The distinguishing characteristic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of A Death Foretold lies on how it is able to blur the lines separating fact from fiction, on how it is able to make the novel appear heavily structured but not linear, and on how it is able to combine elements of journalism and what Kumkum Sangari coins as “marvellous realism” (1985) and make them all blend perfectly in a seamless flow of events that started and culminated with death.
This paper would problematize how the novel transcends its genre by weaving journalism and literature with particular focus on the story and plot duality.
GARCIA MARQUEZ AS A WRITER AND JOURNALIST
“Novel and journalism are children of the same mother.”
(Garcia Marquez, 2003)
To give this paper some local color, here is a brief background on Garcia Marquez’s profession as a journalist and as a writer. His moment of eureka came when he got hold of Kafka’s Metamorphosis which prompted him to write the way he knows: not in a straight, linear narrative nor following a traditional plot, but much like the way his grandmother tells stories. In 1946, his first story “The Third Resignation” was published in El Espectador. It was heavily influenced by his reading of Metamorphosis but “relieved … of its false mysteries and ontological prejudices.” (Garcia Marquez, 2003)
In 1946, the year Gaitan was killed and Garcia Marquez had to transfer to the more peaceful town of Cartagena, he was salvaged from his penniless carefree life by Manuel Zapata Olivella by introducing him to Clemente Manuel Zaballa, then the editor-in-chief of El Universal and by far the “best journalism teacher anyone could imagine.” (Garcia Marquez, 2003). Zaballa was trying to introduce a new form of writing, a kind of creative writing that opposes the “routine and submissive reporting that prevailed at that time.” (Garcia Marquez, 2003) They found the form for Garcia Marquez where he didn’t have to compromise too much of his style and so he started writing editorials. In 1950, Garcia Marquez completely abandoned the dream of his parents for him to become a lawyer. From then on, he had several journalism stints: he wrote a column entitled “La Jirafa” in El Heraldo, became the editor of Cronica and published stories and articles for El Espectador. And in 1955, his serialized feature story on the Columbian sailor who became the sole survivor of a shipwreck after ten days in sea sealed his fate as a journalist. As a fiction writer, he was just beginning.
The creative journalism that Garcia Marquez was introduced to is something akin to literary journalism, a term coined in the 1970’s in reaction to Tom Wolfe’s contentious new journalism of the 1960’s.
LITERARY JOURNALISM
Beyond a definition of the term which would simply state that it is a form of referential writing that uses literary techniques (Kramer: WWW), it is important to describe it through its characteristics as distinguished from standard journalism.
In standard journalism, the voice of the writer is hidden, but in literary journalism, the voice of the writer is given the opportunity to enter the story, sometimes even with dramatic irony. (Kramer, 1995)
The basic formula for standard journalism is to have a lead, lead support, detail, and background with the five basic w’s present in the opening sentence and the details developing on the “how” aspect. It is also more concerned with controversial news items or issues.
On the other hand, literary journalism entails immersion reporting, complicated structures, symbolic representation, personal involvement with the materials, artistic creativity, and of course accuracy of facts. Rather than writing about controversial issues, it is characterized by narratives based on “everyday events that bring out the hidden patterns of community life as tellingly as the spectacular stories that make newspaper headlines.” (Kramer, 1995) A literary journalist’s narrative is also fraught with dialogues.
According to Mark Kramer: “The point of literary journalism is to cross fields, to marry, to rejoin our compartmentalized modern experience.” He also says that ‘what distinguished them (literary journalists) from fiction writers is the intention – to convey to readers the ‘sense’ of actuality.”(1995)
Looking at Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we see how it also appears to “marry” or “rejoin” two worlds and give us a sense of “actuality”. Even the maestro said it himself, he considers Chronicle as “a perfect union between journalism and literature.” (WWW, 2004). However, Chronicle is clearly classified under fiction. Garcia Marquez’s works fall under marvellous/ magic realism, a convergence of two worlds which appear to exist apart from each other, but actually forms a continuum. The structure he employs involves techniques of his profession as a journalist and as a writer. While literary journalists try to establish facts, Garcia Marquez in his fiction foregrounds the genre and reconstructs his own reality.
