Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Powers of Fiction 9780292767850

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Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction

THE TEXAS PAN AMERICAN SERIES

Gabriel García Márquez

and the Powers of Fiction E D I T E D BY J U L I O O R T E G A WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF CLAUDIA ELLIOTT

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

The CIP data may be found on page 97.

Nobel Lecture 1982, T h e Solitude of Latin America," © The Nobel Foundation 1982; reprinted by permission. Copyright © 1988 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1988 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78713-7819 The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company.

ISBN: 978-0292-72370-2

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS JULIO ORTEGA Exchange System in One Hundred TearsofSolitude

Vii I

RICARDO GUTIÉRREZ MOUAT The Economy of the Narrative Sign in No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour

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MICHAEL PALENCIA-ROTH Intertextualities: Three Metamorphoses of Myth in The Autumn of the Patriarch

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ANÍBAL GONZALEZ 6l The Ends of the Text: Journalism in the Fiction of Gabriel García Márquez GONZALO DÍAZ-MIGOYO Truth Disguised: Chronicle of a Death (Ambiguously) Foretold

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GABRIEL GARCIA MÁRQUEZ The Solitude of Latin America (Nobel Lecture, 1982)

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CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book attempts to further the scholarship on Gabriel García Márquez with new perspectives and fresh readings for a more complex and, we hope, rewarding understanding of the texture and scope of his novels. We intend to go not only beyond the predictable thematization of García Márquez's fiction but also beyond the traditional notion of "magic realism," a conceptually poor representation of the specific differences that shape Latin American text and culture. To read these novels in their cultural elaboration, peculiar transcodification, and sign-system of exchange and recording, as well as in their rich intertextuality and playful representation, is our purpose. The long process of translating, retranslating, and English editing of this collection was undertaken with the help of the University of Texas' University Research Institute. Dr. William Livingston's cooperation is most appreciated. The Institute of Latin American Studies helped in the final preparation of the manuscript. Claudia Elliott's revisions of the English edition were determinant for this book's reaching its final form; her effort is appreciated by each of the contributors. Carmen Balcells, García Márquez's literary agent, kindly permitted me to reproduce the author's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1982, and gratitude is expressed as well to the Nobel Foundation. —J.O.

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Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction

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JULIO ORTEGA

Exchange System in One Hundred Years of Solitude

IN THE BEGINNING; THE DISCOURSES Many years later, on a trip to Acapulco, Gabriel García Márquez realized that he would have to tell the story the same way his grandmother used to tell her stories—as if they were true. But the hardest part of all was the beginning: 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.1 "I remember very well," García Márquez explains, "the day I finished, with great difficulty, the first sentence and then asked myself in a panic what the hell was to come after it. Actually, until the discovery of the galleon in the midst of the jungle, I didn't really think the book would go anywhere. But from that point on, it was all written in a kind of frenzy that was also a lot of fun."2 "Many years later" promises the fable, assuring us of reaching a "later" from this present during which we read. The act of reading is thus inscribed in the virtues and resources of the fable. The legibility of the future allows us to return to a time prior to that of the reading, the place where books usually begin and where the tradition of reading rests. "Many years later" is what we read, although tradition would have us read "Once upon a time." Whereas in illo tempore emphasizes the future course of the fable and its promises, the novel's initial sentence explicitly defines our role in the contract—we are made of, and for, reading. We are projected into the reading as the real birth of the fable rather than its anticipation. While "Many years later," as opposed to "Once upon a time," makes future of the past, it also immediately transports us to that "before" made possible by verbal tenses which indicate a fictional coming

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and returning like the back-and-forth motion of reading. The signs of temporal discontinuity (many years, some days before, several months, etc.) act within the rules of fable and myth, yet go beyond the chronological margins of history. As fable-time replaces calendar-time, it communicates a more resonant and more tangible temporality, a time of both duration and transition. The linear syntax of the story carries us from foundation to apocalypse, as the spiral of time takes us circularly through the occurrences or paradigms of tradition. The entire past, therefore, already belongs to the future—to the "later" where the Colonel, remembering, awaits us as he faces the firing squad. Meanwhile, we advance in our reading and catch up with him in the present to free him from death. Just as writing has the property of preventing death, fable has the privilege of extending life. Reading ratifies this tradition through the rules of sign-exchange. In fact, the death sentence is commuted, leaving reading to be deceived by writing, as it exchanges one promise for another. At the expense of our credulity, based on the natural representation of language, the chasm of reading deepens. Writing also changes its code of representation. What it says is not only natural, fantastic, or marvelous; it is also a trap that opens beneath our feet like the void at the end of the book into which the world disappears as the last Aureliano reads. In One Hundred Tears of Solitude, the discourse of fable begins like the chronicle of memory. Chronicle: a book of time, events told in the order in which they occurred, but also a flexible syntax. Memory: a book of shuffled figures, alternating and exchanging paradigms. In writing, memory (selection of events) and chronicle (ordering of events) succumb to one another through duplication, combination, and displacement; in essence, they form their own metalanguage. If the incident of the firing squad belongs to the syntax of the story, the discovery of ice belongs to the paradigmatic axis. Thus the ice discovery (memory) becomes an event in the chronicle; and the incident of the firing squad, which pertains to the story's syntax, becomes a recurrent scene in the fable's own rhetoric.3 Reading someone's past while it is being remembered is like looking over the shoulder of another reader. Yet who records this information? And how is this dual or split representation witnessed and read? Here the writing itself recovers all its traditional power (from that of not recognizing natural orders to that of complete obliteration). It is the writing, therefore, that produces the omniscient narrator who no longer merely represents a viewpoint or distributes information, but who is another instance of the fable itself. The narrator knows future time ("years later"), past time ("distant afternoon"), and also precisely what the Colonel is thinking or

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remembering. Yet the narrator, knowing that the firing squad will not fire, maintains the reader's ignorance through the deception of suspense. It is as if he himself were uninformed, thus making of his apparent ignorance another sign of his knowledge, which is merely the power of a recording. It is the writing that makes and unmakes, thus producing this eloquent sign of its register, this omnipotent faceless and voiceless third person. The narrator, however, is not a person—not even a collective one like the narrator in The Autumn of the Patriarch—but the grammatical voice used by the fable to state and retract impassively, to form and transform. For this reason, a number of intonations and recordings speak from within the fable, a real archive of narrative voices. The novel's first sentence, then, suggests the intonation and perspective of legend: a popular hero, his death imminent, reconstructs his history. Yet the very "promise" of retelling and remembering suggests the intonation of chronicle. And, furthermore, in that stretched arc between childhood and death, in that form of discourse which goes from beginning to end, is the impersonal resonance of myth.4 The novel's next sentences demonstrate how chronicle is used to reconstruct its space of recording into an act of foundation: At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, 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. (p. 1) Now the language of chronicle ("at that time . . . was a village") yields to the nominative series of myth ("river of clear water"). If the chronicle makes a statement about the village and the number of houses, myth speaks through the world's original names: clear water, polished stones, prehistoric eggs. And thus we read toward the past. We gradually retreat from the interrupted execution, as we read from left to right, toward the Colonel's childhood, toward the beginning of Macondo, and toward a world that is almost too recent to be mentioned in the chronicle and which, for this very reason, requires the enunciation of myth. Soon we are at the beginning of everything; we do not even possess the names of things. In this state prior to discourse, this instance prior to myth, how can things be mentioned if they have no names? By designating them, by calling them into existence, the text implies. In other words, the name of the thing is the thing itself, and language is identical to the world. In order to avoid pointing and to permit speaking of things in their absence, we reach for words—those not only of myth but also of chronicle and legend.

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Next, the gypsies arrive: Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. (p. 1) Their arrival is marked by discontinuous time, promoting the temporality of the fable and making us hear its voice, a voice that resounds throughout the novel. "First they brought the magnet," the text continues, as we return to chronicle, to classification, to order and, immediately, to the story's individualized sign, Melquíades. The series of "new inventions," begun by that of the magnet, transports us to a time prior to the recollection of ice. The novel grows from this syntax of figures (magnet, magnifying glass, astrolabe, etc.), of which ice is thefirstin the time of discourse and the last in the time of the story. It appears in the novel's first sentence and reappears at the end of the first chapter like a circular paradigm. The discourse of chronicle with its factual register, the discourse of popular legend with its oral version, and the discourse of myth with its primordial naming follow one another and intertwine in thesefirstpages of Macondo's origin. The town's founding is the narrative model which controls these discourses at the beginning of the novel as it seeks its own language by exploring various recordings of discursive tradition. At the beginning of the family tree and the new city, the novel accounts for its own beginning. The writing begins with its own genealogy; myth, legend, and chronicle are instances or modes of its occurrence. The events in One Hundred Years of Solitude reflect a seemingly endless combinatory freedom (like that of language itself) whose actual register pauses only in the articulations of the fable. Nearly every episode in the repertoire of the fable refers to one or more volumes in that "encyclopedia of the written." Like Don Quixote, García Márquez's novel departs from that which has already been written and is displaced in the reading. This writing depends on that writing by interchanging signs, juggling them, and, finally, "untying" the codified. The mode of writing carnivalizes the "catalogue of catalogues" in Borges' well-known library. There is, in fact, a fable of writing itself (the story of its false and real powers) which, like a proliferating illusion, permits itself the humor of its combinations; the interplay of its dereprcsentations and transgressions; and, in the end, the drama of its own effacement. When the novel reaches that exceptional and radical possibility in which writing imposes its own fabulative order, it is free of mimesis—writing even breaks the laws of natural order. A world in which one can return from the dead as well as rise to heaven is limitless. Its freedom surpasses the natural logic of language and, thus, the derepresented allows the novel to expand in

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every direction. It is a language which has no common border with our natural language, for it itself has no borders. That other world is not even "fantastic"; it is a written freedom in which representations are invalidated, and the interchangeable nature of the written prevails.5 THE CARNIVALIZATION OF PROHIBITION Time functions as a signifier in the story. Its forms, displacements, exchanges, and inscriptions are a simultaneous exploration and interplay of its permutations.6 Time is composed of representations which render it natural. We see it in calendars and chronologies as well as in natural order and in the genealogical tree. These representations are the logic of its discourse. The temporal factor, however, is also dialectic, composed of the logos of another discourse. Whether after or before its representation, the temporal, void of beginning and end, is a derepresented happening through which the story executes all possible permutations and occurrences and which determines the circular, parallel, and open spectacle of the writing. Upon this stage, temporality is a travestied nomenclature, an eloquent rhetoric distributed by the syntax of spectacle. If the temporality of the story is discontinuous, that of history is genealogical. Writing, nonetheless, plays with both. Past, present, and future are reordered, it is true, but genealogy also incorporates a transverse time, a dangerous game, a scene of extravagance and enigma. If, in the time of the discourse, the fable explores the mirages of memory (remembering, knowing), in the time of the story, it explores the mirages of prophecy (fearing, not knowing). The written time of memory (the child who discovers ice on the first page) and the written time of prophecy (the child eaten by ants at the end) are two instances of this temporal dialectic. In the first case, writing unleashes the repertory of origins (chronicle, myth, legend) ; in the second case, that of destruction (prophecy, a world turned upside down, apocalypse). The novel maintains traditional temporality through a cycle of ages whose beginnings and ends spiral toward the following age. While chronological time is linear, cyclical time is periodic; at the end of the spiral, destruction implies a new beginning. In various traditional and rural versions of this temporality (such as those collected in the Andean world), one age corresponds to the "world right-side up"; the following age, to the "world upside down." The disorders of injustice, chaos, and violence correspond, on a simultaneously cosmic and social plane, to the world upside down, while the next age develops the restoration of order. Carnival is the main metaphor of a world upside down and demands a reordered world.7 In One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is a definite cycle

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between the beginning of time (sol or sun) and destruction (edad or age). The organization of this carnivalesque sol-edadparallels that of a mythical cycle, not through traditional popular culture but out of necessity of form, since its structure implies the text's auto-referentiality. Within this broad, traditional cycle, other "ages," such as the "times" of origin, history, repetition, and destruction, are also displaced. The period of origin terminates when the patriarch José Arcadio Buendía repeats one Friday that "it is still Monday." Cyclical time, which is supported by nature, has not changed for him, although it is now replaced by historical or chronological time. After the massacre of the banana-company workers, the historical period ends with the rain lasting more than four years, for the cosmic order is also altered in the face of social and moral violence. These periods, however, are not consecutive but intertwine and overlap; one cycle of the spiral turns upon the following one. The period of the end begins within that of repetition. When we speak of "ages," we do so from a literary text whose figures seem to reorganize the world itself. The order of the world is the order of words in the sentence. In this syntax the models of tradition, that encyclopedic archive to which discourses belong but from which novels stray, are refracted, but no longer reflected. Although One Hundred Tears of Solitude is a traditional novel (even its own freedom is represented), it is definitely a modern text, one of radical exchange. Its linkages (origin, history, cycles, end) are removed from the consoling depths of archives and reordered as a game with no beginning and no end, a game multiplied by its own rule of transformation. Thus, the beginning itself is no longer the origin. The founding couple is only equivalent to the first human pair. And the founding is no longer merely cultural but, above all, imaginative, and even erratic. The town is a second town, a supplementary one whose founding acts rewrite, upon the urban order, the nostalgia of a different order—a precapitalistic, mythic one. It is, however, condemned by historicity and, as if hypnotized, by the story's very discourse. Even at the end of the book, there are two texts: Melquíades' writings and, as if to purposely prevent its own termination, the text we are reading. If cyclical time reveals the places of spectacle, as a signifier testing different signifieds in distina contexts, what happens with linear, chronological time? The story is constructed upon these two axes, upon return (rhythm, repetition) and dissolution (progress, deterioration). As the story unfolds, it literally incarnates time within the family lineage. As in the biblical Book of Chronicles, here temporality is genealogical. In fact, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the chronicle of the House of Buendía establishes its "legal" and "natural" family tree. Traditionally, history seeks the origin, root, seed, and recounts the end, the anti-natural disorder. The chronicle of this ancestral tree is a no less carnivalized spectacle; prohibí-

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tion occurs at the beginning (the cousin-cousin couple) as well as at the end (the nephew-aunt couple). Again, temporality is a signifier that diversifies, diverges, reiterates, and dissolves with the somnambulistic energy of its extravagant play and impassioned brilliance. Ironically, procreation carnivalizes fornication.8 Time here is spermatic; it recklessly multiplies men and ties them to the tree where the prohibition is written. Incest is this prohibition, this law proclaimed by the mother who tries to regulate desire and to preserve the tree, the species, and the House of Buendía. The child of incest, the child bearing a pig's tail, takes the species back to a prehistoric period and brings the tree and the House of Buendía to an end. He returns us to the discourse of legend (to punishment) and myth (ending of an age). The last Aureliano and his aunt are unaware of their family relation, and of the prophecy about the family. But they love one another freely, and the price of their desire brings the novel to an end. Time, therefore, stops in a metaphor of the tradition which denies it. What is one to do with a discourse on incest that acts like a parodic and paradoxical law? The parody is obvious. Unlike the myth of Oedipus (triangle of incest and parricide), in One Hundred Tears ofSolitude the children multiply the figure of the father, as if their spermatic condition were a paternal reduplication. The founding patriarch himself sets the pattern, for the children, actually his grandchildren conceived illegitimately, must be incorporated into the family. The hand is not raised against the father; what is raised, however, is the phallus that confirms him. The prohibition of incest, therefore, is not only a regulation of desire but, what is perhaps more important, a discourse of law. When the baby with a pig's tail is born, it is not incest as such that has triumphed, but its discourse as a fabulating version of family descent. In fact, incest per se does not occur; it is merely Ursula's understanding of the law. When her children are born, she assumes that because they do not have pig's tails, they are not children of incest. The foster-brother and sister (José Arcadio and Rebeca) scorn it. Nieces, nephews, and aunts guiltily brush shoulders with it. In some cases, the exchange of couples prevents it. Only at the end does the child with the pig's tail confirm it, fabulously. The aunt and nephew, however, resemble the incestuous couple of tradition only in the product that succeeds them. Thus incest is another metaphor produced not by the actions of the couple but through their grotesque product, the child (which is a paradox). It is not resolved in the myth of Oedipus but is dissolved in the popular legend of consanguineous fornication, in the carnivalization of the prohibition. Although true incest is not necessary in order to create an Oedipal picture, here the prohibition is a sanction against sexual interchange. That exchange ends by carnivalizing its own punishment. The last Aureliano's very ignorance of his family origin

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proves that "Nobody is truly legitimate. There is no real father."9 In contrast to the story of Oedipus, One Hundred Tears of Solitude deals with erratic paternity. It is through this dissolving, dis-foundational sexual activity, through the son's own paternal act that his identity is revealed. Again, the fable is in the mode of writing, the writing which not only cures forgetfulness but also kills, in the end, with truth. We are dealing not with the Oedipus complex but with the Oedipus conversion. The hermetic word has been replaced, in popular culture, by tribal laughter.10 WRITING AND THE ECONOMY OF SELF-DECONSTRUCTION Although the magnet, magnifying glass, ice, daguerreotype, etc. are "inventions" for José Arcadio Buendía, they are objects of dysfunctional nature in the novel, for their basic functions have been replaced by others of an imaginative order. Based on an exchange of functions, this little museum of literal technology opens a narrative space, the "territories" or open "boundaries" of imagination. On the other hand, in this first process of discovery and representation, where the novel must establish the order of its own information, a moral drama is imposed. Are the men of Macondo ingenuous and the gypsies, in consequence, tricksters? Is José Arcadio Buendía an ignorant child and Melquíades a clever swindler? In fact, Melquíades "was an honest man" (p. 2), and he warns José Arcadio Buendía that magnets are incapable of extracting gold from the bowels of the earth.Melquíades'"corrective" function, which is repeated, regulates his fantastic role in the novel. Knowledge is not generated from the interactions between an instrument and the material world (for example, between the magnet and gold) but between one instrument and another (between signs and forms). It is for this reason that Melquíades introduces writing: José Arcadio Buendía "bemoaned to Melquíades the failure of his project and the gypsy then gave him a convincing proof of his honesty: he gave him back the doubloons in exchange for the magnifying glass, and he left him in addition some Portuguese maps and several instruments of navigation. In his own handwriting he set down a concise synthesis of the studies of Monk Hermann, which he left José Arcadio so that he would be able to make use of the astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant" (p. 4). This is the supplementary, but also functional, nature of writing. Along with the alchemy laboratory, Melquíades left "a set of notes and sketches concerning the processes of the Great Teaching . . ." (p. 7). And later, "In the small separate room, where the walls were gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous drawings, he [José Arcadio Buendía] taught them [his sons] to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them about the wonders of the

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world . . ." (p. 16). Here, in the alchemist's room, the father extends Melquíades' functions; it is in this scene of writing that Melquíades later transcribes his own rhymed chronicle of Macondo and the Buendías, and this is where the founder's descendants will learn writing and alchemy simultaneously.11 Melquíades, having taken refuge in writing prophecies, raves, seeks "the formula of his resurrection" (p. 75). This nomadic stranger, this pharmakeus and introducer of writing, of the remedy for forgetfulness, is also to be the pharmakos; his totemic death is a second founding of the city, the one inscribed in memory, in the annals, in the times of the written.12 In this way, Macondo becomes the city of writing; writing is its destiny. Prophecy, genealogy, and the legendary chronicle are that Melquiadian text that we read refracted in the novel's textuality. Melquíades, the great operator of exchange, does not found the signified but the sign that produces it. His function is to demonstrate the interchangeable character of signs, the perpetually substitutive nature of writing. Far from being based on its representative authority, writing stems from the festival of the letter, the pleasure of its occurrence, and the pure virtuality of its exchange. In the case of José Arcadio Buendía, two very clear generative images are joined—that of the imaginative explorer and that of "the youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the raising of children and animals" (p. 9)· The first image is derived from the discursive series linked to the "cultural hero" and his social aims and, therefore, it represents an agrarian, colonizing, and civilizing economy. The other and intentionally predominant figure promotes the antipuritan, anticapitalistic economy—the economy of waste.13 It is no coincidence that this is the economy which upholds the letter, the productive game of writing. In the end, it is writing which decides between one image and another. While the determining factor of the patriarch's image is repetition (the founders' houses were arranged in the "image and likeness" of his own; Macondo was an "orderly and hardworking" village [p. 9]), that of the explorer's image is variation, hyperbole. Together they promote a "trial" of origins through exchanges ("That spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets," etc. [p. 10] ). In the book's textuality, certain characters and events are reductions of the discourse; others are its generators. We are dealing here with a peculiar economy of sign. The first exchange (José Arcadio Buendía "traded his mule and a pair of goats" for the magnets [p. 2] ), shows that the value of acquired objects is not one of use or one solely of exchange. It is not an ornamental value or one of prestige. The magnet that extracts gold, the magnifying glass that conquers in war, the daguerreotype that takes a picture of God, etc. have, for José Arcadio Buendía, a revealed value whose dysfunctional use is ludic and for which writing has a characteristic value—that of being exchange-

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able. The value of the sign, therefore, is another sign. The mule and the pair of goats (which could have figured productively in Don Quixote) exit from the novel in exchange for the magnetized ingots. Later, the ingots and "three colonial coins" are exchanged for the magnifying glass. The same magnifying glass immediately goes back to Melquíades, who returns the doubloons and, in addition, hands over maps and navigation instruments. These exchanges of signs produce the economy of imaginative extravagance beginning with José Arcadio Buendía. At the same signic level, however, they imply an economy void of expenditure. It is, in fact, a recurrent exchange, based on a value of possible equivalences. Since it is a question of economy of information, some signs full of informative value replace others which have exhausted that value. The exchange feeds back information, renewing it with signs that permit other functions of association and transformation. Textuality produces its own mechanism of amplifications and variations, developing new generative data into the episodic space of history, the expansive horizon of discourse, the dynamized registering of narration. This is the production of writing as spectacle; the letter (the grapheme sounding like another word) seems to come from one discourse and be in transition toward another, as in an interplay of masks or of alternate intonations and dictions. The exchange of information in the writing itself marks that transition. The signs mutually yield space, a space of privileged communication, where Melquíades establishes exchanges and their verifications, where José Arcadio Buendía expands registers, and where Ursula represents empiricism and saving. Melquíades is thus responsible for the input of information, José Arcadio Buendía for carrying it out, and Ursula for its preservation.14 In the mythical time of origin, information is a selfreferential game. Preconceptions, perceptions, and versions produce an established or self-corrected and reestablished world. Everything within this first cycle of the novel is inscribed in such informative flickering. In the subsequent historical time (that begins with Colonel Aureliano Buendía's wars), however, information becomes unreliable as people change, news becomes undependable, and information gradually deteriorates. Its processing and preservation enter a critical stage, and representations (the house, the town, the novel's characters, relationships, and, in general, names) become exhausted, grow old, or are destroyed. In the third cycle, that of repetitions, information is echoed in a mirror-like fashion as names are reiterated, and gestures and actions are reflected in others. It is as if the world and time (as we are told) had indeed begun again. Information turns upon itself; it sees itself reflected in its own discourse and plays with new exchanges and openings. In the last stage, irreversible deterioration begins with the exploitation and violence introduced by the banana company with its new order of information (the simple object of the banana

