The Duality of Karl in The Beet Queen

In Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen, mythology, both Eastern and Western, is infused with the text. Erdrich includes Nordic, Hindu, Christian, Greek and Native American mythology, and even combines them. This intertextuality is dominant throughout the book, and is especially noticeable in the character of Karl. Karl’s nature and being demonstrate a dualism found in Greek and Christian mythology in particular. It is through Karl’s duality that the intertext of his character is fully developed.

Karl’s character can be related to Greek mythology in the forms of Pan and Dionysus. Though his origin is unclear, some myths tell that Pan is abandoned by his mother, just as Karl is. It is because of Pan’s monstrous form that his mother abandons him. Similarly, Dionysus never meets his real mother who is killed by his father, Zeus, and taken from the womb to be born a second time from Zeus’ leg. After his birth, Zeus turns him into a goat in order to further conceal Dionysus from Hera (Souli 50). Karl is also born out of an adulterous relationship. The dual nature of both Dionysus and Pan can be partly defined in their half animal, half human form. Though not half animal, Karl reflects dualism in his gender. When he first meets Giles Saint Ambrose on the train, Giles says, “You’re a girl, aren’t you?” and even when Karl denies it, Giles doesn’t seem to understand (23). Karl decides that he is attracted to Giles, and when they begin to kiss, Giles realizes, “You’re no girl,” [. . .] then he kissed Karl on the throat and began to touch him in a new way” (25). Both Pan and Dionysus engaged in and encouraged promiscuous sex. Pan was very sexually active with both nymphs and young boys alike (Souli 56). It is through this duality in both gender and sexuality that intertext between myth and modern is developed.

Karl also shares characteristics with figures in Christianity. Both Lucifer and Jesus, though vastly different, each have dual natures. When Mary slides down the ice and cracks it at school, she says, “The pure gray fan of ice below the slide had splintered, on impact with my face, into the shadowy white likeness of my brother Karl” (39). Everyone else, with the exception of Celestine, sees the face of Jesus. When Karl is an adult, he finds his brother Jude, who, not knowing Karl’s true identity, calls him, “the devil” (82). This presents another aspect of Karl’s duality: the nature of both good and evil residing in him. He is analogous to Jesus, perhaps subconsciously, in the eyes of one sibling, and analogous to the devil in the eyes of the other.

This duality, however, is best exemplified in Karl’s actions while in seminary. Karl tells the reader, “I had a great talent for obedience. I was in love with the picture of myself in a slim black cassock, and felt that the green lawns of the seminary and white brick of the chapels set me off to good advantage” (55). While Karl is putting forth this image of a holy seminary student, the advantage he refers to is that he can attract the attention of men whom he wants to sleep with. He admits, “Between the lines of sacred texts, I rendezvoused with thin hard hoboes who had slept in the bushes [. . .] they saw me as a pure black flame” (55). He is committing, in the eyes of the priests and his fellow students, a terrible sin while putting forth a holy image. In this same way, Lucifer was an angel, pure until he wanted to put himself on God’s throne. In his heart resided evil, although his exterior portrayed a holy being. Karl’s dual nature in this respect can even be compared to Jesus who, in Christian tradition, is believed to have been fully human and fully God. While Jesus himself committed no sin or evil, he was tempted and had the ability to; the natures of God and man can be equated to good and evil.

While Karl is not completely analogous to any one of these characters, he can be seen as a compilation of their traits. It is through the duality of Karl’s character that intertextuality exists in Karl. This creates an intertext not only between The Beet Queen and each cultural mythology but between all three in which Karl is one nexus for all three.

Works Cited

Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen. New York: Harper Perennial, 1986.

Souli, Sofia. Greek Mythology. Trans. Phillip Ramp. Athens: Editions Michalis Toubis S.A., 1995.

The Inescapability of Memory, or Why We Remember the Past and not the Future

In the epigraph of her ninth novel, Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood quotes a passage from Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: “Why do we remember the past, and not the future?” In reference to the novel, this quote raises two interesting questions. The first is with regard to the nature of time itself; Hawking asks why do we remember the past rather than why can we only remember the past, suggesting that it may be possible to somehow look into and thus remember the future. Hawking seems to suggest that knowing the future is somehow equal to the past. Thus, the second is rhetorical but vitally important in Elaine’s quest for identity: What is advantageous about the future? Throughout Elaine’s childhood, she is obsessed with women older than her—with guessing what she will be like once she’s older. In her fifties, Elaine cannot escape the effects of her past, is concerned with meeting the future version of Cordelia, and continues to question her own future in an attempt to answer these questions about the nature of time. It is through meeting Cordelia in the present that past, present, and future will become one.

