SOURCE: “Historical Subversion and Violence of Representation in García Márquez and Ouologuem,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 107, No. 5, October, 1992, pp. 1235-52.

[In the following essay, Aizenberg addresses the differences between actual history and common beliefs, and discusses the concept of embellished history in historical novels by Gabriel García Márquez and Ouologuem.]

The rediscovery of history—a recent literary-critical event associated with new historicism, the engagement of the text with the world, and the postmodernist presence of the past—marks a negative response to the older ahistorical, if not antihistorical, bias of literature and criticism, in which formalisms of various kinds ruled the intellectual roost.¹ Of course, the response to the response has been swift and loud; the “rediscovery” of history has given small comfort to the previous roost rulers, who have seen their hallowed objectivities and unities shattered in the name of a mixed multitude of ex-centrics: women, minorities, Third Worlders (I realize the term Third World is problematic). Reinstating history, it seems, threatens to unmask how the West (was) won or, at the very least, to unsettle considerably the smooth surface of the master narratives that generations have imbibed.

The previous paragraph reflects a Western bias. Why assume that the story of the West's “rediscovery” of history is everyone else's story? Indeed, even as Euro-North American literature and criticism reconnect with the historical-political context in which works are embedded, largely by acknowledging ex-centric discourses and vindicating the wronged, that move's rehegemonizing potential has been interrogated (see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 162–63, 172–73; Jan-Mohammed and Lloyd 182–86). The West is still explicating the West, more critically and globally to be sure, but nonetheless parting from Western conditions (“late capitalist, bourgeois, informational, postindustrial society”) and answering Western needs (resisting the “totalizing forces” of “mass culture”) (Hutcheon, Poetics 7, 6). This unchanged focus could renew the subsumption of the non-Euro—North American into the Western, as well as continue the distortion of non-Western cultural experiences. Linda Hutcheon's important Poetics of Postmodernism both subsumes and distorts when it cites works such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Carlos Fuentes's El gringo viejo (The Old Gringo), and Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) as examples of a “new desire to think historically” (88; emphasis added). The comment fails to recognize that these novels were not produced under normative Western circumstances, primarily as responses to metropolitan exigencies, and also that their desire to think historically is nothing new, since history has never gone out of style in the Third World.

The use of these works to explicate Western developments is therefore dubious, the emphasis on “margins” and “edges” notwithstanding.² In fact, a more basic question arises when the historical specificity of postcolonial novels is flattened out to illustrate the center's renewed desire to engage history: To what extent has ahistoricism truly been banished? In the metropolis, arguments over this question have revolved around postmodern “simulacra of history” (Jameson, “Postmodernism” 71). The past is present in contemporary writing; but, as Jameson asks, is its presence “direct,” hence historical? Or are we receiving a historical ersatz, “some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present”? E. L. Doctorow's fiction—Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, for example—proves, for Jameson, that history is far from present in current literature; for Hutcheon, that it is far from banished: the admission implicit in Doctorow's historical metafiction, that we can only reconstruct the “ideas” of a past, does not necessarily vitiate history, but it does make problematic or revisionist views of history possible (Hutcheon, Poetics 212; see also McHale 90).

Yet what of the “periphery”? From a Third World perspective the question of the West's banishment of ahistoricism takes on a different cast. Here the directness or indirectness of the past is not in dispute: there is simply no past of which to speak. By bracketing the immediate social, linguistic, and literary situation of Third World novels and by disregarding their function as non-Eurocentric “histories of the imagination,” a returned Western historical awareness betrays the persistence of a blind spot—the continuing ahistorical ontologizing of non-Western phenomena, a practice that might well constitute a more serious challenge to the West's historical “recovery” (Rincón 66, 81). The complex and shifting interaction of worlds in today's global village is undeniable, and postcolonial novels do participate. But my focus here, on García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence (Bound to Violence), serves to reveal the absent history: those Third World conditions and exigencies that link postcolonial fiction and a desire to think historically.³

That the two novels have many characteristics befitting the historiographic-metafictional bent of contemporary Western novels illustrates not so much the state of the metropolis as the search for self in societies not Western but heavily marked by the West. Of course, even as I position myself “at the margins,” I take note of my insertion in the Western academy, an insertion that inevitably imposes blind spots of its own. Paradoxically, these blind spots may affect the vision of both the “margins” and the metropolis itself; the “West” is not a uniform beast, and one must keep in mind the historical specificity of Western nations in the relation of “center” and “rim,” imperializer and imperialized.⁴

I

One might argue that history is the stuff of which the postcolonial novel is made. This kind of generalized statement invites arguments and the citing of exceptions, but grosso modo history has been a consistent concern of Latin American and African fiction. The Latin American novel was “born” at the moment the Spanish colonies became independent, and many of the significant early novels were historical—an indication that imaginatively re-creating the past is a necessary part of the nation-building project. Works such as Vicente Fidel López's La novia del hereje ‘The Heretic's Love’ (1846), Manuel de Jesús Galván's Enriquillo (1882), Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Guatemocín (1846), and José Mármol's Amalia (1851) deal with conflictive moments in Latin America's history: the rivalries and repressions of the colonial period, the tragic relations between Native Americans and Europeans in the wake of the Spanish conquest, the difficulties of achieving postindependence stability and freedom. Noé Jitrik points out that although Walter Scott provided an important example for the nineteenth-century Latin American historical novel, what was in Europe the “desarrollo cualitativo de una continuidad” ‘qualitative development of a continuity’ became in Latin America the “iniciación necesaria de una práctica imprescindible” ‘necessary initiation into an indispensable practice’ (16–17). That is, for Latin Americans the writing of historical novels was not just a way of seeking a particular social or class identity but a search for identity itself: a political-national identity in recently constituted countries fractured by ethnicities and races and a literary identity in an area with a colonized imagination.

The ongoing demands of this search largely determined the persistent historical bent of literary works. In their approaches to history, novelistic techniques, and propositions for self-identification, these works traveled a long way from the foundational texts and varied from the naturalistic realism of such novels of the Mexican Revolution as Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo (1916; The Underdogs), to the oneiric mythologism of Miguel Angel Asturias's indigenist Hombres de maíz (1949; Men of Maize), to the self-conscious metahistoricity of Augusto Roa Bastos's dictator novel, Yo el Supremo (1974; I the Supreme). But left unchanged was the fictional commitment to engage history in response to what Jitrik characterizes as an identity full of prohibitions, constituted by intermittencies (17).

