Graduate Course

PAPER - 8
Contemporary Literature

Contents:

Lesson 1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez : A brief biography

Lesson 2. Introduction
Lesson 3. Study Guide to Reading and Comprehension
Lesson 4. Strategies for Interpretation
List of works cited
Appendix : Excerpts from Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza’s interview with Marquez
Assignments

Editor:
Dr. Seema Suri

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

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 Academic Session 2012-13 (800 copy)

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 Preface

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold was first published in Spanish in 1981 and
it was translated into English the next year. All references to the novel in this study-material are to this
edition:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981): Trans. Gregory Rabassa, Penguin: India, 1996.
Read the novel before using this study-material, which introduces you to Marquez's innovations in
style and structure, his magical realism, and his humanitarianism. Since no commentary can ever do
justice to the work of a literary giant like Marquez you should read more about his fiction. A brief reading
list is attached.
The assignments at the end may be sent to me for evaluation. I am always interested in feedback. So
if you have any comments, suggestions for improvement, or if you have noticed any errors, you could
write to me.
Dr. Seema Suri
Reader
Deptt. of English
School of Open Learning
University of Delhi
Delhi-110007
1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A brief biography

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town near the
coast of the Atlantic. Ocean, in that nation's Caribbean region, which is regarded as exotic even in other
parts of Colombia. He was the first of sixteen children born to Gabriel Eligio Garcia, a telegraph operator,
and his wife, Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran. Shortly after his birth, the family left Aracataca, leaving
Gabriel there to be raised by his maternal grandparents. One may find in these early years the first seeds
of Garcia Marquez's fictional techniques and preoccupations: his grandmother, Tranquilina Iguaran Cotes,
told him of ghosts and other supernatural beings as if they were the most natural things in the world, and
his grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Marquez Iguaran, told the boy equally fantastic stories based on his
participation in the Colombian civil wars in the early years of the century. When Gabriel was eight, his
grandfather died. Gabriel was sent to school in Zipaquira, a town near the capital city of Bogota. He
completed his high-school education in 1946, and in 1947 he enrolled at the National University of
Colombia in Bogota in order to study law. Also in 1947 appeared the first of fifteen short stories that he
would publish in Colombian newspapers over the next five years. The following year saw the beginning
of a decade-long period of violence and political instability in Colombia, which led Garcia Marquez to
transfer to the National University of Cartagena, a coastal city.

At this time, he also began to work as a journalist, writing for El Universal in Cartagena. In one of
his 1949 articles, he mentions William Faulkner. It was his discovery of Faulkner’s work. Garcia Marquez
later said, that inspired him to become a writer. Moving to Barranquilla in 1950, he continued his
journalistic career, writing for El Heraldo, and became a member of a gathering of young writers and
intellectuals who called themselves the Group of Barranquilla. Through their reading and passionate
discussion of such novelists as Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway. James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Virginia
Woolf, they grounded themselves in the experimental narrative techniques of modernist fiction. His
reading of Kafka's The Metamorphosis also led Garcia Marquez to the realization that serious literature
could be based on ideas as fantastic as his own. It was at this time that he abandoned his law studies and
decided to pursue a career as a writer.

In 1954, he moved to Bogota, where he became a reporter for El Espectador. In the following year,
his literary career was launched when he won an award for his story "One Day After Saturday" and
published Leaf Storm, his first novella. Also in 1955, he was sent to Europe by his newspaper, which
shortly thereafter was shut down by the Colombian government. Garcia Marquez was to spend the next
three years in Europe, living a threadbare existence in Paris, where he devoted himself to his fiction, and
also touring Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, travels that exposed him to a very different way of life
from anything that he had known in Colombia. Upon his return in 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha, a
pharmacist from Barranquilla. They would become the parents of two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

In 1958, Garcia Marquez published No One Writes to the Colonel, a novella, in the Colombian
magazine Mito. It was published in book form three years later. Two books would appear in 1962: Big
Mama's Funeral, a collection of short stories, and In Evil Hour, his first full-length novel. In the wake of
the Cuban revolution in 1959, which was warmly greeted by most Latin American intellectuals, he went
to work for the Bogota branch of the Cuban news agency Prensa

Latina, a position that led to extended stays in Havana and New York before internal dissension led
him to resign in 1961. After a bus tour through the American South, largely for the purpose of visiting
Faulkner's Mississippi, he moved his family to Mexico, where he eked out a living for the next several
years as a journalist, public relations representative, and film scriptwriter. In 1965, according to his own
testimony, he finally began to see how to fit together the bits and pieces of a novel that had been forming
in his head for the past several years. With his imagination and creative energies fired by the prospect, he
suspended all other activities for a year and a half in order to write his book. By the time of its
completion, he and his family were so impoverished that they could barely afford to mail the manuscript
1
to a publisher in Argentina. Interest in the novel had been created through enthusiastic prepublication
notices by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Julio Cortazar of Argentina, two of Latin America's leading
novelists. Upon its publication in May 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude became an instant sensation,
acclaimed as the most important Latin America novel of the age, eliciting rave reviews, and, after selling
out its first edition in less than a week, exhausting printing after printing. In the next several years, as
translations appeared, it won awards and became a bestseller in Italy, France, the United States, and many
other countries, bringing Garcia Marquez an international reputation and forever ending his financial
difficulties.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those rare works of fiction that exist on many levels
simultaneously. Rich, dreamlike, filled with tragicomic incidents narrated in a poetic style, it is set in the
fictional (and microcosmic) town of Macondo, and it tells the story of the Buendia family, commencing
with an incestuous union whose dire consequences are fulfilled in a birth several generations later. Many
of its incidents - civil wars, the intrusion of American business interests, a massacre of striking banana
workers - have a historical basis in the history of Colombia in particular and of Latin America in general.
On a more mythic level, the novel enacts a fable of human development from loss of primal innocence
through the rise and fall of civilization. Filled with bizarre and impossible occurrences - flights on magic
carpets, resurrection after death, life spans of nearly a century and a half- described in the most matter-of-
fact tone, the book is a prime example of the mode of "magic realism", whose origins are attributed to the
Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Its thesis is that the true story of Latin America cannot be captured
through purely realistic techniques, but requires a surreal, at times hallucinatory approach to communicate
its essence. Since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez has been recognized
as the principal exponent of the magical realism tradition.

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), his next novel, was more overtly political, having as its central
figure a dictator who had ruled for so long that no one could remember a time when he was not in power.
Disjointed in narrative sequence and, like its predecessor, replete with fantastic incidents, it met with a
generally positive reception, although there were those who complained of its relative plotlessness and the
great length of its sentences, feeling that it was more concerned with its own style and techniques than
with its ostensible subject matter. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) also experimented with the
narrative framework, describing the same incident from multiple perspectives and generating suspense
over the outcome of an incident whose conclusion is known from the opening paragraph. Reviewers once
again praised Garcia Marquez's deft handling of his materials, as well as his often sly satire - overlaid with
sympathy for those imprisoned by its imperatives - of the macho code of his native region. The year after
its publication, the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Garcia Marquez certified his eminent
standing among contemporary writers.

Although the receipt of the Nobel Prize has often seemed to administer a deathblow to its recipient's
creativity, this has certainly not been the case with Garcia Marquez. In Love in the Time of Cholera 1985,
he addressed the complexities and nuances of man-woman relationships and the unquenchable spirit of
passion that refuses to submit gracefully to the coming of old age. The General in His Labyrinth (1989)
takes his work in yet another direction, as it treats of the last months in the life of Simon Bolivar, South
America's legendary liberator and Colombia's first president. Just as these works demonstrate the
continuing breadth and fertility of his imagination, News of a Kidnapping (1996), his most recent work, a
nonfictional account of the kidnappings of a number of Colombian journalists by the Medellin drug cartel,
bears witness to his undiminished concern with the ills of his native country. It is because of this
combination of artistry and conscience that Gabriel Garcia Marquez continues to be one of the most
rewarding and important writers in the world today. At present he is working on his memoirs and lives in
Los Angeles where he is undergoing treatment for lymphatic cancer.

[ Source: X.J. Kennedy & D. Gioia, Marquez: Biography: Literature Online.

<http://occawonline.pearsoned.com> ]

2
2. Introduction

The Background

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is based on a murder that caused a sensation in Colombia and
beyond. On January 22, 1951 in the small Colombian town of Sucre, a newly wed wife Margarita (Angela
Vicario in the novel) was returned to her parents' home when her husband Miguel Reyes Palencia
discovered, on his wedding-night, that she wasn't a virgin. Palencia beat his wife and forced her to identify
her lover. When she named Cayetano Gentile Chimento, a friend and drinking companion of his, he gave
her a knife with which to kill him. To uphold the honour of the family Margarita's brothers, Victor and
Joaquin Chica Salas killed Cayetano, heir to the ' biggest fortune in town. Numerous articles appeared in
newspapers, documenting the memories, feelings, and thoughts of the people linked to the murder.

The bride, her brothers, the accused lover, their families and the witnesses, were all friends,
neighbours or relatives of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who was twenty-three years old at that time. Twenty-
seven years after the murder of Cayateno Gentile, Marquez visited his native town to gather material for a
research based journalistic piece. He realized, during the course of his interviews, the impossibility of
writing an objective account of the incident and changed his strategy. Thirty years later, on 28 April 1981
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published. Remember, that in spite of its anecdotal basis the novel is
fictional. There are many aspects in which the novel digresses from the real. In the novel Bayardo returns
to Angela whereas in real life Miguel Reyes Palencia remarried and Margarita continued to live alone. But
correlating the fact with the fiction would be a misdirected undertaking. In an interview with Mendoza,
Marquez said that this kind of incident was commonplace in his country and the "vital ingredient" in the
drama was that the murderers had tried their best to get somebody to prevent them from committing the
crime.

The Title

The original Spanish title of the novel Cronica de una muerte anunciada, if translated literally,
would be 'Chronicle of an announced death', but Gregory Rabassa has inverted the syntax and used the
apocalyptic 'Foretold'. This is perhaps to echo the fatalism in the novel in its title. Do you think that this
change is justified? Give reasons for your answer.

