Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE” (“CIEN ANOS DE SOLEDAD”) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (first published in Spanish in 1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa)

A couple of times before on this blog (see my reviews of The General in His Labyrinth and Autumn of the Patriarch), I have peddled the tale of how I spent seven weeks or so reading the major works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) ahead of writing a newspaper review of Gerald Martin’s biography Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. Each time I have discussed this Nobel Laureate, I have made a point of noting that his two most-read novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, never really appealed to me, even though I know that One Hundred Years of Solitude has sometimes been called the most significant Spanish-language novel since Don Quixote. I suppose it is now time for me to explain why I am a heretic in this matter, so here goes:

I have tried very hard to like One Hundred Years of Solitude because it is universally regarded as Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece and the key South American novel – but I simply did not engage with it and in the end found myself only dutifully marching through it.

In “magical realist” style (much as Garcia Marquez and others came to hate that term) the novel covers at least one hundred years (and then some) in the life, across six or seven generations, of the Buendia family in the small Colombian town of Macondo – which reportedly stands in for Garcia Marquez’s hometown of Aracataca. Some of the characters, such as the matriarch of the first generation Ursula Iguaran, live through the whole period. Others, such as her son Colonel Aureliano Buendia (who is said to have fought in 32 wars) exert an influence over many generations. Time is stopped, sped up, reversed etc. and of course repeats itself, sometimes with the implication of the “eternal return”, which has befooled more than one person who can’t be bothered investigating in detail the changes that history brings.

Despite its careful structure, the novel is essentially episodic – which meant that I engaged with it only on an episodic level, enjoying individual stories that are embedded in it, but little else.

It is hard to discern which themes are implicit or intentional. In the early chapters, there is much talk about the introduction of modern technology (railways etc.) to the basically pre-industrial society of Macondo and its region; hence there is presumably a balancing of the modern and the pre-modern – the scientific and the magical. There is also much about the creative power of the word and the imagination. It is the gypsy Melquiades who introduces much of the technology in the early section, and near the very end of the novel a young descendant of the Buendia family finds writings by Melquiades which could suggest that the whole story of the Buendias family is a figment of the gypsy’s imagination… or could the gypsy be a personification of Fate or Time or History?

The town of Macondo vanishes at the end of the novel, and is preserved only in the memory of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who introduces himself as a very minor character towards the end.

In the matter of politics, it is interesting to see how Garcia Marquez views the struggles between Liberals and Conservatives with complete impartiality. Colonel Aureliano Buendia fights for the Liberals, but in the political to-ing and fro-ing, the regime he favours is shown to be neither more benign nor more popular than its Conservative rival, and is just as corrupt. This dispassionate view of the political scene is true of Garcia Marquez’s later novels, too, as is the author’s relatively amused view of the Church, which is basically seen as backward but harmless, and is taken for granted as a background factor in everyone’s life. There is some gentle mockery of excessive religiosity. Jose Arcadio, one of the later Buendia offspring, is raised by his pious mother in the hope that he will become pope. But he does not study at all when he is in Rome and instead he becomes a wastrel and a sensualist.

Of course Yanqui imperialism comes in for condemnation with one episode, set in the 1920s, in which thousands of striking workers are massacred to advance the interests of a North American–owned banana company, whose presence has totally changed Maconda’s economy. The massacre is blithely denied and written out of the history books so that nobody any longer believes it happened  – a very ironical instance of the creative power of the word.

Only research subsequent to reading this novel told me that much of the action is deeply rooted in Colombian history. The 32 wars in which Colonel Aureliano Buendia fought were Colombia’s many military upheavals between the 1880s and 1901. The period between 1901 and 1930 was when the country’s economy became heavily controlled by the (American) United Fruit Company, and the mass shooting of striking workers took place in 1928. One Hundred Years of Solitude has often been interpreted as commentary on colonialism and neo-colonialism. According to a critical consensus the “solitude” of the title points to Macondo representing the unassimilated Hispanic culture which has never fully attuned itself to the South American continent and hence which often feels isolated and receives modern developments from the wider world as if they are “magic”. This false consciousness has to disappear before a real, grounded national character can emerge. Yet when he was alive, Garcia Marquez disavowed any specific political “message” for the novel, and one of the reasons for the novel’s popularity is that it can bear many conflicting political interpretations.

