Garcia+Marquez+-Inventing+America

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Invention of America by Carlos Fuentes, in Myself with Others

This is a cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.

I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood.

"How realities are to be learned or discovered is perhaps too great a question for you or me to determine, Cratylus; but it is worthwhile to have reached even this conclusion, that they are to be learned and sought for, not from names but much better through themselves than through names . . ." "That is clear, Socrates. . ."

The first of these three quotations is from a famous passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garda Marquez, in which, after a plague of insomnia, the whole village of Macondo is affected by loss of memory, so that Aureliano Buendia devises a saving formula: he marks everything in the village with its name--table, chair, clock, wall, bed, cow, goat, pig, hen.

At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS.

In the second quotation, from Swann's Way, the Narrator has just accomplished one of the greatest feats of modern fiction: the liberation of time, through the liberation of an instant from time that permits the human person to re-create himself or herself and his or her time. This splendid literary achievement, through which the novel becomes the ideal vehicle for the reintroduction of the human person into time and through time into himself or herself, his or her authenticity, has its fragile but luminescent origin in what is probably a handful of lies: just a few names, Balbec, Guermantes, Venice, Parma, in which the Narrator learns that names forever absorb the image of reality because they are the privileged meeting places of desire; and desire through names can _ substitute for time itself:

Even in spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman Gothic.

But Proust's novel, as Roland Barthes warns us, is a voyage of. both learning and disillusionment: from an age of words when we think that we create what we name (Parma, Balbec, Guermantes), to an age when the original prestige of names is ruined by contact with the outer world ("So it was this! Madame de Guermantes was only this!") to the age of things, where words manifest themselves as something outside the speaker, as objects (Bloch's anti-Semitic speeches are a rejection of a guilty passion in himself for another: it reveals the truth of the passion as it becomes a thing).

The third quotation is from Plato's Cratylus, perhaps the first book of literary theory of the Western world. In it, several attitudes toward names are debated by Socrates and his friends. To Cratylus, names are intrinsic to things: they are natural. To Hermogenes, they are purely conventional: whatever name you give to a thing is its right name. Socrates concedes that an onomastic legislator might give things their fixed or absolute or ideal name; but this substantialist demiurge is soon defeated by history. He makes names, but, alas, the dialectician uses them, and, says Socrates, simply by paying good coin to the Sophists, we will not learn the true name that we come to know dialectically, in its usage, but not originally, in its essence. Plato, who does not hold the world of letters in high esteem, would not fall into any trap laid by the likes of Marcel Proust (or Gabriel icraC Marquez). He makes Socrates reveal the deceit of Hermes, which is similar to that of Kafka's messengers: though he is identified with the power of speech, Hermes, the messenger of the word, the purported interpreter of the gods, cannot even give us the true names of the divinities, for it is clear that among themselves the gods address one another in a manner different from our own. They use their true names; we do not.

It is Hermes who is guilty. He circulates words as if they were money and robs them of their permanence, which is the same as their essence; he makes words have a double meaning, sometimes true, sometimes false, always worn thin. Socrates would then have men of reason dispense with names and rather seek to know things directly, in themselves or through each other, in their relationships. The Cratylus is, of course, a polemic against Heraclitus and his philosophy of constant change. It defends a substantialist point of view: if things are always chang- ing, there will always be no knowledge. Names are changing and changeable words, and they belong to the unstable and unessential world where "all things are like leaky pots." Cratylus is not convinced by Socrates; he prefers to think that Heraclitus's ideas are true. Socrates lets the argument rest. He bids Cratylus come back another time and teach him; and Cratylus leaves hoping that Socrates will also continue to think of these matters. So the dialogue ends on a civilized note of mutual tolerance.

This is America. It is a continent. It is big. It is a place dis- covered to make the world larger. In it live noble savages. Their time is the Golden Age. America was invented for people to be happy in. You cannot be unhappy in America. It is a sin to have tragedy in America. There is no need for unhappiness in America.

America does not need to conquer anything. It is too vast. America is its own frontier. America is its own utopia. And America is a name. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the name of an American writer, a writer of the New World that stretches from pole to pole lrehtar than from sea to shining sea.

America is a name. A name discovered. A name invented. A name desired. In his classic book The Invention of America, the Mexican his- torian Edmundo O'Gorman maintains that America was invented rather than discovered. If this is true, we must believe that, first of all, it was desired and then imagined. O'Gorman speaks of Europeans who were prisoners of their world, prisoners who could not even call their jail their own. Geocentrism and scholasticism: two centripetal and hierarchical visions of a perfect, archetypical universe, unchangeable--yet fi- nite because it was the place of the Fall.