From the first lines of the novel it is clear that the narrator, Elaine, is concerned with the properties of time. She tells the reader, “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once” (3). This sets the tone, the framework for the novel. The plot revolves around Elaine’s desire to exist in two places at once: not only to know her future when she is a child but to perhaps return to the past to make things different when she is an adult. The way she can do this is by encountering Cordelia in the present: Cordelia would then be the future version of the memory Elaine has of her. Elaine would like to see those two existences as one.

As a child, Elaine is fascinated with the older women she is surrounded with. She examines their dress, their mannerisms, their tone. In the early part of her life, Elaine’s mother is the only woman she knows. She has nothing to compare her to. Once the family moves to Toronto, Elaine makes friends and notes what she finds odd about them, and while she is fascinated by this new girl world she has been sucked into, she can’t help but notice her friends’ mothers and how different they are. She thinks, “it’s strange to think of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell lying in [the twin beds] at night,” when Carol shows Elaine her parents’ sleeping arrangement (56). She is told that “Grace’s mother has a bad heart” and she notes that “Mrs. Smeath is not like Mrs. Campbell [. . .] She doesn’t wear lipstick or face powder [. . .] She has big bones, square teeth [. . .] skin that looks rubbed raw” (63). She notes her clothes, her hands, every detail of her physical character. Mrs. Smeath clearly had a large impact on Elaine because Elaine painted, “many of her” as an adult (443). There are differences between Cordelia’s mother and her own: “Cordelia’s mother arranges the flowers herself, wearing gardening gloves. My own mother doesn’t arrange flowers” (78). Even her teacher, Miss Lumley, is subject to Elaine’s examination. This culminates in her imagining Miss Lumley’s underwear. That is all Elaine can think of: “The ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley’s invisible bloomers” (87). Elaine is “afraid of these bloomers” (87). Deep down, Elaine is really afraid of what she is going to become when she gets older. She does not particularly like the variety of older women she is surrounded with. She does not like or understand the world of girls she is now a part of, but she is trapped: she does not see a positive future for herself because that vision is a reflection of the women she is surrounded with.

It is not until her teenage years that Elaine begins to truly imagine what she will be like when she becomes an old woman. She and Cordelia watch the old ladies on the streetcars. Elaine admits that the crazy ones are “the kind we like best. They have a certain gaiety to them, a power of invention, they don’t care what people think” (5). Elaine, back in the present, thinks, “What if they just couldn’t see what they looked like? [. . .] I’m having that trouble myself now” (6). She wonders what Cordelia looks like now: “I think of Cordelia examining the growing pouches under her eyes [. . .] Perhaps in a worn coat and a knitted hat like a tea cosy, sitting on a curb, with two plastic bags filled with her only possessions, muttering to herself” (7). She has not seen Cordelia since their teenage years, thus an encounter such as this would be the only way for past and future to collide. Elaine is her future self: the self she cannot deny was shaped primarily by Cordelia, yet she does not know what Cordelia’s future self is like.

She cannot escape her past as she walks the streets of Toronto, a grown woman. She begs, “Get me out of this, Cordelia. I’m locked in. I don’t want to be nine years old forever” because it is Cordelia who left the greatest impression on her, especially during that year (437). The mystery of time is confusing to Elaine in this respect because she desperately wants to meet the future Cordelia. She is a memory, stuck in the past, perpetually young, yet Elaine tells the reader, “Really it’s Cordelia I expect, Cordelia I want to see” at her retrospective, but she never does (450). Elaine decides, “I’m headed for a future in which I sprawl propped in a wheelchair, shedding hair and drooling [. . .] While Cordelia vanishes and vanishes” (451-452). She wants her future to involve Cordelia just as her past had. Elaine calls herself “A reflection” of Cordelia: “We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key” (450). She believes she will find closure through meeting the future Cordelia because otherwise Cordelia will simply fade into the past, just the way her brother Stephen did after his death. When she accepts the fact that she will never see Cordelia again, she says, “This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea” (462). No matter how hard Elaine tries, she cannot remember the future the way she does the past. There is no way of knowing the future Cordelia.