HOW MUCH OF IT IS JOURNALISM AND HOW MUCH IS FICTION?
This question I would not attempt to answer because journalism and fiction are not two separate categories in the novel. Both journalism and fictional techniques were employed to unearth a deeper drama in the narrative. What this paper will try to identify are the structures or elements common to journalism but was used by the novel to give it the impression of fact disguised as fiction or vice versa.
The novel opened with the perfect lead. It already stated what is going to happen. Santiago Nasar is going to get killed that day (p.3). This would appear to conform with the journalistic requirement of an inverted pyramid. The reader already knows what is going to happen, when it is going to happen, and to whom it is going to happen. Only the perpetrator and the motive are not revealed to build up the suspense. In journalism, this is the lead, in fiction and in Genette’s term, this is what we call the prolepsis. Prolepsis is defined as the “narration of story-event at a point before earlier events have been mentioned.” (Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, 1983) It builds the suspense of trying to know “how is it going to happen?” This will be dealt with more detail as we discuss the structuring of text-time and story-time in the novel.
Also mentioned earlier is another important aspect of journalistic writing, the ‘detail’. Detail refers to the drama reflected in sound and active image and captured in quotations and picture words. (Santos, 1992) In this aspect, the novel abounds. The narrator gives a minute by minute blow of the events that lead to Santiago Nasar’s death, reconstructing history through interviews. Here, it fulfills the requirements of literary journalism as it involved the use of several dialogues, immersion reporting, complicated structures, voice, and even symbolic representations such as Nasar’s recurrent dream of trees which spells of a sacrifice like the crucifixion of Christ (p. 3); the crowing of the roosters on the day the Bishop came and Nasar was killed, thus ‘betrayed’ (p. 21); and the stab in the right hand of Nasar found during his autopsy which looked like a stigma of the crucified Christ (p. 75)
Another important element of journalistic writing is ‘backgrounding’. Backgrounding refers to recalling the past in relation to the news. (Santos, 1992) Backgrounding is the primary reason why the narrator in Chronicle has to shift back and forth in time. It has to explain how a death that is clearly foretold happened. And he can only do this by showing what kind of characters are in the novel, what kind of life they lead, and what are the events that happened before that fateful day. This backgrounding is almost synonymous to Genette’s term analepsis. Analepsis is the narration of a story-event at a point in the text after later events have been told (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, 1983).
At this point, it is important to emphasize that although Chronicle of a Death Foretold is based on a true story, Garcia Marquez did not only change the names of the actual persons involved, he also made the killers, twins, when they actually weren’t, he made the groom a ‘stranger’ from the place when the ‘real’ groom was a son of town landowners, and he made the one who got stabbed to death an Arab instead of the medical student that the actual person is. Garcia Marquez also injected an element of romanticism when he made Santiago Nasar and Angela Vicario reunite in the novel when the real life couple led separate lives, with the groom remarrying and producing his own children, while the woman ‘faded from history”. But someone did get killed because it was his name that was spoken when the bride was asked who made her lose her virginity on the night of her wedding. (Bodtorf Clark, 1999) And that person who got killed really was a friend of the narrator, Garcia Marquez. And Garcia Marquez said it himself that the novel is based on what happened in Sucre back in 1951. And that the death of Cayetano Gentile (represented by Nasar in the story) was really foretold with the murderers doing their utmost to try to get somebody to prevent them from committing the crime. (Repertorio Espanol Study Guide, WWW)
How does Garcia Marquez achieve this blurring of worlds, of realities, and genres? For this, the temporal structure of the novel plays an important part. The novel gives precise times thus making it appear linear. However, it constantly shifts back to events that happened in the past to contextualize the present. It also presents simultaneous occurrences to reveal what everybody in the town was doing on the day that the crime was committed. This would appear to be how an investigation would normally develop. Going deeper, this simultaneity of time, as in the words of Kumkum Sangari, is a “restless product of a long history of miscegenation, assimilation and sycretization as well as conflict, contradiction, and cultural violence. The cultural simultaneity of Latin America is a matter of historical conjecture in which different modes of production, different social formations, and different ways of seeing overlap as the ground of conflict, contradiction, change, and intervention, both indigenous and foreign.” (Sangari, 1984) The distinctiveness of Garcia Marquez’s work lies in its very roots. It cannot help but assume a form of non-linearity because the story from which the novel derives its narrative/ discourse is a result of the complexities of Latin American life and Columbia in particular.