The response to this "feeling of enclosure and impotence" was a hunger for space that quickly became identified with a hunger for freedom. Some of the names of this hunger are Nicholas of Cusa and later Giordano Bruno, Luca Signorelli and Piero della Francesca, Ficino and Copernicus, Vasco da Gama and then Co- lumbus. Some of the names of this freedom in its European and American incarnations are: First, the freedom to act on what is. This is the freedom won by Machiavelli in Europe and acted on by Cortes in America. It is the freedom of an epic world made to the measure of the self- made man, not he who inherits power but he who is capable, with equal measures of will and virtue, of winning it. This is the world, in the Latin American novel, of the descendants of Machiavelli and Cortes in the jungles and plains of the American continent: the Ardavines, the ferocious political bosses of the Venezuelan llanos in olumoH Gallegos; Pedro Paramo, the fissured Mexican cacique in Juan Rulfo; Facundo, Sarmiento's immortal portrait of the archetypical caudillo. And: Francia, Estrada Cabrera, Porfirio ,zaiD Juan Vicente Gomez, Trujillo, and Somoza in the news; and in the novel, Asturias's El Senor Presidente, Carpentier's El Primer Magistrado, Roa Bastos's El Supremo, and, outliving them all, incorporating them all, Garcia Marquez's ageless Patriarch: "The only thing that gave us security in earth was the certainty that he was there, invulnerable to plague and hurricane . . . invulnerable to time."

The second is the freedom to act on what should be. This is the world of Thomas More in Europe and of Vasco de Quiroga in America. Discovered because invented because imagined because desired because named, America became the utopia of Europe.

The American mission was to be the other version of a European history condemned as corrupt and hypocritical by the humanists of the time. On the contrary, Montaigne in France, Vives in Spain, and the Erasmists all over, saw in America the utopian promise of a New Golden Age, the only chance for Europe to recover, eventually, its moral health as it plunged into the bloody Wars of Religion.

Historically, Father Vasco de Quiroga, the Spanish reader of More's Utopia, lived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, arriving only a few years after the Conquest, and created communities totally faithful to the precepts of the English writer. Quiroga- venerated to this day by the Tarascan Indians as "Tata Vasco"- believed that only the utopian commonwealth would save the native inhabitants of America from violence and desperation.

He established the first utopian communities in Mexico City and nacaohciM in 1535. That same year, Thomas More was beheaded by order of Henry VIII. So ,hcum one would say, for utopia. Yet utopia persisted as one of the central strains of the culture of the Americas. We were condemned to utopia by the Old World.

What a heavy load! Who could live up to this promise, this demand, this contradiction: to be utopia where utopia was demolished, burned and branded and killed by those who wanted utopia: the epic actors of the Conquest, the awed band of soldiers who entered Tenoch- altit with Cortes in 1519 and discovered the America they had imagined and desired: a New World of enchantment and fantasy only read about, before, in the romances of chivalry. And who were then forced to destroy what they had named in their dreams as utopia.

So Carpentier's narrator in The Lost Steps follows the Orinoco River upstream, to its sources, to the Golden Age, to utopia, to this living in the present, without possessions, without the chains of yesterday, without thinking of tomorrow. . . And so the Buendias found a precarious Arcadia in the jungles of Colombia, where not only the virtues of the Golden Age of the past ' are acclaimed but also those of the coming Utopia of Progress. We realize in Garcia Marquez that, since the Enlightenment, Europe is the utopia of Latin America: law and science and beauty and progress were now a Latin American albatross hung around the neck of Europe: we expected from the West the photograph that finally fixed our image for eternity; or the ice that burns as it cools. But this notion of progress-and the names that accompany it- is to prove illusory: "It's the largest diamond in the world." "No," the gypsy countered. "It's ice."

This gypsy leads us to the third aspect of freedom at the root of the name America: the freedom to preserve an ironical smile, a freedom not unlike that won by the first Spanish philosopher, the Stoic from Cordoba, Seneca, but even more rooted in the Renais- sance reflection on the duality of truth and on the difference be- tween the appearance and the reality of things. To deny any absolute, be it the absolute of faith before or of reason now; to season all things with the ironic praise of folly and thus appear a madman in the eyes of both Topos and U-Topos: this is the world of Erasmus in Europe and especially in Spain, where Erasmus became, more than a thinker, a banner, an attitude, a persistent intellectual disposition that lives to this day in Borges and Reyes, in Arreola and Paz and Cortazar.

