Cien años de soledad: The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing

The destruction of the city of mirrors (or mirages) and the erasure of the Buendía race as described on the final page of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) calls to mind Jacques Derrida’s definition of writing in «Ellipse» (19 67):

Similarities between events described in García Márquez’s novel and imagery and ideas put forth in Derrida’s philosophical treatise on writing are common terms that, quite independently of any intentions on the part of their respective authors, allow these works to summon up each other and create an intertextual metaphor that clarifies their common denominator in the writing process. This paper will explore those «common terms» in order to show how Cien años de soledad may be regarded as a fictional account of «the end of the book and the beginning of writing» (Grammatology 6-26)⁴², as a movement of infinite reflection on itself. Both novel and treatise describe an infinite reiteration of reality in an essentially circular, self-referential structure. Before examining this parallel and the forces it brings into play, I will outline briefly some of Derrida’s key concepts about writing that appear to have a «déjà vu» correspondence with events in Cien años de soledad.

The «end of the book» signifies the end of its referral to a natural totality outside of itself. Derrida suggests that the idea of the book as the totality of a signifier pre-existed by the totality of a signified which supervises its inscription is profoundly alien to the sense of writing:

The «end» of the book -the end of an external signified concept- is also the «beginning» for Derrida, as it allows writing to assume an open movement of signification. In a similar vein, García Márquez has commented on the «open» and «closed» nature of his writing. He alleges that his work usually revolves around a «lost chord» (the «lost origin» of writing?) whereby the phrases which comprise the work are kept in their «pure state» with their «sources open» and «their mystery intact» (Mainstream 337-38). He suggests too that Cien años de soledad is different from his other books as «there is a kind of finality in it all. Here almost all of the clues are given» (340). He envisions the book as «a sort of base for the puzzle» he has been piecing together in his previous work. «With this book, I conclude my cycle on Macondo, and turn to something completely different in the future» (340). García Márquez does not specify what the «puzzle» represents in its entirety. I propose that the completed puzzle is a representation of writing in its pure state, as pure fiction, referring to no definable reality outside of itself. The implied finality of the last page of Cien años de soledad appears to glorify the book as an epoch of Being: «... an epoch coming to an end which would permit us to see Being in the glow of its agony or the relaxation of its grasp, and an end which would multiply, like a final illness, like a garrulous and tenacious hypermnesia of certain moribunds, books about the dead book» (Writing 77)⁴⁴. Paradoxically, only through closure (the «death» of the book) can the text be born as writing with an open movement of

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signification.

Writing as classically determined by Aristotle was regarded as a centered system whose movement of signification was ordered by the full presence of voice. Derrida’s contribution has been to demonstrate how writing gives rise to and constitutes a non-centered system of signification. In «Linguistics and Grammatology», for example, he proposes that writing effects the loss of its own origin through the act of representation itself: the repetition of the signified concept in writing causes the origin to be lost in a play of reflected doubles:

Writing is repetition, repetition is death, and death is the beginning, as the loss of the «center» extends the movement of signification of the non-centered system to infinity:

Derrida also compares this repetition to the reading of the «book in the book»: the reduction of a signifier into its signified concept:

García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad culminates with an apocalyptic reading of the book (Melquíades’s manuscript) within the book (the novel). The «doubling» of the central event responsible for the «origin» of the Buendía race and Macondo -the birth of the child with the tail of a pig- permits reading of the «book in the book». Aureliano Babilonia perceives the final keys which unlock the code of the manuscript for him, when an event in his «lived» reality corresponds to a sentence in the «text»:

The manuscript predicts that the annihilation of the Buendía race and the city of mirrors and mirages will occur at the precise moment that Aureliano Babilonia finishes deciphering the parchments. Aureliano’s reading of Melquíades’s manuscript within the book that his family has been living (and which its author has been writing) is the moment in which the living book (the Buendía race) and the written book (Melquíades’s manuscript) recognize themselves as doubles, causing the living presences to which the written book refers to lose themselves in a play of reflected doubles, and to leave an abyss which must be supplanted by the infinite «redoubling» of interpretations about the event of «doubling» itself. The whirlwind that sweeps up Aureliano and Macondo as Aureliano deciphers the instant he is living suggests, by its form, the movement of signification of writing, revolving around the abyss created by the loss of its central signified concept through the event of representation.

