the whole history of man. The village begins ex nihilo, rises to a golden age, and falls away into oblivion. Everything that can happen in our world happened there. A village was founded, children begotten, revolutions spawned, technology developed, lust, love, death, and beatitude were all enacted with the luxuriant and unending variety that suggests the inexhaustibility of the individual experience of human events. Marquez's myth has its own cosmology, "going back to before original sin." The world began the "day that Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha," and it is of no consequence that Drake set sail and lived a lifetime prior to this day. In the golden age of Macondo nobody died, and all men lived in a sacred and eternal present tense. As time passed knowledge accumulated, but wisdom was still the property of the few, and political power belonged, even as in our world, to the cheat and the liar. As the world aged, it was overtaken by a great insomniac sickness which resulted in a loss of memory. In fear that their loss would bring chaos, the people of Macondo put up signs to remind themselves of the identity of things; "table, chair, clock, door...," and on main street they placed the largest of all the signs against their forgetfulness, "DIOS EXISTE." In giving things names, they also gave them reality; in having Jose Arcadio Buendia to give things their names, Garcia Marquez gives him the function of Adam, the first man, and he simultaneously seems to tell us that anything which may be forgotten by man may lose its existence and, perhaps, its reality.

Marquez gives a sort of sacredness to all experience by breaking down the wall between the sacred and the profane, as he has broken down the wall between fact and fiction, and by refusing to intellectualize his characters. Remedios the Beauty, for instance, remains utterly chaste—not because she is pious, but because she is simple and does not know the thoughts of men. But what does it matter whether her innocence came by piety or ignorance? In either case, she ascends into heaven while hanging sheets in the backyard, and who is to gainsay her ascension? Marquez, whose point of view in the novel is somewhat like God's, has declared it so. In short, the writer has created in Remedios a natural piety which may be thought of as pure without puritanism—simultaneously sacred and profane.

Time also has mythopoetic significance in the novel. Everything ages and moves toward its own end. Life, regardless of its particular reality, is a transient condition, at best. Marquez's point of view in the novel is the point of view of God: all time is simultaneous. The story of Macondo is at once complete from beginning to end, and, at the same time, it is the story of only one out of an infinite number of worlds, each with its own story. More than that, it is the story of Jose Arcadio Buendia, one out of an infinite number of men, but one who is more the father of man than Adam himself, for if Adam's sin was to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Jose Arcadio's was to live too much and too long. He lived from the beginning of time until the world became old. One has the feeling that if the world had not become old, Jose Arcadio would not have died—but he and his descendants would never have deciphered the parchments of the ancients, never have acquired knowledge. "What's happening," Ursula notes, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end." When the great apocalypse does befall Macondo however, it falls not in fire or flood, but rather it creeps in as the rot and decay of antiquity. When Aureliano Babilonia deciphers the parchments of Melquiades which contain all the knowledge and all the secrets of the ancients, he finds that "Melquiades had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they co-existed in one instant." The simultaneity of all time cannot be achieved literally by the novelist, and therefore he must create the illusion of it. This Marquez does by creating a microcosm of Macondo and giving it a micro-history, while the individuals involved are as real as we.

In the last analysis, "time" is one of the major themes of the novel, as its title suggests. By setting all things in the context of their mortality, by dramatizing the apocalyptic nature of antiquity and decay (some say the world will end in flood, some say in fire, Marquez says it will die of old age), Marquez induces in us a rich reverence for all of his characters and events. There are great depths of bitterness in this novel—bitterness for the death of the old woman clubbed to death by the soldiers' rifle butts, for the treachery of the government and the North American fruit company, for the train-load of massacred townsfolk whose corpses "would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas." Yet time and decay spread over these bitter incidents in such a way as to mellow and sanctify them. All of history occurred in Macondo, and it became holy through Melquiades's recitation of it in the sacred parchments; in like manner Marquez transforms the common experience of our world into something magical by his telling of it in the novel. Time bestows its blessing; all things are made holy because they have existed.