The past plays a definitive role in the future; Elaine clearly experiences that. But it is the role of the future with which Elaine is most concerned. Her fixation on it continues to shape her even into adulthood. The cliché, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty” seems not to fit for Elaine. She does not look into the past to see clear answers, only more questions. Foresight is what she is after through meeting Cordelia: a collision of past, present, and future. In Elaine’s world, Hawking’s question then makes sense. Why shouldn’t we look into the future as we do the past?

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. New York: Random House, 1988.

We Will Divide and Pull Apart

It occurred to Jonas, upon seeing the future, that it was a mistake to tell his wife she no longer needed to inform him when throwing out any of his personal effects which she deemed junk. The nagging had become almost unbearable and that is why he chose the laziest way out possible.

“Don’t be disappointed if you lose something you think is important,” she warned him.

“It’s all important. That’s why I still have it,” he replied.

“You are a pack rat.”

“I’m a collector.”

Jonas knew the later was correct, but it was more than a simple matter of right and wrong. He did like to be right. But more than that, he didn’t want to think of himself as something as deplorable as a pack rat. He did have collections. There was his collection of CD jewel cases. Thousands of them. A jewel case for every CD he had ever bought since he was twelve. Many of them were cracked and broken because, although Jonas loved to hold on to things, he was never careful about it.

“Why do we need those?” his wife asked.

“They might be worth money someday.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, with the advent of mp3s and downloadable music, soon CDs will go the way of the vinyl record. Only collectors and true music fans will be interested in them. And records nowadays are worth more when they still have everything in tact. Everything, dear.”

“And how long until this music revolution?”

“Who knows? Could be a decade or more. But with the speed of technology nowadays, could be tomorrow.”

His collection of ticket stubs was much larger in number, though easier to contain and thus, keep out of his wife’s warpath. He kept them for the same reason he did the jewel cases. Someone might want them someday.

His collection of paper scraps was much less perceptible in its reasoning. He found his first scrap when rifling through photographs of a trip he took to Europe during his first summer out of college. He had not ever looked at them. His wife finally forced him look them over and discard any that he did not want. Stuck inside one of the envelopes was a receipt for gelato from a stand in Florence. This little piece of paper had some how miraculously made its way back six thousand miles from Italy to Jonas’s first apartment. Then to every apartment after that. And finally to his first house with his wife. He put it in a file folder and into the filing cabinet in their home office. It wasn’t because he thought someone would want it someday. It was proof that he had been somewhere. He had existed outside his normal life.

All of this was packed into a single filing cabinet in their home office. There were many more artifacts of course. Papers and things only Jonas knew the meaning of. For Jonas to explain the meaning was not enough to convince someone of their value. One would have to be Jonas. Recently, every time he placed a new item or set of items in the filing cabinet, it rumbled. Closing any of the doors now required the use of a sledgehammer. Jonas was certainly glad he invested in a durable material for his filing cabinet. He thought that it might be time to buy a second, but he decided he’d rather not spend the money.

The future (or vision) came to Jonas as he was watching Sport Center. He never watched Sport Center, and that was what he used to designate the experience as a vision. But it was real. The image of Stuart Scott’s talking head moved out of the screen.

“Honey?” Jonas mouthed.

No sound came out.

His wife was no longer on his plane of existence anyway.

Stuart Scott’s head detached itself from its body and floated out of the screen. In one single moment, future folded onto present. Stuart Scott’s head flattened, forehead to chin, folded in on itself, just as time had, and then imploded, taking everything with it. The T.V. was gone. The living room was gone. The street was gone. The city was gone. The mountains and trees were gone. The oceans were gone. Jonas floated, bodiless, through the void of space. Space was both black and white. All black and all white simultaneously. In this same instant, space and time were gone. Jonas had never been able to conceive of such a thing until that moment. He was sure no one had. Jonas could perceive that all these events had taken place in the same instant, though the idea of instant no longer had any meaning since the disappearance of time. The instant was now stretched forever in to eternity, no end and no beginning.

As quickly as everything had disappeared, it all came rushing back, faster than the speed of light. Space first, its emptiness pouring into the deeper, more complete nothing it had left behind. The sky began as a speck, a star in the distance, and exploded in a fireball of purple, orange, red, yellow and blue.

