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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Solitude of Alexander Von Humboldt
When critics attempt to account for the genesis of Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (a sort of Genesis text in its own right), there are two ready-to-hand narratives they can employ: first, the young Gabriel faithfully transcribing his grandmother’s fabulist stories, thereby producing a “magic realist” literary modernism out of humble beginnings, and, second, the “Faulknerian revolution” story that Pascal Casanova has been putting forward. In interviews, García Márquez has contributed liberally to both narratives. But here’s another source text, from the second volume of Alexander Von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804:
“We found at Calabozo, in the midst of the Llanos, an electrical machine with large plates, electrophori, batteries, electrometers; an apparatus nearly as complete as our first scientific men in Europe possess. All these articles had not been purchased in the United States; they were the work of a man who had never seen any instrument,who had no person to consult, and who was acquainted with the phenomena of electricity only by reading the treatise of De Lafond,and Franklin’s Memoirs. Senor Carlos del Pozo, the name of this enlightened and ingenious man, had begun to make cylindrical electrical machines, by employing large glass jars, after having cut off the necks. It was only within a few years he had been able to procure, by way of Philadelphia, two plates, to construct a plate machine, and to obtain more considerable effects. It is easy to judge what difficulties Senor Pozo had to encounter, since the first works upon electricity had fallen into his hands, and that he had the courage to resolve to procure himself, by his own industry, all that he had seen described in his books. Till now he had enjoyed only the astonishment and admiration produced by his experiments on persons destitute of all information, and who had never quitted the solitude of the Llanos; our abode at Calabozo gave him a satisfaction altogether new. It may be supposed that he set some value on the opinions of two travellers who could compare his apparatus with those constructed in Europe. I had brought with me electrometers mounted with straw, pith-balls, and gold-leaf; also a small Leyden jar which could be charged by friction according to the method of Ingenhousz,and which served for my physiological experiments. Senor del Pozo could not contain his joy on seeing for the first time instruments which he had not made, yet which appeared to be copied from his own. We also showed him the effect of the contact of heterogeneous metals on the nerves of frogs. The name of Galvani and Volta had not previously been heard in those vast solitudes.”
Maybe García Márquez’ Spanish-language commentators know all about this (and I, like Senor Pozo, am reinventing the wheel from the periphery) but I can’t seem to find any references to the passage. And the parallels between José Arcadio Buendía and the Senor Carlos del Pozo are striking, as is the use of “solitude” to describe their thwarted desires to be on the cutting edge of scientific discovery. In the novel itself, there’s even a hat-tip to Von Humboldt, when the groping monologues of the senile Melquíades repeatedly return to the name of that 19th century explorer and the words equinox, itself an Humboldtian trope. But only one.
Comments
This a fabulous find, Smurov—thanks for sharing it.
Smurov—Jay Corwin, a Spanish professor who teaches in New Zealand, published a brief, Spanish-language monograph on the sources of *100 Years*. He discusses Von Humboldt.
I believe that it is Von Humboldt who wrote that, due to the extreme humidity of the South America forests, no written document can survive more than 100 years—which suggested to Marquez the idea of a small community losing track of its history due to its environment, its atmosphere.
That’s useful. Von Humboldt also notes, interestingly, that “Sad experience taught us but too late, that from the sultry humidity of the climate, and the frequent falls of the beasts of burden, we could preserve neither the skins of animals hastily prepared, nor the fishes and reptiles placed in phials filled with alcohol.” So, while humidity destroys anything written in the region, ironically the only thing this naturalist actually *can* bring back is a text about the region.
As for Garcia-Marquez, I wonder in what way this passage provokes him, whether he thinks such isolation and loss of history is a good thing or not (the ending of the novel, where history is destroyed, is pretty ambiguous). For Humboldt, it is not, I think, though he’s very interested by the indigenous creation that such isolation makes possible: the passage on the “electricity machine” is followed by a long excursis on the electric eel, and the prospect of scientific exploration coming from the periphery rather than the centers of scientific learning (Franklin, etc) clearly fascinates him.
Interpretations and critiques of OHYS in Spanish and English are both lacking in certain respects, including the points you have made above. I did publish comments on this in 1997 along with an outline of the Chibcha mythology and its inclusion in the novel via the main characters (jose arcadio buendia, ursula iguaran, melquiades, pilar ternera), the incorporation of El Dorado and fundamental elements of the Guajiro mythology and particularly their burial ritual which includes cleansing of the bones of the deceased which are kept in a canvas bag (vs. Michel Perrin, Le chemin des indiens morts). The short version is that there is no biblical myth in OHYS, it is nearly all derived from local indigenous sources. If you are interested you can email me and I would be glad to send you an article addressing these things in English. Best wishes.