The centrality of time in the analysis of the Buendia family’s fortunes in Gabriel Garcia

Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

By Barbara C. Manyarara

My topic proposed itself to me after the UNISA Latin American Report’s call for papers and the

news that Mario Vargas Llosa had won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature” and that [H]e is the

first South American winner of the prize since 1982 when it went to Colombian Gabriel Garcia

Marquez. Llosa wrote the foreword to the 40th anniversary edition of Garcia Marquez’s classic

work, One Hundred Years of Solitude” according to The Standard (October 10 To 16, 2010).

Surfing the internet provided me with a surfeit of all sorts of illuminative perspectives to the

fortunes of the Buendia family, the subject matter of a solitude that lasted an amazing one

hundred years! That’s how I found myself specifically analyzing just how the seven generations

of Buendias could have squandered a whole century and come out of the experience the worst for

wear!

Sequential and chronological time are simultaneous realities that occur at the same time in the

novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (OHYS) .Besides these two forms of time, Garcia Marquez

allows room for several interpretations of time, “…an abundant zigzags in time, both in

flashbacks of matters past and long leaps towards future events” (Wikipedia). The present study,

unlike Rena Sherwood’s critique centred on the match between memory and real time, imagines

other forms of time at work in the Buendia family. Playfully modernistic, the current study

makes a conscious break with earlier critiques of OHYS by examining numerous strands of the

lexical item “time” and some of the different force fields of meaning the word creates in this
novel. Suffice to say that there are many kinds of non-sequential and non-chronological time that

can be illustrated from OHYS.

Sociologists Berquo and Xenos (1992), for example, assure us that the passage of time is both

micro-dynamic and macro-dynamic. Thus the Buendia family, as a concrete social structure, is

eligible for spatio-temporal analysis. The references to different kinds of time include

semantically and syntactically related time words and phrases that I am willing to apply to the

“time” analysis of the Buendias. Following, but not in any particular order, are some of the time

words and phrases:

Time capsule, time limit, specified time, current time, living time, dead time, capturing

time, constant time, manipulated (controlled) time, passage of time, natural cycle, time-

out, time-warp, time-lag, time-lapse, social and individual time, intrusive time, incredible

time, cruel time, bloody time, repeated time, hard times, good times, investment in time,

time turning on itself, and contradictions of time.

The list is long.

The aspects of life in Macondo may be legendary, distorted or invented by Garcia Marquez, but

all exist in some kind of time, a special time. We are told of how the gypsy man Melquaides on

one of his early visits to the Buendia house is understood that, (by the then five-year old Colonel

Aureliano Buendia and his brother Jose Arcadio), “… [He] would pass on that wonderful image

as a hereditary memory to all of his descendants”. Thus he becomes a veritable time capsule,

preserved for future discovery. Later on, the same gypsy’s renewal to “… a youthful Melquaides,

recovered, unwrinkled, with a new and shining set of teeth,” suggests an encapsulated

specimen. Through the author’s distortion of the time continuum by allowing Melquaides the
liminality to pass from the past to the present or the future, this character appears to exist in a

time warp. He typifies a character who, (according to Maria-Elena Angulo, 1995), is able to

break the barriers of space and time, interacting among generations during his life and after death

in a world where the unusual is the usual.

Time may stand still in the present and the introduction of the daguerreotype in the Buendia

household is one such attempt to preserve the family “… for an eternity”, a kind of time warp,

meant to endure. This then is an attempt to capture time, that is, artificially making time stand at

will. Similarly, during the insomnia plague, when “… dawn in Macondo found the whole town

awake, … happy at not sleeping because there was so much to do in Macondo, there was barely

enough time” p.45. Not sleeping, everyone gained time by dislocating natural time.

From the familial perspective, time begins at the point of marriage and the birth of children,

followed by a long period of the children’s growth and maturity which in turn is followed by a

senescent period, a stage when the family roster dwindles down to the last survivor

(Ryder,1992). A typical individual’s life involves both the family of orientation in which one is a

child and the family of procreation in which one is a parent. The Buendia family attempts to

rejuvenate itself by engaging in a kind of time lag through repeating names inter-generationally.

