Community in Chronicle of a DeathForetold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a discordant and ambiguous account of Santiago Nasar’s violent murder by the Vicario twins. Fact is fused with the abstract, such that they become indistinguishable. The narrator himself recognises the brokenness of his attempts to establish coherence. He, simultaneously a figure integrated into the community and an outsider, highlights that it is the community’s culture and preoccupations that provide reason for Angela’s rejection and for the twins’ plan. Furthermore, Nasar’s brutal honour-killing takes place during a period of frenzied festivity within the community, rendering it incomprehensible. More fundamentally, through the narrator’s warped organisation of fragmented material obtained from the townsfolk and his reliance upon their collective mass of deteriorated memories and inconsistent claims Marquez points directly to the fact that the community is at the root of the incoherence.

Custom and honour form the foundations of Chronicle’s cultural setting and the townsfolk’s choices. Marquez paints a Columbian town terrified by the prospect of shame – that chooses to believe that “Honour is love"[1]. Individuals are thus presented as objects of their rigid culture. Angela’s anxieties and precautions regarding both her virginity and getting ready for the wedding ‒ “there was no public misfortune more shameful than for a woman to be jilted in her bridal gown"[2] ‒ exemplify the intensity of tradition. It is in accordance with this unspoken but oppressive honour-code that the Vicario twins decide to murder Santiago Nasar. Pablo Vicario labels the brutal killing of Nasar as “a matter of honour"[3]. Even the lawyer in charge of the case rules it a “legitimate defence of honour"[4]. Despite Nasar’s seeming fragility and presentation as a scapegoated figure ‒ his eventual wounds resembling a “stigma of the crucified Christ"[5] even lending him a certain sanctity ‒ the honour code is accepted, often passively, by the community. Nonetheless, the failure to subvert this notion of honour troubles the townsfolk’s sense of justice. As the narrator recalls, “[their] daily conduct… begun to spin around a single common anxiety"[6]. This observation depicts the way in which the killing results in a derailing of the town’s customs, demonstrating, perhaps, the incompatibility of such customs with love and justice.

The community’s customs do not rest solely on the idea of honour, however; they are also preoccupied with prophecy and interpretation, both of which are portrayed as fundamental to the townsfolk’s everyday lives. The ambiguity of the events being described, alongside the unreliability and incoherence of the chronicle itself stem, not just from the community’s reliance upon traditional prophetical practises, but from their shortcomings – from discrepancies between signifier and signified. The novel opens with Placida Linero’s recollection of Santiago Nasar waking up from a dream upon the day he was killed, with emphasis upon her attentiveness towards apparently vatic experiences: we are told that “She has a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people’s dreams"[7]. We are then told that the respected Placida fails to notice any “ominous augury"[8] in her son’s dreams; the narrator thus demonstrates the inherent flaws of her practice. The narrator’s recording of the community’s response to the Vicario’s murder plot and their undertaking of the act are also central to the presentation of interpretational failure: for example, Hortensia Baute’s hallucinatory experience that triggers highly erratic behaviour, when she sees the twins’ knives, “bloody"[9] though still unused.

The lead-up to Nasar’s murder, because it occurs at the same time as the end of the wedding festivities and the bishop’s arrival, is frenzied and carnivalesque. The majority of the participants are nonetheless aware of the twins’ plan to kill Nasar: “There had never been a death more foretold"[10]. Tellingly, the narrator admits that he “had a very confused memory of the festival before [he] decided to rescue it piece by piece from the memory of others"[11], at once evoking both the chaos of the revelry and the fractured nature of his account. Christie argues that “the existence in the novel of narrative ambiguities … is insufficient reason for the reader to abandon investigation into the central narrative questions"[12]; however, despite the temptation to draw conclusions, Marquez presents the general incoherence as a barrier only strengthened by investigation, as is the case with the autopsy. The narrator notes that “No one could understand such fatal coincidences"[13] and yet he records the confused attempts that the community makes to do so. Reaching beyond this is impossible. Contradictory assertions within, and the deterioration of, the community’s collective memory that forms much of the chronicle’s foundations, heighten the ambiguity of the novel. Even the “illustrious people" who come with the groom’s family “[pass] unnoticed in the tumult of new faces"[14]. Equally, the flickering between lyrical descriptions of the events – such as, “in the half shadows there was the baptistery smell that had startled me on the morning of the crime"[15]‒ and the rigorous, although fragmented, pinning down of detail – such as “in the closet he also kept a Malincher Schonauer 30.06 rifle… and a Winchester repeater"[16] – mirror this intoxicated incongruity. Marquez thus builds interplay between uncertainty and clarity amidst a mass of equivocal and disordered signals. As a result, the reader, like the townsfolk, is immersed in the “mangrove of the bash"[17] – a position of ambiguity and frenzy stained by a profound awareness of Nasar’s impending fate.

