In his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, Colombian Nobel Prize in Literature winner (1982), Gabriel García Márquez, portrays the disintegration of all the markers of a society. A society struggling with its own shortcomings, the loss of meaning with the passing of time, and the planned disappearance of the context in which it is immersed, namely the fictional tiny South American village called Macondo, which limits ultimately turn out to be those of the world as a whole.
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A challenging but powerful narrative
From the outset, the reader of the novel realizes that the narrative presented to them will be neither linear nor chronological, but rather circular or even concentric, so much so that time cannot be apprehended with conventional analytical tools. The incipit itself attests to the temporal telescoping from the start: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Indeed, the narrative voice ceaselessly composes, decomposes, and recomposes the fabric of the story through countless tales of hostilities, wars, and massacres intimately linked to the history of Colombia itself. These stories intersect, diverge, repeat, lose sight of one another, find each other again, converse, bounce back and repel each other, and so on. The fundamental material this narrative voice deals with is the labyrinth of a family tree spanning seven generations, that of the Buendía family, with 24 representatives who, like Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, are all bound by the same flaws – namely, stupidity, superstition, repeating the same mistakes – and are condemned to remain prisoners of their irrational fears, to live in incest, and to endure a solitude of a hundred years. Despite the impression of lives unfolding and evolving, these family members actually fatefully repeat cycles of disasters, leading them inexorably to their extinction, as well as that of their village. Time is therefore utterly frozen, even though it moves forward and persistently wreaks continuous destruction.
Macondo is, moreover, a village cut off from the world. Living in entropy. But does being closed in on oneself mean living? Regardless, the reader watches in amazement as this village, seemingly emerging out of nowhere, appears to experience a happy, even magical era at the very beginning, especially since its sole connection to the outside world is a tribe of gypsies who approach it every year to sell objects of all kinds. The leader of the gypsies, a kind of wise sorcerer named Melquíades, utters a series of enigmatic prophecies written on parchments regarding the village and its founders: José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán (who will live for a hundred years), two married cousins despite the threat that their offspring will be born with a pig’s tail. Which will not happen.
On the question of eternal recurrence
Soon, the plagues of insomnia, forgetfulness, and aphasia descend upon the village. But also, violence, massacres, and natural cataclysms fill the passing decades. Generations take part, one after another, in various wars, losing much and gaining some, leaving the village and returning, but never losing sight of the need to decipher Melquíades’ prophecies.
On the threshold of a hundred years, the last descendant, Aureliano (first names also repeat themselves throughout the generations), has an affair with his aunt returning from Brussels, Amaranta Ursula. From this liaison, a child with a pig’s tail is born. The original threat eventually materializes. Amaranta Ursula dies in childbirth, the newborn dies, devoured by carnivorous ants, while Aureliano, alone in a deserted village, finishes deciphering the gypsy leader’s parchments and understands, in extremis and in a remarkable mise en abyme, that the history of the Buendia family was written in advance, that it ends there with his own imminent disappearance and the equally imminent disappearance of Macondo.
On the question of eternal recurrence
If we happen to recall Nietzsche’s quote from The Gay Science, we who are not afflicted by the plague of forgetfulness or aphasia like the inhabitants of Macondo: “And if one day or night, a demon were to stealthily creep into your loneliest solitude and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live and have lived, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, and all in the same order and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’”, it will then be necessary to acknowledge that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel illustrating the concept of “eternal recurrence”. This concept is one of the cornerstones of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought, which he inherits from the Stoic philosophers. These philosophers, indeed, were convinced of the cyclical nature of the universe’s life and, by extension, of everything that lives within it as well. Does not Epictetus himself assert, following this idea, that everything that happens has already happened and will happen again, an assertion that we now know is at the very heart of the theory on the phenomenon of entanglement in quantum physics?
Beyond the observation of the cyclicality of seasons, such as the cyclicality of animal and human life (daily and in its entirety), of human activities like the economy or financial markets, beyond the cyclical movement of the moon, the earth, the hands of a clock, etc., “eternal recurrence” marks the return of the same or the return to the same. Although humanity has reached the 21st century, the Sapiens from 300,000 years ago still haunts mankind: predation, violence, conquests, score-settling, defense of property, abductions, hunting, fighting, homicide, etc. Everything that characterizes primates is always ready to resurface. For many researchers, moreover, there is no reason to think that current behaviors are different from those of the Middle Paleolithic. One only has to look at the current world to be convinced.
If we return to Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, we might think that there, at least, despite the proven cyclicity, the hundred years of solitude, calamities, animosities, etc., have an end for both man and the village of Macondo, which vanish definitively, as in an implosion of the “samsara”, to use the Buddhist lexicon, referring to the eternal cycle of successive existences, subject to suffering, pain, selfishness, and ignorance, and sanctioned by “karma”. However, this implosion is truly magical, in a story where levitations, resurrections, reincarnations, and children with pig’s tails coexist without any strangeness. The magical is characteristic of the imagination, not of reality. Thus, it is impossible, in our reality, to believe we are at the end of our disasters.
And yet, according to philosopher and historian Patrick Wolting, a specialist in Nietzsche’s works, the concept of “eternal recurrence” should be summarized by this single injunction to humanity: “Lead your life so that you may wish it to repeat itself eternally.” Regrettably, this injunction seems incomprehensible or even inaudible on the scale of human societies.
