Motif of Productivity in One Hundred Years of Solitude

In One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, the motif of productivity is used to explain the nature of the characters and their relationships. It resurfaces in many places and in many forms. Gabriel García Márquez uses this to show that unproductive work can lead one into intense solitude. He shows this through José Arcadio Buendía’s unproductive search for new inventions, Colonel Aureliano’s unproductive obsession with making little golden fishes, and Aureliano and Amaranta’s incestuous relationship.

José Arcadio Buendía’s unproductive search for new inventions leads him into first social, and then physical solitude. His social solitude is especially presented as he is grieving over Melquíades’ death. During this time, he does not grieve with other people. This is seen when Pietro Crespi brings gifts to José Arcadio Buendía: “Mechanical ballerinas, music boxes, acrobatic monkeys, trotting horses, clowns who played the tambourine: the rich and startling mechanical fauna that Pietro Crespi brought dissipated José Arcadio Buendía’s affliction over the death of Melquíades and carried him back to his old days as an alchemist” (41).

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His consistent return to experimentation shows that José Arcadio Buendía needs to constantly be working, whether the work is productive or not, to get over an emotional struggle like Melquíades’ death. This quote also shows that he has no interest in talking to the other people in Macondo, and only cares about his machines. After receiving these gifts, José Arcadio Buendía continued work on discovering a method of perpetual motion, something that logically cannot exist.

This drives him into insanity, another form of social solitude, as seen in this quote: “José Arcadio Buendía finally got what he was looking for: he connected the mechanism of the clock to a mechanical ballerina, and the toy danced uninterruptedly to the rhythm of her own music for three days. That discovery excited him much more than any of his other harebrained undertakings. He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. Only the vigilance and care of Rebeca kept him from being dragged off by his imagination into a state of perpetual delirium from which he would not recover...” (43). It is ironic that Gabriel García Márquez describes José Arcadio Buendía as “perpetually delirious”, as he became what he was searching for. His life became perpetual, which is what lead him into his physical solitude, as seen in violent rage: “‘What day is today?’ Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. ‘I was thinking the same thing,’ José Arcadio Buendía said, ‘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.’... Ten men were needed to get him down, fourteen to tie him up, twenty to drag him to the chestnut tree in the courtyard, where they left him tied up,” (43). That is how José Arcadio Buendía’s unproductive search for new inventions leads him into first social, and then physical solitude.

Colonel Aureliano’s unproductive obsession with making little golden fish leads to him locking himself away from society. After the war, instead of finding some other meaning for life, Aureliano decided to go back to making golden fish: “Since he had decided not to sell any, he kept on making two fishes a day and when he finished twenty-five, he would melt them down and start all over again” (131). Gabriel García Márquez has built up to this moment in the past few paragraphs. He inserts hints suggesting that Colonel Aureliano’s solitude has been taking a toll on him, such as how he is eating very slowly, feeling drowsy, and that he has been having weird dreams: “Then, very slowly, he ate the piece of meat roasted with onions, the white rice, and the slices of fried bananas all on the same plate together. His appetite did not change under either the best or the harshest of circumstances.

After lunch he felt the drowsiness of inactivity... In the dream he remembered that he had dreamed the same thing the night before and on many nights over the past years and he knew that the image would be erased from his memory when he awakened because that recurrent dream had the quality of not being remembered except within the dream itself” (131). What is more interesting is what happens to Colonel Aureliano when he attempts to break out of solitude. This happens when he decides to observe the circus that was parading through town. When he approaches the chestnut tree, he rests his head on it, and enters the ultimate solitude, death: “He pulled his head in between his shoulders like a baby chick and remained motionless with his forehead against the trunk of the chestnut tree. The family did not find him until the following day at eleven o’clock in the morning when Santa Sofía de la Piedad went to throw out the garbage in back and her attention was attracted by the descending vultures” (132). The most interesting part of this quote is how the vultures were attracted to his body. This shows that his body, despite just dying, has been rotting for a while.

Aureliano and Amaranta’s unproductive relationship led to Aureliano’s solitude. Their relationship was solely based on sexual actions, and since the relationship was incestuous, there was no possibility of it being productive in any way. But even if there was no incest, it still would not be a truly productive relationship, as most of the time they are just doing nonsensical things: “In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton” (195). As seen in this quote, not only were they unproductive, they were destructive. The fruit of this destructive lifestyle was a child with a pig’s tail, and Amaranta’s death: “It was the tail of a pig... Amaranta Úrsula’s passionate blood was insensible to any artifice that did not come from love. In the afternoon, after twenty-four hours of desperation, they knew that she was dead because the flow had stopped without remedies and her profile became sharp and the blotches on her face evaporated in a halo of alabaster and she smiled again” (199).

This quote explains the beginning of Aureliano’s solitude, as he loses the women he loves. It is clear that Aureliano has full knowledge of this, as he curses his friends that had left him alone, as seen in this quote: “But when he was alone again in the last dawn of Macondo, he opened up his arms in the middle of the square, ready to wake up the whole world, and he shouted with all his might: ‘Friends are a bunch of bastards!’ ” (199). His solitude is fully realized when his child dies: “And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquíades’ final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants” (200). That is how Aureliano and Amaranta’s unproductive relationship leads to Aureliano’s solitude.

That is how Gabriel García Márquez uses the motif of productivity in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Through José Arcadio Buendía’s unproductive search for new inventions, Colonel Aureliano’s unproductive obsession with making little golden fishes, and Aureliano and Amaranta’s incestuous relationship, Márquez describes the pitfalls that one can fall in if they get lost in cycles of unproductivity.