In the 1960s, the renowned Boom writers rejected the documentary tendency of previous Latin American narratives in favor of formal experimentation and the “universal” models of modernism—the modernism known for its ahistoricism. Yet even these writers were fully interested in Latin American history and identity, turning the aesthetic arsenal of modernism to such problems in books like Carlos Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz) or Mario Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (1966; The Green House). One Hundred Years of Solitude was part of that moment, participating in its strategies while forming a link with more recent historicizing novels. In these works, the popular and oral modes of recalling that are important in García Márquez's novel become primary features, along with testimonial narrative—as in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (1983; I, Rigoberta Menchú)—and they convey the petite histoire of the Native American, the black, or the poor. The concern with the “sweep” of national and continental history that One Hundred Years of Solitude displays is another principal trait of post-Boom narrative; Eduardo Galeano's multivolume rewriting of that history from the pre-Columbian era to the present, Memoria del fuego (1982–86; Memory of Fire [1985–88]), is an example. Post-Boom authors thus controvert and continue the achievements of their famed predecessors: they question the effectiveness of excessive linguistic bravura as a means to liberate history and identity, and they intensify the voices of the local, the marginal, and the ideologically “incorrect”; at the same time, they retain the legacy of the Boom both in the fragmentation and self-consciousness that reveal the fault lines of history and in the exploration of the ways words and narrative configure or disfigure historical events.⁵

African literature has had a similarly central interest in history. As Abiola Irele writes, the “essential force of African literature” is “its reference to the historical and experiential,” and the main task of criticism is to bring that force “into focus” (11). This emphasis again relates to the traumas of imperialization and a conflictive identity; in Irele's words, “Modern African literature has grown out of the rupture created within our indigenous history and way of life by the colonial experience” (27). It is no accident that early masterpieces of contemporary African writing were historical novels, since the fictive reelaboration of precolonial society and its confrontation with the Europeans—as in Chinua Achebe's seminal Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964)—directly correlates with the political struggle to gain independence and constitute a new nationality. In Africa, as in Latin America, the desire to come to terms with a fractured history and a still unintegrated national-cultural identity, not metropolitan dictates, induced the enduring importance of the historical.

Later works shifted away not from history but from historical reconstruction in a realist mode, often with gentle nostalgia for the precolonial, to hard-hitting, more formally innovative novels; here a nonidealized past intersecting with a bitter present expressed the disillusionment of the postindependence era: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood (1977), Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1979), and Bound to Violence exemplify this trend. Like Latin American writers, African authors used the styles of modernism and its successors, including self-referentiality, intertextuality, fragmentation, and the problematizing of historical and fictional narration, not to maneuver an escape from but to engage with history.

Furthermore, as Jonathan Ngate indicates, during the 1960s francophone African writers like Ouologuem adopted aggressive narrative strategies in response to both regional historical distress and the “first stage” francophone novels—Camara Laye's L'enfant noir (1953; The Dark Child) was paradigmatic—that propounded the lyrical view of the past, akin to Senghorian negritude. (I return to this topic later.) In other words, the demands of African history and of a developing African literary tradition primarily determined novelistic shape. As the political-historical anguish of postindependence francophone Africa deepened, novels such as Makombo Bamboté's Princesse Mandapu (1972) still featured political denunciation and a decentering of style, now with an even greater awareness of African speech patterns and an African audience (Ngate 59–61, 107–08). A similar awareness in anglophone Africa led Ngũgĩ to abandon English in favor of Gikuyu and a narrative technique with closer ties to the oral tale. The lessons of modernism as applied to African history, however, continue to echo in his Matigari (1987) through the stress on issues of discourse—who holds the power of rhetoric?—and through the enactment of storytelling and fiction making.

Instead of seeing the historical engagement of postcolonial fiction as evidence of Euro—North American literature's “new desire to think historically,” with the specter, once again, of the “center” absorbing the “margins,” one might argue that the “center” has finally caught up with the “margins.” The Western conditions and needs described by Hutcheon, Jameson, and others—be they multinationalism or a mass culture of the fleeting present and the well-designed package—have had a striking effect. They have forced the West to relearn the history its former colonies have never forgotten and, like those former colonies, to turn Western modes against themselves through a process of hybridizing and indigenizing. Yet, as I have said, my primary interest is not the “center” and what it has learned but the history, exigencies, and searches of the “margins.”

II

One Hundred Years of Solitude and Bound to Violence treat the Latin American and African pasts by chronicling imaginary but emblematic families—the Buendías of Macondo, the Saifs of Nakem. Both families are founders of a long-lived dynasty and rulers of a fiefdom, and their stories ring with the “sweep of history,” starting in a distant era tinged with legend and reaching modern days. The legend of the Saifs, set in the region of the Mali and Songhay empires, begins in the year 1202, in the fictional Empire of Nakem; it concludes in the post-World War II period, a time of nationalist ferment in French colonial Africa (see Imperato). Likewise, the saga of the Buendías, while anchored in the one hundred or so years of Colombian and Latin American history between formal independence in the mid-nineteenth century and the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950s, harks back to the 1500s, when Spain, poised between medievalism and modernity, colonized a “New World.” The Buendías and Saifs each bear the stamp of this particular colonial experience: the Buendías are descendants of the Spaniards who peopled Latin America's settler colonies; the Saifs, indigenous overlords of territories conquered but not settled by the French. What unites them (and the novels), however, is more significant than what divides them.

In giving the novels the aura of historical breadth, García Márquez and Ouologuem appear to follow consecrated models of historical narration that begin “in the beginning” and move forward to “our time,” thereby implying continuity and progress(ion). These models are Western, particularly the biblical paradigm García Márquez closely recalls in the novel's opening sequences, when the Buendías found Macondo, and numerous later historical writings, scholarly and fictional, whose linear or chronological disposition strives to suppress contradiction and to organize a seamless story, often a grand narrative that provides ideological justification and a sense of purposeful advancement (Lyotard). Some of these models are also non-Western, like the epics of the African oral tradition evoked by Ouologuem—the Sundiata, for instance—but they share with many Western narratives a sequencing, smoothing, and legitimating function through their accounts of the splendorous centuries of ruling dynasties, from the misty originary times of the god-heroes to current, closer times.