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initiates an exploitative exchange). The end of representation is the last function of the letter—to erase itself (with the help of another disguise, apocalyptic discourse). Upon returning to his concubine's house after the devastating flood, Aureliano Segundo discovers that she is preparing a new raffle: "You're crazy," he told her. "Unless you plan to raffle off bones." Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress, but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had fed it with her wrath, and when there was no more hay or corn or roots, she had given it shelter in her own bedroom and fed it on the percale sheets, the Persian rugs, the plush bedspreads, the velvet drapes, and the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed. (p. 338) Unlike José Arcadio Buendía's mule, which was traded for the magnets, for that promise of discourse, Petra Cotes' mule is fed with the discourse of the novel itself. Representation in this inverse economy, consequently, gradually diminishes; new signs replace it to impose decay. The last Aureliano, who "between parchments . . . had gone from the first page to the last of the six volumes of the encyclopedia" (P· 379), is the reader who ends up being the sign of his own reading. This Aureliano also reads the parchments and their codes "without the slightest difficulty, as if they had been written in Spanish," discovering "the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time" (p. 421). The novel thus rests upon two metaphors: Melquíades (the intra-author) has written the future, while Aureliano (self-reader) reads the past, and the present of his reading is his only time. It is, of course, the time of revelations because the evidence of death, for others an instance of memory, is for Melquíades an instance of knowledge. The reading resolves but also dissolves. The desire to know, the endless exercise of pure exchange of signs, is what implies, at the end, that the reader is an anti-Oedipus. Letter is the substitutive machine; Book, the metaphor of the beginning and the end; Language, the space of a remade reality, constantly changing in the exchange which defines the use of the word. A theory of fiction underlies the story. The discourse of fiction is what permits all possible exchanges, revealing and making possible in the structure of language not the difference in traits (Saussure) but the exchange of one sign for another in all possible articulations. Yet even within actual and virtual freedom itself, the novel is full of signs of well-

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regulated control. Syntax, rhythm, and form are organized with precision and economy within the same signifying flow: It was, in reality, the result of multiple and rare diseases (p. 6) José Arcadio Buendía was, in fact, frightened (p. 51) Actually, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been in the country (p· 159) Actually, Remedios the Beauty was not a creature of this world (p. 202)

In reality, it made no difference to her where she ate (p. 238) . . . she also admitted the resemblance of the horseman . . . to the colonel. . . although he was actually a Tartar warrior (p. 328) Actually, her pernicious habit. . . had brought about a new confusion (p. 353) Actually, in spite of the fact that everyone considered him mad (pp. 354-355) Actually, he was talking to Melquíades (p. 362) Ever since he had expelled the children from the house, José Arcadio was really waiting (p. 381) These formulas (others allude to preconceptions, common knowledge, presuppositions, etc.) demonstrate the text's ability to regulate information produced by its own combinatory capacity. This mechanism belongs not to story or to discourse but to narration (although in this novel, there is not a narrating subject but an instance of writing which narrates from the text of the fable). And this is not the only mechanism, for narration, the productive impulse of the text, controls and distributes the information through contrasts, variations, and recurrences as well as through ellipses, summaries, and transpositions.15 On the other hand, this sign of verification corrects information like a supplement of certainty within the license of imagination. It is a type of notation external to the story but internal to its reading. The text discriminates its information and is capable of the greatest responsibility—guaranteeing the reader a verification of the facts. The text is a retelling, and the part that tells is inserted into the informative whole: "Actually, Remedios the Beauty was not a creature of this world." The text, having all information, plays with its own knowledge. In this case, indeed, Remedios is another appearance within the story, another of the novel's epiphany-like signs which can be exchanged only by its own disappearance. As memory's song and tale, One Hundred Yean ofSolitude circulates in the maternal chorality of legend, making chronicle of arbitrary fathers, celebration of the collective, lament of its loss and destruction. Among so many remembering voices, the novel recovers the totemic des-

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tiny of writing in order to dissolve the taboo of incest as well as confers a language of historical consciousness to exorcise its gratuitous dead, that outpouring of collective meaning. Having loosened the orders bound by language itself, the writing that produces this spectacle of open memory is gradually erased. Like a wound made by language, it must be healed in meaning, in the name of another closure: that of solitude, of everyday oblivion—in order to recommence a reading ever composed of new and renewed opportunities. NOTES 1. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 1. All quotations are from this edition. The novel was originally published as Cien años de soledad (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1967). Bibliographic information on the author is available in Pedro Simón Martinez's Recopilación de textos sobre Gabriel García Márquez (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1969) and Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Barrai, 1971). Two especially useful critical compilations are Pedro Lastra's 9 Asedios a Gabriel García Márquez, 3d. ed. (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1972) and Peter Earle's Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Madrid: Taurus, Serie El escritor ante la crítica, 1981). One of the first critically stimulating readings of the novel in Latin America is that of Carlos Fuentes in La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969), although Fuentes had written with enthusiasm about his reading of the manuscript even before its publication. In Spain, Ricardo Gullón's García Márquez o el arte de contar (Madrid: Taurus, 1970) justly praised its worth. 2. Gabriel García Márquez, El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinto Apuleyo Mendoza (Bogotá: La Oveja Negra, 1982), p. 80 (my translation). In connection with his previous efforts at writing, he says: "I never succeeded in building a continuous structure, but only scattered passages, some of which were published in the newspapers where I was working at that time. The number of years was never anything that bothered me. In fact, I'm not really sure that the story of One Hundred Tears of Solitude actually lasts a hundred years." The writing of it took him "about fifteen more years. But I did not find the tone that would make it credible to me. One day, going to Acapulco with Mercedes and the children, I got the revelation: I would have to tell the story in the same way that my grandmother told me hers, starting from that afternoon when the boy is taken by his father to discover ice." 3. On this perspective and its critical possibilities, see Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 121-140. De Man comments: "One can ask whether this reduction of figure to grammar is legitimate. The existence of grammatical structures within and beyond the unit of the sentence in literary texts is undeniable, and their description and classification are indispensable. The question remains if and howfiguresof rhetoric can be included in such a taxonomy. This question is at the core of the debate going on, in a wide variety of apparently unrelated forms, in contemporary poetics . . ." The fol-

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lowing observation on other model texts is explicit: "It can be shown that the systematic critique of the main categories of metaphysics undertaken by Nietzsche in his late work, the critique of the concepts of causality, of the subject of identity, of referential and revealed truth, and others, occurs along the same pattern of deconstruction that is operative in Proust's text; and it can also be shown that this pattern exactly corresponds to Nietzsche's description, in texts that precede The Will to Power by more than fifteen years, of the structure of the main rhetorical tropes. The key to this critique of metaphysics, which is itself a recurrent gesture throughout the history of thought, is the rhetorical model of the trope or, if one prefers to call it that, literature.'' 4. Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana, pp. 59-60, observed that "one of the extraordinary aspects of García Márquez's novel is that its structure corresponds to that of that profound historicity of Spanish America: the tension among Utopia, Epic, and Myth." He continues: "In each of these acts of fiction, the positivist time of the epic (this really happened) and the nostalgic time of utopia (this might have happened), and the absolute present time of myth is born: this is happening." 5. On interchange, value, and signs, see Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) as well as Jacques Ehrmann's essay, "Structures of Exchange in Cinna," in Structuralism, ed. J. Ehrmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 158-188. Also relevant is the chapter entitled "Exchanging" in Michel Foucault's The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971). 6. See Cesare Segre's essay "II tempo curvo in García Márquez" in his I segni e la critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1969). 7. From another perspective, linear time has been associated with schizophrenia (dissolution) and cyclical time with manic depression (repetition); see a summary of the subject in Alan McGlashan's Gravity and Levity (London, 1976). Also pertinent are Juan Ossio's "Guarnan Poma: Nueva Coránica o Carta al Rey; Un intento de aproximación a las categorías del pensamiento del mundo andino," in his Ideología Mesiánicadel Mundo Andino (Lima: Prado Pastor, 1973), and "Las cinco edades del mundo según Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala," in Revista de la Universidad Católica, No. 2 (Lima, 1977). On the idea of "the world turned upside down," a carnivalizing notion, there is information in Mikhail Bakhtin's L'Oeuvrc de Franíçois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Also see his book Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973). 8. Josefina Ludmer states the case as follows: "One Hundred Tears of Solitude is built upon a family tree and on the myth of Oedipus. These two axes constitute the basis of the story but also the basis of the activity of reading: to read a family tree not only in its extension but also in its intention and its density is to read a series of forms with a special type of organization; to read the myth of Oedipus is to read a myth of family relationships, another version of the family tree"; see her Cien años de soledad: Una interpretación (Buenos Aires: Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1972). 9. René Girard, quoted by Max Hernández in his article "En torno al complejo de Edipo" in Hueso Húmero, Nos. 15/16 (Lima, October-March 1983), pp. 99-122. In this excellent discussion, Hernández reminds us that "Since the Oedipus complex is constitutive and structuring, it is also an event which occurs in an evolutive

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moment of human development. A moment preceded by other moments. Moments which have been considered as antecedents, precursors, or even precocious manifestations of the same." And also: "Once the Oedipus complex is structured and the subject instituted, the human task begins, as unthinkable by the neurotic as it is realizable. With the remains of the shipwrecked complex, like Robinson Crusoe with the remains of his ship, the human being enters genitality and constructs its possibility. To awkwardly paraphrase Camus, one would have to imagine a happy Oedipus." 10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss this important debate in Chapter 3, "Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men," in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977) : "That is why the commentators most favorable to the universality of Oedipus recognize nonetheless that one does not encounter in primitive societies any of the mechanisms or any of the attitudes that make it a reality in our society. No superego, no guilt. No identification of a specific ego with global persons—but group identifications that are always partial, following the compact, agglutinated series of ancestors, and the fragmented series of companions and cousins. No anality— although, or rather because, there is a collectively invested anus. What remains then for the making of Oedipus? The structure—that is to say, an unrealized potentiality? Are we to believe that a universal Oedipus haunts all societies, but exactly as capitalism haunts them, that is to say, as the nightmare and the anxious foreboding of what might result from the decoding of flows and the collective disinvestment of organs, the becoming-abstract of the flows of desire, and the becoming-private of the organs?" (pp. 143-144). The authors' distinction between exchange and inscription results in their defining society not as a medium of exchange and circulation but as a place of inscription, where the essential thing is to mark and be marked. This proposal, however, is contested by One Hundred Tears of Solitude: the inscriptions, the marks, are transitory and capable of being erased and of erasing themselves; this flux of what is inscribed is not "essential," but is a going and coming, a passing, a transition of marks which, as they shift, change the meaning of their location. This circulation of signs, these strata of exchange presuppose the idea of the cultural as sign-systems which produce, exchange, and preserve information. Again, popular culture has the answer: the Spanish American tradition of reciprocity, which regulates control of ecosystems as much as communication and survival, also regulates confluent markets and their horizontal economic structure. One Hundred Tears ofSolitude defines, from this economic syntax, its sign system of production. By the same token, this system is responsible for the novel's powerful criticism of the monopolistic and capitalistic mode of production, a violent rupture of the natural order and its prodigal grammar. 11. Jorge Guzmán lists a considerable number of traits which may connect Melquíades with the figure of Hermes Trismegistus: "In thefirstplace, Melquíades isagypsy, which immediately makes us think of the origin of Hermes, for the word gitano, 'gypsy,' means 'Egyptian' in classical Spanish. Melquíades and his tribe, therefore, are linked with the inventions that 'are useful in the life of man,' a concept which appears to have been taken from Hecateus of Abder's ideas on HermesThoth, whom he considers to be the inventor of all that is useful to human life . . . which is the same capacity in which Vico mentions him, quoting Iamblichus. The

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fame of Hermes Trismegistus is based chiefly on his being an inventor of alchemy. It seems strange that he is not mentioned in One Hundred Years of Solitude and that, on the other hand, there is a mention of Zosimus, in whose writings we do find Hermes Trismegistus, referred to with reverence and enthusiasm . . . Among Hermes' writings is found the recipe for immortality, which consists of three prayers. . . It is a coincidence. . . that before his second death Melquíades declares that he has attained immortality, and that he declares it as an explanation of a previous enigmatic saying of his, namely, 'When I die, burn mercury in my room for three days?' For it is very tempting to think that it is a literary riddle to have the gypsy mention in the same breath mercury, the Latin name of the god Hermes, and the word three, which forms the Greek name of the character . . . Because Thoth was the gods' scribe when Horus and Anubis weighed the hearts of the dead, and because he had the general role of the gods' secretary, the Egyptians considered him to be the inventor of writing." From his article "Cien años de soledad: En vez de dioses, lenguaje," in Acta Literaria, No. 7 (Concepción, 1982), pp. 17-49. 12. "Plato's Pharmacy," the fundamental and fruitful essay by Jacques Derrida, should perhaps make us reread One Hundred Tears ofSolitude as a type of Platonic drama about the meaning of writing. In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 93-94, Derrida has the following to say of Thoth: "This god of calculation, arithmetic, and rational science also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulas that calm the sea, of secret accounts, of hidden texts: an archetype of Hermes, god of cryptography no less than of every other -graphy . . . The god of writing, who knows how to put an end to life, can also heal the sick. And even the dead. . . The god of writing is thus also a god of medicine. Of 'medicine' both as a science and an occult drug. Of the remedy and the poison. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon. And it is writing as a pharmakon that he presents to the king in the Phaedrus, with a humility as unsettling as a dare." 13. An economy which Severo Sarduy has properly linked to the poetics of the Baroque; see his Barroco (Buenos Aires: Sudamérica, 1974). 14. On the interactions of information, literature, and culture, see B. A. Uspensky et al., T h e Semiotic Study of Cultures," in Jan van der Eng and Mojmír Grygar, eds., Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture (The Hague: Mouton, 1973) ; Daniel P. Lucid, ed., Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and École de Tartu, Travaux sur Us systèmes des signes (Brussels, 1976). 15. See Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).

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The Economy of the Narrative Sign in No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour

On at least one occasion García Márquez has referred to In Evil Hour and No One Writes to the Colonel as somewhat limited novels whose "rational" structure was determined by their theme, "Colombian reality."1 It is fair to point out that this statement does not refer directly to the text of the novels as much as to the ideological framework in which they were conceived. García Márquez confesses that in writing them he yielded to the proddings of his "militant friends" who thought that Leafstorm (his first novel) had no political value in that it failed to denounce the bloody political persecutions rampant in Colombia during and after the period known as "la violencia."2 Thus, García Márquez temporarily abandoned the elaborate language and construction of Leafitorm in order to write engagé literature. The poetics of this literature, as defined above, reflects the dogmatic Marxist argument that content determines form, an argument which today is a mere historical curiosity, even among Marxists. As Fredric Jameson points out, content is never amorphous like "the unshaped substances of the other arts"; content is "meaningful from the outset, being neither more nor less than the very components of our concrete social life: words, thoughts, objects, desires, people, places, activities."3 Form and content are always dialectically related, as Marx pointed out long ago, even if orthodox Marxism feels theoretically compelled to make content dominant over form.4 This essay focuses on the relationship between the economic component of society and the content of In Evil Hour and Colonel. Both novels deal with the conflict between a natural and a monetary economy, questions of wealth production and distribution, fraud, and other economic representations. The economic, however, is not isolated from the narrative discourse or form that articulates it. Nor is it something constituted outside or prior to the sign-work that gives it meaning. An economy of signs exists which cannot be dissociated from the text's economic mean-

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ings. As money is both a form (a measure of value, a language) and a content (a commodity to be bought and sold), a dialectical relationship between an economy of the signifier and an economy of the signified can thus be posited. In Colonel and In Evil Hour, the dialectic is resolved into an identity; the setting of both novels is a poor town, a town in which wealth is so unequally distributed that the general impression is one of poverty. The economy of the signifier in these texts is also poor,5 "underdeveloped," but although productivefreeplayis limited and constrained, it is by no means negligible. Otherwise, the dialectic is open-ended, often involving a complex interplay of reading levels. In any case, however, the economy of the signifier is linked to that of the signified by an ongoing production. The text is like a workshop or factory whose internal organization is principally derived from the larger social organization in which its products circulate. The analysis of this production must avoid "commodity fetishism" by reaffirming the genetic link between the work of the signifier (use-value) and the production of the signified (exchange-value).6 IN EVIL HOUR: NATURAL AND MONETARY ECONOMY Economic historians before and after Marx and Engels distinguish between two types of economies: The feudal chieftainship, the medieval manor, the monastery, the pueblo, and other vaster and more complex elaborations . . . are outstanding types of a form of social organization which might be described as an enlargement of the household, operating by what some writers have called the "natural" economy as distinct from the money economy.7 The lack of widespread means of exchange in a natural economy does not mean that division of labor is unknown: Money was not indispensable, because the essence of the social arrangement did not depend upon an exchange, but upon everyone doing an assigned task and the product being divided by wellestablished custom or according to traditional hierarchical [patriarchal] rights.8 Norman Angelí implies that work within a natural economy was not alienated but integrated into a social and religious whole which represented a

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plentitude of meaning. The negative aspect of this type of organization, Angelí points out, is lack of individual freedom, restored to the human subject only with the advent of a money economy which, nevertheless, breaks up the social organization: Money has come to be necessary in the exchange of goods as language in the exchange of ideas . . . Our whole industrial order is based on production of goods for sale at a money profit. The economic value of virtually everything . . . is based on the expectation that it can be sold for money . . . Services as well as commodities compete in price markets; human success is measured mainly by salaries and wages; individual initiative is rewarded mainly in terms of money.9 There is a historical transition between these two types of economies (in Europe it takes place in the thirteenth century) which can be correlated to Marx's scheme of modes of production (the primitive mode corresponding to a natural economy and the ancient mode to a fully developed monetary model, with the Asiatic mode somewhere in between). But it is more interesting to consider these distinct economic organizations from an ideological, mythical, ethical, and textual perspective, because it is from these viewpoints that they are constructed in García Márquez's texts. Mario Vargas Llosa calls attention to a fundamental socioeconomic change in García Márquez's thematics from Leafitorm to No One Writes to the Colonel. Whereas in Leafitorm there is an aristocratic class whose prestige and power over the other classes (the bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, the servants) is inextricably connected to the foundation of the town, in Colonel this "natural" class is replaced by a type of nouveau-riche bourgeoisie which does not depend on any kind of "natural" prestige but rather on money: Here the monetary unit is the peso and everything in life is referred to money, everything is measured and conditioned by money: Don Sabas' situation, the colonel's drama, his wife's anxieties. Here we know what things "cost": a rooster can cost 900 pesos, a pair of shoes 13 pesos, a watch 40 pesos. Social hierarchies, happiness and unhappiness, things, are valued in monetary terms: this did not happen in Leafitorm.10 Vargas Llosa makes clear in his comments on In Evil Hour that, generally speaking, tradition means litde in the novel's "fictitious society," and that money has usurped the role of antiquity and family name in the social hier-

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archy. Nevertheless, the change is not total; within the commercial society described by the novel, there remain "feudal traces" embodied in the Asíc family, one of the founding families of the anonymous town, whose wealth is based on land and livestock.11 This property is not exchanged. Instead, it is consumed internally, thus overdetermining a self-sufficient community (the large Asís household, probably a latifundio) organized by a natural economy. Patriarchalism is the basis for this economy, despite the absence of the family founder, dead long before the narrative begins. It is possible to correlate the novel's socioeconomic representations to those of history. It is well known that after Latin American independence, a major sector of the ruling elite was composed of a neofeudal, patriarchal, landowning oligarchy which placed a high value on (Iberian) tradition. In the nineteenth century, however, the power of this class began to be eroded by that sector of the landowning elite politically and economically inspired by European liberalism, a class allied with the typical bourgeoisie: The interests of the traditional rural patriarchs did not always harmonize with those of the landowners eager to modernize their estates in order to take advantage of export markets and of the merchants, bureaucrats, and other members of the affluent urban bourgeoisie.12 The Asís family plays the role of the traditional landowning class, but its competitors are not represented by Don Sabas or Montiel. It would be extravagant to endow them with political or economic principles, as their land and livestock were obtained by fraud and opportunism and not by inheritance. It is, nonetheless, impossible to accept in García Márquez a simplistic mimesis; even if we grant a point of departurefirmlyanchored in an historical economy, as opposed to an imaginary one, content remains subject to exploitation and, ultimately, to the regulatory laws of an economy of text. Vargas Llosa does not fully subscribe to the conventional opinion regarding In Evil Hour's realistic or mimetic vocation. In a bold statement, mitigated by his explicit awareness of the novel's sociopolitical dimension, he calls In Evil Hour the first "fantastic text" written by García Márquez (excluding the "prehistoric" stories) and proceeds to a detailed investigation of the novel's non-realistic elements: dreams, eccentricities, exceptional events, and, most important, the connection between the lampoons and the imaginary.13 Perhaps Vargas Llosa's rigid distinction between "lo real objetivo" (the plane where sociopolitical problems are situated) and "lo real imaginario" (the plane of imaginary reality) prevents

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him from seeing that the novel's socioeconomic formations might be modeled by the imaginary. The novel is certainly composed of various references to this effect. For example, the patriarchate (as in the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude) is less social than biblical or mythical: the family's surname Asís (the name of the saint whose feast day marks the beginning of the novel's chronology) is inscribed in a symbolic pastoral code, as are the names of Judge Arcadio and the (figurative) shepherd Pastor. The onomastic code refers to pastoral simplicity and innocence by a naïve mutual motivation between sign and referent which feigns natural spontaneity. Thus, the priest is Father Angel; the mountain man is Montero (the verbs montar, "to mount," and desmontar,"todismount," are prominent in his introduction); and the servant girl, who works in the hotel where the masked salesmen used to relieve themselves in public, is "Masks." Even the clearly delineated social types (mayor, judge, dentist, barber, pharmacist, merchant, doctor, priest) bespeak a well-ordered, immutable, "natural" society. Finally, the town's history of fratricide is subtly biblical with the lampoons playing the role of Cain's mark. That there should be a Cain introduces the possibility of an ambivalent reading of the Edenic allusions. Although these are ostentatiously displayed at the beginning of the narrative, negative elements are woven into the fabric of the discourse which subvert the bucolic script. The poisoned mice and the first lampoons infect the town's atmosphere while representing a more deep-seated malaise. Ambivalence is further produced by the contrast between the natural and the artificial. Although the bucolic myth is a myth of nature, In Evil Hour presents a brazenly artificial narrative discourse. The novel opens as if onto an empty stage soon to be populated by a parade of characters not very different from the circus parade later described; in both, the scene unfolds. The church doors are opened and Father Angel contemplates the spectacle of the sleeping town: "The desolate square, the almond trees sleeping in the rain, the village motionless in the inconsolable October dawn . . ."14 The same doors are pushed open, and the priest again gazes out onto the empty village stage when the play is over. The recount of characters that begins on page 128 underscores the world-is-a-stage theme. The passing of the Golden Age and man's fall are strongly suggested by García Márquez's treatment of the Arcadian myth. One must remember, however, that mythical (literary) allusions mediate and defer the real. From the beginning of the novel, two non-realistic codes are interwoven—that of myth and that of repression. While consisting of a plainly realistic if not naturalistic set of references, the latter is metaphorically organizable. The collective unconscious of the town represses a history of violence, corruption, and hatred signified by neurotic symptoms

