From the Space of the Wunderkammer

t o M a c o n d o s Wo n d e r Ro o m s : T h e
C o l l e c t i o n o f M a r v e l s i n Cien an os
de soledad
Jeronimo Arellano
Brandeis University

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship of Gabriel Garca

Marquezs novel Cien anos de soledad to early modern material culture. In
particular, it argues that we may reread central passages in the novel as a
ludic reintegration of the space of the camara de maravillas or Wunderkammer: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repositories of objects that were
conceived of as marvels or wonders. While this transhistorical relationship
appears at first to link Garca Marquezs novel to modern and contemporary reinventions of the Wunderkammer in Europe and North America, the
present article underscores the specificity of Cien anos de soledads approach
to the early modern culture of the marvelous in light of the novels retracing
of the affective cartographies of empire.

It has been repeatedly observed that writers such as Gabriel Garca Marquez and Alejo Carpentier revisit the sixteenth-century cronicas de Indias in
novels such as Los pasos perdidos (1953) and Cien anos de soledad (1967)
(Zavala; Calasans Rodrigues; Vargas Llosa; Martn; Serrano). In these readings, the cronicas are generally interpreted as an oddity or quirk of early
modern discourse, in which the representation of the rare and wondrous
predominates over the description of the regular and ordinary. Scholars of
early modern culture, however, warn that we can think of these texts as
deviations or anomalies only if we remove them from the context within
Hispanic Review (summer 2010)
Copyright 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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Figure 1. Wood engraving depicting the interior of Ferrante Imperatos wonder chamber,
reproduced as frontispiece in his Dellhistoria naturale (Napoli, 1599). Courtesy of
Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, DC.

which they take shapethat the representation of the marvelous and wondrous does in fact become institutionalized in sixteenth-century travel writing and historiographical discourse (Greenblatt; Sell). Furthermore, looking
beyond literary texts, we can argue that wonder (as an affective response)
and marvels (as the objects associated with that response) also attain a privileged role in early modern material culture, as the emergence of camaras de
maravillas or Wunderkammern demonstrates.
In a late sixteenth-century wood engraving of the interior of Ferrante
Imperatos Wunderkammer, we see four men standing in a spacious room,
staring at a crocodile mounted on the ceiling (see fig. 1). A constellation of
objects that at the time would have been considered marvelous or wondrous
surround the crocodile: shells, corals, mollusks, starfish. Three of the viewers
look up to take in the sight. One of them, perhaps Imperato himself, directs
a pointer at the roof. The fourth visitor leans on a wall and contemplates an
armoire in which more marvels and curiosities have been placed.

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371

The chamber of wonders represented here marks a turning point in the

cultural history of collecting practices in Western Europe. In wonder rooms
such as Imperatos, the collection of Worthies of the thesaurus and studiolo
gives way to a repository of articles valued for their capacity to induce wonder in the beholder.1 Samuel Quiccheberg first describes the early modern
Wunderkammer in his study of museography (1565) as a theater of the world
or theatrum mundi (see Maurie`s 23). Three decades later, in his A Device of
the Grays Inn Revels (1594), Francis Bacon advises scholars to keep a
goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art
or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion, whatsoever singularity,
change, and the shuffle of things hath produced shall be sorted and
included (55)a recommendation that underscores the popularity of the
Wunderkammer as a privileged space of knowledge production at the close
of the sixteenth century.2
Silvia Spitta has suggested that the early modern Wunderkammer appears
to contemporary eyes as a form of epistemological disorder akin to one that
Michel Foucault identifies in the Chinese encyclopedia of a story by Jorge
Luis Borges (6). According to Foucault, Borgess chimerical encyclopedia
transgresses the boundaries of thought by imagining a site wherein fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite. [T]hings are laid,
placed, arranged in sites so very different from one another, Foucault
argues, that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define
a common locus beneath them all (xviixviii).
We will return to Borgess Wunderkammer shortly; for now, it seems crucial to insist that in early modern culture the heteroclite collections of the
pan-European Wunderkammercontaining, among other items, rare uni-

