4 - Writers and magicians

Summary

The great city will be quite desolate Of its inhabitants not one will remain.

Nostradamus

Memories of the future

Writing is a form of seeing with the memory (although it is other things as well), and it pursues this activity by finding the future in the past, retracing the road of hindsight. All historical narratives do this to some degree, could scarcely manage without it, but the discovery of pointed promises is also something of a trick: an optical illusion which answers a real need, what Wallace Stevens would call a necessary fiction. García Márquez' vivid display of the need and the trick centres on the notion of destiny and some interestingly related verbal forms.

In the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude we hear not only of ice and a firing squad and a rank, but of a future act of memory: ‘Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember’. In the first chapter alone we are told that José Arcadio Buendía's sons ‘were to remember for the rest of their lives’ the solemnity with which he announced his discovery that the earth was round [12: 14]; that Aureliano ‘was to remember for the rest of his life’. Melquíades as he was one hot afternoon telling his fantastic stories [13: 15]; that the smell of a spilt chemical ‘would stay for ever’ in Úrsula's mind [13: 16]. José Arcadio Buendía himself ‘would have liked to invent a memory machine’ to register all the attractions the gypsies bring [22: 24].