It looks like Sunset, Jonas thought. Jonas had never seen a sunset before. Only pictures. He knew that they occurred at the end of the day. He knew that they were colorful. But time was still absent. There was nothing to allow Jonas to locate what he was seeing in time, so what he saw was only sky and colors. He was thankful for the colors because he might not have been able to distinguish the sky from the oceans, which had now appeared. Mountains and trees blew out of the water. Then houses and streets slipped up out of the ground. They were two-dimensional at first, but popped into depth once free of the ground. Jonas was back on his couch. He sensed time coming back. Clear, waving lines, like heat rising off hot pavement, appeared and flooded his vision: like looking at the room underwater. Jonas was aware that everything was taking place in one instant, but now he was living the instant out what felt like minutes. He knew then that time had indeed returned. Once this realization hit him, a rushing sound, a great wind came into his ears and then suddenly stopped, snapping the all the lines into perfect clarity.

He turned his head to see his wife at the fireplace, burning pieces of paper.

—What are you doing? he asked.

—You gave me permission, remember?

—To burn paper?

She turned her head and glared at him.

—No, to dispose of anything I deem as junk. You’ve had these pictures, these ticket stubs, these scraps of paper for far too long. It’s time for them to go.

—But—

In another instant, everything Jonas witnessed during his journey to the future went in reverse before his eyes. But he did not have the luxury of experiencing the instant apart from time as he did before. In an amount of time not perceptible to the human mind, Jonas was back on the couch again. Stuart Scott’s head was back on Stuart Scott’s shoulders.

Jonas looked down at his hands. He had thought he felt his fingers leaving his hands once he realized what his wife was burning. It must have been because of the time warp, Jonas thought. It wasn’t, and Jonas knew that, but he did not want to admit it to himself. He removed himself from the couch and entered the kitchen to get some water. He felt the air brush against his face. He counted his steps to the kitchen in rhythm with the tick of the grandfather clock sitting in the hallway. The tile floor of the kitchen was cold, and Jonas was suddenly aware that he had feet. He reached out and felt the smooth wood of the cupboard. The glass he pulled out of it had a different texture. He moved his hand back and forth between the glass and the cupboard.

“What are you doing?” his wife asked, entering from the dining room.

“I’m—living,” Jonas replied.

“I see that.”

She took the cup from his hand and put under the faucet to fill it up for him. Jonas watched as the water poured out of the faucet and instantly expanded, filling the glass. He walked over to the sink, and took the glass from his wife’s hand. He poured out the contents, slowly, and then put the glass under the faucet again. He turned it on, first allowing only a few drops to exit and then a little more, his eyes fixed on the bottom of the glass. Again the water instantaneously expanded and filled the bottom of the glass. He poured it out and tried it again.

“What the hell are you doing?” his wife asked again.

“I want to see it happen. The water fill the cup.”

“Take your insanity somewhere else, please.”

“Where?”

“You know, your papers started overflowing out of the filing cabinet.”

“What do you mean overflowing?”

His wife explained that as she was trying to get the home office in some semblance of order, paper began to flow out of the filing cabinet, slowly like lava from a volcano. She took the broom from the closet in the hall and began to beat it back until it was once again contained.

“But it won’t last long,” she warned. “The only thing to do is burn it.”

“Why not just throw it out?”

“No, no. There’s much too much. There’s one hundred filing cabinet’s worth of—stuff—in that one cabinet.”

“Why don’t we buy another filing cabinet?”

“I’d rather not spend the money,” his wife replied, disconcerted.

“But a fire?”

“My mind is made up. You said—“

“I know what I said.”

Jonas walked back into the living room and out the front door.

On the porch, he noticed it was fall. The trees lining his street were all green, none having leaves that indicate the passing of time. Green year round. Jonas’ maple tree was different. It had all the corresponding colors of fall, and individual leaves drifted lethargically to the ground. A motionless fire consumed the tree. Jonas walked out to the maple that stood on the edge of his front yard. It rose two hundred feet and stretched its branches a span of forty feet. The base of the trunk protruded half way into the front yard, across the sidewalk and into the street. It was scarred from the saws and axes of men who had tried to cut it down. The street curved around it, as did the sidewalk. Jonas didn’t really like to think of it as his tree. It was there when he and his wife bought the house. It had always been there, Jonas assumed. The city obviously grew around it: and farmland and orchards must have before that. And Indian tribes before that. And who knows what before that. People sometimes came from other parts of the city to stare in awe at the motionless flames. It was the only tree like it in the whole city. The leaves this afternoon were almost too bright to look at, even with the sun concealed behind a dainty cloud, the only one in the sky. The sun was almost gone now. Jonas’ house faced the Western horizon. He watched as the sun moved from behind the cloud, the colors of the sky began to change and deepen, matching the colors of the tree. The maple tree grew brighter with the sun’s revealed light. Brighter and hotter. Jonas could no longer look at the tree, and he fell backwards from the heat. The fire took motion, and just as the sun disappeared, a bright flash appeared over the horizon, for a split second, igniting the tree. As quickly as the flash came, it disappeared. The tree was ablaze. The one dainty cloud, which had concealed the sun over the horizon, was now expanded into a thick, grey blanket over the city. A cold wind blew from the horizon. It swept across the city, rustling all the leaves off the trees. It put the fire out with no effort. A cloud of ash flew down the street, following after the wind. The maple tree was bare. It was now winter.