A second element of Marquez's view of life, beyond the mythopoetic, is the concept that man is naturally a scientist. The wisdom of the people who live in Macondo is a composite of folk wisdom, hearsay, legend, superstition, and religion—all indiscriminately mixed. And yet Marquez builds into the novel a clear sympathy for a certain quality of knowledge. We might think of this sympathy as an instinct for science. Jose Arcadio Buendia has it, as do each of his descendants who, in successive generations, lock themselves away in Melquiades's room to search for knowledge and truth. This science itself is a mixture of alchemy and occultism, but in it there is a feature which separates it from the popular wisdom of the town- its profound belief that reality is infinitely more wondrous than the most inventive of illusions. It is true that in Jose Arcadio the love of science exists in undisciplined comradeship with the folk wisdom.

Jose Arcadio was crude and ignorant in his methodology, but a true scientist in his heart. His fascination with magnets, ice, the sextant, and the geography of the world make it clear that in spite of his own inability always to separate superstition from science, the great yearning of his heart was to know things. In many ways Garcia Marquez sees him as the archetype of all scientists, for do they not all share his dilemma? Which scientist could ever truly separate his own illusions from his empirical knowledge? Which scientist could ever know that his methodology is pure and perfected? How much of modern science is old illusion given a new name? The common characteristic shared by true scientists, however, is their great wonder at the profound mystery of reality. And if this be so, then to the brotherhood of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, old Jose—with his poor sextant and his undeterred will to find a system for identifying the exact stroke of noon—eternally belongs.

It is this instinctive awe of reality that separates the first from the second generation of gypsies. Melquiades—a combination of Wandering Jew, picaro, Mephistopheles, and God—is a huckster, true enough, but beyond his sleight-of-hand and his alchemy, he is a man of great wisdom. It is easy from the vantage point of a highly developed technological culture, to think of Melquiades and Jose Arcadio as being naive, having too many gaps in their learning to be true scientists. There are loose ends in their knowledge which make them seem provincial. Should we judge them thus, however, we would betray only our own provinciality, for all science has loose ends. There must have been something of the gypsy, too, in Albert Einstein, for his paradox of the clock is really not different from Buendia's visualizing the air and hearing the buzzing of sunlight. Garcia Marquez perceives it all as a vital and organic whole, as though the jungle itself were a Gothic artifact, creating, nourishing, destroying, and regenerating in great, broad brush strokes and in infinitely delicate detail. Marquez's way of seeing things is compatible with both myth and science, but it is neither thing in itself. It has the analytical curiosity of science coupled with the synthetic method of myth. The result is a technique which puts him in the tradition of Unamuno, Gallego, and Lorca, and it may reveal him as one of the most inventive novelists of our day-—not because others have failed to explore this artistic fusion of myth and science, symbol and surface, but because of Marquez's ingenuity and the profusion of his imaginative details.

The view of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a view of life as it is—complex, changing, indefinite, and difficult to understand. It is a view of reality richer and more exciting than any cross-section of any of its parts could ever reveal.

Source: L. Robert Stevens and G. Roland Vela, "Jungle Gothic Science, Myth, and Reality in One Hundred Years of Solitude," in Modern Fiction Studies, No. 2, Vol 26, Summer, 1980, pp. 262-66.

Foreshadowing as Technique and Theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Ciplijauskaite describes the ways in which Garcia Marquez uses foreshadowing throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude to tie different aspects of the novel together.

The constant use of foreshadowing and premonition stands out as one of the basic structural elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude. All such elements, including cyclical reiteration, paradox and parallelism, are tightly interwoven with the main themes of the book; as a consequence, they can be studied as integral parts of the "story" as well as of the "discourse," where syntactic and semantic aspects are interrelated. A major portion of the book obeys the rule of ambiguity more generally referred to as "magic realism" when applied to the Latin American novel and short story.

