by Ilan Stavans
In his mind, his magnum opus wasn’t a summing up. He perceived himself as “a slave to a perfectionist’s exactitude,” as he put it, decades later, in Living to Tell the Tale. He polished every sentence, ensured the arc of a plotline in any given piece was well-rounded, looked at each character as if he or she were an autonomous entity, and reduced dialogue to the bare essentials; these were all representative of what he conceived to be his supercilious dedication as a writer. His book of books needed to be at once sumptuous, abundant, baroque, but straightforward, distilled, and self-sufficient.
There is much debate about exactly when García Márquez started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s unquestionable that its essence had been with him for a long time. In June 1950, he had published “La casa de los Buendía: Apuntes para una novela” (The Buendía House: Notes for a Novel) in Crónica.6 But no copies of the magazine exist, so until one manifests itself, what the piece contained is the subject of mere speculation. This is the period when García Márquez got sick in Barranquilla; he was writing his newspaper column, “La Jirafa,” for El Heraldo. He asked to take a leave of several weeks to return to Sucre, where he convalesced with his family. His illness was described as pneumonia. But his friends knew he used the time to work on a novel.
“It was supposed to be a drama about the Thousand-Day War in the Colombian Caribbean,” García Márquez said later, “about which I had talked to Manuel Zapata Olivella on an earlier visit to Cartagena. On that occasion, and with no relation at all to my project, he gave me a pamphlet written by his father about a veteran of the war whose portrait was printed on the cover, and who, with his liquiliqui shirt and his mustache singed by gunpowder, reminded me somehow of my grandfather. I have forgotten his name, but his surname would stay with me forever after: Buendía. That was why I thought I would write a novel with the title La casa, the epic tale of a family that could have in it a good deal of our own history during the sterile wars of Colonel Nicolás Márquez.”7
Judging by the description of its content, if not by its prophetic title, it is clear that, seventeen years before One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, García Márquez was already defining its parameters. La casa was his working title, which he used any time he referred to the project. It is important to note that the house is a ubiquitous symbol in Latin American fiction, appearing in a number of novels by or related to El Boom, such as Vargas Llosa’s The Green House, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio’s La casa grande.8 Yet for years García Márquez has said that the true beginning was a trip he took with his mother on a yellow train back to Aracataca in 1950 or 1951; this journey serves as the opening of his memoir Living to Tell the Tale. It was then, he says, looking at the place where he had grown up, invaded by the ghosts of the past, that the idea of writing a book about the house, the family, and the town came to him. In an interview, he stated: “When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the house, the people, and the memories.”9
Dasso Saldívar, author of the biography El viaje a la semilla, believes that the novel’s inception took place when the movie producer Antonio Matouk proposed that García Márquez and Luis Alcoriza, who had worked as a screenwriter with Luis Buñuel, write a series of screenplays for a regular salary. Ten years García Márquez’s senior, Alcoriza was originally from Badajoz, in Extremadura, Spain. He lived in exile in Mexico, where he wrote the screenplays for Buñuel’s The Brute, The Exterminating Angel, and what became the defining movie about Buñuel’s political engagement, Los olvidados. They both collaborated with other filmmakers and went into seclusion in order to work. They wrote at least three screenplays and came up with a number of other ideas, but the producer kept on rejecting their output. This, Saldívar argues, was the excuse García Márquez needed to focus his concentration away from the uncertain profession of screenwriting and on his magnum opus, which had been taking shape in his imagination for quite some time.10
All in all, the composition of One Hundred Years of Solitude took eighteen months, from 1965 to 1967. García Márquez has told friends, acquaintances, and reporters that it was while driving from Mexico City to Acapulco in his Opel with Mercedes for a family vacation that he had an epiphany. (In some versions of the story, the automobile is a Volkswagen.) In any case, the legend behind the work isn’t unlike that behind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision of a Dream,” an example of how the muse of inspiration takes over an artist at a particular time. Coleridge, an English Romantic, claimed to have “received” the poem about the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kubla Khan during an opium-induced dream in the fall of 1787, at a farm house in Exmoor, England. When he awoke, he proceeded to write down the lines, which have since become famous: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree;/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea.”
The key point is that Coleridge didn’t struggle to compose the poem; it simply came to him from a higher power. The idea is fitting to the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, which perceived the poet as a conduit with inspiration coming from the celestial sphere. As Coleridge wrote, he was interrupted by a knock on the door by “a person from Porlock.” He attended to it, but when he returned to his task, the remainder of the poem had vanished from his mind. He couldn’t remember the rest. “Kubla Khan” was left unfinished, with only fifty-four lines.
