The striking balance of dark and light that governs the novel from its famous opening line — “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” — gives way to a fuller darkness as the novel nears its conclusion. Macondo itself begins to fall apart; the destruction starts in earnest with the massacre of protesting banana plantation workers by government forces, an act that, upon its completion and the swift removal of bullet-riddled bodies by train, officially never happened. Meanwhile, members of the Buendía family live increasingly attenuated lives, each in their own chosen isolation, locking themselves into workshops, bedrooms, old houses. By the novel’s end, one senses that a family so centrifugal and destructive in its lived-out passions provokes, simultaneously, a centripetal force in each of its members. In the novel’s closing pages, Márquez effects a resolution that intensifies the preceding energies, while also holding out the possibility of redeeming solitude itself.
Having lost both his lover-aunt and their pigtailed newborn son, the last of the novel’s twenty-two Aureliano Buendías spends Macondo’s final hours reading through the parchment prophesies of the gypsy Melquíades. Engrossed by the very same story we have been following, he fails to notice the strong winds tearing apart the house with “the wrath of [a] biblical hurricane.” This last Aureliano is also the town and the family’s lone survivor, and thus the novel’s culminating figure of solitude. His final act is to make sense of the prophesies that have brought him and us together to this very moment: “He began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.” There can be no fuller act of identification between a reader and a literary character than to read the same lines at the same time, which Márquez brilliantly brings off on the final page, joining the imagined to the real in a criss-crossing harmony. This identification between reader and character invests the novel’s abiding sense of solitude with a subtle if literal sense of fellow feeling, which makes the apocalyptic final sentence the more bearable:
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that [Macondo] would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment Aureliano . . . would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
But the condemned races of this sacred book do indeed have second opportunities, and more still. Great and original books, and few among the moderns are greater or more original than One Hundred Years of Solitude, are read and reread and read still more. Their influence is enormous and is felt beyond tributes and celebrations, in the ever-expanding readerships they gain, and in those books and films whose existence we could not imagine were it not for their predecessors. More than anything else, though, One Hundred Years of Solitude matters like few other books of the past fifty years because it gives us licence to envision the modern world in its absolute fullness, to know the story of our times as an ongoing chronicle of fecund, destructive glory.
Comments