Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

The utopian founders were soothsayers. They knew how to recognize the language of the world, hidden but preestablished; they had no need to create a second language; they had only to open themselves to the language of what was. How to know this preexisting language that truly names things in their essence and in their true relationships is the Platonic problem, and José Arcadio Buendía, when he abandons divination in favor of science, when he migrates from sacred knowledge to the exercise of hypothesis, opens the doors to the novel’s second part: the part that belongs to the epic, which is a historical process in which the Utopian foundation of Macondo is denied by the active necessity of linear time. This part, significantly, happens between the thirty-two armed uprisings headed by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the banana fever, and the final abandonment of Macondo — the founding utopia exploited, degraded, and in the end killed by the epic of activity, commerce, and crime.

The flood — the punishment — leaves behind it a Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where dust and heat have become so tenacious that it is hard to breathe. Who remains there? The survivors, Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, hidden away by solitude and love (and by the solitude of love) in a house where it is almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants. Then the third space of the book opens. This is the mythical space, whose simultaneous and renewable nature will not be understandable until the final paragraphs, when we find out that all this history was in fact already written by the gypsy Melquiades, the seer who accompanied Macondo in its foundation and who, in order to keep Macondo alive, must have recourse to the same trick used by José Arcadio: the trick of writing.

Comparable in this and many other aspects to Cervantes, García Márquez establishes the frontiers of reality within a book and the frontiers of a book within reality. The symbiosis is perfect, and once it takes place, we can begin the mythical reading of this beautiful, joyful, sad book about a town that proliferates, like the flowers inside the stranded Spanish galleon, with the richness of a South American Yoknapatawpha. As in his master William Faulkner, in García Márquez a novel is the fundamental act we call myth: the re-presentation of the founding act. At the mythical level, One Hundred Years of Solitude is an incessant interrogation: What does Macondo know of itself? That is, what does Macondo know of its own creation?

The novel is a response to this question. In order to know, Macondo must tell itself all the “real” history and all the “fictitious” history, all the proofs admitted by the court of justice, all the evidence certified by the public accountants, but also all the rumors, legends, gossip, pious lies, exaggerations, and fables that no one has written down, that the old have told the young and the spinsters whispered to the priest: that the sorcerers have invoked in the center of the night and the clowns have acted out in the center of the square. The saga of Macondo and the Buendías thus includes the totality of the oral, legendary past, and with it we are told that we cannot feel satisfied with the official, documented history of the times: that history is also all the things that men and women have dreamed, imagined, desired, and named.

That it understands this is one of the great strengths of Latin American literature, because it reveals a profound perception of Latin American reality: a culture where the mythical constantly speaks through voices of dream and dance, of toy and song, but where nothing is real unless it is set down in writing — in the diaries of Columbus, in the letters of Cortés, in the memoirs of Bernal, in the laws of the Indies, in the constitutions of the independent republics. The struggle between the legal literature and the unwritten myths of Latin America is the struggle of our Roman tradition of statutory law, and of the Hapsburg and French traditions of centralism, with our intellectual response to them and ultimately with our perennially undiscovered, inexhaustible, and, we hope, redeemable possibilities as free, unfinished human beings. Legitimacy in Latin America has always depended on who owns the written papers: Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz, the aging patriarch who justifies himself as the repository of the Liberal Constitution? Or Emiliano Zapata, who says he owns the original deeds to the land granted by the King of Spain? This is the struggle John Womack has staged superbly in his book on Mexico’s agrarian revolution. The truth is that Zapata owns more than a piece of paper: he owns a poem, a dream, a myth.

García Márquez brings to his novels the same distinction and the same approach. The simultaneous nature of his world is inexorably linked to the total culture (dreams, habits, laws, facts, myths: culture in the sense understood by Vico) of Latin America. What is simultaneous in Macondo? First, as in all mythical memories, the recall of Macondo is creation and re-creation at the same time. García Márquez embodies this in an edenic couple, José Arcadio and Úrsula, pilgrims who have fled the original world of their sin and their fear to found a Second Paradise in Macondo. But the foundation — of a town or of its lineage — presupposes the repetition of the act of coupling, of exploitation, of the land or the flesh. In this sense, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a long metaphor which merely designates the instantaneous act of carnal love between the first man and the first woman, José Arcadio and Úrsula, who fornicate in fear that the fruit of their union shall be a child with the tail of a pig, but who must nevertheless procreate so that the world shall maintain itself.

Memory repeats the models of the origin, in the same way that, over and over, Colonel Buendía makes golden fish that he then melts in order to make golden fish that he then melts to … to … to be constantly reborn, desired and desiring, discovering and discovered, inventive and invented, naming and named. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a true re-vision and re-creation of the utopias, the epics, and the myths of America. It shows us a group of men and women deciphering a world that might devour them: a surrounding magma. It tells us that nature has domains, but men and women have demons. Bedeviled, like the race of the Buendías, founders and usurpers, creators and destructors, Sartoris and Snopes in one same breed.

But in order to achieve this simultaneity, the myth must have a precise time and a precise writing — or telling — or reading. A Spanish galleon is anchored in the mountain. A freight car full of peasants murdered by the banana company crosses the jungle and the bodies are thrown into the sea. A grandfather ties himself forever to an oak tree until he himself becomes an emblematic trunk, sculptured by storm, wind, and dust. Flowers rain down from the sky. Remedios the Beautiful ascends to this same sky as she spreads out her bedsheets to dry. In each of these acts of fiction, the linear time of the epic dies (this really happened), but the nostalgic time of utopia, past or future, also disappears (this should happen), and the absolute present time of the poetic myth is born (this is happening).

That is the precise time of García Márquez. And the precise writing is the second writing, which, in the second reading, makes us understand the full meaning of the acts of fiction, finally bracketed between the initial fact that one day José Arcadio Buendía decides that from then on it shall always be Monday and the final fact when Úrsula says: “It is as if time had been turning in circles and we had now come back to the beginning.” She is wrong. Her time is an illusion; it is the reading that is right as it coincides with the writing. A universal writer, García Márquez is aware that, ever since Joyce, we cannot pretend that the writer isn’t there; but also that, ever since Cervantes, we cannot pretend that the reader isn’t there; and, moreover, that, ever since Homer, we cannot pretend that the listener isn’t there.