Play and Playfulness in Garc�a M�rquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Play and Playfulness in García Márquez' One Hundred Years ofSolitude Enrique A. Giordano University of Cincinnati Understanding the playful nature of contemporary literature is a task which has not yet been undertaken with the necessary rigor, not even in the case of its most obvious exponents such as Borges or Cortázar. Those studies which speak of play, in both poetic and narrative works, part from a prior, tacitly accepted assumption between critic and reader, which provides neither a greater questioning nor an intrinsic analysis of the concept. The concept of play is extremely complex, and its connotations, numerous and oftentimes contradictory. This has already been indicated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, according to whom there is no common nature of play, only a network of overlapping and crisscrossing similarities. This idea is well-grounded if we observe that in spite of the inexhaustible bibliography which exists on the subject, there is no common criterion, much less a generic concept which would allow us to define precisely what constitutes play. In just what way a playful reality differs from a non-playful one is something which no literary critic has been able to formulate exactly, much less in what way playful texts vary among themselves. Borgean play is very different from Cortázar's, and quite obviously from Cabrera Infante's and Lezama Lima's. I am unable to make a comprehensive summary of the many meanings of the term play in this study. I shall limit myself to reviewing some which are, in my view, essential for application to One Hundred Years of Solitude, and to drawing thence some conclusions which may prove useful for future investigations. Johan Huizinga defines play as a well-defined action, different from everyday life, whose supralogical dynamics create a separate level of reality, which is endowed with rhythm and harmony within a perfect temperospatial frame (28). Play has autonomous laws and transcends the immediate reality (former, non-playful reality). This implies a perfectly demarcated and autonomous playful space. The excessive generality of this concept has already been pointed out on several occasions. Such a definition covers too wide a radius of textual possibilities. Adhering to it without question would force us ultimately to accept realism as play as well, since it fully responds to the concept as posited. Jacques Ehrmann, in his article "Homo Ludens Revisited," carries this to its extreme, completely negating Huizinga's definition, especially with regard to the remission of play to a second reality, differing from immediate reality (Ehrmann 217 218Rocky Mountain Review 31-57). But in his excessive extremism, he only succeeds in furthering the confusion. The studies of authors such as Susan Stewart, Jacques Derrida, and Hans-Georg Gadamer will prove more useful for us. According to Susan Stewart, play implies a transgression of the interpretative processes of common sense, a process of redemarcation or refraining . The elements of playful discourse and the strategies of communication decontextualize the context of common sense, yielding a superior level of metacommunication among transmitter, message, and receiver (Stewart 3-46). The discourse of common sense which is being transgressed is, in this case, more precise than it was in Huizinga: the level of reality is everyday and empirical, and the discourse is accepted by the codes of said reality, even when these may have been transgressed in another moment of literary history (contemporary common sense is not the common sense of the past century ). Thus play implies a decodification and "disruption of presence" (Derrida 423-25), but with the purpose of recontextualizing the discourse. In the new discourse we are offered a new system of codes, a system of metacodification and metacommunication. This is what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the "process oftransformation in structure"; the result of the transformation is radically different from the previous presence (99-100). Susan Stewart says: "The more clearly the metacommunication is marked, the more playful the discourse " (20-32). In light of this, in what sense is One Hundred Years ofSolitude playful? Among the studies we have on García Márquez' texts we find few references to the play element. The only study that approaches directly and explicitly One Hundred Years of Solitude's...