I WAS REREADING ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE WHEN a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaisons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil’s major characters: Ulrich, his sister Agathe, Walter, his wife, Clarisse, and Diotima; and Schweik; and Kafka’s protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason—to erase the infant from his life—that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the art of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the “only real subject,” the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go, and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others; they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.
Don Quixote dies and the novel is over; that ending is so perfectly definitive only because Don Quixote has no children; with children, his life would be prolonged, imitated or contested, defended or betrayed; a father’s death leaves the door open; in fact so we are told ever since our own childhood: your life will continue in your children, children are your immortality. But if my story can go on beyond my own life, that means that my life is not an independent entity; it means it is unfinished, unfulfilled; it means there is something utterly concrete and earthly into which the individual blends, agrees to blend, consents to be lost in: family, posterity, tribe, nation. It means that the individual person, as “ground for everything,” is an illusion, a gamble, the dream of a few European centuries.
With García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the art of the novel seems to emerge from that dream; the center of attention is no longer an individual but a procession of individuals; they are each original, inimitable, and yet each of them is merely the brief flash of a sunbeam on the swell of a river; each of them carries with him his future forgotten self, and each is conscious of that, none of them remains on the novel’s stage from beginning to end; the mother of the whole tribe, Old Ursula, is 120 when she dies, and that’s a long time before the book ends; and all the characters have similar names—Arcadio José Buendía, José Arcadio, José Arcadio the Second, Aureliano Buendía, Aureliano the Second—such that the edges between them blur and the reader confuses them. To all appearances the era of European individualism is no longer their era. But then what is their era? An era that goes back to America’s Indian past? Or some future era when the human individual will blend into the human anthill? I sense that this novel, which is an apotheosis of the art of the novel, is at the same time a farewell to the age of the novel.