That the two narratives seem to conform to “sweep of history” paradigms, Western and indigenous, is no wonder; after all, are not both authors looking for a past order that they can use, along with its discursive patterns, to forge an identity? The answer is that neither Ouologuem nor García Márquez simply follows a line of history, a glorious saga of noncontradictory continuity; to do so, to pretend a seamless sweep, would be, as Ouologuem writes in Bound to Violence, “menu folklore” ‘empty folklore’ (9; 3).⁶ Rather, his Empire of Nakem is interesting because of “la fuite désespérée de sa population, … disséminée … en groupements … séparés les uns des autres par des tribus diverses … s'escrimant … en rivalités intestines où la violence le disputait à l'épouvante” ‘the desperate flight … of its population, … strewn about … separated from one another by all manner of tribes … and warring … with a violence equaled only by the dread it called forth’ (9; 3–4). The description is a gloss on both the content and the textual configuration of the work; Ouologuem and García Márquez, gesturing toward the linear and progressive, in fact give narrative substance to the violences of that model, interrogating normative European and indigenous schemata at the level of both fabulation and fabulatory strategy. Needless to say, linear progression is not the only model for European or indigenous narration, nor is interrogation of that model exclusive to postcolonial novels; it has also been a project of the Western novel. In the framework of an imperialized history, however, the pervasiveness and ascendancy of the normative take on a different coloring, calling for dismantling with particular force. Thus the violence in the novels—García Márquez's solitude is a form and product of violence—is not incidental, for it is central to each work's exploration of a broken history and an inchoate identity.

III

Just as problems of historical representation have reentered the Western critical agenda, so have issues of violence and representation—witness, for example, The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, a recent collection edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. In the introduction, the editors, citing Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault as major influences, underline their aim of exposing the power and violence inherent, but hidden or justified, in a variety of Western texts. They note that two modalities of violence interact in these texts: the violence that is “out there” in the world and the violence exercised on things through words (9). Armstrong and Tennenhouse admit that their Western, primarily Anglo-American, emphasis necessarily makes the collection a “partial statement,” although one of its goals is to expose the “imperialisms” of Western discourse, the physical and verbal violence inflicted on the (neo)colonized (2, 9). Still, in Gayatri Spivak's terms, the subaltern does not speak in the anthology, even though the subaltern began speaking on history, colonialism, and violence, and theorized violence and representation, long before the present Western “discovery” of the topic (xv, 201, 243).

During the 1960s, the period of Bound to Violence and One Hundred Years of Solitude, Frantz Fanon published Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), a meditation—though it is hardly meditative—on the process of decolonization and the development of Third World national polities and cultures. In the first part of the book, “Concerning Violence,” the Martinican-Algerian psychiatrist and political thinker argues that violence is essential for understanding history and representation in the colonized world. The European conquest, which manipulated and exacerbated tribal feuds and the existing injustices of elite rule, was achieved and maintained by dint of bayonets; the “native” was represented as a “nigger,” a “dirty Arab,” the opposite of the sublime inheritors of Greco-Roman culture; and indigenous history was obliterated (30, 37). Fanon writes:

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension … not [of the] history of the country he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called into question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonisation—the history of pillage—and to bring into existence the history of the nation—the history of decolonisation.

(41)

The task for the “native,” then, is to take the violence of collaborationist-colonialist rule and historical discourse and use it as a “cleansing force,” a force that directs rage into positive and creative channels to fight oppression, poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment (73).

Fanon repeatedly underlines the role of the intellectual in this process; “On National Culture,” the section of The Wretched of the Earth devoted to the subject, describes the Westernized intellectual reconnecting with the people and confronting degradation and savagery, unafraid if need be to become “just the sort of nigger that the white man wants.” The vigorous styles of writing in this period evince the assumption of Le Devoir de violence, not as an end in itself, but as a strategy of liberation (178, 177). To read Ouologuem's violent, historical-revisionist text is in large measure to read Fanon in a fictional expression.

The links Fanon establishes among colonialism, violence, and representation, made primarily within an African context (although he repeatedly alludes to Latin America), are taken up by the Chilean Ariel Dorfman in his study Imaginación y violencia en América. Dorfman reads the history of the area as an aggression that began long ago, and, like Fanon, whose Wretched of the Earth he cites directly, he traces the effects of violence on the solitary, traumatized psyche of the colonized; on the unstable, incestuous social relations; and on the exploitative and bloody political order. The question, therefore, is one not of violence or no violence but, as in Fanon's formulation, of the uses of violence—most important, the use of violence as a way out.

To plunge into this miasma thus became “el gran acto catártico,” the type of great cathartic act in which Latin American writing in the post-World War II era was engaged, especially during the Cuban Revolution. The narrative aggressiveness that was the hallmark of the new Latin American Boom novel expressed the violence exercised on the minds and bodies of Latin America's people, a violence that finally seemed to promise catharsis and salvation through Cuba's struggle for national liberation. Like Latin American existence itself, the works assumed violent themes and forms: the technical experimentation and linguistic slaps in the face found in the new novels seemed to mirror occurrences throughout centuries of history and reflect developments that now appeared to be coming to a head; they also shook up the reader by shaking up the basis of his or her fictional (and factual) worldview (see Dorfman, Imaginación 9–18, 24, 35–36). It is not incidental that Dorfman devotes a chapter of his book to One Hundred Years of Solitude (Imaginación 139–80); he takes up the theme of violence in García Márquez again in the recent Some Write to the Future.

Fanon's and Dorfman's theorizations indicate that at a crucial juncture—the accelerated decolonization and nation formation of the 1960s—the requirements of history, of Third World history, determined the application of modernism's frenzied fabulatory modes to Latin American and African literature. Although the effectiveness of this application has been challenged as both an “aesthetization” and an exaltation of violence, it unquestionably represented a significant and far-reaching reply, from a postcolonial perspective, to the violence “out there” and the violence exercised through words (see Concha xvii; Miller, Theories 62–63).

Jaime Concha argued that it is time to “dispense” with the “commonplace of Latin American violence,” since in the final analysis all history is violent (xvii); but the intention of Fanon and Dorfman, and of García Márquez and Ouologuem, is precisely to underline Third World violence as the product of a colonialist history, not to dilute or essentialize it as part of an ahistorical, generic category of “violence everywhere.” Galeano, capturing the abiding relevance of that intent, comments that “Latin America is always searching for its identity. … Peoples who are unsure of where they come from, what roots, what mixtures, what acts of love, what violations, are unlikely to know where they are going. But this implies the discovery of our true history, lied about and betrayed by the winners” (qtd. in Martin, Journeys 311).

Such awareness of the particular site of textual production is vital in addressing not only violent narrative content but violent technique as well. Many of the formal devices used in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Bound to Violence—parodic intertextual deflation is an important one—are, as mentioned, found in the repertoire of modernism and its successors. But the links Dorfman and Fanon establish between colonialist outrages and outrageous textuality serve as reminders of the very different functions of metaphorical violence in circumstances scarred by the literal type. A device “in the hands of those who exercise genuine power” assumes quite a distinct cast “in the hands of those classified as powerless.” Site and destination—the final uses of the text—cannot be ignored (see Hutcheon, “‘Circling'” 164, 151).