Between the various combinations of the names Jose, Arcadio, Aureliano and Segundo, not only

may a reader get lost, Ursula the founding mother, “… ha[s] a vague feeling of doubt… the

insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed certain” p.186. In

the end Colonel Aureliano’s numerous reduplications of himself through his seventeen sons is a
re-invention of the self that suggests a sense of some delay between connected events or

phenomena, a time lap.

The ghost of Prudencio Aguillar, killed in a duel by the founding father, Jose Arcadio Buendia,

simply refuses to leave the human world, to remain dead, that way disrupting living time and

dead time. Ursula sees this ghost in the house so often that she puts out such human comforts as

it appeared to need. However, Jose Arcadio Buendia threatens the ghost. He says, “…[Y]ou go

to hell … just as many times as you come back, I will kill you again”. Thus the ghost recovers

current time in the narrative. Current time is further recovered only to be dislocated again, to

the extent that Prudencio Aguillar, although dead “… has also aged” p.81. Thus the dead are not

really dead, they still exist within the life cycle, a contemporary time. The ghost became so real

a presence that Jose Arcadio Buendia, after keeping vigil with the dead Prudencio, demands to

know what day it is. It happens to be a Tuesday but he insists it was a Monday and categorically

decides that in future it will always be Monday, that way telescoping his days into one. For him,

“… the time machine has broken”, p.82. Finding refugee in madness, he gains constancy and in

his mind he halts the passage of time, once again, artificially creating time for himself, a feat

unfortunately, that sees him tied down to a chestnut tree and at the mercy of the elements for half

a century!

Controlled time is another kind of time evident in the Buendia household. Several events are

controlled through the manipulation of time. The character Amaranta is particularly able to

control events to suit her. First, she deliberately puts off the foundling girl Rebeca’s marriage to

the Italian Pietro Crespi by sending him on a false summons to keep him away from the wedding

party. Next, she delays the wedding by making a seemingly innocent suggestion that the wedding

inaugurate a new church being built in Macondo. However, the building process is so slow that
the particular wedding is ten years away, but still three years if they hurried. Amaranta, Colonel

Aureliano and their mother Ursula all appear to pull time manipulating tricks. Amaranta

towards the end of her life must weave her own shroud and die once the task is completed. She

stalls time, weaving by day and unraveling the shroud by night, that way gaining herself more

than four years of an unnatural but deserved investment in time.

It has been established by many scholars in psychology, sociology and in other fields with

interest in the human condition that memory repeats the models and matrixes of the beginning. In

that way, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, after more than twenty years of largely unsuccessful

military campaigns, comes back to Macondo to settle, but not before he attempts suicide, his first

bid to control the hand of nature, to hasten his time, that moment at which death is expected. But

it was not yet time out for him so he survives. Like his mother Ursula, he notes “…how awful

…the way time passes”, an observation made by someone who recognizes the burden that time

places on a person. We are told “… during the last two years he had paid his final dues to life,

including growing old”. He strips himself of anything to do with war, definitely “… destroying

all traces of his passage through the world” p.176, but this act is already invalidated: there are so

many of him in the world! His passage through the world cannot be erased because any act

meant to control time: a continuous passing and succession of minutes, days and years. Thus

Colonel Aureliano Buendia kills time by engaging in grossly stultifying activities. I am inclined

to understand these as attempts to deal with the meaninglessness of his life. After all he has to

squander his share of the one hundred years of solitude! So he occupies himself again and again

making small gold fishes which he re-melts to make them again and again. This act of

continuous rebirth ensures with strict, heartfelt acts, the permanence of the cosmos, as observed

by Carlos Fuentes (1988), among others. This becomes a harnessing activity, a kind of active
stasis, inversely becoming, through the pointlessness of the activity, a state of inactivity where

no progress is being made. The colonel and his sister Amaranta become conscientiously busy at

tasks that they cannot complete because they do not intend to make progress for to make

progress would be to escape the grip of the “… hereditary vice of making something just to

unmake it” p.387. The pointless activities gain the status of a time that turns on itself, not

stopping nor going anywhere. Time has turned on itself so much that Sofia Santa de la Piedad,

family member/retainer, in her old age, looks after children whom she can’t place, whether as her

grand or great grand children. In fact the narrator tells us this stasis reflects “… a history of the

Buendia family was a machine with un avoidable repetitions, turning a wheel that would have

gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the

axle”, p.402.

