ROMAN LAW IN THE CONSTITUTION OF MACONDO

7 8 Y R O M A N L A W I N T H E C O N S T I T U T I O N O F M A C O N D O R O B E R T O G O N Z Á L E Z E C H E V A R R Í A The Roman legalistic tradition is one of the strongest components of Latin American culture: from Cortés to Zapata, we only believe in what is written down and codified. – The New York Times Book Review (1986) Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude; English translation by Gregory Rabassa) is redolent with resonances of the Roman Empire: one of the protagonists , Colonel Aureliano Buendía, has the name of an emperor, and the senile patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, speaks only in Latin. This observation should not be surprising. Rome is the unequivocal foundation of Latin American culture, as recent books by Sabine MacCormack and David A. Lupher make clear. Andrés Bello and his disciple Simón Bolívar wrote about the prevalence of Roman linguistic and political ideas and practices in Latin America , even as it became independent from Spain. And in his 1900 Ariel, the most influential essay in the history of Latin America, José Enrique Rodó insisted on the binding filial relationship between Rome and the countries that emerged from the Spanish 7 9 R Empire. They were all correct. In his famous Gramática, Antonio de Nebrija had proclaimed, in 1492 – coincidentally the very year of the ‘‘discovery’’ of the New World – that ‘‘siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio’’ (language was always the companion of empire). He referred, without doubt, to the Roman Empire, which would soon become the model of the one the Spanish would establish across the Atlantic. At its deepest level, Gabriel García Márquez ’s great novel is linked to those remote but determining and still current Latin American antecedents. This is one of its many virtues. I would like to propose that Roman law is an essential part of the novel’s constitution, as much in the sense of its textual origins as in that of the fictional foundation of Macondo, the town that the protagonists of the novel create. Allusions to Roman law in Cien años de soledad also refer to the principles of novelistic discourse, Latin America’s in particular. As I have suggested in publications that date back to 1984 and include my books Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative and Love and the Law in Cervantes, the organization of a modern state by the Catholic rulers Ferdinand and Isabella, with a revamped legal system, promoted the development of what would become the modern novel, which grew out of the pages of La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (1554), Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), and above all, Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605, 1615), but also his Novelas ejemplares (1613). As the source of stories, descriptions, and situations that today we would call novelistic, law in the Spanish realm really harkens back to Alfonso el Sabio’s Siete partidas (Seven Books of the Law, written between 1256 and 1276), a juridical, social, political, and linguistic monument in which, for the first time and in a sustained manner, the specifics of reality – things and human commerce – are cast in a rich and supple vernacular. All of the above, together with the epic, especially the Poema del Mío Cid, with its courtroom-drama outcome, reflected the prevalence in medieval Spain of the Visigoths , the most Romanized of the Germanic peoples who settled in the Peninsula. Beyond the Spanish realm, the novel would retain its closeness to the law, which it would sometimes meet in the courts, as in the cases involving Madame Bovary and Ulysses. There is also a persistence of plots and characters involving criminals; think of the 8 0 G O N Z Á L E Z E C H E V A R R Í A Y works of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, and...