The Great American Novelist

About a year ago, Henry Kissinger admitted, "I am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down." Kissinger's cavalier ignorance--feigned or real--is shared by most of his fellow-citizens, who have never been able to decide whether they are more bored by Canada or South America. The colonial origins of the United States are still reflected in a cultural inferiority complex that carries over into politics. A cabinet reshuffle in a western European democracy gets more attention in the press than a coup d'etat in Central America; the lingering death throes of a Scandinavian king consistently merits more attention than the demise of an el Presidente. The Monroe Doctrine took care of Latin America once and for all; we haven't had to think about it since. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes in No One Writes to the Colonel, to outsiders "South America is a man with a moustache, a guitar, and a gun. They don't understand the problem."

Maybe no one understands it. But a large part of the problem is a compound of U.S. intervention and U.S. disinterest--intervention by the government and disinterest on the part of the foreign policy public. While it would be naive to suggest that public indignation could quickly change the direction of U.S. policy, the same efforts towards educating and interesting and shaming the public that were eventually influential in Vietnam are needed in regard to Latin America.

If the contemporary literary explosion in South America can't start doing this, it will probably never happen. There is probably more good literature being written in Spanish today than in any other language, and much of it is highly political. Jorge Luis Borges, the white haired patron saint, set the stage for the whole flowering by modulating European tradition into a distinctively South American voice, giving South American writers a new self-confidence. While he remains a grand old anti-fascist liberal, most writers of subsequent generations have been more or less socialist. Some, like Pablo Neruda, put their life and art wholly at the command of the movement they support; some, like Jose Lezama Lima in Cuba, have differed with the revolutionists after giving them initial support; some, like Garcia Marquez, have kept away from direct political action yet still have served revolution in their writing.

Writers who choose Garcia's path will be more influential in the U.S. than others. Neruda's work can speak best to those who already share his principles; Borges's work has no political message. Garcia's method is to allow his readers to believe that they are not reading politics at all, only simple, romantic tales of life in the fictional village of Macondo. Within these stories, however, Garcia explains a good deal about the social and historical background of contemporary Latin America. And it serves the U.S. right that the great American novel turned out to be a South American one. Garcia's One Hundred Years of Solitude is the only book to distill the experience of three centuries of European interaction with the Americas into a paradigm of history, culture, morals, and psychology. He proves that a political novel need not be on the level of satire or gossip, that it can rise above Allen Drury and Gore Vidal and Fletcher Knebel. Garcia's heroes are political heroes, and they are better heroes than carefully apolitical novelists have been able to create.

In the March issue of Harper's Garcia published an account of how the Chilean armed forces suppressed the Chilean government in the coup of September, 1973. As he traces the contacts between Chilean military officers and the Pentagon, it seems that Garcia is portraying the military men of his fiction all over again. These are the same men who shot three thousand people in Macondo's central square and carted them off in a freight train, and the next morning denied that the massacre had ever occurred. The politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude seem mythic, distanced from contemporary issues and personalities; but the massacre of that hot Sunday afternoon is something destined to be repeated over and over again, in the streets of the cities of South America and in the pages of its novelists.

Since the success of One Hundred Years of Solutude, Garcia's publishers have brought out in paperback two volumes of short stories that originally appeared in magazines and academic reviews over the last decade. In these books, Garcia is working in a small world between epics--en route from One Hundred Years of Solitude to his next book, The Fall of the Patriarch. But the stories that make up Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel shouldn't be mistaken for out-takes or early sketches for either of the larger books. They explore some of the paths that Garcia couldn't follow up in One Hundred Years of Solitude. That book was self-contained: Garcia chronicled Macondo from its beginning to its destruction by an apocalyptic storm. Now he wants to see what would have happened if the apocalypse had proved false, if the people of Macondo had been forced to live through another century of heat, decay, and silence.

The Buendias of One Hundred Years of Solitude were a superhuman dynasty, and they lived out their one hundred years as if they were in their natural element. Fifty years passed, but Aureliano went on making little gold fishes and planning for a "mortal con-flagration that would wipe out all vestiges of a regime of corruption." Fifty years of wind and rain passed, and Aureliano's father remained tied to the tree in the yard. "Four years, eleven months, and two days" of rain flooded the town, but his mother kept the house dry and safe.

This kind of time is mythic, biblical, fairy tale time. In a mysterious way it preserves instead of oppressing; the men of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel--not a Buendia among them--are all slaves of a destructive sort of time. The remnants of Aureliano's revolutionary army are tricked into waiting paralyzed for a promised pension that never arrives. The whole town waits for death--the individual or collective crisis that might give them a sense of direction, something to fight against--and when death comes it comes as an anticlimax. The "leaf storm," the invasion of the banana company with its false prosperity and erratic electricity and ersatz shelters for its army of migrant workers, passes over the town but disdains to destroy it. The Buendias fail to ignite the town as they burn themselves out.

Aureliano's revolution was the only possible apocalypse and that revolution failed. So the town moves from one false apocalypse to another, and the epic tragedy of One Hundred Years of Solitude degenerates into comedy. Instead of the promised return of the magician Melquiades, who brought the first ice to Macondo, the senile priest decries the reappearance of the Wandering Jew--a bewildered adolescent who is the first visitor in 20 years to stay overnight in Macondo's only hotel. At last the promised end becomes pure satire at the conclusion of No One Writes to the Colonel:

Some of those present were sufficiently aware as to understand that they were witnessing the birth of a new era. Now the Supreme Pontiff could ascend to Heaven in body and soul, his mission on earth fulfilled, and the President of the Republic could sit down and govern according to his good judgment, and the queens of all the things that have been or ever will be could marry and be happy and give birth to many sons and the common people could set up tents where they damn well pleased in the limitless domains of Big Mama because the only one who could oppose them had begun to rot beneath a lead plinth. The only thing left then was for someone to lean a stool against a doorway to tell this story, lesson and example for future generations, so that not one of the world's disbelievers would be left who did not know the story of Big Mama because tomorrow, Wednesday, the garbage men will come and will sweep up the garbage from the funeral forever and ever.

A revolution needs more than the death by natural causes of the "the only one" who could oppose it, because behind Big Mama and the President of the Republic stands the United States. When it comes to politics even Macondo does not exist in solitude.