The realm of the fantastic lies between the real-explicable and the supernatural, with a continuous fluctuation of boundaries and an uncertainty intensified by the total absence of the narrator's guiding point of view. Garcia Marquez suggests that this will also be a characteristic of his book: on the first page, stressing the importance of imagination in Jose Arcadio Buendia, the founder of Macondo, he writes, "his imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic." He causes the whole story to "float" by disrupting the natural temporal sequence and making even spatial relations uncertain. [Mario Vargas Llosa in Historia de un deicidio, 1971.] The constant intertwining of the real and material with the fantastic and spiritual fosters ambiguity and permits a myth to be born. (According to Garcia Marquez, [in "Garcia Marquez de Aracataca a Macando," M. Vargas Llosa, 1969] a similar blend was present in the atmosphere in which he grew up: "For lack of something better, Aracataca lived on myths, ghosts, solitude and nostalgia.") Technically, the use of ellipsis together with chronological leap, both forward and backward, produces a seldom-experienced density of statement which invites both literal and symbolical readings. [R. Barthes in "Introduction an 'analyse structurale des recits," Communications, 1966.] (Garcia Marquez said once he would have liked to be the author of Lapeste whose economy of devices he admired. If one considers that the density achieved by Camus represents a chronicle of the human destiny of a city during a period of nine months, one may be even more surprised to find that Garcia Marquez compresses into a similar number of pages the hundred-year history of a whole tribe and, figuratively, a whole continent. The absurd arrived at has the same poignancy in both authors; the difference in the presentation derives from the rational and civilized character of the French and the overflowing vitality of the Latin Americans.) Repetitions with variations are extremely effective in producing this density: the variants convey essential developments and at the same time establish paradigmatic relations within and between the symbolic patterns of the text.

Ambiguity in the novel is further intensified by the transposition and confusion of senses and sensations (Melquiades speaks "lighting up with his deep organ voice the darkest reaches of the imagination"; Rebeca "spits hieroglyphics"; Jose Arcadio sees a "route that could only lead to the past" and then perceives the sea colored with disillusionment). Such devices as synesthesia, oxymoron and the like in most cases allow more than one interpretation.

Structurally, the fantastic element helps to create and maintain suspense; its semantic function is its very presence in the work. And what could be more fantastic in the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude, asks Vargas Llosa, if not the fact that it is a story of a story told in reverse? An unusual aspect of it—with a distinctly twentieth-century flavor—is that it contains within itself not the account of its writing, but rather one of its reading and interpretation. Thus, all events in the novel gain added significance as clues for a final deciphering. A structuralist can easily discover a careful system of signs and codes in this never-totally-revealed universe full of premonitions.

Vargas Llosa took nearly seven hundred pages to outline a few essential characteristics of Garcia Marquez's work. It would seem vain to attempt here a complete analysis of even one aspect. The role of foreshadowing is of primary importance in the novel, and only a long essay could do it justice. These lines will barely serve as an introduction to what begins the book as technique and ends it as theme. It should be noted that throughout the greater part of the story a single character may embody both technique and theme. The very first image the reader encounters, one periodically reiterated, provides a glimpse of the future (which then is not fulfilled): Colonel Aureliano Buendia in front of a firing squad. Aureliano is the first and the greatest seer of the Buendia family, and one who attains mythical stature. His supernatural qualities are suggested when Ursula hears him cry in her womb, his first spoken words are a premonition: "the boiling pot is going to spill" ([la] olla de caldo hirviendo "se va a caer.") At this point, with the introduction of the husband's and the wife's characters, the dicotomy in their reactions becomes clear, what frightens Ursula seems a "natural phenomenon" to Jose Arcadio. Much later, while awaiting his execution, Aureliano formulates what could be considered a theory of premonitions, which is related to a vital theme of the novel: the natural versus the artificial. Amazed at the fact that on this occasion he has no premonition of his pending execution, he concludes that only a natural death warrants a supernatural sign. As it happens no one dares carry out the orders leading to his "artificial" end; thus, the lack of a premonition of death in his mind becomes in the mind of the reader a foreshadowing of, Me.

Another interesting use of the foreshadowing technique is found in the account of Amaranta's death. In this case, a premonition takes on human form and visits her personally, leaving exact instructions. This fantastic situation is even further exploited as it is raised to the level of superstition: knowing she is to die, Amaranta announces publicly her willingness to collect and deliver the "mail for the dead" on behalf of the whole village. An even greater degree of complexity is achieved by the narrator's comment that "it seemed a farce." The paradox is taken further, however: it is Amaranta herself who, looking and feeling perfectly well, directs to the very end the preparations for her own funeral.

It might be noted that the manner of presentation of each premonition exemplifies the basic technique of the novel itself: in rhythmically repeated "fore-flashes" of the main characters' deaths is included a short synopsis of the strongest emotions and impressions of their lives The same interruptive technique is used throughout the novel to record cardinal stages in the life and death of the tribe and the whole village. The opening sentence of the novel renders Aureliano's first distinctly remembered impression as he awaits his last; as the book closes, the last Aureliano in the family line receives the final impression of his life as he reads about the first. Life and literature become one, and both seem destined to sink into oblivion.