Look up the word 'chronicle' in the dictionary. It is explained as: a formal account or record of a
series of events, described in the order in which they happened. Is that how the narrator presents the
events? Think about the sequence in which the narrator represents the incidents. The structure of the novel
is akin to the gradual putting together of the pieces of a puzzle.

Epigraph

The epigraph is reproduced here:

the hunt for love

is haughty falconry.

GIL VICENTE

3
 These lines are from a short poem by Gil Vicente (1470-1536), one of Portugal's most famous
dramatists, who is regarded as the father of modern Portuguese drama. He wrote many comic plays and
poems in Spanish and Portuguese. In his works he criticized social vices and institutions. He is also
known as the Portuguese Plautus. It is significant that Gil Vicente was a defender of women, who in his
time, could not even walk on the streets without a male escort. The epigraph is from a short poem in
which he warns the falcon of the danger it courts in attacking a heron. The references are apparently to the
male's pursuit of women. The epigraph serves to foreground one of the major issues raised in the novel -
the subjugation of women. Throughout the novel Marquez uses images of birds. The implication is almost
invariably ironic. Locate these images and make a list. More on this topic in the section: The critique of
machismo in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

4
3. Study Guide to Reading and Comprehension

Note that the five sections in the novel are not numbered. This is, perhaps, to prevent any imposition
of linearity on the narrative structure of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The novel does not have a
conventional temporal framework, with a clearly discernable beginning, middle, and end. The word
'Chronicle' is used ironically in the title, drawing our attention to the absence of a sequential narrative. The
novel moves back and forth freely in time.

Though the novel is written in the first person, remember that the narrator should not be identified
with the author, Marquez. The two are distinct identities. You should consider the narrator as one of the
protagonists of the novel.

Page 1-24

The murder of Santiago Nasar is announced abruptly in the first line of the novel. The narrator
begins with the recollections of Placida Linero, Santiago's mother, when he meets her twenty seven years
after the murder. She recalls that it was a Monday in the month of February and Santiago got up early at
5:30 in the morning, as he wanted to go and welcome the bishop. He tells his mother about a dream he has
had where he is going through a grove of timber trees and gets splattered with bird-shit. She tells him that
it is a good omen and he goes to the kitchen to have coffee. The coloured servant Victoria Guzman and
her daughter Divina Flor are cooking there. He leaves his house at six and meets many people on their
way to the docks.

The narrator takes great care to be exact about details like the time as far as Santiago's movements
are concerned. He also accumulates other, minor bits of information, which don't seem to contribute much
to the story. This is paralleled by vagueness characterizing the memories of the people who recall the day
of Santiago's murder:

Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea
breeze coming in through the banana groves,, as was to be expected in a fine
February of that period. But most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a
cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters, and that at the moment of the
misfortune a thin drizzle like the one Santiago Nasar had seen in his dream grove
was falling. (p.2-3)

Victoria Guzman and Divina Flor tell the narrator that Santiago didn't look too well when he came
down for coffee. When Santiago catches her daughter's hand, Victoria Guzman is openly hostile:

Victoria Guzman showed him the bloody knife.

"Let go of her, whitey," she ordered him seriously. "You won't have

a drink of that water as long as I'm alive." (p. 8)

We learn that Santiago's father, Ibrahim Nasar was an Arab immigrant who bought a former
warehouse and converted it into a house with numerous rooms. He had a clandestine affair with

Victoria Guzman in her youth, after which she was brought to his home to work as a servant.
Santiago seems to be disturbed by the sight of Victoria Guzman disembowelling the rabbits in the kitchen.
Read this scene carefully and note the undercurrent of animosity that flows from her.

5
 When Santiago Nasar leaves his house he is unaware of the fact that the twins Pablo and Pedro
Vicario are watching him. They have been waiting for him since three at Clotilde Armenta's shop in the
town square. They make a movement towards Santiago but stop when Clotilde Armenta pleads with them
to stop for the sake of the bishop. She observes that they look at him "more with pity" (p. 15) as he crosses
the square.

The people of the town are disappointed when the bishop's boat doesn't stop. The crowds are left
with the gifts of turkeys, cocks, and wood that they have brought. Santiago is with his friend Cristo
Bedoya and Margot, the narrator's sister, who invites him for breakfast at their house. He promises to
come over after he has changed his clothes, but she insists that he come right away. Cristo Bedoya recalls
that morning:

"It was a strange insistence," Cristo Bedoya told me," so much so that sometimes
I've thought that Margot already knew that they were going to kill him and wanted
to hide him in your house." (p. 18)

But his impression is incorrect. It is only after the bishop's boat has passed by, that the news of the
scandal spreads. Margot gets to know only after Santiago has left that Angela Vicario has been brought
back to her parents' home. She goes home in tears. Luisa Santiaga, the narrator's mother, is Santiago's
godmother. On hearing the news she rushes to warn her friend Placida Linero of the danger to her son, but
before she can reach her house someone tells her that Santiago Nasar has been killed.

Observe how the narrative moves back and forth freely, mixing interviews with the accounts of the
narrator, who has returned to the town twenty-seven years after the murder, to "put the broken mirror of
memory back together from so many shards." (p. 5)

Notice the carefully cultivated reportorial style. Many believe that Marquez's early career as a
journalist influenced his fiction. Many of the techniques that he uses are trademarks of journalistic
writing. The direct quotations of the people connected to the tragedy, the attempts to appear objective, and
the meticulous documentation of details, are some of the characteristics of Marquez's style in the novel.

Answer the following questions in a few lines:

(i) What does Santiago dream about on the night before he is killed?

(ii) Why don't Victoria Guzman or Divina Flor warn Santiago about the twins' plan to kill him?

(iii) Why don't Pablo and Pedro Vicario kill Santiago when they see him cross the square?

(iv) Briefly describe the preparations for the bishop's visit?

Page 24 - 47

The time frame of the novel undergoes a major shift and this section begins with the arrival of
Bayardo San Roman in the town and the subsequent flutter that is caused. He immediately attracts the
attention of the townspeople with his well-toned body, good looks, expensive clothes, and stylized
manner. The town is overawed by his skill at almost every conceivable activity: whether it is swimming or
using the telegraph. He speaks with authority on all matters, on subjects ranging from tropical illnesses to
the need for a railroad in the town. More than anything else he appears to be immensely rich. The
narrator's mother has told him all this in her letters to him at school.

People wonder why he has come to this town and he replies that it is because he is looking for
somebody to marry. Bayardo himself creates this aura of mystery that surrounds him. As the narrator

6
observes, "he had a way of speaking that served him rather to conceal than to reveal."(p 25) One day he
catches a glimpse of Angela and her mother as they are walking by his boarding-house. In his
characteristic, self assured manner he announces his decision to marry her. As with many other incidents,
the accounts of the people are at variance:

Angela Vicario told me that the landlady of the boardinghouse had spoken to her
about that episode before Bayardo San Roman began courting her. "I was quite
startled," she told me. Three people who had been in the boardinghouse confirmed
that the episode had taken place, but four others weren't sure. (p. 28)

Bayardo courts Angela in an extravagant fashion, winning over her family with his display of wealth
and power. They are poor people, as her father is a goldsmith who has gone blind, and they depend on the
twins' work as slaughterers. Angela's mother has brought up her children in the best orthodox traditions:

The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married.
They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash
and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement
announcements. Unlike the girls of the time, who had neglected the cult of death,
the four were past mistresses in the ancient science of sitting up with the ill,
comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead. (p. 30)

What does it tell us about the role of women in this small town? Read the last lines of this paragraph
where the narrator talks about Angela's older sisters, who "organized dances for women only and were
predisposed to find hidden intentions in the designs of men." (p. 31) They have been tutored to be wary of
men and "raised to suffer", (p.31)

Angela's family is excited about Bayardo's proposal. But Pura Vicario insists that he should identify
himself properly. In response Bayardo calls over his entire family. His father is the illustrious General
Petronio San Roman, a civil war hero and his mother, a famed beauty of her time. Their visit to the town,
in all their finery and intimidating Ford car, is enough to quell any doubts about Bayardo's eligibility. The
unexpected factor is Angela's objection that she doesn't love Bayardo. Pura Vicario dismisses it with a
practical solution, "Love can be learned too." Angela tells the narrator:

"He seemed too much of a man for me," she told me. Besides, Bayardo San
Roman hadn't even tried to court her, but had bewitched the family with his
charm. (p. 34)

Bayardo arranges for the wedding on a grandiose scale. He decides to buy the most picturesque
house in town but faces some resistance from its owner, Xius the widower, who refuses the exorbitant
sum offered with a gentle reprimand:

"I'm sorry, Bayardo," the widower said, "but you young people don't understand
the motives of the heart." (p. 36)

After three days Bayardo offers a sum that the poor widower cannot refuse. The narrator gets all this
information from Dr. Dionisio Iguaran, his mother's cousin, who witnessed all this at the clubhouse.
Bayardo thinks that money can buy him anything. As the narrator correctly presumes:

Bayardo San Roman, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of
buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more the
plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to make it
even larger. (p. 38)

7
 Bayardo San Roman goes overboard in his preparations for the wedding: expensive decorations, and
food and drink for the entire town. In its own modest way, the Vicario family also prepares for the
wedding.

A sense of lurking tragedy is introduced with an unexpected revelation: "No one would have thought
nor did anyone know that Angela wasn't a virgin." (p.37) As the wedding approaches Angela gets anxious
about being found out that she isn't a virgin. She wants to tell her mother but two of her closest friends
dissuade her and teach her old wives' tricks to fake her lost virginity. Following their advice, she decides
to remain silent.