MARVELLOUS REALISM: A CONTINUUM
Garcia Marquez’s treatment of time connects to the genre associated to his work, “marvellous realism”.
“Marquez’s marvellous realism not only emerges from the contingent, simultaneous, polyphonic contours of his material world, it is also a transformative mode that has the capacity both to register and to engage critically with the present and to generate a new way of seeing.
Marvellous realism answers an emergent society’s need for renewed self-description and radical assessment, displaces the established categories through which the West has construed other cultures either on its own image or as alterity, questions the Western capitalist myth of modernization and progress, and asserts without nostalgia an indigenous preindustrial realm of possibility.
As a mode, marvelous realism is attached to a real and to a possible. The seamless quality of this mode, the difficulty of distinguishing between fact and invention, bring an enormous pressure to bear upon the perception of reality.”
The brutality of the real is equally the brutality and terror of that which is imminent, conceivable and potentially possible.” (Sangari, 1985)
Garcia Marquez is able to bring the real and the possible together in such an unobtrusive way because he works under the umbrella of marvelous reallism which by itself is already a convergence. What appears marvelous or extraordinary may actually be real, and what appears real may actually be an illusion or a possibility.
The interest in the temporal dimension of the novel is to discover how Chronicle of a Death Foretold moves, in Genette’s terms, from the histoire or the story to the recit or plot. By analyzing this aspect, it is hoped that an understanding will be arrived at on how Garcia Marquez constructs the narrative of Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
APPLYING GENETTE
According to Gerard Genette, the narrative discourse consists of the histoire or the story, that which is recounted; the recit or plot, the account itself; and the narration or the way in which the account is presented.
“Story and narration would not exist for us without the mediation of the recit. But reciprocally, the recit, the narrative discourse, can be what it is only by telling a story, without which it would not be a narrative, and only in so far as it is presented by someone, without which it would not be discourse. As narrative, it lives by its relation to the story it tells, as discourse, it lives from its relation to the narration it offers.” (Genette in Scholes, 1974)
Genette identifies three aspects of narrative discourse; tense, moods, and voice. Tense refers to the temporal relations between story and recit. Moods refer to questions of distance and perspective, scene and narrative. While voice refers to the situation of the narrator with respect to the events narrated, to the discourse and to the audience. (Scholes, 1974)
For this paper, the focus is on the tense aspect; the gaps, re-arrangements and rhythmical devices of the recit through which we perceive the story.
First it is important to identify what we mean by time. Here, the definition given by Shlommith- Rimmon Kenan will be adopted. Time is referred as the “textual arrangement of the event component of the story.” (1983) Time is also identified as a “constituent factor of both story and text… Time in narrative fiction is defined as the relations of chronology between story and text. (Shlomith-Rimmon Kenan, 1983)
In discussing the temporal aspect of the novel, the concepts of story-time and text-time will come into play. Story-time involves a convention which identifies it with ideal chronological order, or what is sometimes called ‘natural chronology’. On the other hand, text-time refers to the “linear (spatial) disposition of linguistic segments in the continuum of the text. Both story-time and text-time are pseudo-temporal. (Shlomith-Rimmon Kenan, 1983)
However, since text-time refers to the disposition of elements in the text and is bound to be one-directional and irreversible, it cannot correspond to the multilinearity of ‘real’ story time, and even with conventional story-time, this is rarely met. (Shlomith-Rimmon Kenan, 1983). The discrepancies between story-time and text-time are discussed by Genette and here is where prolepsis and analepsis enter.
