The Trick of How We Die

            Robert Lowell’s sonnet “History” begins as such:

                        History has to live with what was here,

                        clutching and close to fumbling all we had –

                        it is so dull and gruesome how we die,

                        unlike writing, life never finishes.

           

            Magic realism is a drowning man with a sand-parched tongue. Or better, it is a stylistic coping device. The heartbreak of that story is never in the telling, only in the tragedy and trauma it gilds. Like a world-weary man cataloguing his woes, One Hundred Years of Solitude (as a transcript) belongs to the oral folklore tradition. While the defining fanciful images of Disney’s postwar hallmark films, e.g., pumpkin-cum-carriage in Cinderella and the sorceress-cum-dragon of Sleeping Beauty, heighten the paramours’ romantic stakes, making love as atypical as it is splendored, Solitude’s five-year downpour, litter of yellow butterflies, and apotheosis of sage-like Remedios the Beauty make the utter humanity of the tale bearable.

            Reading magic realism as any sort of naturalism is self-deception; Márquez’s narrator believes his own myth, believing the act of manipulation to not only support the truth, but to comfort us in stomaching it. Agony is in the details, and having the Fernanda’s white sheets described with as much tenderness as ancestral Remedios’ awful bleeding out deals a softened blow, but a blow nonetheless.

            When Rebeca howls, “It’s not right for them to come to me with that memory right now” as (unbeknownst to her) nephew Aureliano Triste combs through her derelict house, that is the sound of a life that has lost its trickeries; her skeletal frame and balding head have shed the necessary fat and locks of vitality (235). Márquez’s Buendías greet history as an native yet unwelcome poltergeist whose existence is independent of the ticking years and wars and Macondo even, only “[living] with what was here.”

Raining in Macondo

The rain that falls on Macondo for years following the massacre functions in multiple ways both physically and symbolically in the chapters that follow this carnage. In a physical sense water cleanses, it erases but it also rots things and causes decay, it is constantly moving, yet is simultaneously transfixing, petrifying due to its rhythm, essential to life even though too much of it drowns, causes death, it is a background white noise that fills silence. In the novel it causes the characters to neglect their duties and put things off: “’I’m only waiting for the rain to stop in order to die,’” says Ursula (320). Or as Aureliano Segundo puts it, “’It’s impossible to do anything now…it can’t rain for the rest of our lives,’” (323). The rain causes the town to fall in a malaise that causes negligence with regards to household care and personal wellbeing. The banana plant stays closed until the rain stops. Physically, rain has the capability of eliminating objects with power and immediacy but also the ability to dull them down slowly over years.

The various functions of ‘rain’ serve a dual purpose as symbolically relevant to Marquez’ greater interests in the novel. In the post-massacre Macondo rain serves in a sense as a symbol for the tragedy that has taken place—it mimics tears. Water is cyclical in motion—precipitation, infiltration, evaporation, repeat. This property connects back to Marquez’ point that time moves circularly, intricately repeating itself, but is never exactly the same as it once was. The common saying, ‘It’s never the same river twice’ is applicable. The seemingly never-ending rant that Fernanda goes on from page 323 to page 325 has the same relentlessness as the rain falling around the disintegrating house and it causes decay in her relationship with the other characters, particularly Aureliano Segundo.

Rain also connects to another important theme in Marquez novel—the theme of ‘solitude’ or ‘silence’. Rain serves as a deterrent to go outside, as a noise that deafens surrounding sound in the same way that the military’s persecution deters people from investigating or talking about the deterioration of Macondo. Rain is an important agent for Marquez I believe because it functions as a point of growth, of movement, of deterioration and of death. In this way I believe Marquez metaphor captures the stages of movement in time and in the town of Macondo as the novel progresses. 

Ursula's Blind Insight

           Though blind, Ursula is able to see more clearly through the past than any other seeing member of her family.  Aureliano no longer has the ability to see the past, and his visions of the future have been greatly limited.  Amarata is able to know the future enough to predict her own death, and she can look back in nostalgia on her life unlike Aureliano, but Ursula is the true keeper of the family’s history.  When Fernanda lost her ring, Ursula is able to look into the past, read the constant movements of her family, and distinguish between a habit and a break in their usual paths, “the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them” (Marquez 247).  I think this image, one of constant motion without really seeing what is happening, is a nice micro chasm of the entire story.  People filter in and out without realizing that the ritual of life is not special for them.  Ursula, in her 100 years of solitude and wisdom, understands that there will always be children to raise, children to hide rings from, mysteries and new inventions. 

            While Ursula grows old, Marquez is able to introduce to the audience ideas of old age that are not necessarily mainstream.  Ursula is surprised to learn that she is seeing more clearly than anyone, even though she is blind.  For instance, they cannot even tell that she is blind.  She has formed an entire way of life, including making the young children give her hints to the seeing world, that allows her to know more than anyone.  She discovers Meme’s lies by listening to her daily activity.  She realizes that there are lies being spread when Meme showers in the evening.  Fernanda is not able to see the truth because she is blinded in another sense.  Ursula can see because spiritually she has the sight of a Buendia.  Fernanda is an outsider, so her inability to see the truth is not surprising.  

The connection between Illness and Obsession as it pertains to Colonel Aureliano Buendia

In the first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude illnesses play a crucial role in developing several different plot lines, allowing Marquez to create parallels between passion, obsession and sickness and changes in identity. Early in the novel the town of Macondo is afflicted by a ‘plague of insomnia’ that also causes loss of memory so that “when the sick person [becomes] used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood begins to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being” (44). By establishing a connection between illness and obsession, Marquez explores his characters’ infatuations and how their raptures are supernatural in their ability to change them, making them, simultaneously, much greater and much smaller than they actually are.

            One of the strongest examples of this correlation surrounds the political turmoil that layers the first half of the novel. When “Liberal fever” (99) catches on in the schools in Macondo it is the ‘Liberal’ Colonel Aureliano Buendia who rationally recommends discretion and, after taking control of the town assures the local leader that when the war is over he will not be mistreated. He says to the old man that what he is doing is, “Not madness…War” (101). It feels reasonable that there could be a separation between war and madness because Colonel Aureliano seems so in control at this point of the book, as if he is about to become a sort of stoic hero. Yet in being at war so long Aureliano begins to lose his humanity. Aureliano has one of his friends who fights for the Conservatives put to death and says to him, “’Remember, old friend…I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you’” (158), as if this absolves him of responsibility—as if it is no longer Aureliano who controls the revolution, but that the revolution has taken control of him. Eventually Aureliano, “lost in the solitude of his power, [begins] to lose direction,” (166) indicative of how the war has in fact warped him drastically. 

              Throughout the first half of the novel Colonel Aureliano is one of many strong examples of how mesmeric certain passions such as power are. Colonel Aureliano not only forgets his original ideologies but also forgets his empathy for, among others, his family: “in an instant he discovered the scratches, the welts, the sores, the ulcers and the scars that had been left on [his mother] by more than half a century of daily life, and he saw that those damages did not even arouse a feeling of pity in him” (173). As Colonel Aureliano loses sight of his original purpose for going to war he morphs in his identity, his ideals and his personality are ravaged, his memory changes, even as the labels on him stay the same: a liberal with conservative ideology, Aureliano, unrecognizable from who he used to be. It is not until he steps outside the bubbl