Can Man Be Redeemed?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Bible, and the Buendia Family
To approach Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as merely a satirical fiction that borrows heavily from the Judeo-Christian Bible is to fall short in understanding the complexities of the Buendia family. It would be impossible to exhaust a full examination of Garcia Marquez’s intentions in so few pages, but perhaps some insight can be gained by looking closely at the relationship between the two books and Garcia Marquez’ manipulations of them. For instance, why does the author transform a priestly king into a wandering gypsy who transcribes labyrinthine codes? Or why does he satirize the grand patriarch into the founder of a city who is destined for madness? These questions, along with others, beg for a closer look. Imbedded within these literary constructs is a theological concept that informs the characters within Garcia Marquez’s novel and provides the framework for the twists One Hundred Years forces upon its biblical source. The ideas that palpitate behind the two books are expressed by a single question: can Man be redeemed?
Within the pages of One Hundred Years, the answer is definitively no, “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude [do] not have a second opportunity on earth” (488). This statement acts as a shroud blanketing the author’s purpose in writing, and that shroud must be dispelled in order understand the condemnation it proposes. What does it mean to be a race damned to a century of being alone? Throughout Garcia Marquez’ novel, the Buendia family and the town they raise from the primordial grime are cut off. They are surrounded by loneliness. Their solitude, from time to time interrupted by the outside, mirrors the biblical account of the founding of Abraham’s seed, the Hebrews. But that nation is not a condemned race. In fact, they are a blessed one as evidenced by Moses request to God: “bless Your people Israel, and the ground which You have given [them]” (Deut. 26:15).
The comparisons between the two beginnings are numerous, but none seem to carry as much weight as the contrast between Abraham and Jose Arcadio Buendia. Abraham’s journeys are not unlike those of Jose Arcadio’s, but from the outset of their endeavors the two founding fathers diverge on very different paths. While Abraham journeyed to “the land that [the Lord would] show” him, Jose Arcadio settled in an area “eternally sad” with relentless vegetation and barbarous landscapes, a land promised to no one (Gen. 12:1; Garcia Marquez, 11-12). Even the names of the patriarchs, Abraham meaning “the father of many” and Jose Arcadio roughly representing the addition to paradise, show hints of the separate paths the two men would embark upon (Gen. 17:7; Russell, para. 4).
While Abraham’s settlement would take hundreds of years to possess, Jose Arcadio’s would require less than two centuries to be completely destroyed. The contrasts between the two accounts even continues along the family tree, as Jose Arcadio sees his sons who run “wild just like donkeys”, an image that resembles the naming of Abraham’s son Ishmael, a child prophesied to be “a wild donkey of a man” (Garcia Marquez, 15; Gen. 16:12). Also the pair of sons born to Jose Arcadio, as well as the twin grandsons, reflect a similar lineage to that of Abraham’s sons and grandchildren. Even the twins, who pretend to be each other so much that they forget who is who, mirror the deception of Issac when his son Jacob posed as his brother in order to steal the blessing of the eldest child (Garcia Marquez, 197-198; Genesis 27). The comparisons between the two families could be taken further, and we could even look at the manipulation of breeding livestock, but these generally only demonstrate the satirical depth of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez, 206; Gen. 31:31-43).
Another character changed by Garcia Marquez is the king of Salem, Melchizedek, who in One Hundred Years becomes the gypsy Melquiades. Melchizedek is not given as much space in the Bible as the prophetic gypsy is given in Garcia Marquez’ novel. The king of Salem appears once, occupying only three verses in Genesis chapter fourteen while Melquiades shows up throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude, constantly subverting men of the Buendia family with his alchemy lab and his prophecies scribbled in Sanskrit (Garcia Marquez, 384). Melchizedek and Melquiades do have something in common though: they each help a patriarch by blessing them, as when Melchizedek blesses Abraham with food and spiritual blessings and Melquiades blesses Jose Arcadio with science and verbal praise (Gen. 14:18-20; Garcia Marquez, 5-6). The interventions of both characters help the bold founders to continue to establish their futures. The two characters have starkly contrasting purposes, however. Melquiades’ main function in the novel is to write down the history of the Buendia family, concentrating a “century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in a single moment” (Garcia Marquez, 446). Melchizedek’s purpose is just as subtle and is revealed more fully in places such as Psalm 110:4, but he serves a hopeful end when the writer of Hebrews explains that Jesus Christ was a “high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (5:10).
