The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gabriel García Márquez · a novel in twenty unnumbered chapters · Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1967 · scored on García Márquez’s Spanish, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Spanish quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath and Gregory Rabassa’s translation (1970) for sense
Mode
Family chronicle as the myth of a people: a historical novel of a century told as Genesis to Revelation, in which the marvellous is reported as fact
Mythos
A founding in a world before names, a primal killing and an exodus, a plague of forgetting, the hero who loses every war, the flood, the sacred book of the end read as it is fulfilled; the incest taboo as the first sin and the pig’s tail as the curse
Phase
Seven generations, from the founding of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán through the civil wars and the banana company to the rain, the ruin and the wind that takes the town away
Presentation
Fiction; twenty unnumbered, untitled chapters in the third person, in a narrating voice that never changes register, with little dialogue; deaths and outcomes announced before they come; the last chapter reveals the book as the parchments of Melquíades
Register
One flat, certain voice across farce, war, eros, plague, prophecy and massacre, in a long cumulative sentence whose signature tense is the conditional of “había de recordar”
Scale
One family, one town, and a century of the Colombian Caribbean from foundation to erasure
Governing Proposition
A man and his wife flee a killing and found a town in a world so new that things have no names; across seven generations their descendants, a lineage closed upon itself and named and renamed Aureliano and José Arcadio, live through wars, a banana company, a massacre the town is told never happened, and a rain of almost five years, until the line ends in the incest it feared from the first, and the last of it deciphers a manuscript written a century ahead and finds that it is his family’s history and the instant of his own reading. The wager of the novel is that a continent’s history can be told in a voice that reports levitation and massacre with the same certainty, and that a people that cannot remember is condemned to live its history as a circle with no second chance.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.”
“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.” The novel opens on a sentence of twenty-eight words in the Spanish that holds three times at once. There is the hour before the firing squad; there is the remote afternoon of the ice; and there is a later time, never named, from which a voice reports that the one man was to remember the other. The verb carries the fold. “Había de recordar”
“was to remember” is a conditional of fate: the memory is foretold before it happens, and the man is placed before the rifles before the reader has seen him grow up.
The book is built on that sentence. It has twenty chapters, unnumbered and untitled, and a single narrator in the third person whose voice does not change from the first page to the last. There is little dialogue. Deaths are announced long before they come, outcomes before the events that cause them, so that what happens in Macondo is already remembered when it is told, and history in the town is fate before it is event. The reader learns early that the colonel will face the squad and is made to wait for it, as the town is made to wait for an end it does not know has been written.
Seven generations of the Buendía family pass through it. The founders are José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán; the last is a child born with a pig’s tail. Between them the names Aureliano and José Arcadio recur in every generation, so often that the colonel’s seventeen sons are all named Aureliano. The recurrence is not confusion. It is the book’s first statement of its law: the family cannot escape itself, and its names come back because its natures do.
Movement II
“El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo.”
“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to speak of them one had to point.” Macondo begins before language has caught up with things. The founders have come from elsewhere: José Arcadio Buendía killed Prudencio Aguilar, and the founding is an exodus to escape the killing. The town begins with a primal crime behind it, and the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar is among the first of its dead.
Into the new town come the gypsies, and with them the world’s wonders, magnets and a flying carpet; and there is the ice, which the founder touches and calls the great invention of the age. Melquíades, whose parchments the family will fail to read for a century, dies and returns from death. José Arcadio Buendía gives himself to alchemy and inventions, and Úrsula keeps the house running on a trade in candy animals. The marvellous and the commonplace arrive on the same terms, and the voice that reports them is surprised by neither.
Then a plague of insomnia comes to the town, and with sleeplessness comes forgetting. The people begin to lose the names of things, and write labels to hold them: on the cow, its name and what she is for, that she must be milked every morning. The town loses its words before it loses its memory. It is the book’s second statement of its law, given in comedy: a people that cannot remember must point, label and begin again, and the book is about what happens to a people that does not recover.
Movement III
The founder’s son becomes the epic hero of the wars between the Liberals and the Conservatives, and the book gives his whole career in one line: “promovió treinta y dos levantamientos armados y los perdió todos”
“he organized thirty-two armed uprisings and lost them all”. The hyperbole is exact. The wars are a century’s civil wars of the Colombian state, and the colonel ends them by a treaty; what he brings home is solitude. He makes little gold fishes, melts them down, and makes them again, a labour that produces nothing and does not stop.
The other children live the same condition in other keys. Amaranta wears a black bandage and makes her own shroud; Rebeca eats earth and whitewash. Each is shut within a self that cannot love outward, and the book names that incapacity as the solitude of its title. Its matriarch, Úrsula, outlives most of them and holds the house together while it fills and empties.
