Como era Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Crónica de una muerte anunciada’ offers no final deciphering of the mystery, but a tricky adventure for all readers, external or internal.

SPA3: ‘Crónica de una muerte anunciada’ by Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Crónica de una muerte anunciada’ offers no final deciphering of the mystery, but a tricky adventure for all readers, external or internal.

To speak of the hermeneutic^[1] aspect of reading Crónica de una muerte anunciada is at best curious. Apparently, the solution of the diegetic mystery is minutiously laid down in the very first sentence, as if trying to act like a journalistic punchline. However, the novel develops on two levels: while the mystery of the anecdote – of the plot itself – is spoilt right from the beginning, a new mystery is created on the sub-textual, artistic level. Through the masterful literary hand, Márquez creates a layered text, which generates mystery without suspense and readers without a writer.

Firstly, we have to identify the sources of mystery, the presence of which is apparently contradictory to the expectations created by the use of the word Crónica.

The title, Crónica de una muerte anunciada, already contains a hint towards the novel’s unorthodox structure, which generates confusion, expectance, but never relief. Crónica is a look towards the past, while anunciada indicates the role that predestination and prediction about the future has to play in the novel. After reading the text, it becomes clear that the title is an allusion to the lack of chronology. Temporal loops and repetitions are an important source of the quirky enigmatic feel of the reading experience.

The novel is structured in five chapters without titles or numbers, each of which tells the story from a different perspective: Santiago Nasar/Plácida Linero (1st chapter), San Román/Ángela Vicario (2nd), the Vicario twins (3rd), Carmen Amador/Cristo Bedoya (4th), and the Investigating Judge/the town-dwellers (5th). Each of these points of view has a different manner of focalising on the murder. The prediction or description of the gory physical act is repeated in one way or another in every chapter, each time in more detail: ‘el horror de Santiago Nasar cuando ella arrancó de cuajo las entrañas de un conejo y les tiró a los perros el tripajo humeante. – No seas bárbara – le dijo él -. Imagínate que fuera un ser humano’ (p.15, I)^[2], ‘Ya lo mataron’ (p.32, I), ’45 minutos antes de morir’ (p. 56, II), ‘Los estragos de los cuchillos fueron apenas un principio de la autopsia […] “Fue como si hubiéramos vuelto a matarlo después de muerto”’ (p.89, IV) ,‘El cuchillo le atravesó la palma de la mano derecha, y luego se le hundió hasta el fondo en el costado. Todos oyeron su grito de dolor. […] Pedro Vicario […] le asestó un segundo golpe casi en el mismo lugar. […] Santiago Nasar se torció con los brazos cruzados sobre el vientre después de la tercera cuchillada. […] la única cuchillada en el lomo, y un chorro de sangre […]’ (p.144, V). However, in the final chapter, the sense of the murder is transformed in literature, in drama, in tragedy. The judge comments: ‘nunca le pareció legítimo que la vida se sirviera de tantas casualidades prohibidas a la literatura, para que se cumpliera sin tropiezos una muerte tan anunciada’ and then the townspeople worry about their own ‘importancia en la drama’, and then the drama becomes ‘la confusión de la tragedía’ (V). The term ‘confusión’ is used very literally, as the story compiled by the narrator is utterly confusing. The temporal loop which is opened in the beginning is closed towards the end of chapter three: ‘El día que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5:30 de la mañana’ (p.5, I) - ‘A las 5:30 cumplió el orden de despertarlo’ (p.86, III). The story starts once again, but from different perspectives, focusing on the brothers’ reluctance to kill, the superstitions about predestination and honour which were so strong, that no one even thought about preventing the murder, and finally the twist in the interpretation of the murder. Thus, a circular temporal dislocation and the patchwork structure of the novel is a factor which allows mystery to emerge.

Furthermore, a second source of ambiguity is the distancing of the narrator, ‘the way in which stories change through a process of Chinese whispers’ (SH, p.21)^[3]. Given the strong link of the events to the biography of the Colombian writer’s family, we are sure that the story does find its correspondent in reality. However, neither the author, nor the anonymous narrator seem to have witnessed the event personally. Márquez hears the news from his fiancée, Mercedes Barcha, who probably also found out about it from a certain source. Details about the death of Cayetano Gentile (the one Santiago Nasar represents) were then most probably added by his mother, Luisa Santiaga. The investigator is attempting to reconstruct exactly what happened by ‘reading’ the accounts of different witnesses of the events. He talks to friends and relatives of the deceased and the murderer (dedicating a chapter to each perspective, as mentioned above), then reads the judge’s brief and as a result writes the text we have before our eyes. The narrator is thus a third-party and the altering effect of the ‘Chinese whispers’ is obviously even greater when his story is read.

Moreover, the distancing does not only happen spatially, through the absence of the narrator from the place of the events, but also temporally: Márquez kept his promise to his mother for 30 years, form 1951 until 1981, that he would not turn the story into a novel until after the death of all those involved. Consequently, his narrator is one biased by the limits of human memory. Márquez also points out the fact that once the events ended, the story about them kept evolving: ‘things kept happening. If I’d written it then, I’d have left out a great amount of material which is essential to the understanding of the story.’ (quoted in SH, p.24). From a literary point of view, those additions are valuable, but in essence, they represent a departure from the pure truth about the events. The enigma here is ours: what kind of readers should we be: literature readers, or fact seekers? And if the author was so keen to encompass all possible artistic interpretations of the events, why call it a Crónica, just to totally contradict our expectations afterwards. The intention is, of course ironic, the same as that of many other elements of the novel.

According to the author, ‘it’s all been poetically transmuted’ (quoted in SH, p.25). What interests him and he thinks should be of interest to us too is ‘the comparison between reality and literary work’ (quoted in SH, p.25). I believe that the only reality were the events as they happened. Everything that was said afterwards, by witnesses, mediators and third-parties, was part of the grand literary work about those events. The only tense which does not, cannot contain non-sequiturs and incongruities is the present tense, the tense of the doer. Past tense is already a retrospective ambiguation of the events which happened and won’t ever come again the same way. In retrospect, they realise all the predicting symbols which they had missed, that all knew except for the one who was to live the events, that there was an unseen anonymous letter foretelling everything in detail. But this might be all made up by the human mind which looks for causation and links in all things. Those links were not there in the reality of the moment, the only one we can call reality. The Crónica is, therefore, mysterious, biased and inconclusive because it is human and fictional, because it represents another step in the gigantic net which is the literary work propagated by the one-time occurrence of the event itself. Paradoxically, any retrospective attempt at deciphering the mystery inevitably becomes an act of literature.

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