Case Study: Execution in One Hundred Years of Solitude
I am begging you to notice that execution is a double-entendre.
As I write this, half of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s heartbending and mindbreaking masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, still lays out before me. But it compels me to write a little about it.
If you haven’t read Solitude (or if you’re my mom and you haven’t read this far into the book—about page 120) be forewarned of spoilers. Although I am starting to think that spoilers in good books are an oxymoron.
I’ve done a few of these before.1 My method is simple. I read something that makes me go, “wow, how’d they do that?” Then I transcribe it—this tedious part is important for the analysis, the inculcation, and the typing practice. Then I write how they did that to my best approximation.
I’ll set the stage for you: Arcadio is a less-major character in Solitude, the grandson of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula, two of the founders of a town called Macondo near a swamp in the jungle. He doesn’t know that his father is José Arcadio, one of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula’s two sons; he thinks he is their third son.
A war has broken out. Aureliano, the other of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula’s two sons, becomes a leader of the Liberal rebels. When he charges off to war, he leaves Arcadio, a young, vastly intelligent radical and schoolmaster, in charge of the town. Arcadio becomes a tyrant.
When the Conservatives come to sack Macondo, Arcadio keeps his men fighting well past reason. All of them die. Thus his court-martial and execution.
Three other characters mentioned in this part that the reader would absolutely know but you can’t: Melquiades, a wizardly gypsy and Macondo’s “greatest patron;” Remedios Moscote, Aureliano’s wife who died tragically not long after their marriage; and Rebeca, an adopted Buendía and wife of José Arcadio, whose property overlooks the cemetery.
Page 118
At dawn, after a summary court-martial, Arcadio was shot against the wall of the cemetery. In the last two hours of his life he did not manage to understand why the fear that had tormented him since childhood had disappeared. Impassive, without even worrying about making a show of his recent bravery, he listened to the interminable charges of the accusation. He thought about Úrsula, who at that hour must have been under the chestnut tree having coffee with José Arcadio Buendía. He thought about his eight-month-old daughter, who still had no name, and about the child who was going to be born in August. He thought about Santa Sofía de la Piedad, whom he had left the night before salting down a deer for next day’s lunch, and he missed her hair pouring over her shoulders and her eyelashes, which looked as if they were artificial. He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most. The president of the court-martial began his final speech when Arcadio realized that two hours had passed. “Even if the proven charges did not have enough merit,” the president was saying, “the irresponsible and criminal boldness with which the accused drove his subordinates on to a useless death would be enough to deserve capital punishment.” In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.
“Tell my wife,” he answered in a well-modulated voice, “to give the girl the name of Úrsula.” He paused and said it again: “Úrsula, like her grandmother. And tell her also that if the child that is to be born is a boy, they should name him José Arcadio, not for his uncle, but for his grandfather.”
Before they took him to the execution wall Father Nicanor tried to attend him. “I have nothing to repent,” Arcadio said, and he put himself under the orders of the squad after drinking a cup of black coffee. The leader of the squad, a specialist in summary executions, had a name that had much more about it than chance: Captain Roque Carnicero, which meant butcher. On the way to the cemetery, under the persistent drizzle, Arcadio saw that a radiant Wednesday was breaking out on the horizon. His nostalgia disappeared with the mist and left an immense curiosity in its place. Only when they ordered him to put his back to the wall did Arcadio see Rebeca, with wet hair and a pink flowered dress, opening wide the door. He made an effort to get her to recognize him. And Rebeca did take a casual look toward the wall and was paralyzed with stupor, barely able to react and wave good-bye to Arcadio. Arcadio answered her the same way. At that instant the smoking mouths of the rifles were aimed at him and letter by letter he heard the encyclicals that Melquiades had chanted and he heard the lost steps of Santa Sofía de la Piedad, a virgin, in the classroom, and in his nose he felt the same icy hardness that had drawn his attention in the nostrils of the corpse of Remedios. “Oh, God damn it!” he managed to think. “I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios.” Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life. The captain gave the order to fire. Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from.
“Bastards!” he shouted. “Long live the Liberal party!”
The very first thing García Márquez does in this passage is tell us exactly what’s going to happen. Arcadio will be court-martialed and executed. García Márquez immediately moves us into the last two hours of his life, the focus of the passage. What matters is how Arcadio died, not that he died, García Márquez’s allotment of words shows us (15 words to tell us that Arcadio dies, and then 674 to tell us how).
And García Márquez tells us how with a grace that stuns me. Novelist Sue Miller said, “What I strive for in my writing (and what I tell my students to work for) is not feeling. As a writer, you do not want to write feelings. You want to fabricate understanding so the reader can come into the work and then feel what he feels.” García Márquez writes no feelings. He fabricates understanding so we can feel what Arcadio feels.