IV

I turn now to the specific practices of historical subversion and violence of representation in Bound to Violence and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Instead of describing continuity in discussions of history and culture, Jitrik, Irele, and Fanon contrast orderliness with disruption, and authorized with nonauthorized versions of historical events. Fanon in particular focuses on the colonialists as the supposed history makers who see their homeland as the point of reference and who consider the history of the colony an extension of metropolitan accomplishments. There are thus an “official” European version of events and an imposed succession in which the history of colonization becomes another link in the forward march of the metropolis and, by extension, of its fortunate progeny. Ouologuem and García Márquez work against such constructs. In their texts, the shared trials of a usurped history evince a common intent to invert that history, despite the divergences in the colonial pasts. One Hundred Years of Solitude turns the history of Europe on American soil inside out—an image we would do well to remember during the glorious celebrations of 1992. Seen from the perspective of Latin America, it is the history of abandonment, obliteration, and illegitimacy. The initial pages of the novel, which tell of the establishment of Macondo, evoke these motifs, in part through emblematic objects and characters: an astrolabe and a sextant represent the sixteenth-century Spanish voyages of conquest that thrust the people into an unfamiliar world; the buried suit of armor hints at the largely medieval heritage bequeathed to them by Spain; ice and gypsies suggest that Western scientific development and progress arrive from the outside anachronistically if at all (see Martin, “‘Magical'” 104).

What the stepchildren of Spain experience as solitude becomes erasure for the Native Americans. The plague of insomnia that signals the loss of memory by Macondo's early inhabitants is first recognized by two Guajiro Indians, prince and princess of a tribe forced into exile because of a similar calamity. This symbolism reflects a major theme in García Márquez's novel: physical and discursive blotting out and the diverse forms of memory that fight against obliteration. García Márquez pointedly inserts the account of the Native Americans and the insomnia plague in a chapter that explores different ways of recalling and recording: telling stories, writing signs, taking photographs, singing folk songs. These activities rebut authorized renderings—for example, those that have Spain bringing the light of “civilization” to the “savages.”

Illegitimacy also works against the celebration of Spain in America; murder and incest are the two related acts that give rise to Macondo. In connecting foundational and sexual violence, García Márquez overturns the religious and cultural ideals of Hispano-Catholic society—the sanctioned ideals of the colony—that emphasize sexual-racial purity and the Sacred and Legitimate Family. The Iberian obsession with limpieza de sangre ‘cleanliness of blood’ was transferred to Latin America, even though colonial Latin American society was begotten through violation and mixture. In placing the mark of tainted sex on Ursula and José Arcadio and on their progeny—who continually fight the inherited impulse to commit incest and whose sexuality is hardly “sacred”—García Márquez rewrites the expurgated version of colonial history; both founders of Macondo are descended from Spaniards, yet they and their children scarcely conform to the ideal. Macondo is a settler colony, but its inhabitants experience a profound sense of alienation from Peninsular norms.⁷

Bound to Violence also deflates the colonialist myth of grandeur and continuity by countering its sanitized traditions. Ouologuem begins with the Arab conquest, which predated the European colonialism. In the first section of the novel, the Saifs embrace Islam, the religion of the conquerors and the alleged depository of “spiritual advancement” (22). But juxtaposed with descriptions of the prayer rituals and the educational institutions through which this advancement is to occur are the images of the Arab slave trade, a horror carried on under the guise of pilgrimages to Mecca, and descriptions of the elites' manipulation of such practices as polygamous marriage, which allowed them to engage in convenient political alliances and unholy sexual practices, including incest. European penetration—the metaphor is apt—represents another high-blown rhetoric of altruism masking violence. The pieties of Koranic discourse (which Ouologuem parodies mercilessly, as I discuss later) are replaced by the French colonialists' “mission of civilization” (44). But, again, Ouologuem places the slogans alongside accounts of the conquering raids and rapes (27).

The church, through its missionaries, becomes an important part of the European “spiritual advancement,” for instance, by seizing “idols” and selling them for profit (76). The obliteration of parts of the indigenous heritage through pillage parallels the imposition of French history on the colony; Ouologuem writes with characteristic sarcasm of African schoolchildren studiously commemorating the glories of the Marne and the eternity of Verdun. Naturally, in rendering the glorious continuity of French civilization in Europe and in the colonies, Ouologuem leans heavily on the violence and does not hesitate to salute “l'anonyme négraille” ‘the anonymous niggertrash’ dragged miles away from home and unjustifiably killed in the wars of the Europeans (143; 123).

Colonialist histories are not, however, the only ones that Ouologuem and García Márquez cut up. Perhaps even more ripe for strewing about and deflating through exaggeration are the versions of the native elites, the successors of Spain in Latin America and the predecessors turned successors of France in Africa who have come to rule much of both areas. The two authors write with the aim of upsetting this order: García Márquez under the influence not only of the early phases of the Cuban Revolution, which promised an end to elite control, but also of La Violencia (1946–66), a twenty-year civil war between Colombian conservatives and liberals; Ouologuem amid the travails of postindependence internecine warfare, neocolonialism, and the growing authoritarianism of African presidents (see Tittler). In his biting essay collection, Lettre à la France nègre, an important adjunct to the novel, Ouologuem characterizes his literary-historical project as a shock of truths: white colonialism was a primordial rupture in the history of Africa, but no African is unaware that the colonialism of the black elites preceded that of the Europeans and the Arabs (90).

Exposing this “colonialisme des Notables noirs” lies at the core of Ouologuem's historical revisionism in Bound to Violence:

Véridique ou fabulée, la légende de Saïf Isaac El Héït hante de nos jours encore le romantisme nègre, et la politique des notables en maintes républiques. … Maints chroniqueurs consacrent son culte par la tradition orale et célèbrent à travers lui l'époque prestigieuse des premiers Etats, dont le roi, sage et philosophe, couronnait une épopée qui appelait la plus grande tâche de l'archéologie, de l'histoire, de la numismatique et autres sciences humaines, auxquelles sont venues se joindre les disciplines naturelles et ethnologiques.

(14)

Whether truth or invention, the legend of Saif Isaac al-Heit still haunts the Black romanticism and the political thinking of the notables in many republics. … Chroniclers draw on the oral tradition to enrich his cult and through him celebrate the glorious era of the first States with their wise philosopher-king, whose history has called not only archaeology, history and numismatics but also the natural sciences and ethnology to their highest tasks.