The wonders of this middle stretch are given flat. When José Arcadio dies, a thread of blood leaves his body and runs through the streets, round corners and along walls, until it reaches Úrsula in the kitchen. Father Nicanor rises a few inches off the ground after a cup of chocolate, and the voice moves on. On the night of the founder’s death a rain of tiny yellow flowers falls on the town. Later Remedios the Beauty rises into the air with the sheets she was folding. The family’s comedy runs on beside its griefs: Aureliano Segundo between Fernanda and Petra Cotes, his raffles, and his animals multiplying.
Movement IV
A North American banana company comes to Macondo, and with it the plantations and, in the end, the town’s ruin. The workers strike. They are gathered at the station and shot, three thousand of them, and the dead are loaded into a train of two hundred cars and carried away to be thrown into the sea.
Then the town is told that nothing happened. The government denies the massacre, and José Arcadio Segundo alone keeps the memory of the dead carried to the sea. The book’s two laws meet here. The voice that reported the blood crossing the town and the girl rising with the sheets reports the massacre with the same certainty, and the state that denies it treats it as a miracle would be treated, as something that cannot have occurred. Official forgetting is the plague of insomnia turned into power.
After the massacre the rain comes, and lasts “cuatro años, once meses y dos días”
“four years, eleven months and two days”. The figure is given to the day, as the uprisings are given to the unit, and after it the town goes toward its ruin. Úrsula, near the end of her life, feels that time is going round in a circle, and the book has shown that it does.
Movement V
The parchments have been waiting since the first chapters. Melquíades wrote them in a room of the house where time does not pass, and generation after generation of the Buendías have tried to read them and failed. Their epigraph, in substance, is that the first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants. The last Aureliano, Aureliano Babilonia, is the one who reads them, and he reads them only when the end they describe is upon him.
The line closes as it was feared from the first. The family has feared incest from the first, and the last union of the line, between kin, brings into the world a child with a pig’s tail. The parchments, deciphered, are the history of the family written a hundred years ahead: not in human time, but so that a century of daily episodes coexists in one instant. Aureliano reads on, and reaches the page that tells him reading it, while outside the wind begins to take Macondo away.
The form is revealed as the content. Every prolepsis of the book, every death announced before it came, was the tense of the prophecy; the novel the reader holds is the manuscript it describes, and the reader has been reading it beside the last of the line. The last sentence closes the town and the book together: “porque las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.”
“because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
Act III · The Twelve
The repetition a careless reader takes for padding is the argument: the names return because the family cannot escape itself, and Úrsula, near the end of her life, feels that time is going round in a circle. A line that cannot remember is condemned to return, and the returns have to be felt as a weight, not reported. The spine is required: the founding marriage of cousins and the fear of the pig’s tail, the insomnia plague, the wars, the banana company, the massacre, the rain, the last incest and the child. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is accretion within that spine. The long comedy of Aureliano Segundo between Fernanda and Petra Cotes, the raffles and the animals multiplying, the courtships of Pietro Crespi, the seventeen Aurelianos who arrive to be shot, and some of Fernanda’s grievance could be shortened or exchanged without the book knowing less. Perhaps a tenth of the whole is the narrator’s abundance rather than the book’s necessity. The episodic method permits additions; the end disciplines them only after the fact.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a people that cannot remember its history is condemned to repeat it, and a lineage closed upon itself, unable to love outward, ends in the incest it feared from the first. The insomnia plague, in which the town labels its cows and its pots so as not to forget what they are for, is the parable; the massacre of the strikers is the same parable made history, for the town is told that nothing happened and José Arcadio Segundo alone keeps the memory of the dead carried to the sea in a train. Official forgetting as an instrument of power is shown exactly. What holds the axis there is the book’s own method. Solitude is the word for the family’s condition, but the narrator asserts it more often than the reader discovers it; the characters are drawn from outside, and the inner lives that would test the disclosure are withheld. Much of the meaning arrives as fate rather than as something found, and the political disclosure is concentrated in the wars, the strike and the massacre, with wonder between.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height reached often, and in more than one register. The first sentence, the firing squad and the ice in one breath. The world so new that things had no names. The thread of blood that runs from José Arcadio’s body through the streets, round corners and along walls, to reach Úrsula in the kitchen. The rain of tiny yellow flowers that falls on the night of the founder’s death. Remedios the Beauty rising into the air with the sheets she was folding. The train of the dead after the massacre, two hundred cars long, and the rain that follows for almost five years. The last pages, in which the last Aureliano deciphers his own life as the wind takes Macondo away. What holds the axis there is the coolness the design requires. The grandmother’s voice tells wonders as facts, and its effect is more often delight than transport: the yellow flowers are beautiful and comic and do not terrify. The dreadful comes seldom, and the long middle chronicle of the fourth and fifth generations runs level for chapters at a time.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and the building is the book. A founding in a world so new that things had no names; a primal crime, the killing of Prudencio Aguilar, and an exodus to escape it; a plague of forgetting; the wars of an epic hero who loses all of them; a flood of “cuatro años, once meses y dos días”