1. Philipp Blom points out that the programme and structure of the medieval treasury and the
late medieval studiolo were fundamentally the same: to assemble a collection of precious and
valuable objects that reinforced the social status and prestige of the collector (1618). The overwhelming curiosity that made collectors [in the late sixteenth century] hunt not for what was
beautiful or emblematic but what was strange and incomprehensible, Blom indicates, was still
far away (18). Other studies of collecting practices in the early modern period describe a similar
transition; see, e.g., Pomian; Kenny; Evans and Marr.
2. Patrick Maurie`s notes, In about 1550, the word Kunstkammer (chamber of art) appeared in
German, to be joined soon afterwards by Wunderkammer (chamber of marvels). . . . Quiccheberg
uses both terms . . . Kunstkammer, that is, a close chamber filled with objects fashioned with
art and Wunderkammer, that is, a collection of marvellous things (id est miraculosarum rerum
promptuarium) (50).

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corn horns, stuffed crocodiles, rare plants, miniatures, feathers, anatomical

deformities in preserving jars, phosphorescent minerals, and ethnographic
objectsbecome conventional arrangements and forms of display. It is not
fortuitous that these collections gain prominence as the first phase of European colonial expansion unfolds: objects taken from colonial territories and
misplaced on the epistemological table of early modern Europe create
momentous lapses in understanding that the cabinets of wonders of the
period attempt to negotiate. As Spitta notes, beads, tusks, coins, feathers,
archaeological artifacts . . . gathered from across the Americas, as well as
objects arriving from the East, were all set together on the same plane (6).
The collection and display of particular objects as wonders or marvels, then,
remains intrinsically linked to forms of colonial expropriation and appropriation. The marvels of the Wunderkammer are samples of an absolute elsewhere that is meant to be apprehended, conquered, and rendered visible
(Blom 1516; Maurie`s 12; Weschler 77).
Taking the space of the Wunderkammer into consideration, we may argue
that, in its earliest phase, the world-system depends on more than concepts
or ideologiesthat it also involves an affective cartography in which the
outside or margin is felt as a space of enchantment. I will argue in this
essay that this cartography can be perceived in Gabriel Garca Marquezs
Cien anos de soledad if we shift from a consideration of the marvelous as
an abstract, decontextualized notion to a discussion of the cultural history of
marvels and their trajectories as depicted in the novel. In this context, I will
suggest that Cien anos de soledad is a narrative that not only recollects but
also decollects, producing assemblages of fictitious objects that unsettle modes
of experiencing feeling and ordering thought. The term decollection is not
circumscribed here to a form of deconstruction. I intend this notion to gesture also toward recombination and recodification, toward the creation of
new alternatives out of old practices. In Garca Marquezs text, I will suggest,
these processes extend from the retracing of the affective cartographies implicated by the historical Wunderkammer to a consideration of literature itself
as a collection of fragments.

Affective Cartographies
A useful starting point for considering the trajectories of marvelous objects
in Cien anos de soledad is a passage in Alejo Carpentiers El camino de

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373

Santiago, a story set between the Americas and the Iberian peninsula in
the early sixteenth century. Here, the storys protagonist, having recently
returned to Spain from the New World, exhibits in an alleyway outside a
fairground the marvels acquired during his journey. Note that the emblematic crocodile mounted on the ceiling of Imperatos Wunderkammer
appears here as well: [D]os caimanes rellenos de paja . . . como trados
del Cuzco . . . un mono en el hombro y un papagayo posado en la mano
izquierda . . . un gran caracol rosado . . . collares de perlas melladas, piedras
para quitar el dolor de cabeza, fajas de lana de vicuna, zarcillos de oropel y
otras buhoneras de Potos (86).
It is precisely this figure, a character returning from the ends of the world
with a bag full of marvels, that Cien anos de soledad reverses in its opening
passages. Reading the mirror image of the map traced in El camino de
Santiago, Melquades and his marvels travel from a world out there
nebulous, distantto the peripheral territory of Macondo. As he travels,
Melquades cuts a path through thickets of forest, an allusion to a practice
that Jacques Derrida terms arche-writing:
Penetration . . . into the lost world . . . ; [here] one should meditate
upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and
of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road, of the
rupture, of the via rupta, of that path that is broken, beaten, fracta. . . . The
silva is savage, the via rupta is written, discerned, and inscribed violently as
difference . . . it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of a
road-map is not at the same time access to writing. (10708)

