PARTISAN REVIEW
575
readership. A mystery, always, the true number of readers such books–
difficult, lyrical, alien - may have beyond the coffee table and the
cover of the
Times.
For there is a resisting vegetable immobility about
the narrative, a kind of jungle hypertrophy of character and event which
I suspect - my suspicion founded on conversation with those who have
actually ventured into the book at all- discourages finishing it, seeing
what Marquez is up to, or out for, beyond a six-generation chronicle
preceded by a genealogical tree from the hands of the publishers (ad–
mirable Forsyte!).
There are cunning references to Fuentes, to Borges, to Cortazar and
to Asturias secreted along the way, indeed at every turn there is a nudge,
a beck to remind us that "the history of a family is a machine with
unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling
into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of
the axle." Yet for all its regionalisms and poetical pieties, this book is
no more a piece of hallucinated reportage than it is a family epic; the
town and the family which founds and then finishes off that town are
represented, are shaded in, only to be canceled out by an opposing
energy, a "view of life entirely inimical to the credibility and even the
structure of narrative (that is why it is so difficult to get to the end of
this book where we discover that it is already completed, as a story, be–
fore it has ever happened). This view of life, this philosophy, this vision
- for that is what it is, a reverie of the body, what Yeats called the
dreaming of the bones, best defined by the discovery that the word
"myth" and the word "epic" both "mean," etymologically, "word" - is
SO
preposterous that it must be ballasted by all the proleptic details in the
chronicler's armory:
The banana company's city which Patricia Brown may have tried to
evoke for her grandchildren during the nights of intolerance and
dill pickles in Prattville, Alabama, was a plain of wild grass. The an–
cient priest who had taken Father Angel's place and whose name no
one had bothered to find out awaited God's mercy stretched out
casually in a hammock, tortured by arthritis and the insomnia of
doubt while the lizards and rats fought over the inheritance of the
nearby church. In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where
the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to
breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in
a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise
of the red ants, Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula were the only
happy beings and the most happy on the face of the earth.
For Garda Marquez's outrageous
propos,
his vision which is determined
to undermine the very texture he has so closely woven of consequential
