Pastoral de desengaño

I use the above as title for this last blog entry on 100 años because I think it is suggestive of the book as a whole. A pastoral is a literary genre portraying an idealized version of country life. From its early days as an utopian Eden where death is unknown and things have yet to be given names, to its final days as a dystopic Sodom of decadence and corruption, the story of Macondo is one of progressive disenchantemtment, of a pastoral gone wrong. It is one replete with biblical references; from paradise to paradise lost, Macondo is the site of an epic deluge, of spiritual decay and final apocalypse. When José Arcadio (II) squanders Ursula's hidden treasure by transforming the Buendía house into a decadent paradise of "equivocal pleasures", one of which includes bathing in champagne with naked adolescent boys, the reference to Sodom is clear and one might suggest A Hundred Years of Sodom as an alternative title. (In a book whose female characters conform so firmly to traditional gender codes, the use of homoerotic evocation to denote sin and foreshadow biblical apocalypse is not really surprising). Yet Macondo is not destroyed for the sin of homosexuality (which is only hinted at), but rather for having been founded in bad faith as an attempt to free its founders from the shame of incest and murder. This unresolved shame condemns the successive generations of the Buendia clan to seek out solitude and silence as a way to avoid communication, change, truth. Members of this clan rarely change, remaining two-dimensional static entities caught up in "un engrenaje de repeticiones irreparables, una rueda giratoria que hubiera seguido dando vueltas hasta la eternidad, de no haber sido por el degaste progresivo e irreperable del eje" (471). Once the truth is finally known, once Aureliano Babilonia draws the curtains to the city of mirrors and deciphers Melquiades' parchments, nothing can stop the ants' final invasion and the wind from erasing the memory of Macondo and its melancholy inhabitants forever. Sometimes repetition is preferable to change, silence to truth, especially when the latter threatens to overwhelm. Fortunately literature exists as a means of documenting the compulsion to repeat, and by doing so, breaking it. Perhaps there would be less solitude were literature not relegated to cargo class.

A few last words on repetition in art:

Each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the dreary repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the [symbolic] repetitions of death, through which we make sport of our own mortality.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.