One Hundred Years of Solitude: chapter 1

Thanks so much for being open to fielding my letters about One Hundred Years of Solitude. It really is a beautiful book, and as I go along, it gets a little easier to keep track of things, but you know I still need to have a notebook handy to jot things down in. There are so many Arcadios and Aurelios and Remedios that knowing if we’re talking about the Grandfather or the Grandson or Nephew or Aunt can be a real brain twister. So writing this will I hope help keep this issue clear and also perhaps draw out some of the patterns that I see emerging as I read the book. This letter will be only about the first chapter, but I am already about half way through the book, and things that seemed merely colorful and amusing at the beginning appear to be recurring themes. Themes include the loss of memory, the different ways that the characters embrace or endure their solitude, incest. Yes, incest! That seems to be an issue, although nobody has actually perpetrated that taboo. Yet. But we’ll leave that for later as these themes become more apparent in the later chapters.

Chapter 1.
There is a town in Central America called Macondo that is so remote as to be virtually cut off from all the world. It was an Eden, really, from when “The world was so recent that many things lacked names.” It is often remarked that Macondo is a town that has not known death. It was founded by several families, led by Jose Arcadio Buendia, after 26 months spent wandering the mountains. Shortly after founding Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s imaginative and somewhat flighty character began to emerge. Once a year, in March, a band of Gypsies would arrive, guided to the town by the captive birds that towns people kept in their houses, and amongst them was an honest Gypsy named Melquaides who would bring strange objects and devices that never failed to spark Jose Arcadio Buendia’s imagination. The problem was that Jose Arcadio Buendia never really understood the inventions and would spend a year in futile experimentation. When Melquaides and the Gypsies would return with another fantastic alchemic device, Jose Arcadio Buendia would trade the previous object for the new one, always with Melquaides’ warning that he was misunderstanding what the device could do. The first was a magnet, which Jose Arcadio Buendia thought could be used to collect gold from the riverbeds, then it was a telescope, that he thought could be used as a military weapon, then it was a set of navigation instruments, that he used to figure out that the world is round “like and orange.” Although this last deduction was correct, his wife and the villagers were convinced that he was mad. When Melquaides and the Gypsies returned again the following year, he gave Jose Arcadio Buendia an alchemy laboratory. Jose Arcadio Buendia spent long hours in his laboratory trying, through alchemical processes, to double the quantity of his wife, Ursula’s, gold. Ursula was quite the opposite of her husband, possessed of a firm, iron will and a anchoring resolve to preserve her family and homestead. Jose Arcadio Buendia succeeded only in turning her gold into a worthless charred crust on the bottom of his cook pot, which pissed her off quite a bit. When again the Gypsies returned, Melquaides had with him a new set of dentures that gave him the appearance of renewed youth. Finally, the wonders the Gypsies brought to Macondo became too much for Jose Arcadio Buendia to bear, he felt like the world was passing him by, and he resolved to blaze a trail to the outside world so that he could gain access to these marvelous inventions. He led a ban of villagers into the jungle. For ten days they did not see the sun. Here is one of my favourite passages in this chapter,
“The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
The long trek through a vast swamp lead only to the sea, and thus he concluded that Macondo must lay on a peninsula, surrounded by swamps and the sea on three sides, and a mountain range on the fourth. Only thing on the other side of the mountains as far as Jose Arcadio Buendia knew was a town called Riohacha that he had left, in part, to escape the ghost of a man whom he had killed with a spear for insulting his virility. But this sense of isolation was terrible to bear and Jose Arcadio Buendia resolved to move his family back over the mountains. Ursula and the rest of the townspeople would have none of it, and she admonished Jose Arcadio Buendia to pay attention to his children. They had two at this time. The older was Jose Arcadio (2) who was born before the founding of Macondo while the settlers had been wandering the mountains. The younger was Aureliano, who was the first child born in the town. Jose Arcadio (2) was big and strong, like his father, but possessed none of his father’s imagination. Aureliano was said to have wept in his mother’s womb and had been born with his eyes open. He was silent and withdrawn and possibly telekinetic. So Jose Arcadio Buendia did focus his attention on his children, teaching them to read and write and do math, and he told them stories, tall tales really, of the fantastic, wonderous outside world. When the Gypsies again returned, it turned out they were not the same band as in previous years. Jose Arcadio Buendia asked around for his friend, Melquiades, and learned that he had died in Singapore and his body had been cast into the sea. This band of Gypsies had a wonder like none other seen by Jose Arcadio Buendia before, a block of ice, which impressed him a great deal,
“He forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious undertakings and Melquaides’ body, abandoned to the appetite of the squids… he exclaimed: ‘This is the great invention of our time.’”

That is chapter one. Oh, how it pains me to think of all that I left out, but I claim success in making sense of what happened and I think I have a line on who is doing what so far. I can see here some things that will be followed up on in later chapters, the growing madness of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s imagination, the stoic character of Ursula, and especially the peculiar character of their son, Aureliano. Melquiades will return as well, but changed by his experience of death. Of all the characters so far, I have the least insight into the elder son, Jose Arcadio (2). I have placed a number after his name to help keep his identity as son straight, otherwise I get him confused with his father, and later his son, grandson and great-grandson. Yeesh! I can only suppose that using such similar names must be deliberate and must mean something. I don’t think Gabriel Garcia Marquez would do such a thing for no reason. But what that is, exactly, I haven’t figured out yet. Finally, I see that he has set up Macondo as this virtual Eden, and that part of the story must be how Macondo itself changes through the years. Characters comment on it in later chapters, and so I think Macondo is a sort of character in and of itself. For not, everything is fresh and green and filled with the songs of birds. We’ll see what happens.