Responses of authoritative members of the community to Nasar’s killing and actions in attempt to interfere with the twins’ plan are all hindered: some are ineffectual actions in themselves, some are lost amid the “abyss of uncertainty"[18], and some responses arise from misconception. Notably, the narrator highlights that the settling of honour disputes is a private duty in the townsfolk’s eyes. Whilst this offers some explanation of the general lethargy in response to the twins’ plot, it does not justify the failure of authority. The judge’s case, for example, is weak and lyrical rather than factual – something written by a man “burning with the fever of literature"[19] and many pages of his brief are damaged by a flood in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha, which is likened to a “lagoon of lost causes"[20], once again presenting with lyricism the hopelessness of establishing coherence to events. More directly associated with the period of Nasar’s death, the narrator records that the bishop ‒ anticipation for whose arrival stirred great excitement within the community ‒ lets them down; the preventative actions of the mayor, who has “no experience in matters of law"[21], are impotent , going only as far as confiscating the twins’ knives; the blind Poncio Vicario is lost, surrounded by the rush of the wedding; the autopsy on Nasar’s corpse, upon the mayor’s orders, is botched – Father Amador notes that “it was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead"[22]. Order and authority are portrayed as inept, particularly when faced with such a seemingly unavoidable progression of events.

The novel is based upon a chronological structure, framed by precise remarks such as “the throb of tragedy that had been gestating since three o’ clock in the morning". However, the account jolts back and forth by hours, days and years incessantly, lacking the total linearityof a conventional chronicle; time is warped, dislocated and twists back on itself. Randolph D. Pope considers this technique to be Marquez creating a trompe l’oeil effect, “disguise[ing]" his craft by claiming it to be a “chronicle"[23]. The novel’s overall trajectory is from the lead up to Nasar’s murder to the moment of his death, even though the first sentence directly refers to the latter: that it was on this day that “they were going to kill him"[24]. As the narrator himself acknowledges, “Chronicle…" is “a broken mirror of memory [put] back together from so many scattered shards."[25] This works as a derailing of order on a larger scale than does the failure of authority within the story; the fragmentation both mirrors the community’s actions and the chaos of the festivities whilst also manifesting the sheer unintelligibilityof the narrator’s efforts to recreate the world of the past in order to fabricate sense and meaning from a “chain of many chance events that made absurdity possible"[26].

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is neither concerned with what the crime was nor by whom it was committed ‒ we know these facts from the beginning ‒ but rather with the way in which an apparently innocent, Christ-like figure’s murder ‒ an unexplainable phenomenon ‒ is indirectly permitted by his community. Questions that may emerge concerning the community’s role in the novel, as to whether the members are innocent or complicit in the act, are unanswerable. Nasar’s death, amidst the feverish celebrations, prophecies and motives of the townsfolk, is pinned down with inexorable certainty, “nailed… to the wall with [Angela’s] well-aimed dart"[27]. The world of Chronicle is one of confusion – a sea of “many, many easily confused names"[28], of shifting identities and misunderstanding – in which little can be done to intervene with honour disputes or to disrupt fateful paths.

Bibliography

Márquez, Gabriel Garcia, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, trans. By Rabassa, Gregory, Penguin Books, 2014

Christie, John S., Fathers and Virgins: Garcia Marquez’s Faulknerian “Chronicle of a Death Foretold", Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 21, No. 41 (Jan. – Jun., 1993), pp. 21-29

Pope, Randolph D., Transparency and Illusion in Garcia Marquez’ “Chronicle of a Death Foretold", Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 15, No. 29, The Boom in Retrospect: A Reconsideration (Jan. – Jun., 1987), pp. 183-200

[1] Ibid. p 98

[2] Ibid. p 41

[3] Ibid. p 49

[4] Ibid. p 48

[5] Ibid. p 76

[6] Ibid. p 97

[7] Ibid. p 2

[8]Ibid. p 2

[9] Ibid. p 98

[10] Ibid. p 50

[11] Ibid. p 43

[12] Christie, John S., Fathers and Virgins: Garcia Marquez’s Faulknerian "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 21, No. 41 (Jan. – Jun., 1993), p 21

[13] Op cit. p 10

[14] Ibid. p 39

[15] Ibid. p 5

[16] Ibid. p 3

[17] Ibid. p 44

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. p 100

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid. p 73

[22] Ibid. p 72

[23] Pope, Randolph D., Transparency and Illusion in Garcia Marquez’ “Chronicle of a Death Foretold", Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 15, No. 29, The Boom in Retrospect: A Reconsideration (Jan. – Jun., 1987), p 184

[24] Op cit. p 1

[25] Ibid. p 5

[26] Ibid. p 97

[27] Ibid. p 47

[28] Ibid.