While the differences and similarities highlighted in One Hundred Years against the backdrop of the Bible create a clever satire, the purpose in going to such great lengths on the part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez cannot be to simply parody the Judeo-Christian text. Without even exhausting the comparisons between the two books, the examples above illustrate a deep amount of time and research put into the characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude that no parody would have needed. Within his novel, Garcia Marquez is ostensibly claiming that the progress of Man’s redemption as seen through the lens of the Bible is a method that is flawed. The failures of the Buendia family, that history of “unavoidable repetitions” and “irremediable wearing” upon the wheels of time, follow the pattern of the history of Israel like that seen in the book of Judges (Garcia Marquez, 425). While the Bible sometimes veils its redemptive ideas in order to reveal them later, One Hundred Years instead destroys its concepts of redemption by entrenching its perception of reality behind the mystery and magic surrounding the Buendias. For this heavily burdened family, there is no hope in the enchantment of the world; there will be no redemption. But the children of Israel have a different fate in store.
It is that hope of redemption that creates the rift between One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Bible. While Macondo’s founder descended into madness tied to a tree for the remainder of his time on earth, Abraham “died in a ripe old age, an old man and satisfied with life” (Gen 25:8) The opposite fates of the patriarchs echo the fates of their respective families. Through the life of Jose Arcadio, Gabriel Garcia Marquez rejects that belief that through a single man the redemption of Man can be achieved. The experiment of paradise is bound to fail, as evidenced by the final judgment executed upon Macondo during the devastating whirlwind at the close of the novel.
What does it mean to be a race condemned to one hundred years of solitude? Perhaps it means failure and destruction. But the story being parodied is burdened under no such fate, for Christ came into the world that “the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:17). The Bible’s story of hope can be seen through the unveiling of Melchizedek’s true importance in Hebrews. For if God’s Son was sent as a “High Priest in the line of Melchizedek,” then Jesus’ “prayers and pleadings,” offered up “with a loud cry and tears” are the fulfillment of the blessings asked for on behalf Abraham (Heb. 5:7). It was “in this way [that] God qualified [Jesus] as a perfect High Priest, and He became the source of eternal salvation” (Heb. 5:9). Melquiades prophesied the destruction of the Buendia family, while Melchizedek foreshadowed the redemption of all Men. Such alterations between the Biblical patriarch and the priestly king suggest a fundamental disagreement with the Biblical account of Man’s redemptive progress.
Examining One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez would appear as a man devoid of hope. While giving his Nobel Prize lecture, the Colombian author spoke of the decline of Man:
Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth. (Garcia Marquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” para. 11)
The contradiction between these words and the message rippling underneath the magical, yet real elements of One Hundred Years of Solitude can only be reconciled in one way. Garcia Marquez believes in the redemption of Man, but not as outlined within the Judeo-Christian Bible. Although this is possibly a reaction to an oppressive Catholic culture, the result is the rejection of the hope of redemption through one man. One Hundred Years of Solitude sets out to dismantle the Biblical idea of liberation by ridiculing important figures in the foundations of the Christian theology. But in the end, the “oaks of Mamre” where Abraham sat with his God do not become the chestnut tree where Jose Arcadio is left “tied up, barking in a strange language and giving off green froth at the mouth” (Gen. 18:1-8; Garcia Marquez, 86). The redemptive story of the Bible does yet have an ending, and time will tell whether or not the “new utopia of life” opposing the town of Macondo will usher in the second opportunity for love proven true and happiness made possible.
References
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Inc., 1998.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. “The Solitude of Latin America.” The Nobel Foundation. Nobel Lecture. 8 Dec. 1982. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html.
Key Word Study Bible: New American Standard Translation. Red Letter ed. Chattanooga, TN: AMG, 1990.
Russell, Elsie. “On the Arcadian Theme.” Net in Arcadia: the Virtual Museum of Contemporary Classicism. 2 June 1995. http://www.parnasse.com/etpnt.htm.