It is not just the final few pages of the novel that are a parable of the end of the book and the beginning of writing, however. Like writing, the town of Macondo and the Buendía family who inhabit it are autonomous, non-centered systems apparently free of the restraints of any external authority. Just as philosophies of writing in the twentieth century have ruptured with their previous history as understood within the metaphysics of presence⁴⁸, José Arcadio Buendía leaves his place of origin and founds the town of Macondo. The origin of the name of Macondo, the manner in which the location for the town was selected, the geopraphical setting of the town, and the philosophy of life adhered to by the town’s first inhabitants all suggest a writing with no outside text to govern its inscription and ensuing movement of signification. Julio Cortázar has described writing as «dreaming awake» (Casilla 111-12). Similarly, the name and choice of location for Macondo do not originate in any external reality, but in José Arcadio Buendía’s dream. The name «Macondo» exemplifies a

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writing that does not refer to anything outside of itself, because it has no meaning at all. The reflective surfaces of the houses with mirror walls making up the city suggest the play of reflected doubles which the act of writing engenders, and which its ensuing movement of signification perpetuates:

The geographical location of Macondo, apparently isolated from civilization and surrounded by water on all sides, parodies the autonomous nature of writing understood as a non-centered system with no «outside text». Just as contemporary philosophies of writing have ruptured with the concept of a transcendental signified, the inhabitants of Macondo have broken with God. Unlike the ancient Israelites who journeyed to the land that God promised them, the founders of Macondo journey to the land that no one had promised them:

The citizens of Macondo do not need priests, because they feel that they have lost the evil of original sin. There is no longer a fall from a central signified concept, because they no longer acknowledge its existence:

The «incestuous» marriage of José Arcadio Buendía to his cousin Ursula Iguarán creates a system with no external referent, because it constitutes a union of blood ties whose origins refer back to each other. In fact, José Arcadio’s and Ursula’s union reflects the incestuous marriages of their forebears (they are described as two healthy products of two races that had interbred for generations) [25], and thus reaffirms closure and autonomy. Being definable only in terms of their arbitrariness or difference within the same system, the husband and wife who engender the Buendía race have an absurd affinity with the concept of the sign as defined by Saussure: «whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system» (117-18). By comprehending both the signifier and its signified concept, the sign is a solitary, autonomous entity («In the sign, you are alone»)⁴⁹. In Cien años de soledad, the Buendías are characterized by their common solitary look (163).

Derrida suggested that language excludes totalization, or is a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite: instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. The lack of external referent renders the apparently inexhaustible field of language finite, because in the absence of a central presence, language can only reflect upon itself (Writing 289)⁵⁰. The lack of an external referent is responsible for the repetitive pattern of the Buendía family also: the union of cousins creates a closed family structure that refers back to itself, while it limits the number of genetic factors that can come into play within the closure of the finite ensemble. The succeeding generations of Buendías repeat the «incestuous» marital pattern of José Arcadio and Úrsula, and the autonomy of the system is thus maintained: José Arcadio Segundo marries his adopted sister who is really his cousin; Pilar Ternera gives birth to two children whose respective fathers are brothers; and although three «outsiders» enter the family circle -Fernanda del Carpio, Santa Sofía de la Piedad and Mauricio Babilonia- the circle is hermetically closed once more when Aureliano Babilonia mates with his aunt Amaranta Úrsula.

The family characteristics keep repeating themselves, in the same manner that the book ultimately turns upon itself. Pilar Ternera comments that she does not need the cards to tell the future of a Buendía, because the history of the family is a machine with unavoidable repetitions, that would go on infinitely, but for the irremediable wearing of the axle (343). Úrsula connects the insistent repetition of the family characteristics to the insistent repetition of the family names: the name itself appears to engender the characteristics which are associated with it:

The thought patterns of José Arcadio Buendía repeat themselves in his descendants (Aureliano Triste’s plans for bringing the railroad into Macondo, for example, are an exact replica of José Arcadio’s earlier project for solar warfare) [195], and the dialogue patterns of the original family recur: José Arcadio Segundo unknowingly repeats an old phrase of Úrsula, his great grandmother, and Úrsula unthinkingly answers with the response that Colonel Aureliano Buendía gave years earlier in his death cell, reaffirming Úrsula’s suspicions that time is not passing, but turning in a circle (291-92).

Despite Derrida’s assertions in «That Dangerous Supplement» (Of Grammatology) that «there is no outside-text» (158)⁵¹ for writing, he also acknowledged in «Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences» the impossibility of writing being totally non-centered, because language, by its very nature, is intrinsically linked to a metaphysics of presence which is very hard to ignore unless one does away with language altogether (Writing 281)⁵². Writing embodies an unresolvable tension between sign and thing: between absence (its essential nature) and the presence outside of itself that it purportedly signifies. Just as writing paradoxically can never escape its former relationship to a metaphysics of presence, so the inhabitants of Macondo (especially their leader and founding father, José Arcadio Buendía), are forced to acknowledge their ties with a civilization and a past history outside their city limits. Even the name of Macondo which apparently has «no meaning at all» manifests evidence at its birth of a tie with another world: it has a «resonancia sobrenatural» (28). José Arcadio thought that Macondo was surrounded entirely by water and therefore was cut off from the rest of the world. He is forced later to admit his error when Úrsula, quite by accident, succeeds in finding a path across the swamp to cities on the coast, and brings back civilization with her (39).

