Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

But again, as I attempted to dramatize in my play All Cats Are Grey (1970), history is most explicitly linked to language in America. The passage of the language of the Aztec nation into a silence resembling death — or nature — and the passage of the Spanish language into a politically victorious yet culturally suspect and tainted condition not only is the foundation of the civilization of the New World: it perpetually questions it as it repeats a history that becomes a myth.

Moctezuma the Aztec emperor refuses to hear the voices of men; he will listen only to the language of the gods. Cortés the conqueror is only too ready to listen to the voices of men and turn the complaints against the centralist, patrimonial despot. He even takes on an interpreter, the Indian princess Marina (La Malinche), whom he calls Mi Lengua — my tongue — and who bears him a son: the first Mexican, the first mestizo, a Spanish-speaking native. The witness to all this is Hermes, the messenger, the writer, under the guise this time of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. This is his name: given yet intrinsic, essential yet secondhand, false yet evocative; changeable yet his destiny. Bernal Díaz del Castillo writes fifty years after the facts; he can name everything, down to the last horse and its owner; he can name because he can still desire, like Marcel Proust, and, like him, searches for lost time. He weeps over what he had to destroy, and so he is our first novelist, an epic writer who destroys the chance of utopia in genocide and is then conquered by the myth of the defeated hero who must now pay in words his debt to the city he enslaved.

More than four hundred years after the discovery and conquest of America, Rómulo Gallegos writes in his masterpiece, Canaima:

Amanadoma, Yavita, Pimichin, el Casiquiare, el Atabapo, el Guainía: with these names these men did not describe the landscape, they did not reveal the total mystery (of the jungle and the river) into which they had entered; they were only mentioning the places where things happened to them — yet all the jungle, fascinating and terrible, was already throbbing in the power of the words …

For, behind these men, if they do not say, name, invent, imagine, discover, desire, lies the “immense mysterious regions where man had not yet penetrated: Venezuela of the unfinished discovery.” And there, nameless, the individual may find himself “suddenly absent from himself, at the mercy of the jungle…”

Similarly, in Alejo Carpentier, the fascinating, at times even joyous, voyage of discovery up the Orinoco — the voyage to utopia in The Lost Steps —suddenly oversteps the limits of the word; in the “vast jungle filling with night terrors,” the word splits open, answers itself, pleads, groans, howls:

But then came the vibration of the tongue between the lips, the indrawn snoring, the panting contrapuntal to the rattle of the maraca … As it went on, this outcry over a corpse surrounded by silent dogs became horrible … Before the stubbornness of death, which refused to release its prey, the Word suddenly grew faint and disappeared. In the mouth of the Shaman, the Threne gasped and died away convulsively, blinding me with the realization that I had just witnessed the Birth of Music.

In this instant of Dionysiac joy and Proustian liberation Carpentier’s Narrator would perhaps like to stand eternally: on the threshold between Music and Word. But the separations unleashed by history have not yet been totally discovered: he is sent spinning off to the very beginning of time, then to the world without word that existed before mankind. It is in this context, in this precarious balance between silence and the word, that the world of Gabriel García Márquez is poised.

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Many thought in Latin America, when One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published and achieved its enormous and instantaneous success, that its popularity (comparable in the Hispanic world only to that of Cervantes and Don Quixote ) was due to the element of immediate recognition present in the book. There is a joyous rediscovery of identity here, an instant reflex by which we are presented, in the genealogies of Macondo, to our grandmas, our sweethearts, our brothers and sisters, our nursemaids. Today, twenty years after the fact, we can see clearly that there was more than instant anagnorisis in the García Márquez phenomenon, that his novel, one of the most amusing ever written, does not exhaust its meanings in a first reading. This first reading (for amusement and for recognition) demands a second reading, which becomes, in effect, the real reading.

That is the secret of this mythical and simultaneous novel: One Hundred Years of Solitude presupposes two readings because it presupposes two writings. The first reading coincides with the writing we take as true: a novelist by the name of Gabriel García Márquez is retelling, chronologically, with biblical — indeed, Rabelaisian — hyperbole, the lineages of Macondo; Aureliano son of José Arcadio son of Aureliano son of José Arcadio. The second reading begins the moment the first one ends. The chronicle of Macondo had already been written; it is among the papers of a gypsy thaumaturge named Melquiades, whose appearance in the novel one hundred years before, when Macondo was founded, turns out to be identical to his revelation as the narrator, one hundred years later. In that instant, the book recommences, but this time the chronological history of Macondo has been revealed as a mythic and simultaneous historicity.

Historicity and myth: the second reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude conflates, both factually and fantastically, the order of what has happened (the chronicle) and the order of what might have happened (the imagination), with the result that the fatality of the former is liberated by the desire of the latter. Each historical act of the Buendías in Macondo is a sort of axis around which whirl all the possibilities unbeknown to the external chronicler but which, notwithstanding, are as real as the dreams, the fears, the madness, the imagination of the actors of the his- or her-story.

One way of seeing Latin American history, then, is as a pilgrimage from a founding utopia to a cruel epic that degrades utopia if the mythic imagination does not intervene so as to interrupt the onslaught of fatality and seek to recover the possibilities of freedom. One of the more extraordinary aspects of García Márquez’s novel is that its structure corresponds to the profounder historicity of Latin America: the tension between utopia, epic, and myth. The founding of Macondo is the founding of utopia, José Arcadio Buendía and his family have wandered in the jungle, in circles, until they encounter precisely the place where they can found the New Arcadia, the promised land of origin:

The men of the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

Like More’s Utopia, Macondo is an island of the imagination. José Arcadio discovers an enormous Spanish galleon anchored in the middle of the jungle, its hull fastened to a surface of stones, its insides occupied by a thick forest of flowers. He concludes that “Macondo is surrounded by water on all sides.”

From this island, José Arcadio invents the world, points things out with his finger, then learns how to name things and, finally, how to forget them, and so is forced to rename, rewrite, remember. But at the very same moment that the founding Buendía realizes “the infinite possibilities of forgetfulness,” he must appeal for the first time to the otherwise infinite possibilities of writing. He hangs signs on objects; he discovers reflexive knowledge (he who, before, knew only through divination), and so he feels obliged to dominate the world of science: what he naturally knew before, now he will know only through the help of maps, magnets, and magnifiers.