The Paradox of the Archive in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

This paper looks at the paradoxical nature of the archive revealed in Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Foucault claims that the archive is a site in which time is arrest, resulting in its inaccessibility of the ravages of time, while Echevarria stresses that the archive is a place of secrecy, origin and law. All these characteristics of the archive can be found in Melquiades’ room in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the mythical manuscripts that it houses create an antithetical force against its own totalizing and paralyzing nature. When these manuscripts are deciphered and when the secret is revealed, it is also the time that the narrative comes to an end. These manuscripts within the archive expose the inherently paradoxical structure of the archive – a totalizing and fossilizing site hoarding liberating, non-originating and untotalizable manuscripts. This may imply that the archive is a doomed endeavour because of its hermeneutic impossibility.