Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chronicle of a Text Foretold:

Gabriel García Márquez’s

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

When I first read Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, finishing it at 4:00 in the morning, aged twenty, I lay the book on my chest and said aloud to myself, “That was the best book I’ve ever read.”

Since then there have been many other favorites, but the impact of that overwhelming introduction to García Márquez’s world has remained one of the most formative reading experiences of my life. Looking back, I can see that it worked to aim me toward and prepare me for many of the major literary epiphanies that were soon to come, especially Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon and Marcel Proust, but at the time it felt like a totality, a final culmination of everything that a book could ever contain or do. Modeled on the Bible, it seemed the Alpha and Omega of novels, and as I lay there on that old red couch with the cheap mass-market edition of the book rising and sinking so lightly upon my breathing body, I felt wholly satisfied and couldn’t imagine a future beyond the book’s all-encompassing boundaries.

The Earth never stops moving through space and time, however, no matter how damascene and seemingly final an experience a soul can have, and the mind and heart and body evolve and encompass further astonishments that often take you away from even the most profound revelations. But as with any other truly great experience, One Hundred Years of Solitude evolves and grows with you, encompassing more and more of what the universe has to show and teach you over the years.

Chronicling several generations of the Buendía family through the evolutions and revolutions and metamorphoses of the fictional/mythical South American town Macondo, One Hundred Years of Solitude sets up its own internal rules, following truths and logics exclusive to itself as its Genesis-like overture creates the book’s world and then carries the reader through its Bible-like begats that follow in dizzying succession and repetition. The universe of Macondo is peopled by patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets, and magicians who seem to circle through a fluid time and morph into one another, some characters even living to an age much longer than the novel’s ostensible one hundred years.

When the book was translated into English in 1970, the great writer and critic William Kennedy wrote that it was “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Many years later (the novel’s opening words are “Many years later”), after I’d graduated with a minor in Religious Studies and was doing a systematic study of the Bible while on a long trip across Europe, I began to see more than just Genesis in García Márquez’s vast novel-scheme, opening up an even more encompassing engagement that was far beyond my original reading.

After the novel’s first chapter, which echoes Genesis in many obvious and subtle ways, with things at the founding of Macondo being so new still that many of them didn’t even have names yet, and with the ruins of an old Spanish galleon found nearby on high ground suggesting Noah’s Ark alighting atop Mount Ararat after the biblical flood, the second chapter uses the word “exodus” to describe how the town’s original inhabitants had left their previous home in search of “the land that no one had promised them.” Then the rise and descent of the Buendía family, with all of its endlessly repeating name-variants of the family’s first-generation patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, mirrors the Bible’s arc from the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges to the First and Second Book of Kings. Coming after the five books of the Torah (or in Greek the Pentateuch, comprising Genesis through Deuteronomy), this second major section of the Bible (called the “Deuteronomical History”) leads toward the establishment of the House of David over the land of Israel and then follows toward the nation’s inevitable disintegration. When Israel’s center cannot hold any longer and breaks into two parts (the northern Israel, which God dislikes, and the southern Judah, which God favors because it’s still ruled by David’s ancestors, whose supporters were the people who compiled and redacted the Bible and who were naturally written to be the winning team), the names and trajectories of the parallel northern and southern kings mirror each other (e.g. Jereboam/Reheboam) and sometimes even have the same name (and diminutive nickname). Eventually God “allows” the northern nation to fall to the Assyrians, but Judah endures long enough to have a kind of renaissance, when in order to repair their deteriorating temple King Josiah (read: José) has the high priest clean out the temple treasury, within which the priest discovers “the book of the law”—presumably an early version of Deuteronomy, which contains all the rules that the Israelites had supposedly forgotten in their decline.

Initial Letter L of Genesis, Wenceslas Bible,
c.1389, illuminated manuscript

After another brief golden age, Judah eventually goes the way of all flesh too and is conquered by the Babylonians as God decides that the nation has been sinning for way too long and that it’s too late to make up for it now. But the thread of Israel’s Davidic lineage continues in the Babylonian exile, because God has promised to let David’s descendants rule forever.