The pots, pans and braziers tumbling down from their shelves during the first page of the novel set the tone for the conflict between freeplay⁵³ and central «presence» which undergirds the novel’s plot at all levels. Despite Melquíades’s assurances to Macondo’s innocent inhabitants that the kitchen utensils follow the ingots he drags behind him because things have a life of their own («Las cosas tienen vida propia» [9]), Melquíades and the reader both know that the pots and pans follow the ingots because the former are iron and the latter are magnetized: the utensils are subject to an external (though invisible) force because of their intrinsic nature. Similarly, the sign, frequently contemporarily understood as an entity having a life of its own, is in reality unable to escape its inherent nature of a signifier referring to a signified concept outside of itself.

José Arcadio Buendía epitomizes the tension between freeplay and restraint which characterizes Macondo. Although repeatedly attempting to escape temporality and the limitations placed upon objects by nature, he paradoxically tries to preserve the past reality associated with objects during the insomnia plague by labelling things and providing written descriptions outlining the function and signification of each object. Macondo may have been founded as a result of José Arcadio’s break with his past but he nevertheless fears the «idiocy that has no past» («una especie de idiotez sin pasado» [46]) to which a total loss of memory might give rise. Unconsciously, he realizes that objects must retain some rapport with an external referent in order to signify anything. Unable to accept his failure to create a perpetual motion machine and transcend temporality, José Arcadio attempts yet another unsuccessful escape from time and order by sinking into a state of perpetual delirium. He appears to return to a state of total innocence wherein he babbles to himself in some unintelligible language which is apparently of his own invention (76). The parish priest pragmatically discloses, however, that José Arcadio Buendía’s «devilish jargon» is Latin ( 80). His escape from one «epistémè» has only served to re-integrate him with a dead discourse which is an integral part of his civilization’s cultural heritage.

The conflict between autonomous freeplay and externally opposed restraint which José Arcadio Buendía represents is sustained and repeated in his descendants. After his father’s failure to establish a system of freeplay, Aureliano and most of the other inhabitants of Macondo take up the struggle: the thirty-two civil wars waged by the liberals against the conservatives are a macrocosmic reflection of José Árcadio Buendía’s struggle to escape his past, temporality, and the limitations of nature. Whereas the liberals fight for decentralization, socialism and the negation of a supreme power, the conservatives defend centralization governed by a «godgiven authority» which upholds a hierarchic order:

Like his father, Aureliano fails to establish a decentralized order free of external restraint: he fights thirty-two civil wars, but loses them all.

The internal skirmishes of the liberals and the conservatives are replaced by the more international clashes between the workers of Macondo and their American employers, the Banana Company. Like José Arcadio Buendía and Aureliano, the workers are not successful in their struggle and are almost totally annihilated. Nature takes up the fight, however, and the Banana Company leaves town because the business is not able to operate during the four years of rain which follow the massacre of the protesting workers. Paradoxically, in its attempt to transcend nature, the Banana Company comes to resemble José Arcadio Buendía. Whereas José Arcadio tried to find the philosopher’s stone, create gold from base metals through alchemy and invent a machine that would transcend time, the Banana Company pretended that it could change the schedule of the rains. Whereas José Arcadio attempted to nullify his crime of murder by leaving his place of origin, the Banana Company tries to mask mass murder with an official press release ascertaining that there were no dead -the satisfied workers had gone back to their families (269). The end of the first era of Macondo thus resembles the beginning of that same era, at the same time that it is a new beginning: after the four years of rain, which reduce the inhabitants of Macondo to such a state of ruin that they lose all contact with their former reality, the gypsies come once more to the town with their magnetized ingots and magnifying glasses, and repeat the tricks that duped the original inhabitants (300). In the absence of a definable past or an absolute truth to order its development, the history of Macondo, like the movement of signification of writing, turns upon itself.

The succession of conflicts between opposing orders in the novel progresses from an individual’s struggle against the established order of his own past, to a town’s struggle against the external order of the district magistrate, to a region’s struggle against the ruling power of the country, to an international company’s struggle against the cosmic order of nature. All of these conflicts of opposing orders have three factors in common: they are all struggles between noncentered freeplay and centrality; they are all brought to an apparent end through death and/or defeat; and they are all replaced by another conflict that brings the same forces into play. Just as each succeeding movement of signification born from writing adds something to the writing itself, so each succeeding conflict in Macondo is bigger than the one before it.