Snow began to fall. Jonas smelled smoke.

He walked back to the porch and into the house. It was freezing inside. Jonas went to the thermostat and turned it up as high as it would go. Through the kitchen and out the back window, he could see a fire in the compost heap. He ran out the back door and discovered his wife.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“You gave me permission, remember?”

“To burn paper?”

She turned her head and glared at him.

“No, to dispose of anything I deem as junk. You’ve had these pictures, these ticket stubs, these scraps of paper for far too long. It’s time for them to go.”

“But—“

“But nothing, Jonas,” she said sweetly, “The filing cabinet will no longer overflow. This is everything from it. It’s empty.”

“But, I—“

“Jonas. This is it.”

She picked up a shovel and began to scoop in mounds of paper. The stack was the width of their house and at least two stories taller than it. Nearly the height of the maple tree. Jonas went back inside.

His wife worked all through the night, the snow falling and melting hundreds of feet above the pyre. The next morning, Jonas looked out the window to see his wife, still shoveling into the fire. His papers. His ticket stubs. His photographs. His jewel cases. Everything in his collection. Even old clothes were being scooped into the insatiable fire. He could feel his heart struggling to pump blood to the rest of his body. His extremities were beginning to numb.

“Can’t you see what this is doing to me?” he called to his wife from the back door.

“It’s liberating you.”

Night after night, she kept the fire going, never stopping.

“Aren’t you tired? You should sleep.”

“If I stop, you’ll take what’s left and put it back. Then where will we be? No, I can’t stop until it’s finished. The fire is keeping me warm and strong. But I could use a glass of water. Do you mind, Dear?”

Jonas complied and brought his wife a glass of ice water.

The snow did not stop. It snowed every day of winter that season. The news reports called it a weather phenomenon. The city was blanketed with snow. Every square inch except for a large circle surrounding the fire, which his wife continued to feed. Jonas spent his winter afternoons watching the maple tree, hoping it would soon return to its former glory. Day after day passed. Jonas felt weak. He didn’t know if it was a condition of the heart, because he had not spent time with his wife in months, or if it was simply the cold. He decided he needed to write. He’d write down what was happening to him and throw it into the wind. He thought in this way he could deceive his wife and keep something of his alive, something that had meaning only to him. He told her about his plan to mock her.

“Sweetheart, I think it’s wonderful you’ve decided to take up a hobby,” she told him, “But I can’t see them going anywhere, except into the fire.”

He lost his first finger two weeks before the vernal equinox. It didn’t happen all at once. First his fingernail disappeared, and then knuckle by knuckle the rest of the index finger on his right hand vanished. The pile outside was getting much smaller. More fingers followed over the next few days in the same fashion. First on his right hand, his writing hand. He had to revert to his left. In the afternoons, he watched the maple tree, its branches becoming heavy with snow.

“Do you see my hands?” he asked his wife a few days later.

“No. Where are they?”

“I don’t know, but they’ve been gone for days now. My toes are disappearing too.”

“If this is some kind of joke, it isn’t funny,” his wife said, never stopping her shovel.

“You’ve been doing that all winter, don’t you think you should stop for a while? Help me find my hands.”

“Don’t be simple. They’ll turn up. Besides, I’m almost finished.”

The pile had shrunk to the size of a small igloo. Jonas wrapped himself in a blanket to hide the disappearance of his limbs. He confined himself to the bay window in the living room, where he could see the maple tree. Before his feet disappeared, he used them to tack paper to the side of the sill and attempted to write with his mouth. It was unsuccessful, but he did it anyway.

