How does Marquez modify the conventions of the detective novel in Chronicle of a Death Foretold?
The New York Times in 1983 reviewed Gabriel Gracia Marquezs novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Pub. 1981) as a sort of metaphysical murder mystery in which the detective, Marquez himself, reconstructs events associated with the murder 27 years earlier of Santiago Nasar, a rich handsome fellow who lived in the Caribbean town where the author grew up. It is interesting to read this novel as a work of detective fiction as all the ingredients of a conventional murder mystery seem to be in the bowl, but they are mixed up a tad differently.
Obviously the first step would be to highlight the main tenets of the detective fiction genre, its applications and expectations. This paper would be incomplete without reference to the Golden Age of detective fiction which is generally accepted to have been written between the two world wars, the famous Agatha Christie known as its Queen. In stark contrast with its high culture literary counterpart i.e. the Modernist literature, the popular fiction detective novels were only concerned with rational detection. Says Michael Holquist on the co-existence of detective fiction and modernist literature and the categorization of the former as escapist literature, all the certainties of the 19th century-positivism, scientism, historicism-seem to have broken downIs it not natural to assume, then, that during this period when rationalism is experiencing some of its most damaging attacks, that intellectualswould turn for relief and easy assurance to the detective story? Detective fiction of the Golden Age has rules or rather commandments to be followed. The most famous written rules of this genre are the ones penned by Van Dine and Ronald Knox which exclude reliance on Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God . The post modern detective fiction, in its bid to invert the modernist traditions, subverted these rules as well. Again I quote Michael Holquist when he says, The metaphysical detective story does not have the narcotizing effect of its progenitor; instead of familiarity, it gives strangeness, a strangeness which more often than not is the result of jumbling the well known patterns of classical detective stories. Instead of reassuring, they disturb. They are not an escape, but an attack. .
Keeping the conventions used by detective fiction of the Golden Age, and post modernist inversion of these very traditions in mind, let us now analyze Marquezs Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The novel is written as reportage. The novel is calibrated down to the minute. We know that Santiago woke up at 5:30 in the morning to see the bishop, and that he was dead by 7:05. To put Garcia Marquez' style in flatly journalistic terms, he is always concerned with showing us the who, where, when and how. However he also explores the why?, and fails to come up with anything concrete, only possibilities. Why did no one warn Santiago about his impending future? Why did Angela Vicario take his name as her perpetrator? The detective, Marquez himself, is investigating the murder of Santiago 27 years after it happened. Apparently the town could not talk about anything else all these years and after so many years having to give details about that day, not as a gossip forum, but as a contribution to an investigation, the townsfolk seem to give accurate details as to when they saw him or the twins. But strangely enough, no one can seem to decide if it was raining or not on the morning of his death. Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morningBut most agreed that the weather was funerealand that at the moment of the misfortune a thin drizzlewas falling. Its most stark difference from the conventional detective novels, whether of the Golden Age or the Post modernist ones, is that the murder, or rather the death, is foretold. People are aware of the crime which is going to be committed, aware of the criminals and the victim and even the reasons for it. the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, and in addition, the reasons were understood down to the smallest detail. Also the investigation of the crime happens 27 years later, not right then and there. Of course the Vicario twins receive their sentence because Everything that happened after that is in the public domain , but the detection only ensues almost three decades later.