The narrator, his brother Luis Enrique, Cristo Bedoya, and Santiago Nasar are good friends who
always hang out together. During the wedding festivities, none of them observe anything implicating
about Santiago's conduct. Santiago spends most of his last hours with his friends trying to calculate the
exact cost of the wedding celebrations. The narrator remembers:

I was with him all the time in the Church and at the festival, along with Cristo
Bedoya and my brother Luis Enrique, and none of us caught a glimpse of any
change in his manner. I've had to repeat this many times, because the four of us had
grown up together in school, and nobody could have believed that we could have a
secret without its being shared, all the more so such a big secret. (p. 41)

But the narrator's observations cannot be considered conclusive. Later on in the novel we learn that
the narrator had a clandestine sexual liaison with Maria Alejandrina Cervantes. This was kept a secret
from Santiago Nasar, as the narrator didn't want to wound his friend's sensitivities (p. 66). Consider how
the novel repeatedly undermines the authority of the narrator through such observations. The narrator does
not realize that if he can keep a secret from his friend, the obverse is also possible.

After the wedding celebrations are over, the couple leaves for their new home at ten. Even after their
departure many young men linger on in the streets. Pura Vicario goes to sleep after clearing up and is
woken up by the sound of slow knocking at her door. It is Bayardo with Angela. He leaves his wife there
and departs quietly. There are sufficient hints to indicate that he has discovered that his wife is not a
virgin. Realizing what has happened, Pura Vicario beats Angela till her face is bruised. The twins are
summoned and they ask her to name her lover. Take note of the beautiful simile used:

She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many
easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall
with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always
been written.

"Santiago Nasar," she said. (p. 47)

It is linked thematically to the fatalism inherent in the title of the novel, Chronicle of a Death
Foretold. The real identity of Angela's lover remains a mystery. It has troubled many readers and has been
called an "unsolved enigma".

Now answer these questions in a few lines.

(i) Bayardo San Roman has been called "a character straight out of the pages of romantic
fiction".

(ii) Do you agree with this assessment? Give reasons for your answer.

(iii) Where do Bayardo and Angela meet for the first time? What happens there?

8
 (iv) Can you guess Angela's reasons for singling out Santiago Nasar's name, assuming that she
was not deflowered by him?

(v) What does Pura Vicario do after Angela takes Santiago's name?

Page 48-71

This section mainly comprises the twins' interviews to the narrator. The focus is on their psyche.
Pablo and Pedro surrender to their church after killing Santiago Nasar. They declare their innocence
before God, as it was "a matter of honor" (p. 49). After spending three years in jail, awaiting trial because
their family is too poor to afford bail, their plea of "homicide in legitimate defense of honor" (p. 48) is
upheld by the court and they are absolved. Their acquittal is a comment on the outdated social beliefs and
customs of their society, which condones a brutal murder for the preservation of a hypocritical morality.
Notions of honour, chastity, and revenge are upheld through the subjugation of women.

The twins tell the narrator that after Angela took Santiago Nasar's name, they picked up their best
butchering knives and proceeded to the meat-market to sharpen them. They tell anyone who asks them,
that they are sharpening their knives to kill Santiago. Most of their butcher friends dismiss it as a bluff,
except Faustino Santos. He reports the matter to a sergeant named Leonardo Pornoy, who has come to buy
liver for the mayor, Colonel Aponte. The twins look for Santiago Nasar at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes'
place. Not finding him there, they wait for him at Clotilde Armenta's shop, where "almost everybody
would stop except Santiago Nasar." (p. 50) They tell everyone who comes to buy milk that they are
waiting to kill Santiago. Clotilde Armenta observes that the brothers were "not as anxious to fulfill the
sentence as to find someone who (would do them the favor of stopping them." (p. 57) The twins tell the
sergeant about their plan when he comes to buy milk. When the mayor hears about it, he isn't unduly
worried. But when his wife gives him news of Angela's return to her parents, he rushes to Clotilde
Armenta's shop. He takes away their knives and sends them back home. Clotilde Armenta is the only one
who thinks that the danger is not over:

They left. Clotilde Armenta suffered another disappointment with the mayor's
casual attitude, because she thought he should have arrested the twins until the
truth came out. Colonel Aponte showed her the knives as a final argument.
"Now they haven't got anything to kill anybody with," he said.
"That's not why," said Clotilde Armenta. "It's to spare those poor boys from the
horrible duty that's fallen on them." (p. 57)

The priest, Father Amador also receives her urgent message but he is preoccupied with the
preparations for the bishop's visit.

At this point the narrator briefly describes the twins. Pablo, the elder one is more imaginative
whereas Pedro, the younger one, is sentimental. He served in the army for eleven months and returned
with a bullet wound and a urinary disorder. It is Pedro who decides that Santiago Nasar should be killed
but when the mayor takes away their knives he considers his obligations over. Then Pablo takes over and
they return to their pigsty to get more knives. Pedro has an attack of pain and remains outside. His brother
construes this is as a deliberate delay and drags him along. On their way back to the shop they stop for
coffee at the house of Prudencia Cotes, Pablo's fiancée. Then it is Pedro's turn to suspect his brother of
wavering in his purpose. They go back to the milk-shop again and wait for Santiago Nasar.

The narrator remembers that after the wedding celebrations were over they went to Maria
Alejandrina's House of Mercies. At the age of fifteen Santiago has had a passionate affair with the

9
proprietress till his father put an end to it. It is clear that the brothel is openly frequented by almost all the
young men in the town. Compare their conduct to Angela Vicario's fears about her wedding-night.

After leaving Maria Alejandrina's house the friends go to sing bawdy songs for the newly wed
couple. They are not aware that Bayardo is, at that moment, alone in the darkened farm-house. Presuming
that the house is empty, the friends disperse. Santiago Nasar goes home to sleep and Cristo Bedoya to his
grandparents. The narrator surreptitiously returns to Maria Alejandrina Cervantes and his brother goes
home. At Clotilde Armenia's shop the twins inform Luis Enrique about their intention, but he is far too
drunk to grasp anything. He falls into a deep slumber in his bathroom and is awaken by the sound of his
sister, the nun, shouting that Santiago Nasar has been killed.

This section of Chronicle of a Death Foretold illustrates the operational mechanisms of the
antiquated notions of chastity and honour in this small town. Before Santiago Nasar is killed almost
everybody knows about the twins' plan. Most of the people, such as the mayor and the butcher friends of
the twins dismiss it as the false bravado of drunkards. At the same time the factors of class and racial
prejudice can be glimpsed in the conduct of the people. There are some, like Clotilde Armenta's husband,
who think that the twins would never dare to touch a man from a higher class:

"Don't be silly," he told her. "Those two aren't about to kill anybody, much less
someone rich." (p. 55)

Others, like the priest, Father Amador, don't act out of sheer passivity, whereas Victoria Guzman's
silence arises out of hatred for Santiago Nasar (p. 11). When the twins are at Prudencia Cotes' house for
coffee, both she and her mother approve of their decision, observing that it is a matter of honour. Clotilde
Armenia is the only one who senses the twins' condition and realizes the danger to Santiago.

Now, answer these questions in a few lines.

(i) Where do the twins surrender after killing Santiago Nasar? Why?

(ii) Why does the narrator return to Maria Alejandrina's house in secret?

(iii) What steps does Clotilde Armenta take to prevent the murder?

(iv) What do the twins do after the mayor, Colonel Aponte takes away their knives?

Page 72 - 96

The time frame shifts to events subsequent to Santiago's murder. The mayor, not aware of the steps
to be taken in such a situation, immediately orders an autopsy. As the only doctor in town, Dr. Dionisio
Iguaran, is away, the priest Father Amador is ordered to conduct it. He was a medical student before he
became a priest. Moreover, there is no human-sized refrigerator to keep the body. Against this backdrop
of underdevelopment the autopsy is carried out with primitive craftsmen's tools. The autopsy is described
in detail, using medical jargon.

Why does the author give us all the gory details of the autopsy? What purpose does it serve? Does
this scene remind you of the one where Victoria Guzman is disembowelling the rabbits for lunch (p. 8-9)?
Comment on the similarities.

After the autopsy, Santiago Nasar is buried quickly and the narrator goes to Maria

10
 Alejandrina Cervantes for solace. But she sends him away because he smells of Santiago. Even the
twins are troubled by the stubborn smell of Santiago:

At that moment they were comforted by the honor of having done their duty, and
the only thing that worried them was the persistence of the smell. (p. 79)

The smell that refuses to be washed away; the insomnia of Pedro that doesn't let him sleep for
eleven months; Pablo Vicario's attack of dysentery; and Pedro Vicario's painful penis, should all be read
as metaphor. These exaggerations are expressions of their suppressed guilt. Though the court upholds the
"thesis of homicide in legitimate defense of honor" and they declare that they "would have done it again a
thousand times over for the same reason" (p. 48), it would not be incorrect to presume that their
consciences are troubled. This manifests itself in the form of these physical disorders.

They also get paranoid, imagining a retributive attack from the community of Arab settlers, to which
Santiago Nasar belonged. When the mayor goes to investigate, he notices nothing to worry about from the
Arabs who are "clannish, hard-working, and Catholic." (p. 81) In any case, the twins are transferred to the
jail at Riohacha. They are released three years later because they are too poor to afford bail while waiting
for the trial to be over. After they are released Pablo goes on to become a goldsmith and marries
Prudencia Cotes whereas Pedro re-enlists in the army and disappears during a foray into guerilla territory.

At this point you will notice that the narrative suddenly picks up pace and the narrator gives us a
quick, synoptic account of the eventual fate of the survivors of the tragedy. Events covering many years
are compressed into a few sentences. Compare this to the description of the autopsy in minute, nauseating
detail.

Angela leaves the town with her family to go and live in Manuare, a remote village by the sea. The
father Poncio Vicario dies soon after, as his "moral pain carried him off." (p. 83) People forget about
Bayardo after Santiago's murder. Five days later, the widower Xius sees a phosphorescent bird fluttering
over his former home and informs the mayor, who suddenly realizes that Bayardo must be still there. He
finds him sick in his farmhouse. Bayardo's family is informed and after an exaggerated display of grief by
his sisters and aunts he is carried away in a hammock. Over the years, the widower Xius' farmhouse falls
into decay and everything within disappears. The narrator's attempt to interview Bayardo twenty-three
years later is rebuffed. He refuses to divulge information of even the most insignificant kind. The
townspeople rationalize the brutal murder without any trace of guilt:

Santiago Nasar had expiated the insult, the brothers Vicario had proved their
status as men, and the seduced sister was in possession of her honor once more.
(p. 84)

It is an ironic comment on the collective consciousness of the community depicted in the novel. Pay
special attention to the words: 'insult', 'men', and 'honor'. What is their it significance?

