Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

And so the Buendías found a precarious Arcadia in the jungles of Colombia, where not only the virtues of the Golden Age of the past are acclaimed but also those of the coming Utopia of Progress. We realize in García Márquez that, since the Enlightenment, Europe is the utopia of Latin America: law and science and beauty and progress were now a Latin American albatross hung around the neck of Europe: we expected from the West the photograph that finally fixed our image for eternity; or the ice that burns as it cools. But this notion of progress — and the names that accompany it — is to prove illusory:

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

This gypsy leads us to the third aspect of freedom at the root of the name America: the freedom to preserve an ironical smile, a freedom not unlike that won by the first Spanish philosopher, the Stoic from Córdoba, Seneca, but even more rooted in the Renaissance reflection on the duality of truth and on the difference between the appearance and the reality of things. To deny any absolute, be it the absolute of faith before or of reason now; to season all things with the ironic praise of folly and thus appear a madman in the eyes of both Topos and U-Topos: this is the world of Erasmus in Europe and especially in Spain, where Erasmus became, more than a thinker, a banner, an attitude, a persistent intellectual disposition that lives to this day in Borges and Reyes, in Arreola and Paz and Cortázar.

Indeed, Erasmus is the writer of the samizdat of Spanish and Spanish-American literature, the underground courier of so many of our attitudes and words, he who failed externally in Spain only to be victorious eternally forever and ever: Erasmus the father of Don Quixote; the grandfather of Tristram Shandy and Jacques le Fataliste; the great-grandfather of Catherine Moreland and Emma Bovary; the great-uncle of Prince Myshkin; and the revered ancestor of the Nazarín of Pérez Galdós, the Pierre Ménard of Borges, and the Oliveira of Cortázar — but also of the Buendías, who incessantly decipher the signs of the world, those that are put on trees and cows so their names will not be forgotten, or their functions, those signs they have seen behind the world’s appearances, those they have read in the chronicles of their own lives, feverishly naming things and people and then feverishly deciphering what they themselves have written. What they have discovered — invented — imagined — desired — named.

Macondo … was built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point …

The invention of America is indistinguishable from the naming of America. Indeed, Alejo Carpentier gives priority to this function of the American writer: to baptize things that without him would be nameless. To discover is to invent is to name. No one dare stop and reflect whether the names being given to things real and imagined are intrinsical to the named, or merely conventional, certainly not substantial to them. The invention of America occurs in a pre-Socratic time, that time whose disappearance Nietzsche lamented; it happens in a mythical time magically arisen in the midst of the nascent Age of Reason, as if to warn it, in Erasmian terms, that reason that knows not its limits is a form of madness.

García Márquez begins his Nobel Lecture by recalling the fabulous things named by the navigator Antonio Pigafetta as he accompanied Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe:

He had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.

This discovery of the marvelous because it is imagined and desired occurs in many other fantastic chroniclers of the invention of America; but even the more sober, one feels, had to invent in order to justify their discovery of, even their being in the New World. The pragmatical Genoese, Christopher Columbus, thinks he can fool the Queen who sent him off at great expense, by inventing the existence of gold and species where they do not exist. When at last he does find gold — in Haiti — he calls the island La Española, says that there all is “as in Castile,” then “better than in Castile,” and finally, since there is gold, the gold must be the size of beans, and the nights must be as beautiful as in Andalusia, and the women whiter than in Spain, and sexual relations much purer (to please the puritanical Queen and not frighten off further appropriations), but there are Amazons as well, and sirens, and a Golden Age, and a good, innocent savage (to please the Queen this time by amazing her). Then the good Genoese merchant reasserts himself: the forests of the Indies where he has landed can be turned into fleets of ships.

So we are still in the East. America has not been named, although its marvels have. Columbus has named what he was sent to find: gold, species, Asia. His biggest invention is finding China and Japan in the New World. For Vespucci, however, the new thing about the New World is its newness. The Golden Age and the Good Savage are here, described and named by him in the New World, as a New Golden Age and a New Good Savage bereft of history, once more in Paradise, discovered before the Fall, untainted by the old. Indeed, we deserve Amerigo’s name: he invented our imaginary newness.

For it is this sense of total newness, of primeval appearance, that gives its true tone to names and words in America. The urgency of naming and describing the New World — of naming and describing in the New World — is intimately related to this newness, which is, in effect, the most ancient trait of the New World. Suddenly, here, in the vast reaches of the Amazonian jungle, the Andean heights, or the Patagonian plains, we are again in the very emptiness of terror that Hölderlin spoke of: the terror that strikes us when we feel so close to nature that we fear we shall become one with her, devoured by her, deprived of speech and identity by her; yet equally terrified by our expulsion from nature, our orphanhood outside her warm maternal embrace. Our silence within. Our solitude without.

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I will not go into a long discussion of the place of nature in the novel. But in my heart the European fiction of the nineteenth century takes place in cities and in rooms. Donald Fanger has given us a most brilliant discourse on the appearance of the city in Gogol, Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Walter Benjamin has reminded us of the existence of nineteenth-century interiors as places where personal property is secure; when it is not, a new hero appears to protect it: the detective of Collins’s Moonstone, of Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” of Conan Doyle’s “Bruce-Partington Plans.” And George Steiner has observed that only the literatures of Russia and the United States reclaim wide spaces — Tolstoy and Turgenev, Cooper and Melville — without sacrificing the counterpoint of some of the most suffocating enclosures of all fiction: Poe’s nailed coffins and walled sepulchers, and Dostoevsky’s tiny rooms and shadowy staircases, where Raskolnikov plots and Rogozhin awaits. But perhaps nowhere is the terror of being thrust outside history or into history as explicitly linked to the act of naming as in the literature of Latin America. Indeed, the immediacy of the voyages of discovery, written in our own language, is a factor here; John Smith and the other original wetbacks at Plymouth Rock definitely did not see mermaids on the coast of Massachusetts.