“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (Márquez 1). Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude begins with this well-crafted sentence steeped in magical realism, drawing readers’ attention to two of the major characters: Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his father, the patriarch of the Buendías and the legendary founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía. An enterprising and eccentric man with curiosity and exploratory instincts, José Arcadio Buendía tries to expand Macondo and starts an expedition to probe through the surrounding environment. This essay investigates how the expedition contributes to the characterization of José Arcadio Buendía by means of close reading, and further hypothesizes that the expedition embodies José Arcadio Buendía’s characteristics as a subjective rather than objective explorer and forebodes his ending in madness. In the first section, this essay will summarize how the expedition and the map that he created after the expedition reflect Jose Arcadio Buendia’s desire to explore the world as an agent. The second section will analyze the implications of the expedition and the subjective modes of thinking reflected. The third section will explore how such a thought process is embodied by madness.
Section 1: The Expedition as a Demonstration of José Arcadio Buendía’s Explorative Nature
The intention of José Arcadio Buendía’s expedition is to explore the natural surroundings of Macondo, which could potentially bring Macondo to prosperity. He starts the expedition because “[he] was completely ignorant of the geography of the region” (9) and hopes to establish “contact with civilization” (9) after Macondo is found on the way of his previous expedition. Faced with the obstacles during the expedition, he displayed courageous or rather stubborn and audacious persistence, leading his men “ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects” (10) and “guiding [them] toward the invisible north so that they would be able to get out of that enchanted region” (10). Being the leading adventurer in the expedition represents his enterprising nature and his natural curiosity in trying to comprehend the external world.
Moreover, the map that he created also reflects his personality as mentioned above. Firstly, through his action of creating the map as a product of the expedition, José Arcadio Buendía again demonstrates his curiosity and his penchant for documenting. Moreover, as visual representations of spatial information including routes, and archiving features, maps do not only serve as guides for recognizing the physical world, expanding one’s knowledge about the external sphere, but are also a reflection of subjective individual creativity. In cartography, individual perspectives, biases, and preferences determine what information is eventually included and how it is presented. When José Arcadio Buendía creates the map, he concretizes his knowledge into claims that might transform the physical world by transforming other people’s understanding of it. Since the map is a bridge between his subjective knowledge and the physical world, he not only wants to understand the external world but also impacts it through this interaction, indicated by the action of cartography. In other words, through crafting the map, José Arcadio Buendía is projecting his subjective understanding of the world onto reality and onto others, and it enhances his figure as both the enterprising explorer and a subject that asserts his will through documenting his projections.
Section 2: The Implication of the Expedition and the Inaccurate Map
Exploration is a process that involves a subject in active engagement with the physical world around them in order to recognize and understand the object, and therefore how the subject explores the world can be analyzed as a reflection of their cognitive thinking. For José Arcadio Buendía, exploration works in an almost impressionistic way: he does not investigate features and characteristics of the surroundings, but only sees the overarching phenomena. For instance, his adventure ends in “the discovery of the galleon” (11) as it indicates the proximity of the sea. Seeing such an unfamiliar and counterintuitive scene, other people, such as Aureiliano, would “[wonder] how the galleon had been able to get inland to that spot”, yet José Arcadio Buendía “did not concern himself with that” (11). This illustrates that he gains his belief mainly through observation, instead of learning through the scientific methodology that demands additional steps of verification and reasoning. Directly after the trip, inspired by the findings from the expedition, José Arcadio Buendía invents “the plan to move Macondo to a better place” when he “mulled over for several months in the small room he used as his laboratory” (11). Similarly, the process of planning is solely based on his imagination of “feverish designs” as Úrsula commented. He proposes the decision without consulting other people’s opinions or evaluating the practicality of the plan, indicating a gap between his internal world and the reality, metaphorically as he did so when he closed himself up “[mulling] over for several months in the small room”. His ideas are thus far-fetched and “unbridled” as Úrsula pronounces, which enhances and implies the discrepancy between his cognition and reality.
The inaccuracy of the map further emphasizes the fact that José Arcadio Buendía does not refer to objectivity. His first draft of the map of Macondo is drawn “in rage, evilly, exaggerating the difficulties of communication, as if to punish himself for the absolute lack of sense with which he had chosen the place,” yet “the idea of a peninsular Macondo prevailed for a long time” (11). The hand-drawn map is more of an expression of impression instead of an objectively rendered documentation of geographical truth, as the map does not accurately refer to the actual landscape with a methodological understanding of the physical world. Moreover, from his attitude towards the knowingly unreliable map, he trusts his subjectivity more than objectivity, as he takes his map as true. For José Arcadio Buendía, the reality is intertwined with his subjective perception that might not be accurate.
