But in terms of'the writer s duty', Marquez mythicised the dominant figure of the liberal civil war veteran, his maternal grandfather, the Colonel, morally and sexually, and selectively transferred him to fictions. At school in Bogota he gains from his mother materials that will be ordered into Chronicle of a Death Foretold. His fictions in fact emerge in the triangulation of the patriarchal moral warrior, grandmatriarchal magic and superstition, and matriarchal social alertness. He loathes fantasy because 'the imagination is just an instrument for producing reality... the source of creation is always, in the last instance, reality'. From Graham Greene he learned how to connect 'disparate elements' into 'an inner coherence both subtle and real', a method through which to 'reduce the whole enigma of the tropics to the fragrance of a rotten guava'. He admires Conrad, a writer preeminently poised between unavoidable elements and power skills, and plotting his navigations between them. Fr^m Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa Marquez drew a naturalist comment on his autumn patriarch : 'certain elephant customs explained my dictator's immorality perfectly'. Drawing on actuality, the fiction is, nevertheless, 'a secret code, a kind of conundrum about the world'; and the Colombian code contains an African 'taste for the supernatural'—in Angola in 1978—'a watershed in my life' — 'I suddenly found myself back in the world of my childhood... I even started having my childhood nightmares again'. But finally, all writers write 'the book of solitude'—the solitude of the lieutenant mayor, 'the solitude of power' which enclosed the general, the working region of One Hundred Years. The patriarch exists in a 'prose poem'^4 which is a single sentence design holding 'multiple monologues' into which the reader is submerged into obsessive solitary continuity as he is in Remembrance of Things Past, Doctor Faustus, Absalom, Absalom, and 'The Bear' section of Go Down, Moses. Spatialising form devolves chronicle time and durational time in ways Ezra Pound, a major poet of solitude and power, writes of: 'out into TIME, as a design is determined SPACE.... Most arts attain their effects by using a fixed element and a variable.'^ But the writer can never totalise reality into fiction. In 1966, Jacques Derrida writes : If totalisation no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infmiteness cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalisation. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions.... One cannot determine the centre, and exhaust totalisation because the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre s place in its absence—this sign adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more. Marquez's dictator is a centre sign of solitude and power who exists in a text design which collapses time into stasis, and the text's prose is what Levi-Strauss calls the 'overabundance of the signifier', 'a surplus of signification'. Curiously Journal of Arts and Ideas 33