‘The quicksand of forgetfulness’: semantic dementia in One Hundred Years of Solitude

摘要

This multidisciplinary article compares the pattern of memory loss described in Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez’s One Hundred Years ofnSolitude to that exhibited by patients with semantic dementia (SD). In his renowned novel, Garcı´a Ma´rquez depicts the plight ofnMacondo, a town struck by the dreaded insomnia plague. The most devastating symptom of the plague is not the impossibilitynof sleep, but rather the loss of ‘the name and notion of things’. In an effort to combat this insidious loss of knowledge, thenprotagonist, Jose´ Arcadio Buendı´a, ‘marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan’. ‘Studying theninfinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by theirninscriptions but that no one would remember their use’. The cognitive impairments experienced by Macondo’s inhabitants arenremarkably similar to those observed in SD, a clinical syndrome characterized by a progressive breakdown of conceptualnknowledge (semantic memory) in the context of relatively preserved day-to-day (episodic) memory. First recognized in 1975,nit is now considered one of the main variants of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Writing within the realm of magical realismnand investigating the power of language as a form of communication, Garcı´a Ma´rquez provides beautiful descriptions of the lossnof ‘the name and notion of things’ typical of the syndrome. He further speculates on ways to cope with this dissolution ofnmeaning, ranging from ‘the spell of an imaginary reality’ to Jose´ Arcadio’s ‘memory machine’, strategies that resonate withnattempts by semantic dementia patients to cope with their disease. Remarkably, Garcı´a Ma´rquez created a striking literaryndepiction of collective semantic dementia before the syndrome was recognized in neurology. The novel also provides anninspiring and human account of one town’s fight against ‘the quicksand of forgetfulness’.