Pronoun Shifters, Virginia Woolf, Bela Bartok, Plebeian Forms, Real-Life Tyrants, and the Shaping of Garcia Marquez's "Patriarch"

Abstract

Because so much has already been said about the differences between Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch, I would like to start by stressing certain continuities central to his art, certain key aspects to be examined here. First, there is in both novels a virtually seamless interweaving of real history with narrative fantasy. In One Hundred Years we find such established facts as Francis Drake's 1596 raid on Riohacha and the United Fruit workers' strike of 1928 (to which the author is quite faithful in the details), alongside a fantastical epidemic of insomnia, some amazing longevities, a spell of state-imposed amnesia, and a rain of yellow flowers. Similarly, in Patriarch we find traits and actions plundered wholesale from the biographies of Latin despots such as Trujillo, Somoza, Per6n, and Juan Vicente G6mez, all in artful combination with the fictive tyrant's century or two of life, his reported healing powers, his absolute double Patricio Aragones, a magical eclipse of the sun, and the removal of an entire sea. Unbridled exaggeration, by and large the most persistent fantastical device employed by the chronicler of Macondo, now becomes the dominant feature of this, his six-part portrait of autocracy. Second, there is the unusually successful fusion of the complex traditions of high culture with attitudes and occurrences that are flamboyantly plebeian in origin. The strictly literary genealogy of One Hundred Years of Solitude includes sources as diverse as the Bible, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Mann's Buddenbrooks, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf; the plot features a great deal of joyous fornication, many scenes of gourmandizing and revelry, Colonel Buendia's death while urinating under a chestnut tree, and numerous profanities,