enough, given this novel's subject in tyranny, it contains an aesthetic function which the end of Derrida's essay helps to explore : The name of man [is] the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontology—in other words, throughout 'his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of play.^6 The language densities of Patriarch and One Hundred Years attempt to totalise, just as the plot mosaic of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and in doing so support the cultural system from which the fictions emerge. Art can create what the artist overtly loathes; the totalitarian engages the democratic socialist. Ironically, One Hundred Years of Solitude, an account of Latin American history, gave Marquez power through fame which nearly ruined his own life. For this novel as history, Latin American history as a novel—to adapt Mailer's formulation—is his attempt to contain 'immense useless enterprises and great dramas condemned to oblivion in advance', to curtail 'the plague of loss of memory' and to make it impossible to forget Colonel Aureliano Buendia.37 He cannot stop the dictators from degenerating into the solitude of being incapable of love; the fictions do not resolve that degeneracy—the Buendia family, the lieutenant-mayor, the doctor of Leaf Storm, Erendira's grandmother, Mr. Heibert, the Vicario twins, and the rest. They rule, murder, maim and ruin, within the complicity of a culture. Unlike Hawthorne's isolated selfish intelligent people, incapable of'the sense of brotherhood with man' ('Ethan Brand'), resulting in 'a bleak and terrible loneliness', they depend on social complicity. They do not 'lose hold of the magnetic chain of humanity', since the social supports them in depth, such is the static power of the Macondo location. Nor does Marquez intervene with judgement on his controllers. Jlis deconstructions halt there. He studied the insane lives of Latin American dictators—Papa Doc of Haiti who killed all the black dogs because 'one of his enemies, afraid of being taken prisoner, had turned himself into a dog, a black dog',38 Martinez of El Salvador who had streetlights covered with red paper to combat a measles epidemic; Gomez of Venezuela who used to have his death announced and then come back to life—a dominant antecedent for the Patriarch. In using such materials, Marquez is more obsessed by their irrationalities than the American ambience of power which enabled them to thrive. He became a brief member of a Communist cell at the age of twenty, but never a party member. His Marxism came from a teacher trained at a college during the 1930s' Leftist government of President Lopez, and he left school with 'two very strong principles. One was that good novels must be poetic transpositions of reality, and the other was that mankind's future lay in socialism'. He left the Cuban news agency because the old Cuban Communist Party took over many of the institutions of the Revolution, but still holds that the 34 January-June 1985