Evidence of a life after death recurs repeatedly in Cien años de soledad. Melquíades dies on the sands of Singapore, then returns to life because he cannot bear the unbearable solitude of death. Amaranta spends her whole life rejecting people who attempt to communicate with her, but offers to carry letters and greetings from the living to the dead. Just before his «final» death in Macondo, Melquíades declares that he no longer fears death because he has found immortality (70). Although offering no explanation, he makes his assertion immediately after finishing his manuscript and thus implies that his discovery of immortality is connected to his writings.

Aureliano Babilonia is not able to decipher the code in which Melquíades’s manuscript is written until he perceives an event outside the text -the child being eaten by the ants- which corresponds to an event described in the text. The lived event is the cipher that unlocks the meaning of the manuscript and allows Aureliano to perceive it as the written history of his family. Similarly, the series of deaths and rebirths occurring in the novel are «lived» experiences whose repetitive pattern is the key that unlocks the closure imposed upon the Buendía race in the last sentence of the book, and intimates that the Buendías have an infinite number of lives as writing with no external «text» or referent, beyond their annihilation as «living» beings.

Derrida has suggested that the loss of a central signified concept for writing in the play of doubles (the represented and its representation) engendered causes its movement of signification to be one of infinite reflection on itself: a movement of supplementarity occurs as a result of the need to supplant the lack of a definable point of reference. The movement of supplementarity is infinite, but it can never exceed the abyss which gave rise to it, because it is limited by the absence of an absolute signified concept outside of itself

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(Writing 289)⁵⁴. Similarly, the plot of Cien años de soledad, the pattern of development of the Buendía family and the movement of self-reflection of the text all constitute a series of «terminal» linear movements whose endings are the beginnings of succeeding movements.

The original child with the tail of a pig born to José Arcadio Buendía’s uncle and Úrsula Iguarán’s aunt was the sign which indicated that their family was aclosed, incestuous system. The second child with the tail of a pig born to Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt Amaranta Úrsula is the fulfillment of the unspeakable terror that caused Úrsula Iguarán and José Arcadio Buendía to leave their birthplace and found Macondo. By closing the circle and reappropriating the event which established it as an autonomous system in the first place, the Buendía race reaffirms the abyss of closure (circularity) and selfreferentiality which was always its most essential nature and its prime directive.

The «death» of the Buendía race that this reappropriation engenders is a metaphorical repetition of the event of «rupture» resulting from García Márquez writing the novel and creating the Buendías as characters. Many critics have attempted to show that the origins of Cien años de soledad are García Márquez’s family and friends, and the history of Colombia. In «Myth and Reality: the Perfect Synthesis», George R. McMurray suggested that the novel presents on a historical level «a vast synthesis of the social, economic and political evils that have plagued much of Latin America since the revolt against Spanish rule early in the nineteenth century» (70). Similarly, Suzanne Jill Levine proposed in El espejo hablado that the main characters of Cien años de soledad are reflections of real people with whom García Márquez was intimately acquainted; the origin of Úrsula Iguarán probably being García Márquez’s grandmother, and events in García Márquez’s grandfather’s life (he was a colonel in the Colombian civil wars and he suffered from an inescapable feeling of guilt because he killed a man) probably being the origin of two of the main episodes of the novel (José Arcadio Buendía’s execution of Prudencio Aquilar and Aureliano Buendía’s participation in thirty-two civil wars) [17]. There are undeniable parallels between the Buendía family and García Márquez’s ancestors, Macondo and Colombia; but rather than limiting the movement of signification of the novel, the play of doubles en gendered by these similarities liberates the novelistic world and allows it to be perceived in universal terms. Macondo is not Colombia, José Arcadio Buendía is not García Márquez’s grandfather, the origin of signification of the novel is thus a difference rather than a full presence, and the lived events which may have given rise to the novel are only functions in the chain of differences which constitute the novelistic experience. Each movement of signification born from the reading of the book reaffirms or deepens the abyss of redoubling which the original act of writing produced.

We saw that the «book» within the book signifies the infinite redoubling of writing within itself: the written characters of Melquíades’s manuscript are a repetition of the «living» characters of the novel, and thus cause the latter to become lost in a play of reflected doubles. The abyss which results from the reduction of the represented into its representation within the book is a double of the abyss created by the «original» act of writing which allowed the Buendía race to assume a life of its own, as pure fiction, independent of any historical origin or any socio-political reality outside of itself. The multiple interpretations of Cien años de soledad arise from the reader’s need to supplant the «hole» in the book created by the turning of the book upon itself. In fact, it is the absence of any definable external presence for the novel which causes the reader to find its meaning within himself. This abyss of meanings deepens each time a reader reads himself within the book, at the same time that it remains sublimely consistent: it is always the reflection of our essential condition whose curse and liberation (like José Arcadio Buendía’s) is an interminable, seemingly hopeless search for knowledge and enlightenment, conducted within the confines of a system of thought and discourse whose very existence effaces what it both avoids and seeks-its origin.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 74, Number 1, March 1991