Race and Character in Cien años de soledad

Abstract

For AndyCien anos de soledad has been viewed through many prisms but in critical readings of the novel there is very little focus on the question of race. The narrative arguably presents the novel's events through a European filter, or Pseudo-European presumed whiteness.1 A reading is sensitive to race shows racial mixture most often intersects with illegitimacy in Cien anos de soledad. White women are instrumental in policing racial hierarchy; black women are relegated to the margins of the socius, most particularly to brothels. Vivir para contarla, Garcia Marquez's 2003 autobiography, provides unsettling insights into how the Nobel laureate transmuted his experience of coastal Caribbean race relations into his novel.White identity is evident throughout the first two chapters of Cien anos de soledad. In the opening chapter Macondo's founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, expresses contempt for the past and the Spanish Conquest haunts his movements, not as an epoch of terror but as an age of heroism, irretrievably lost. According to Avery Gordon, haunting describes how that which appears not to be there is often a seething (8). Gordon's analysis examines the invisible or uncanny historical presence of ostensibly silenced or marginalized people. Victors and conquerors haunt history as well. This is apparent in Jose Arcadio Buendia's explorations in the first chapter, in which the founder of Macondo discovers the remains of a Spanish galleon and a suit of armor from a previous heroic age. These refer to a golden age of discovery, upheld by ethnic Europeans in Latin America as justification for claims of patrimony. The golden age of discovery and exploration has been lost to the villagers of Macondo. They inhabit an isolated and degraded reality, in which the monumental object of the Spanish Conquest may only be recovered piecemeal, if at all. 2The predominantly Spanish ancestry of Macondo's family of leaders is never in doubt. Ursula Iguaran's great-grandfather was Aragonese and Jose Arcadio Buendia's was criollo cultivador de tabaco (CA 103). In the United States, creole connotes racial mixture whereas its Spanish homophone criollo refers to a native-born person of European ancestry, although the term is misleading. The ancestors of Ursula and Jose Arcadio lived on land nominally shared with the original inhabitants: del mar, en una rancheria de indios pacificos (CA 102). The Buendias' Spanish forebears leave an indelible stamp on a territory which once belonged to indigenous inhabitants: antigua rancheria que los antepasados de ambos transformaron con su trabajo y sus buenas costumbres en uno de los mejores pueblos de la provincia (103). A central myth of whiteness, as Richard Dyer notes, is its claim to aspiration and enterprise (21-23). Enterprising ancestors notwithstanding, the tale of the Buendias illustrates a criollo anxiety regarding whiteness and reproduction. Inter-racial sexuality, as Dyer brilliantly argues, threatens whiteness because bodies. ..can no longer guarantee their own reproduction as (25). In Garcia Marquez's novel, the copulation of white bodies eventually leads to bestial offspring. Due perhaps to the limited availability of socially acceptable (white) partners, the descendants of the Aragonese Spaniard and the criollo tobacco planter are threatened by endogamy, incest, and monstrosity. In warnings to her great-great-grandson, Ursula states the danger clearly: mujeres de la calle, que echaban a perder la sangre; las mujeres de la casa, que parian hijos con cola de puerco (CA 503).In the prehistory of Macondo, Ursula's attempt to avoid bearing children with tails leads to violence: Jose Arcadio Buendia murders the man who mocks his childless marriage. Prudencio Aguilar's return as a ghost precipitates the Buendias' journey across a Latin American wilderness: despues de varios meses de andar perdidos por entre los pantanos, lejos ya de los ultimos indigenas que encontraron en el camino, acamparon a la orilla de un rio pedregoso cuyas aguas parecian un torrente de vidrio helado (108). …