The narrator periodically receives news of Angela Vicario from his sisters who visit her. Twenty-
three years after the tragedy he gets an opportunity to meet her, in the course of his work as a travelling
salesman. He finds her a changed woman: with grey hair, bespectacled, and passing her days
embroidering. Though she is forthcoming about all the details of her wedding night, she maintains that
Santiago Nasar was the culprit. Nobody believed it was him because they came from such diverse
backgrounds. She dismisses the narrator's probing with a single sentence: .

"Don't beat it to death, cousin," she told me. "He was the one." (p. 91)

11
 She tells him that, following her friends' advice, she carried all the items necessary to fake her lost
virginity but at the crucial moment she decided against it:

"I didn't do any of what they told me," she said, "because the more I thought
about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn't be done
to anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me."
(p. 92)

Angela divulges a secret that she hasn't told anyone before; she confesses that she began to fall in
love with Bayardo the moment her mother started to beat her. A few years after her departure from the
town she catches a glimpse of her husband outside a hotel in Riohacha. This ignites a strange passion and
she pours out her feelings to him in a letter. There is no reply but this does not deter her from writing to
him almost every week. This continues for seventeen years, in spite of her not receiving a single reply
from Bayardo San Roman. She writes to him when her mother has gone to sleep and takes the help of her
seamstress friends to post the letters. One day she hears footsteps and Bayardo is at the door. Old, fat,
shortsighted, and balding; the "diminished" Bayardo San Roman, who has come back to his wife, has
nothing in common with the Bayardo who charmed almost an entire town twenty-three years ago. (p.96)
He returns with two bags full of Angela's unopened letters.

Answer these questions briefly.

(i) Why is the autopsy outlined in such detail?

(ii) Describe the condition of Pablo and Pedro in jail?

(iii) Why do Angela's feelings towards her husband change after he has forsaken her?

(iv) Poncio Vicario, Angela's father, dies of "moral pain ". Explain this phrase.

(v) Why does Bayardo return to his wife?

(vi) Why hasn't Bayardo opened any of the letters that Angela sends him?

Page 97-122

Santiago's death has a disturbing effect on the collective consciousness of the town. The people are
anxious to discern an order in the "chain of many chance events" (p. 97) that led to the killing. They take
refuge in a simple fatalism: ".. .none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and
the mission assigned to us by fate." (p. 97). Note that the narrator uses the collective pronoun 'we'. Like
the other people in the town the narrator also attempts to philosophize Santiago's murder.

Those who failed to act and prevent the crime "consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of
honor are sacred monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama." (p. 98). They absolve
themselves of guilt by reference to the social code of 'honor'. Read pages 97-98 very carefully. After
Santiago's murder the town is "like an open wound" (p.99) with crowds pouring in to give testimonies.
The killing affects even those people who are only remotely associated with the murder:

Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that
weren't bloody yet, felt so affected by the hallucination that she fell into a
penitential crisis and one day, unable to take it any longer, she ran out naked in the
street. (p. 48)

12
 Do you find this believable or is Marquez exaggerating?

The narrator manages to locate 322 pages of the original 500-page brief prepared by the
investigating magistrate. He appears to be a man well versed in literary texts and undermines his legal
document with notes in the margin that verge on the lyrical. The magistrate is "perplexed by the enigma
that chance had touched him with", (p. 100) Don't miss the irony in these lines:

Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many
coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled
fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold. (p. 100)

Like everybody else, the magistrate shows a lack of insight, interpreting Santiago's death as a pre-
destined event. Santiago's conduct before his death seemed to be that of an innocent man. He appeared to
be genuinely perplexed when he finally learnt that the Vicario brothers were waiting to kill him. Although
there is no evidence to support her contention, Angela swears that Santiago was the one who seduced her.
This prompts the magistrate to write Archimedes' maxim,

Give me a prejudice, and I will move the world. (p. 101)

without understanding its relevance. The narrator is also convinced that Santiago died without
"understanding his death." (p. 102)

The narrator goes back to the moment when Santiago Nasar, Cristo Bedoya and Margot are waiting
for the bishop. When he doesn't disembark they are disappointed and disperse. Santiago promises to visit
Margot's house after changing his clothes. As he is walking through the market square with Cristo
Bedoya,. Yamil Shaium beckons the latter to learn the truth about the rumours he has heard as he does'nt
wish to alarm Santiago. As soon as the Arab shopkeeper tells Cristo about the twins' plan he runs after
Santiago. He searches for Santiago in his house, unaware that he has gone to his meet his fiancée, Flora
Miguel. Victoria Guzman and Divina Flor lie to him that they haven't seen Santiago.

Picking up Santiago's revolver and unaware that it is empty; he rushes to look for him at the
narrator's house. He is held up on the way by a patient who needs his assistance. As he is running towards
the narrator's house he sees Luisa Santiaga, who is weeping for the dead Santiago. While Cristo Bedoya
was looking for Santiago Nasar, the latter had gone to meet Flora Miguel.

She has heard the news about Angela and returns all his letters to him, before locking herself in her
room. Her father Nihir Miguel tells the baffled Santiago about the Vicario twins' plan. Santiago ignores
his offer of a rifle and leaves. Crowds have already gathered at the market square as if in anticipation of
the killing; By this time Santiago has started running towards the front door of his house. Placida Linero
has learnt just five minutes earlier that the Vicario twins are waiting to kill her son. When Divina Flor
informs her that she has seen Santiago go upstairs, she orders the front door to be locked. Just when
Santiago is a few yards away from his house the door shuts on him.

Santiago faces his murderers. Each thrust of their butcher knives is described in graphic detail. The
narrator was not present there but the twins have told him about it. The scene has a near surrealist feel to
it, described as if in slow motion:

"The strange thing is that the knife kept coming out clean," Pedro Vicario declared
to the investigator. "I'd given it to him at least three times and there wasn't a drop
of blood." (p. 120)

Marquez was a scriptwriter and this explains the literary parallel of the cinematic technique where
the moment on screen is stretched by decreasing the speed of the camera. A fatally wounded Santiago gets

13
up and walks through a neigbour's house to reach the back door of his house. The novel ends with the
haunting image of Santiago walking with his intestines held in his hands and collapsing on the floor of the
kitchen.

Answer the following questions.

(i) How does Santiago's death affect the town?

(ii) What are the observations of the investigating magistrate about the murder?

(iii) What is Angela's stand before the magistrate

(iv) What does Cristo Bedoya do after he learns about the twins' plan?

(v) Why are Santiago Nasar's letters to Flora Miguel "loveless"?

(vi) Why does Santiago Nasar smile when he finally faces his killers?

14
Strategies for Interpretation

This section will introduce you to those aspects of the novel, which have engaged critics since its
publication. After reading this part of the study material you should be able to,

■ Identify the innovative features of Marquez's style;

■ Comment upon the form or structure of the novel;

■ Discuss the expose of 'machismo' in the novel; and

■ Formulate your individual perspective.

(a) Marquez's style in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

At this point I would like to reiterate that the narrator is not to be confused with the author Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. The narrator is a construct of the author, as much a subject of his ironic treatment as the
other characters in the novel. The two are distinct.

The narrator visits his town twenty-seven years after the murder of his friend Santiago Nasar He
assumes the posture of the investigative reporter who has returned to interview the people connected with
the provincial drama. His intention in writing this chronicle is "to put the broken mirror of memory back
from so many shards." (p. 5) The most frequently used stylistic device is of direct quotation, as in this
passage:

"He was always dreaming about trees," Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty-
seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant Monday. (p. 1)

"He was fat and was beginning to lose his hair, and he already needed glasses to
see things close by," she told me. "But it was him, God damn it, it was him!"
(P. 96)

Raymond Williams has painstakingly counted the total number of quotes, character-wise:

Reviewing these individuals cited directly by the narrator, one can note a total of
thirty-seven characters who contribute to this "chronicle" of the narrator-investigator.
The characters who are most quoted, as sources of information are, in descending
order, the following: Angela Vicario (directly quoted twelve times), Cristo Bedoya
(nine times), Pablo Vicario (seven times), and Margot (seven times). The narrator-
investigator's total "record" for his chronicle consists of nine citations from the
written record and a total of 102 quotations from the thirty-seven characters. (p. 136)

In addition to such a large number of direct quotations there is a large amount of paraphrasing and
summarizing. Marquez borrows many customary tricks of the journalistic trade. His style is no doubt
influenced by his early career as a journalist and it is easy to understand why Raymond Williams felt that
Chronicle of a Death Foretold "showcased Garcia Marquez the journalist."(p.132) But it would be a grave
misreading to categorize Chronicle of a Death Foretold as a work of non-fiction. In spite of its real
background the novel is a fictional account.

The first line of the novel is arresting:

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the
morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. (p. 1)

15
 Like a good piece of investigative journalism it generates curiosity about the manner in which the
killing will be carried out as well as the reasons for it. The narrator accumulates details, which convey the
impression of a meticulous documentalist:

After their sister revealed the name to them, the Vicario twins went to the bin in the
pigsty where they kept their sacrificial tools and picked out the two best knives;
one for quartering, ten inches long by two and a half inches wide, and the other for
trimming, seven inches long by one and a half inches wide. (p. 50-51)

But the accumulation of minutiae is never unintentional. Descriptions of the house that Ibrahim
Nasar built for his family, and the descriptions of the gifts brought by the illustrious guests at the wedding
of Angela and Bayardo, are evocative of the exalted status enjoyed by both Santiago Nasar and Bayardo
San Roman. Similarly, the senseless brutality of Santiago's murder is brought to the foreground by the
naturalistic autopsy report.

