I am feeling clownish and ridiculous in my interpretations, unworthy of analysis of this great book that I in ignorance somehow justify in applying to my own small self. My thoughts are amateur and self-serving, and I am missing the bigger picture, the history, the meaning.
In focusing on the characters, I see their strength, and yet it is difficult to understand them. I am beginning to doubt my perception and comprehension of them as people, but have not as yet discovered their secret, what they represent in Marquez’s mind as well as in those of higher intellect that perhaps have shared this wisdom and simple searching on our new web of life’s information would indeed repair my broken window and present the view.
"The house was suddenly filled with unknown guests, with invincible and worldly carousers, and it became necessary to add bedrooms off the courtyard, widen the dining room, and exchange the old table for one that held sixteen people, with new china and silver, and even then they had to eat lunch in shifts."
The train, the odd Mr. Herbert and his love of the bananas, the outgoing and lusty Aureliano Segundo, have all brought to Macondo a drastic change by welcoming an inflow of people from all over the world. Amaranta is scandalized. Fernanda is humbled. Colonel Aureliano Buendia goes deeper into the cave of his workshop. But Ursula simply buys more food, accomodating the different tastes of the foreigners who descend upon her home.
These are no longer simple people with an unreal ability to adapt to upheaval of their lives that rivals the absurdities of Candide. They stand for more than I am reading into them. My friend Neha may be right in her assessment of character as vehicle of a greater meaning. But I am at a loss to peel off their clothing and see the nakedness for what it is.
"Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague. She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more inpenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities. She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home."
I like Remedios for her innocence and free spirit. She cuts off her flowing hair and shaves her head. Still, she is even more irresistible to men. She has the lack of emotion of all the Buendias, yet remains ignorant of her powers, and while she adapts as easily as the rest, it is a leap ahead she takes to retain her self, plotted out to protect her own private sphere of solitude.
How can my feeble efforts to understand her, to understand those around her, around me, have any value to any but myself? What am I missing in my box of tools of reading? Am I using a hammer to smash a bubble instead of using a pin?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
What am I missing in my box of tools of reading?
You could also ask this question: what are you looking for? In Remedios you’ve found something interesting, something essential. Write it: there is something essential in Remedios. She’s the Beauty. But beauty has been ringed with jewels, tapped with gold foil. One key is the idea of the “baroque,” an idea which was infused in Latin America by the Spanish: take a look at some 16th, 17th century representations of beauty. That’s what Remedios is not. This is another kind of solitude: she is not what others are: she is other and alien to what has become common. She is immutable.
So, what is real beauty?
With Marquez, it is foolish not to pick up on his hints that are boldly repeated (Begonias, people. Remember them for you’ll need them later; begonias.) And it is as obvious with Remedios’ love of running around naked as well as her beauty (Remedios the Beauty). Especially in contrast to Spanish Baroque (I’m a picture framer, remember?). But while I believe her beauty is what separates her to form her shell of solitude, even without the trappings most other women must depend upon, I believe it is more than a question of what is real beauty, or natural unadorned. Mainly because while everyone sees her as a beauty, the men who die for it are not exactly high in intellect nor see her in a philosophical view of beauty. There’s a deeper meaning here that applies to the human race and I almost tend to think it leads towards the irrefutable perfection that we all seek, whether it be intellectual or one of mere understanding of life–beauty as life perhaps, simple (as is Remedios) and pure. And, unreachable except perhaps through death.
So you’re claiming here that Remedio’s draw is really the draw of death . . . for men, that she’s somehow calling them back to an ultimate mystery? She is desired because men desire to die in her?
No, not really, although I think that death may be the ultimate achieving of what is sought, or rather, the only way to achieve what is sought–or maybe not ever achieved at all, but the focus is in the striving. I think Remedios represents perfection — whether it be knowledge, the mystery of life, the extreme ends of whatever each individual seeks for himself, and sees in her. Whatever draws a man to her, he draws from her as well: “What no member of the family ever knew was that Remedios the Beauty gave off a breath of perturbation, a tormenting breeze that was still perciptible several hours after she had passed by.”
This would describe the attraction, an obsessive need. Then this, when the peeper on the roof as she bathes, falls through and crashes to the ground: “The foreigners who heard the noise in the dining room and hastened to remove the body noticed the suffocating odor of Remedios the Beauty on his skin. It was so deep in his body that the cracks in his skull did not give off blood but an amber-colored oil that was impregnated with that secret perfume, and then they understood that the smell of Remedios the Beauty kept on torturing men beyond death, right down to the dust of their bones.”
Let’s say it’s knowledge one seeks…one has gained (been impregnated with) whatever has been gained in that lifetime. With my leanings toward reincarnation, the seeking continues on. She is elusive. No one ever really gets her (therefore, it is not mere sexual lust that drives them, or copulation would be the culmination that is sought). It could be anything, knowledge, fame, fortune, that she represents to them, but it is never achieved in a lifetime. Never satisfied fully. Blue balls or death. That’s the question.