If the early modern Wunderkammer attempts to make distant territories

tangible and present for European audiences, the collection of marvels in
Macondo traces a reverse process of decollection, in which a peripheral space
gathers the oddities of a distant, fugitive mainland. Instead of botanical specimens, archaeological artifacts, feathers, or snakeskins, what Melquades
brings to Macondo as maravillas are technological artifacts: magnets, telescopes, and daguerreotype cameras. Contemplating these marvels, Jose
Arcadio Buendathe patriarch of a town whose location has yet to be registered on a mapreaches the conclusion that in the metropolis across the
river astonishing events are taking place: En el mundo estan ocurriendo
cosas increbles. . . . Ah mismo, al otro lado del ro, hay toda clase de apara-

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tos magicos, mientras nosotros seguimos viviendo como los burros (Garca
Marquez 90).
This epiphany sets Jose Arcadio Buenda off on a parodic journey of discovery that begins on the margins of the worldat worlds endand ends
nowhere. After traversing an enchanted region adjacent to Macondo, Jose
Arcadio Buendas expedition reaches the non-place of a grimy sea: Sus
suenos terminaban frente a ese mar color de ceniza, espumoso y sucio, que
no mereca los riesgos de una aventura . . . Carajo! grito [Jose Arcadio
Buenda] Macondo esta rodeado de agua por todas partes (96). As Carlos
Rincon suggests, the narrative in Cien anos de soledad reimagines the worldsystem from a vantage point that remains at all times grounded in precisely
this peripheral, isolated location (206). We can add that the decollection of
marvels in Cien anos de soledad overturns the relationship between center
and periphery that structures the Wunderkammer as a privileged site of imperial epistemology: Jose Arcadio Buendas cabinet of technological wonders
underscores the breakdown of the circuits that link the center of the world
to its peripheries.
But the object of enchantment itself is never left alone in the text, or
allowed to rest auratically at a safe distance. Instead, what we see in Cien
anos de soledad is a constant evisceration and rearticulation of marvels. Jose
Arcadio Buenda, for instance, takes the aforementioned artifacts apart and
puts them together againin a wrongfully correct wayor else uses them
for purposes for which they have not been designed. When Melquades
makes a public demonstration of the magic of the magnet, for instance,
Jose Arcadio Buendia imagines that this object may be redeemed from its
inherent uselessness if it is made to extract incredible quantities of gold hidden beneath the ground: Jose Arcadio Buenda, cuya desaforada imaginacion iba siempre mas lejos que el ingenio de la naturaleza . . . penso que sera
posible servirse de esa invencion inutil para desentranar el oro de la tierra
(82). Later on, Jose Arcadio Buenda imagines that a magnifying glass
brought by Melquades could be refashioned into a weapon of mass destruction. A gigantic magnifying glass, he speculates, could channel solar energy
into a blazing beam of fire:
Un medioda ardiente hicieron una asombrosa demostracion con la lupa
gigantesca: pusieron un monton de hierba seca en mitad de la calle y
le prendieron fuego mediante la concentracion de los rayos solares. . . .
Tratando de demostrar los efectos de la lupa en la tropa enemiga, [Jose

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375

Arcadio Buenda] se expuso . . . a la concentracion de los rayos solares y

sufrio quemaduras que se convirtieron en ulceras y tardaron mucho
tiempo en sanar. (8384)