In keeping with his reportorial style, the narrator marks each movement of Santiago on the day of
his murder by recording the exact time:

Furthermore; all the many people he ran into after leaving his house at five minutes
past six until he was carved out like a pig an hour later remembered him as being a
little sleepy but in a good mood, and he remarked to all of them in a casual way
that it was a beautiful day. (P.2)

The public spree broke up into fragments around midnight, and all that remained
was Clotilde Armenta's establishment on one side of the square. Santiago Nasar
and I, with my brother Luis Enrique and Cristo Bedoya, went to Maria Alejandrina
Cervantes' house of mercies. Among so many others, the Vicario brothers went
there and they were drinking with us and singing with Santiago Nasar five hours
before killing him. (p. 45)

Does the careful documentation of these facts help the narrator decipher Santiago's death? Or does
this misdirected strategy deflect the reader's attention from the real cause?

Remember that the journalistic style is carefully cultivated only to expose its utter inadequacy as a
method to understand Santiago's death. A careful reading throws up many elements in the novel that run
counter to the spirit of objective reporting. The narrator subverts his own attempts at objectivity by
incorporating the subjective impressions of the characters. His personal observations are also recorded.
When he eventually meets Bayardo San Roman, about whom he has read in his mother's letters, he writes:

I met him a short while after she did, when I came home for Christmas vacation,
and I found him just as strange as they had said. He seemed attractive, indeed, but
far from Magdalena Olivers' idyllic vision. He seemed more serious to me than his
antics would have led one to believe, and with a hidden tension that was barely
concealed by his excessive good manners. But above all, he seemed like a very sad
man to me. (p. 27)

Many times the subjectivity verges on the surreal. When Santiago Nasar crosses the square on his
way to the docks to welcome the bishop, dressed in white clothes:

Clotilde Armenta, the proprietress of the establishment, was the first to see him in
the glow of dawn, and she had the impression that he was dressed in aluminum.
"He already looked like a ghost," she told me. (p. 13)

16
 The hallucinatory is also incorporated into the narrator's account, as when Hortensia Baute sees the
knives of the twins' "dripping blood" (p.98) even before they have killed Santiago. Divina Flor insists that
she saw Santiago enter his house and go upstairs when he was in fact out in the street: "it was a very clear
vision, " (p.118) she says. There is no suggestion of any skepticism or condescension on the narrator's part
when he reports these experiences. Folk beliefs, superstitions, dreams, and omens are included in the
narrator's account with the same seriousness accorded to normal occurrences. After Bayardo is carried
away in a hammock, the empty farmhouse falls into decay. All the valuable objects in it start
disappearing, including a most unlikely wardrobe that was assembled in the farmhouse:

At first the widower Xius was overjoyed, thinking that they were the posthumous
recourses of his wife to carry off what was hers. Colonel Lazaro Aponte made fun
of him. But one night it occurred to him to hold a spiritualist séance in order to
clear up the mystery, and the soul of Yolanda Xius confirmed in her own
handwriting that it was in fact she who was recovering the knickknacks of
happiness for her house of death. (p. 87-88)

Gossip and rumour form essential components of the narrative. Bayardo's arrival in the town
generates the wildest possible kind of rumours about his past:

It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as
troop commander that he had escaped from Devil's Island, that he'd been seen in
Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he'd
salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward
Channel. (p. 32)

Everyone speculates about the real identity of Angela's lover, as nobody believes that it could be
Santiago:

The most current version, perhaps because it was the most perverse, was that
Angela Vicario was protecting someone who really loved her and she had chosen
Santiago Nasar's name because she thought that her brothers would never really
dare go up against him. (p. 91)

Marquez's narrator poses as a journalist but a detailed examination on his style reveals the inclusion
of every possible type of non-objective reporting. The narrator does not succeed in his attempts to
reconstruct the tragedy, concluding that the murder was a pre-destined event, a death "foretold". He fails
to understand the real causes behind the senseless murder of Santiago.

(b) The Structure of the Novel

None of the familiar conventions governing the novel are found in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Broadly speaking they could be classified as.

- Chronological sequence,

- Authorial depersonalization,

- Unity of point of view, and

- 'Reality effect'.

The absence of an omniscient narrator in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is justified on grounds of

the theme and the structural innovations. Marquez does not provide us with access to the inner lives of his

17
characters. Compare this with the extensive discussions about Maggie Tulliver's moral and emotional
dilemma in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. The unseen and omniscient narrator talks authoritatively
about her as if he knows exactly what is going on in her mind. On the contrary the narrator in Chronicle of
a Death Foretold presents us with the individual versions without attempting to erase the contradictions,
confusions, and half-truths. When the narrator interviews Victoria Guzman and Divina Flor after
Santiago's murder they deny knowing that Pablo and Pedro Vicario were waiting to kill Santiago. Later
Victoria Guzman admits that she got information of the twins' plan from a beggar woman, but:

"I didn't warn him because I thought it was drunkard's talk," she told me.
Nevertheless, Divina Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had
since died, that the latter hadn't said anything to Santiago Nasar because in the
depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him. (p. 11)

Characters ascribe motives where none exist and make incorrect inferences. On the morning of the
bishop's visit Margot invites Santiago to have breakfast at her house. Cristo Bedoya suspects her of
knowing beforehand about the danger to Santiago's life. But Margot did not know about the twins' plan till
she reached home. By that time Santiago had left for his house to change his clothes. When Clotilde
Armenta sees Father Amador pass by her place on his way to receive the bishop she thinks that he hasn't
received any of her urgent messages:

"I thought he hadn't got my message," she said. Nevertheless. Father Amador
confessed to me many years later, retired from the world in the gloomy Calafell
Rest Home, that he had in fact received Clotilde Armenta's message and others
more peremptory while he was getting ready to go to the docks." The truth is I
didn't know what to do," he told me. "My first thought was that it wasn't any
business of mine but something for the civil authorities..." (p. 70)

The novel does not provide us with the comforting coherence of a single point of view. The narrator
does not try to homogenize the different, sometimes contradictory and conflicting versions in the
narrative. He does not judge or offer his opinion on the different people he talks to. One way in which this
multiplicity of perspectives is sustained is the mix of genres. Interviews, letters, memoirs, reports, and
magisterial briefs, as well as omens, dreams, superstitions, and gossip: all are used to create a complex
narrative structure, which does not depend on a single, dominant point of view.

Culler (1930) said that the traditional novel functions on the assurance that the reader can interpret
the text in the same way as the real world. Descriptive details are included to produce the 'reality effect.'
Chronicle of a Death, on the other hand, includes self-conscious references to the echoes of literature in
the 'real' life that the novel purports to represent:

No one could understand such fatal coincidences. The investigating judge who
came from Riohacha must have sensed them without daring to admit it, for his
interest in giving them a rational explanation was obvious in the report. The
door to the square was cited several times with a dime-novel title: "The Fatal
Door". (p. 11)

When the narrator goes to visit Angela Vicario in the remote village of Manuare,
twenty-three years after Santiago's death, he finds her sitting by the window,
embroidering by machine. He immediately senses the resemblance to "bad
literature", (p. 89)

Note that the killing of Santiago is always referred to as the 'drama' or 'tragedy'. The narrator
obliquely reminds us again and again that his work is different from literature, which depends on artificial
elements, such as coincidences and drama. These disparaging references to the artificiality of literature are
meant to underline the reality, which the narrator is chronicling. The interesting thing to note is that

18
Chronicle of a Death Foretold may pose as non-fiction but it proves that the distinctions between fiction
and real-life are not so clear.

It leaves us with a sense of the impossibility of representation in literature as the lines

distinguishing them are blurred. This is reflected in the structure of the novel, which defies all established
conventions of structural organization. Read this observation by Bell:

Indeed, Marquez has allowed his narrator to divide the action into five sections
suggestive of the five acts of a drama. Of course, the five sections do not directly
mimic the theatrical structure but then neither do they simply unfold the
experience in a conventionally chronological way. Their spatialised retrospect
combines the concentration of dramatic structure with the digressive spirit of
narrative as the narrator continues to circle around the central enigma. As in
Hundred Years, the first chapter, and the first sentence, give a synoptic statement
of the whole. The subsequent chapters then circle in different ways around the
same action, adding layers to our understanding. From the very opening sentence,
the whole structure is a cunning combination of gradual narrative meditation on
its meaning. In other words, the fundamental structure combines what for
purposes of exposition, I am calling the 'tragic' and the 'novelistic' consciousness.
The novelistic is irradiated by the tragic while the tragic is constantly questioned
and displaced by the novelistic. (p.204)

The narrative does not proceed in a chronological manner. The five sections are not numbered and
the novel moves back and forth. Sometimes, events spread over many years are presented synoptically in
a few lines, as when the narrator tells us about what happened to the Vicario brothers after they were
absolved of the murder (p. 83-84). On other occasions, the moment is extended and described almost as if
in slow motion. Read this passage from the end of the novel:

Mortally wounded three times, Santiago Nasar turned frontward again and
leaned his back against his mother's door, without the slightest resistance, as if
he only wanted to help them finish killing him by equal shares. "He didn't cry
out again," Pedro Vicario told the investigator. "Just the opposite: it looked to
me as if he was laughing," Then they both kept on knifing him with alternate
and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other
side of fear. (p. 120)

Marquez's use of this cinematic technique can be traced to his passion for cinema. At one time, he
even aspired to be a director because he felt that cinema, with its technical possibilities, was the only
medium that could do justice to the reality of Latin America.

The novel has a broad temporal framework with delimitation from Santiago's awakening to his
death. Chronicle of a Death Foretold begins from a point where other novels generally end. The killing of
Santiago is the point of departure for the investigations. The whole town is shown trying to understand
why Santiago is killed, in spite of the fact that the killers didn't want to commit the crime and try their best
to make somebody stop them. The priest and the mayor, repositories of religious and state authority, fail
to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Though they are warned beforehand they don't act in a decisive
manner. Their conduct is symptomatic of the failure of the church and the state to mediate and contain the
needless violence in their community. After Santiago is killed, the townspeople rationalize his death:

But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and still
didn't do it consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred
monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama. (p. 98)

19
 There is irony in the attempts to understand the murder as the culmination of a series of fatal
coincidences. The fatalism recurs like a refrain throughout the novel, as in the notations, which the
investigating magistrate makes on the margin of his brief:

Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many
coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled
fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold. (p. 100)

With their blinkered vision the townspeople don't understand that it is their anachronistic sexual
morality that is the real cause of the tragedy: a code of conduct that is prohibitive for women only. Note
that both Pablo and Pedro Vicario visit Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' House of Mercies but they are
convinced that Angela has tarnished their family honour by having a lover before marriage.