Genette identifies three aspects of time: order, duration, and frequency. We shall limit our discussion to order. By order, he refers to the different ways of how story-events are presented in the narrative; whether they are presented after later events have been told (analepsis) or before earlier events have been mentioned (prolepsis)
Looking at the first part of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the story started with a prolepsis, “on the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning”(p.3) and then it rewinds a little to when he dreamt of trees before waking up, an analepsis. The plot or recit comes in by revealing that this is being narrated by the mother twenty-seven years after. She is recounting what happened that day until the part when he left the house to see the Bishop who was coming that day. As Placida Linero, the mother, recounts the past, since she is telling this from the future, we are given a picture of what she has become after the incident, and we find her sitting in the same hammock she had watched him leave that day and in the same position. (p.6) And such may be considered a prolepsis. The reader wonders why this happened to her; what happened to “immobilize” her, what was her contribution to her son’s death?
In between this narration, the narrator who was also the person who went back to his hometown to interview was interjecting his knowledge of Santiago Nasar, his memory of him. So the reader sees the past told in the future. An analapesis within a prolepsis.
APPLYING TODOROV
Studying the device employed by the author of the novel, we can turn to the “Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966) by Tzevetan Todorov which distinguishes between the first story and the second story. Although classifying Chronicle of a Death Foretold under detective fiction is very limiting since as mentioned before, it creates a genre all by itself, distinguishing between the story of the crime (first story) and the story of the investigation (second story) is helpful in reconstructing the reality of the novel.
In the novel, the first story consists of the events that led to the crime or the death of Santiago Nasar and the subsequent events. This includes the arrival of Bayardo San Roman in the town, the time when San Roman chose Angela Vicario to be his bride, Bayardo and Angela’s wedding, Angela’s return to her home on the night of her wedding, the hunt and murder of Santiago Nasar. The first story also includes the lives of the people in the town especially the families of Vicario and Nasar before that day or even before San Roman entered the picture, what all the other people in the town were doing during the wedding and on the Monday of the crime, and all the events that happened after Nasar’s death.
On the other hand, the second story, also known as the plot, involves the method employed by the narrator to present the details of the first story. This includes his return to the hometown, his interviews, memories, and observations, and the way he presented all of these ‘facts, his constant back and forth movement in the narration, his use of the third person, first person, and omniscient voice in recounting the details of the story.
Todorov says that a detective fiction is able to effectively fuse the first story and the second story because authors of this type of genre fabricates the story in such a way that the second story appears natural and unobtrusive, not calling attention to itself. He listed other characteristics of detective fiction that categorized it as such but since he explicitly distinguished between popular art and high art saying that detective fiction falls under the former, we will no longer touch on that. (1966) What is important is that we learn how Garcia Marquez in Chronicle of a Death Foretold successfully fuses the first story and the second story. However, this also poses a dilemma since it is known that the first story of the novel is not the ‘real’ story of the event that really happened. The reader knows of a story prior to the first story and this is what makes the novel a form of ‘marvellous realism’.
THE TEXT
Now, going back to our discussion of the temporal aspect of the narrative, the novel is divided into five chapters. Although here, it is important to note that the novel doesn’t really have chapter numbers, just divisions to separate one part from the other. This implies that one can start with whichever part and end with the same thing, the death of Nasar.
The first part began with Nasar waking up and Nasar getting killed. The events included: the recollection of Placida Linero, as mentioned earlier; the situation with the cook, Victoria Guzman, why she didn’t warn him; the arrival of the bishop; the realization of Luisa Santiaga, the narrator’s mother, that Santiago Nasar is going to get killed that day; and how she tried to warn him but it was too late.
The second part started with the arrival of Bayardo San Roman in the town and ended with the revelation that sealed Santiago Nasar’s fate. The chapter includes how Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario met, how Bayardo San Roman woed the family of Angela, the wedding day, the wedding night, and the return of Angela Vicario to her home. In this chapter, although it didn’t end with Santiago Nasar getting killed, it did end with the revelation of his name which the twins, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, considers almost like a done deal, that there’s no other way but to kill Angela’s perpetrator.
