One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch: Circular Time and Power
This essay discusses both novels in full, including their endings.
The patriarch’s hernia “whistled like a teakettle during audiences.” Across the uncertain span of his reign, the ailment whistles on, tormenting a decrepit body that still commands people born long after others have died waiting for his death. The country has to endure a man who seems capable of suffering forever.
That whistle belongs beside the repeated Aurelianos and José Arcadios of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both novels make the past recur with an almost physical insistence, though the means of prolonging it change. In Macondo, the town whose history unfolds around the Buendía family, new bodies inherit old names. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, generations pass beneath the continuing authority of one body, whose eventual disappearance becomes almost impossible to imagine.
A family perpetuates itself through succession; the patriarch keeps postponing decisions about what will happen to his country after he dies. Calling both arrangements “circular time” risks overlooking who can replace whom, and who will still be there when the repetitions cease.
A family name, a ruler’s image
The recurrent names and desires of Macondo train us to carry earlier lives into later introductions. An Aureliano is born, and the name has already accumulated solitude, foresight, withdrawal. Úrsula, the family’s long-lived matriarch, sorts her descendants through such associations. Twins who exchange clothes, bracelets and identities put this sorting in doubt; even they may have lost track of their own names.
Meeting a new Buendía, we already have someone else in mind. The family resemblance encourages us to predict a life, while the new person’s conduct keeps disturbing the prediction. A family tree, fixing the branches in place, cannot settle how much of a predecessor survives in the person bearing his name.
The patriarch’s subjects know his face from portraits copied from other portraits; even the hernia, an intimate mark of identity, belongs to the machinery of impersonation. His double, Patricio Aragonés, says the general had the same bodily defect inflicted on him. When Patricio dies, the general uses the corpse to stage his own death, watches the response, and returns to punish those who celebrated or prepared to replace him.
Succession is rehearsed and violently cancelled, the dead body producing another display of the ruler’s survival. By making death itself repeat, Márquez teaches the country—and us—to distrust the event that should finally divide before from after.
The general fathers children and has a legitimate son, Emanuel, who is murdered with his mother, Leticia Nazareno. Outliving this possible successor, the father continues to rule. Macondo’s familiar names keep receiving new lives; in the palace, new lives fail to establish an authority that will outlast the old one.
At the centenary of his accession, the cry of “a hundred years already” recalls the duration named by the family novel. A span spacious enough for Macondo’s generations has become one man’s tenure, making all those possible replacements seem small beside the astonishing fact that he is still there.
The work of staying the same
At his workbench, Colonel Aureliano Buendía fashions little gold fishes he no longer sells. He makes two a day until there are twenty-five, then melts the batch and begins again. The finished objects supply the material for their own destruction. His labor continues by undoing its accumulation, keeping him occupied as the wars and affections of his earlier life recede.
The colonel undoes his own handiwork; the patriarch goes on inhabiting a body whose decline everyone can hear. One man withdraws into repetition after war, the other continues to govern through it. His nightly locks and scant urination make continued existence look laborious, even as his subjects must organize their lives around it.
In one nighttime passage, the thin whistle becomes the only sound in the world, followed by the claim that “he alone was the nation.” The sentence enlarges a bodily complaint to the scale of a country, whose existence contracts around its ruler’s lonely sensations. We can hear how extravagant the identification is in that undignified accompaniment.
Leticia’s bathing and care of this body make its helplessness intimate, sometimes moving, the humor surviving alongside considerable misery. Those moments remain in the same novel as his sexual violence, massacres and authorization of torture. His pain solicits our pity even while his orders perpetuate suffering elsewhere; prolonged power looks exhausting for its possessor and unbearable for those subjected to it.
The fishes, meanwhile, outlast the routine that produced them. An army officer searching the Buendía house treats them as former signs of subversion, now collectible relics. Their gold returned again and again to the crucible while the world went on revising the objects’ political value. Private repetition coexists with a history moving brutally onward.