The narrator is implicated in the collective attempt to read Santiago's death as the inexorable
working of an impersonal fate:

The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many
chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we
weren't doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could
go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned
to us by fate. (p. 97)

At the narrative level, Chronicle of a Death Foretold remains an unsolved enigma. The novel does
not allow the reader the catharsis that comes from resolution. The failure of the narrator to finally
'understand' Santiago Nasar's death is an index of the community's failure to break out of their repressive
norms.

(c) The critique of machismo in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

In an interview with Mendoza, Marquez said that:

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is certainly both an expose and condemnation of the

basic machismo within our society - a society which is actually matriarchal. (p.108)

The dictionary explains machismo as 'an exaggerated show of masculinity'. Santiago Nasar's
impressive collection of guns and rifles; Bayardo San Roman's challenge to the local people to swim
across the river; the bullet wound which Pedro flaunts; are all displays of their masculinity. Marquez,
when he was asked what he understood by 'machismo' replied that it is the 'usurpation of other people's
rights' (Mendoza, p. 108). In the context of Chronicle of a Death Foretold the subjugation of women is
how machismo operates.

Marquez castigates the machismo in his society through Bayardo's return to Angela after twenty-
three years, through the irony in the townspeople's philosophizing of Santiago's death as a predestined
event, and the psychological disturbances and physical aberrations of the twins.

Male characters are associated with the world of action. In addition to his collection of rifles
Santiago Nasar possesses "falconry equipment" (p. 3). He breeds horses and from his father he has learned
"the manipulation of firearms, his love for horses, and the mastery of high-flying birds of prey" (p. 6). His
Arab origin and superior financial status set him apart and if possible, accentuate his maleness. Like his
father Ibrahim Nasar, he has no qualms about sexually abusing his female servants, and doesn't let go of
any opportunity to handle Divina Flor, with his "butcher hawk hand." (p. 12) He is insensitive and selfish
in his pursuit of sexual pleasure. The narrator calls him a "chicken hawk", who "went about alone, just
like his father, nipping the bird of any wayward virgin that would begin showing up in those woods..." (p.

20
90-91). The same insensitivity characterizes his engagement to Flora Miguel, which is dictated by "the
same utilitarian concept of matrimony as his father", (p. 113)

Notice the frequency with which images of birds are used in relation to Santiago Nasar. The narrator
recalls how the fifteen-year-old Santiago had a passionate affair with Maria Alejandrina Cervantes and his
warning to him:

A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain. (p.65)

When Santiago Nasar finally learns about the twins' plan to kill him from Nihir Miguel he appears
like "a little wet bird" (p. 116). It is the custom in that part of the world to throw water on birds before
killing them. On the morning of his death Santiago gets up with a headache and tells his mother about the
dream he has had, where he gets splattered with bird droppings. These references to birds form a cluster of
images that link up with Gil Vicente's epigraph. They constitute a censure of the male's pursuit of the
female for sexual satisfaction. At this point I would like to remind you that the Portuguese poet Gil
Vicente was sympathetic to women and their suffering in his society. In addition to these images
associated with Santiago Nasar, there is the "phosphorescent bird" fluttering over the widower Xius' house
after Santiago has been killed and Bayardo is alone. (p. 84)

In the novel, it is never clearly established whether Santiago is guilty of deflowering Angela
Vicario. Yet he doesn't become an object of pity because by a "larger logic" he is guilty of abusing women
(Bell, 194). Angela's singling out of Santiago's name is plausible if we assume that she is aware that he is
a sexual predator and she thinks that he deserves to die anyway. Santiago is the victim of society's false
sense of honour and morality.

The affinities between Bayardo and Santiago establish a sort of brotherhood between these two men.
Bayardo San Roman is young, strong, good-looking and immensely rich. Angela's family believes he is
"the prize of destiny" (p. 34). Compare this with Margot's assessment of Santiago:

"I suddenly realized that there couldn't have been a better catch than him," she told
me. "Just imagine: handsome, a man of his word, and with a fortune of his own at
the age of twenty-one." (p. 17)

Make a note of the similarities between these two men. Pay attention to Santiago's pre-occupation
with the calculations of the exact amount that Bayardo must have spent on his wedding. It keeps him
absorbed till his death. Is there any significance in this?

Bayardo becomes the toast of the town soon after his arrival. People make wild conjectures about
his past as he has a way of speaking that "served him rather to conceal than to reveal." (p. 25) Unlike her
family, Angela Vicario is not charmed with Bayardo. She thinks that he is "conceited" and "stuck-up" (p.
29). She resents the fact that Bayardo doesn't try to court her and is intimidated by Bayardo being "too
much of a man" (p. 34). The worldly Bayardo is aware that the decision to marry would be taken by
Angela's family and he focuses on them. Bayardo plans and executes the wedding in a flamboyant
fashion. He has enough money to invite almost everybody in town to the celebration. Notice that Angela
rebukes Santiago for asking Bayardo about the cost incurred (p. 42). She displays a singular sensitivity
that stands up in contrast to the crass materialism of Bayardo. When Bayardo suggests that they get
married by the bishop she declines:

".. .I didn't want to be blessed by a man who only cut off the combs for soup and
threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage." (p. 38)

This sets her apart from the other people who carry baskets full of fattened roosters as gifts for the
bishop who doesn't even disembark to bless his subjects.

21
 It is through Angela that the conduct of the males is critiqued. At every stage she goes against the
social dictates, though not in a visibly rebellious way. Moreover she is not alone in this. Her two
confidantes teach her "old wives' tricks" to feign her lost virginity (p.38). Women have cleverly found a
way around the problem. This tactic for survival highlights the hollowness of a code that is not followed
in spirit, only externally. Angela initially agrees to the deception but at the critical moment she remains
passive:

"I didn't do any of what they had told me," she said, "because the more I thought
about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn't be done to
anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me." (p. 92)

When Bayardo returns Angela to her parents' home, her mother starts to beat her. By a seemingly
perverse logic she starts to fall in love with him at that moment. After Santiago's death her mother takes
her away to live in a remote village, where her mother tries to "bury her alive" (p.88). A few years later, a
chance glimpse of Bayardo in a hotel in Riohacha ignites a strange passion in her. She writes a letter to
her husband. There is no reply but she keeps writing to him for seventeen years: one letter every week.
These assertions of her will over that of a society that has condemned her to the life of "an old maid" have
a liberating effect (p.94). Though she writes the letters surreptitiously at night, when her mother has gone
to sleep, she feels that she is finally "mistress of her fate."(p.94) Bayardo's return to Angela, seventeen
years after she starts writing to him, makes a mockery of the honour, to uphold which, her brothers killed
Santiago.

As for the question of the real identity of Angela's lover, the novel does not pursue the mystery. This
is not because the author wants it to remain "an unsolved enigma" but there is an indication that the
question is perhaps not worth asking:

The unanswered question is not an invitation to further, guesswork, but addresses

itself to whether the question itself is worth asking or is it necessary to answer,
whether the question itself is not the first in a series of violations of which the
murder is a culmination. (p. 120, Sangari)

The author's refusal to pursue this riddle is an assertion of his solidarity with Angela. Compare this
to the common sentiment that there was only one victim in the whole tragedy:

For the immense majority of people there was only one victim.... The only one who
had lost everything was Bayardo San Roman: "poor Bayardo" as he was
remembered over the years. (p.84)

It is not the men alone who perpetuate the subjugation of women. The women are party to it. When
Bayardo brings Angela back to her parents' home it is Pura Vicario who beats her daughter even while her
husband is sleeping in the next room, and summons the twins. The next day she makes her daughter wear
a red dress and takes her away to a remote village. Angela realizes that her mother is "a poor woman
devoted to the cult of her defects."(p. 93) Pablo Vicario's fiancée. Prudencia Cotes knows that he and his
brother are going to kill Santiago:

"I knew what they were up to," she told me, "and I didn't only agree, I never would
have married him if he hadn't done what a man should do." (p. 63)

But there are exceptions. Clotilde Armenta is one: the gutsy woman catches hold of Pedro Vicario
when he starts to move towards Santiago, but she is pushed away. The narrator's mother. Luisa Santiaga
also rushes to warn her friend Placid Linero of the danger to her son, as soon as she hears about Angela's
return to her parents.

22
 In real life, the brothers of the rejected wife Margarita Chica Silas killed Cayetano Gentile, her
lover. But in the novel Marquez's characters are twins. Do you think that this served any literary purpose?
By profession the twins are slaughterers. The narrator slyly asks their butcher friends whether their trade
did not make their souls "predisposed to killing a human being."(p.52) There is double irony at work here.
This question pre-empts any attempt on part of the reader to ascribe any symbolic significance to their
profession. At the same time, Santiago's death is nothing short of butchery. The shadow of Victoria
Guzman pulling out the intestines of the rabbits looms over the twin' literal disembowelling of Santiago.