It may appear farfetched to link Coleridge to García Márquez. Their historical contexts couldn’t be more different. The Romantic vision of the poet in communion with the sublime belongs to another period in Latin American culture: the Modernista movement. One of its leaders, the Nicaraguan homme des lettres Rubén Darío, described poets as “towers of God.” Darío’s legacy lived on among intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century. But by the time García Márquez came along, Modernismo emitted only a distant murmur. By then the autor, in a land marked by the wound of colonialism, was a belligerent, an agent of change, committed to giving voice to the voiceless. His inspiration didn’t come from a divine source but from the injustice that surrounded him. His profile was of a committed, nonspiritual, down-to-earth man of the people, a foe of the status quo.
That was certainly García Márquez’s profile, but the legend that surrounds the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude, one fanned by the author himself—of the artist as an instrument of the muses—is surely Romantic in tone. García Márquez has described the process as less like writing and closer to taking dictation. While he struggled to find the right narrative tone, there is an element of alchemy to his creation. When he was ready to put pen to paper, García Márquez secluded himself from the world for months until the product was ready to be seen.
The García Márquezes lived at Calle Lomas #19 in the neighborhood San Angel Inn. The writer called his study La Cueva de la Mafia. It was a smoked-filled place where he battled his demons.
During those eighteen months, the García Márquezes were overwhelmed with debt. He tapped into savings from his journalism and screenplays. Mercedes was in charge of the family finances and used the scant resources to buy food and clothes for the boys. But when the money ran out, she needed to look for alternatives. Álvaro Mutis, as usual, came to the rescue and lent her some money, as did other friends. Later, García Márquez would recall that he didn’t even have enough to photocopy and post the manuscript. They were $10,000 in debt (roughly 120,000 Mexican pesos) when he finished the manuscript. Mercedes, always a source of strength for her husband, persuaded their landlord to let them fall behind with the rent for seven mont
hs. “She has helped construct walls around him that protect his privacy, ensure his creative comforts, and allow him to write,”11 suggested Pete Hamill in a profile.
Even though legend has it that García Márquez remained in La Cueva de la Mafia for the duration of the writing, he ventured far out, to Cartagena, in March 1966, to attend the premiere of Tiempo de morir at the Cartagena Film Festival. He boarded a ship in Veracruz and sailed to his old Caribbean town, where he had found his voice as a reporter. It was an opportunity to visit family and friends, to take a respite from the project. Although García Márquez wasn’t fully satisfied with Arturo Ripstein’s direction of the movie, it nonetheless received first prize at the festival. He traveled to Bogotá and Barranquilla. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza received a phone call at his office in Barranquilla from García Márquez, who surprised him by telling him he was having a whisky in Mendoza’s own home.12 He spoke with him and with Álvaro Cepeda Samudio about the novel, suggesting it was a departure. “Either I’m going to succeed big time or fall miserably on my face.”13
The manuscript was 1,300 pages long. He had written in eight-hour stretches every day. García Márquez calculated that he had destroyed maybe twice or three times that amount of paper.14 In twenty symmetrical chapters, each approximately twenty dense pages, a third-person narrator—is it Melquíades the gypsy?—chronicles, with frightening precision, the rise and fall of Macondo, exploring its geographical, temporal, ideological, and cultural dimensions. In spite of the title, the narrative time spans more than a century. The Buendía genealogy consists of dozens of archetypical figures surrounded by a cast of thousands.
The need to belong shapes each of the Buendías and their entourage, from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, modeled after the real-life military hero General Rafael Uribe Uribe, who fought in Colombia’s Thousand-Day War, to Remedios the Beautiful, whose beauty is so overwhelming she ascends to heaven. There’s a rainstorm of small yellow flowers, a woman who eats soil, a clairvoyant, and a character obsessed with photographing God. The novel’s matrix is Úrsula Iguarán, a patient, down-to-earth woman, the closest one gets in Macondo to Mother Nature, who keeps the family afloat for almost a century. Afloat but not together: Úrsula’s progeny don’t know how to love healthily.
The word Macondo is the name of a finca, a piece of land in the countryside that García Márquez saw when he returned with his mother to Aracataca on the yellow train. The word was written prominently on a gate. He talks about it in Living to Tell the Tale: “This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had taken with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant.” Later, he discovered in the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica that in Tanganyika, Africa, there are a nomadic people called Makonde. He believed this was likely the origin of the word.15 To what extent did these inspirations define the setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude? Arguably at the most unconscious level. At the beginning of the novel, Macondo is a small, nondescript town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, comprised of twenty houses built on the edge of a river with clear water running over large stones that resemble prehistoric eggs. The word—Ma-con-do—rings stridently in that opening paragraph: the name and the place it refers seem intimately connected. It suggests a primitive, Edenic quality, as if the place was located at the edge of the world and remained untouched by Western civilization.
Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela is watched by far more people on a single evening than all the readers of García Márquez’s novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. A soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience’s passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable. Yet, when read closely it’s clear that first and foremost the novel is a melodrama, albeit a glorious one, with syrupy scenes of unrequited love, sibling animosity, and domestic backstabbing. García Márquez’s original title could have been Blood & Passion. But isn’t that what all good novels are about, a rollercoaster of emotions that request from the reader a suspension of disbelief?
The novel’s central motif is incest: the Buendías don’t seem capable of targeting their sexual desire at anyone but each other. This Hieronymus Bosch—like Garden of Earthly delights—is narrated in a flamboyant style but with equanimity, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. There are references to buccaneers and adventurers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, as well as accounts of Spanish explorers and missionaries to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of tricks. García Márquez himself shows up toward the end, and he makes coded references to his friends and colleagues, including Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes. The novel may all be a joke, the reader finds himself thinking as the novel reaches its climatic conclusion.
For Spanish-speaking readers, one of the most astonishing aspects of the book is its lavish, baroque language. There is not a word out place; everything is exactly where it should be. This is all the more impressive when one realizes that in the Spanish-speaking world at the time—and to a large extent, still today—there were no such things as developmental editors and copyeditors. Instead, there are correctores de estilo, style editors, in charge of correcting slight grammatical lapses. Their work is unintrusive as compared to what editors do—asking an author to flesh out ideas, rewrite sections, and reconfigure chunks of the plot—or copyeditors, for that matter, who standardize a manuscript by ensuring its orthography and factual components are in place. There were no such professionals in Buenos Aires when the manuscript arrived at the offices of Editorial Sudamericana. What García Márquez wrote is what the reader got—minus a few corrected typos.
In the last chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is a plethora of inside jokes. “I was having fun,” said García Márquez about the chapter. “It was the end of my eighteen-month siege, and the book was advancing nicely at that point; I had the feeling nobody could stop it, that I could do anything I wanted with it, that the book was in the bag. In that state, I was so happy, especially after the early agonies, that I started to make those private jokes. There are many more jokes in that section that are apparent to the casual reader. Friends see them and they die laughing, because they know what each one refers to. That was a book that had to be finished with great joy—because, otherwise, it is a very sad book.”16
In spite of the Romantic idea of inspiration, finding the right tone for the narrative was a challenge. Iberian interviewer Miguel Fernández-Bermejo observed to García Márquez that “some grunt work” must have taken place “as far as enriching your language was concerned, because in One Hundred Years of Solitude there’s a luxuriant handling of the prose.” García Márquez responded that the novel was written that way “because that’s how my grandmother talked. I tried to find the language that was most suitable for the book, and I remembered that my grandmother used to tell me the most atrocious things without getting all worked up, as if she’d just seen them.”
He realized that that imperturbability and that richness of imagery with which his grandmother told stories was what gave verisimilitude to his. He added: “And my big problem with One Hundred Years of Solitude was credibility, because I believed it. But how was I going to make my readers believe it? By using my grandmother’s same methods. You’ll notice that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, especially in the beginning, there are a huge amount of deliberate archaisms. Later, halfway through the book, I was swimming like a fish in water and in the last parts there aren’t only archaisms, there are neologisms and invented words and whatever. ’Cause I believe the final parts reflect the joy I felt at having found the book.”17
Since its original publication, there have been innumerable discussions about García Márquez’s writing technique. For instance, rumors circulated early on that One Hundred Years of Solitude was longer and that García Márquez had burned a thousand pages of it. “False,” he s
tated, “. . . but it’s strange how in all legends there are elements of truth. After I finished [it], I threw out all the notes and documentation so there wouldn’t be any trace of them left. That way, the critics would have to take the book on its own merits and not go looking in the original papers. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It’s a little embarrassing—like being seen in your underwear.”18
Unsurprisingly, on a continent where success is a source of unveiled envy and resentment, García Márquez was accused of plagiarism. At a writer’s conference in Bonn in 1970, Günther Lorenz leveled the accusation that One Hundred Years of Solitude was a veiled rewriting of Balzac’s La recherche de l’absolu. In Paris, Marcelle Bargas compared the two novels and suggested that some elements of one appeared in the other. And in Honduras, the magazine Ariel ran an article by Luis Cova García entitled “Coincidence or Plagiarism?” García Márquez recalled that someone who had heard about the allegations sent Balzac’s book to him. “I had never read [it],” he said. “Balzac doesn’t interest me now, although he’s sensational enough that I read what I could of him at one time—however, I glanced through it. It struck me that to say that one book derives from the other is pretty light and superficial. Also, even if I were prepared to accept that I had read it before and decided to plagiarize it, only some five pages of my book could possibly have come from La Recherche, and in the final analysis, just a single character, the alchemist.”