The third section of the novel opened with the ruling of the court which is to uphold the stand of the twins’ lawyer, homicide in legitimate defense of honor and ended with the sister of the narrator, the nun, running and crying, “They’ve killed Santiago Nasar!”(p. 71) It gave a detailed account of how the twins proceeded with their crime, the people they encountered along the way, the people who knew all about what was going to happen.
Only the fourth chapter did not end with the tragedy. This part began with the autopsy performed by Father Carmen Amador which was like killing Santiago Nasar all over again and ended with the reunion of Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman after nearly twenty years. This chapter also pictured Bayardo San Roman as the helpless victim, the one deserving of a happy ending after having been disillusioned. And this is like killing Santiago Nasar twice over. He wasn’t just killed twice over because of the autopsy but more so with the happy ending that came to Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario while his life had to end abruptly, appearing to be the sacrificial lamb.
The last chapter started by recounting what happened to the townspeople years after and culminated with the carnage of Santiago Nasar in the front porch of his house, just in front his mother who accidentally locked the door seconds before he could enter the house because she thought he was already inside.
Chapters one, three, and five all started with a prolepsis, a glimpse of the future and then rewinds to the day of the crime, culminating with the death of Nasar (analepsis). While chapters two and four started with analepsis, moving steadily forward. Chapter two ends with the revelation of Nasar’s name (still an analepsis) and chapter four with the reunion of San Roman and Vicario.
The way the novel plays with its temporal structure shows how it is able to shuttle back and forth to the reality of the novel and the reality of what happened out there. The narrator even injects personal occurrences in his life like how Nasar hides a gun under his pillow but takes off the bullets first and hides them somewhere else (p. 5-6) is almost similar to the experience that Garcia Marquez’s grandmother had when she was cleaning bed sheets and the revolver hidden under the pillow fell down and the bullet came wheezing past very close to her face (Garcia Marquez, 2003); and Garcia Marquez’s proposition to Mercedes Barcha during the wedding celebration, who is actually Garcia Marquez’s real-life partner (p. 43)
This is the magic of the novel. Through the author’s temporal treatment, it was able to make the structure work for what he wants the readers to see. By employing journalistic techniques, it was able to relieve the story of gross sentimentality and present the lucidity of the people when the crime was committed. By using a real occurrence as the springboard of the novel, it was able to play with its genre and transcend it.
The way the events were weaved in the narrative impresses on the reader the inevitability of Santiago Nasar’s fate. Although events leading up to the crime shout otherwise, whichever way the author proceeds, the crime will still be committed and each of the characters would have contributed to it.
“Fatality makes us invisible”
– Investigating Magistrate (p. 113)
References:
Primary Text
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Tr. Gregory Rabassa. New
York: Vintage Books, 2003.
Secondary Text
Bodtorf Clark, Gloria Jeanne. A Synergy of Styles: Art and Artifact in Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. Maryland: Univ Press of America, 1999.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Living to Tell the Tale. Tr. Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2003
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics. London and New
York: Methuen, 1983.
Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible” Journal of Arts and Ideas (Delhi) 10-11
(January-June 1985)
Santos, Vergel. Basic Journalism: An Asean Handbook. Manila: Asean Committee on
Culture and Information, 1992.
Scholes, Robert. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven and London:
Yale Univ, 1974.
Sims, Norman and Mark Kramer, Ed. Literary Journalism. New York: Ballantine
Books,1995.
Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction” In The Poetics of Prose. Tr.
Richard Howard. 1966
Worldwide Web Sources
Baez, Luis Antonio, Tr. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Violence as a Genre.” 9 July
2004. http://www.iacd.oas/Interamer/Interamerhtml/Vergarahtml/verg64_cp1.htm
Many, Paul. “Literary Journalism: Newspapers’ Last, Best Hope.” Connecticut Review,
17 August 2004, http://www.ctstate.edu/univrel/ctreview/spring96/pmljnlbh.html
The Spanish Repertory Theatre. “Reportorio Espanol Study Guide.” 20 August 2004,
http://www.repertorio.org/education/index.php?area=sg&id=28
“The uncertain old man whose real existence was the simplest of enigmas.” 19 July
2004, http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.html
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