(8)

Here are encapsulated the various threads in the novelist's attack. The oral tradition, which for many became the repository of “Africanness” and a “people's form” in response to Western denigration of nonliterate cultures, was a frequent apologia for the status quo: the much vaunted griots and their oral epics generally served the conservative role of exalting great figures. Negritude, whose best-known exponent was Léopold Sédar Senghor, the president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, was another celebration of blackness that could be turned to elite ends. Although negritude was a complex movement with diverse strands, the romanticized vision of a pre-European, spiritually holistic, justly ruled Africa that figured in many of Senghor's writings often served to draw attention away from the abuses, past and present, of the “wise philosopher-king.” The support given to this view of negritude by some European investigators, among them the ethnologist Leo Frobenius (the Shrobenius of Ouologuem's novel), helped to legitimate and canonize it.⁸ These renditions of African history, elaborated to replace European falsifications, were in effect falsifications themselves, used to cover up the outrages of precolonial elite suzerainty and to justify twentieth-century cults of personality.

Ouologuem replaces the sanctioned museum or tropical-garden image of Africa with what, echoing Fanon, he considers the miserable reality of underdevelopment, slavery, blood, and violence (Lettre 190). (In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon also rejects the cultural-political stance of negritudist “Black romanticism.” Ouologuem's novel dwells on this gory, sadistic sexually perverted subject matter in detail as the notable Saifs act less than notably, providing their people with the only continuity Ouologuem grants (Sahelian) African history—the continuity of recurrent fracturing. In Scribe, Griot, and Novelist, Thomas Hale takes to task earlier critics who dismiss this reading of history as an “invention that had nothing to do with reality”; more often than not Ouologuem is right on target, in some instances anticipating the latest historical studies—although what he offers his readers is unquestionably an “interpretive, creative image” (Hale 138, 146). In the novel, Ouologuem enters the violence of colonialist-collaborationist domination and becomes a “dirty wog” as a cleansing force, in the way Fanon envisions.

The same can be said of García Márquez. The main events of his novel, after the violences of the founding years, are the revolutionary wars and the banana-strike massacre, both instances of violence generated by elite authoritarian control and based on major occurrences in Colombia's history (see Mena; Minta). Again, the author makes the issue of memory and obliteration central, for the conservative oligarchies that dominated Colombia during much of the hundred-year period of the novel literally rewrote history to suit their views. Alliances with neo-colonialism—primarily with North American commercial interests that monopolized sectors of the economy (e. g., the banana plantations)—reinforced the oligarchies' dominance, so that producing versions favorable to these interests became part of the historical rewriting.

The task of One Hundred Years of Solitude is thus to counter the history that García Márquez calls “la falsa que los historiadores habían admitido, y consagrado en los textos escolares” ‘the false one that historians had created and consecrated in the schoolbooks’ (296; 322). The liberal rebellions that Aureliano Buendía leads against the conservative forces, as well as the strike on the banana plantations that ends with the gunning down of workers, are recovered from oblivion and retold from the point of view of the defeated. Against the pretended stability, the author pits ongoing chaos, with only mild hyperbole: “El coronel Aureliano Buendía promovió treinta y dos levantamientos armados y los perdió todos. Tuvo diecisiete hijos varones de diecisiete mujeres distintas, que fueron exterminados uno tras uno” ‘Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other’ (94; 104). The prodigious violence and the prodigious sexuality bear witness to the unfinished business of consolidating a nation and an identity on ideals other than the censorships and official pieties of the colony retained in the oligarchy.

García Márquez's novel criticizes both conservatives and liberals; the endless civil wars between them, represented by Aureliano's insurrections, lead to little stability and less change. Further, the dynasty that lives out the pained history of Colombia and Latin America is the liberal Buendía clan, not unelitist itself. García Márquez advocates an end to all forms of elite ascendancy; for all their progressiveness, the liberals—who also had their turns at leadership—are hegemonic as well. Yet it is the conservatives who embody the worst features of oligarchic repression, which they justify under the banner of a God-given power to establish “public order and family morality” (97).

Indeed, the government tries to expunge the story of Aureliano Buendía's wars, so that with time the memory of him is diluted to that of an invented figure; the account of the strikers shot at the station is likewise set forth in judicial documents and elementary school textbooks as a nonevent, because it conflicts with such rose-garden renditions of officialdom as the legal system and the educational network (359). The deluge “decreed” by Mr. Brown (whose portrayal has more than one shade of Ouologuem's Shrobenius) effaces any recollection of the slaughter, just as the insomnia plague wipes out memory in the early epoch of Macondo; but the memory survives through eyewitnesses, by word of mouth, in the testimony of the novel. Like Ouologuem, García Márquez plunges into the nightmare of (neo)colonial Colombian and Latin American history as a strategy of liberation: his task, in the words of the novel, is to annihilate a past “consuming itself from within” (371).

In Bound to Violence and One Hundred Years of Solitude, then, characteristics such as noncontinuity and the problematizing of historical or fictional narration are conceived primarily as responses to local circumstances—not to Western needs or “universal” styles. The issue of authorized and unauthorized renditions of history is of particular import because paradigms imposed on the colonies, to the detriment of the subalterns' own historical identity, forced Third World writing to focus on interrogating history. Thus, a major question of postmodern historiographic metafiction—“How can we know the past today—and what can we know of it?”—is the question of books like Bound to Violence and One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hutcheon, Poetics 92). In these novels, the problems of constructing the past and of having access to it only in textualized form—schoolbooks, judicial records, griots' epics, as well as the counterpractices of stories, folk songs, and contemporary fictional discourse—radicalize the (meta)historicizing tendencies already inherent in Latin American and African writing because of specific world-historical conditions.

This radicalization is clear when we look at an earlier novel such as Things Fall Apart. The surface of its apparently straightforward realist narration is already interpellated when the representative of empire, the District Commissioner, selects the title and the contents of his book on the events just recounted: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger (191). These words close Achebe's work, and they bespeak a sharp awareness of the intertextual inevitability of historical recuperation in Africa; but Achebe's concern is scarcely the undoing of a modernist withdrawal into textual (self-)referentiality to escape the “nightmare of history.” Rather, it is the colonialist construction of the African past, of African history and identity, by means of colonialist textualizations (see, e. g., Morning). Things Fall Apart is Achebe's counter textualization, his undoing of an imperialist discourse that, as Helen Tiffin has underscored, was more than textual, enabling “conquest and colonization and the capture and/or vilification of alterity” (“Post-colonial Literatures” 22). The title Achebe gives the District Commissioner's volume (which another British builder of empire “reads” in the author's next novel, Arrow of God) echoes the title of countless volumes written by European settlers and civil servants “out of Africa”; and the portrait of African (Igbo) life he builds—the language, the customs, the worldview—is a direct rejoinder to novels such as Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson (Aizenberg, “Third World” 88–89).