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such as the lampoons and the dead and rotting animals which relate intertextually to the Camusian plague. The town's quandary is economic in the full meaning of the term. The limited influence of a natural economy (reduced to the Asís clan and, even further, to a bygone era) opens the way to the disarticulation of the domestic from the political and of the ethical from the economic—now understood in a narrow, alienated sense. It is significant, in view of the etymological value of the word economy (management of the household), that thefirstmurder in the town after a year or two of peace is motivated by domestic irregularities, presumed or real (apparently the former, judging from the testimony of Father Angel's servant). Soon this private vendetta becomes a political issue; the transgression of the laws of the home disrupts the political economy. The destruction caused by César Montero reflects the abuse of power and corruption practiced by a class grown rich in the climate of violence which will safeguard its privileges at any cost. The process of wealth-accumulation within the novel is invariably linked to deception, corruption, and physical intimidation, especially in the case of the mayor. He accepts a bribe from his wealthy prisoner (Montero), deceives the folk flooded out from their low-lying shacks into thinking he is doing them a favor by relocating them on municipal land, andfinallytortures the faithful Carmichael in order to obtain the Montiel fortune. What is left of the economy, the dealings of the honest merchants (Mr. Benjamín and Moisés the Syrian), is incoherent. There is an ironic inversion (doubly ironic in Spanish, since inversion means both "inversion" and "investment") in the fact that the merchants are the characters par excellence who do not profit from their businesses. The real business of the town is not the sale of merchandise regulated by just prices, but the turning of peace and elections into profitable commodities, as the mayor, Don Sabas (even the character's palindromic name can be inverted/invested), and Montiel do. Aristotle would call this economy "chrematistic" and would relate it to the activities of a tyrant. He would also call it unnatural because it combines orders that should remain separate; for example, the judge's wife tells the priest: "Don Sabas bought me for two hundred pesos, sucked my juice out in three months, and then threw me into the street without a pin" (pp. 70-71), and the mayor states: "There's no favor that doesn't cost the person who gets it some money" (p. 73). The ambivalence found in the bucolic script—the qualification or subversion of the pastoral signs—is not mirrored in the novel's evaluative system. The narrative discourse, however subtly, clearly exposes the evils perpetrated by the powerful on the powerless; and if it does not fully revalue or reappraise the Arcadian option, it does suggest a possible redemption embodied in the guerrillas who, at the end of the novel, begin

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to populate that sort of natural reserve represented by the rural country. Attached to the moral critique of corruption produced by the narrative discourse, is the possibility of a more general critique of money and representation whose model can be found in Rousseau. A truly economic critique, it is generated by the symbolic properties of money and includes the political as well as the ethical. Rousseau criticizes the symbolic status of money, language, and political representation as elements of a single compound, and proclaims in opposition a "natural" situation whose literary image is Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In this ideal situation, one without money and language, objects appear as they are, in their concrete and differentiated form, and are not mediated or leveled by language or "exchangevalue." The human subject is free because in the absence of society, one does not have to delegate one's sovereignty to political representatives who can only alienate it. And there can be no deception insofar as no language will exist (should one become theoretically necessary) without the guarantee of the referent, its natural base.15 It is not Rousseau's linguistic theory that merits our attention, but his rejection of the monetary economy and its political effects in favor of what can only be called a natural economy, one in which exchange proceeds without representation. García Márquez does not produce a philosophical critique of society, but the nearly genetic relationship between representation (in money, in political proxy) and deception in In Evil Hour and other texts is clear. The ideological use of the carnival (a discourse nonetheless recessed at this point in García Márquez's work) is another aspect of the author's political critique, as well as a significant instance in which the use-value of signs is displayed. (It is worthwhile emphasizing that throughout Garcia Márquez's narrative, the circus is a metaphor for the return to communal origins.) The carnival isfirstsuggested by the lampoons, which become a kind of circus or festival of the poor in view of their class-specific nature (their primary target being the wealthy classes): "That afternoon Father Angel noticed that in the poor people's houses, too, they were talking about the lampoons, but in a different way and even with a healthy merriment" (p. 92). The same kind of carnivalesque discourse which suggests the toppling of the powerful, or at least their disgrace, articulates the sequence of the curfew proclamation. The decree is proclaimed with what would seem to be the usual official fanfare: The drum roll reappeared like a specter out of the past. It burst forth in front of the poolroom at ten o'clock in the morning and held the town balancing on the very center of its gravity until the three energetic warnings were drummed at the end and anxiety was reestablished. (p. 116)

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But the official tone and prestige of the ceremony are undermined by contamination with the circus rituals that precede it: While the confession was going on the mayor sat in the hall. He thought about the circus, of a woman hanging onto a bit by her teeth, twenty feet in the air, and a man in blue uniform trimmed with gold beating on a snare drum. (p. 72)l6 Another form of power is being parodied in these passages in accordance with the central thematics of the carnival. Beyond this content level, the scene points to the material affirmation of the use-value of the carnivalesque sign itself, and its more radical subversive function aimed at the very symbolism of any power investiture, especially in a case where this process is alienated. The identity of the carnivalesque sign's user—traditionally the masses or the underclasses—is also significant. NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL: SYMBOLIC INVESTMENT AND SIGN-EXCHANGE Despite the genetic relationship between In Evil Hour and Colonel (the latter was originally an episode of the former which grew to the dimensions of a short novel), there is one important difference. In Evil Hour articulates a political economy within which the place of literature, manifested by the lampoons, is eminently subversive. The lampoons (engagé literature) circulate within the larger and corrupt economy of which they are a part and whose deceptive fabric they unravel. As Jean-Joseph Goux reminds us, circulation is one of the perspectives from which any aspect of the social process can be envisaged. The other point of view is that of production, linked to use-value to the same extent that circulation implies exchange-value.17 Whereas in In Evil Hour, literature is placed on the side of circulation and envisioned primarily as a public discourse aimed at public consumption, in Colonel, literature does not exist in an institutionalized form and withdraws into a private space where the only remaining question is that of the production of the narrative sign, not that of its exhibition and consumption.18 One confronts an internal economy of signs, which in no way rejects a sociopolitical investment, but simply displaces it from the sphere of circulation. Throughout the narrative the reader frequently returns to the protagonist's household, where the overwhelming problem is the upkeep of the domestic economy: T h i s is the miracle of the multiplying loaves," the colonel repeated every time they sat down to the table during the following week.

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With her astonishing capacity for darning, sewing, and mending, she seemed to have discovered the key to sustaining the household economy with no money.19 The text abounds with details concerning the privations endured by the colonel and his wife, and the miracles they have to perform (the wife, particularly) in order to eat and clothe themselves: The afternoon heat stimulated the woman's energy. Seated among the begonias in the veranda next to a box of worn-out clothing, she was again working the eternal miracle of creating new apparel out of nothing. She made collars from sleeves, and cuffs from the backs and square patches, perfect ones, although with scraps of different colors.. . . "One has to be half a magpie to dress you," she said. She held out a shirt made of three different colors of material except for the collar and cuffs, which were the same color. "At the carnival all you have to do is take off your jacket." (pp. 17-18)20 The colonel's harlequinesque image is not meant to function as a caricature. Rather, it connotes affection, domestic harmony, even family wholeness, since Agustín (their son) had once attended an open air spectacle with his parents and sat under a "circus umbrella." There is something clown-like, however, about the colonel when it is his turn to "repair [remendar] their household economy" (p. 29): his worn-out shoes, his outsize burden, his commercial ineptitude. It is true that relations between husband and wife are strained by poverty, but in the end, and throughout, the wife has no other choice but to become an accomplice of the colonel's grand scheme concerning the rooster. Angelí, echoing Aristotle, describes the natural economy as "an enlargement of the household." In Colonel, as in the "parent" novel, the relationship between the domestic economy and the larger political economy is perturbed by the corruption of ethical values and the breaking of the compact between the individual and the state. The colonel had exercised his military rank in the insurgent army which many years before had defied the government. When the legendary leader, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, dictated the revolutionaries' surrender, the colonel took pains to attend the signing of a peace treaty and to restore the funds of the civil war to the country's treasury. In return the government promised to pay the revolutionaries veterans' pensions, for which decades later, the "anachronistic" colonel still waits.21 The government fails to deliver on a payment which is an economic matter to the highest degree. Every aspect of the protagonist's private and public life is affected by this official default. Others, particularly Sabas, are "partners" in the breakdown of the political

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economy. Wealth is acquired unjustly but no moral or ethical dilemma results. There is injustice in the case of both characters, yet one of them has managed to dissociate the economic (the chrematistic) from moral, ethical, and social law. This dissociation can occur only in a non-natural, monetary economy in which the colonel is marginal, despite the operable values of an older society.22 That which dynamically conjugates the domestic and the political economy in the novel is the rooster. In fact, No One Writes to the Colonel is "about" the symbolic investment of the rooster, a process which conflates the private and the public and substitutes the missing organic link between domestic and political orders, the individual and the state. The rooster is the colonel's "wealth" ("'He's worth his weight in gold,' he said" [p. 39] ) and is the only inheritance left by his murdered son besides the sewing machine whose sale is the "orphaned" couple's only source of income for nine months. From an analytic perspective, the animal is originally asymbolic and acquires a symbolic value when the colonel's son is caught distributing clandestine literature during a cockfight. The rooster then becomes an emblem of the colonel's determination to continue the revolutionary struggle and finally obtain his overdue compensation (in both monetary and traditional "currency," the latter at all times investing the former). Finally, the cock turns into a communal symbol of resistance to the government's repression; his apotheosized victory in a training session is an anticipation of definite victory in the regional fights. Not every character, however, perceives the rooster's emblematic status. The colonel's wife is puzzled by the importance assigned to such an ugly animal whose head is disproportionately small for his legs. Sabas, too, as Vargas Llosa points out, is an asymbolic reader, because he can only think of the animal in commercial terms: Don Sabas is not identified with the town, he does not feel between him and the rest of the [socioeconomic] pyramid a fateful and visceral union . . . On the other hand, symbols lack meaning for Don Sabas. He is fundamentally a pragmatic man . . . He does not understand those symbolic ties between a man and a place, or between a man and an animal. That is why he is so surprised by the relation between the colonel and the rooster.23 It is clear that the rooster is a heterogeneous symbol and, therefore, irreducible to gold—the quintessential homogeneous measure of value whose aesthetic properties, writes Marx, "make it suitable directly to express the superfluous: attire, luxury, natural need to shine on feast days, and wealth in itself."24 Even if the reader does not accept the colonel's wife's unflattering characterization of the rooster, it is still difficult to think

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of the animal as the equivalent of a noble metal. The cock is a mocking restatement of the symbol par excellence of the monetary economy, a carnivalesque travesty of gold. In any case, the animal's symbolic heterogeneity and its substitutive relationship to gold emphasize the problematic existence of two rival economies within the same body politic. The economy based on the "rooster standard" threatens to sell out to the dominant monetary economy; in the end, however, no satisfactory price can be set. Money, the measure of all commodities, cannot adequately measure the colonel's rooster, which is not a commodity and consequently has no exchange-value. The rooster, on the other hand, does have use-value. Its symbolic value is the product of a specifically human and, more specifically, political work. The social relationships of production are not sublimated in an abstract exchange-value nor hidden behind a commodity or replaced by money fetishism. On the contrary, the creation of value in an alienated society is precisely the object of the narrative work—its thematics. The use-value of an object is not exclusively predicated on its immediate consumption (thus, the hungry owners refuse to make a meal out of the rooster), but also on its capacity to produce other objects, whether ideal (hope) or material (signs). With this in mind, the level of a properly textual economy is one in which the first problem is the production or productivity of writing. It is instructive to compare the image of writing in One Hundred Tears ofSolitude and Colonel. In the former, writing appears as a fabulous practice surrounded by an aura of mystery and revelation. For Melquíades, writing is magical, oracular, hieratical (a more pedestrian view, which states that literature is "the best plaything ever invented to make fun of people," is also emitted to correa the mythical and idealist vision). In Colonel, on the other hand, writing is essentially a craft and the writer an artisan; the material nature of writing (its work) is epitomized by the scene of the protagonist's letter-writing: He wrote with a studious neatness, the hand that held the pen resting on the blotter, his spine straight to ease his breathing, as he'd been taught in school. The heat became unbearable in the closed living room. A drop of perspiration fell on the letter. The colonel picked it up on the blotter. Then he tried to erase the letters which had smeared but he smudged them.. . . The colonel filled a page with large doodlings which were a litde childish, the same ones he learned in public school at Manaure. Then he wrote on a second sheet down to the middle, and he signed it. (p. 27)25 When reading García Márquez's works, it is impossible not to register the use-value of the narrative sign insofar as his novels and short stories engage each other in a complicated process of revision, re-elaboration, and erasure

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leading to an always displaced definitive version. In this light the sign is malleable matter, copper (or bronze) in the earlier works and gold in One Hundred Tears of Solitude. In No One Writes to the Colonel, furthermore, writing (the government letter) is also a displaced, deferred, absent object which must be compensated by a substitute—the rooster. The textual economy is based to a significant degree on sign-exchange and substitution, yet this process differs from the monetary creation of exchange-value in an important respect; sign-exchange does not require the mediation of a third element (money). There is no discontinuity between production and circulation. For these reasons, and in consonance with its "primitive" mode of production, the textual economy can better be conceived in terms of barter, a process in which only use-values are exchanged.26 The absent letter is replaced symbolically and relatively by the rooster, around which is generated an economy of signs, since all signs (characterological, descriptive, evaluative) converge on it, transforming it into a veritable narrative commonplace. The economy of the rooster/ letter exchange is, particularly from the character's point of view, a compensation. (Ironically, the colonel's letter does not achieve this.) A similar compensatory exchange takes place between the absent subject of the writing indicated in the novel's title, and the presence of the writing subject in the conspirators' watchword: "Agustín wrote" (p. 32). The news that Agustín brings is not what the colonel eagerly awaits throughout the narrative. The revolutionary mail, harbinger of vindication by other means, replaces the illusory government pension. The affective value embodied in the father's assumption of the martyred son's cause, moreover, is absent from another type of textual exchange—the equivalence of money and excrement. Conventionally, the production of feces is the symbolic equivalent of the production of wealth (and art understood in a material, plastic sense). In Colonel the protagonist neither produces nor receives wealth, nor can he defecate: It was a false alarm. Squatting on the platform of unsanded boards, he felt the uneasiness of an urgefrustrated.The oppressiveness was substituted by a dull ache in his digestive tract, (p. 15) The frustration experienced by the colonel in this passage is more than physical, although the character's body becomes a knot of meanings, a text which displays a critique of the town's political economy. Agustín is quoted as saying on the night of the cockfight interrupted by his death: "Shut up; this afternoon we'll be rolling in money" (p. 30; in Spanish the phrase is nos vamos a podrir de plata, "we'll be rotted by money"). The one who is "filthy rich," however, is Sabas. This predicament is indirectly reflected in

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his characterization of the town: "This town stinks" (p. 35; in Spanish, Este es un pueblo de mierda). Feces and putrefaction are explicitly brought together in another passage: The colonel also suffered a relapse. He strained for many hours in the privy, in an icy sweat, feeling as if he were rotting and that the flora in his vitals was falling to pieces. (p. 29)27 Beyond the categorization of the town's social economy in terms of the scatological and the rotten is the text's materialist critique through bodyrelated language. (Sabas' diabetic body, too, signifies the corruption of wealth, of excessive consumption.) Finally, a textual form of exchange, subsumed under the rubric of an effective style or composition, is that of the description of Agustín's funeral in terms of the description of the anonymous musician's funeral and wake, during which the colonel experiences a shock that can only be motivated by the substitution of the deceased in the textual economy. This kind of substitution becomes multiple within the paradigm of waiting generated by the text in such a way that a variety of objects or characters become interchangeable (the colonel not only waits for his letter but also for his coffee at the beginning of the novel, for Sabas when he attempts to sell the rooster, for the animal's victory later on, for the arrival of December; his wife waits for the period of mourning to be over in order to go to the movies or sing). Yet the number of exchangeable objects is actually limited, as is the production of the text in terms of the "Yield" of event, character, description, dialogue, motivation, and length. Repetition and variation play an important role in the textual dynamics, which establishes an inverse proportion between value and scarcity (the more scarce a "commodity," the greater its value). The relationship between value and the quantity of sign-work, however, remains directly proportional.28 The foregoing omits a discussion of certain stylistic traits which commonly belong to the rubric of literary economy.29 It is, nonetheless, rewarding to mention Vargas Llosa's encomium of this aspect of García Márquez's novel, because it unconsciously uncovers its own transcendence. The Peruvian writer praises the omission of unnecessary details, the brief and precise dialogues and descriptions, the way in which the novel's elements imply and comment on one another, and the perfectly adequate relationship between "manner" and "matter"; the reader thinks that the story could have been told only in that form.30 Also apparent are the deliberate symmetries (or outright repetition) between sentences, and the almost Borgesian, magical economy of the anticipatory detail (the litde

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boy who threatens the colonel with a wooden rifle prefigures the policeman who later points a real gun at the colonel; the entire scene is an incomplete replay of Agustín's murder). The principal point remains the moderation with which García Márquez distributes narrative signs, even if they are not as transparent as Vargas Llosa would have us believe. García Márquez's measured language with respect to content is neither excessive nor insufficient (as Vargas Llosa claims is the case in "The Sea of Lost Time"). Given the clearly political content, it is possible to substitute Vargas Llosa's aesthetic economy for a political one which includes aesthetics. A relationship could then be posited between a just and proportionate textual economy and the larger unjust and disproportionate political economy which supervises it. For example, the novel's economy, composed of a proper stylistic distribution and characterized by a primitive, natural, craftsmanlike mode of production, proposes a corrected sociopolitical model according to a compensatory logic which is itself economic. Nevertheless, García Márquez's "economic" treatment of political injustice avoids the truculence that characterized other denunciations, literary and otherwise, of "la violencia," whose most achieved literary representation is found in No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour. We may deduce, therefore, that in the literature about "la violencia," content did indeed determine form. NOTES 1. See Gabriel García Márquez, El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinto Apuleyo Mendoza (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1982), p. 82. 2. Ibid. 3. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 402-403. The signified (as content of the sign) is previously informed as well, not by amorphous reality but by sign relations within a given linguistic system. 4. "But if form and content are inseparable in practice, they are theoretically distinct. This is why we can talk of the varying relations between the two. Those relations, however, are not easy to grasp. Marxist criticism sees form and content as dialectically related, and yet wants to assert in the end the primacy of content in determining form" (Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976], pp. 22-23). 5. Regina Janes calls these two novels "economic" and claims that they suffer from "rhetorical privation," whereas a text like "Big Mama's Funeral" is "rhetorically the richest of the fictions, with sentences as overstuffed with carnival details as if they were sausages" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Revolution in Wonderland [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981], p. 43). 6. The traditional view of language, says Jean-Joseph Goux in Freud, Marx: Economie a symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973), stresses the exchange-value of signs, their

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capacity to circulate and to be translated. But signs also have a use-value to the extent that they are the means of production of other signs. Moreover, he writes: "The opposition between signifier and signified is nothing but . . . this scission between use-value and exchange-value" (p. 127; my translation). 7. Norman Angelí, The Story ofMoney (New York: Garden City, 1929), p. 18. 8. Ibid., pp. 22-23. 9. W. T. Foster and W. Catchings, Money (New York, 1927), quoted in Angelí, The Story ofMoney, p. 19. See also Karl Marx, T h e Power of Money in Bourgeois Society," in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964). 10. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1971), p. 305 (my translation). π. Ibid., pp. 426-427· 12. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty ofProgress: Latin America in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 16. 13. Compare Wolfgang Luchting's comment: "It has been pointed out that Leafstorm is similar to Greek tragedy (Antigone); the lampoons too have the ominous tone of a chorus calling out more or less terrible crimes. The name Cassandra for the circus clairvoyante is surely no accident, nor are the allusions to legends and superstitions, the blind grandmother of Mina who insists that everything is 'written down"' ("Lampooning Literature: La mala hora" Books Abroad, 47, no. 3 [Summer 1973]: 477). For his part, Angel Rama speaks of a "hallucinatory realism" in "García Márquez: Un novelista de la violencia," Nueve asedios a García Márquez, ed. Mario Benedetti (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1972). 14. Gabriel García Márquez, In Evil Hour, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1979), p. 3. All further references are to this edition. Originally published as La mala hora (Mexico City: Era, 1966). For the cinematographic origin of García Márquez's visual rhetoric see Julianne Burton, "Learning to Write at the Movies: Film and the Fiction Writer in Latin America," Texas Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 92-103. 15. See Marc Shell, The Economy ofLiterature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978), chapter 4. Goux points out that in Marx the "natural," "original" relation between man and his objects is encompassed within the notion of use-value (Economie et symbolique, p. 72n). 16. A related passage occurs on p.111:"The mayor watched it [the circus parade] from the poolroom, shaken by the coppers and brasses of the band. A girl with a silvery costume passed first on a midget elephant with malanga ears. Then the clown and trapeze artists passed . . . When the music stopped so the man on stilts could read the proclamation, the whole town seemed to rise up from the earth in a miraculous silence." 17. Goux, Economie et symbolique, p. 106. 18. The instance of the novel's production is reproduced in the text to the extent that the colonel is a fictive projection of García Márquez, who when writing the novel in 1957 was poverty-stricken, starving in a bare Parisian attic, and awaiting an infinitely deferred check. The colonel's check is supposed to be issued by the government, whereas García Márquez's check was due him for his work as a reporter

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for El Espectador, closed down by the Rojas Pinilla government while the writer was abroad. The sense of isolation and of being stranded is patent in the novel and creates the image of a private space filled by the illusion or delusion of writing. 19. Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, trans. J. S. Bernstein (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 19. All further references are from this edition. Originally published as El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Medellín: Aguirre, 1961). 20. In these metaphors of improvisation there is a suggestion of bricolage which a critic has associated with "Big Mama's Funeral." See Robert L. Sims, "Theme, Narrative Bricolage and Myth in García Márquez," Journal ofSpanish Studies: Twentieth Century 8, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 1980): 143-159. Yet the novel's narrative discourse corresponds rather to the engineer's project and not the bricoleur's account of its "rational," calculated economy. 21. "Anachronistic" also concerning the colonel's numerous child-like traits, the most significant of which is his illusory wait for the letter: "You can't cat [hope], but it sustains you" (39). 22. This is a point made by Vargas Llosa (Historia de un deicidio, p. 307). The colonel's credit (with the doctor and Agustín's friends) is good where nonmonetary values remain. 23. Vargas Llosa, Historia de un deicidio, p. 303 (my translation). 24. Cited by Goux, Economie et symbolique, p. 73 (my translation). Note the absence of gold in the novel's descriptions and its "replacement" by copper and bronze: "But the insistence of the cracked bells . . ." (in Spanish, "de los bronces rotos") (p. 4); "The colonel noticed the lack of a trumpet..." (in Spanish, la falta de un cobre"; p. 8); "Comforted by the copper sun . .." (p. 19); "You're lucky because you've got a cast-iron stomach" (in Spanish, "puede comerse un estribo de cobre"; p. 35). These can be considered figures of speech, but their admission into the text is determined or overdetermined by the symbolic. 25. So too Balthazar—the metaphoric artist of "Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon"—is a carpenter. 26. Goux points out that Marx sometimes refers to barter as a "natural exchange" (Economie et symbolique, p. 211). 27. The colonel's digestive trauma can also be recuperated at a realistic level; the character cannot defecate because he cannot afford to eat. García Márquez's use of scatological language is consistent with the conventions of the carnival. 28. "Value" here is, in a Saussurean sense, equivalent to "meaning." Interchangeability, therefore, is simply another way of saying that the meaning of the novel's opening—insofar as meaning is relational—is its determination by and within a textual system of waiting (itself included in a more general system of verisimilitude). The colonel's other possible actions run the risk of seeming arbitrary, functionless (except at the degree zero of functionality, the production of the "reality effect"), "meaningless." We must also avoid, as Saussure himself does in the Course, identifying linguistic and economic value. On this point see Goux, Economie et symbolique, p. 29. 29. "Despite Aristotle's integration of aesthetic and economic theory, the term 'economy' soon came to mean, as if by a bad metaphor, merely the internal disposi-

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t i o nof a literary work. . . . Indeed, the history (in literary theory) of economy is, like that of mimesis, often little more than the description of why and how the fundamental philosophical and political categories were stripped of their explicit philosophical and political implications" (Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature, pp. 101-102).