This tells you (superficially) what the novel is “about”, but it does not really give you my reasons for being so lukewarm about it. Basically, my objections resolve themselves into three things.

First, I never attuned myself to Garcia Marquez’s (wilful) confusing use of proper names. Across six or seven generations of the Buendia family, a very small pool of personal names is used. Nearly all the men are Aureliano, Jose Arcadio or such imaginative variants as Aureliano Jose. The women across the generations are all variants of Ursula, Amaranta and Remedios. Yes, there are some exceptions, but as very few people are characterised distinctively enough to separate one from another, it is frequently difficult to know who is being discussed – or to care. I should note, by the way, that some have seen a subtext of incest running through this novel – the founding patriarch and matriarch of the Buendia family are first cousins; there are superstitions about babies being born with pigs’ tails; repeatedly, across the generations, reproduction rarely happens in marriage, or it happens in marriage only after many obstacles are placed in its way. It is an inward-turning society that is being depicted.

Second, there is that deadly, boring, killing, monotonous South American machismo. It is hard to find in this novel any exception to the notion that love is nothing more than seduction and sexual conquest. Frankly, it bored the hell out of me to be told that Colonel Aureliano Buendia fathers seventeen different bastard sons on seventeen different women (all of the sons being called Aureliano); or to have yet another account of somebody’s visit to a brothel; or to be given yet another boastful macho account of seduction and copulation in various poses and angles. It is odd how, apparently, South American culture encourages even left-wing writers to measure themselves by the activity of their penises. Women in this novel are either matriarchs OR they are incredibly sexy and willing OR they are cold and cruel and turn away their faithful dying-for-love swains. (There are two or three examples of the latter class in the novel).

In this field, characters remain cartoonishly shallow stereotypes. Does this mean that I am not attuned to the novel’s intended “epic” style – the broad sweep of an historical panorama rather than the intense close-ups of the tighter narrative? Maybe – but the characters are still shallow.

Third, the historian in me rebels at the violation of linear time. Anterior action (reported in conversation etc) is fine. Flashbacks and memories are fine. But when the hundred years-plus are stirred together as if they are one mythic event, we are really confronted with mystification (i.e. “fudging”) by the author. Often, Garcia Marquez’s style comes across as an evasion of cause and effect and historical specificity. As for the magical realist trimming – to me they are just that. Trimmings.

I have just said negative things about a novel that is held in almost universal esteem, so I am on the wrong side of most commentators and many millions of readers. It is sometimes a burden to have tastes and opinions of one’s own, no matter how well-founded they are.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

 “THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (“EL OTONO DEL PATRIARCA” written 1968-74; first published in Spanish 1975; English translation by Gregory Rabassa first published 1976)

            As I remarked some months back on this blog (see review of The General in His Labyrinth), I was never as enamoured of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera as were most of the admirers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014).  Though they are the most-praised novels of the Colombian Nobel Prize-winner, their undertone of boastful machismo, and the diffuseness of their narratives, frequently irritated me. I might some day deal with them on this blog (when I will, of course, also have favourable things to say about them).  But I re-affirm here that I was more impressed with Garcia Marquez’s more overtly political novels.

            The Autumn of the Patriarch, coming relatively early in the Garcia Marquez canon, is one of the most political. It is a “dictator novel”, apparently as established a South American genre as the “jungle novel” (see the review of Jose Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex). It is written in a fantastical style that is nearer to magical realism than to the more sober and researched history of The General in His Labyrinth. It is an account of the unnamed dictator of a Caribbean-coast country, like Colombia. We are told at one stage that he has been ruling for one hundred years. In other words he is the paradigm of all South American dictators, the “eternal” dictator. He is the father of over five thousand children and his age is given as being somewhere between 107 and 232. He has magical powers, mythologised by his hypnotised subjects. When he is bored with a night, he can decree that it become day, and it does.