Who gets to carry the past
Úrsula’s conviction that time moves in a circle takes shape during a conversation with José Arcadio Segundo, the Buendía who witnesses the banana-company massacre. Her words repeat something the colonel once said; the man before her remains trapped in memories of a train carrying corpses. A family echo and a political atrocity occupy the same exchange. Repetition cannot be divided neatly between a domestic novel and a dictator novel.
Returning from the massacre, José Arcadio Segundo encounters the assurance that nobody has died; later he teaches the young Aureliano to read and write, transmitting his testimony against the schoolbooks’ version. A descendant can inherit a contradiction, carrying a memory the public record has suppressed. The family’s repeated names make identification troublesome, but kinship can also keep a forbidden history within reach.
In The Autumn of the Patriarch, the narration takes us among those who help manufacture such a public record. Children used in a rigged lottery are concealed from inspectors and eventually killed; the ruler decrees that nothing has happened. The first-person plural now admits accomplices: a voice saying “we” can protect the ruler as readily as testify to life under him.
Across the novel’s long paragraphs, collective recollection can slip into an official’s voice, the general’s thoughts or an intimate address, with no tidy division into separate testimonies. We have to keep asking who can know a detail and whose interest it serves. Reading Macondo, we carry previous lives into each new name; in the palace, several voices contend over the same life.
The general seems to address the cleric investigating his mother’s supposed sainthood: “father, put yourself in my skin, but he didn't say it.” A third-person correction retracts the plea before the sentence can end; we have heard words his listener never receives. Soon he obtains the investigator’s agreement to conceal what the inquiry has disclosed about the fraudulent cult. An unspoken wish to be pitied ends in a spoken arrangement to preserve deception.
The teakettle whistle intrudes into this same inward appeal. He includes the ailment among the burdens of a nation supposedly forced upon him, asking to be pitied for the power he possesses. No full stop separates that self-pity from the pact of silence he secures from the cleric.
Such density can also tire the ear. When grotesqueries and atrocities accumulate relentlessly, one outrage threatens to efface the last. The hernia retains its force because its recurrence changes context: an identifying feature can be copied, a private complaint becomes the nation’s only sound, an audience must accommodate its whistle. Each return directs our attention to a particular use of the body amid the reign’s otherwise engulfing duration.
The ruler himself eventually receives a newspaper printed in a single copy, tailored to his wishes. Other people edit the present he inhabits. The man who authorizes the falsification of his country’s experience also lives inside a falsified world, insulated from the changes taking place beyond him.
An ending someone can survive
At Macondo’s end, Aureliano Babilonia, the last Buendía reader, deciphers the manuscripts left by Melquíades. Their century of events has been arranged so that they “coexisted in one instant.” As he reads toward his own present, the act of deciphering catches up with the act of living, and the town is destroyed.
The manuscripts gather the family’s repetitions into a completed form. Each new bearer of an old name has seemed to promise another beginning; the final reading closes that prospect. Aureliano deciphers the family’s accumulated experience at the instant when he loses any future in which to pass it on.
Beside this catastrophe, the patriarch’s death can be greeted with joy. The six-part novel has returned repeatedly to his body and to the doubts over whether the corpse is really his. Its final section runs through one immense sentence, moving among memory, fantasy, humiliation and violence until his life is finally exhausted. The whistle stops; people who have lived under him are still there to hear the bells celebrating his death.
Márquez leaves an ugly survival inside that release. The general dies on his bedroom floor in the clothes he wears at home. Those who find him will report that he lay on the office floor in uniform, as the prophecy requires. Even at the moment that ends his rule, the telling adjusts the body to the image. The nation’s future begins among people still capable of reproducing its falsifications.
The people celebrating must still live among those who falsify their history; his death supplies no guarantee about the government or stories that will succeed him. Macondo’s final act of reading consumes its future, whereas the patriarch’s final loss of breath returns a future to people who must still make something of it. After a whole novel spent doubting whether the old man could ever cease, we can finally imagine life beyond him.
Sources
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Penguin Books, 2014 digital edition; English translation first published in 1970).
Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Penguin Books, 2014 digital edition; English translation first published in 1976).
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