30. Vargas Llosa, Historia de un deicidio, pp. 326-327.

MICHAEL PALENCIA-ROTH

Intertextualities: Three Metamorphoses of Myth1 in The Autumn of the Patriarch

Although intertextuality has always been part of literature, it has not always been part of literary theory. Its complex theoretical elaboration is a relatively recent phenomenon. The diffusion of the theory of intertextuality, however, may today be considered to be world-wide. Like all the best theories, it builds on what we "sense" to be true; and many critics have been "speaking intertextuality" all along, whether they realized it or not, much as Molière's Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, to his eventual surprise. The applicability of the theory of intertextuality is exaggerated; for while it may explain the dynamics of some literary works, one must always remember—as some French and American critics seem to forget—that literature is not created ONLY from other texts. Intertextuality is but one aspect of the creative process. It is, nevertheless, an important and fascinating aspect of certain authors' ars faciendi; and this is especially true of García Márquez in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. Intertextuality exists every time a text is constructed—directly or indirectly—by means of another text.2 There are three basic forms or kinds of intertextuality, as distinguished by Lucien Dällenbach.3 First, there is "general" intertextuality, in which an author cites texts by other authors. Second, there is "restricted" intertextuality, in which an author cites from another work that he himself has written. Third, there is "autarchic" intertextuality, which occurs when the author cites from another portion of the text that he is in the process of writing. "Restricted" and "autarchic" intertextualities are, therefore, self-citations. This essay focuses on "general" intertextuality in The Autumn of the Patriarch. Intertextuality transforms a previous text. When placed in a new context, words can acquire a different meaning. The tone is usually transformed as well, either into one of admiration or, more frequently,

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into irony, parody, and satire, all of which undermine the original text. In Latin American literature the most self-consciously ironic intertext is probably Jorge Luis Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"4 Menard is a twentieth-century author whose life-work consists, in part, of writing Don Quixote. With infinite care and patience, he composes a masterpiece of fiction which, word for word, is identical to the original Don Quixote. As the author of Pierre Menard's story of authorship, Borges cites texts from both Cervantes' and Menard's Don Quixote. In doing so he demonstrates, with inimitable Borgesian irony, how an early seventeenth-century text means something radically different when written in the twentieth century. The same words yield different meanings. The Borges-Menard principle applies to the transformations of myth: any myth, placed in a different context, becomes a new myth. The dynamics of such transformations may be discussed under the general rubric of "metamorphosis." Whether the transformation is that of a text or a myth, a previous reality or entity becomes a new reality or entity as the old text becomes a new text, the person becomes a monster, the animal becomes a prince. Although the transformations in The Autumn of the Patriarch are not so radical, García Márquez exploits the following figures: Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus, and Rubén Darío. Around each figure is gathered one of the central thematic complexes of the novel: García Márquez uses Julius Caesar to explore the concept of power; Christopher Columbus, issues of political and cultural imperialism; and Rubén Darío, questions of aesthetics and the literary life in relation to the aged dictator. Each figure affords us the opportunity of analyzing a concrete and extensive example of intertextuality. Together, they document how "mythical metamorphosis" works in García Márquez—how the new intertext is constructed. I. JULIUS CAESAR at the mercy of omens and the interpreters of his nightmares5 In a 1977 interview with García Márquez, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo asked him about the theme of the dictator in Latin American literature. García Márquez's response focused on the creation of his Patriarch: I learned a lot from Plutarch and Suetonius, as I did in general from all the biographers of Julius Caesar. That is only natural, since Julius Caesar is, in truth, the one character I should like to have created in literature. Because I couldn't do so, because, that is, it was already too late in my life, I had to make do with that crazy

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quilt which is the old Patriarch, stitched together as he was from all the dictators in the history of man.6 Julius Caesar is indeed "stitched" into The Autumn of the Patriarch. He is stitched both into the character of the Patriarch and into García Márquez's prose.7 The Patriarch and his Roman predecessor are similar in that they both try to rearrange time and even to "redo it": the Patriarch tries to recalculate time arbitrarily according to his own "will"; Julius Caesar does so in accordance with the scientific knowledge of his day. Both are haunted by auguries or prophecies. While the Patriarch takes them so seriously that he often alters his life to accommodate them, Julius Caesar tries to ignore them and is eventually killed as prophesied. Both men are epileptics. During public meetings the Patriarch often tumbles from his throne in convulsions (Autumn, p. 43; Otoño, p. 47). According to Suetonius, Julius Caesar frequently fainted toward the end of his life, and twice epileptic fits surprised him during campaigns.8 Both the Patriarch and Julius Caesar have trouble sleeping and are often awakened by fitful dreams and nightmares. The two rulers are also reputed to be great lovers. In the Patriarch's case, the designation is ironic. In the case of Julius Caesar, writes Suetonius, "it is admitted by all that he was much addicted to women, as well as very extravagant in his intrigues with them, and that he seduced many illustrious women" (p. 29). Both dictators rule as though their every pronouncement were law. Examples of this attitude—and its abuse—are legion in the novel. Suetonius reports that Julius Caesar thought that "men ought to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law" (p. 42). We read in Plutarch that the Romans submitted to Julius Caesar only because they saw no other solution to their internecine wars and to the misery of their daily lives; the government of a single person, they thought, "would give them the time to breathe."9 It was only because of these circumstances that Julius Caesar was named dictator for life. Plutarch, Suetonius, and García Márquez have commented that the conjunction of great power and extended rule leads almost inevitably to tyranny (see, for instance, Plutarch, p. 349; Suetonius, pp. 41-42). Both the Patriarch and Julius Caesar live with the threat of assassination. While the Patriarch survives every attempt on his life, Julius Caesar does not and is killed in a scene which has passed into literary immortality through its elaboration in Suetonius, Plutarch, and, of course, Shakespeare. Once dead, both the Patriarch and Julius Caesar are accorded divinity and perhaps for similar reasons. Their subjects somehow feel responsible for their deaths and want to render them in death the homage that they had insufficiently rendered them in life. Both the Patriarch and Julius Caesar, finally, are associated with the portents of nature, particu-

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larly with comets. The Patriarch thinks that his death has been prophesied to coincide with the return of Halley's comet, but that does not occur. And for an entire week after the death of Julius Caesar, a great comet appeared every night, as if to remind the people of the greatness of their fallen leader (Plutarch, p. 364; Suetonius, pp. 4 9 5 0 ) . The great temptation of intertextual criticism is the unbridled application of the critic's imagination. That imagination must be based, if the analysis is to have any validity, on secure foundations. In the case of The Autumn of the Patriarch, fortunately, there is little danger of unfounded comparisons in Plutarch and Suetonius, for here García Márquez's intertextual practice is blatant. Not only does he mention Suetonius in regard to that illustrious Latinist and precursor of the Patriarch, General Lautaro Muñoz ("an enlightened despot whom God keep in His holy glory with his Suetonius missals in Latin"—Autumn, p. 52; Otoño, p. 56), he also incorporates information on Julius Caesar from Plutarch and Suetonius to create a scene in which the Patriarch dreams of his own death. Following are the relevant scenes from Plutarch and Suetonius: Plutarch: But those who came prepared for the business inclosed him on every side, with their naked daggers in their hands. Which way soever he turned, he met with blows, and saw their swords levelled at his face and eyes, and was encompassed, like a wild beast in the toils, on every side. For it had been agreed they should each of them make a thrust at him, and flesh themselves with his blood; for which reason Brutus also gave him one stab in the groin. Some say that he fought and resisted all the rest, shifting his body to avoid the blows, and calling out for help, but that when he saw Brutus's sword drawn, he covered his face with his robe and submitted, letting himself fall, whether it were by chance, or that he was pushed in that direction by his murderers, at the foot of the pedestal on which Pompey's statue stood, and which was thus wetted with his blood. So that Pompey himself seemed to have presided, as it were, over the revenge done upon his adversary, who lay here at his feet, and breathed out his soul through his multitude of wounds, for they say he received three and twenty. And the conspirators themselves were many of them wounded by each other, whilst they all levelled their blows at the same person. (pp. 360-361) Suetonius: As [Julius Caesar] took his seat, the conspirators gathered about him as if to pay their respects, and straightway Tillius Cimber, who

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had assumed the lead, came nearer as though to ask something. When Caesar with a gesture put him off to another time, Cimber caught his toga by both shoulders. As Caesar cried, "Why, this is violence!" one of the Cascas stabbed him from one side just below the throat. Caesar caught Casca's arm and ran it through with his stylus, but as he tried to leap to his feet, he was stopped by another wound. When he saw that he was beset on every side by drawn daggers, he muffled his head in his robe, and at the same time drew down its lap to his feet with his left hand, in order to fall more decently, with the lower part of his body also covered. And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, "You too, my child?" All the conspirators made off, and he lay there lifeless for some time, until finally three common slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, with one arm hanging down. (pp. 46-47) The corresponding text in The Autumn of the Patriarch takes place during one of the Patriarch's dreams. (The words and phrases in italics refer to either Suetonius or Plutarch.) The Patriarch sees himself in the big empty house of a bad dream surrounded by pale men in gray frock coats who were smiling and sticking him with butcher knives, they harried him with such fury that wherever he turned to look he found a blade ready to wound him in the face and eyes, he saw himself encircled like a wild beast by the silent smiling assassins who fought over the privilege of taking part in the sacrifice and enjoying his bloody but he did not feel rage or fear, rather an immense relief that grew deeper as his life trickled away, he felt himself weightless and pure, so he too smiled as they killed him, he smiled for them and for himself in the confines of the dream house whose whitewashed walls were being stained by my spattering blood, until someone who was a son of his in the dream gave him a stab in the groin through which the last bit of breath I had left escaped, and then he covered his face with the blanket soaked in his blood so that no one who had not been able to know him alive would know him dead and he collapsed shaken by such real death throes that he could not repress the urgency of telling it to my comrade the minister of health and the latter ended up by putting him in a state of consternation with the revelation that that death had already occurred once in the history of men general sir, he read him the story of the episode in one of the

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singed tomes of General Lautaro Muñoz, and it was identical, mother, so much so that in the course of its reading he remembered something that he had forgotten when he woke up and it was that while they were killing him all of a sudden and with no wind blowing all the windows in the presidential palace opened up and they were in fact the same number as the wounds in the dream, twenty-three, a terrifying coincidence which had its culmination that week with an attack on the senate and the supreme court by corsairs along with the cooperative indifference of the armed forces . . . (Autumn, pp. 90-91; Otoño, pp. 94-95) Prior to each of these scenes, the central character is haunted by prophecies. A soothsayer (named "Spurinna" in Suetonius; unnamed in Plutarch) has warned Julius Caesar to be wary of the ides of March. In Suetonius, in addition, a so-called "kingbird" flies in through one of the palace windows pursued by other birds which destroy it; in García Márquez's novel, that bird is transformed into one that sings above the Patriarch's head (Autumn, p. 90 Otoño, p. 93). In Suetonius' version, on the night before he is killed, Julius Caesar dreams that he is flying through clouds holding on to Jupiter by the hand. This detail anticipates the ending of García Márquez's novel and that way in which the Patriarch actually dies, "flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock" (Autumn, p. 269; Otoño, p. 271). While in Suetonius and in Plutarch it is Julius Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, who senses the imminent death of her husband, in García Márquez's novel, the comparable role is played by the Patriarch's mother, Bendición Alvarado. After she finds an egg with two yolks, the Patriarch, trembling for his safety, changes the date of a public appearance (Autumn, p. 90; Otoño, p. 94). The only fragment of the novel's manuscript which has been published is—quite fortuitously, for the purpose of this study—the facsimile of a draft of this crucial scene.10 Perusing it reveals the care with which Garcia Márquez works. On the margin of page 7, for instance, is the author's note to himself: "ojo: el texto de Plutarco (Suetonio). Ver" (Note: See the text of Plutarch [Suetonius]). Although some textual borrowings are obvious, others are subtle textual allusions. For instance, in Suetonius (though not in Plutarch) Julius Caesar, upon perceiving that one of his assassins is Marcus Brutus, cries out to him in Greek, "You too, my child?" (p. 47). In García Márquez, this cry is transformed from reality into dream, for the novelist relies on Plutarch (the detail is not in Suetonius) to specify the place where Brutus stabbed Caesar: "alguien que era hijo suyo en el

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suenõ le dio un tajo en la ingle" ("someone who was a son of his in the dream gave him a stab in the groin"). On a more profound level, a reference in the manuscript not found in the printed version is of interest to anyone studying the creative process. Around the phrase "hijo suyo" (his son), García Márquez has drawn a circle and queried himself in the margin: "¿uno de sus 5.000 hijos?" (one of his 5,000 sons?). In so questioning himself about the Patriarch's son, García Márquez is treating his character as though he had a life of his own, independent of his creator. These and other questions are a means by which García Márquez develops his character more fully and, from the knowledge gained by such private queries, creates a richer, more rounded, more convincing literary hero. For García Márquez, such a modus operandi is associated with Hemingway's. In an article published simultaneously in English in the New York Times Book Review (26 July 1981) and in Spanish in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, entitled "My Personal Hemingway," García Márquez cites the American writer in a description, in part, of his own writing: "Writing in literature is only valid if—like the iceberg—it is supported beneath the surface by seven eighths of its volume." The dream sequence in The Autumn of the Patriarch has this kind of validity. Julius Caesar seems to have interested García Márquez primarily as a well-defined and stable mythical legendary figure who could be used as a foil for his Patriarch. The Colombian author, however, did not change the legend or the myth significantly. Intertextuality, therefore, is accomplished without irony or parody. Structurally, the writings of Plutarch and Suetonius function as a kind of palimpsest on which the Patriarch's story is written. We should remember, however, that in the ancient palimpsests the original text (first erased and then written upon) normally had no relationship with the new text other than that of spatial contiguity. In terms of content, the palimpsest effect in The Autumn of the Patriarch resembles the iceberg effect. Plutarch and Suetonius' subtexts support the Patriarch's dreams and fears, giving them a density and a context (and, therefore, "meaning") they would not have otherwise had. The myth of the Patriarch—or the mythical, legendary being that the Patriarch becomes—is nourished by the mythic subtexts of Julius Caesar; it does not, however, represent a "modified" Julius Caesar or one adapted to Latin American reality. The Autumn of the Patriarch gains literary and symbolic weight and density by drawing sustenance from its classical subtexts.

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2. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS Unfortunate admiral

(Rubén Darío, "To Columbus")

Christopher Columbus belongs to Latin American reality, culture, and history in a way that Julius Caesar never can. With the passing centuries, Columbus, like George Washington, has increasingly become part of American consciousness, a figure surrounded by myth and legend. In the sixteenth century, however, Columbus was anything but a revered mythical or legendary hero. He died abandoned and poverty-stricken in Valladolid in 1506; during the entire sixteenth century he did not appear in a single work of Spanish literature. It is only during the early years of the seventeenth century, with the 1614 publication of Lope de Vega's play El nuevo mundo descubierto por Colón (The New World Discovered by Columbus), that the literary mythification of Columbus may truly have begun.11 This mythification reaches its ironic apogee with The Autumn of the Patriarch. Although the myth of the Patriarch is based on the subtexts associated with Columbus,12 as well as on those of Julius Caesar, García Márquez's treatment of the two is distinct; while he does not renovate the myth of Julius Caesar, García Márquez transforms the "myth of Columbus" to such an extent that our vision of him is altered forever.13 García Márquez is extremely knowledgeable about Columbus and his works. For him, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea is not only the first European to have landed on American shores, but also the first "American" writer. Upon being asked about magical realism in Latin American literature, García Márquez once answered: The first masterwork of the literature of magical realism is the Diary of Christopher Columbus. From the first it was so contaminated by the magic of the Caribbean that even the history of the book itself makes an unlikely story. Its most moving moments, the moments, that is, of the discovery itself, were written twice, and we do not possess either version directly. A few nights before he returned to Spain on the first voyage, a tremendous storm lashed his ship near the Azores. He thought that none of his crew would survive the gale and that the glory of his discovery would belong to Martín Alonso Pinzón, whose ship was sailing ahead. In order to make sure that the glory would belong to him alone, Columbus hastily wrote down a history of his discoveries, placed the sheaf of papers in a water-proof barrel, and commended it to the waters. He was so mistrustful that he did not confide in a single one of his

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sailors but instead made them believe that the barrel contained a prayer to the Virgin Mary to make the storm abate. One surprising thing is that the storm did abate, and another is that the barrel was never found, which means that if Columbus' ship had gone down, his account would never have seen the light of day. The second version, written at greater leisure, has also been lost. What we know as The Diary of Columbus is, in reality, its reconstruction by Father Las Casas, who had read the original manuscript. However much Las Casas may have added to the manuscript, and however much he may have taken out, the truth is that the text is the first work of the magical literature of the Caribbean.14 A follow-up question asks how García Márquez could consider the diary to be a literary work, and a magical one at that, when it purports to be both a general and personal account of the "real" discovery of America. García Márquez responded: [I consider the diary as such] because in it one reads of fabulous plants, of mythical animals, and of beings with supernatural powers which could not possibly have existed. Columbus, probably, was a con man above all else, for everything he said was intended to excite the King and Queen so that they would continue to finance his expeditions of discovery. In any case, however, this text is the first work of the literature of the Caribbean.15 Garcia Márquez is also unusually knowledgeable about Columbus' life, what he was like, what legends surrounded him, and what happened to his cadaver: The second work [of the literature of the Caribbean] is the life of Columbus himself, full as it was of mysteries which he himself encouraged. He has so often been depicted as impoverished, as wandering from pillar to post, as departing emotionally charged from the monastery of La Rábida in the company of his son Diego, and as dying in chains and in misery, that no one can imagine what he was truly like. And what was he like? He was a very tall man, a red-head, and covered with freckles; he had blue eyes and he was balding, something that bothered him so much that during his voyages he searched for magical anti-baldness elixirs. Nothing, however, is perhaps as fantastic as what happened to his cadaver. He is perhaps the only man in history for whom there are three tombs in different parts of the world, and no one knows

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for certain in which of the three his cadaver is really to be found. There is a tomb in the Cathedral in Santo Domingo, one in Havana, and another in Seville.16 Columbus' frequent appearance, usually as a character but once as a "text," further demonstrates the iceberg effect in García Márquez's work. First let us note some of García Márquez's allusions to Columbus the man. The Patriarch seems to have known him personally, for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea (the official tide granted him by the King and Queen for his discoveries) has given the Patriarch a golden spur to be worn on the left heel as a sign of the highest authority (Autumn, pp. 176-177; Otoño, p. 179). At three different points in the novel are passages which deal with Columbus's three tombs and with his posthumous existence: . . . and the granite promontory of the empty mausoleum for the admiral of the ocean sea with the profile of the three caravels which he [the Patriarch] had built in case he [Columbus] wanted his bones to rest among us . . . (Autumn, p. 100; Otoño, pp. 101-104) . . . I had had a tomb built for an admiral of the ocean sea who did not exist except in my feverish imagination when I myself with my own blessed eyes had seen the three caravels anchored across the harbor from my window . . . (Autumn, p. 123; Otoño, p. 125) . . . they said he [Columbus] had become a Moslem, that he had died of pellagra in Senegal [note the "restricted intertextuality" here, for the echo is to Melquíades in One Hundred Tears of Solitude], and had been buried in three different tombs in three different cities in the world although he really wasn't in any of them, condemned to wander from sepulcher to sepulcher until the end of time because of the twisted fate of his expeditions . . . (Autumn, p. 256; Otoño, p. 258) There are other, briefer references to Columbus: to "the flagship of the first admiral of the ocean sea just as I had seen it from my window" (Autumn, p. 247; Otoño, p. 248); to Columbus' incipient baldness, to his poverty, and to the three caravels (Autumn, pp. 255-256; Otoño, p. 258). One day, from the window of his presidential limousine (particularly note the deliberately syncretistic conjunction of centuries), the Patriarch recognizes Columbus in the crowd, "disguised in a brown habit with the cord of Saint Francis around his waist swinging a penitent's rattle" (Autumn, p. 256; Otoño, p. 258), a detail so bizarre to most twentieth-

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century readers that it would seem to have been invented. In fact, however, Columbus did dress in a Franciscan habit after his second voyage and again just before his death. The most important allusion, however, is not to Columbus but rather to his famous—or infamous—diary. A long passage found at the end of the first chapter of The Autumn of the Patriarch is concretely based on Columbus' diary entries of the twelfth and thirteenth of October, 1492, the moments, therefore, of the discovery of America. Following are the relevant portions from the diary: [Friday, October 12]: I, says he [Columbus, for this is a direct transcription from the diary by Las Casas], in order that they might develop a very friendly disposition towards us, because I knew that they were a people who could better be freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force, gave to some of them red caps and to others glass beads, which they hung on their necks, and many other things of slight value, in which they took much pleasure. They remained so much our [friends] that it was a marvel. . . . . . it appeared to me that these people were very poor in everything. They all go quite naked as their mothers bore them; and also the women, although I didn't see more than one really young girl. All that I saw were young men, none of them more than 30 years old, very well built, of very handsome bodies and very fine faces; the hair coarse, almost like the hair of a horse's tail, and short. . . . Some of them paint themselves black (and they are of the color of the Canary Islanders, neither black nor white), and others paint themselves white, and some red, and others with what they find. And some paint their faces, others the body, some the eyes only, others only the nose. They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron. Their darts are a kind of rod without iron, and some have at the end a fish's tooth and others, other things. They ought to be good servants and of good skill, for I see that they repeat very quickly whatever was said to them. I believe that they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion. [Saturday, October 13]: At the time of daybreak there came to the beach many of these men, all young men, as I have said, and all of good stature, very handsome people. Their hair is not kinky but straight and coarse like horsehair; the whole forehead and head is very broad, more so than [in] any other race that I have seen, and

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the eyes very handsome and not small. They themselves are not at all black, but of the color of the Canary Islanders; nor should anything else be expected because this is on the same latitude as the island of Ferro in the Canaries.17 In the corresponding passage from The Autumn ofthe Patriarchy the words and phrases which are derived from the diary (primarily from the entries cited above) are in italics. Also worthy of note are Rabassa's archaizing touches in the translation which reflect both García Márquez's original text and Columbus' fifteenth-century Spanish (Morison's translation cited above is a modernized version): . . . and contemplating the islands he evoked again and relived that historic October Friday when he [the Patriarch] left his room at dawn and discovered that everybody in the presidential palace was wearing a red biretta, that the new concubines were sweeping the parlors and changing the water in the cages wearing red birettas, that the milkers in the stables, the sentries in their boxes, the cripples on the stairs and the lepers in the rose beds were going about with the red birettas of a carnival Sunday, so he began to look into what had happened to the world while he was sleeping for the people in his house and the inhabitants of the city to be going around wearing red birettas and dragging a string of jingle bells everywhere, and finally he found someone to tell him the truth general sir, that some strangers had arrived who gabbled in funny old talk because they made the wordfor sea feminine and not masculine, they called macaws poll parrots, canoes rafts, harpoons javelins, and when they saw us going out to greet them and swim around their ships they climbed up onto the yardarms and shouted to each other look there how well-formed, of beauteous body andfineface, and thick-haired and almost like horsehair silk, and when they saw that we were painted so as not to get sunburned they got all excited like wet little parrots and shouted look there how they daub themselves gray, and they are the hue of canary birds, not white nor yet black, and what there be of them, and we didn't understand why the hell they were making so much fun of us general sir since we were just as normal as the day our mothers bore us and on the other hand they were decked out like the jack of clubs in all that heat, which they made feminine the way Dutch smugglers do, and they wore their hair like women even though they were all men and they shouted that they didn't understand us in Christian tongue when they were the ones who couldn't understand what we were shouting, and then they came toward us in their canoes which they called rafts, as we said before, and they were amazed that

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our harpoons had a shad bonefora top which they called afishytooth, and we traded everything we had for these red birettas and these strings of glass beads that we hung around our necks to please them, and also for these brass bellsthat can't be worth more than a penny and for chamber pots and eyeglass and other goods from Flanders, of the cheapest sort general sir, and since we saw that they were good people and men of good will we went on leading them to the beach without their realizing it, but the trouble was that among the PU swap you this for that and that for the other a wild motherfucking trade grew up and after a while everybody was swapping his parrots, his tobacco, his wads of chocolate, his iguana eggs, everything God ever created, because they took and gave everything willingly, and they even wanted to trade a velvet doublet for one of us to show off in Europeland, just imagine general, what a farce, but he was so confused that he could not decide whether that lunatic business came within the incumbency of his government, so he went back to his bedroom, opened the windows that looked out onto the sea so that perhaps he might discover some new light to shed on the mixup they had told him about, and he saw the usual battleship that the marines had left behind at the dock, and beyond the battleship, anchored in the shadowy sea, he saw the three caravels. (Autumn, pp. 4 0 - 4 2 ; Otoño, pp. 4 4 - 4 6 ) The fact of the intertextuality is undeniable. Of interest is the way in which García Márquez has retold this famous discovery. He introduces the scene by using the mythic pattern of the eternal return: the Patriarch "evoked again and relived" the day of discovery. In the mythical conception of the world,18 everything can live anew, and historical events that are so repeated come to be considered (and are, in a sense) "mythic" events. The "historic October Friday" is willed to exist again in the Patriarch's mind and experience, and in the world of the novel. Columbus first gives the Indians some "red caps," and these naturally are the first things that the Patriarch notices upon leaving his room at daybreak. Surprised, the Patriarch tries to find out what had happened in the world (a phrase that echoes similar ones in One Hundred Years ofSolitude and other works) while he has slept. The description which follows can, then, be considered the result of the Patriarch's investigations. At the end of the chapter, as though to reaffirm the truth of the radical transformation of the indigenous night into the dawn of the European day in the New World, the Patriarch looks out of his palace window and sees, at anchor, the sight which seals the fate of the Indians and inaugurates the new era: the three caravels. In the New World in 1492 these were probably as bizarre as spaceships from another galaxy would be today.