            There is no linear narrative. This is very self-consciously an experimental and modernist novel, a novel of memory and reveries and reflection and thoughts drifting back and forth in a semi-steam-of-consciousness, linked by key words and odd, fortuitous associations. It begins and ends with the dictator’s death. It is divided neatly into six sections of equal length.

The narrative viewpoint shifts and shifts again, often in the same sentence. Sometimes it is told in the “we” of the collective hero (like Silone’s Fontamara), who is the voice of the community. Sometimes it is told in the first-person-singular of the dictator himself. Or of his aides. Or of his whores. The most obvious stylistic device, and the one most challenging to readers, is the use of long string sentences, running for pages and punctuated only with commas (a nod to Faulkner?), involving different narrators. One critic computed that the whole novel comprises only fifty sentences. It is odd how the effect of these sentences is at once breathless and languid.

The novel’s best moment is the opening (recapitulated at the end), where crowds burst into the dictator’s palace to find his dead and useless body, now stripped of real power and yet still radiating power like a fetish. It sets the tone for the sense of decay (physical and moral) that dominates the novel.

In a series of memories we are introduced to a number of socially-representative characters.

There is Patricio Aragones, the dictator’s exact double, who took his place on public occasions and who was therefore assassinated in his place – thus the dictator’s two “deaths”. There is General Rodrigo de Aguilar, the general’s most loyal supporter, who later conspires against him and is executed and eaten. There is also the dictator’s mother Bendicion Alvarado, an ignorant bird-seller. The general wants to have her canonised as a saint when she dies. He expels the church and shoots the priests when they don’t comply. The proletarian Venus, Manuela Sanchez, brings in the typical Garcia Marquez theme of machismo and love-making. Leticia Nazareno is a novice nun whom the dictator kidnaps and makes his chief mistress. Her love leads him to frenzies of revenge on others. The man who runs the dictator’s security services, Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, is in charge of the state’s torture chambers. All torture is done far from the dictator’s residence so that the dictator can claim to be totally ignorant of what is going on. Hence the official torturer has a chance of becoming the scapegoat for popular wrath, should there be a revolution.

Some of the incidental stories in The Autumn of the Patriarch are consciously and deliberately bizarre. If we were not aware that dictators, answerable to nobody, really are capable of such things, we might read such stories as particularly sadistic surrealist fantasies. The dictator has two thousand children murdered by drowning, when the public realizes that the children have been used to rig the national lottery: protests of the pope and the League of Nations do not make them appear again. The dictator likes seducing innocent and virginal schoolgirls who are sent to him. He flies into a rage when he discovers that they are all in fact practised whores, groomed and dressed by his security services to look like schoolgirls. The dictator sells the Caribbean Sea, drop by drop, to the United States of America, which helps to keep him in power.

By its mannered style, The Autumn of the Patriarch gives off a sense of something heavy weighing down the state and stifling social life. It is, as the title tells us, the “autumn” of the patriarch. There are many descriptions of the dictator walking slowly through his huge palace, like a man who has lost something and then forgotten what it is. He is dying. His power – built on violence, built on his increasingly non-functioning penis – is waning. But the dictator is also the “patriarch” – both literally and figuratively he is the father of his people. They believe in him, even as they despise him, and he is their product, having come from the lowest social classes. There is a symbiotic relationship between oppressor and oppressed. Often in dreamlike terms, the novel is also telling us that the dictator is a recurring type. This dictator may die, but another like him will take his place, despite all the fervour of revolution. Of course the dictator’s absolute power is hollow – it leads nowhere and builds nothing. But then, in the dismal recurrent course of history, the joy of his overthrow is also hollow.

In one sense, given that this novel was conceived and partly written in the 1960s, it is oddly retro in its imagery. We often appear to be dealing with a theatrical dictator of the 19^th century rather than with the 20^th century monsters, many of whom were (and are) more savvy about public relations and about what to suppress and how to propagandise. The world of The Autumn of the Patriarch is the world of dictator as make-believe military leader, with a big military hat and lots of gold braid.