Jose Arcadio Buendas experiments, then, give rise to a chamber of technological forgeries, if we understand a forgery as both a falsification of the
original and the creation of something new. While underscoring the material
dimensions of poesis as a form of making, these reconfigurations of objects
appear to function as an allegory of the resistance of local cultures to homogenizing forces in colonial and postcolonial contexts. As Michel de Certeau
notes in Linvention du quotidien, mass culture and technologies are never
passively received, nor are subjects defenseless against large-scale disciplinary
systems. In Frank Dikotters words, de Certeau showsagainst Foucault
that ordinary people are not so much subjected to an insidious form of
discipline but capable of resisting by everyday acts of appropriation (160).
These antidisciplinary practices are given a precise narrative form in the
recurrent imaginary permutations of technology in Macondo. Wonder and
enchantment emerge at this juncture as charged, ambivalent emotions situated at the heart of a tension between homogenizing processes of technification and the subversive potential of local forms of indiscipline. In turn, these
coordinates problematize the customary interpretation of technology as a
purely destructive force in readings of Cien anos de soledad.3 Through the
forging of foreign technologies, Jose Arcadio Buendas Wunderkammer of
marvelous machines also inscribes strategies of resistance, ludic appropriation, and reinvention.
Garca Marquez takes this unwriting and rewriting of technology to a
hyperbolic extreme in the description of delirious artifacts, conceivable only
as fictional machines. These include una maquina de pendulo que le sirviera
al hombre para volar (172); la maquina multiple que serva al mismo
tiempo para pegar botones y bajar la fiebre, y el aparato para olvidar los
malos recuerdos, y el emplasto para perder el tiempo (100); and the diccio3. It is customary for magic and technology to be thought of as binary opposites in analyses of
Cien anos de soledad. Jane Robinett argues, for instance, that Garca Marquezs vision of technology is a dark one that points up clearly the kinds of traps technology builds for those who become
too dependent on it. . . . Against this perception is set an older view, one that insists on the
existence and the value of magic, and the primacy of relationships between human beings and the
natural world . . . technology is destructive of magic because it separates human beings from
nature (8096). Similar aguments have been pursued by Jerry Hoeg and Brian Conniff.

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nario giratorio that Jose Arcadio Buenda devises when Macondo is ravaged
by a plague of forgetfulness:
El artefacto se fundaba en la posibilidad de repasar todas las mananas, y
desde el principio hasta el fin, la totalidad de los conocimientos adquiridos
en la vida. [Jose Arcadio Buenda] [l]o imaginaba como un diccionario
giratorio, que un individuo situado en el eje pudiera operar mediante una
manivela, de modo que en pocas horas pasaran frente a sus ojos las nociones mas necesarias para vivir. (139)

But why use the term maravilla to describe these fictional artifacts? And why
forge these fictional objects against the background of the cultural history of
marvel collections?
A possible answer emerges through a consideration of the colonial roots
of modernity as described by Anbal Quijano (Colonialidad y modernidad/
racionalidad and Colonialidad del poder). For Quijano, the geocultural
construction of the Americas as a marginal territory constitutes one of the
foundations of the processes of normalization and rationalization of modern
forms of capitalism. The model of centerperiphery that emerges in this
process is also the axis around which the Wunderkammer is constructed:
early modern collections of marvels, as noted above, entail an effort to assimilate, regulate, and contain the radical alterity of the peripheries of the
world. Therefore, beyond a parody of colonial collecting practices, the creation of a wonder cabinet of technological forgeries produces a critique of
the continuities between coloniality and modernitya critique of the links
between the construction of the colonial outside as an exotic wonderland
and the conceptualization of the postcolonial periphery as technologically
disenfranchised. As noted above, what Cien anos de soledad underscores is
that these cartographies of coloniality/modernity are not merely conceptual
modelsand, therefore, that the charting of a geopolitics of knowledge
(Mignolo) cannot fully dismantle thembut that they also involve a crucial
affective dimension. An emotion map of the world-system emerges here in a
dual movement: first, in the retracing of trajectories of objects of enchantment from the Americas to Europe, and second, in the reconfiguration of
spaces of wonder as contested sites that may be reinvented, reconvened, and
decollected.

