be avoided, and he has some spiritual peace. The Colonel's vicious circle is echoed elsewhere in the novel. In particular, Amaranta (the first) spends her last days weaving her shroud. She has been reliably informed that she will die when she finishes the weaving, and she wants to outlive her rival Rebeca, so she resists finishing: 'It might have been said that she wove during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it' (p. 242) This vicious circle reminds us of Penelope, but on this occasion we know that Amaranta has forever missed her Odysseus (or Marquez) and that she is not likely yet to experience any spiritual peace from her vicious circle. Her egotistic rivalry with Rebeca is what keeps her in solitude; she is not working for the sake of work itself, but in order to have a rebellious triumph. So she is trying to rebel against time by undoing her work. The truth begins to dawn on her, however: As she got closer to the unavoidable end she began to understand that only a miracle would allow her to prolong the work past Rebeca's death, but the very concentration gave her the calmness that she needed to accept the idea of frustration. It was then that she understood the vicious circle of Colonel Aureliano Buendia's little gold fishes, (p. 260) The result of this new accommodation with the vicious circle of weaving and unweaving is a kind of peace and a newly found role of deliverer of messages to the dead. She becomes not an author, but at least a disseminator of literature. From such examples, we might take comfort that even if we never escape the vicious circle of reading Marquez, or Melquiades, we too may find ourselves accelerated in our race towards the future, and also find ourselves the bearers occasionally of words that briefly capture reality, for the dead or the unborn. One final word, though, has to be said, or repeated. For us, even though reading can never end, we are unlike the characters in the novel who are fixed in a pattern by the formality of the text they inhabit. Our relation to the text is different since, unlike the characters, we can also resist it; we can find ourselves inside it, outside it, or both places at the same time. Which means that we must come away from reading Marquez with a heightened sense of the need to carry over our techniques of reading into life in general, into story and into history. 1. Walter Benjamin^ The Storyteller, in Illuminations. Harcourt, New York, 1968. 2. Roland Barthes. S/Z, Hill and Wang, New York, 1974 3. The point is made in various places, but perhaps most succinctly in 'Signature, Event, Context in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, 1982 4. See George R. McMurray. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ungar, New York, 1977. Journal of Arts and Ideas 75