“four years, eleven months and two days”; and an apocalypse foretold in a sacred text that the last of the line reads as it is fulfilled. The founding sin is the marriage of cousins and the curse it risks, the child with the pig’s tail, and the curse is realized in the last generation. The epigraph of the parchments, “El primero de la estirpe está amarrado en un árbol y al último se lo están comiendo las hormigas”
“The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants”, is fulfilled to the letter in the founder bound to the chestnut and the last child carried off by the ants. The particular stays particular: Macondo is a town of the Colombian coast, the wars are the Liberal and Conservative wars, the company is a company, and Úrsula is a woman and a matriarch at once. Held below the very top because some figures, Remedios and the seventeen Aurelianos among them, are emblem more than person, and because the myth is so legible that it can be read off rather than discovered.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Faulkner’s county and its doomed families, Kafka’s deadpan acceptance of the impossible, Borges’s books that contain their readers, and in the Spanish of the Americas Carpentier’s “lo real maravilloso”, the prologue of 1949, and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), whose dead town speaks in a voice that fuses the marvellous and the plain. The synthesis is itself a turn. The total novel in Spanish had been going toward difficulty, Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) above all; this book made it narratable, a chronicle of a continent in the single voice of a family storyteller, with wonder and history on one plane and a closing turn in which the novel is revealed as the prophecy it narrates. The stake was real: a writer of four small books and no wide readership, by his own account in debt through the writing, wagering years on a long family chronicle in a manner the avant-garde had left behind. What holds the axis there is that the means were made by others. The departure is in the fusion and the tone, not in the instrument.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first sentence folds three times into one: a man before a firing squad, an afternoon far in the past, and a future the reader has not reached, from which both are told. The whole novel is built on that fold. Things are told as already remembered and deaths announced before they come, so that history in Macondo is fate before it is event. The recurrence of names across seven generations is the circularity of the family made visible on the page, and the one voice that reports a levitating priest and a massacre in the same tone is the instrument by which the official history is shown to be as fantastic as the marvels and more false. The end is prepared from the first chapters, with Melquíades’s parchments: the last Aureliano reads the book of his family while the wind destroys the town, and the reader finishes the novel as the town is erased. What holds the axis there is the middle chronicle, a container in which many episodes could be moved within their generation without the book knowing less; the end redeems that additive stretch rather than shaping it from within.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: nearly sixty years of reading that has not exhausted it. Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (1971); Roberto González Echevarría’s reading of the book as the archive of Latin American narrative in Myth and Archive (1990); Gerald Martin’s biography (2008); and a criticism in many languages, political, anthropological, psychoanalytic, of the Bible in it and of the Caribbean. The text keeps its questions open: whether time in the book is a circle or a line spiralling to its end; whether the parchments make the family’s fate a fate or a reading; whether the novel indicts the solitude or loves it; how its comedy of women, Fernanda, Amaranta and Rebeca, reads now. What holds the axis there is that the meanings, once seen, do not reorganize themselves on return. The circle, the solitude and the forgotten massacre are found and stay found; the book is reread for its pleasures more than for new sense, and much of the criticism circles the label of magical realism and the genealogy.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the novel in Spanish of the twentieth century and, as this book carried it there, the novel of the world. The force: it gathered the Latin American new novel into one narrative any reader could follow, and showed that a single town and family could carry a continent’s history in a mythic register without loss of political edge, the marvellous not ornament but the means of telling a history the official record denies. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book made the Boom a world event and fixed “magical realism” as a name and a mode across literatures; it opened a road for Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982), whose family chronicle across generations comes directly from it, and novelists from Africa to China, Mo Yan among those who have named it; and the McOndo anthology of Fuguet and Gómez (1996) defined a generation by its reaction against Macondo, which is reach too. What holds the axis there is that the force synthesizes more than it reorganizes. The method was prepared by Rulfo and Carpentier, the Boom was under way before 1967, and part of the reach is the reach of a mode that became a formula and a marketing category, not of the book alone.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The case for survival at fifty-nine years, past the line of about fifty, is made all the same, since it stands near that line. The text survives whole, as the author published it in 1967, with nothing lost or reassembled. The presence is among the widest of any novel of its half-century: in print without a break, translated into dozens of languages, read in schools across the Spanish-speaking world and taught well beyond it; fame and sales are presence, not proof. Its surface is not fixed to 1967: the matter is the Colombia of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the strike behind the massacre is history the novel has helped to keep. What holds the axis there is the span. Fifty-nine years cannot show that the book outlasts the readers and the fashion that raised it, and a mode that was a world fashion in the 1970s and 1980s can date as a fashion. The axis stands in the upper part of what six decades can show, not at its top.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on the Spanish. The sentence is the instrument: long, cumulative, clause on clause, in a past tense that holds the habitual, the remembered and the foretold at once, with the conditional “había de recordar”
