Modern Mind

generations share so many names, the chronology is not always clear. Ideas and things from the outside world sometimes reach Macondo (like railways), but always the town returns to isolation, the Buendías sequestered in their solitude.
    The exuberant and deadpan attention to detail combine to create a unique sense of humour. ‘Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.’ 18 The Buendías are also surrounded by a cast of dotty eccentrics. For example, on one occasion a young Buendía, Meme, brings sixty-eight friends home from school for the holidays. ‘The night of their arrival the students carried on in such a way, trying to go to the bathroom before they went to bed, that at one o’clock in the morning the last ones were still going in. Fernada then bought seventy-two chamber-pots, but she only managed to change the nocturnal problem into a morning one, because from dawn on there was a long line of girls, each with her pot in her hand, waiting for her turn to wash it.’ 19 Macondo is a world where the itinerant gypsy sage Melquíades returns to life after dying because he couldn’t bear the loneliness of death, where yellow flowers rain down from the skies and real rainstorms last for months.
    The story of Macondo has a mythic quality, with countless allusions to twentieth-century ideas. Márquez deliberately gives his story a dated feel, so the reader is distanced from the action, as Bertolt Brecht recommended. It is likewise an attempt to re-enchant the world: things happen in Macondo that could happen nowhere else. This is not exactly biblical but close; we may not believe what happens, but we accept it. The illusions evoke Kafka, but a very sunny Kafka. In some senses José Buendía and his wife Ursula are the primordial couple, who undertake an exodus from the jungle in search of the sea; the ages of some characters are vastly inflated, as in the early books of the Bible; Melquíades presents the family with a manuscript written in Sanskrit code: this recalls both the decipherment of languages of earlier civilisations and the observations of Sir William Jones, the British judge in India, about the ‘mother tongue.’ The parchment on which the code is written turns out also to be a mirror, throwing us back on the relation between the text and reader and the ideas of Jacques Derrida. The playing with time recalls not only relativity but Fernand Braudel’s ideas of
la longue durée
and what governs it. Underneath all, as Carlos Fuentes has pointed out,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
questions: ‘What does Macondo know about its creation?’ In other words, the very question that has so obsessed twentieth-century science. 20 In the way that Macondo ends, Márquez even raises the idea of entropy. In the very last sentence, he reminds us that we have no second opportunity in life, and this is the ‘big reason’ why the ‘official version’ of things should never be ‘put up with.’ The book may well be the greatest achievement of its kind in the last half of the twentieth century.
    The wider significance of these alternative worlds is twofold. They are metaphors for Latin America itself, as a site for ‘the other,’ a key concept, as it turned out, in postmodernism. Second, and arguably more important, is their ‘playful maturity’; these are artists who have distanced themselves from thequotidian and the political. In so doing, they have given an undoubted stature to Latin American fiction with which the mother country, Spain, cannot compete. As Márquez makes explicit, Latin American fiction at base is about solitude, the continent itself used as a metaphor for that predicament.
    After the magic realism of Latin America, the fabulous intricacies of Indian fiction probably come next in any fledgling ‘canon.’ Twentieth-century Indian novels written in English date from the 1930s at least, with the works of Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand, but the novels published since, say, R. K. Narayan’s ‘Malgudi’ stories fall into two kinds: minute observations and commentaries on Indian life, and attempts to