Pablo and Pedro Vicario betray their anxiety and nervousness in the disclosure of their intentions to
everyone they meet. After their sister has named Santiago as her lover, they look for him at a couple of
improbable places and then go to Clotilde Armenta's shop "where they knew that almost everyone would
stop except Santiago Nasar." (p. 50) Clotilde Armenta is the only one perceptive enough to sense that the
twins are trying to evade "the horrible duty that's fallen on them." (p. 57) She is not satisfied with the
mayor's simple action of taking away their knives and feels that it would have been better if they were
locked up. The twins' wavering resolve is personified through their dual identity:

Pedro Vicario, according to his own declaration, was the one who made the
decision to kill Santiago Nasar, and at first his brother only followed along. But he
was also the one who considered his duty fulfilled when the mayor disarmed them,
and then it was Pablo Vicario who assumed command. (p. 60-61)

When they return to their pigsty for more knives, Pedro remains outside to change the bandage for
his urinary disorder whereas Pablo goes in to get the butchering knives. On their way back they stop for
coffee at Prudencia Cotes' house: a highly improbable thing for a potential murderer to do. Pedro's manner
is "too insolent to be natural" (p. 108) and to Clotilde Armenta he looked "like a killer in the movies" (p.
64). It is obvious that they are posturing. After they kill Santiago and surrender to the church, their
attitude is defiant. They declare their innocence "before God and before men." (p. 49) They also refuse to
cover their faces when they are transferred to another jail at Riohacha. When the deed is over they "feign a
much more inclement bloodthirstiness than really was true."(p.49)

The facade that they have built up, crumbles when they are in jail. Read the passages describing
their condition (p.78-83). Is there any significance in the smell of Santiago that they try to wash away?
The insomnia that doesn't let Pedro sleep for eleven months, and the attack of dysentery which Pablo has:
would you agree that these are manifestations of the guilt they carry in their sub-conscious mind? They
imagine that the Arab community, to which Santiago Nasar belonged, is out to kill them. But their
paranoia is unfounded. The condition of the twins is a reflection on the artificiality of the honour code,
which they feel obliged to defend.

(d) Magical Realism

The German art critic Franz Roh first used the term 'magic realism' in 1925 to describe a post-
expressionist form that was emerging in literature and painting. The genealogy of the term is inextricably
linked to the Surrealist movement in France. With the publication of Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto
in 1924 the unilinear perspective was abandoned in favour of techniques which foregrounded sensory
ideas and the subconscious reality. The movement represented a reaction against, what its members saw,
as the destruction wrought by the rational that had guided European culture and politics in the last two
centuries, culminating in the First World War. Surrealism's fundamental aesthetic principle is montage. Its
theory is simple: by removing the objects of daily existence from their familiar context and then
juxtaposing them again, only in the "wrong" sequence or constellation, an effect of estrangement or shock
is produced. The shock effect serves to "defamiliarize" the everyday and hence penetrate the barriers of
repression.

23
 Surrealism seeks to undermine a routinized bourgeois existence from within It was a means of
reuniting the conscious and unconscious realms of expression so completely that the world of dreams and
fantasy would be joined to the everyday world in "an absolute reality, a surreal reality." (Breton) Its most
famous painters were Pierre Roy, Rene Magrite, and Salvador Dali.

Throughout Latin America, Surrealism invoked an almost instantaneous surge of fascination and
sympathy. This is clearest in the case of vanguardist Latin American poetry of the 1920s; 30s and 40s,
most particularly that of Jorge Luis Borges, Cesan Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda. Indeed it
would not be incorrect to say that the Neruda of the two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933/35) has
long since emerged as the most widely read poet of Surrealism.

In 1949, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier wrote his famous prologue to his novel The Kingdom of
this World in which he counters the European brand of Surrealism, which he sees as dependent on
"conjurer's tricks" to create a magical effect, with an espousal of the maravilloso which is not a literary
contrivance but issues out of "a reality followed strictly in all its details." The cultural difference is
underlined in the last sentence of the prologue: "For what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle
of magic realism." Carpentier thus instituted a new vocabulary within the literary aesthetic. In his Nobel
prize acceptance speech in 1967, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias spoke of the novel in his
continent as "the vehicle of ideas, an interpreter of peoples using as instrument a language with a literary
dimension, with imponderable magical value and profound human projection."

In 1955, Angel Flores applied the term magical realism to Spanish American writing. Flores put
forward Borges as the master and suggested Kafka as its European equivalent. Its distinctive feature was
identified as a mixing of the realist with the fantastic; the mythic with the magical:

What came to dominate the story and to leave a lasting impression was the view of
man as a mystery surrounded by realistic data. A poetic divination of reality.
Something that for a lack of a better word could be called Magical Realism.

The term quickly came to be appropriated by Anglo-American critics who applied the term loosely
to non-Anglo-American literatures, without differentiation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years
of Solitude (1970) is considered its most representative novel. From a literary aesthetic, magical realism
came to be misinterpreted as a genre peculiar to Latin American and third-world writers. Closer home,
Salman Rushdie has been placed in this category.

It is a term that should be applied with caution as Marquez himself resisted any
attempt to label his fiction as magical. He says that it was possible for him to write
such novels "simply by looking at reality, our reality, without the limitations which
rationalists have tried to impose on it." (Mendoza, p. 60)

In Marquez's fiction the 'defamiliarization' of Surrealism is not achieved from the juxtaposition of
the mundane with non-contiguous objects, as in montage. It is the subjective, psychic realm that is dug up,
without shock, and as the spontaneous experiences of everyday life. In the narrative of Chronicle of a
Death Foretold Marquez has interwoven the real with the irrational. He does this with an equanimity
associated with ordinary events. The tears bubbling inside the widower Xius' heart, which Dr. Dionisio
Iguaran can hear (p. 37); Pedro Vicario's eleven month long insomnia (p. 80); the flooded Palace of
Justice where the narrator finds the floating 322 pages of the brief (p. 100); the soul of Yolanda Xius who
talks to the mayor during a séance (p. 87); and the knife that keeps coming out clean from Santiago's body
(p. 119) - these are all instances of magical realism. But it is not simply a literary style whose sole intent is
to surprise or draw attention to its uniqueness. It is a metaphorical presentation of reality. When the
bishop's boat passes by the town the roosters kept in the baskets start to crow together. The unnatural
sound is remembered, in exaggerated proportions, by the people, thus acquiring the status of an
omen.(p.12) Though academics have most frequently described magical realism as a mix of the magic and
the real, the two are not mutually exclusive categories for Marquez.
24
 Folklore has been considered an integral part of the work of the magical realists. But magical
realism is not simply a literary mode designed to render the social and psychological realities of Latin
American society as somewhat quixotic and different. Because Marquez abandoned the linear, rational
narrative structures in his fiction and included folklore elements such as omens, dreams, and superstitions
it should not be construed as a conscious revolt against European narrative traditions. Marquez said that,
"Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things." In Chronicle
of a Death Foretold Marquez penetrates into the collective consciousness of the community portraying its
fatalism and its medieval code of honour.

In his Nobel Prize speech in 1982, Marquez begins with an overview of the political turmoil,
ethnocide, dictators, civil wars, and military coups that have plagued the Latin American continent. He
says:

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that
has deserved the attention of the Swedish academy of letters.

The writer has a political agenda in presenting the locale with all its contradictions and
backwardness. The voices of the marginalized are documented without modification.

The town in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a mislaid town where there is no railroad (p. 25) and
the people depend on the river for transport. The roads are bad and dusty. The deprivation and neglect are
prefigured in the bishop's boat that doesn't stop at the town. He passes by with an empty blessing in the
air. After Santiago Nasar's death there is no human sized freezer to preserve his body and the only doctor.
Dr. Dionisio Iguaran, is away. Father Amador who was once a medical student conducts the autopsy in a
disastrous way.

Transmission of information is primarily through rumours and gossip. In the uneventful provincial
life of the people, the arrival of an intriguing stranger is enough to capture the imagination of the entire
town. The marriage of Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario becomes a public spectacle, acquiring
carnivalesque proportions. The novel also hints at the multi-ethnic profile of the town, with its Arabs and
mulatto girls at the brothel. The racial tension is palpable in Victoria Guzman's epithet for Santiago Nasar,
"whitey" (p. 8), and the call from a balcony when he is rushing towards his house: "Not that way, Turk: by
the old dock." (p. 117) Violence is a part of their lives. Colonel Lazaro Aponte, the mayor has caused
many "repressive massacres" in his career. (p.77) Bayardo's father is war veteran who is a hero from the
civil war that wracked Colombia from the end of the last century to the beginning of this one and in which
nearly 100,000 people lost their lives. Santiago's family has had two barroom killers (p.82).

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold Marquez's surreal imagery and the dreamlike quality are
unmistakable. They are the easily identifiable elements of the aesthetic of magical realism. But in the last
analysis it is as an ethnographer that Marquez is most effective, chronicling his community with incense
sympathy and understanding. You must read his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to understand his
concerns as a writer, who is chronicling the neglect, deprivation, and backwardness of his community.

25
 Appendix

The following are excerpts from Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's interview with Marquez. Read it
carefully to get an insight into his work and craft.

What is your point of departure for a book?

A visual image. For other writers, I think, a book is born out of an idea, a concept. I always start
with an image. Tuesday Siesta, which I consider my best short story, grew out of seeing a woman and
young girl dressed in black with a black umbrella walking through a deserted town in the scorching sun.
In Leaf Storm, it's an old man taking his grandson to a funeral. The point of departure for Nobody Writes
to the Colonel was the image of a man waiting for a launch, in the market-place in Barranquilla. He was
waiting with a kind of silent anxiety. Years later in Paris I found myself waiting for a letter - a money
order probably - with the same anxiety and I identified with the memory of that man.

Which visual image did you use for One Hundred Years of Solitude?

An old man taking a child to see some ice which was on show as a circus curiosity.

Is it something which really happened?

Not exactly, but it was inspired by something real. I remember when I was a very small boy in
Aracataca, my grandfather took me to the circus to see a dromedary. Another day, when I told him I hadn't
seen the ice on show, he took me to the banana company's settlement, asked them to open up a create of
frozen mullet and made me put my hand in. The whole of One Hundred Years of Solitude began with that
one image.

You usually attach a lot of importance to the first sentence of a book. You told me once that at times
it has taken you longer to write the first sentence than all the rest of the book together. Why?

Because the first sentence can be the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the
length of the book.

Does it take you long to write a novel?

Not to actually write it. That's quite a rapid process. I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in less
than two years. But I spent fifteen or sixteen years thinking about that book before I sat down at the
typewriter.