The importance of foreshadowing becomes evident when we analyze the first chapter more closely. In it can be found most of the major themes and devices of the novel. Like the entire book, the introductory chapter forms a perfectly circular structure, a circle that runs counter to the clock. There is also a complete integration of various temporal levels: what the colonel glimpses of the past in the first sentence (which is itself a fore-flash) closes the chapter as a living experience in the present tense. Fire and ice unite as opposites, forming a paradox, a device constantly used throughout the novel. The importance of the word—the Verb, the Creation—is stressed at both the opening and the close. Macondo is so new to the world that names have to be invented to designate objects, says the narrator in his first description of the town. At the end of the chapter we see Jose Arcadio groping for words when confronted with what for him is a new phenomenon—ice. The novel itself closes with a character reading the last line, which for the first time releases the book's full meaning.

The circle—and the premonition—can also be found in the symbol of the child with a tail. What appears in the first chapter as superstitious fear (thereby opening the gates to the realm of the fantastic) is finally justified in the last. The whole novel in some way anticipates the fulfillment of this oracle. Another use of foreshadowing can be found in the first pages: i.e., the prediction by Melquiades that the whole tribe of Buendias will be extinguished. Melquiades's life comes full circle within the limits of this chapter: it starts with his first arrival in Macondo and ends with the news about his death, just as the book itself develops from the arrival of the Buendias in Macondo to the written news of, then final extinction.

It may be worthwhile to note that the first character introduced in this book is Melquiades, a fantastic figure constantly fluctuating between the real and the supernatural: he "was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. But in spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life." The physical description of him, in turn, intensifies the temporal distortion: he wears "a velvet vest across which the patina of centuries had skated." And one of the first "wonders" he brings is called "fierros," not "hierros magicos," an archaic form of the word which also suggests his agelessness. While indulging in magic, he is able to give the most lucid explanations about recent progress in the scientific world. (One of the most delightful examples is his conversation with Ursula about his being a demon, where he explains to her the odor of the devil from a chemical point of view.) His blindness, and the increased lucidity it brings about, foreshadow Ursula's last years, when the role of intuition is emphasized. It leads, moreover, to another principal theme in the novel: that of insanity versus sanity, which is developed with regard to several members of the family.

Melquiades bears within himself the main theme of the novel: he returns from the kingdom of the dead, renouncing immortality, because he is unable to endure solitude. The book closes with the reading of his scriptures. Only at this point does the reader realize that Melquiades was not only a character, but the narrator himself. In one of his first appearances in the novel, he even gives a definition of what the book turns out to be—"fantastic stones"—suggesting, moreover, that there are always several interpretations to a phenomenon: on the same page we see him through four different pairs of eyes, interpreted four different ways. Thus, the figure of Melquiades points to everything in this novel being a language of signs and patterns, a "recit indiciel" with intricate metaphorical relationships. [Barthes, 1966.]

The first chapter makes full use of such structural elements as paradox, which is essential in the presentation of the theme of the absurd (Jose Arcadio sets out to look for the sea, gets lost in the jungle and founds Macondo; while seeking to communicate with the city, he discovers the sea; Ursula, seeking her son, discovers the road to civilization); parallelism (Jose Arcadio as a symbol of the village and Ursula, of the home); antithesis (Jose Arcadio embodying imagination, Ursula embodying common and practical sense; the two sons who become archetypes for the entire descendency divided between an emphasis on physical enjoyment of life and the anguish of imagination); repetition as the essence of the story, summarized by Pilar Ternera at the end: "the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions." The repetition may be associated with the symbol of mirrors perceived by Jose Arcadio in the dream which determines the founding of Macondo, transposed once we understand that the mirrors do not reproduce the image an infinite number of times, but instead a mirage which is impossible to repeat.