On the other hand, Ursula the founding mother, displays total consciousness of the passage of

time and its stasis. When she visits her son Colonel Aureliano Buendia in prison and he

questions her about the physical changes that have occurred to the members of the family and to

the rest of Macondo, Ursula in response observes, “…time passes” as it must for the individual

as it does for the society. She does not halt time, she resists its effects on her. We are told, “… in

spite of time, of superimposed periods of mourning, and her accumulated afflictions, Ursula

resisted growing old” p.15. She is the observer who participates but stands out of the circle and

so notes what time is doing or not doing to her and her family. She says, “I know all of this by

heart, … it’s as if time had turned and we are at the beginning,” p.199. Eternally observant,

Ursula is bewildered by the unnaturalness of “new time”. She notes a progressive break down of

time and says “…the years these days don’t pass the way the old ones used to do”p.51. Her

memory of previous passage(s) of time do not coincide with present time and we are told, “…
the truth was that Ursula resisted growing old, even when she had lost count of her age”p.251.

She re-invents herself by employing and marshalling her energies into masking her decrepitude.

Her clumsiness is not a victory of old age and darkness but a sentence passed by time, a cruel

time that sees her “… swallowing over a century of conformity”p.257.However, whatever

ravages of time that Ursula had to bear are nullified by her knowledge of when she will die, a

death she postpones to clean the house! With certainty she declares, “I’m only waiting for the

rain to stop in order to die” p.327, a rain that had been falling for almost five years. Real time I

presume!

The upsetting of regular effect of time on humans is clearest on the brief life of Remedios the

Beauty. A child bride to Colonel Aureliano Buendia, she never breaks out of her naturally child-

like cocoon. She remains the eternal child despite the adult role she had to grow into. Again

belying the passage of time, Remedios does not die, she ascends into heaven, a rare feat indeed.

Her life thus takes a definitive but different path to getting on, passing on and passing through

the world, a time out of time, a hiatus that functions to break the natural life cycle.

Lastly this paper would not be complete without considering Aureliano Segundo, great grandson

to the founding father Jose Arcadio Buendia. He typifies slow motion. During the nearly five

years of continuous rain in Macondo, he lives life at a pace slower than normal. He became

extremely sluggish, taking longer than expected to respond to crises whether at home or at his

concubinage. Petra Cortes his concubine sends word that his animals were drowning in the

incessant rain but he “… answered that there was no rush, the situation was not alarming… there

was plenty time to think of something when it cleared. …there is nothing to be done…others will

be born when it clears” p.326. When eventually he goes to Petra’s house, Aureliano stays there
“…more than three months … because he needed all that time to make the decision to throw the

piece of oilcloth back over his head”. An incredible time wastage indeed!

WORKS CITED

Angulo, Maria-Elena. Magic Realism: Social Context and Discourse. New York: Garland

Publishing, Inc, 1995.

Berquo, Eliza and Peter Xenos (eds). Family Systems and Cultural Change. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1992.

Fuentes, Carlos. ‘Garcia Marquez: the Second Reading’. Introduction to the Everyman’s Library

Edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1998.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa.

Introduced by Carlos Fuentes. London: David Campbell Publishers, 1998.

Minta, Stephen. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Writer of Colombia. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.

Ryder, Norman B.’The Centrality of Time in the Study of the Family’. In Berquo, E. and

P.Xenos (eds). Family Systems and Cultural Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Sherwood, Rena. ‘Time in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’

http://www.helium.com./items/1985339-time -in-one-hundred-years-of-solitude
Barbara Chiedza Manyarara lectures in English language and literature courses in Curriculum

and Arts Education at the University of Zimbabwe as well as at the Catholic University in

Zimbabwe.