476 García Márquez, Gabriel
decline, imposes her parents’ norms on the house-
hold, returning to the past. And, despite her efforts
at cleanliness and order, the house is overtaken by
lizards, rodents, ants, and moss; the structure itself
begins to revert back to a primeval state. When
Amaranta Ursula, great-great-granddaughter of
Macondo’s founders, herself attempts to reorganize
the house, her efforts fail. The destructive circle of
time continues as she and her nephew make love
amid the sounds of Macondo’s ghosts trying to stave
off creation’s inevitable entropy. Indeed, their love
ends when Amaranta dies, having repeated family
history by giving birth to a child with a pig’s tail.
Shortly after Amaranta’s death, Macondo is
blown away by the winds of fate. This ending, fore-
told by the history of prior Buendía generations,
depicts both the futility and fatality faced by an
insular Latin America. Any community unable to
recognize and to break the constraints of its own
historical cycle and intrinsic patterns of behavior is
doomed not only to repeat the past but also to be
eternally destroyed by it.
Anne Massey
memor y in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Memory in One Hundred Years of Solitude functions,
or malfunctions, simultaneously on two planes—
individual and collective recall. From beginning
to end, recollection and its opposition, forgetting,
point to the insufficiency of familial ties and societal
connection in the face of Latin American political
corruption and the economic reality of poverty.
The novel’s opening—Colonel Aureliano
Buendía’s standing before a firing squad and remem-
bering his father’s taking him to discover ice—seg-
ues into a description of the idyllic beginnings of
Macondo and the Buendía family. This connection
between pleasant memory and death demonstrates
the inadequacy of familial and societal bonds in the
face of unjust political manipulations. The utopia
of the colonel’s youth will not withstand the decay
brought about by political contamination.
Indeed, early in the novel all efforts to manipu-
late memory for individual or community benefit
fail. The Gypsies, who introduce a machine to make
people forget bad memories, so confuse the com-
munity that the citizens of Macondo become lost
in their own streets. When faced with the illness
of insomnia that destroys memory, both José Arca-
dio Buendía and his son unsuccessfully attempt
to fend off complete erasure of past events with
various inventions, including a machine designed to
aid in recall. In the end, only through the magic of
Melquíades is the community rescued and memory
restored.
Eventually, memory fades, dominated by the slow
invasion of forgetting. Perhaps the most extreme
example of forgetting is the massacre engineered
by the government and the banana company during
a strike by the company’s workers. Three thousand
people are gunned down in the town square, but
afterward no one recalls the event except José Aure-
liano Segundo and the boy he rescued from the
mob. In fact, José Aureliano Segundo can find no
evidence of the massacre, and when the boy attempts
to force the people of Macondo to recall the grue-
some day, he is written off as insane. Here, the fail-
ure of collective memory serves as a metaphor for
the community’s inability to confront the political
abuse found in much of Latin American history as
well as its failure to address economic manipulation
by nations outside of Latin America, in particular
the United States.
Over time, memory in the novel evolves into
nostalgia, recollection colored by a longing for
the unattainable. Nostalgia heightens the sense
that Latin America’s societal bonds are insufficient
mechanisms for resolving conflicts. For instance,
upon returning from the war, Colonel Aureliano
Buendía, feeling trapped by nostalgia, destroys all
evidence of his past and attempts suicide. After-
ward, lauded as a martyr for his suicide attempt by
fickle followers who accuse him of selling out the
war effort for personal gain while honoring him
for rejecting the Presidential Order of Merit, the
colonel considers starting a new war simply to please
his supporters. This is an odd position for a man
who once advocated working with the opposition
to bring an end to conflict. Seen through the lens
of nostalgia, societal bonds are not only insufficient
buffers against political corruption, but also have
become destructive forces in and of themselves.
The novel’s conclusion joins memory and for-
getting as final proof that societal structures fail to