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On the one hand, it is surprising that the Spaniards were not immediately killed. On the other, the Spanish presence in the New World was seen as a sign from heaven, and such messengers are usually well received. According to Columbus, although one wonders how he could understand a language he had never heard before, the natives shouted to one another, "Come and see the men who come from the sky, bring them food and drink" (Diary entry for October 14). Cortes, incidentally, was also initially protected by a similar native belief. The attitudes of Columbus and, later, Cortés and the advantage each took of the native naïveté are but two examples of the cultural arrogance which characterized the European incursions into the New World.19 Such arrogance is often apparent when a first-world country comes in contact with a third-world country, and Latin America as a whole has only recently begun to emerge from beneath this attitudinal yoke. One of the ways García Márquez casts off this yoke in The Autumn ofthe Patriarch is by changing the perspective from which the discovery of America is viewed. With this shift in perspective comes a simultaneous shift in attitude, in cultural arrogance. For García Márquez, the superior culture belongs to the native Americans, el pueblo (the people), and the Patriarch, symbolically converted for the rest of the scene into an Indian chief. García Márquez satirizes European attitudes toward native peoples and the New World, and he describes the Spaniards as if they were the bizarre creatures: "some strangers had arrived who gabbled in funny old talk" (p. 41). Ironically, the modern Spanish of the New World is considered more correct than that offifteenth-centurySpain. The incomprehension is mutual. Neither culture understands the other's language, dress, customs, or value system: "[The Spaniards] shouted that they didn't understand us in Christian tongue when they were the ones who couldn't understand what we were shouting." Columbus' diary gives the impression that the arrival of the Spanish in the New World was the beneficent act of a superior culture, and that the resulting transformation of simple native lives was part of a necessary civilizing process. García Márquez consistently undermines the cultural superiority of the Spaniard. For instance, when the natives, courteously adhering to their customs for receiving strangers, swim out to the Spanish ships, the sailors scurry up the yardarms and chatter at each other like monkeys, getting as excited as "wet little parrots." These images hardly befit those of a conquering and culturally superior nation. The Spaniards are startled by the nudity of the natives. The latter, however, are even more surprised at the stupidity of the Spaniards who, in the tropical heat, are "decked out like the jack of clubs." Another piece of clothing emphasizes the cultural abyss between the Europeans and the native Americans. On October π Columbus had promised the first man to sight land a velvet doublet, a valuable item for Europeans. In the novel, that velvet doublet is suggested

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as being equivalent in value to a native American. The native reaction is appropriate: "what a farce." It is a farce not only to exchange a human being for an article of clothing, but also to wish to barter with a useless item. A velvet doublet, reaching from the neck to the waist and worn snugly against the body, seems hardly the best apparel for the humidity and warmth of the Caribbean. Moreover, it is superfluous in a culture in which everyone is naked. Another native practice—the use of body paint—is also misunderstood. Whereas the natives use it to protect themselves against the sun, the Spaniards see it only as decoration, and bizarre decoration at that, not as something useful or socially significant. García Márquez's irony at the end of this opening chapter of The Autumn of the Patriarch could not be more profound. It is as though he wishes both to rid Columbus' enterprise of all its heroic and legendary content and to destroy its historical validity. Through parody, through the reversal of the hermeneutical perspective, García Márquez brings us face to face with the other side of the history of the New World. That other side possesses its own truth and, although it too may be culturally conditioned, it at least has a right to be heard and to exist alongside the dominant ideological interpretation of the discovery of America. The point is not that Columbus has invented the reality of what he discovered or that he has lied. The point is, rather, that he cannot help but see "American reality through the prism of his European consciousness. And since his is the dominant culture, American reality is primarily defined through the European prism.20 In emphasizing the other side of the events of 1492, García Márquez makes Columbus one of his principal antagonists. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea, therefore, is unlike Julius Caesar in this regard. Perhaps because of Columbus' position in the exploitation of the New World and because of his place in the thematics of The Autumn of the Patriarchy García Márquez said that the historicalfigureshe disliked most were "Christopher Columbus and the general Francisco de Paula Santander."21 Perhaps, for García Márquez, Columbus is indeed, in Rubén Darío's words, a "hapless admiral." 3. RUBÉN DARÍO the forgotten poet

(Autumn, p. s; Otoño, p. 8)

García Márquez once said that "there has never been an homage to Rubén Darío like that in The Autumn of the Patriarch. The book includes entire verses of Darío. It is written in Rubén Darío's style. It is full of gestures to the connoisseurs of Rubén Darío. I tried to figure out who was the great poet in the era of the great dictators, and it was Rubén Darío. Darío even

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makes an appearance as a character."22 García Márquez later commented: "I even think that it is more of a poem than a novel. [The text] has been worked on more in the manner of poetry than that of fiction."23 The novel may, therefore, be read either as an homage or as a poem. The first direct allusion to the so-called "poet of America"—the sobriquet itself is a hint of Dario's legendary importance to Latin American literature and culture—may be found on page 5: ". . . one Sunday many years ago they had brought him [the Patriarch] the blind man on the street who for five cents would recite the verses of the forgotten poet Rubén Darío and he had come away happy with the nice wad they paid him" (Otoño, p. 8). In Latin America, Darío is recited in perhaps the same way Homer was recited in his time. As a character, the poet of America makes a cameo appearance in the era of Leticia Nazareno, who invites him to recite his verses in the National Theatre. At that time he is considered not the "forgotten poet" but "the well-known poet" (p. 183; Otoño, p. 185), and he is received as though he were a god: . . . in through the open balconies came the crowd's hymns of jubilation that had previously been sung to exalt his glory as they knelt under the burning sun to celebrate the good news that God [Rubén Darío] had been brought in on a ship general sir, really, they had brought Him on your orders, Leticia, by means of a bedroom law . . . (Autumn, p. 176; Otoño, p. 178) The visit of the Nicaraguan poet is so special that the presidential house is painted white and decorated with new lamps. On the evening of the poetry reading, the Patriarch accompanies Leticia Nazareno to the National Theatre and listens to America's poet recite his verses. As a character, Rubén Darío is decidedly minor. It is his poetry, however, that is important in The Autumn of the Patriarch. The "Dariano" setting and mood are apparent almost immediately, as the Patriarch's body seems to be discovered during the epoch of Darío. Upon entering the palace prior to discovering the cadaver, the people enter "the atmosphere of another age" (Autumn, p. 2; Otoño, p. 5), a decadent one of colored mushrooms and pale irises, of ancient carriages, coaches, and limousines, all "under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag" (Autumn, p. 2; Otoño, p. 6). "The atmosphere of roses" wafts among the "camellias and butterflies" (ibid.), but beneath it all, in a very "unDarian" way, we smell the cow-dung and the stench of urine belonging to the cows and the soldiers, and, in a flash, Dario's world—or rather the world of his early poetry, the world of roses, long-necked swans, ballrooms, and sad princesses—has disappeared. Some of the descriptions in The Autumn of the Patriarch

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refer to that world of the early Darío, to the poet ofAzul (Blue) and Prosas profanas (Profane Hymns).24 The following description, for example, relies on the early Darío: [During trips on "the eve of his autumn" the Patriarch's train would "creep" and "crawl"] about the cornices of his vast mournful realm, opening a path through orchid springs and Amazonian balsam apples, rousing up monkeys, birds of paradise, jaguars sleeping on the tracks . . . [and as it went along it would leave] a wake of player-piano waltzes in the midst of the sweet fragrance of gardenias and rotting salamanders of the equatorial tributaries, eluding prehistoric dragons in their leather gun cases, providential isles where sirens lay down to give birth . . . (Autumn, pp. 15-16; Otoño, pp. 19-20) There are two other brief intertextual moments concerning Darío in The Autumn of the Patriarch. One day, during the last years of the Patriarch's rule, the blind declaimer of Rubén Darío sits down in the shade of the palace's dying palm trees and, thinking that the cows going by are marching soldiers, "recited those lines of poetry about the happy warrior who came from afar in a conquest of death, he recited them with full voice and his hand outstretched toward the cows who climbed up to eat the balsam apple garlands on the bandstand with their habit of going up and down stairs to eat" (Autumn, p. 218; Otoño, p. 220). The subtext here is Darío's famous "Sonatina" (1895), and the stanza in question reads as follows: "Hush, Princess, hush," says her fairy godmother; "the joyous knight who adores you unseen is riding this way on his wingèd horse, a sword at his waist and a hawk on his wrist, and comes from far off, having conquered Death, to kindle your lips with a kiss of true love!"25 Corresponding to the theory of intertextuality, the same words in a different context mean something different. The novel literally repeats a phrase from the penultimate line of this poem, vencedor de la muerte, "conqueror of death," a phrase which neither the translator of García Márquez nor that of Rubén Darío has rendered with total accuracy, thus making possible and even likely the loss of the intertextual reference. In any case, here García Márquez is being doubly parodic, as he undermines both the "precious" world of the "Sonatina" and the decadent world of the Patriarch. The first world comments on the second, for the escapist

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sentiments of "Sonatina" contrast sharply with the sordid reality of a senile and melancholy dictator. In the novel it is not a "joyous knight" who climbs the stairs but a few cows. Many years ago there was a sad princess in the Patriarch's world. Her name was Manuela Sánchez. Now there is no one even remotely resembling her. Moreover, the Patriarch himself is not, in the end, the "conqueror of death" (although at times during his reign he seems to have been), and it has been years—if indeed it ever occurred— since he "kindled" with his lips "a kiss of true love." Another example of "general intertextuality" in the novel is when the Patriarch, having but a few hours to live, follows his customary nocturnal routine. Toward the end of that routine, after eating a spoonful of honey, he places the honey jar once more in the hiding place where there was one of his little pieces of paper with the date of some birthday of the famous poet Rubén Darío whom God keep on the highest seat in his kingdom, he rolled the piece of paper up again and left it in its place while he recited from memory the well-aimed prayer of ourfather and celestial lyrophorous master who keepeth afloat airplanes in the heavens and liners on the seas. . . (Autumn, p. 265; Otoño, p. 267) The italicized words belong to the first line of Rubén Darío's poem, "Responso a Verlaine," which reads, in Spanish, "padre y maestro mágico liróforo celeste" (it is quoted verbatim in the novel). Darío's poem not only "celebrates" Verlaine; it "deifies" him. Placed in the context of the novel, Verlaine becomes, ironically, a kind of God to the Patriarch. It is ironic not only that a poet should be worshipped by a man like the Patriarch, who is totally ignorant of literature and who, until the last few years of his life, remains illiterate; but also that the poet should be French (a language and culture of which the Patriarch has no clue). The only character in the novel to whom such an act of worship might have seemed "natural" is, of course, General Lautaro Muñoz, a Latinist and, like many presidents of Colombia, a man of letters. Thematically, the poetry of Rubén Darío is also important to García Márquez's vision of "love" in the novel. This is to be expected, for, as Pedro Salinas points out, in La poesía de Rubén Darío (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948), "love" is Darío's most constant theme. Here García Márquez exploits the man as well as his poetry. For example, there were three important women in Darío's life: Rafaela Contreras (his first wife, idealized as "Stella" in the poetry); Rosario Emelina Murillo (his second wife, known as "la garza morena"—"the dark heron"); and Francisca Sánchez (his "companion" of many years, 1899-1914). And there are three central women around the Patriarch: Bendición Alvarado (his mother),26

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Manuela Sánchez (his "inviolate" love), and Leticia Nazareno (his wife). The name of Rubén Darío's last great love, Francisca Sánchez, is split into two in the novel and is shared by two women loved, however briefly, by the Patriarch: the peasant woman Francisca Linero (Darío's last love was also a peasant) and Manuela Sánchez. Like Aldonza Lorenzo (or "Dulcinea") in Don Quixote, Manuela Sánchez is idealized, now into an "untouchable maiden" (Autumn, p. 77), now into a "queen" (p. 78). The air surrounding her is perfumed with roses. Hopelessly in love with this Beauty Queen, the Patriarch visits her house in the slums, wondering, while he waits for her, "where is your rose, where your love" (Autumn, p. 74; Otoño, p. 77). When she enters the room, she bears a rose, and when he leaves, the rose is dead. During the many months of almost daily visits, the relationship does not progress beyond the platonic. He is unable to seduce her, and she unable to summon any sympathy for this toothy old man (Autumn, p. 75; Otoño, p. 78), tolerating him only because he is the President of the Republic. Finally, one day as they watch an eclipse together, she disappears before his eyes, vanishing into air as easily as Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred TearsofSolitude ascends into heaven. Manuela Sánchez's disappearance brings to mind Darío's poem entitled "To Margarita Debayle" (1907-1908), in which a princess disappears when she tries to find—and catch—a star in the sky. After losing Manuela Sánchez, the Patriarch becomes obsessed by her "absent presence," by his memory of her, and, especially, by her flowery fragrance. Transformed into a ghost, she haunts him in his bedroom, passing through the walls at will. "Extinguish that rose," the Patriarch moans (Autumn, p. 67; Otoño, p. 70), for he associates Manuela Sánchez with failure and with unrequited love.27 It is not surprising that Rubén Darío and the Patriarch have opposite attitudes to roses, for in García Márquez's novelistic universe, the two men are polar opposites. Darío was loved by the "people" of Latin America; the Patriarch was tolerated, at best, by his countrymen. Darío lived almost his entire life in the public eye, surrounded by friends and acquaintances; the Patriarch lived in aloof isolation. Darío was a poet; the Patriarch, an illiterate. Darío belonged to the world of letters; the Patriarch, to that of politics. Darío was a man without "power" (in the conventional sense of that term); the Patriarch, a man for whom power was both a fact and an obsession. Darío died at a relatively young age (fortynine); the Patriarch, as we know, lived to an incredibly advanced age. These contrasts are the basis for the most elaborate and extensive Darío-García Márquez intertextuality in the novel. One of the poems which the Patriarch hears recited at the poetry reading in the National Theatre is the famous "Marcha triunfal" (1895), the "Triumphal March." This becomes part of a beautiful textual mosaic in the novel. Since

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García Márquez systematically incorporates numerous phrases from Dario's poem into this scene of The Autumn of the Patriarch, it is worthwhile to reproduce the entire poem: The procession is coming! The procession is coming! You can hear the clear trumpets, and the swords flash in the sun: the procession of the paladins, gold and iron, is coming. The solemn glory of the standards, borne in the strong hands of heroic athletes, is passing beneath tall arches adorned with figures of Mars and white Minerva, triumphal arches where Fame lifts her long bugle. You can hear the clattering weapons of the knights, the bold war horses champing their bits, their hooves wounding the earth, and the drummers beating out the step with martial rhythms. Thus the fierce warriors pass beneath the triumphal arches! The clear trumpets sound their music, their sonorous song, their fervent chorus, surrounding the august pomp of the flags with a golden thunder. It speaks of struggle, wounded vengeance, the rough manes of the horses, rude crests, the pike and spear, and blood that watered the earth with heroic crimson; of the black mastiffs which death urges forward, which battle governs. The golden sounds announce the triumphant arrival of Glory; leaving the peak that guards their nests, unfolding their enormous wings to the wind, the condors arrive! Victory has arrived! The procession is passing. A grandfather points out the heroes to his grandson.

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See how the old man's beard surrounds the child's gold ringlets with its ermine. And beautiful women are fashioning crowns of flowers, their faces under the porticoes are roses, and the loveliest of them smiles at the fiercest of the warriors. Honor to him who brings the strange banner he captured, honor to the wounded, honor to the faithful soldiers who were slain by alien hands. Trumpets! Laurels! The noble swords of the glorious past salute the new crowns and triumphs from their panoplies: the old swords of the grenadiers, who were stronger than bears, the brothers of those lancers who were centaurs. The warlike trumpets resound, The winds are filled with voices— Hail to those ancient swords, those illustrious arms that embody the glories of the past, and hail to the sun that shines on these new-won victories, to the hero leading his cluster of fierce young men, to the soldier who loves the ensign of his native land, to the soldier who, his sword in hand, defied the sun through long red summers and the wind and snow of cruel winters, the night, and the frost, and hatred, and death, immortal servant of the homeland— the heroes are hailed by the brazen voices that sound the triumphal march!28 The relevant passage from The Autumn of the Patriarch follows, with the references to Darío's poem italicized: [During the evening the audience] saw no one else in the presidential box [besides the Patriarch's young son and Leticia Nazareno], but during the two hours of the recital we [the people] bore the certainty that he was there, we felt the invisible presence that watched over our destiny so that it would not be altered by the disorder of poetry, he regulated love, he decided the intensity and term of death in a corner of the box in the shadows from where unseen he watched the heavy minotaur whose voice of marine lightning lifted him out of his place and instant and left him floating without his

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permission in the golden thunder of the trim trumpets of the triumphal arches ofMorses and Minervas of a glory that was not his general sir, he saw the heroic athletes with their standards the black mastiffs of the hunt the sturdy war-horses with their iron hooves the pikes and lances of the paladins with rough crests who bore the strangeflagcaptive to honor arms that were not his, he saw the troop offierceyoung men who had challenged the suns of the red summer the snows and winds of the icy winter night and dew and hatred and death for the eternal splendor of an immortal nation larger and more glorious than all those he had dreamed of during the long deliriums of his fevers as a barefoot warrior, he felt poor and tiny in the seismic thunder of the applause that he approved in the shadows thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado this really is a parade, not the shitty things these people organize for me, feeling diminished and alone, oppressed by the heavy heat and the mosquitoes and the columns of cheap gold paint and the faded plush of the box of honor, God damn it, how is it possible for this Indian to write something so beautiful with the same hand that he wipes his ass with, he said to himself, so excited by the revelation of written beauty that he dragged his great feet of a captive elephant to the rhythms of the martial beat ofthe kettledrums, he dozed off to the rhythm of the voices of glory ofthe cadenced chant ofthe calorific choir that Leticia Nazareno recited for him in the shade of the triumphal arches of the ceiba tree in the courtyard, he would write the lines on the walls of the toilets, he was trying to recite the whole poem by heart in the tepid cowshit olympus of the milking stables when the earth trembled from the dynamite charge that went off ahead of time in the trunk of the presidential automobile parked in the coach house . . . (Autumn, pp. 192-193; Otoño, pp. 194-195) The importance of these references lies not solely with the existence of intertextuality and with the great number of Darío's verses incorporated into the novel, but with the Patriarch's reaction to these verses and the thoughts they trigger amidst his discomfort in the presence of "poetry" and/or "culture." For the first time in his life, the Patriarch finds himself face to face with an astonishing, poetic, and personal phenomenon, and he begins to be conscious of the great abyss which exists between a beloved "man of the people" and a dictator, between poetry and politics, between literature and the exercise of power. The text signals that abyss through a series of negations. In other words, the poetic world of Mars and Minerva concerns a "glory that was not his." The war-horses, the paladins, and the captive flag honor "arms that were not his." The "eternal splendor" of that world celebrates a nation "larger and more glorious than

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all those he had dreamed of." The poetic imagination, at least in this scene of the novel, proves to be more powerful than political activism—literature more powerful than life. In the face of Dario's world, a world of which the Patriarch was previously unaware, the Patriarch feels impotent; in the presence of the poet himself, diminished and alone, impoverished and small. The adoration of the poet makes the Patriarch realize the inauthenticity of the people's celebrations in his honor, and this insight only further diminishes his own sense of self-worth. In addition, the elevated rhetoric of Dario's discourse (in the original) contrasts sharply with the Patriarch's crudeness. In fact, it is fully in character for him to react to the unexpected beauty of the poetry by asking himself how "the Indian" could write such verses "with the same hand that he wipes his ass with." The incongruity in linguistic ability and culture between the poet and the Patriarch represents a double parody. On the one hand, if one considers the Patriarch to be the archetypal representative of the caudillo in Latin American history, then that figure is—as a type—rude, crude, and despised. The Patriarch, unable to appreciate Dario's poem on an aesthetic level, expresses his "appreciation" in an obscene way. On the other hand, the Patriarch's reaction also demonstrates the great distance between the world of poetry and his own world and, by extension, how far Darío is from the present realities of Latin America. It is probably for this reason that Darío is introduced in the novel as the "forgotten poet," as simply being irrelevant to the way the Latin American people today must live and love and work. Hypnotized by his experience that evening, the Patriarch tries for a while to live "poetically." He moves his elephantine feet to the rhythms of Dario's martial music. Leticia Nazareno reads him to sleep at night with Dario's verses. Having at long last learned how to read and write, the Patriarch writes Dario's words on bathroom walls, perhaps symbolically and unconsciously returning the poetry to the only world he had been able to call upon in reacting to the poetry in the first place. In light of this reaction, the Nicaraguan pater noster which the Patriarch much later recites to Verlaine every night (Autumny p. 265; Otoño, p. 267) is ironic. By then, however, senile and near death, the Patriarch has lost control over his memory, and he has forgotten Darío just as, earlier, he had forgotten even his wife. Why should the Patriarch have been so affected—for a while at least—by the poetry reading? Was it because he discovered a "New World," a world which he, like Columbus, had never dreamed of? Was it because of the incredible and unexpected sounds and rhythms of a language he thought he knew? Perhaps. Perhaps, however, he was shocked by the people's reaction, by their spontaneity, by their exuberance, by, above all, the sincerity of their love. The affection shown Darío was not

