“Fernanda worried whether or not [Aureliano Segundo] might not falling into the vice of building so that he could take apart, like Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his little gold fishes, Amaranta and her shroud… José Arcadio and the parchments and Ursula and her memories.”
-One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabrial García Marquez, p321
We all suspect our families of cursing us with certain traits. I have a friend whose family is prone to producing lawyers and teachers. The twin spectres of alcoholism and mental illness run in other bloodlines. Marquez’s 1967 novel deals with the “cursed” Buendía family and the peculiar types of solitude in which the members live.
Building in order to destroy can be seen in One Hundred Years of Solitude as a nostrum for the traumas the cursed brothers and sisters suffer in the world outside their ancestral home. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, exhausted by an un-winnable war, traps himself in a cycle of creation, destruction, and renewal. Each day he makes a small golden fish pendant, which he then melts down in order to make a new one. The rhythmic, cyclical nature of his action brings to mind the image of a mental patient rocking themselves. It is a pointless, lulling physical action, so in comitting himself to it, Aureliano abandons reason. His sister, Amaranta, is unlucky in love. She delays her death by weaving and unpicking her own funeral shroud.
The eloquence of this quote for me comes from the fact that until this point in the novel, the casual reader probably hasn’t drawn parallels between the family members’ various endeavours. Then, suddenly, the little golden fish, the winding funeral shroud, the continual rebuilding of the house, become one and the same thing. It is a reminder of what families are: regeneration. As each member dies, new members marry in and bear children. This quote is Marquez’s way of unifying his themes and motifs: the cyclical nature of time, family, and building to destroy.