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377

Loose Pages and Purple Scribbles

The story of the Wunderkammer, as narrated by cultural historians, takes the
shape of a bell curvea period of emergence and effervescence from the
mid-sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century, followed by a gradual
decline at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment (Daston and Park;
Mauries). At this point, it is suggested, new systems of analysis and classification break up the shuffle of things (Bacon 55) of the Wunderkammer
into the order of the modern museum. Natural and artificial objects are split
into separate collections; the stuffed crocodile mounted on the ceiling of
wonder chambers is transferred to a display of taxidermied animals; items
previously defined as marvels are relabeled and reclassified. Unicorn horns
become narwhal tusks. The chameleon loses its status of natural wonder once
scientists prove that it does not feed off the air around it (Daston and Park
33031).
Long after its historical eclipse, however, the Wunderkammer experiences
an afterlife in modern and contemporary culture, in the hands of artists and
writers who revisit its arrays in order to critique hegemonic epistemological
and affective structures. In the early twentieth century, for instance, surrealist
artists reassemble cabinets of wonders in the pursuit of spaces that would
bring together elements of reality belonging to categories that are so far
removed from each other that reason would fail to connect them (Jay, quoting Andre Breton, 240).4 In the late 1980s, Mario Merz installed a taxidermied
crocodile on the ceiling of the Guggenheim, recreating, according to Patrick
Maurie`s, in a quite unexpected way the element that was undoubtedly the
most symbolic of the curiosity cabinet . . . in the most distant, or the most

4. According to Maurie`s, surrealist culture rediscovers all the variables of the culture of curiosities of the early modern period in order to liberate their potential value (217). Yet this rediscovery also produces forms of ethnographic surrealism in which non-Western cultures and their
artifacts are once again mapped out as peripheral sources of enchantment. Against readings that
tend to see magical realism as part of these exoticizing tendencies (Avelar), it is crucial to note
how specific texts classified under this problematic rubric confront the distinctions between
inside and outside, center and periphery, on which ethnographic surrealism depends. In a
novel such as Cien anos de soledad, the space of enchantment in itself emerges as an ambivalent
domain linked to the geocultural articulation of coloniality. A recognition of this aspect of the
cultural history of wonder and enchantment is entirely absent in the surrealist reinventions of the
Wunderkammer.

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real, context: the artificially low ceiling lit by neon (232).5 More recently,
Mark Dion has assembled cabinets of curiosities out of urban waste, and
Rosamond Purcell reproduced Ole Worms famous Wunderkammer on college campuses in the United States (see fig. 2).
In Los Angeles, David Wilsons Museum of Jurassic Technology, explicitly
modeled after an early modern Wunderkammer, showcases exhibits that, not
unlike Jose Arcadio Buendas decollection of marvels, probe the boundaries
between artistic invention and scientific fact. What is seldom noted, however,
is that the afterlives of the Wunderkammer in modern and contemporary
culture extend beyond visual culture and into literary texts. Within the latter,
the afterlives of the wonder chamber give rise not to delirious or contestatory
museums but to chimerical texts that recover the potential of writing as an
antidisciplinary practice and as a form of disarraythe passage from Borges
cited by Foucault in The Order of Things is a case in point.
The story by Borges in which this passage is found, El idioma analtico
de John Wilkins (1951), describes a chimerical system of classification that
reorganizes stones according to the following categories: comunes (pedernal,
cascajo, pizarra), modicas (marmol, ambar, coral), preciosas (perla, opalo),
transparentes (amatista, zafiro) e insolubles (hulla, greda y arsenico). Metals
are also reclassified as imperfectos (bermellon, azogue), artificiales (bronce,
laton), recrementicios (limaduras, herrumbre) y naturales (oro, estano,
cobre), and so on (157). The narrator in Borgess story compares the ambiguedades, redundancias y deficiencias in Wilkinss system to the aforementioned Chinese encyclopedia, entitled Emporio celestial de conocimientos
benevolos. In this text, animal species are ordered according to the following
categories:
(a) pertenecientes al Emperador, (b) embalsamados, (c) amaestrados, (d)
lechones, (e) sirenas, (f) fabulosos, (g) perros sueltos, (h) incluidos en esta
clasificacion, (i) que se agitan como locos, (j) innumerables, (k) dibujados
con un pincel finsimo de pelo de camello, (l) etcetera, (m) que acaban de
romper el jarron, (n) que de lejos parecen moscas. (15758)