What Achebe does not make as explicit in his early fiction—it is more obvious in his recent Anthills of the Savannah—is the constructedness, the metahistoricity, of his version of the past. García Márquez and Ouologuem, however, indicate openly that their novels are both “referential” inscriptions and “imaginative” re-creations of history (Hutcheon, Poetics 144). (García Márquez also acknowledges such meta-history in his 1989 novel, El general en su laberinto [The General in His Labyrinth], a journey through Bolívar's final days.) They do so to clarify the ideological biases and economic-political networks that determine historical versions; to deflate these versions and produce more revealing, though more painful, interpretations; and to recognize that, ultimately, all histories—theirs included—are interpretative constructions, fictions that refer to themselves and to other fictions. These objectives lead them not to a valueless relativism—their books definitely have a point of view—but to a greater understanding of just what is at stake in constructing history and in making use of these constructions in the world. Thus each novel puts contestatory fabulatory strategies at the heart of its project, displaying in its narrative economy a violent subversiveness that parallels its content.

V

The charge of plagiarism leveled at Ouologuem by a number of critics signals the centrality of (inter)textuality in Bound to Violence; García Márquez has not been accused of stealing for One Hundred Years of Solitude, but he indicates that in his book, too, text leads to text, text violates text.

Eric Sellin, Aliko Songolo, Seth Wolitz, Christopher Miller, and Bernard Mouralis, among others, have studied Ouologuem's ravishment of various works: André Schwarz-Bart's Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just), Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield, Guy de Maupassant's “Boule de suif”; ethnographic literature, most prominently Frobenius; African fiction; the Bible and the Koran; the African oral tradition; and Arabic-language chronicles, particularly the Tarîkh el-Fettâch and the Tarîkh es-Soudan. Ouologuem himself expands the list; in the “Lettre aux pisse-copies, Nègres d'écrivains célèbres” (“Letter to the Copy-Pissers, Negroes [ghostwriters] of Famous Writers”), he submits best-sellers by Ian Fleming and a half-dozen popular novelists as “model” texts. The author provides algebraic charts outlining variant combinatoria of humor, description, suspense, violence, and eroticism, along with sample paragraphs of each, to assist in the creative process; he thereby ensures the budding copy-pisser endless potential readings and references—as in nothing less than the Thousand and One Nights (Lettre 167–78).

Sellin, in his article “Ouologuem's Blueprint for Le Devoir de violence,” accuses the author of bad faith, noting that the missive to the copy-pissers “now emerges not as the satire it appears to be but rather as an all-too-real modus operandi” (120). But that is exactly the point, and other critics, working with the concept of intertextuality, have come to evaluate Ouologuem's mode of operation less as perfidy than as necessity—the necessity of undermining accepted discourses about Africa (Mouralis; Miller, Blank Darkness, “Trait”). The novel's aggressive inter-cutting of bits and pieces from diverse “sources” is a way of disputing and repositioning these archetypes. Laurent Jenny's comment about the intertextual word is pertinent: “L'allusion suffit à introduire dans le texte centreur un sens, une représentation, une histoire, un ensemble idéologique sans qu'on ait besoin de les parler. Le texte-origine est là, virtuellement présent, porteur de tout son sens sans qu'on ait besoin de l'énoncer” ‘The allusion is enough to introduce into the centering text a meaning, a representation, a story, an ideological complex without any need for spelling them out. The originary text is there, present for all intents and purposes, carrying the entire weight of its meaning, without any need for direct mention’ (266; my trans.).

In Bound to Violence, the opening passage immediately sets the intertextual stage by mimicking oral discourse held as the archetype of African literature: “Nos yeux boivent l'éclat du soleil, et vaincus, s'étonnent de pleurer. Maschallah! oua bismillah! … Un récit de l'aventure sanglante de la négraille—honte aux hommes de rien!” ‘Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and, overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! wa bismillah! … To recount the bloody adventure of the niggertrash—shame to the worthless paupers!’ (9; 3). The intent of the formulaic rhetoric of orature, and of the Arabic-Islamic discourse characteristic of the chronicles, is, however, inverted by Ouologuem's repositioning: the ironic tone and the startling content (the suffering of the people, not the saga of glorious dynasties or conquests) set into motion a chain of allusive subversions whereby the highly coded forms, their ideological underpinnings, and their historical versions are demolished.

The same inversion occurs with Western texts, ancient and modern. Ouologuem takes on the Bible as well as the discourse of colonialism, a discourse often justified by recourse to Holy Writ: “Saif dit: ‘Que les missionnaires soulagent la misère des humbles … que la loi française donne au pays des fruits contenant leur semence d'ordre et de calme'—et il en fut ainsi” ‘Saif said: “May the missionaries appease the misery of the humble … may French law give to the country the seeds of order and peace”—and so it came to pass’ (81; 66). European authors fare no better: Greene's mild eroticism becomes a commentary on the sexual exploitation of African women; Maupassant's descriptions of European killing European turn into a critique of colonialism replaced on African soil (Ouologuem 69, 55; 144, 124).⁹ Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, which has been called the blueprint (Sellin) or matrix text (Mouralis) for Bound to Violence, is the European work with which Ouologuem dialogues least violently, perhaps because it tells of a centuries-old violence, by Christian Europe against the Jewish people, that culminated in the gas chambers; there are multiple parallelisms between Jews and Africans in Bound to Violence.

One Hundred Years of Solitude also “steals” and repositions (master) texts of the West as well as colonialist discourse. The Bible, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, is an insistent blueprint, and its diction is continually mimicked: “la noche en que acamparon junto al río … José Arcadio Buendía soñó … que en aquel lugar se levantaba una ciudad. … Preguntó qué ciudad era aquella, y le contestaron …” ‘the night on which they camped beside the river … José Arcadio Buendía dreamed … that right there a … city … rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered …’ (28; 31–32). But the biblical tradition that was an essential instrument of conquest is disrupted: despite the diction, God is absent; Adam (José Arcadio Buendía) begins with banishment from the Garden; the new land is unpromised and violent; the voice of prophecy (Melquíades) speaks and writes not of a divinely ordained future but of a predestined destruction; there is no salvation—although the Spaniards, speaking the Word from the very beginning, had insisted that there was (see Harrison).