Instead of listening to the charges, which he considers farcical, Arcadio “thinks” of his people. This word choice from García Márquez (and translator Gregory Rabassa) evokes no sentimentality, foists no feelings on the reader. It’s a statement of fact. He doesn’t lament over, imagine, envision, fantasize or romance about. No adornments like mournfully, regretfully, nostalgically, or sadly tell us what he’s feeling; they are unnecessary. In that vacancy we can infer the feelings Arcadio has: numbed, perhaps, melancholy or resigned. The reader’s interpolation of those feelings makes them stronger than if García Márquez had told us they were there.
After—only after—the narrator has given us an opportunity to place these feelings does he recapitulate: “He thought about his people without sentimentality,” and he also forwards the significance of what Arcadio is doing in a way that we could not interpret on our own, “with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most.”
That first paragraphs awes me not only because of how it communicates Arcadio’s state of mind and self-denial, but how it gives us exposition necessary to appreciate Arcadio’s final request. We learn he has an unnamed daughter and his wife is expecting and we learn the names of his grandparents (whom he thinks are his parents). This gives his final request, what his children should be named, significance and immediacy. Not only is it practical, reminding the reader who Arcadio’s parents are, but it gives us insight to Arcadio’s state of mind. Yet you must know if you’ve read the book up to this point who Arcadio’s parents are and that he has a daughter and his wife is expecting. So while the statements that Arcadio “thinks” about these people function as exposition and reminders, their purpose is to give his final request immediacy. He is “beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most.”
Ursula had recently humiliated him. She deposed his reign over Macondo by spanking him. Yet he wants his daughter to carry her name. (She won’t; but the gesture matters. In a twist of irony, the family will intuit Arcadio’s wish that his next child should be named Remedios if a girl and give the daughter that name instead, his next children, twins, will be José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo, and their names will imbue the two with fateful powers and characteristics). In the world García Márquez has created, names matter. Why, the executioner’s name means butcher.
The immediacy of Arcadio’s thoughts—just before he gives his final wish he has been thinking about these people he thought he hated—fabricates the feeling, as Sue Miller would say, for the reader.
“Oh, God damn it!” he managed to think. “I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios.”
Futility refrains throughout the passage. The president finds that Arcadio “ ‘drove his subordinates on to a useless death’ ” while Arcadio “found the formality of death ridiculous” and insists through the narrator that death doesn’t even matter to him. He informs Father Nicanor he has nothing to repent (an absurd statement from a Catholic, even a renounced one). We will find, though, at the end of this passage that death does scare him, that Arcadio, as he always has, is putting on a brave face (even as he insists he isn’t).
García Márquez shows us how Arcadio’s bravado cracks. “Arcadio saw that a radiant Wednesday was breaking out on the horizon” and like mist his nostalgia—the etymology of which is the pain of homecoming—evaporates to “curiosity.” What is Arcadio curious about, though? What death is like, I’d guess. I’d guess also that “curiosity” is an intermediary emotion for him between nostalgia and fear. He’s starting to wonder, and worry about, what death will be like.
Because what happens next is so quotidian, and under different circumstances would be comical, it evokes pity: here is an awkward, mundane thing Arcadio will do for the last time: try to get the attention of a friend from a distance. Rebeca takes a “casual” look and barely has time to register what she’s seeing—that Arcadio is about to die, and he is waving to her. Tension here for the reader. We already know Arcadio’s about to die—the narrator told us that 514 words ago—but will he get Rebeca’s attention before he goes, or will he be shot as he waves dumbly? Arcadio is not a venerable person, but I don’t want him to die while acting a buffoon.
Now García Márquez repeats the astonishing technique of getting us to feel. Without adornment, he describes Arcadio’s sensory experience of three moments in his life: Melquiades chanting, which would push him along the path of the intellectual; Santa Sofía de la Piedad’s footsteps presaging their first carnal encounter and the smell of Remedios’s suddenly-dead corpse.
He lets the reader ruminate over why Arcadio would think of these moments as he dies. Thoughts before death are a theme running throughout the story—as are firing squads; the famous first line of the book is, “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.” The answer is simple, these are the moments these people became important to Arcadio, these people he thought he hated.
And then we get the tragedy. Again, we already know that Arcadio is about to die. The tragedy is how he dies. We flirted with this tension with Rebeca—will she notice Arcadio saying good-bye to her?—but that was resolved. Now his senses have reminded Arcadio of something he forgot to do: “ ‘Oh, God damn it!’ ” he managed to think. ‘I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios.’ ” He won’t have a chance to express this final wish; the guns are already aimed at him. It’s time to go. Realizing this, his defenses crack. “Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life.” And though he feels the terror, at least Arcadio gets the dignity of standing upright and as he goes, defiantly exclaiming, “ ‘Long live the Liberal party!’ ”
What are your thoughts on Arcadio? Have I convinced you to read One Hundred Years of Solitude yet?2 What the hell more do I have to do? Thanks for reading.
See How to Write a Gripping First Chapter or How to Write Better Similes for more
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