5. This emblematic object also appears in Cien anos de soledad. When passing through the
enchanted region outside Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buenda remembers that in this territory en
epocas pasadas . . . Sir Francis Drake se daba al deporte de cazar caimanes a canonazos para
llevarselos a la reina Isabel (92).

Figure 2. Neo Museum Wormianum. Installation by Rosamond Purcell. Photograph Rosamond W. Purcell 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

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Spitta notes that Borgess passage recalls the experience we have today when
confronted with the cabinets of wonders (6). The resonances of the wonder
chamber in Borgess text, however, may be established beyond a reminiscence; El idioma analtico de John Wilkins appears in fact to take the
surrealist reinvention of the Wunderkammer as a visual grammar of the heteroclite in a new direction, suggesting that a literary fiction can also act as a
space that subverts conceptual landmarks through juxtapositions of heteroclite objects. In the context of the present discussion, Borgess Wunderkammer prompts us to attend to a neglected aspect of Cien anos de soledad: the
characterization of the practice of writing as a form of entropy, fragmentation, and disarray.
For Roberto Gonzalez Echevarra, Cien anos de soledad can be thought of
as an archival fiction where important narrative modalities in Latin
America . . . are contained and analyzed as in a kind of active memory; it is
a repository of narrative possibilities (3). What is particularly suggestive
about this reading, for our present purposes, is that it remains caught
between a consideration of intertextuality as a clash of texts . . . some of
which have a molding and modeling power over others (10) and the figure
of an Archive where such a clash of texts may be analyzed, interpreted, and
perhaps in the future, but only perhapsdismantled. Following Foucault,
Gonzalez Echevarra thinks of the masterstories collected in Cien anos de
soledad as the mechanisms of a process of constraining, denying, limiting
and of writing as the handmaiden of hegemonic discourses which oppress,
watch, control (9). If writing is complicit with power and officialdom
(9), the best an archival fiction can hope for is critical distance and selfreflexivitythe Archive as watchtower. Within these coordinates, Gonzalez
Echevarra interprets the figure of Melquades as an avatar of Borges:
Melquades stands for Borges, the librarian and the keeper of the Archive.
There is something whimsical in Garca Marquezs inclusion of such a
figure in the novel, but there is a good deal more. It is not difficult to
fathom what this Borgesian figure means. Planted in the middle of the
special abode of books and manuscripts, a reader of one of the oldest
and most influential collections of stories in the history of literature,
Melquades and his archive stand for literature; more specifically, for
Borges kind of literature: ironic, critical, a demolisher of all delusions, the
sort of thing encountered at the end of the novel when Aureliano finishes
translating Melquades manuscript. (23)