Indeed, Erasmus is the writer of the samizdat of Spanish and Spanish-American literature, the underground courier of so many of our attitudes and words, he who failed externally in Spain only to be victorious eternally forever and ever: Erasmus the father of Don Quixote; the grandfather of Tristram Shandy and Jacques el Fataliste; the great-grandfather of Catherine Moreland and Emma Bovary; the great-uncle of Prince Myshkin; and the revered ancestor of the Nazarin of Perez Glados, the Pierre Menard of Borges, and the Oliveira of Cortazar but also of the Buendiaz, who incessantly decipher the signs of the world, those that are put on trees and cows so their names will not be forgotten, or their functions, those signs they have seen behind the world's appearances, those they have read in the chronicles of their own lives, feverishly naming things and people and then feverishly deciphering what they themselves have written. What they have discovered-in- vented-imagined-desired-named.

Macondo. . was built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. ..

The invention of America is indistinguishable from the naming of America. Indeed, Alejo Carpentier gives priority to this function of the American writer: to baptize things that without him would be nameless. To discover is to invent is to name. No one dare stop and reflect whether the names being given to things real and imag- ined are intrinsical to the named, or merely conventional, certainly not substantial to them. The invention of America occurs in a pre- Socratic time, that time whose disappearance Nietzsche lamented; it happens in a mythical time magically arisen in the midst of the nascent Age of Reason, as if to warn it, in Erasmian terms, that reason that knows not its limits is a form of madness. Garcia Marquez begins his Nobel Lecture by recalling the fab- ulous things named by the navigator Antonio Pigafetta as he ac- companied Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe:

He had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer dna the whinny of a horse.

He described how the first native. encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.

This discovery of the marvelous because it is imagined and desired occurs in many other fantastic chroniclers of the invention of Amer- ica; but even the more sober, one feels, had to invent in order to justify their discovery of, even their being in the New World. The pragmatical Genoese, Christopher Columbus, thinks he can fool the Queen who sent him off at great expense, by inventing the existence of gold and species where they do not exist. When at last he does find gold-in Haiti-he calls the island La Espanola, says that there all is "as in Castile," then "better than in Castile," and finally, since there is gold, the gold must be the size of beans; and the nights must be as beautiful as in Andalusia, and the women whiter than in Spain, and sexual relations much purer (to naseelp the puritanical Queen and not frighten off further oitauriporppa .r but there are Amazons as well, and sirens, and a Golden Age. and a good, innocent savage (to please the Queen this time by amazing her). Then the good Genoese merchant reasserts hi IIl5 eli: the forests of the Indies where he has landed can be turned into fleets of ships.

So we are still in the East. America has not been named, although its marvels have. Columbus has named what he was sent to find: gold, species, Asia. His biggest invention is finding China and Japan in the New World. For Vespucci, however, the new thing about the New World is its newness. The Golden Age and the Good Savage are here, described and named by him in the New World, as a New Golden Age and a New Good Savage bereft of history, once more in Paradise, discovered before the Fall, untainted by the old. Indeed, we deserve Amerigo's name: he invented our anigami newness.

For it is this sense of total newness, of primeval appearance, that gives its true tone to names and words in America. The urgency of naming and describing the New World-of naming and describ- ing in the New World is intimately related to this newness, which is, in effect, the most ancient trait of the New World. Suddenly, here, in the vast reaches of the Amazonian jungle, the Andean heights, or the Patagonian plains, we are again in the very emptiness of terror that Holderdin spoke of: the terror that strikes us when we feel so close to nature that we fear we shall become one with her, devoured by her, deprived of speech and identity by her; yet equally terrified by our expulsion from nature, our orphanhood outside her warm maternal embrace. Our silence within. Our solitude without.