And it took The Autumn of the Patriarch that long to mature. How long did you wait before writing
Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

Thirty years.

Why so long?

When the event took place in 1951, I was interested in it not as material for a novel but a newspaper
article. But that genre wasn't very well developed in Colombia at the time, and I as a provincial journalist
on a local paper, which wouldn't, have been interested in the matter anyway. I started thinking about the
case in literary terms several years later, but I always had to human mind how upset my mother would be
at the very thought of seeing so many of her friends and relatives in a book written by her son. Still, the
truth of it is that I wasn't really gripped by the (sic page no. 251) until, after I'd chewed it over for many

26
years, I discovered the vital ingredient - that the two murderers didn't want to commit the crime and had
tried their utmost to get somebody to prevent it, without success. This is the only really unique element in
the drama; the rest is pretty commonplace in Latin America. A later cause for delay was the structure. In
real life, the story ends nearly twenty-five years after the crime, when the husband comes back to his
rejected wife, but it was always clear to me that the book had to end with a meticulously detailed
description of the crime. The answer was to introduce a narrator who could move freely through the
novel's temporal structure: I wrote in the first person, for the first time. So what happened was that after
thirty years I discovered something we novelists tend to forget - the best literary formula is always the
truth.

Let's talk now about the craft side involved in being a writer. Can you tell me who's been the
greatest help to you in your long apprenticeship?

My grandmother, first and foremost. She used to tell me about the most atrocious things without
turning a hair, as if it was something she'd just seen. I realized that it was her impassive manner and her
wealth of images that made her stories so credible. I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude using my
grandmother's method.

Was it through your grandmother that you discovered you were going to be a writer?

No, it was through Kafka, who recounted things in German the same way my grandmother used to
When I read Metamorphosis, at seventeen, I realized I could be a writer. When I saw how Gregor Samsa
could wake up one morning transformed into a gigantic beetle, I said to myself, 'I didn't know you could
do this, but if you can, I'm certainly interested in writing'.

Why did it attract you so strongly? Because of the freedom of being able to invent anything you like?

All of a sudden I understood how many other possibilities existed in literature outside the rational
and extremely academic examples I'd come across in secondary school textbooks. It was like tearing off a
chastity belt. Over the years, however, I discovered that you can't invent or imagine just whatever you
fancy because then you risk not telling the truth and lies are more serious in literature than in real life.
Even the most seemingly arbitrary creation has its rules. You can throw away the fig leaf of rationalism
only if you don't then descend into total chaos and irrationality.

Into fantasy?

Yes, into fantasy.

You loathe fantasy. Why?

Because I believe the imagination is just an instrument for producing reality and that the source of
creation is always, in the last instance, reality. Fantasy, in the sense of pure and simple Walt-Disney-style
invention without any basis in reality is the most loathsome thing of all.

You've said that every good novel is a poetic transposition of reality. Can you explain this concept?

Yes, I think a novel is reality represented through a secret code, a kind of conundrum about the
world. The reality you are dealing with in a novel is different from real life, although it is rooted in it. The
same thing is true of dreams.

27
 The way you treat reality in your books, especially in One Hundred Years of Solitude and in The
Autumn of the Patriarch, has been called 'magical realism': I have the feeling your European readers are
usually aware of the magic in your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...

This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of
tomatoes and eggs. Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary
things. To make this point, I usually cite the case of the American explorer F.W. Up de Graff who made
an incredible journey through the Amazon jungle at the end of the last century and saw, among other
things, a river with boiling water, and a place where the sound of the human voice brought on torrential
rain. In Comodoro Rivadavia, in the extreme south of Argentina, winds from the South Pole swept a
whole circus away and the next day fishermen caught the bodies of lions and giraffes in their nets. In Big
Mama’s Funeral I tell the story of an unimaginable, impossible journey by the Pope to a Colombian
village. I remember describing the President who welcomed him as, bald and stocky so as not to make
him look like the President in power at the time, who was tall and bony. Eleven years after this story was
written, the Pope did go to Colombia and the President who welcomed him was bald and stocky just like
the one in the story. After I'd written One Hundred Years of Solitude, a boy turned up in Barranquilla
claiming to have a pig's tail. You only have to open the newspapers to see that extraordinary things
happen to us every day. I know very ordinary people who've read One Hundred Years of Solitude
carefully and with a lot of pleasure, but with no surprise at all because, when all is said and done, I'm
telling them nothing that hasn't happened in their own lives.

So everything you put in your books is based on real life?

There's not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.

Where does this ability to tell such extraordinary, such... magical tales come from?

My grandparents were of Galician origin and many of the supernatural things they told me about
came from Galicia. However, I think this taste for the supernatural also comes to us through our African
heritage. The Caribbean coast of Colombia is, together with Brazil, the part of Latin America closest to
Africa. In this connection, the trip I made round Angola in 1978 gave me one of my most fascinating
experiences ever. It was a watershed in my life. I expected to find a strange, totally unfamiliar world but
from the moment I set foot in Africa and breathed in its air, I suddenly found myself back in the world of
my childhood. Yes, I rediscovered my childhood there, the customs, all the things I'd forgotten. I even
started having my childhood nightmares again.

In Latin America they teach us that we're Spaniards. It's partly true of course, since the Spanish
ingredient is an undeniably important part of our cultural make-up; but on that trip to Angola I discovered
that we're Africans as well or, rather that we're a racial mixture. Our culture is enriched by contributions
from many different races. I'd never been conscious of this before.

There are forms of culture with African roots in the Caribbean, where I was born, very different
from those of the Altiplano where the indigenous cultures were strong. The exuberant imagination of
African slaves, mixed with that of the pre-Colombian natives and added to the Andalusian taste for
fantasy and the Galician cult of the supernatural, had produced an ability to see reality in a certain magical
way. This is common to both the Caribbean and Brazil. Out of this has grown a literature, a music, a style
of painting (like the Cuban Wilfredo Lam) which are the aesthetic expression of that region.

So the strongest influence on you, stronger than anything in your literary background, comes from
your cultural and geographical identity. From the Caribbean. It is your world, the world you express.
How does this influence come over in your books?

The Caribbean taught me to look at reality in a different way, to accept the supernatural as part of
our everyday life. The Caribbean is a distinctive world whose first work of magical literature was The

28
Diary of Christopher Columbus, a book which tells of fabulous plans and mythological societies. The
history of the Caribbean is full of magic - a magic brought by black slaves from Africa but also by
Swedish, Dutch and English pirates who thought nothing of setting up an Opera House in New Orleans or
filling women's teeth with diamonds. Nowhere in the world do you find the racial mixture and the
contrasts, which you find in the Caribbean. I know all its islands: their honey-coloured mulattos with
green eyes and golden handkerchiefs round their heads: their half-caste Indo-Chinese who do laundry and
sell amulets; their green-skinned Asians who leave their ivory stalls to shit in the middle of the street; on
one hand their scorched, dusty towns with houses which collapse in cyclones and on the other,
skyscrapers of smoked glass and an ocean of seven colours. Well, if I start talking about the Caribbean
there's no stopping me. Not only is it the world which taught me to write, it's the only place where I really
feel at home.

How did you come to find this other, let's call it mythical, approach to reality which produced One
Hundred Years of Solitude?

As I've already said, my grandmother's stories probably gave me the first clues. The myths, legends
and beliefs of the people in her town were, in a very natural way, all part of her everyday life. With her in
mind, I suddenly realized that I wasn't inventing anything at all but simply capturing and recounting a
world of omens, premonitions, cures and superstitions that is authentically ours, truly Latin American.
Remember those men in Colombia who get worms out of cow's ears by saying prayers, for example. Our
day-to-day life in Latin America is full of this kind of thing.

I was able to write One Hundred Years of Solitude simply by looking at reality, our reality, without
the limitations which rationalists and Stalinists through the ages have tried to impose on it to make it
easier for them to understand.

And the larger than life element, the exaggerated proportions in One Hundred Years of Solitude and
The Autumn of the Patriarch and your latest stories. Is that real as well or is it literary licence?

No, disproportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself out of all proportion. This often
presents serious problems for writers who can't find words to describe it. If you talk about a river, the
biggest one a European reader can imagine is the Danube which has 1,770 miles long. How can the reader
imagine the Amazon, which at certain points is so wide you can't even see across it? The word storm
conjures up one thing for the European reader and quite another for us. The same applies to the word
'rain', which cannot possibly convey the meaning of the torrential downpours of the tropics. Rivers with
boiling water, storms which make the earth tremble, cyclones which sweep away whole towns, are not
inventions but the vast dimensions of the natural world in our hemisphere.

In which sense is Chronicle of a Death Foretold better?

In the sense that I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. This had never happened before. In my
other books the story took over, the characters took on a life of their own and did whatever they fancied.

That's one of the most extraordinary things about literary creation...

But I felt I needed to write a book over which I could exercise strict control and I think I did it in
Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The theme demanded the precise structure of a detective story.

29
 References

Bell, Michael.' Male Tragedy/ Female Novella: Chronicle of a Death Foretold' In Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Critical Companion Ed. P. Unni Krishnan. Worldview:
Delhi, 2001.

Sangari, Kumkum. 'The Politics of the Possible or the Perils of Reclassification'. In Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Critical Companion Ed. P. Unni Krishnan. Worldview:
Delhi, 2001.

Williams, Raymond L. 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Journalism'. In. Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Ed. Jayanti Seth. Doaba: Delhi, 2001.

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ACADEMIC SESSION 2012-13

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

Try to answer all these questions. You may send them for evaluation to the writer of this study material.

Q.1. Write short notes on the following characters:

(a) Victoria Guzman

(b) Clotilde Armenta

(c) Father Amador

(d) Pura Vicario

(e) Bayardo San Roman

Q.2. Do you think that the title Chronicle of a Death Foretold is ironical? Give reasons for your answer.

Q.3. Do you think that the non-linear structure of the novel is justified on grounds of its theme?

Q.4. "Angela Vicario subverts many of the chauvinistic codes of her society". Elaborate this statement.

Q.5. Identify and describe the elements of magical realism in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

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Notes

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