The chronicles of the Indies, which, starting with Columbus's diary, were the archetypes of colonialist discourse on the Americas, are likewise alluded to, in Jenny's sense, and given new functions. In his Nobel address, García Márquez refers to these writings—with their tales of monstrous animals, disturbing mirrors, the illusory and sought-for land of El Dorado, and alluvial soils brimming with endless gold—as the germs of contemporary Latin American novels. The rhetoric of the chronicles and of analogous “marvelous” readings of Latin America is so pervasive in One Hundred Years of Solitude that it has come to be considered the novel's defining narrative trait, often under the not unproblematic rubric of “magical realism.” Yet, in the same address, after characterizing the chronicle readings of the New World as “demencia,” García Márquez insists that the continent has no desire to be a mere shadow of a dream: “La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, … cada vez más solitarios.” “El desafío mayor para nosotros ha sido la insuficiencia de recursos convencionales para hacer creíble nuestra vida” ‘To interpret our history through schemas which are alien to us has the effect of making us even more unknown, … even more solitary.’ ‘The major challenge before us has been the want of conventional resources to make our life credible’ (332–33; 209–10; emphasis added).

The author's comments link up with recent studies that examine magical realism in a postcolonial context. In these works, manipulating the discourse of the marvelous is understood as an act intended to reproduce, puncture, and overcome the unreality imposed by the colonialist enterprise. This enterprise first read the New World through the distorted glass of a European imperialism fed by a medieval worldview, and it went on doing so, even though it was the persistence of the “fabulous” stereotypes and the ongoing madness of a colonialist history that kept Latin America “magical” (see Martin, “‘Magical'”; Palencia-Roth; Bhabha; and Slemon, “Magic Realism”). In the magical-realist text, the magical is not part of a self-assured discourse of domination, as it is in the chronicles. Instead, Slemon writes, magical realism foregrounds the “gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter and reflected in the text's disjunctive language of narration” (“Magic Realism” 13). Novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude remain suspended between the language of the magical and the real, not because Latin America is inherently more magical than, say, Spain but because the text enacts the deliriums of a world marked by colonialism, where alien schemata interpret reality and violent discontinuities mark the configuration of time and space.

The notion of a disjunctive or foreshortened time-space is useful for understanding of García Márquez's transformative handling of other works from the Western narrative tradition: “También el tiempo sufría tropiezos y accidentes y podía por tanto astillarse y dejar en un cuarto una fracción eternizada” ‘[T]ime also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room’ (296; 322). This pregnant description characterizes the room holding Melquíades's Sanskrit parchments, which are, at the same time, the narrative of Macondo and the Buendías, set down prophetically by the gypsy seer, and a compendium of ages of Western writing. Within the condensed time-space of (post)colonial culture, represented by the magical writerly locales of the novel—Melquíades's room, the Catalonian's bookshop, Gabriel's hotel room—García Márquez mixes epochs, authors, languages in a provocative intertextual freewheeling that undercuts their solemnity and modifies their constitution not only through specific inversions but through the very juxtaposition.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author uses Sanskrit, the Ursprache of Indo-European civilization and the carrier of a high literature with sacred tales of gods and heroes, to recount the hardly sacral foibles of mere mortals living on the outer reaches of Western culture, enduring its lowest exploitations. The text is further “degraded” as a “translation” into mere Spanish and as a patchwork of other texts (Kristeva's “mosaic of citations”), many of them also translations—Oedipus Rex (power, obstinacy, incest), Nostradamus's Centuries (esotericism, prophecy), Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (fantasy, hyperbole, laughter), Kafka's Metamorphosis (the naturalization of the bizarre), Faulkner's stories of the South. The importance of translation, itself an indication of the intertextual inevitability and cultural hybridism of Third World novels, underscores the heterogeneity and compression inherent in One Hundred Years of Solitude, like the wise Catalonian's bookstore, “un basurero de libros usados, puestos en desorden” ‘a dump for used books, which were placed in disorder’ (310; 338).

But this compressed intertextual “disorder,” this representational violence, contains the promise of a new pluralistic, nonhierarchical order. The jostling of text with text in One Hundred Years of Solitude intensifies the deconstructive and recombinatory possibilities of the novel. It reinforces the power of allusion to pierce the lofty-tragic diction of Western classics, to satirize the persistence of European “magic” in the New World, or to metamorphose ribald and fantastical critiques of European society into a critique of colonialism. The same is true of Ouologuem's maneuvers, where the subverting resonances of translation and intermingling are even more potent, because in Africa “other tongue” and “mother tongue” are at odds: Ouologuem, unlike García Márquez (and most Latin Americans), handles a language that is not his first (Zabus 1). For a “mere” African, the use of French, the minority “langue de culture” imposed on the colonies, to question and jumble the texts of that culture becomes an especially powerful tactic of textual deflation.¹⁰ By eroding the hegemonizing potential of consecrated discourses while reinscribing their liberating possibilities through novel, oppositional rubbings together, each author helps construct a truly open dialogue, the real aspiration of a “global” world.

VI

Throughout my discussion, I have referred to deflation through exaggeration, the use of ironic tone, the undercutting of solemnity, and merciless parody as characteristics of García Márquez's and Ouologuem's intertextual violence. Parody, a major form of twentieth-century “inter-art discourse,” is closely aligned with historical consciousness, as artists seek to relate the past to the present in periods of ideological instability (Hutcheon, Parody 2, 101, 82). From a Western perspective, such instabilities include the questioning of the subject, with the concomitant unprivileging of the author and of the text-as-origin, and, in more recent, postmodern times, the revision of modernism's formalist isolation from history. Through parody, received, “used-up” modes, in John Barth's phrase, are shaken and renewed. Their “worldly” dimension is likewise put in doubt, since parody's repetition with a difference, its ironic recoding, is invoked more often than not at the expense of the original text's ideology (Barth, “Literature of Exhaustion” 64; Aizenberg 10, 204; Hutcheon, Parody 4–5, 110, 101–03).

Barth, Gérard Genette, and Hutcheon all cite Jorge Luis Borges as an expert at the palimpsestic text, an author whose inescapable parody of canonic works and forms became an essential model for the renewal of contemporary letters. Not often noted, but relevant to García Márquez and Ouologuem, is that Borges comes from a far-off, southern republic marked by a colonialist history. (For Euro-North American critics, Borges has largely been osmosed into the metropolis, aided by his cultivated “British” persona and political conservatism.) The parodic miniaturization of venerable works of art—the Divine Comedy in “The Aleph,” Don Quixote in “Pierre Menard,” Utopia in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—became a favorite ploy because it allowed Borges, an intellectual keenly aware of Argentina's outsider status and ambiguous position, to come to terms with the West's history and literary tradition. To see this process at work, one need only read Borges's essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”), which advocates the right of Argentine intellectuals, like other colonized or subordinated groups (the Irish, the Jews), to treat the canon “sin supersticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene, consecuencias afortunadas”'without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already has, fortunate consequences’ (Obras 273; Labyrinths 184).¹¹

For Borges, as for García Márquez (one of his Boom ephebes) and for Ouologuem, irreverent parody cannot be separated from a Third World condition; and that condition, more than Western preoccupations, determines the felicitous lack of superstition in their subversively original works. The individual subject of Enlightenment philosophy is not a burden in much of the world; history, as I have noted, need not be rediscovered. What is needed—and here parody acts as both symptom and cure—is an irreverently violent textual linking of a colonialist past and a post-colonial present. Out of this Third World need, with its hybridizing and indigenizing strategies, comes a vital contribution of the parodic ethos to literary history: a recharging of form that to a great extent explains the status of Borges, García Márquez, and other Latin American and Third World writers as path breakers in twentieth-century literature. One must not forget, however, the hurtful world-historical context of that innovativeness.