I will not go into a long discussion of the place of nature in the novel. But in my heart the European fiction of the nineteenth century takes place in cities and in rooms. Donald Fanger has given us a most brilliant discourse on the appearance of the city in Gogol, Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Walter Benjamin has reminded us of the existence of nineteenth-century interiors as places where personal property is secure; when it is not, a new hero appears to protect it: the detective of Collins's Moonstone, of Poe's "Purloined Letter," of Conan Doyle's "Bruce-Partington Plans." And George Steiner has observed that only the literatures of Russia and the United States reclaim wide spaces-Tolstoy and Turgenev, Cooper and Melville--without sacrificing the counterpoint of some of the most suffocating enclosures of all fiction: Poe's nailed coffins and walled sepulchers, and Dostoevsky's tiny rooms and shadowy staircases, where Raskolnikov plots and Rogozhin awaits. But perhaps nowhere is the terror of being thrust outside history or into history as explicitly linked to the act of naming as in the literature of Latin America. Indeed, the immediacy of the voyages of dis- covery, written in our own language, is a factor here; John Smith and the other original wetbacks at Plymouth Rock definitely did not see mermaids on the coast of Massachusetts.

But again, as I attempted to dramatize in my play All Cats Are Grey (1970), history is most explicitly linked to language in America. The passage of the language of the Aztec nation into a silence resembling death-or nature--and the passage of the Spanish language into a politically victorious yet culturally suspect and tainted condition not only is the foundation of the civilization of the New World: it perpetually questions it as it repeats a history that be- comes a myth.

Moctezuma the Aztec emperor refuses to hear the voices of men; he will listen only to the language of the gods. Cortes the conqueror is only too ready to listen to the voices of men and turn the com- plaints against the centralist, patrimonial despot. He even takes on an interpreter, the Indian princess Marina (La Malinche), whom he calls Mi Lengua-my tongue--and who bears him a son: the first Mexican, the first mestizo, a Spanish-speaking native. The witness to all this is Hermes, the messenger, the writer, under the guise this time of Bernal zaiD del Castillo. This is his name: given yet intrinsic, essential yet secondhand, false yet evocative; changeable yet his destiny. Bernal Diaz del Castillo writes fifty years after the facts; he can name everything, down to the last horse and its owner; he can name because he can still desire, like Marcel Proust, and, like him, searches for lost time. He weeps over what he had to destroy, and so he is our first novelist, an epic writer who destroys the chance of utopia in genocide and is then conquered by the myth of the defeated hero who must now pay in words his debt to the city he enslaved.

More than four hundred years after the discovery and conquest of America, Romulo Gallegos writes in his masterpiece, Canaima:

Amanadoma, Yavita, Pimichin, el Casiquiare, el Atabapo, el Guainia: with these names these men did not describe the landscape, they did not reveal the total mystery (of the jungle and the river) into which they had entered; they were only mentioning the places where things happened to them-yet all the jungle, fascinating and ter rible, was already throbbing in the power of the words. ..

For, behind these men, if they do not say, name, invent, imagine, discover, desire, lies the "immense mysterious regions where man had not yet penetrated: Venezuela of the unfinished discovery." And there, nameless, the individual may find himself "suddenly absent from himself, at the mercy of the jungle . . ." Similarly, in Alejo Carpentier, the fascinating, at times even joyous, voyage of discovery up the Orinoco--the voyage to utopia in The Lost Steps-suddenly oversteps the limits of the word; in the "vast jungle filling with night terrors," the word splits open, answers itself, pleads, groans, howls:

But then came the vibration of the tongue between the lips, the in- drawn snoring, the panting contrapuntal to the rattle of the maraca. . . As it went on, this outcry over a corpse surrounded by silent dogs became horrible. . . Before the stubbornness of death, which refused to release its prey, the Word suddenly grew faint and disappeared. In the mouth of the Shaman, the Threne gasped and died away convulsively, blinding me with the realization that I had just witnessed the Birth of Music.

In this instant of Dionysiac joy and Proustian liberation Carpentier's Narrator would perhaps like to stand eternally: on the threshold between Music and Word. But the separations unleashed by history have not yet been totally discovered: he is sent spinning off to the very beginning of time, then to the world without word that existed before mankind. It is in this context, in this precarious balance between silence and the word, that the world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is poised.

Many thought in Latin America, when One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published and achieved its enormous and instantaneous success, that its popularity {comparable in the His- panic world only to that of Cervantes and Don Quixote) was due to the element of immediate recognition present in the book. There is a joyous rediscovery of identity here, an instant reflex by which we are presented, in the genealogies of Macondo, to our grandmas, our sweethearts, our brothers and sisters, our nursemaids. Today, twenty years after the fact, we can see clearly that there was more than instant anagnorisis in the Garcia Marquez phenomenon, that his novel, one of the most amusing ever written, does not exhaust its meanings in a first reading. This first reading (for amusement and for recognition) demands a second reading, which becomes, in effect, the real reading.