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381

But taking the textual Wunderkammer in El idioma analtico de John Wilkins into consideration, we may wonder about the kind of Borges that
stands in this abode and about the relationship he establishes with the texts
in his possession. Is this the figure of an archivist or collector who watches
his texts from a distance, or is it the librarian who forges the texts in his
collection? In other words, can the writing of an archive not only recollect
but decollect?
In Cien anos de soledad, writing certainly appears as the code of an
archive of masterstoriesthe encrypted text in Melquadess parchments
but it should be noted that it is also represented as an activity and practice.
To the coded text in Melquadess parchments, then, we may juxtapose not
other images of written texts but of writing itself, as event and procedure.
This takes us away from the Archive and its keeper to the frantic movements
of the characters hands as they writecompulsivelythroughout the text
and to the bathrooms and storerooms where these scenes of writing take
place in secret: Aureliano scribbling nonsensical verses en los asperos pergaminos que le regalaba Melquades, en las paredes del bano, en la piel de
sus brazos (15859); Amaranta hand-writing cartas febriles . . . dirigidas y
nunca enviadas a Pietro Crespi (162); Pietro Crespi hiding at the back of his
store to write esquelas desatinadas (207) that no one reads or understands.
One of the crucial insights in Gonzalez Echevarras reading is that, given
that Cien anos de soledad recurrently points to its condition as a written text,
we should pay close attention to the representation of writing and textual
repositories in the novel. And yet, an interpretation of writing as a disciplinary code obscures the minor scenes of writing in which movement and
impulse are privileged over decoding and interpretation. Paradoxically perhaps, the representation of writing in these latter scenes underscores its nonhermeneutic dimensionsthe fact that writing can operate as a nervous
impulse and bodily movement that is always more or less but never
quite equivalent to representation.
In turn, these scenes of kinetic writing lead us to a repository where a
collection of texts is represented as a heap or a lump, as an archive without
an arche: libros . . . puestos en desorden (Garca Marquez 490). The Catalonian librarian in charge of this messy archive, described toward the end of
the novel, is seated at a table, wearing only underwear, feverishly covering
loose pages with delirious purple scribbles:
Mas que una librera, aquella pareca un basurero de libros usados, puestos
en desorden en los estantes mellados por el comejen, en los rincones

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amelazados de telarana, y aun en los espacios que debieron destinarse a

los pasadizos. En una larga mesa, tambien agobiada de mamotretos, el
propietario escriba una prosa incansable, con una caligrafa morada, un
poco delirante, y en hojas sueltas de cuaderno escolar. Estaba en calzoncillos,
empapado de sudor, y no desatendio la escritura para ver quien haba
llegado. (490)

Writing, then, once again as a nervous activity and as a compulsive bodily

impulse, but with one crucial difference: now this form of writing is linked
to the heteroclite order of an archive in ruins.
The implications of this form of writing for the decollecting practices at
work in Cien anos de soledad are outlined later in the text. Wishing to translate the delirious writing of the librarian into Spanish, Alfonso, a minor character in the novel, places a few of the Catalonians loose pages inside his
pocket. In the depths of Alfonsos pocket, the Catalonians writings mysteriously disappear in a mess of recortes de periodicos y manuales de oficios
raros (527). When the librarian hears that his writing has mysteriously vanished inside Alfonsos pocket, he does not become alarmed. Instead he smiles
and states that literature is created precisely so that it may lose its way among
fragments: aquel era el destino natural de la literatura (52728).
The point of rescuing these minor scenes of writing and messy textual
repositories is to insinuate the possibility that the relationship between the
masterstories that Gonzalez Echevarra poignantly identifies may be reconceived as a libidinal economy of assemblage and entropy; of multiplication,
fragmentation, and disarray; of mutual contamination and ruination. Evoking a literature made up of fragments and minor genresthe literature of
Roberto Arlt, or perhaps the patchwork archive of Walter Benjamins
Arcades Projectthis pocket filled with recortes de periodicos y manuales
de oficios raros allows us to reconceive the clash of texts in Cien anos de
soledad as an assemblage of fragments.
The exploration of early modern collecting practices in Cien anos de
soledad, I have argued in the first section, gives rise to a decollection of both
concrete spaces (the historical Wunderkammer) and the system within which
they take shape (the affective cartography of coloniality/modernity). But this
practice of decollection through writing can also turn or coil back into the
practice of writing itself, as Borgess passage reveals. For a visual artist, the
recreation of a wonder chamber in the early twentieth century or in the
present day produces an alternative space that subverts the way art (Merz,