Wikipedia’s brief snippet on this novel informs us that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was inspired by a number of real dictators, including various dictators of Colombia and Venezuela. There could also possibly be an element of Spain’s Francisco Franco. Apparently the novel was written in Barcelona, in the last years of Franco’s regime, and it was first published in Spain in 1975, some months before Franco died. It was [another snippet from Wikipedia] apparently the most widely-read novel in Spain that year. Reading it, my mind clanged with images of Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay and the Somosas of Nicaragua. Oddly, though, I thought most of Juan Peron of Argentina (far away from Garcia Marquez’s Colombia). That military uniform. That symbiotic relationship with the people who at once loved and hated him (and his wife). Cuddling up to the church and then turning against it when it wouldn’t do his bidding. And having a long “autumn”, including a return to power after he had been overthrown. The eternal dictator. The fraud. The hollow man behind the big smile.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (El General en Su Laberinto first published 1989; English translation by Edith Grossman first published 1990)

Six years ago, the books page editor of the Sunday Star-Times asked me to write a long-ish review of Gerald Martin’s very long and (as it turned out) rather too worshipful biography Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A Life. I readily accepted the commission as I am not the lad to turn down a book-reviewing job unless the book sounds like complete tosh. There was only one snag, about which I did not tell the editor. I hadn’t at that stage read any of Garcia Marquez’s works.

No problem.

Over the five or six weeks before deadline, I did a crash course on Garcia Marquez, reading seven of his best known novels and two of his shorter works of reportage, before I plunged into the biography. I wanted to be knowledgeable about the chap whose life I was reviewing.

What an experience! I know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927–2014), who died last year, was a popular Nobel laureate and was certainly the most famous novelist Colombia ever produced [displacing Jose Eustasio Rivera – look up The Vortex via the index at right]. I know that he ended up as the South American sage, consulted – not always wisely – on all manner of political matters and giving kidding press conferences to journalists. His feud with his fellow Nobel laureate, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, was the stuff of literary gossip worldwide. I was aware that his One Hundred Years of Solitude was sometimes described as the most influential Spanish-language novel since Don Quixote; and his Love in the Time of Cholera came a close second as a Garcia Marquez favourite. Heretic that I am, though, when I came to read them I did not consider them the novelist’s best. My own choice would go to his highly-experimental early novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (with which I might some day deal on this blog) and especially to the robust and complex historical novel about the last days of Simon Bolivar, The General in his Labyrinth.

Here’s the synopsis I jotted into my reading diary:

Known throughout the novel only as “the General”, Simon Bolivar is travelling up Colombia’s Magdalena River, from Bogota to the Caribbean port of Cartagena. The year is 1830. He is on his way to exile in Europe. Although he is only 46 years old, he is wracked with tuberculosis and hence is depicted as an old man pushing his strength to the limits. The journey is arduous, requiring both a strong will and a strong constitution. Even the humid tropical air is an enemy:

“The last stage of the journey to Honda was along a heart-stopping precipice through air like molten glass that only physical willpower and stamina like his could have endured after a night of agony.” [p.66 in the Penguin edition – this novel is not divided into chapters.]

 In fact, this journey turns out to be the General’s last, for he dies in Santa Marta before he can embark for Europe.

Much of the third-person narration is presented in flashback, via his memories of past battles, past victories and past defeats. The tone is often elegiac and regretful. His ideal was a united Spanish-American republic after independence was won and the royal Spanish forces had been driven out. Instead, independence has meant the splitting up of the old Spanish Empire into quarrelling separate states. Venezuela has seceded from the proposed grand state of Colombia, and the man who was once called “the Liberator” is no longer so universally respected. There have been plots and assassination attempts against him. His most loyal high-ranking military follower, Field Marshal Sucre is assassinated. Before he dies, Sucre remarks to the General “It’s destiny’s joke… It seems we planted the ideal of independence so deep that now these countries are trying to win their independence from each other.” The General replies dryly “Don’t respect the enemies’ vile remarks, even when they’re as accurate as that one.” (p.18)

 General Santander plots against the General. General Rafael Urdaneta would be willing to hand over power to the General, but the General knows his time is past. Throughout this novel, the characters who stand most constantly by the General are his servant Jose Palacios and the minor figure of General Daniel O’Leary, who later writes voluminous memoirs of the General.