The day before the equinox, his wife reduced the pile to just a few scraps of paper.

“Almost finished!” she sang out, unaware of Jonas’ location.

She wandered the yard collecting stray bits of paper, tossing them into the fire. She made sure to get every piece. Jonas decided he had to finish his manuscript and throw it to the wind before his wife came in to take it to the fire. He scribbled madly, his pen between his fading teeth. He finished the last sentence, signed it, and used his mouth to open the window. The wind swept into the living room and pulled the short stack of paper out in a whirlwind. They blew up and down the street, but as his wife had predicted, Jonas’ papers ended up strewn about the backyard, where she, unaware of their origin, picked them up as she had the others. One by one she threw them into the fire, which had also shrunk to a few isolated flames. Everything was at its end.

She did not read the papers as she threw them in. She did not know they belonged to Jonas. She crumpled the final paper, which happened to be the first page, and tossed it into the fire. The flames curled the corners and the page opened up to reveal the text. The first line read, It occurred to Jonas, upon seeing the future--

Life Over Death: Binary Opposition and Logocentrism in Joyce’s “The Dead”

The presence of binary oppositions in Joyce’s “The Dead” is a central part of the story, particularly in Gabriel’s epiphany. Classic oppositions such as meaning over meaninglessness and life over death are two of many, which have dominated the history of Western thought. Gabriel’s own worldview, an unconscious product of these oppositions, is in the end deconstructed. He firmly believes in meaning over meaninglessness and, most importantly, life over death, two classic, logocentric notions. It is through Gabriel’s experiences in the story that his binary oppositions become deconstructed.

To begin, it is important to first define what it means to deconstruct logocentricsm specifically, and thus define, in very simple terms, what deconstruction aims to do. Jonathan Culler, in “Semiotics and Deconstruction,” offers a helpful definition: “To deconstruct logocentrism is to show that what was taken to be the truth of the world or the ground of an enquiry is in fact a construct that has been imposed and which is contradicted by certain results of the enquiry it founds” (138). It also important to note that in deconstructing these two oppositions, meaning over meaninglessness and life over death, the opposition is not reversed. Norman Melchertt, in The Great Conversation, using the example of speech over writing, explains that:

The claim is rather that the characteristics of what was held to be secondary and derivative are already, and necessarily, found in what was thought to be basic and primary. It is not, then, that the speech/writing dichotomy is simply overturned, so that it becomes writing/speech, with writing now in the primary spot, but that a deeper sense of “writing” is discovered that underwrites both terms. (707-708)

It is not that Gabriel discovers meaninglessness or death to be more important than their classical primaries. Rather, he discovers it is impossible to deny that death is inherent in life as meaninglessness in meaning.

Throughout the story, Gabriel is extremely self-absorbed and concerned with personal appearance. He is desperately trying to be important. Immediately after his introduction to the reader, he makes an inconsiderate comment to Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, someone he has known for years, and immediately, “Gabriel coloured [. . .] and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes” (23). He felt, “he had failed with the girl” (24). He is not necessarily concerned with his feelings, but more his own appearance. Looking good at all times is one way in which Gabriel can ensure his life has meaning. When contemplating the speech he is to give to the party guests at dinner, he decides not to quote the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers [. . .] The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his [. . .] They would think he was airing his superior education [. . .] He would fail. (24)
Gabriel not only feels that he is superior to Lily and the other guests, but he is afraid of failing in front of them. He sits below the floor on which the party is taking place, contemplating all this, absorbed in his own self-image. It is this fear, coupled with others that create the greatest fear within Gabriel: Fear of living a meaningless life in the present and fear of dying without having done anything meaningful.

Part of Gabriel’s quest for meaning comes in his value of popular European fashion and culture. He wears, and forces his wife to wear, galoshes, when no one seems to know what they are. Gretta, Gabriel’s wife, explains to aunts: “You’ll never guess what he makes me wear now! [. . .] Goloshes! [. . .] That’s the latest” (25). All the while, she is laughing. Gabriel seems to be embarrassed, either at his aunts’ reactions, or that they are not cultured enough to understand how fashionable galoshes are. In either case, the episode is a source of frustration for Gabriel as he, “laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly while Aunt Kate nearly doubled herself, so heartily did she enjoy the joke” (25). A short while later, Gabriel turns on Miss Ivors, admitting, “O, to tell you the truth [. . .] I’m sick of my own country, sick of it” (32). Yet, he can give no reason. He has refused Miss Ivors invitation to visit West Ireland because he wants to visit France and Belgium, “partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change,” and when Miss Ivors queries, “haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish?” Gabriel replies, “Irish is not my language” (32). Gabriel attributes meaning to something that to Miss Ivors is meaningless. The reverse is also true because Gabriel sees reconnecting with his Irish heritage as completely meaningless. His idea of a meaningful life vis-à-vis culture is constantly undermined. It seems the characters surrounding Gabriel silently wish him to simply live and be happy with what he has around him. Yet, it is not until the end of the story that the opposition of meaning over meaninglessness is deconstructed.