Many secondary themes are also introduced in this chapter and later developed more fully: the first notion of religion is, significantly, mixed with superstition; the only reference to the civil government is especially important, for it underscores its inefficiency. Jose Arcadio's desire to invent a "memory machine" is a precursor of the long episode of the "insomnia plague"; his interest in developing arms for "solar warfare" hints at the future revolution and the mythical exploits of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The principles of self-government and equality are established by Jose Arcadio's distribution of land and sun, thus, introducing the important roles nature and climactic conditions are to play. Jose Arcadio's expedition wrestling with the fierce forces of the jungle provides one of the earliest glimpses of the jungle's power and makes convincing its final invasion of the Buendias' family house in the last chapter.

Nature also serves to introduce the eternal dichotomy between the natural state of man and civilized man, illustrated in the first chapter by the two tribes of gypsies. The first are simple and honest and want to share their knowledge. Those that follow, "purveyors of amusement," come to cheat and loot. The theme of solitude and isolation is opposed to that of friendship and is brought out by emphasizing the desire to communicate, which is as strong in individual characters as it is within the village community as a whole.

There is, finally, in these first pages of the novel an early intimation of one of the most exuberant of the later epistles: Aureliano Segundo's "papering" the walls of his house with money clearly echoes Jose Arcadio's announcement in the first chapter that "we'll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house." (The paradox attached to the theme of gold is that we see Jose Arcadio on the first page, and Aureliano Segundo toward the end of the book, desperately searching for it without success, while at the peak of the fortune a saint's figure [to whom Ursula lights candles and prays] is discovered containing a treasure of gold. A further paradox can be seen in the fact that Ursula's hiding place is indicated in the first chapter and later repeated, but when the whole house and garden are dug up during the search, nobody looks under her bed.) A strong parallelism can be observed between the fall and rise of the family and of the village, which is symbolized at the end of the book by the return of the first tribe of gypsies we met in Chapter I: The development of the village has completed a full circle between the two comings, and the villagers have returned to a state where they can again be awed by innocent, primitive magic.

A powerful imagination is the prime characteristic defining Jose Arcadio. It, too, comes full circle: in the first chapter we see him teaching his children "by forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes," interrupting his task only to greet the arrival of gypsies who bring even more imaginary inventions. At the end, the last descendants receive instruction from Aureliano Segundo, who uses an English encyclopedia without being able to read it; he draws on his imagination to invent instructions.

There is a distinct gradation among the first "wonders" acquired by Jose Arcadio from the gypsies, a gradation further developed in later chapters. He begins by exploring the fields around Macondo with a magnet in search of gold for personal purposes (prosperity that will be achieved through Ursula's fabrication of candied animals and later through the proliferation of real animals during Aureliano Segundo's reign); then he passes on to convert a magnifying glass into a weapon of war (war will eventually involve the whole country through his son's revolutionary opposition to the government); with the compass and the sextant his imagination crosses seas and frontiers—as his last descendants will do in actuality. Finally, alchemy transports him to a realm of irreality, which is later repeated as several members of the family end their lives "liberated" from the limits of time, space and social convention.

Only the all-important element of time remains to be examined in the first chapter. Again a technique is introduced which is used throughout the novel. The compression of time is evident: fourteen years of life are packed into fourteen pages. This is achieved mainly by fragmenting and juggling various temporal levels, a process which can be summarized as follows: future with the present, in which five different stages are marked by the successive arrivals of the gypsies, introducing the great theme of transformations; the past alone, which contains allusions to an even more remote past; and present, past and future together. On all these levels, further divisions as well as interrelations between real time and imaginary time could be established. One remark by Ursula deserves mention: almost ready to die, she complains that "time was slower before." In fact, Jose Arcadio and his men need four days to conquer twelve kilometers in the first chapter; in the last, Gaston is contemplating the establishment of airmail service to Macondo. The speed of events becomes frantic at the end, when the sudden whirlwind of destruction prevents Aureliano Babilonia (note the change in name) from finishing the deciphering of the manuscript. Almost at the exact center of the novel Ursula utters, "it's as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning." From this point on, one can add to the reading in progression another reading in regression. The tempo increases, but the quickened passing of time only brings omens of degeneration and destruction. All human efforts are revealed to be futile, all hopes absurd in the face of the ultimate predestination. But precisely at this point, where written time ends, the cycle is reinitiated—in the reader's imagination.

Source: Birute Ciplijauskaite, "Foreshadowing as Technique and Theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude" in Books Abroad, No. 3, Vol. 47, Summer, 1973, pp. 479-84

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