Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in Garda Marquez

Abstract

History is full of telling coincidences. So it is with the year 1928. Jose Eustacio Rivera, until then Colombia's greatest novelist, was dying that year-and across the country, in Aracataca, a woman was giving birth to a man-child who would surpass Rivera's literary achievements Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rivera's major novel, The Vortex, had ended with the famous words: Y se los devoro' la selva"and the jungle devoured them," referring to protagonists engulfed by the ferocious, neverforgiving alien land of Latin America. Though nature would certainly be a brooding presence in the future works of Garcia Marquez, his fundamental obsession was extremely different from Rivera's: to find out why history had devoured his people, history, the entity that men and women supposedly make and that should, at least in principle, be the territory where they exercise some command over their lives, hammer out some recognizable image of themselves. But in that same year, 1928, remotely, perhaps ironically, echoing the cries of labor of Gabriel's mother, an act was being committed that would express, if not radically symbolize, how far Colombians were from deciding their own destiny. Hundreds, some estimates say thousands, of workers were being massacred by government troops in the town of Cienaga-an incident which would serve Garcia Marquez as the basis for one of the most dramatic incidents of his fictitious village of Macondo, an incident which leads to Macondo's irrevocable decline and decadence, as if from that moment onward it would be impossible for its inhabitants to even dream of controlling their own existence. In fact, in the novel, it is only after the massacre that nature begins to encroach upon them, Rivera-like. What had been a paradisiacal climate turns to horror-almost half a decade of rain followed by ten years more of absolute drought. That rain, however, is not an objective, neutral force that develops independently of peoples' lives or wills, outside humanity. Not only is the downpour, in One