Revaluing Nature Writing: Toward Love and Flower Power
In any case, this novel about love can be considered nature writing because García Márquez cultivates delight in flowers as early as in the first chapter (well before Remedios the Beauty is even born), thus instructing how we are to read what follows. After founding Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, with a band of men, sets out to find civilization and discovers, instead,
an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. […] Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers. […] Many years later Colonel Aureliano Buendía crossed the region again, when it was already a regular mail route, and the only part of the ship he found was its burned-out frame in the midst of a field of poppies. 18
Allow me a brief digression, for isn’t there a more famous field of poppies in a much older work of literature? Comparing L. Frank Baum’s novel to MGM’s movie version, Salman Rushdie writes: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, contains many of the ingredients of the magic potion—all the major characters and events are here, as well as the most important locations, the Yellow Brick Road, the Deadly Poppy Field, and Emerald City. [… which] was green only because everyone in it had to wear emerald-tinted glasses.” May I suggest, then, that we don our own green-tinted glasses, so that we may be better equipped to see García Márquez’s nature writing in full effect? Just as Baum’s characters “must survive the Deadly Poppy Field, helped by a mysterious snowfall (why does snow overcome the poppies’ poison?), and so arrive, accompanied by heavenly choirs, at the city gates,” 19 I believe Jos&ecute; Arcadio Buendía and his men must abandon their desire to find civilization, even if it means rotting their “lives away [in Macondo] without receiving the benefits of science.”
The poppies, incidentally, are the only flowers ever mentioned in association with Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and I suppose they, like those in Oz, are also poisonous, but in the sense that their appearance serves as an omen that Colonel Aureliano Buendía “was simply a man incapable of love.” Instead of flowers, his relationship with nature is relegated to the little gold fish he makes—things people buy with gold coins, which he then melts in order to produce more gold fish, until they become meaningless to everyone except as historical relics. As for José Arcadio Buendía and his band of men, the galleon’s orchid-adorned rigging and interior forest of flowers is a message telling them to go back, to return to Macondo, which they eventually do, so as to have the opportunity to touch the captive miracle in the chest, “an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars.” Young Aureliano “took a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing it immediately. ‘It’s boiling,’ he exclaimed, startled. But his father paid no attention to him,” and, instead, proves that “the greatest invention of our time” is love, which, like ice (and its Oz form, snow), fills the heart “with fear and jubilation at the contact with [its] mystery.” 20
Macondo’s role as a physical setting in the plot of the novel allows us to recognize that flowers—as metaphors for human and nonhuman mortality, as well as the mortality of a place—can help us positively influence the way we treat our environment. I would argue, then, on behalf of ecocritics, that place (alongside race, class, and gender) very much deserves to be considered a critical category in literary thought and discussion. Macondo’s fate reminds us that the end of man is a simple scientific possibility; its creation as a sweeping utopia of life, a place whose inhabitants have a second opportunity on earth, suggests that metaphorical values do not necessarily have to be consistent with ecological wisdom as long as we are able to literally comprehend that nature in revalued nature writing must be represented not as something that exists solely for our pleasure, but as a part of our daily lives that we must not let down.
