A Hundred Years of Love 2 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

Gerald Martin’s new biography of Gabriel García Márquez and the fine review of it in The New York Review of Books (July 16, 2009) have taken me back to my first love affair with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Published as Cien Años de Soledad in Buenos Aires in 1967, the novel instantly thrust García Márquez onto the worldwide literary map.

I read the English translation as soon as it came out in 1970. I was just finishing my doctorate in literature; semiotics and structuralism were becoming all the rage, and the novel’s dramatization of these theoretical fads’ premise that nothing exists beyond our language had me ecstatic with delight. García Márquez had gloriously created a world made up solely of words.

Of course the world of any novel is created by words. But García Márquez pushed this truth to its limits by ending the novel with the revelation that its entire world, astoundingly rich in the details of poignantly interweaving generations, is “actually” a script composed by the mysteriously deathless character Melquíades, who wrote all the characters’ destiny in advance of their living it. And at this revelation, the novel’s world implodes, eating itself up (in the form of an infestation of man-eating ants).

In that pagan phase of my life, in my exuberantly atheistic twenties, I giddily relished this infinite regress of meanings that swallowed each other up. I also loved the mind-bending play with time that is both theme and structural device of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The famous opening line is typical:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Time does gymnastics here, spiraling inside and around itself, middles folded forward into endings and back to beginnings.

But the glorification of instability, the meanings created by words that pointed only to other fictitious worlds: within a few years this heady stuff plunged me into what I called, in the drug language of the 1970s, my “cosmic freak-outs.”

Hurling headlong through these panic-driven experiences, I began reaching out wildly, desperately, for a transcendent meaning that could ground me. Eventually I found it (amazing grace) in Christianity. With my baptism in 1983, I renounced the structuralist mind-games of infinite regress, along with their literary representations in fictions like those of Borges and in much of Wallace Stevens’ poetry.

But I never renounced One Hundred Years of Solitude. In fact, when I began learning Spanish in the early 1990s, Cien Años de Soledad was the first novel I wanted to read. I haven’t stopped reading it since. I’ve kept my Spanish copy on my bedside table; and until knitting took over as my bedtime activity about a year ago, I’d fall asleep to some of the lusciously convoluted lines of Cien Años. I had read the novel so many times in Spanish that I could open it anywhere and feel right at home.

So I’m wondering: what is it about this novel that keeps hold of my heart?

I continue to love its richly imagined world, its density of detail caressed so charmingly by its author. I love the novel’s famed “magical realism”: that creative inventiveness that lures us into believing that, sure, a beautiful young woman hanging sheets out to dry can simply ascend with them into the sky and disappear. I love the rhythm of the sentences in their Spanish original. And I continue to admire the craft with which García Márquez turns time inside out.

Now, however, I enjoy this not as a brilliant mind-game but rather as a psychological truth: we do experience time in a non-linear fashion, as Colonel Aureliano Buendía does in that instant before the firing squad.

In my past decade or so with Cien Años de Soledad, though, I do eschew its ending. I’m no longer interested in the narrative trick of self-devouring worlds. So my reading re-writes the novel, I suppose. My reading re-creates it as a beloved world that remains forever. If this makes me untrue to the letter of the book, I’d argue that I’m still true to its spirit.

And I enjoy the irony that the “solitude” of the novel’s theme and title is my constant companion.