Internet Publishing

Yellow! I'm still alive. Been busy lately, applying for teaching positions, working on my thesis, catching up on my readings, and performing my desk job and all...

Anyway, one of the requirements of the college I'm applying for is to submit a collection of scholarly works. I have written some for my masteral but not one of them has been published. They all need a lot of polishing up or reworking. But since, I have to produce a scholarly portfolio, I'm taking advantage of internet publishing to post my work here and make them available for your criticisms and suggestions. That way I wil be submitting to them "technically" published works.;) (the joy of internet:)

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Constructing Consciousness: A Study on
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”
By: Joahna D. Toledo (10294481)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was explicit in stating that Chronicle of a Death Foretold is in part based from a real occurrence in Sucre back in 1951. It was an event that affected his family because the victim of the crime is a friend of his. For this reason, it took him nearly thirty years to write about it.

This common knowledge however should not lead us to believe that the novel is so constructed to reflect reality. In fact, what this paper would try to do is show how the novel interrogates reality, how the realistic (albeit marvelous at times) or journalistic mode of writing employed by the Maestro does not equate to real life, and how its very constructiveness defamiliarizes and jolts the readers to see how Latin Americans are represented or misrepresented and positioned as subjects in the novel.

In the chapter on “The Vision of Structuralism in Contemporary Fiction” from The Structural Analysis of Literary Texts, Robert Scholes states that:

“The role of a properly structuralist imagination will of necessity be futuristic. It will inform mankind of the consequences of actions not yet taken. But it must not merely inform, it must make us feel the consequences of those actions, feel them in our hearts and vice versa.” (1974, p200)

This will bring us into the structure of the novel which revealed outright what would happen, Santiago Nassar was going to get killed that day. This prefiguring of the end is what Genette calls prolepsis or the “narration of story-event at a point before earlier events have been mentioned.” (Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, 1983) This also calls our attention to the novel’s construction of the story or its plot. It talks about a death foretold and so it places the end of the crime right in the beginning of the story thereby commencing with the story of the investigation.

In analyzing the structure of the novel, it is helpful to turn to Todorov’s Typology of Detective Fiction. Although I would not limit Chronicle of a Death Foretold to the genre of detective fiction since I believe the novel creates a genre all by itself through the use of elements of magic realism, journalism, and other literary techniques and devices not to arrive at the truth but to question what appears or what we assume to be the truth. What can be applied to the novel are Todorov’s concepts of the first story (story of the crime) and second story (story of the investigation), how they are fused together, and the assignment of stereotypical roles to the characters of detective fiction.

In the novel, the first story consists of the events that led to the crime or the death of Santiago Nasar and all the subsequent events. This includes the arrival of Bayardo San Roman in the town, Bayardo’s courting and proposition to 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, and what became of the characters after Nasar’s carnage. 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 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.

Reading the novel is like seeing Santiago Nasar getting killed over and over again. The structure ensures that such is projected. The novel is divided into five parts, no chapter numbers. This could imply that there is no one way to read the novel, one can start with whichever section and arrive at the same ending, Nasar’s foretold death.

The first part begins with Nasar waking up and ends with Nasar getting killed. Placida Linero, Santiago Nasar’s mother, recollects rather vividly the events that happened on that fateful day. Victoria Guzman, the resident cook, justifies her actions for not warning Nasar. The bishop arrives but does not even set foot on land. Luisa Santiaga, the narrator’s mother, realizes what is going to happen to Santiago Nasar and tries in vain to warn him and his mother.

The second part starts with the arrival of Bayardo San Roman in the town and ends with the revelation that seals Santiago Nasar’s fate. Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario meet. Bayardo San Roman woes the family of Angela. Bayardo and Angela are joined in matrimony. Everybody in the town joins in the carnivalesque and extravagant wedding celebration. Angela Vicario is returned to her home. In this chapter, although it doesn’t end with Santiago Nasar getting killed, it does end with the revelation of his name which has more or less determined what would become of him in the hands of an indifferent community.

The third section of the novel opens with the court ruling to uphold the stand of the twins’ lawyer which is homicide in legitimate defense of honor and ends with the sister of the narrator, the nun, running and crying, “They’ve killed Santiago Nasar!”(p. 71) It gives a detailed account of how the twins proceeded with their crime, the people they encountered along the way, and the people who knew all about what was going to happen.