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affection by decree; it came from the heart and made the Patriarch aware that the true ruler of the people is the one who controls their hearts, rather than the one who controls their bodies. In Latin America, it is usually the poet, not the president, who speaks for the people. This is why literature is much more powerful in the national life of Latin American countries than it is, for example, in the United States or in Canada. This is why so many poets have been presidents of their country, why the voice of García Márquez himself is so influential, and why Darío can be considered, both with and without irony, the "poet of America." It is indeed fitting that Darío be singled out for special homage in The Autumn of the Patriarch. More than homage is being rendered to the Nicaraguan poet; the text announces, or reminds us, of his apotheosis. The religious phrase "the good news" ("gospel" is another translation) occurs but twice in the novel. One use is at the very end, when the world is informed of "la buena nueva" (which Rabassa mistranslates, in my opinion, as "the jubilant news") that the Patriarch has died. The "gospel" here announces the death of a tyrant, not the coming of a messiah. The other occurrence of the phrase is associated with messianic thinking. Many years before, the crowds which had been singing hymns exalting the Patriarch got down on their knees in the hot sun and, kneeling all the while, began to "celebrate the good news that God had been brought in on a ship general sir" {Autumn, p. 176; Otoño, p. 178). The God being celebrated is Rubén Darío. This deification, given the history of Latin America, is in part ironic. The Patriarch's literary genealogy is impressive. Through intertextual methodology and the transformation of prior myths, García Márquez associates him with classical literature, history, with one of the most famous prototypes of the dictator (Julius Caesar); with the history of the New World, with the beginning of Latin American literature (Christopher Columbus); and, finally, with one of the demigods of that literature itself (Rubén Darío). The practice of intertextuality does not ensure literary greatness. What distinguishes García Márquez's practice from that of so many others is the degree of thematic, stylistic, and symbolic integration which his subtexts achieve in the undeniably brilliant product. Although it is possible to read the novel with pleasure without being aware of its subtexts, they enrich our experience of the novel profoundly and deepen our understanding of the Patriarch, a character who, after all is said and done, holds an honorary position in the literary history of the tyrant in Latin America. NOTES 1. I analyze a number of mythical metamorphoses in my recent book entided Gabriel Garcia Márquez: La linea, el círculo y las metamorfosis del mito (Madrid:

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Gredos, 1983), from which I freely translated and adapted the present essay. I am grateful to Gredos for allowing me to publish a translation and revision of part of my book. 2. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Semeotiké: Recherches pour une sénumalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969) and Jeanine Parisier Plottel, ed., Intertextuality: New Perspectives in Criticism (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1978). In The Pursuit of Signs Jonathan Culler lucidly defines intertextuality in a way that emphasizes its dual nature. O n the one hand," writes Culler, intertextuality "calls our attention to the importance of prior texts, insisting that the autonomy of texts is a misleading notion and that a work has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Yet in so far as it focuses on intelligibility, on meaning, 'intertextuality' leads us to consider prior texts as contributions to a code which makes possible the various effects of signification. Intertextuality thus becomes less a name for a work's relation to particular prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture: the relationship between a text and the various languages or signifying practices of a culture and its relation to those texts which articulate for it the possibilities of that culture" (The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981], p. 103). In relation to García Márquez, Culler's definition means not only that prior texts are important to the "meaning" of The Autumn of the Patriarch, but also that the use of Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus, and Rubén Darío in the novel says something significant about Latin American culture and the way it views its dictators and men of power. For instance, the association of presidents with poets is a fairly natural one for Latin Americans. Colombia, after all, has had at least eight presidents who were also published poets. 3. See Lucien Dällenbach, "Intertexte et autotexte," Poétique 27 (1976) : 282-25)6. This special issue of Poétique is entirely devoted to the theme of intertextuality. 4. Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,19 in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 36-44. (Originally published as "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," in Ficciones, 1944.) 5. Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn ofthe Patriarch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 90. See El otoño del patriarca (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1975), P· 93. Wherever possible, I either cite from English translations of the works in question or supply my own. Where it seems advisable to cite the original text in the body of this essay I do so. Hereafter, each reference to either the Spanish original or the English translation is included in parentheses in the body of my text. 6. Eva Norvind, "Intelectuales interrogan a GGM," in Garcia Márquez habla de García Márquez, ed. Alfonso Rentería Mantilla (Bogotá: Rentería Editores, 1979), p. 152 (my translation). (This article was originally published in the magazine Hombre de Mundo, Mexico City, 1977) 7. García Márquez has alluded to several of the other Caesars as well. To cite but two examples: Caligula forced parents to be present at the executions of their own children. When one of the fathers protested, insisting that he was too ill, Caligula

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ordered that the man be brought to the execution on a litter. The Patriarch demonstrates this kind of cruelty in the episode of the children's lottery. Also, the Caesar named Galba suffered so from gout that he could not even wear shoes on his swollen feet. The Patriarch's feet are described as those "of an elephant," and he suffers similarly. 8. See Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, trans. and ed. Joseph Gavorse (New York: Random House, 1931), p. 27. All citations from Suetonius are taken from this edition and translation. 9. See Plutarch, Lives: The Translation Called Dryden's, corrected and rev. A. H. Clough, vol. 4 (New York: Bigelow, Brown and Co., 1911), p. 349. All citations from Plutarch are taken from this edition and translation. 10. See Rentería, García Márquez habla de García Márquez, pp. 114-115. 11. See J. H. Elliott's summary of how, and how belatedly, Columbus acquired his posthumous fame, in The Old World and the New (1492 -1650) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 10-12. 12. Ironically, for our purposes, Columbus himself also "fed" on prior myths and legends. During his first voyage, for instance, the legend of the Great Khan was constantly with him, and, in preparation for meeting the oriental potentate, he took along translators (no one, however, who knew either Chinese or Japanese) and letters of introduction. Columbus thought for a while that Cuba was part of the Khan's kingdom, and during the second voyage he forced his sailors to swear solemnly that Cuba was indeed part of the mainland and part of the Khan's kingdom. During the third voyage Columbus sought the Earthly Paradise, and believed he had found its entrance (it was in truth the mouth of the Orinoco River). 13. When The Autumn ofthe Patriarch wasfirstpublished, critics largely ignored García Márquez's use of Columbus. Only Graciela Palau de Nemes had developed this theme in her brief but intelligent review of the novel, "Historicidad de la novela," Hispamérica 4, nos. 11-12 (1975)· 173-183. Since then, other critics have looked at this aspect of the novel, the most recent being Martha Canfield. In the closing pages of her article on García Márquez's patriarch, she comments on both Columbus and Rubén Darío ("El patriarca de García Márquez: Padre, poeta y tirano," Revista Iberoamericana, nos. 128-129 [1984]: 1017-1056). 14. Rentería, García Márquez habla de García Márquez, p. 196 (my translation). 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. There are a number of biographies of Columbus. The most complete and the best for English readers is Samuel Eliot Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea,firstpublished in 1942. 17. Samuel Eliot Morison, trans. and ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963),

pp. 64-66.

18. For a more detailed account of the mythical conception of the world, and of the function of repetition in it, see the introduction to my book on García Márquez (pp. 13-24). 19. The actions of Columbus, Cortés, and others were supported by an ideology of conquest which owed a great deal to the wars against the Moors for the reconquest of Spain. Concrete action in the New World was backed by theory, a theory

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which evolved, however, in response to the differences in the realities encountered. See J. H. Parry's brief but lucid exposition, The Spanish Theory of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940); and also the recent work by Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (1982; English translation by Richard Howard, New York: Harper and Row, 1983). 20. For greater detail on the comparison of the New World consciousnesses of Columbus and García Márquez, see my forthcoming article entided "Prisms of Consciousness," in Critical Perspectives on García Márquez (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). 21. Rentería, García Márquez habla de García Márquez, p. 156 (my translation). 22. In an interview with Manuel Pereira, originally published in Bohemia (Cuba, 1979); reprinted in Rentería, García Márquez habla de García Márquez, p. 207 (my translation). 23. Interview, published first in "El Manifesto" (Bogotá, 1977); reprinted in Rentería, García Márquez habla de García Márquez, p. 166 (my translation). 24. Wherever possible, I have relied on Lysander Kemp's translations, published in Selected Poems ofRubén Darío (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965). 25. Ibid., p. 53. 26. In her article entided "Apuntes sobre el mito dariano en El otoño del patriarca," Cuadernos Hispanaoamericanos 340 (October 1978) : 71, Michèle Sarrailh states that the surname of Bendición Alvarado comes from one of Darío's aunts: Rita Darío de Alvarado. 27. The ghostly presences of both Manuela Sánchez and (at the very end) the figure of Death are reminiscent of a similar episode in Rubén Darío's life, described in his Autobiografia (1912). In that never forgotten nightmare, Darío saw himself reading late at night in the small living room of his home. To his right, there was a door which led to the bedroom. Through the open door Darío saw, at the end of the room, a ghostly figure. After looking away to clear the vision from his mind, Darío looked again. There, in the depths, he saw a white-robed figure; it was shrouded, as cadavers are, and it walked toward him. He screamed, but no one heard him. He screamed again, and still no one heard. He tried to flee, but the presence of thefigureparalyzed him. He saw that it had no face but a human trunk. It had no arms but was about to embrace him. It had no legs but still it "walked." The odor of dead flesh permeated the room. Darío, in self-defense, tried to bite the ghost and suddenly he awakened, drenched in sweat. See Rubén Darío, Obras completas (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950) 1: 34-35. 28. Selected Poems ofRubén Darío, trans. Kemp, pp. 73-75. Reprinted by permission from the University of Texas Press. Darío's poetry, admittedly, does not translate well. What is eloquence in Spanish tends toward bombast in English. The martial rhythms, so carefully worked out in the original, are almost impossible to replicate in translation. The epic vocabulary of the Spanish, which for every native speaker carries connotations of military music and stories of legendary exploits, pales in translation and loses much of its evocative power.

ANÍBAL GONZALEZ

The Ends of the Text: Journalism in the Fiction of Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez, like most of his contemporaries in the Latin American novel, is an heir to the avant-garde legacy. Even when the "telluric novels," or novelas de la tierra, which depict Latin American culture as a struggle between humanity and the forces of nature, such as Rómulo Gallegos' Doña Bárbara (1929), were popular, the avant-garde remained very much alive in Spanish America. García Márquez's positive attitude toward journalism would seem to be a consequence of the particularly intense relationship that existed between journalism and literature during the modernista and avant-garde periods in Latin American literary history. Like Rubén Darío, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alejo Carpentier, García Márquez chose journalism to earn a living while doing something he liked very much: writing. During his years as a struggling young author, García Márquez worked not merely as a columnist or literary journalist, as Borges, Carpentier, and others had, but also as a reporter. His work in the Colombian newspapers El Universal, El Heraldo, and El Espectador, the Venezuelan magazines Momento and Venezuela Gráfica, and the Cuban press agency Prensa Latina required him not only to write social chronicles and film reviews, but also to do investigative reporting.1 In a recent interview with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, García Márquez claims that in 1951, when he first heard about the events of which he later wrote in Chronicle ofa Death Foretold, "they didn't interest me as material for a novel but as a subject for a reportage. But that was a poorly developed genre in Colombia in those days, and I was a provincial journalist in a local newspaper which perhaps would not be interested in the affair."2 In 1955, he wrote a series of articles about the experiences of a Colombian sailor who spent ten days shipwrecked. Although they were based on García Márquez's interview with the sailor, the articles showed, probably because of their subject matter, a markedly novelistic character.3 The link between these facts from García

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Márquez's biography and his literary texts is not clear. Can we really posit a linkage, beyond the circumstantial evidence provided by biography and a few random thematic traces in the author's oeuvre, between García Márquez's (or any author's, for that matter) journalism and his literary work? What are the textual traces left in narrative fiction by its century-long association with journalism? And how do they differ from the more recent traces left in an author's writing by his or her journalistic work? Journalism and the modern novel have been interacting with and interpenetrating each other since their respective origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and similarities between the institution of journalism and the genre of the novel abound. The modern novel arose with the picaresque and Don Quixote in the midst of the Renaissance dilemma of distinguishing history from fiction. Journalism is derived from a textual amalgam that unhierarchically encompasses news items, essays, and narrative prose. From the beginning both genres have shared a similar conception of knowledge and representation: that which was explicitly formulated by English empiricism and which emphasizes the role of the senses, particularly sight, in the acquisition of knowledge.4 The novel itself is a radically mimetic genre that tends to imitate other genres and subgenres such as the letter, the historical chronicle, legal depositions, and journalistic articles.5 The fact that both journalism and the novel are of "low" rhetorical and social origins and are notoriously lacking poetics, is another sign of their common modernity; the novel's "journalism" emphasizes "novelty," the newness of its stories and of itself as a genre. The differences between journalism and narrative fiction have frequently been determined by the conventions of a specific historical period, and, with the passing of time, they have become blurred once more. Journalism's claims to immediacy and veracity were, therefore, ignored by nineteenth-century historical novelists and by the writers of gothic romances, but they were promptly taken up once again by the realistic novelists. There is no doubt that there have been moments when the novel has moved closer to journalism, explicitly invoking the form and the rhetoric of specific journalistic genres, such as the essay on manners, the society chronicle, the interview, and the crime story. In general, these may be seen as attempts by the novelists to renew the novel's narrative power by returning to the textual origins of the genre.6 One would also have to agree with Alceu Amoroso Lima that as cinema and the electronic mass media have risen in importance in the last few decades, written journalism has increasingly become a literary genre of sorts, and the distance between journalism and literature has grown correspondingly smaller.7 If it is impossible to distinguish journalism from literature by appealing to absolute formal or stylistic criteria, what are we to do with the huge mass of journalistic texts produced by an author like García

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Márquez? If what one believes to be a stylistic or rhetorical borrowing from journalism is already a long-established element of modern prose writing, what sense does it make to posit any meaningful relationship between the author's journalism and his literary work? One could consider García Márquez's journalism a kind of archive or "author's notebook," a source of information about how García Márquez developed certain themes, as well as an index to his intellectual background and preferences. It must not be forgotten, however, that, as a reporter, García Márquez was assigned to write about certain things in which he may not have been much interested (such seems to have been the case with his stint as a film reviewer).8 Furthermore, tracing the origin of one of García Márquez's stories to a specific event he covered as a journalist has merely anecdotal value if not connected to a broader literary problematic. Nevertheless, positivistic scholarship has its place in the scheme of criticism and should not be ruled out. Another way to approach the relationship between the author's journalism and other writings is to explore those instances in which journalism is explicitly alluded to, thematized, parodied, or otherwise self-consciously placed in the foreground of the literary text. This is the most economical and immediately fruitful approach in terms of critical penetration; after all, one characteristic of literary "modernity" is increased self-consciousness. In recent interviews, Garcia Márquez has remarked that his journalistic practice did not aid him, "as has been said, to find an efficacious language. Journalism taught me stratagems to give validity to my stories. Giving Remedios the Beautiful sheets (white sheets) in order to make her go up into heaven, or giving a cup of chocolate (and not another drink) to father Nicanor Reina before he levitates ten centimeters above the ground are very useful tricks of journalistic precision."9 He continues, "the language I used in No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and several of the stories in Big Mama's Funeral is concise, sober, dominated by a concern for efficacy that comes from journalism."10 Garcia Márquez also frequently insists on his stories' foundations in empirical reality: "There is not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality." " García Márquez sees journalism's influence on his work not so much as a matter of style, but as one of rhetorical stratagems which he uses to give verisimilitude to his stories. By insisting on the "reality" of his stories, he is often simply emphasizing their verisimilitude. The mere use of narrative details and description to achieve a "reality-effect" does not necessarily signify a direct impact of journalism on the story's writing, as these are traits which, despite remote journalistic origin, have already become part of modern narrative prose. Furthermore, the use of stylistic elements derived from journalism does not always imply that an author is trying to achieve verisimilitude. In fact, the only story of those García Márquez

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mentions in the previously cited statements that alludes to and parodies journalistic rhetoric openly and directly is "Big Mama's Funeral," and there verisimilitude is of little importance. The story's effectiveness, however, depends almost entirely on the narrator's rather bombastic rhetoric of sensationalist journalism. The narrator begins with protestations of veracity addressed to the "unbelievers" who read it: This is, for all the world's unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived [in possession of power] for ninety-two years, and died in the odor of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope.12 The narrator also appeals to pseudo-precise details, such as the fact that Big Mama died "one Tuesday last September," and that the Pope came to the funeral. Later, another journalistic trait surfaces in the story—the need to tell the tale immediately, before it is swallowed by time: "now is the time to lean a stool against the front door and relate from the beginning the details of this national commotion, before the historians have a chance to get at it" (p. 153). The most obvious allusion to journalism in the story is the narrator's emphasis on the novelty of the event; Big Mama's death is "big news"; it is an event which alters the course of history. Here the appropriateness of García Márquez's recourse to journalistic rhetoric derives from the story's theme: Big Mama's death signals the end of an autarchic, genealogy-obsessed idea of language and the beginning of an antigenealogical, decentered age of writing.13 While alive, Big Mama sought to control language absolutely by systematically erasing the conventional boundaries of "propriety/property" which coordinate meaning, while using her power to impose her own order and ensure the continuity and cohesion of her bloodline (pp. 160, 163). Although she was a virgin, Big Mama decided who among her relatives was going to marry whom (p. 157). It is only fitting that, after her death, when she is no longer present to enforce her interpretation of the codes (legal and linguistic) on which she based her power, a carnivalesque, disseminating festivity should ensue (pp. 167-170), and that all these events should be narrated in the rhetoric of a textual institution which has made of dissemination its byword: journalism.14 In "Big Mama's Funeral," the discourse of journalism demonstrates the existence not only of civil liberties (a common cliché about journalism) but also, and more significantly, of textual liberties. Now that the one person who sought to be the mistress of all codes, of all texts, is rotting in her leaden casket, authority can be more equitably distributed in society, and it becomes possible to tell the one story that could not be told before: that of Big Mama herself and of her will to power. The story's re-

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course to journalism's immediacy and penchant for detail becomes a liberating gesture after the endless years of Big Mama's stultifying ideological abstractions: The wealth of the subsoil, the territorial waters, the colors of the flag, national sovereignty, the traditional parties, the rights of man, civil rights, the nation's leadership, the right of appeal, Congressional hearings, letters of recommendation, historical records, free elections, beauty queens, transcendental speeches, huge demonstrations, distinguished young ladies, proper gendemen, punctilious military men, His Illustrious Eminence, the Supreme Court, goods whose importation was forbidden, liberal ladies, the meat problem, the purity of the language, setting a good example, the free but responsible press, the Athens of South America, public opinion, the lessons of democracy, Christian morality, the shortage of foreign exchange, the right of asylum, the Communist menace, the ship of state, the high cost of living, republican traditions, the underprivileged classes, statements of political support. (p. 161) Journalism in the story is a demystifying practice, not only at the social level (as in the cliché of the valiant journalist exposing corruption in government), but also at the textual level. The attempt to narrate "journalistically," by making use of immediacy, novelty, and the glorification of the trivial that are consistently identified with journalistic discourse, lays bare the ideologies with which literature has tried to give itself the authority and power that is usually associated with other discourses in society (such as those of science, law, and religion). Appropriately, the story of Big Mama's funeral is told among the trash andfilth,"the empty bottles, the cigarette butts, the gnawed bones, the cans and rags of excrement that the crowd which came to the burial left behind" (p. 153). Unlike the other, more "exalted" discourses to which Big Mama resorted, with their vacuous and high-sounding phrases, the discourse of journalism deals with the everyday, the ordinary, and even the excremental. Journalism's emphasis on empirical details and its (rather deluded) belief in its own veracity mock and corrode the abstract and totalizing impulse of a certain literary language that is symbolized in the story by Big Mama. The matriarch's death is also, to a certain extent, the death of the "mother tongue," or, to be more precise, of the notion of language as a "mother"—an organic entity, rooted in Nature, and, like Nature, possessing its own secret laws. Instead, Big Mama's demise reveals her complicity with written language, with the ambiguity, belatedness, and impropriety of writing itself, which she managed to hide under the false harmony of her (literally) massive presence and her unquestioned authority.