“was to remember” as the book’s signature tense. The deadpan is sustained across the whole book without a lapse into wonder or apology: Father Nicanor rises a few inches off the ground after a cup of chocolate, and the voice moves on. The exact number set against the impossible makes the marvel factual and the fact marvellous: thirty-two uprisings, seventeen sons, four years, eleven months and two days. The similes are physical and exact, the river stones “blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos”
“white and enormous like prehistoric eggs”. The management of a century across twenty chapters, with deaths announced long before they come and still landing, is construction of a high order, and the detail carries character: the colonel’s little gold fishes, made and melted down and made again; Amaranta’s black bandage and her shroud; Rebeca eating earth and whitewash. Charged: one voice for seven generations flattens the people into a register; dialogue is scarce; the devices recur in the later generations as manner more than discovery; and the genealogy defeats a reader without a family tree.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a girl ascending to heaven with the household linen, and three thousand strikers shot at the railway station and carried to the sea. One law governs both: whatever happens in Macondo is told in one voice with the same certainty, and the town believes the miracle and is made to disbelieve the massacre, which is the book’s politics. A second law, return, governs the comedy and the tragedy alike: the colonel’s fishes, Amaranta weaving her shroud, the names. The range is wide, from the gypsies’ magnets and flying carpet to war, eros, plague, history, prophecy and apocalypse, and it is held. What holds the axis there is the middle and the close. In the fourth and fifth generations the comic hyperbole, the animals that breed at Petra Cotes’s touch and the raffles, runs on a looser physics than the war and the massacre; the North American company is drawn closer to caricature than the rest of the book allows itself; and the last chapters, the sex comedy of the last Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, change the book’s temper before the end binds it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Held, not listed. The family: seven generations, marriages, incests, bastards, and the matriarch who outlives most of them. Labour and capital: the founder’s alchemy and inventions, the candy animals of Úrsula’s trade, the banana plantations, the strike and the massacre and its erasure. The state: the Liberal and Conservative wars, the colonel’s thirty-two uprisings, the treaty that ends them, the government that denies the massacre. History: a century of the Colombian Caribbean, from foundation through civil war and the foreign company to ruin. Science and its wonder: the magnets, the ice, the alchemy. The sacred: Father Nicanor, Melquíades returned from death, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, Fernanda’s piety, prophecy. Eros in every form the family can find. The natural order: the swamp, the rain, the ants, the jungle that takes the town back. One law of return and solitude integrates them. What holds the axis there is consciousness: no mind is rendered from within at depth, the women are drawn as types, the matriarch, the beauty, the spinster, the prude, and the Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean lives of the town stay at its edges.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 9.2, then Pressure on Tradition, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 9.1. A myth built from Genesis to Revelation on a Caribbean town, its founding before names, its flood and its apocalypse read in a sacred text as it is fulfilled; a long Spanish sentence that holds three times in one clause and sets the exact number against the impossible; a book that made the Latin American novel a world event; one voice that tells the miracle and the massacre with the same face; and a century of a nation held in one house.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.4, held by accretion within the spine, where the comedy of Aureliano Segundo, the raffles and the animals, the courtships and some of Fernanda’s grievance run longer than the design compels. Next above it, The Unconcealment, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.8: a disclosure stated as fate more than found, with the inner lives that would test it withheld; a fusion of elements prepared by Faulkner, Kafka, Borges, Carpentier and Rulfo rather than a new instrument; and meanings that, once seen, do not reorganize themselves on return.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.1. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. At fifty-nine years the book is past the age line of about fifty, and its case for reach and survival is made regardless, since it stands near that line.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, published by Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, in 1967, and written in Mexico City in 1965 and 1966, over about eighteen months. It is scored as the novel as published in 1967, in Spanish and complete: twenty unnumbered and untitled chapters, the chronicle of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo from its founding to its erasure. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text beyond the count of the opening sentence, and no quotation was checked against a file. The design, the genealogy and the principal episodes are known closely; the minor figures of the middle generations are known less exactly, and that gap is the desk’s, not the work’s, and is charged to no axis. Every axis is judged on García Márquez’s Spanish. Spanish is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close rendering beneath; events are paraphrased, and Melquíades’ epigraph to the parchments is given in substance. Citations are by episode, with no chapter numbers, since the book has none. Translation · Gregory Rabassa’s English (Harper and Row, 1970), the translation the desk knows best, read for sense; it is not quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the novel. Matters that could not be verified, among them the month of publication, the word count, the number of languages of translation, the exact words of the town’s denial of the massacre, the position of episodes by chapter and the history of later adaptation, are not given.