Only the fourth chapter does not end with the tragedy. This part begins with the autopsy performed by Father Carmen Amador which was like killing Santiago Nasar all over again and ends with the reunion of Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman after nearly twenty years. This chapter also pictures Bayardo San Roman as the helpless victim, the one who deserves a happy ending after having been disillusioned and fooled. And this is like killing Santiago Nasar twice over. Nasar appears to be the sacrificial lamb for the reunion and happy ending of Bayardo and Angela Vicario.

The last chapter starts by recounting what happened to the townspeople years after and culminates with the carnage of Santiago Nasar in the front porch of his house, just in front of his mother who accidentally locks the door seconds before he could enter the house.
The novel cannot be merely classified under detective fiction because its construction is not just to make the second story as unobtrusive as it can or to find out who committed the crime or why they did it. Its very structure is defamiliarizing. It plunges the reader of the novel into the crime again and again to show how something like this happens recurrently everywhere, in the streets of Latin America and the rest of the world, because they have chosen or have been positioned to desensitize themselves from monstrosities such as that of the novel’s.

There is also the essential duality of narrative that goes beyond the first or second story of Todorov. Using Roman Jakobson’s diagram of speech act, a “narrative emphasizes its relation to context or its relation to receiver. Narrative can be mainly concerned to communicate a vision of a context or to stimulate a reaction in an audience.” (Scholes, 1974) Borrowing from the terms of structuralists, the narrative or Chronicle of a Death Foretold in particular acts as our signifier with an arbitrary relation to the signified.

On the first level of signification, we might take the signified to be the community in Sucre in 1951 who watched the death of Cayetano Gentile (Santiago Nasar in the novel) unfold before their eyes. The second level of signification may refer to Latin America in general and how it is positioned as subject in the eyes of Western capitalists/ imperialists. The stereotypical roles or behaviors assigned to them. On the first level of signification, Bayardo San Roman may signify the real life groom who abandoned his wife on their wedding night because he discovered he is no longer a virgin. On the second level of signification, Bayardo San Roman may represent the United States, a foreign invader, who suddenly takes notice of Latin America as a “fertile bride” which will bear him “laboring children” to satisfy his imperialist and capitalist whims but which he will right away abandon when he discovers that his “bride-to-be” has already been “exploited”. Angela Vicario, on the first level of signification, may represent the abandoned bride who in real life does not remarry and fades into oblivion. On the second level, she may represent Latin America who realizes that a “foreign invader’s” rejection of her does not mean she cannot survive on her own and strive to “conquer” that former lover who rejected her. It could mean the triumph of one nation over another or of matriarchy over patriarchy.

The novel can be seen as a parody of Latin America. The death of Santiago Nasar is revealed right from the beginning. The title says that this death is foretold. The novel then portrays the characters acting according to their stereotyped roles, the roles assigned to them by the society or the roles which they have taken for themselves. Their indifference to the death of Nasar signifies their indifference to their own representation.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Prize Lecture entitled The Solitude of Latin America which he delivered on 8 Dec 1982, the same year that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published, he said that the solitude of Latin America is due to the foreigners’ insistence to interpret their reality through foreigner eyes.

“It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” (Garcia Marquez, 1982)

This brings us to the idea of an interrogative text. Catherine Belsey said that a good text is that which brings more questions about reality. It problematizes what has always been accepted as natural or accepted. The significations we discussed above should not be taken as they are. Their connecting lines are arbitrary and therefore questionable. It also perpetuates a certain ideology or myth. However, what’s good about it is that it offers options of interpretations. We can look at the signified and try to find out what kind of ideology is perpetuating this.

In the same speech, Garcia Marquez said that “the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home.” (1982) Looking at the novel, we see how it was not really the workings of Bayardo San Roman that killed Santiago Nassar but the community’s psyche. It was not the coming of Bayardo to their town and his marrying of Angela Vicario that placed an abrupt end to Nasar’s life but the apathy of the townsfolk. In this way, the novel serves as an allegory of the Latin American society or history, how the countless murders and other crimes from the War of a Thousand Days in 1899 up to present were not committed “three thousand leagues” from their land but by their own people.

However, Garcia Marquez also said in that same speech that “we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”

In the novel, following the post-structuralist thought, the realist/ journalistic mode employed by it does not equate to reality but constructs it. For this reason, we see Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario reuniting in the end. Since language constructs the world and as in Catherine Belsey’s expressive realism that every text, including realism is ideological, discursive or positions subject into a kind of thinking, the audience of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is hoped to be positioned into a kind of thinking where they are able to empower themselves and create their own stories.

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