García Márquez mimics many of these biblical complexities and absurdities as Macondo develops and expands and then inevitably descends toward disintegration, which fascinatingly finds his dream city reverting into a bizarre parody of the Garden of Eden, and he has a mysterious Gypsy named Melquíades write it all down long beforehand in a profusion of unreadable parchments that detail Macondo’s entire one-hundred-year story, in perhaps the exact same words we read in the book we’re now holding in our hands. In the final pages of this novel’s reflection/reconstruction of Melquíades’s ur-chronicle the penultimate Buendía malechild, Aureliano Babilonia (note well his patronymic), finally decodes Melquíades’s parchments and in the last paragraph reads his own culminating story in it as the world around him swirls into oblivion. Thus, as with the Bible we now know, which is in part a redaction of the unearthed “book of the law,” we get a glimpse of this novel’s primal first draft in its last pages and can extrapolate some of how its final version makes its way into our hands.

A minor character named Gabriel Márquez, who’d been one of four of Aureliano Babilonia’s close friends, relocates before Macondo’s end/dissolution to Paris, where he perhaps writes the very book we’re reading, whose fictional original is presumably Melquíades’ parchment text. Thus the character Gabriel Márquez, who may or may not be the author Gabriel García Márquez, goes into a kind of “Babilonian” exile and is the only one left to tell the tale when it’s all over.

Or is he? And does he know the whole story? And how does he know it?

Gustave Doré’s The Wandering Jew, 1852

García Márquez chronicles a biblical rise and fall in his novel, with a heavy stress on the turn-turn-turn nihilism of Ecclesiastes, in which there’s a time for everything but no lasting or inherent meaning to any of it, and he assiduously avoids all of the Christian scriptures’ salvational trickery, which magically gives its communicants an escape route from life’s inexorable dissolution. In one of the novel’s last chapters the townspeople hunt down and kill a semi-human creature that they think is the Wandering Jew, a legendary figure who supposedly mocked Jesus as he was being taken to his death and who as punishment was cursed to walk the earth until Jesus’ return. Killing the Wandering Jew then necessarily precludes any kind of Second Coming or afterlife for García Márquez’s imagined world. But Aureliano Babilonia’s four close friends all get away before Macondo’s Alice-in-Wonderland house-of-cards collapse, and perhaps this novel is meant to suggest just one of Macondo’s imperfectly transmitted histories. Perhaps we’re meant to imagine the three other friends’ complementary and contradictory versions of the story, mirroring and parodying the Christian scriptures’ four wildly diverging testaments.

As in the Bible, we read in One Hundred Years of Solitude of an endlessly overlapping and circling mythical history that exists in written form within the novel itself as its own ur-chronicle and that’s presumably reconstituted later by one of its characters into a book that may or may not be conterminous with the novel we get to hold in our hands and read, creating for Macondo a multivalent literary afterlife rather than a merely facile celestial one. Or perhaps the character Gabriel Márquez in fact creates the book’s real original in Paris, only projecting a magic-lantern glimpse within its pages of a fantastical ur-version—which he wasn’t there to decode with Aureliano Babilonia and couldn’t be reconstructing from memory—as a ghostly precursor to the work he’s writing, which of course may or may not be the same text as the author Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

García Márquez’s master, Jorge Luis Borges, slyly insinuates the myth of the Wandering Jew into his 1947 story “The Immortal,” never mentioning the reference in the text but suggestively naming its narrator Joseph Cartaphilus, which intertwines the biblical Joseph of Arimathea with the apocryphal Cartaphilus, who was said to mock Jesus on the way to the cross and who like the pious Joseph of Arimathea was believed in the thirteenth-century to be wandering the earth still in wait for Jesus’ return. This fusion of legends into one name was inspired by a tale in Roger of Wendover’s medieval chronicle Flores Historiarum that mentions both of these contrasting figures, and Borges’s play on it subtly reflects the crossed and conflated identities of his story’s interconnected immortals. The salient part of this connection is in how García Márquez’s novel plays with and extends the gamey last page of “The Immortals,” which includes this ruminative intimation of immortality: “When the end draws near, there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Borges then has an invented critic tease out a number of the story’s literary games and references—but nowhere near all of them, such as the fact that the Greek word Cartaphilus means “lover of paper,” which adds yet another level of resonance to the story’s ingenious paper chase—and it’s this deliberately elusive and open-ended tension between words and reality that García Márquez plays with so brilliantly in his novel’s astonishing hypertext.

At twenty, with my hands suddenly empty as the novel lay finished on my chest, I was entirely dazzled by the book from within its own parameters and only understood a glimmer of these vast resonances. But the book utterly changed me and sent me on journeys that I couldn’t have imagined at the time, making One Hundred Years of Solitude both a starting-place and an encompassing point of return that can be wholly loved and appreciated by the unschooled twenty year old and the older writer/critic alike—and in my case, connecting and uniting them into one constantly unfolding epiphany.

—David Wiley