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In "Big Mama's Funeral," García Márquez uses certain elements of journalistic rhetoric as critical instruments in exposing the mystifications created about literature by a specific literary ideology, one which we could roughly identify, in literary history, with post-Romanticism. Moreover, that story marks a turning point in García Márquez's own literary endeavor. Significantly, "Big Mama's Funeral" is the closing story of the book with the same title; the next narrative García Márquez published was his novel In Evil Hour (1961), in which the authority of Macondo's brutal military mayor is put into question by a crude form of journalism, by leaflets printed with scandalous gossip which mysteriously appear pasted on the town's walls. Journalism is not thematized in García Márquez's undisputed masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), but it is not difficult to see that the saga of Macondo, with its implicit (and occasionally explicit) meditation about the problems of writing and history in Spanish America, could only have been written after the deconstruction of oldfashioned critical ideologies, by an appeal to journalism, in "Big Mama's Funeral." There is also, perhaps, a subtle reminiscence of journalism in One Hundred Tears of Solitude's parody of history-writing, particularly in Melquíades' manuscript, which, surpassing journalism, prophesies, in minute—journalistic?—detail, the future history of Macondo. There are also traces of journalism in García Márquez's next major novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)· Its theme is similar to that of "Big Mama's Funeral" (the death of an authority-figure), and the allusions to Spanish American modernismo (specifically to Rubén Darío) are very suggestive.15 An explicit and striking use of journalism in García Márquez's narrative, however, is found in his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981). If in "Big Mama's Funeral" García Márquez uses journalism as a rhetorical device to criticize a specific literary ideology, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he examines journalism's links with literature. Chronicle takes place in that murky region where journalistic reportage and the novel intersect, and we are made aware of this through the selfinclusion of the author, who within the novel performs the research that is necessary to write his work. The author's overt participation in the text— as one character among many—is a strikingly self-conscious gesture for such a typically canny writer as García Márquez. It is true that there is a character named "Gabriel" in One Hundred Tears of Solitude who, we are told in the text, goes on to become a writer, but this inclusion is rather oblique and timid, since no relationship is suggested between Gabriel and the writing of Macondo's history. In much of García Márquez's previous fiction, the narrative is presented in a Cervantean way asafait accompli, an already given text which the author simply conveys to his readers (an emblem of this is Melquíades' manuscript in One Hundred Tears of Solitude,

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which is already written before the telling of the tale begins). In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, however, the narrative is strewn with allusions to the author's task of reconstruction, and a good deal of the suspense that the story generates emanates not from the "foretold" ending but from the narrator's quest for the detailed truth about Santiago Nasar's murder. This is one of the few elements that distinguishes this novel from conventional investigative reporting (such as García Márquez's 1955 piece on the Colombian castaway), in which the journalist's comments about his efforts to piece together his story are reduced to a minimum in his report. In Chronicle, on the other hand, there are blatantly "confessional," or "autobiographical" passages, such as those about the narrator's relationship with María Alejandrina Cervantes.16 Chronicle is said to be based upon a real murder which occurred in García Márquez's hometown in 1951, and all of the characters are said to be relatives and friends of García Márquez.17 García Márquez's comments to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza about how he wrote this text are illustrative: When the events took place, in 1951, they did not interest me as material for a novel but as a subject for a reportage. But that was a poorly developed genre in Colombia in those days, and I was a provincial journalist in a local newspaper which perhaps would not be interested in the affair. I began to think about the case in literary terms several years later, but I was always mindful of my mother's disgust at the mere idea of seeing so many friends, and even some relatives, put in a novel written by her son. Nevertheless, the real truth is that the theme did not really attract me so much until I discovered, after thinking about it for many years, what seemed to me to be the essential element: that the two murderers did not want to commit the crime and that they had done everything possible to make someone stop them from doing it, and they had not succeeded. In the end, this is the only really new thing this drama has, because otherwise it is a very common occurrence in Latin America. Another cause for my delay was of a structural nature. In reality, the story ends almost twenty-five years after the crime, when the husband returns to the wife he had given back, but to me it was always evident that the book had to end with the detailed description of the crime. My solution was to introduce a narrator— which for the first time is myself—who would be able to move about as he wished backward and forward within the novel's time frame. In other words, after thirty years, I discovered something that we novelists often forget: that truth is always the best literary formula.18

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García Márquez's "explanations" about his work are resolutely pragmatic and remain on the level of literary technique. The last phrase about "ruth" is consistent with his frequent claims to verisimilitude in his stories, but it could also be interpreted as "the search for truth." In journalistic parlance, the event that gives rise to the story in Chronicle could be classified as a fait-divers, defined by Roland Bardies as a news story in which the event somehow violates our normal expectations of causality and where coincidence plays an important role.19 It is perhaps the most "literary" form of news, because the reverse causality, the coincidences and ironies which that type of journalism emphasizes all resemble a deliberate manipulation of events by an unknown author. Like many forms of literature (Barthes specifically cites the short story), the fait-divers tends to be immanent; it provides the reader with "all" the facts necessary to cause its effect (astonishment, horror, laughter). Like literature, the fait-divers exists in that gray area in which causality and chance vie for predominance, and where interpretation can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation. It is clear, then, that when García Márquez sets out to exploreafait-divers summarized as "a man murdered in full sight of all the townspeople by two men who did not want to kill him and who did all they could to make someone stop them," he is in fact delving into a literary dilemma, into the nature of fiction. Furthermore, he is specifically dealing with questions related to authorship and authority. Like José Arcadio Buendía trying to find God by taking daguerreotype pictures of everything in Macondo, the narrator in Chronicle tries to find Barthes' "god that prowls behind the fait-divers,"20 the controlling principle which produces the narrative and gives it the illusion of coherence. The "literariness" of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, as opposed to its journalistic actuality, is evidenced not only by the sly allusion to thefictionalcolonel Aureliano Buendía as having been one of the opponents of Bayardo San Román's father (pp. 33-34), but also by the literary propriety of many of the proper names in the novel. The name of María Alejandrina Cervantes is a key character in the novel, and she is, in fact, the only character with whom both the narrator and the victim, Santiago Nasar, have had an intimate relationship. María Alejandrina is the owner of a popular bordello (a "house of mercies," as the narrator puts it; p. 45). She once had a very passionate affair with Santiago Nasar and at the time of Nasar's murder was particularly generous to the narrator (p. 65). One may consider María Alejandrina and her bordello as figures symbolic of literature. Indicative is the highly influential Cuban writer Severo Sarduy's development of the bordello as a topic of Spanish American literature; much of the action in Sarduy's novels, starting with From Cuba with a Song (1967) and on into Cobra (1972), Maitreya (1980), and his recent Colibrí (1984), takes place in a theatrical space that is part bordello, part burlesque

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show, in which the sexual gender of the characters is virtually impossible to determine (in this context it seems significant that García Márquez "feminizes" Cervantes). The episode in Chronicle in which Santiago Nasar (who, we are told, "had an almost magical talent for disguises") begins dressing up María Alejandrina's mulatto girls so that in the end their identities are mixed up (p. 65), is very Sarduyan, and thus suggests an allegorical interpretation of the novel as a discourse on literature.21 The associations evoked by the name "Cervantes" are obvious, but her second name, "Alejandrina," also has literary connotations. It suggests Alexandria, the great center of Hellenistic culture which produced not only inventors like Archimedes, but also a school of Biblical exegesis. As Joseph A. Mazzeo indicates, "the Alexandrian fathers, with the precedents of Phil Judaeus and the markedly hellenized synagogue behind them, developed an intensely philosophical kind of exegesis, to the point of sometimes denying the literal significance of important portions of Scripture in the interest of a preferred allegorical meaning."22 Supporting such an apparently far-fetched (not to say blasphemous) interpretation of María Alejandrina's name are allusions to the Bible, particularly to the New Testament and the story of Christ, which form an important subtext in many of García Márquez's fictions.23 Indeed, Biblical and religious allusions are scattered throughout Chronicle with such insistence that their purpose becomes a bit too obvious. Not only does Santiago Nasar die on the day the bishop goes by the town in his boat, but his very name, and the names of his murderers, are suggestive. Santiago (James) is the name not only of two saints, but also a brother of Jesus (to whom one of the Gospels is sometimes attributed); with a few changes in the spelling of his name, Nasar becomes "Nazareno" (Nazarene). The estate left to Santiago by his father is called The Divine Face; Santiago's murderers bear the names of two apostles, Peter and Paul, and their last name, Vicario, suggests not only the adjective "vicarious" (obviously important to any interpretation of this text), but also the noun "vicar," a term frequently applied to the Pope in his functions as "deputy" of Christ on Earth. The Vicarios' father is named Poncio (like Pontius Pilate), and so on. Chronicle ofa Death Foretold is a repetition, a "turn of the screw," so to speak, of the same question of authorship and authority that Garcia Márquez has been exploring at least since "Big Mama's Funeral." Aren't "Big Mama's Funeral," One Hundred Tears ofSolitude, and The Autumn of the Patriarch all "chronicles of deaths foretold," of the inevitable end of authorship and authority? Santiago Nasar is, along with the novel's narrator, an author-figure in the text; Christlike, he derives his authority from The Divine Face, and like Christ's brother and the figure of the author in general, he is a secondary figure, an administrator, a deputy (yes, a "vicar" too), who has gained authority through the absence of the father.

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His links with literature, with representation, are emphasized by his talent for disguises and his "serious affection" (p. 65) for María Alejandrina Cervantes. In fact, at one point the text becomes almost suspiciously explicit about Nasar's status as an author. When the investigating magistrate whose scattered papers the narrator consulted asked Angela Vicario, "with his oblique style," if she knew who the deceased Santiago Nasar was, she replied: "He was my perpetrator" (p. 100); the English translation disguises the double meaning of the Spanish original: "Fue mi autor."24 In the end, although the ultimate cause of Santiago Nasar's murder remains a mystery (since the uncertainty remains about who deflowered Angela Vicario, and why she chose to accuse Nasar), an allegorical (Alexandrian?) interpretation based on Nasar as an author-figure suggests that his "fate" was sealed from the moment of his infatuation with literature, with representation. The narrator's warning when Nasar "lost his senses" over María Alejandrina was significant in more ways than one: "A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hopefor a life of pain" (p. 65)—an affair with "whorish" literature is always a risky business. This line of verse (which in the original Spanish has more ominous connotations: "Halcón que se atreve con garza guerrera peligros espera," a more literal rendition of which would read, "Danger awaits the falcon who chases a warlike crane") comes from the same poem by the Spanish Renaissance author, Gil Vicente, who furnishes the novel's epigraph: "The pursuit of love is like falconry." Again, the English translation does not permit the double meaning found in the Spanish original: "La caza de amor es de altanería." In Spanish, altanería has the archaic meaning "falconry" (which is probably the denotation intended in Gil Vicente's courtly poem), but its contemporary usage is close to that of the Greek hubris, "haughtiness" or "overweening pride." That Santiago Nasar had a tragic streak of such a feeling is suggested in the novel not so much by his relations with the townspeople ("By his nature, Santiago Nasar was merry and peaceful, and openhearted," we are told on p. 8) as by his playful but significant penchant for calculating the cost of parties to the last cent (pp. 17-18,42-43). If anything, Nasar was guilty of a kind of intellectual hubris, and of a certain overconfidence that came with his early exercise of authority; he was used to being in control of things, of mastering causality. The passage about the guns at the beginning of the novel is important in this respect. Nasar never left any of his many guns loaded: "It was a wise custom established by his father ever since one morning when a servant girl had shaken the case to get the pillow out and the pistol went off as it hit the floor and the bullet wrecked the cupboard in the room, went through the living room wall, passed through the dining room of the house next door with the thunder of war, and turned a life-sized saint on the main altar of the church on the opposite side of the square to plaster dust. Santiago Nasar, who was a young child at the time, never forgot the

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lesson of that accident" (p. 6). Yet Nasar never did learn to apply that lesson to other aspects of life, and it is precisely that same deranged causality that makes him its victim.25 As an author, Nasar's insensitivity to the vagaries of causality ends by turning him into the victim of a ritual slaying and a subsequent autopsy that could very well be allegories of the process of literary criticism; cruel "readers," the Vicario brothers end up slashing Nasar (as author and text) to shreds, and the job is finished on Santiago's corpse by the bungling Father Carmen Amador, whose erudite remarks about the weight of Nasar's encephalic mass sound like a parody of a philologist's comments (pp. 75-76). A certain identity between Santiago Nasar and the narrator of Chronicle is implied not only by their relationship with María Alejandrina, but by the narrator's observation near the beginning of the novel that "no sooner had I appeared on the threshold than she [Nasar's mother] confused me with the memory of Santiago Nasar" (p. 5). Yet the novel's narrator is a much more wary and sophisticated author than Santiago Nasar ever was. Unlike Nasar, he is fascinated by causality and the questions it raises and is well aware that his control over his narrative is as feeble and uncertain as that of the anonymous magistrate who first investigated the case, whose "good work at times seemed ruined by disillusionment" (p. 100), and who "never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature" (p. 99). Shrewdly, the narrator of Chronicle neither excises coincidence from his tale nor attempts to explain it; instead, he incorporates causality and chance into his text in such a visible way that he leaves his potentially "dangerous" readers with nothing solid at which to strike—just a handful of pages from flooded legal files and a bundle of conflicting interpretations. The world of narrative, as it appears in this novel, is a world without a single, all-powerful "God." It is populated, like the cosmos of Greek myth or that of the Alexandrian gnostics (of which Borges has written so frequently), with numberless minor deities, each vying for a share of power in the text, each adding one voice to the constant background hubbub from which the narrative springs.26 Through his canny use of journalistic discourse in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, García Márquez manages to reveal the humble, threadbare origins of narrative in gossip, conjecture, and the petty details of life, as well as narrative's dependence on belief—on "prejudice," as the unnamed magistrate says (p. 100)—to achieve the authority and power it wields over its readers. García Márquez's recourse to journalism in this work lets us see, as if through a magnifying glass, the warp and woof of the text and the nothingness that lies beyond it. His evocation of journalism reminds us that the end of authority, like a petty Apocalypse, is already "foretold" by the lowly beginnings—which are also the ends—of the text.

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NOTES 1. Jacques Gilard, prologue to Gabriel García Márquez, Textos costeños (Obra periodística, vol. 1), collected with a prologue by Jacques Gilard (Bogotá: Ediciones Oveja Negra, 1981), pp. 5-46; and prologue to Entre cachacos (Obra periodística, vol. 2), collected with a prologue by Jacques Gilard (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1982), pp. 7-87. See also Mario Vargas Llosa, Garcia Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Barrai, 1971), pp. 35-65. At the time of writing this essay, I had not read afineessay by Lois Parkinson Zamora which studies Chronicle ofa Death Foretold from a perspective similar to my own, "Ends and Endings in García Márquez's Crónica de una muerte anunciada," Latin American Literary Review (Special Issue: Gabriel Garcia Márquez) 13 (1985): 104-115. 2. Gabriel García Márquez, El olor de laguayaba, interviews with Plínio Apuleyo Mendoza (Bogotá: Oveja Negra, 1982), p. 37 (my translation). 3. García Márquez, "La verdad sobre mi aventura," in Entre cachacos, pp. 566-581, 584-620,625-652.

4. Ian Watt, The Rise ofthe Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 9-59; see also William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). There is as yet no serious and satisfactory study on the relationship between journalism and the modern novel; it is not surprising to find that among the few authors who have attempted such a study in recent decades are the Latin Americans Antonio Olinto, Jornalismo e literatura (Rio de Janeiro: Ediçóes de Ouro, 1954); Alceu Amoroso Lima, O jornalismo comogêneroliterário (Rio de Janeiro: AGIR Editora,1960);and, more recently, Mario Castro Arenas, El periodismo y la novela contemporánea (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1969). 5. On legal rhetoric and the origins of the modern novel, see Roberto González Echevarría, "José Arrom, autor de la Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (picaresca e historia)," in Relecturas (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1976), p. 17-35.1 have also profited much from a recent essay by the same author, "Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive," MLN, Hispanic Issue (Spring 1984), pp. 358-380. 6. In recent years, partly due to the critical effect the Cuban Revolution has had on many aspects of Latin American culture, testimonial narratives have become the vogue in Spanish American literature, and texts following journalistic models, such as Miguel Barnet's Biografia de un cimarrón (The Autobiography ofa Runaway Slave, 1966) and Canción de Rachel (1969), Reynaldo González's La festa de los tiburones (1978), Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's El entierro de Cortijo (1983), among many others, have proliferated. Their popularity as a genre accounts in part for García Márquez's writing of Crónica de una muerte anunciada. Two recent and important essays on the subject of the Latin American documentary narrative are Roberto González Echevarría, "Biografia de un cimarrón and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 13 (Spring 1980): 249-263; and David William Foster, "Latin American Documentary Narrative," PMLA 1 (January 1984): 4I-557. Amoroso, Lima, O jornalismo como gênero literário, pp. 9-10. 8. Gilard, prologue to Entre cachacos, pp. 31—42.

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9. García Márquez, El olor de la guayaba, p. 44 (my translation). 10. Ibid., p. 86 (my translation). 11. Ibid., p. 50 (my translation). 12. Gabriel García Márquez, "Big Mama's Funeral," in No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, trans. J. S. Bernstein (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 153. The English translation omits an important phrase ("en función de dominio") which I have translated and placed in brackets. All quotes will be from this text. 13. I am drawing here from the perceptive comments by Roberto González Echevarría in his note, "Big Mama's Wake," Diacritics (Summer 1974): 55-5714. I am using the term "dissemination" here in the sense proposed by Jacques Derrida in La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972); for Derrida, dissemination is an operation performed by certain texts which consists in making meaning circulate indefinitely through several different domains (science, mathematics, philosophy, religion, psychoanalysis, etc.) until the boundaries which define meaning in the first place are erased. 15. García Márquez has indicated that The Autumn of the Patriarch "is full of winks to the connoisseurs of Rubén Darío. He is even a character in the book" (El olor de la guayaba, p. 71; my translation). See also Julio Ortega, "El otoño del patriarca: texto y cultura," Hispanic Review 46 (Autumn 1978): 421-446. 16. Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1983), pp. 64-65, 68, 77-78. All quotes will be from this text. 17. García Márquez, El olor de la guayaba, p. 37. 18. Ibid., pp. 37-38 (my translation). 19. Roland Barthes, "Structure of the fait-divers," in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 190-192. 20. Ibid., p. 194· 21. See Severo Sarduy, "Literatura/travestismo," in Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969), pp. 43-48. 22. Joseph A. Mazzeo, "Allegorical Interpretation and History," Comparative Literature 30 (Winter 1978): 4· 23. González Echevarría has pointed this out with particular reference to The Autumn of the Patriarch, in T h e Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship: Carpentier, García Márquez, Roa Bastos," Latin American Research Review 3 (1980): 205-228. 24. Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Bogotá: La Oveja Negra, 1981), p. 131. 25. Like many contemporary Spanish American writers, García Márquez probably learned much of what he knows about causality and literature from Borges' well-known essay, "El arte narrativo y la magia," in Discusión (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1957), pp. 81-91. 26. See Jorge Luis Borges, "Una vindicación del falso Basílides," in Discusión, pp. 61-66. The French philosopher of science Michel Serres has written abundantly on the relationship between "background noise" and the origin of the text in Hermès IV: La Distribution (Paris: Minuit, 1977), as well as in Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980).

GONZALO DÍAZ-MIGOYO

Truth Disguised: Chronicle of a Death (Ambiguously) Foretold

Many years later, as he faced the blank page, the writer Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that fateful Monday when his friend Santiago Nasar took his place under the avenger's knife . . . Yes or no? Yes and no. This hypothesis would seem impossible to verify, since the account of those memories, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, adopts a persistently novelistic stance. Nonetheless, for the assiduous reader of García Márquez, the subtlety of this amusing piece of tongue-in-cheekery may make him recall the diabolic escape of Patricio Kelly, that spy whom the writer admired so much and whose success, he said in one of his old newspaper articles, was based on the fact that he had simply been "protected by the certain and well-proved fact that no one would have believed he had the nerve."1 The event occurred on January 22,1951, in Sucre, Colombia. After having discovered on his wedding night that his wife, Margarita, was not a virgin, Miguel Reyes Palencia returned her to her mother early the following morning. Soon afterward, Cayetano Gentile Chimento died at the hands of Víctor Chica Salas for having dishonored Victor's sister. It was a crime involving neither mysteries nor complications, commonplace in its motives, circumstances, and execution. Thirty years later, on April 28, 1981, not one, but two "chronicles" about the affair were published: García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which was simultaneously published in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Spain; and journalists Julio Roca and Camilo Calderón's "García Márquez Saw Him Die,"2 an exclusive story for the first issue of the weekly Colombian magazine, Al Día. It was probably García Márquez himself who suggested this reportorial task to the two journalists, for their story ended with these words:

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García Márquez has enriched and dramatized the facts. And we hope that this story will permit its readers to discover for themselves the differences and the new elements with which the author has so tightly structured his story.3 A few days after the publication of the novel, its author declared in Mexico: "What I am interested in, and what I believe ought to interest the critics, is the comparison between the facts and the literary work." And then he went on to specify: The novel appeared on Monday, and a magazine in Bogotá had already published a story from the place where the events took place, with photographs of the supposed protagonists. Their job is excellent from a journalistic viewpoint; but it is astonishing that the drama told to the journalists by the witnesses is totally different from that of the novel. Perhaps the word "totally" is not quite accurate. The point of departure is the same, but the evolution is different. I flatter myself that the drama in my book is better, more controlled, more structured.4 The interesting part, as García Márquez says, is not the comparison between the facts and the literary work, but the distinction between two types of accounts: the journalistic, which is carried out as if it were predetermined, prescribed or pre-inscribed, by the events that are narrated; and the novelistic, in which events are controlled by the narrator—even when he presents himself as if the events prescribed or preinscribed him. The importance, therefore, lies not in the numerous contrasts between the two chronicles; but in the inherent, categorical differences among their coincidental details. Whether it is a true report or the semblance of one, Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not, despite factual coincidence, lose its fictitious and unanswerable character. It is an account no less imaginary for being faithful to the facts and, conversely, no less historical for being a work of the imagination. These qualities are evident, although not overtly expressed, in García Márquez's explanation of this chronicle a few months after its publication. In August 1981, a two-part article entided "The Story of the Story," which purports to be the "true history" of Chronicle of a Death Foretoldy appeared in Madrid's newspaper El País. It is, however, nothing but a tissue of fantastic tales which amply justify its ironic title, "The Story of the Story," or story to the second power. This second tale in no way pertains to the events that took place on that Monday in January 1951, although it does deal with a related account, one which quietly and

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from within Chapters 2 and 4 of the novel frames those events: the fabulous idyll of Bayardo San Román and Angela Vicario. According to García Márquez, it was his now deceased friend, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, who said: "I've got a tip for you. . . . Bayardo San Román went back for Angela Vicario." Just as he expected, I was petrified. "They're living together in Manaure," he continued, "old and pooped out, but happy." He didn't have to say anything more to make me understand that the end of a long search had arrived . . . Alvaro Cepeda Samudio's revelation, that Sunday in Sabanilla, made everything fall into place for me. Bayardo San Román's return to Angela Vicario was, undoubtedly, the final missing link. Everything became clear then: because of my fondness for the victim, I had always believed that this was the story of an atrocious crime, when really it must have been the secret history of a terrible love.5 Without this information, "there was one part missing" from the story, that is, from the facts in their narrative version—a part, said García Márquez, that "I kept looking for in my imagination, trying to invent it by main force, without even thinking that life too was doing it all by itself, and even more cleverly."6 Life, naturally, did not invent that precise piece of information which so neatly rounded off the imaginary, novel-like idyll. As is learned from the interview with the real husband by one of the same journalists,7 Margarita Chica Salas, the rejected wife, continued to live alone in Sincelejo. After having tried unsuccessfully to annul his marriage in Colombia, her husband was remarried in more permissive Costa Rica to Enriqueta Obregón, with whom he had twelve children. The couple presently resides in Barranquilla, where he is an insurance agent. Upon reading this second minichronicle, one is undoubtedly surprised that its author describes his visit to Angela Vicario to confirm his friend's news with the same words used under the same circumstances by the narrator in the novel. The chronicle of the crime is, thus, framed, circumscribed from within by an imaginative account which separates and distinguishes it from reality. But this account, in turn, is inscribed in that additional minichronicle, "Story of the Story," which, despite its historical claim, is merely a prolongation of a single layer of fictitious circumstances. García Márquez's goal in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not to validate the truth or falsehood of certain events, but to assure the simulated nature of his account—the irrelevance of a probatory, judicial confrontation with the facts. It is otherwise impossible to understand the tenor of the writer's last observation in his "Story of a Story":

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By the way: George Plimpton, in his historic interview for The Paris Review, asked Ernest Hemingway if he could say something about the process of changing a person in real life into a character in a novel. Hemingway answered "If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers."8 This observation, however, did not deter García Márquez from explaining to his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza: The device that allowed me to write Chronicle of a Death Foretold was to introduce a narrator—who for the first time is myself—able to meander at will, forward and backward, within the structural time frame of the novel. After thirty years I discovered something that we novelists often forget—that the best literary formula is always the truth.9 What truth is composed of both "the best literary formula" and lies like those I have indicated, if not the classic truth of the liar, of the type "we Cretans always lie"? In Chronicle of a Death Foretold García Márquez deceives with truth. Fate is that supernatural agency to which individuals attribute those actions for which they do not wish to be held responsible. This supernatural agency predicts the result of every situation, and its role is limited to this prediction. The prediction, however, can either be known beforehand or discovered. Although foretelling an event must occur before the event takes place, the prophecy is not actually realized until it is fulfilled. Unfulfilled prophecies are, therefore, simply not prophecies at all. Since the prediction is made retroactively, any event may be the object of a prophecy. A prophecy is always constructed in reverse as a means of explaining, a posteriori, the event that has occurred. Prophecies, therefore, either divide the present or they exist twice: once as future, in a climate of uncertainty, until they are fulfilled; and again as past, under the sign of Fate, after what has been prophesied has occurred—a previous future or a future within the past which is, nevertheless, no more than the present itself. The path of the event is traveled simultaneously in two contradictory directions: as a deletion and as a confirmation of the other, which also remains visible. A prophecy is, thus, always the coexistence of two mutually exclusive views about the causality of a single event. The (pre)supposed (pre)diction is, obviously, fictitious. We are dealing here with a very particular deception—that of believing