VII

As I have said, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Bound to Violence refer not only to other fictions but also to themselves; inter- and intra-art discourse are intimately linked. Both novels close with the text becoming “un espejo hablado” ‘a speaking mirror,’ in García Márquez's well-known formulation (350; 383). When Aureliano Babilonia finally deciphers Melquíades's parchments, we discover that the manuscript written by the gypsy sage is the novel we have been reading; the history of Macondo, “la ciudad de los espejos (o los espejismos)” ‘the city of mirrors (or mirages),’ is the book, and when the book ends, so does the city. Ouologuem similarly reflects the narrative back on itself in his concluding pages, making explicit its status as a tissue of images and words. The last part of the novel describes not new “action” but a film, Zamba, that tells the history of the Empire of Nakem—the story we have been reading. The self-referential mise en abîme is reinforced by a chess game that immediately follows. The last Saif and the last colonial bishop “play out” the violent history of the empire on the board, their play mirrored by a verbal duel that recalls the figures, events, and linguistic techniques of the novel. As dawn arrives, the book comes to a finish, and Saif, the bishop, Nakem, and all its memories dissolve into air, water, and fire, the basic elements—in much the same way that Macondo is swept away by a biblical hurricane; biblos originally meant papyrus, of course, and biblion, book.

But the self-reflexive “game” (the last word of Bound to Violence) sums up the ultimate intention of these books' textual strategies, from the breakup of linearity, to the intertextuality, to the problematizing of narration, to the autorepresentation. What the mirror reveals is history, and if it reveals history to be constructed, it is for the sake of constructing the still-to-come history of Africa and Latin America (see Sommer and Yúdice 206). The mirror held to the book shows the fabrications that led to the violence and the uncohered identity, an identity that these novels struggle to explore, “make credible,” and reconform. Because if the not credible includes ersatz identities such as native-hating Europeans, paradisiacal pre-Europeans, “dirty wogs,” pure-blooded elitist minorities, or wise feudal lords, the credible becomes everything that stands in opposition; that accepts impure and lowly origins, hybridity, the composite; that favors open process over exclusionary stasis. Out of these materials the future identities and histories of the Third World, indeed of the whole world, are to be fashioned. But we must first accept books like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Bound to Violence on their own terms, as mirrors of the solitude of postcolonial societies, whose history is as yet interpreted through alien schemata.¹²

Notes

1. The antihistorical bias of literary criticism as a response to “positivistic ‘factualism’ and historicist overschematization” is studied by Graff in Literature 124–25 and, more extensively, in Professing Literature. On the engagement of the text with the world, see Said; on new historicism, see Veeser.

2. For a discussion of the problem from a Latin American perspective, see Rincón 77–81; Yúdice 117–18; Ortega 407–09; and Franco, “Nation” 210–11. Franco cites McHale's use of Latin American works as a recuperation that deprives texts of their “own historical relations” (210); Ortega concentrates on the analogous strategy in Barth's “Literature of Replenishment.” See also Slemon, “Modernism's Last Post.”

3. In preparing this essay, I have consulted several texts in addition to the critical material specifically cited: on García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude, works by Bell-Villada, González, Jansen, Martinez, McGuirk and Cardwell, McMurray, Montañer, and Morello-Frosch; on Ouologuem and Bound to Violence, works by Barkan, Fatunde, and Wright.

4. Jameson's “Third-World Literature” and the controversy it ignited illustrate the difficulties of writing about the “edges” from the Western academy. For a critique of Jameson, see Ahmad; Franco, “Nation,” esp. 204–08. Studies of Canadian and Australian literatures stress the need to nuance the understanding of the “West” in the context of histories of imperialization. These histories, Slemon writes, are marked by a “tradition of refusal toward the conceptual and cultural apparatuses of the European imperium,” although neither country is part of the Third World (“Modernism's Last Post” 6). Hutcheon, in “‘Circling,’” likewise considers the Canadian example. She notes, “History cannot be conveniently ignored” (153).

5. Analyses of the Boom and its relation to the post-Boom can be found in Sommer and Yúdice, esp. 191, 201, 204–06; Martin, Journeys 197–235, 311–67; Sommer 71–75; Larsen, “Juan Rulfo”; Beverly; and Franco, “Crisis.” Critiques of the Boom focus on its extreme faith that a revolution in language is, ipso facto, a revolution in society and on the gaps in its societal-historical concerns. Franco argues that although Boom writers applied the assumptions of literary modernism to the Latin American circumstance, the very reproduction of these assumptions undermined the writers' project.

6. Parenthetical citations for translations give the page number from the original-language text first, followed by the page number from the English translation.

7. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin consider at length the feeling of alienation in English-speaking settler colonies and its expression in literature. These colonies could have “the temporary illusion of a filiative relationship with the dominating culture.” a “privilege” unavailable to colonies of intervention in Africa, for example (26). But what they had was indeed an illusion, particularly in the realm of history. The dissimilarities in colonializations notwithstanding, received European history is “run aground,” as in African and other postcolonial writing (34; see also 133–45).

8. Cham discusses the conservatism of the oral tradition. On the griot as a form of cultural literacy linked to those in power, see Hale 163. Rogmann studies the ideological underpinnings of Senghorian negritude. For Frobenius's thinking and its connections to Senghor, see Jahn. Irele provides a concise review of critiques of the movement (83–86).

9. Wolitz analyzes the Greene passage; Miller, in “Trait d'Union” and Blank Darkness, the Maupassant.

10. Zabus adopts Calvet's term glattophagia to describe French linguistic imperialism in Africa (17). She notes, “More so than English, French emerged as the most eloquent instrument of cultural domination and eradication” (20).

11. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin examine the rewriting of canonical stories as a significant technique of postcolonial texts (97–104).

12. This study was written under a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers. I thank the endowment for its support.

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