Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Earlier this year there were major floods in Colombia. The site of Garcia Marquez’ novels was awash; rivers were swollen, houses and people were swept away, whole villages were blotted out. Day after day the world turned to water.  Indeed there was so much water running through Colombia that for those of us living in chronically dry places, stricken by drought and bushfire, it was like something from the Bible, something you believed in but could hardly imagine happening in the same space and time that you yourself lived in. Almost beautiful, until the statistics hit home.

            Water is a profound and powerful metaphor in the work of Garcia Marquez. More rain falls in the pages of his works than on any other site in literature, more even than in King Lear or Wuthering Heights. It’s not the stormy rain of Shakespeare or Emily Bronte, but an endless unrelenting downpour, representing time and all the forces of oblivion, the things that blot us out.

            Here, for example,  from  One Hundred Years of Solitude is the effect of four years, eleven months and two days of rain on the inhabitants of Macondo, hometown of the Buendias, where ‘the waves of lucidity’ that come to people when the rains ease up, are blurred and human awareness is completely dominated by the effects of unending wetness, beautiful but with all human elements subdued as other things and creatures take over, where 

            ‘the threads in brocades rusted and wet clothing would break out in a rash of saffron-coloured moss. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms…’ It’s gorgeous, like a Matisse painting, but fatal to human happiness, as we see in Fernanda whose life is tarnished 

            ‘because, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it had been raining…’

            This same imaginative current runs through the ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold.’  For me it is at its most impressive in this image of the national archives where the unnamed narrator, trying to piece together and come to terms with the slaughter of Santiago Nasar, finds himself some twenty years later in a building invaded by the sea‘…in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha.’ 

 ‘There was no classification of files whatever and more than a century of cases were piled upon the floor of the decrepit colonial building that had been Sir Francis Drake’s headquarters for two days. The ground floor would be flooded by high tides and the unbound volumes floated about the deserted offices. I myself did my searching many times with the water up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes…’

That’s the key phrase: ‘that lagoon of lost causes,’ where all is in disarray, where history is lost. There is no order.  There is little that can be retrieved and tidied into the present world. As with the floods that obliterate his country year after year, Garcia Marquez, in novel after novel, has written about Oblivion, about the elusiveness of truth and the fragility not just of the future but of the present and the past. We have, he is telling us, no solid ground to stand on. 

And this thought pervades the whole novel.  Twenty years later the narrator manages to salvage – he uses the verb ‘filched’- from ‘that lagoon of lost causes ‘ where records of forgotten enterprises wash up and down in the tides- ‘some 332 pages’ from the brief that the first Judge in the trial of the Vicarios had been given, whose marginal notes ‘seemed to be written in blood.’ Even the murder itself, the climax of the novel’s events, tends to evaporate into dream: even as they are butchering their victim, ‘knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs,’ the Vicario brothers found themselves  ‘ floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear.’ 

He’s a great novelist, Marquez. He’s a visionary of his own land. What we see in the Archives is the epicentre of his great theme – obliteration and the mist of remembering and forgetting that gives the book its poetry.  What he shows us in this Chronicle (the title references the simplest way of ordering history by arranging events in a time sequence) is that any attempt to make clear sense of the event – both at the time and also twenty years on- is destined to failure.   So where, we have to ask, does that leave the student essay writers who year after year pick up their pens or open their laptops to offer an account of the work. 

It is a dilemma.. And the dilemma is this: with this novel the essay writer needs to write systematically and in an orderly way about a novel whose every effort is to explode the idea that systematic understanding is ever possible.  (The hideous travesty of the autopsy not only comments on the brutalising of Santiago Nasar’s corpse; it is also a travesty of all Method.) 

‘They gave us back a completely different body…and we had to bury him hurriedly at dawn… Because he was in such bad shape.”

This could almost be read as a warning to those of us who write on this text – against destroying its substance as we try to pin down the causes that run through it.  Many of us write and are encouraged to write essays on the ‘Themes’ of the book, one of the most popular being, for example, a study of the macho honour culture of Latin America and  the ‘gender inequality’ enshrined in that society. These are certainly meanings within the novel, thematic ropes that hold the material together. But the larger meaning which is Garcia Marquez’ primary concern, which engages his creative imagination far more powerfully than these is that truth is something we can never get hold of, a vision that could be called Shakespearian in its mixing of tragic cruelty and lyric beauty and comic exaggeration – in short, the poetic vision of the novel – something that eludes definition and summary – which culminates in the account of the slaughtering of Santiago Nasar in ‘the dazzling backwater…on the other side of fear.

Now of course as we write on the novel and try to shape our experience of it into the organised form of an essay it is perfectly valid and useful to present the themes that are so widely taken up by student essayists. In the community we all belong to – students, teachers and examiners – writing methodically is our primary concern (though Garcia Marquez is in pursuit of something larger and less definable). That is the nature of the Essay – that it does order things into a sequence of ideas. But it is also our major responsibility – to the work and to ourselves – to honour the reading experience, the overriding poetic qualities of the text, the sense of mirage and uncertainty, the themes of forgetting and oblivion that haunt and soften the edges of events in the realm of actuality. If indeed ‘actuality’ exists.

 ‘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 misfortune a thin drizzle like the one Santiago Nasar had seen in his dream grove was falling.’

Indeed this is not just the uncertainty of memory that Garcia Marquez is setting before us – it’s deeper than that: what he is evoking is the frailty of ‘reality’ itself, the term we go by in our own lives – how it is composed of solitary subjectivities and communal fantasy, how there is no dividing line between the illusions of sleep and the illusions of the waking world. This is the major vision of the novel and as early as page 2 he is training us to read the truth of this world, to become the Ideal reader of his book, the work of his imagination.

In a way his narrator is luckier than the essay writer – he has a whole book to complete his task of ‘trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards.’ And many of the things that give substance to his ideas are concrete and real – Santiago’s clothes, the visit of the Bishop, ‘the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes’ with her significant surname.

So this is just a simple plea – when writing under the necessity of accounting for the visions and themes of the book don’t simply head for the lists of extractable ideas one can take from it – of course it is susceptible to the examination of gender issues, for example, – but make sure you acknowledge the overarching theme of a work like this – that in the end nothing is reducible to what we like to call an issue. Or to a concrete patterning of events, a linking of cause and effect that the word ‘Chronicle’ usually suggests. 

Acknowledge the fictive quality , the visionary or poetic effects of the writing. The deepest meanings of a work like this are in its manner, its way of presenting ideas as dreams, illusions, strangenesses.  Truth of the kind we like to present in our discussions is unavailable to the inhabitants of this novel – and as readers and commentators we need to observe the same protocols.  But here’s the dilemma – the members of Santiago Nasar’s community would never write on the theme of Honour. We have to. We can’t just get vague and cloudy. On the other hand we have to avoid the brutality of the post-mortem. This is the dilemma we face when commenting on Chronicle of A Death Foretold – nice one, Garcia. We will rise to your challenge and by doing so we will honour you in the brilliance of your work.