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ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Cien años de soledad to early modern material culture. In particular, it argues that we may reread central passages in the novel as a ludic reintegration of the space of the cámara de maravillas or Wunderkammer, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repositories of objects that were conceived of as marvels or wonders. While this transhistorical relationship appears at first to link García Márquez's novel to modern and contemporary reinventions of the Wunderkammer in Europe and North America, the present article underscores the specificity of Cien años de soledad's approach to the early modern culture of the marvelous in light of the novel's retracing of the affective cartographies of empire.
It has been repeatedly observed that writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier revisit the sixteenth-century crónicas de Indias in novels such as Los pasos perdidos (1953) and Cien años de soledad (1967) (Zavala; Calasans Rodrigues; Vargas Llosa; Martín; Serrano). In these readings, the crónicas are generally interpreted as an oddity or quirk of early modern discourse, in which the representation of the rare and wondrous predominates over the description of the regular and ordinary. Scholars of early modern culture, however, warn that we can think of these texts as deviations or anomalies only if we remove them from the context within which they take shape - that the representation of the marvelous and wondrous does in fact become institutionalized in sixteenth-century travel writing and historiographical discourse (Greenblatt; Sell). Furthermore, looking beyond literary texts, we can argue that wonder (as an affective response) and marvels (as the objects associated with that response) also attain a privileged role in early modern material culture, as the emergence of cámaras de maravillas or Wunderkammern demonstrates.
In a late sixteenth- century wood engraving of the interior of Ferrante Imperato's Wunderkammer, we see four men standing in a spacious room, staring at a crocodile mounted on the ceiling (see fig. 1). A constellation of objects that at the time would have been considered marvelous or wondrous surround the crocodile: shells, corals, mollusks, starfish. Three of the viewers look up to take in the sight. One of them, perhaps Imperato himself, directs a pointer at the roof. The fourth visitor...