The novel is divided into five unnamed chapters, reminiscent of the Shakespearean five Act tragedies which follow the rise and fall of the main protagonist. Is the real protagonist here Santiago Nasar? We as readers constantly ask this question, as the narrative form is that of Empathetic Unsettlement which does not let the reader easily identify with the protagonist, in this case the victim. In detective novels the victim is not given so much space, and more or less is a flat character. The criminal, whose identity is maintained till the very end, is the one with the personality; his motives never very cryptic, but the manner in which he commits the crime is. The narrative usually gives maximum space to the detective. A game between the detective and the criminal who is present throughout the investigation, a game between the author and the reader. In this particular novel though, there is no game. The facts are known right from the start and the different accounts of all the people who could even remotely be involved are judiciously noted down. And yet the mystery remains unsolvable. Not the mystery of his death, or even the reasons for it. But the mystery of how a whole town full of people could not manage to inform Santiago of the Vicario twins proclamation. There are various accounts of the people justifying their actions, or rather inactions to prevent the tragedy. There had never been a death more foretold, the narrator asserts, repeating the truth that haunts the entire town. Dismissing their superficial reactionsmost of the townspeople consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolieshe finds the murder has in fact created a single anxiety which had made of the town an open wound.
Some excused themselves in the name of honor, in the name of fate, some thought the twins to be too drunk to act on their word, some assumed that since everybody knew even Santiago would have known by now, some deliberately didnt tell him, and some simply forgot as the Bishop was arriving that very morning. No detective story would ever have the evidence spread out in front of it, by way of the murderers declaring their intentions before they kill.
Reverting back to the exclusions mentioned earlier in the commandments of writing a detective story, coincidence is one of them. And this story is one of those incidents that seem abnormal, almost supernatural in its chain of coincidences which lead to Santiago never finding out about his waiting fate. Its like a line of dominoes falling in chorus till the end. If Bedoya had not made his only mortal mistake Santiago would have known about the twins; if the Bishop was not arriving that very morning the Priest would have been more attentive to the twins claim; if Colonel Aponte did not have so much faith in his own word he would have stopped the twins instead of merely telling them to go home and take their knives; if the mayor did not go into the social club to check on a date for dominoes he could have acted faster in preventing the tragedy, and of course if Santiago for some unfathomable reason had not decided to take the back door instead of the front door in the morning as he always did in his fine clothes, he would have found the note that had been slipped under the door informing him of his fate. In no detective story is there a collective sharing of the guilt, and not one, rather two, only murderers.
Also another deviation from the Golden Age conventions is the neatness of the crime that is always maintained in for example, the Christie mysteries. There is never any gore, mention of dismembered bodies, always a clean, sharp fatal wound. This is in contrast to the post modernist stories where the crime is explained in detail. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold also apart from the actual killing which is described in detail, so is the autopsy procedure, which is performed by Father Carmen Amador, It was as if we killed him all over again . The autopsy is like as in a brief, very detailed and exact with the number of wounds and the damage done to what organs etc. but right at the end the official report says for the wounds in his hands, It looked like a stigma of the crucified Christ . The biblical allusions between Santiago and Christ are subverted in his being, as a human, and his death which is Christ like, almost as if nailed to his own door: they both kept on knifing him against the dooryet they thought Santiago Nasar would never fallwasnt falling because they themselves were holding him up with stabs against the door . Religion has little, if not no, role to play in a conventional detective story which is based solely on evidence, facts and reasoning.
Salman Rushdie in the London review of Books said about Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The book and its narrator probe slowly, painfully, through the mists of half-accurate memories, equivocations, contradictory versions, trying to establish what happened and why. The narrators/detectives sole reliance on memories reconstructing the event 27 years later is the most apparent aberration in the traditional detective story fabric. All physical evidence is either damaged or lost for example the court report of the trial which was approximately estimated to be 500 pages out of which around 300 were rescued by the narrator. And even from that the narrator gleans the love of literature that the unnamed judge had flourished in the margins of the report, Give me a prejudice and I will move the world . Only the judge seemed to think Santiago not guilty as he could not find a single indication, not even the most unlikely one, that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong . Strangely enough the institution of law could not intervene before the crime had been committed, a rule that cannot be breached in any respectable detective novel.
Bibliography:
1. Julian Symons. What They are and Why We Read Them: Golden age Detective Fiction. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2001.
2. Michael Holquist. Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-war Fiction. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2001.
3. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1996.
4. Internet sources, web addresses mentioned in footnotes.
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