The labyrinth of the title is threefold. It is the labyrinth of memory in which the General is caught. It is also identified specifically with the twisting course of the river, which the journey follows. As the General’s physical condition degenerates, it is also specifically identified with his body and the diseased sinews through which death creeps. The General is in his labyrinth – a journey going nowhere. The General is also aware that he is replaceable, as suggested in the cynical aside:

“Someone had told the General that when a dog died it had to be replaced without delay by another just like it, and with the same name, so you could go on believing it was the same animal.” (p,173)

There’s a certain paradox in my appreciation of this novel. It’s possible that if I knew South American history better, I would like The General in his Labyrinth less. When it was first published in South America, it drew cries of protest from those who thought it depicted the great continental hero Bolivar negatively. It was noted that Garcia Marquez freely mixed historical fact with outright fiction, especially as there is no historical documentation of Bolivar’s last journey. However Garcia Marquez showed in a note of thanks (printed at the end of the Penguin edition) that he had put a couple of years of solid research into the novel – as well as allowing the free play of his imagination. He also noted that the genesis of The General in his Labyrinth was an unfinished novel about Bolivar by his friend Alvaro Mutis, who approved of Garcia Marquez doing his own take on the General.

One of the unflattering things about Garcia Marquez’s version of Bolivar is the man’s voracious sex-life. At one point we are told that he had cohabited with 35 women (not counting frequent one-night stands) and had sworn to them all that he loved them eternally.

“Once satisfied, he was content with the illusion that he would keep them in his memory, give himself to them from a distance in passionate letters, send them extravagant gifts to protect himself from oblivion, but, with an emotion that resembled vanity more than love, he would not commit the least part of his life to them.” (p.183)

The women in his life include the Englishwoman Miranda Lyndsey and the robust virago Manuela Saenz, who to the very last plots and fights on his behalf. Only towards the very end of the novel do we hear of his short-lived early marriage, which left him a widower at the age of 20.

Story-book superman sensuality is a staple of such Latin American fiction as I have read, but I am fairly sure that in this novel (unlike some of his others) Garcia Marquez is offering a satirical critique of boastful machismo, especially as, in the novel’s “present”, the sexual athlete that the General used to be has been reduced to a skeletal tubercular body.

In political matters that are perhaps closer to the General’s heart than women are, the General is aware that those who call themselves a new “liberal” party are often members of a wealthy elite – so here is the familiar problem of a self-interested bourgeoisie taking over once a war of independence has been won. At the same time it appears that the General’s own ideal of a republic gives little consideration to non-Europeans. Black slaves are taken for granted and there is scarcely a mention of indigenous (“Indian”) South Americans. In the General’s final reflections before he dies, Garcia Marquez has Bolivar say:

“America is ungovernable. The man who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. This nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants of every colour and race.” (p.257)

Both class prejudice (“mob”) and racial prejudice (“colour and race”) are evident in this disillusioned outburst.

What is clear is that Garcia Marquez is using his historical novel to suggest the origins of all Spanish America’s subsequent woes – militarism (leadership by dictatorial generals); political factionalism; rule by European elites; the division of the continent into petty, feuding states. In all this, I am interested that the church does not come in for more criticism – perhaps because, by the time the novel was written, the church in South America (via liberation theology etc.) had taken a big step towards identifying more with the deprived classes than with the wealthy elite. Bolivar is a Freemason, but the comments on the church, which the novelist puts into his mouth, are relatively benign ones.

Garcia Marquez also uses the imagined historical situation to comment obliquely on the present day. At one point, Bolivar tells one of his generals “don’t go with your family to the United States. It’s omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.” (p.223). Elsewhere in the novel, the United States representative at the Congress of Panama is likened to “a cat at a congress of mice”. These are clearly remarks influenced by all the United States’ unwelcome interventions in South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seen by Garcia Marquez as yet another of the continent’s ongoing woes.

Partly admiring, but also partly iconoclastic about an historical hero, The General in his Labyrinth is an excellent instance of historical novel as political statement.