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383

Dion), natural history (Purcell), or scientific information (Wilson) is organized and displayed. For a writer, a decollecting practice such as those noted
here gives rise to alternative textual enclaves. In the latter case, the delirious
museum gives way to an archive of fragments (Garca Marquez) or an
impossible encyclopedia (Borges).
The question of whether we can establish a relationship between the cultural history of the Wunderkammerexplicitly invoked in Garca Marquezs
novel but not in Borgess short storyand these chimerical texts turns on
issues of recontextualization, misreading, and interpretation. Is Borges in fact
aware of the surrealist Wunderkammer as he devises the heteroclite arrangements of his Chinese encyclopedia? Does the science/fictional decollection of
marvels in Cien anos de soledad inform the idea of writing as an assemblage
outlined above?
Perhaps the answers to these questions are somewhat inconsequential if
we extend the lesson that an artist such as Wilson or Dion extracts from the
Wunderkammer to the writing of literary and cultural criticism. If we think
of the arrangement of the Wunderkammer as a critical practice, then the
relationship between the transfiguration of the Wunderkammer and the
notion of writing as assemblage in Cien anos de soledad may be seen particulary fitting because it is ill-fitting, and fertile because of its capacity to introduce an array of dissonances within a corpus of transhistorical resonances.
More generally, as far as literary and cultural criticism is concerned, could it
be in fact considered of value to strive for the construction of a table or
ground on which it is impossible to find a place of residence for objects or
texts, or define a common locus beneath them all (Foucault xviixviii)?
Is Foucaults commentary on Borgess passage, in other words, a lesson in
comparative literary and media analysis for which the arrays of the historical
Wunderkammer provide a model?
But returning to Cien anos de soledad one last time, we should note, in
closing, that however we choose to define the relationship between the literary transfiguration of the Wunderkammer in the novel and the representation
of writing as a form of disarray, these aspects of the novel outline a particular
predicament that distinguishes Garca Marquezs novel from Wilsons wonder cabinet or Merzs installation. In the latter two cases, the confrontation
with hegemonic organizational models and entrenched politics of display
through a recovery of the Wunderkammer leaves little room for vacillation.
As figures of unselfconscious negativity, the value of these interventions is
not only that they unsettle familiar ways of thinkingthis is evidentbut

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that they confront reified structures of feeling. This is what Foucault has in
mind when, prior to his celebration of the shattering of intellectual structures in Borgess passage, he speaks of a strange laughter that the passage
incites in the reader, disclosing in this sense an affective and physiological
response that resists conceptual assimilation.
In Cien anos de soledad, however, the potential of a libidinal form of writing that produces particular affective responseswonder, ravishment,
strange laughteris counterpointed by a retracing of the cultural history
of such responses in the context of the colonial and postcolonial Americas.
Contemporary artist-scholar Silke Dettmers speaks of the wonder chamber
as a space that opens a multitude of possibilities (42); she speaks of the
experience of wonder itself as a necessity. Cien anos de soledad, on the other
hand, retraces in relation to the Wunderkammer and its multiple possibilities
an affective cartography of coloniality/modernity in which wonder and
enchantment are mobilized as part of systemic domination. Within Cien anos
de soledad, then, an awareness of the interweaving of the management of
emotion (Elias) and the production of space (Lefebvre) in the Americas construes the spaces of enchantment in the novel as haunted, intrinsically conflicted domains. It is precisely because of the existence of these tensions that
so-called magical realism in Latin America must be distinguished from the
ethnographic surrealisms of the West.
In Cien anos de soledad, the reconstruction of these affective cartographies
and Jose Arcadio Buendas decollections of objects begin with the promise
of forceful forging or rewriting that is never entirely fulfilled. In the end, the
Wunderkammer of fictional technologies in Cien anos de soledad devolves
into a collection of malfunctioning machinery (15455, 17172). Surrounded
by his broken marvels, Jose Arcadio Buenda comes to see the flow of time
in Macondo as a failed mechanism: la maquina del tiempo se ha descompuesto! (172). Then again, as the characters of Garca Marquezs novel make
abundantly clear, there is no artifact or machinebroken or notthat cannot be properly unfixed.

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