Section 3: José Arcadio Buendía’s Madness as Forboded in His Map
José Arcadio Buendía’s madness can be attributed to his modes of thinking that is previously mentioned: his characteristic of enterprising and explorative nature makes him want to make assertions and claims to understand the external world, yet his understanding of the external world is mainly based on his subjective perception. José Arcadio Buendía, the heroic patriarchal figure of the Buendías, descends into madness when he insists on believing that the days are all identical and time does not pass. Aureliano tells him that the day is Tuesday, yet José Arcadio Buendía says, “But suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too” (70). On Wednesday of that week, José Arcadio Buendía claims that “today is Monday too” again. His judgment of reality relies on his subjective experience of the elements, such as the air or the sun, which are all “the same as yesterday and the day before” (71). Furthermore, he trusts his illusionary time machine that is not tested by any scientific methodology, while he distrusts other people’s consensus, which is more objective than his subjective judgments. In addition, to prove that his judgments are correct, “he spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day […]. He spent the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to Prudencio Aguilar, to Melquíades, to all the dead, so that they would share his distress” (71). When confronted with a discrepancy with reality, his first instinct is not to ask other living people but to appeal to the ghosts, while the ghosts are literally discrepant from the objective physical world. Furthermore, he testifies his subjective judgments again by the means of subjective observation: “he watched the appearance of nature again until he did not have the slightest doubt but that it was Monday”, and from that conclusion, he turns to the destructive instincts towards the external world, “[grabbing] the bar from a door and with the savage violence of his uncommon strength” and “[smashing] to dust the equipment in the alchemy laboratory, the daguerreotype room, the silver workshop […]” (71).
The subjective and surreal nature of the map created from the expedition forebodes José Arcadio Buendía’s madness: in the cartographic process, the map becomes an embodiment of his subjective judgments and idealistic modes of thinking. He does not refer to the objectivity of things when making judgments but rather believes in subjectivity, which is epistemologically wrong, as others besides him have defined objectivity by reaching a consensus about the external world, such as the definition of time. Seeing how his subjective or individualistically limited understanding of the world is disapproved and discrepant from the comparatively objective and materialistic consensus that other people have, José Arcadio Buendía turns to destruction and folie as he crushes the objects in the house, resulting in Aureliano asking the neighbors to tie him to the chestnut tree. He is thus diagnosed to be crazy: “When Úrsula and Amaranta returned he was still tied to the trunk of the chestnut tree by his hands and feet, soaked with rain and in a state of total innocence. They spoke to him and he looked at them without recognizing them, saying things they did not understand” (71). The loss of communication with the external world indicates that insanity expresses itself by him being lost in his own world, just like how his inaccurate and subjective map makes Macondoans and himself lost in the inaccurate geography that it depicts.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the study has delved into the significance of the expedition in characterizing José Arcadio Buendía in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Through a close reading of related passages, it is reasonable to say that the expedition from Macondo to explore the surrounding geographical situation contributes to the characterization of José Arcadio Buendía as it establishes his figure as an enterprising explorer and presages his tragic ending in madness.
By examining the expedition and the map that it inspires, the study extracts José Arcadio Buendía’s personality as someone who is naturally curious with explorative instincts. Moreover, the modes of thinking hidden behind the ways of exploration, the proposal of moving Macondo to a better place, and the imprecise map is that though José Arcadio Buendía wants to comprehend and probe the external world, he places his subjectivity of more importance than referring to the objective truth in the methodology of science. Such thought patterns forebode the madness since his madness is also relevant to his lost in the internal world due to not verifying the thoughts through the physical world.
While this study analyzes the implications of the expedition, it focuses primarily on its relationship with the madness, and further research could explore other aspects, such as the question of whether José Arcadio Buendía’s expedition implies primitive colonialistic tendencies, how magical realist elements related to José Arcadio Buendía blurring reality and imagination contributes to the overall theme of this novel, and why would José Arcadio Buendía speak Latin and forget his native language in madness.
In closing words, One Hundred Years of Solitude continues to be a masterpiece in world literature that influences readers across continents. The downfalling fate of the Buendías prompts people to reflect upon incest and original sin, while the unconventional narratology of magical realism blurs the boundaries of reality. Ultimately, Gabriel García Márquez calls attention to the “solitude of Latin America”, invoking a larger-scale reflection upon history and modernity in the postcolonial age.