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oneself deceived without having been so. This double deception has two stages. First, the individual divides causality into two agencies or paths: his own, the effective one, which is labeled as "ineffective," and Fate's, which he labels as "effective," although it is equivalent to his. This division produces the second deception: the belief that Fate's agency, despite its "effectiveness," is merely an imitation of his own "ineffective" one, and, thus, supplants him. Even when the individual accepts an outcome different from Fate's, the two are indistinguishable. The individual's is only a wishful negation of Fate's determination, with no other positive characteristics. Fate's "effective" reality is, thus, deceptive and duplicitous, and the individual's "ineffective" reality is deceived and original. The latter is truly illusory, since it is both ineffective and negative; the former is the real one, since it is effective and positive. Fate, as the deceptive twin of the individual, is the duplicate of a fiction, a false double, the deception of a deception. This imaginary splitting of one's own actions is undoubtedly the line of conduct followed by the Vicario brothers and, through them, by the whole town. The brothers' repeated announcement of Santiago Nasar's death, however, is not the true origin of the death prophecy; it is not the prediction itself. On the one hand, their declaration is a repeated (fictitious) attempt to avoid the fulfillment of an already existent prophecy. On the other, it is a real invitation or summons to the town to co-participate in the prophecy's fulfillment. It is no accident that the brothers are named Pedro and Pablo, like the two chief apostles and first priests of the Catholic Church, of a congregation of the faithful for the unanimous repetition of the sacrifice of Mass. For this same reason, their surname is Vicario; they are representatives or substitutes of the entire town. They are also, therefore, sacrificial butchers. The true prophecy is announced by Angela, the person who pronounces the name of the victim. It is to her, because of her name, that this function etymologically belongs. The real author of this "angel of the Lord's" prediction, however, is the intriguing mystery which García Márquez suggests we call Fate, rather than God. The aborted visit of the religious nuncio, the Spanish bishop, indicates that the Christian God he represents on Earth limits himself to blessing, absent-mindedly and from a distance, a lay sacrifice that is already in process or about to happen. The pronunciation of the victim's name by Angela Vicario is a judicial sentence. In fact, the code of honor that her words set in motion gives them the value of a sentence, predictive like all sentences. This penal code, a protocol of conduct in which, initially, the names of the parties are left blank, prescribes the death of the offender at the hands of the offended party; virginal blood is repaid by criminal blood. We are dealing here with a code that has been abundantly written and rewritten in classical Spanish literature, particularly in Cal-

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derón's well-known dramas of honor, El médico de su honra (The Physician of His Honor) and El pintor de su deshonra (The Painter of His Dishonor). Calderón writes about the painful dilemma which this codified obligation poses for the individual: vengeance or dishonor, moral death or social death. Chronicle of a Death Foretold develops the theme, however, from a different viewpoint and with different aims. There is no question of choosing between two evils of this type. The Vicario brothers do not suffer from an indecision caused by conflicting obligations, as they will also not suffer the equally detestable consequences of choosing between one sort of misfortune and another. For them, the obligation of revenge offers no doubt. The brothers' predicament, therefore, resembles La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), rather than dramas of honor, or a hybrid of both, in which the prophecy arises from the code of honor instead of an astrological code. García Márquez also greatly admired Antigone, the tragedy of duty, and Oedipus Rex, the tragedy of destiny, the latter having more concomitants with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Oedipus Rex is the paradigmatic formulation whose "defects" García Márquez sets out to correct:"Thereally superb detective story," the writer said on one occasion, "is Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, because it is the detective who discovers that he himself is the murderer." And to this he immediately added,"Theonly irritating thing about the detective story is that it doesn't leave you any mystery. It is a literature made to reveal and destroy mystery."10 In Chronicle of a Death Foretold there is no mystery. Santiago Nasar's death is explained without the slightest hesitation: Fate chose him as the victim for a communal, sacrificial rite. Because of the reader's fascination, like that of the murderers, with the prophecy's power and the code's obligations, the inescapable nature of Nasar's death appears to be obvious. They overlook, however, a fact equally obvious in the novel— that Santiago Nasar was probably not guilty of the offense of which he was accused and, consequently, died by mistake. It must be recalled that one of the most provocative novelistic devices in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the unknown identity of the (true) perpetrator of Angela Vicario's dishonor and, hence, from cause to effect, of the individual whose place the dead man took. This identity was no mystery in real life, although the article in Al Día indicated that it was—a possible influence from García Márquez's novel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold accentuates this mystery to the point of stating that, whoever he was, the man responsible could not have been the victim. Surprisingly, though, the narrator also states that this intriguing mystery did not bother anyone: The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was

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obvious that we weren't doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.11 It must have been that this thought troubled the novelist for years until he resolved it by writing his chronicle: T h e dead man tormented him," states an interviewer, quoting García Márquez, worse than my constant toothaches; I don't know why I don't resign myself to having my teeth extracted and getting it over with, as I have done with Santiago Nasar now, with a prolonged, agonizing, but effective stroke of the pen.12 In Chronicle ofa Death Foretold,finally,each of the participants—including, primarily, the anonymous narrator—occupies the place and assumes the mission assigned by Fate. The novel reorganizes the historical event to such a degree that the obvious impersonality of Fate fills the void created by the true culprit's hidden personality. Fate, in the end, transcends guilt. The novel tries to convince us of this by reasoning that in the face of the irremediable nature of any death, it is more interesting to know how it happened, its preparation and execution, than to know whether it ought to have happened. Indeed, what importance can there be in uncovering a hypothetical who-ought-to-have-died-in-his-place, a nonevent, compared to the imperious need to understand how what undoubtedly and irreparably occurred did occur? Does Fate not sufficiently explain an execution independent of the usual justification (or impedance) which is the victim's guilt (or innocence)? The fatalistic pattern achieves a satisfactory explanation of the death only to the degree in which that death is unjustified for lack of proved or undoubted guilt. Santiago Nasar's lack of guilt, therefore, should not be forgotten or overlooked, but, rather, remembered so that his probable innocence increases the relevance of the fatalistic explanation. If Santiago Nasar had been guilty, he would have died exactly the same way; his execution would have progressed by means of the same coincidences. Fate, however, would have been different, less fatal—if it is possible to establish lesser degrees of fatality—because it would have been justified. Because of its coincidence with some connections between crime and punishment that we are used to thinking of as logical, Fate would merely have been the name of Justice. In fact, Fate is all the more fatal insofar as it is neither just nor unjust, but independent of both concepts. Hence, the doubt about the dead man's guilt, instead of being an accessory detail in explaining his

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death, is the basis for the fatalistic explanation's convincing strength and exemplary rigor. Fate, finally, not only explains why Santiago Nasar dies but also explains, or rather implies, why it is the innocent and not the guilty one who dies. The rigid clockwork of fatality made irremediable a disastrous error which the anonymous culprit had no occasion, or intention, of dispelling—and whose resolution, in the end, became irrelevant. Fate in Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not annul the mystery of that unknown identity, but ambiguously substitutes it. Another reason for the novel's deceptive lack of interest in the victim's guilt or innocence is the second of its nonexistent mysteries—that of the real culprit's identity. Who killed Santiago Nasar? The Vicario brothers, to be sure; the whole town, perhaps. We know about the ambiguous and routinely unsuccessful attempts of one character in the novel after another to "avoid" Santiago Nasar's death. All of them have to fail because they are in the hands of Fate, whose internal logic converts the act of avoidance into an effective act. Everybody overlooks the one solution that would have been truly effective, that of suggesting that Santiago Nasar's destiny was not his destiny. If the offense had been attributed to its real author, Santiago Nasar would have been declared innocent. Who knew this piece of information? Who kept it quiet? Who, in the end, was responsible for setting in motion that implacable and impersonal death machine? Except for Angela Vicario—whose name indicates her role as a mere mouthpiece—no one else in the town could feasibly know that hidden identity, or, therefore, offer that solution. No one, except the culprit himself. But the price of his life was silence, for to exonerate Santiago Nasar by confessing would have instantly resulted in his own death. It seems, then, that the man who both possessed this information and withheld it was one and the same person, the culprit. We are assured in the novel that those who did not hear Santiago Nasar's death warrant, the false accusation, were the following: Angela Vicario's father and sisters, her husband, and the anonymous "I" of the story, Angela Vicario's cousin. Obviously we must exclude all of them from a list of possible culprits except the last one. Who is this curious character without a name, but with such a solid identity? Narrative truth obliged the chronicler to use the first person because, as teller of the story, he had to have been the investigator of the events. What this narrative fidelity did not oblige him to do, however, was to confess himself a witness or, much less, a participant in those events. García Márquez had been neither; he was not there when it happened. According to his brother Luis Enrique, who was there,

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it isn't true, as has been said, that Gabito saw Cayetano die. Gabito wasn't even in Sucre that day; he was in Cartagena, where he was a teacher of Spanish language in the Departmental College Annex of the University of Cartagena. And he wrote chronicles for El Universal. He was studying law.13 This additional bit of fakery is more disturbing than those pointed out in relation to his conduct as an investigator, especially given the reason this anonymous participant, the only one whose behavior seems not to have had any consequences for Santiago Nasar, stays away from the crime. He is unaware of its announcement as well as its execution because María Alejandrina Cervantes had left the door of her house unbarred. I took leave of my brother, crossed the veranda where the mulatto girls' cats were sleeping curled up among the tulips, and opened the bedroom door without knocking. The lights were out, but as soon as I went in I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness, and then I didn't know anything else about myself until the bells began to ring. (p. 69) This confessional detail was previously untold. It was not known that this anonymous character had spent those early morning hours in the arms of Santiago Nasar's former love, a woman who still "had so much respect for him [Santiago Nasar] that she never again went to bed with anyone if he was present." It was not known that that tryst was part of a jealously guarded secret. In the line following the previous quotation, however, the narrator confesses: During those last vacations she would send us off early with the pretext that she was tired, but she left the door unbarred and with a lamp lighted in the hall so that I could come in secretly. (p. 65) The secret is an important one, particularly if compared to another "secret" that the narrator had questioned not long before: Nor was it known what cards Santiago Nasar was playing. I was with him all the time, in the church and at the festival, along with Cristo Bedoya and my brother Luis Enrique, and none of us caught a glimpse of any change in his manner. I've had to repeat this many times, because the four of us had grown up together in school and later on in the same gang at vacation time, and nobody could have

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believed that one of us could have a secret without its being shared, particularly such a big secret. (p. 41) No one could believe that the narrator had a secret as important as that of taking his friend's place in his former lover's arms. This reciprocal substitution indicates that, while Santiago Nasar's nonexistent secret about Angela is "revealed" with fatal consequences, the narrator's, until now unrevealed, but genuine, secret about Alejandrina achieved exacdy the opposite: from making him the only person in the novel totally unresponsible for the crime to freeing him from death. Perhaps the narrator could not have saved his friend because he did not know the real culprit's identity. Even if he did, his unawareness of the danger and, hence, of the need for doing something about it, was due to yet another coincidence similar to the many which disqualified the other participants. Perhaps if he had heard the announcement and had wanted to do something, his help might have been equally ineffective. These are all possible theories. Nonetheless, not knowing what he would have been able to do makes his conduct different from that of all others. In a situation where everyone's actions are clearly effective or ineffective, one's ambiguous behavior, so fortuitously unknown, provokes a variety of speculations—particularly whether his behavior, in its very inaction, may not have been the most decisive of all. If Angela Vicario's cousin is not responsible for her dishonor, his passivity and unawareness during the event have no significance (but both that passivity and that unawareness are minimally or not at all convincing). If he is responsible for the dishonor that sets criminal vengeance in motion, that which keeps him from preventing it (and dying) is either a fateful coincidence identical to that which affects the rest of the town, or his personal desire, concealed under a cloak of fateful coincidence. His guilt, although seemingly convincing, is always ambiguous; it never allows us to determine whether his conclusive silence is voluntary or involuntary. If voluntary, there was no real Fate, only the trick of making us believe that there was. If involuntary, there was indeed Fate, but then we are dealing, as always, with a self-deception as great as that of the killers; this anonymous friend would have performed an illusory self-division, attributing his silence to an unknown cause, Fate, and considering himself an involuntary cause. In both cases the voluntariness or involuntariness of his silence, the very cause of his innocent friend's death, is attributed to another as the double of an individual. Had this individual been an ordinary character in the novel, there would be no further speculation about the awareness or unawareness of his own divided self, about his responsibility. But we are dealing with the narrator himself. The mirror-like relationship established

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between actor and narrator by the use of the first person permits the following additional deductions. When the narrator does not dispel the doubt about whether the actor's silence is voluntary or involuntary, he is permitting, or rather creating, that doubt and does so deliberately. He is lying, by omission, when he now silences that (lack of) knowledge in the past. This lying-narrative-silence, by repeating and prolonging the actor's silence, merely reproduces the ambiguous illusory duplication of itself—this time as the first-person narrator mirrors the book's titular author. In this new relationship, we are again offered the same unsolvable duplicity. If the lying narrator coincides with the author, then the latter too is lying by creating a lying chronicler; if he does not—that is, if the narrator is a fiction distina from the author—then the author is lying again, for not only does he make him speak in thefirstperson but implicitly lends him his own name. In both cases we are faced with a fateful, deceptive split: first, with a narrator who deceptively duplicates the author as if he were his Fate and second, with an author who acts as if he were the narrator's Fate—the same duplication, but reversed. The narrative alternative exactly reflects the narrated alternative in all its ambivalence as a deceptive Fate, either known or unknown. The essential difference at the level of narration lies in the fact that narration, unlike action, always consists of a deceptive split. Its singularity, its idiosyncrasy or unicity, is duplicity itself; narrative production can only be a reproduction. The deceptive split, optional at the level of fatalistic action, is obligatory at the level of narration. Optional too, therefore, is the reflection of one in the other. In this case, it is a conscious effort, unless one supposes a learned ignorance on the author's part—unconvincing in the case of the Cervantesquely wise García Márquez. Through simple mirrorlike reflections, we can deduce that knowledge on the part of the author, Gabriel García Márquez, implies knowledge on the part of the anonymous actor of the efficacy of his own silence. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, "García Márquez," enclosed in quotation marks to distinguish him from the flesh-and-blood García Márquez (an identification which, although not impossible, would require more time to establish), is the man responsible for the death of his friend Santiago Nasar (see figure). This is the solution, albeit an implicit one, with which Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a novel of love and death, mystery and fate, correas the Oedipal-daeaivesque "defect" of single and indubitable responsibility. It does so through a silent repetition of that defect by placing before the readers the very fact that it wishes to conceal from them—that the detective himself is the criminal.

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NOTES 1. Gabriel García Márquez, "Kelly sale de la penumbra," Momento (Caracas), January 24, 1958, pp. 24-26, reprinted in Obra periodística, vol. 4: De Europa y América (1955-1960), compiled and with a prologue by Jacques Gilard (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1982), p. 547 (my translation). 2. Julio Roca and Camilo Calderón, "García Márquez lo vió morir," Al Día (Bogotá), no. 1, April 28,1981, pp. 52-60,108. 3. Ibid., p. 108. 4. Quoted by Jesús Ceberio, "Gabriel García Márquez: 'Crónica de una muerte anunciada es mi mejor novela,'" El País (Madrid), Friday, May 1, 1981, p. 29. 5. Gabriel García Márquez, "El cuento del cuento," El País (Madrid), August 26, 1981, pp. 7-8; September 2,1981, 9-10. The quotation is from page 7 for the first installment (my translation). 6. Ibid. 7. Julio Roca, "Sí: La devolví la noche de bodas," Al Día (Bogotá), no. 3, May 12,1981, pp. 23-27. 8. García Márquez, "El cuento del cuento," p. 10 of the second installment (my translation). 9. Gabriel García Márquez, El olor de laguayaba: Conversaciones con Plinto Apuleyo Mendoza (Bogotá: La Oveja Negra, 1982), p. 28 (my translation). 10. Interview with Manuel Pereira for Bohemia (Havana), 1979, reproduced as "Dix mille ans de littérature," Magazine Littéraire (Paris), no. 178 (November 1981): 20-25. 11. Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 96. All quotations and page numbers are taken from this edition. 12. Graciela Romero, "Crónica de una muerte anunciada: García Márquez, Tui testigo del crimen,'" HOT: La verdad sin compromisos (Santiago de Chile), 5, no. 212 (August 12-18,1981): 30 (my translation). 13. Juan Gossain, "Una novela con testigos presenciales: La realidad de la muerte anunciada," El Espectador (Bogotá), May 10,11, and 12,1981. The quotation is from the second installment, subtitled "Hermano de Gabo recuerda el día trágico" (my translation).

GABRIEL GARCIA MÁRQUEZ

The Solitude of Latin America (Nobel Lecture, 1982) Translated from the Spanish by Marina Castañeda

Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that 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 and 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 short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chroniclers of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. The founders' lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of

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Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold. Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had street lamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Morazán erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures. Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will—and sometimes those of bad, as well—have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one—more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Upsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children, who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years. One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tra-

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dition of hospitality—that is, ten percent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but litde of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without a valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan king anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the sixteenth century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword. I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and

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humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world. Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excesses of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude. In spite of this, to oppression, plundering, and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources—including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune. On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would feel unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for thefirsttime since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the

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creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Julio Ortega, professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and chairman of Latin American Studies at Brandeis University, is the author of Poetics of Change: The New Spanish-American Narrative (1984), among many other books, and the coeditor of Latin America in Its Literature (1980). Ricardo Gutierrez Mouat has published José Donoso: Impostura e impostación (1983). He teaches in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Emory University. Michael Palencia-Roth is a professor in the Program of Comparative Literature of the University of Illinois, Urbana, and is the author of Gabriel García Márquez: La línea, el círculo y las metamorfosis del mito (1983) and Myth and the Modern Novel (1987). Aníbal González is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published La novela modernista hispanoamericana (1987). Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo is a professor at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of Estructura de la novela: Anatomía de "El Buscón" (1978) and Guía de Tirano Banderas (1984).

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INDEX

Angelí, Norman, 18-19, 25, 31 Aristotle, 22, 25, 29, 32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14 Barnet, Miguel, 72 Barthes, Roland, 68, 73 Baudrillard, Jean, 14 Benedetti, Mario, 31 Borges, Jorge Luis, 35, 58, 61, 71, 73 Burns, E. Bradford, 31 Burton, Julianne, 31 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez, 87 Caesar, Julius, 35-40 Calderón, Camilo, 74, 86 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 78-79 Canfield, Martha, 59 Castro Arenas, Mario, 72 Catchings, W., 31 Ceberio, Jesús, 86 Cepeda Samudio, Alvaro, 76 Cervantes, Miguel de, 66, 69, 84. See also Don Quixote Columbus, Christopher, 41-48, 59, 60

Culler, Jonathan, 58 Dällenbach, Lucien, 58 Darío, Rubén, 48-57, 59, 60, 73 Defoe, Daniel, 23 Deleuze, Gilles, 15

de Man, Paul, 13 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 73 Don Quixote, 4,10, 35 Eagleton, Terry, 30 Earle, Peter, 13 Ehrmann, Jacques, 14 Elliott, J. H., 59 Engels, Friedrich, 18 Faulkner, William, 90 Foster, David William, 72 Foster, W. T., 31 Foucault, Michel, 14 Fuentes, Carlos, 13,14 Gallegos, Rómulo, 61 García Moreno, Gabriel, 88 Genette, Gérard, 16 Gilard, Jacques, 72, 86 Girard, René, 14 González, Reynaldo, 72 González Echevarría, Roberto, 72, 73 Gossain, Juan, 86 Goytisolo, Juan, 35 Grygar, Mojmír, 16 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 24, 30-31, 32 Guattari, Félix, 15 Gullón, Ricardo, 13 Guzmán, Jorge, 15

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INDEX

Harari, Josué V., 13 Hemingway, Ernest, 40, 77 Hernández, Max, 14-15 Hernández Martínez, Maximiliano, 88 Jameson, Fredric, 17, 30 Janes, Regina, 30 Kelly, Patricio, 74 Kemp, Lysander, 60 Kristeva, Julia, 58 Lastra, Pedro, 13 Lima, Alceu Amoroso, 62, 72 Luchting, Wolfgang, 31 Lucid, Daniel P., 16 Ludmer, Josefina, 14 McGlashan, Alan, 14 Magellan, Ferdinand, 87 Mann, Thomas, 89 Martínez, Pedro Simón, 13 Marx, Karl, 17,18,19,26,31, 32 Mazzeo, Joseph Α., 69, 73 Mendoza, Plínio Apuleyo, 13, 30, 72, 77,86 Morazán, Francisco, 88 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 59 Nelson, William, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14 Neruda, Pablo, 88 Norvind, Eva, 58 Olinto, Antonio, 72 Ortega, Julio, 73 Ossio, Juan, 14 Palau de Nemes, Graciela, 59 Parisier Plottel, Jeanine, 58

Parry, J. H., 60 Pereira, Manuel, 60, 86 Pigafetta, Antonio, 87 Plimpton, George, 77 Poniatowska, Elena, 72 Plutarch, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 59 Proust, Marcel, 14 Rama, Angel, 31 Rentería Mantilla, Alfonso, 48, 49, 60 Roca, Julio, 74, 86 Rodríguez Juliá, Edgardo, 72 Romero, Graciela, 86 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 23 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 88 Sarrailh, Michèle, 60 Sarduy, Severo, 16, 68, 73 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11, 32 Segré, Cesare, 14 Serres, Michel, 73 Shakespeare, William, 36 Shell, Marc, 31, 33 Sims, Robert L., 32 Sophocles, 79 Struik, Dirk J., 31 Suetonius, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,40, 59 Todorov, Tzvetan, 60 Uspensky, Β. Α., 16 Van der Eng, Jan, 16 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 13,19, 20, 26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 72

Watt, Ian, 72 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 72

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gabriel García Márquez and the powers of fiction / edited by Julio Ortega with the assistance of Claudia Elliott.—1st ed. p. cm.—(The Texas Pan American series) Includes index. Contents: Exchange system in One hundred years of solitude / Julio Ortega—The economy of the narrative sign in No one writes to the colonel and In evil hour / Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat—Intertextualities : three metamorphoses of myth in The autumn of the patriarch / Michael Palencia-Roth—The ends of the text : journalism in the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez / Aníbal González—Truth disguised : Chronicle of a death (ambiguously) foretold / Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo—The solitude of Latin America (Nobel lecture, 1982) / Gabriel García Márquez. ISBN 978-0-292-72370-2 1. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1928- —Criticism and interpretation. I. Ortega, Julio. II. Elliott, Claudia. HI. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1928- Soledad de la América Latina. English. 1988. IV. Series. PQ8180.17.A73Z6736 1988 863—dc19 88-1370 CIP