That is the secret of this mythical and simultaneous novel: One Hundred Years of Solitude presupposes two readings because it presupposes two writings. The first reading coincides with the writing we take as true: a novelist by the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is retelling, chronologically, with biblical-indeed, Rabelaisian-hyperbole, the lineages of Macondo; Aureliano son of Jose Arcadio son of Aureliano son of Jose Arcadio. The second reading begins the moment the first one ends. The chronicle of Macondo had already been written; it is among the papers of a gypsy thaumaturge named Melquiades, whose appearance in the novel one hundred years before, when Macondo was founded, turns out to be identical to his revelation as the narrator, one hundred years later. In that instant, the book recommences, but this time the chronological history of Macondo has been revealed as a mythic and simultaneous historicity.

Historicity and myth: the second reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude conflates, both factually and fantastically, the order of what has happened (the chronicle) and the order of what might have happened (the imagination), with the result that the fatality of the former is liberated by the desire of the latter. Each historical act of the said Buendias in Macondo is a sort of axis around which whirl all the possibilities unbeknown to the external chronicler but which, notwithstanding, are as real as the dreams, the fears, the madness, the imagination of the actors of the his- or her-story.

One way of seeing Latin American history, then, is as a pilgrimage from a founding utopia to a cruel epic that degrades utopia if the mythic imagination does not intervene so as to interrupt the onslaught of fatality and seek to recover the possibilities of freedom.

One of the more extraordinary aspects of Garcia Marquez's novel is that its structure corresponds to the profounder historicity of Latin America: the tension between utopia, epic, and myth. The founding of Macondo is the founding of utopia. Jose Arcadio Buen- dia and his family have wandered in the jungle, in circles, until they encounter precisely the place where they can found the New Arcadia, the promised land of origin:

The men of the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

Like More's Utopia, Macondo is an island of the imagination. Jose Arcadio discovers an enormous Spanish galleon anchored in the middle of the jungle, its hull fastened to a surface of stones, its insides occupied by a thick forest of flowers. He concludes that "Macondo is surrounded by water on all sides."

From this island, Jose Arcadio invents the world, points things out with his finger, then learns how to name things and, finally, how to forget them, and so is forced to rename, rewrite, remember. But at the very same moment that the founding Buendia realizes "the infinite possibilities of forgetfulness," he must appeal for the first time to the otherwise infinite possibilities of writing. He hangs signs on objects; he discovers reflexive knowledge (he who, before, knew only through divination), and so he feels obliged to dominate the world of science: what he naturally knew before, now he will know only through the help of maps, magnets, and magnifiers.

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 Jose Arcadio Buendia, 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 Buendia, 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 Ursula, 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 ac- companied Macondo in its foundation and who, in order to keep Macondo alive, must have recourse to the same trick used by Jose Arcadio: the trick of writing.

Comparable in this and many other aspects to Cervantes, Garcia Marquez 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 Garcia Marquez 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 saidneuB 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 Cortes, 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 un- written myths of Latin America is the struggle of our Roman tra- dition 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 Diaz, 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.

Garcia Marquez brings to his novels the same distinction and the same approach. The simultaneous nature of his world is inex- orably 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 mem- ories, the recall of Macondo is creation and recreation at the same time. Garcia Marquez embodies this in an edenic couple, Jose Arcadio and Ursula, 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, Jose Arcadio and Ursula, 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 Buendia 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 Buendias, 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 Garda Marquez. 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 brack- eted between the initial fact that one day Jose Arcadio BuendIa decides that from then on it shall always be Monday and the final fact when Ursula 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, GarcIa Marquez 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.

We cannot renounce our consciousness of any of these great accomplishments of literature. Garcia Marquez certainly does not give up as he finally integrates his American imagination and his universal imagination in the essential, the artificial, the conventional, the naturally named chronicle of Macondo. Deciphered by several members of the Buendia family, this chronicle is the story of their lives and the prediction that they would spend their lives trying to decipher the chronicle: the lives: the world. Reading and living thus become coexistent; by the same token, so do listening and writing. Aureliano Babilonia, the last male heir of the Buendias ,said deciphers the instant he is living; he deciphers as he lives it; he prophesies himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the manuscript: as if he were seeing himself in a talking mirror.

This is a novel. A novel is something that is written. A novel is something that is read. A novel is something that is heard. We must do this so that reality can be remembered. The names in a novel are times and places in the present. There is no other way of truly knowing the relationship between things. The alternative is silence. The alternative is death.