In Gabriel’s insatiable thirst for significance, he believes in privileging life over death. He equates life with the present and the future, while death is part of the past. Throughout the night, Gabriel is surrounded by images of and conversation about death, though he does not realize it until his Joycean epiphany at the end. Both his mother and father are dead. His uncle, Pat, is dead. In his aunts’ home hang pictures of the dead: “the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet...and beside it was a picture of the two murdered princes in the Tower” (30). Aunt Julia reminisces about Parkinson, who was “A beautiful pure sweet mellow English tenor” (41). It is this talk of dead singers that prompts Gabriel to mention something about death in his speech. He speaks of the past and says:

Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die. (43)

Gabriel’s assumption is that once someone dies, so does the memory of him or her. Only through fame can one’s memory live on because that fame, the important and significant achievements of that person deserve to live on in the hearts of humanity. Gabriel also uses the dead, as with his dead grandfather, as a source of humor. He tells the story about Patrick Morkan, stretching the details, without compassion in order to garner a laugh from those listening. In this case, death allows him to use someone as nothing more than a punchline. It is this separation of life from death, and Gabriel’s favoring of life over death that is deconstructed through his wife’s story about Michael Furey.

Gretta’s story about this childhood love brings Gabriel’s selfishness to the full attention of the reader. He mocks, “O then, you were in love with him? [. . .] Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?” completely ignoring his wife’s feelings (56). During the story, Gabriel cannot comprehend why someone would have such strong emotion towards a person who is no longer a part of her life. Michael Furey is part of the past, and although Gabriel does not yet know that Michael Furey is dead or why he died, people of the past have no place in the present except as a way for Gabriel to bring more significance to his own life. When he does finally find out how Michael Furey died, he at first still tries to deny the connection that life and death share and write off Gretta’s experience as nothing important. “So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake,” Gabriel thinks to himself, and “It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life” (58). It is at this moment that Gabriel begins to deconstruct the logocentrism of his beliefs. He begins to think of all the people whom he knows now—who are alive—but who would someday succumb to death. He imagines Aunt Kate and himself mourning the death of Aunt Julia. Suddenly, “One by one they were all becoming shades,” and Gabriel realizes that everyone he knows, including himself will die. Simultaneously, things that seemed to have no meaning before—the West of Ireland, death, his wife’s own feelings—are now meaningful. Gabriel cannot escape them because of how he now sees his wife. He realizes that although he has had the utmost concern for his public appearance, his wife, who’s opinion of his public appearance and significance he should value most, is affected by someone whom, for all Gabriel knows, lead a meaningless existence. Based on these realizations, Gabriel lies in bed, watching the snow fall “upon all the living and the dead” (59). Thus, Gabriel’s epiphany deconstructs the logocentrism of Gabriel’s worldview regarding meaning.

The question of what Gabriel does with this epiphany is relevant. While it is enough to say his change was incredibly profound, Joyce leaves the question open to the reader. Either Gabriel learns from the deconstruction of these two core beliefs and attempts to change his life, or he succumbs to the pessimism that his realizations present. However, succumbing to that pessimism would not constitute complete deconstruction of the logocentricism of his beliefs because while he recognizes death as an inherent part of life, Gabriel would still value life over death. If his beliefs have been truly deconstructed, he will be able to move forward and rebuild his relationship with Gretta.

Works Cited

Culler, Jonathan. “Semiotics and Deconstruction.” Poetics Today 1.1/2 Special Issue: Literature, Interpretation, Communication (Autumn 1979): 137-141. JSTOR. 3 October 2007.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” The Dead: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s: 1994.

Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: Volume II: Decartes through Derrida and Quine. 4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Knowledge and Invention: Modernity as the Destroyer in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Humanity’s quest for knowledge has allowed for its greatest achievements but has also been its greatest scourge. Through the quest for knowledge, the world has seen the advent of devices and theories, which have changed the course of history and have, many would argue, made the world a much better, safer place. However, the quest for knowledge has also been the root of war and devastation as deadlier weapons are invented, disagreements over what is true continue to arise, and the waste from the modern, developed world pollute. In his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez explores the detrimental effects of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the devastation that Modernity has had on the world.

In the earliest days Macondo, the village is an Eden of sorts. Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembers that “many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (1). The town held an innocence that quickly disappears once Melquíades, a gypsy, introduces science to José Arcadio Buendía, Macondo’s founder. He introduces magnets, a telescope, and a magnifying glass to José Arcadio Buendía. Melquíades helps him build an alchemy laboratory. It is through the introduction of these tools of science that José Arcadio Buendía begins to lose his mind. He reveals to his wife that, “The earth is round; like an orange,” and soon the whole town “was convinced that [he] had lost his reason...” (4-5). Once science and the quest for knowledge are introduced, the town loses its innocence. Arabs come to trade with the village. More groups of gypsies arrive to share their secrets. It is José Arcadio Buendía’s search for the philosopher’s stone that ultimately leads to his insanity. The villagers eventually “drag him to the chestnut tree in the courtyard, where they left him tied up, barking in the strange language and giving off a green froth at the mouth” (78). Buendía is speaking Latin, the language of science.

Many years later, a railroad comes to Macondo and with it comes a banana plantation and many other industries: both are symbols of modernity and progress coming to Macondo. The town is confused at first by the building of the tracks. “No one paid any attention to [the gangs] because they thought it was some new trick of the gypsies...” (222). The narrator gives a prophecy of the effect that the train will have when he says it “was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo” (222). The people, prior to this moment, were not aware of modernity and its innovations at all. The only exposure they had was through the gypsies, Melquíades, and Jose Arcadio Buendía, who went insane. They are amazed by “the pale electric bulbs fed by the plant that Aureliano Triste had brought back when the train made its second trip” and the magic of film, which they call “living images” (223). Modernity appears to be very positive. Strangers from distant lands arrive and bring with them more innovations.

A generation following the arrival of Modernity to Macondo, a strike of plantation workers, during which the plantation is burned to the ground, leads to the execution of three thousand men, women and children. Following the massacre, it begins to rain when “It had not rained for three months” and it is announced by Mr. Brown, the dictatorial manager of the plantation, that “As long as the rain lasts we’re suspending all activities” (309). It rains for nearly five years following this decree and once the skies clear, “the world lighted up...and it did not rain again for ten years. Macondo was in ruins” (330). The train no longer stops in Macondo. The banana plantation and houses of the former workers are completely abandoned: “The wooden houses, the cool terraces...seemed to have been blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth” (330-331). This prophetic wind is brought about by the last of the Buendía line and through the simplest, yet most important invention and product of human knowledge: writing.

Malquíades’ mysterious parchments are a source of frustration for many of the men in the Buendía line. Arcadio attempts to decipher them, but gives up quickly. José Arcadio Segundo, after the plantation massacre, spends the remainder of his life attempting to interpret the parchments until “the only visible in the intricate tangle of hair was the teeth striped with green slime and his motionless eyes” (335). When he finally dies, “he fell back on the parchments and died with his eyes open” (353). The parchments reveal to him the truth of the massacre that he witnesses, but which no one believes happened. With this truth, he dies. The parchment writing has a similar effect in the final destruction of the town. Melquíades appears to Aureliano Babilonia and aides him in deciphering the parchment. The parchment, he discovers, is “the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time” (415). However, “impatient to know his own origin, Aureliano skipped ahead” (416). It is at that point that the wind, which destroys the town, begins to strengthen and as Aureliano reads the final sentences, which proclaim the destruction of the town, it is destroyed. It is clear that Aureliano’s arrogance and selfishness in wanting the knowledge of his origin hastened the destruction of the town, it was the writing itself, which stated Macondo’s destruction.

The quest for Modernity and knowledge are unavoidable. They are an inherent part of human nature and curiosity. However, Garcia Marquez points out the importance of being aware of the potential destructive powers. It is not enough to believe that through the acquisition of knowledge and the furtherance of Modernity will solely benefit mankind. Humanity must be aware there are dire consequences for ignoring the side effects of progress.

Works Cited

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.