The day before yesterday a close friend of mine killed himself by blowing his brains out. Today in my head his death assembles a thousand memories of his life, which I now see, not perhaps more clearly, but more truthfully than before. Life being lived always tends to simplify; hence one of the reasons why a certain kind of story is told to contest the opportunism of these simplifications. In one sense a story does not go anywhere, it just is – as my departed friend now is in my imagination.
These simple thoughts are relevant to Garcia Márquez’s new book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, whether one considers its story or its form of storytelling. I want principally to consider the latter because Garcia Marquez is an exemplary storyteller in a tradition which to us in our NATO culture has become rare. By understanding better Garcia Márquez’s storytelling we can perhaps learn more about most people in the world and even about our own future, when our culture falls apart.
Like his others, this story is set somewhere roundabout Colombia, the country where Garcia Marquez was born. It is short, a mere 120 pages. Like The Autumn of the Patriarch, this one is about a death, a violent one.
The narrative, told with the hindsight of today, describes what happened between 5.30 and 6.30 one morning, in February a quarter of a century ago, when Santiago Nasar, of Arab descent, is knifed to death while hung over after the previous night’s wedding revels and after the bride had been discovered by the sad groom not to have been a virgin; knifed to death against one of the two doors of his own house which inadvertently his mother, usually so clairvoyant about her son’s dreams, had ordered to be bolted, thus cutting off his only means of escape from the two brothers Vicario with their pig-slaughtering knives who had been forced by honour (notwithstanding all their attempts to let their victim be forewarned and thus to escape) to kill the man whom in a moment of truthfulness or aberration – who knows? – their sister Angela, the bride, had just named that night as the one who had deflowered her.
The story is more austere than any of his others. It is written as though by an investigator who is anxious to find out the simplest truth. But because it is not a Protestant Western book the model for the investigator is not that of a detective but rather that of a hieroglyphist. The lines of enquiry are centred, like the petals of a daisy, round their capitulum, which is the moment of the assassination against the door. Everything is centred on that instant when Santiago Nasar, twenty-one years old, ranch-owner, falconer, cries out for his mother for the last terrible time.
And with all his short, slender petals of enquiry, what is it that Garcia Marquez hopes to find out? Never psychological motivation. Never legal guilt or innocence. Never a process of cause and effect. Never the pathology of drunkenness or sexuality. Never a story of success or failure. He simply wants to establish what may have happened that early morning in the public square when the town was already awake and out in the streets: because if he establishes this and if he allows us, his listeners, to grasp what may have happened, it is possible that the destiny of all those involved – Nasar, his fiancée, his mother, the two brothers reluctantly avenging the honour of their sister, the bride and bridegroom – will be mounted (like a stone in a ring) in all its mystery. Detective stories set out to solve mysteries. The Chronicle of a Death Foretold sets out to preserve one.
For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. 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.
Of my contemporaries, Garcia Marquez is the one I admire the most. Perhaps this is not disinterested. In some countries critics have compared my own recent fiction with his and it is true that I see him, not as a critic but as a colleague in an art of storytelling.
But which art? Garcia Marquez sets out to preserve a mystery. Does this mean that he is an obscurantist, profiting from, or enjoying, mystification for its own sake? Such an accusation would be absurd; he is also a highly professional journalist committed to exposing ideological myths and to the struggle for the democratic right to know. He speaks of ‘the mission assigned to us by fate’. Yet undoubtedly his sense of history is Marxist. What is the form and tradition of storytelling which reconciles what we have been taught to think of as such irreconcilable contradictions?
A moment’s reflection shows that any story drawn from life begins, for the storyteller, with its end. The story of Dick Whittington becomes that story when he has at last become mayor of London. The story of Romeo and Juliet first begins as a story after they are dead. Most, if not all, stories begin with the death of the principal protagonist. It is in this sense that one can say that storytellers are Death’s secretaries. It is Death who hands them the file. The file is full of sheets of uniformly black paper but they have eyes for reading them and from this file they construct a story for the living. Here the question of invention, so much insisted upon by certain schools of modern critics and professors, becomes patently absurd. All that the storyteller needs or has is the capacity to read what is written in black.
I think of Rembrandt’s painting in The Hague of the blind Homer; it is the supreme image of such a secretary. And I like to think of a photograph of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with his bon vivant’s face and scurrilous energy, beside it. There is nothing pretentious in this comparison: we Death’s secretaries all carry the same sense of duty, the same oblique shame (we have survived, the best have departed) and the same obscure pride which belongs to us personally no more than do the stories we tell. Yes, I like to think of that photo beside that painting.
It is significant that this book is called a chronicle. The tradition of storytelling of which I am speaking has little to do with that of the novel. The chronicle is public and the novel is private. The chronicle, like the epic poem, retells more memorably what is already generally known; the novel, by contrast, reveals what is secret in a family of private lives. The novelist surreptitiously beckons the reader into the private home and there, their fingers to their lips, they watch together. The chronicler tells his story in the market-place and competes with the clamour of all the other vendors: his occasional triumph is to create a silence around his words.
Thus novelist and storyteller are distinct and it is obvious that they both belong to different historical periods, confronting or collaborating with different ruling classes. Yet there is an internal distinction too which concerns the tense of the narrative. Novels begin with the drama of hope: their protagonists’ hopes for their lives. The novel as a form does not lend itself to the telling of the lives of the absolutely underprivileged. (Dickens rescues the most destitute of his characters so that they can become characters in a novel.) And so the tenses of the novel, or, rather, the tenses of the reader’s heart as he reads a novel, are those of the future or the conditional. Novels are about Becoming.
The tense of the chronicle, the narrative of the storyteller, is the historic present. The story refers insistently to what is over but it refers to it in such a way that, although it is over, it can be retained. This retaining is not so much a question of recollection as of coexistence, the past with the present. Epic chronicles are about Being. The capitulum of Santiago Nasar’s assassination, that moment at 6.30 a.m. twenty-five years ago, is still present.
Perhaps this makes the story sound portentous. Those who know Garcia Márquez’s writings will find this hard to believe and they are right. Indeed, of all his books, this one is the most everyday, the most ordinary. All the characters are small-town petit-bourgeois. Their daily preoccupations are short-sighted and trivial. There is not a single noble appeal in the book. When he goes to meet his death, Santiago Nasar (who in my opinion did not seduce Angela and was to die absurdly for an act that he never committed) is still calculating with a kind of idle curiosity – in a few seconds’ time this idleness will acquire the quality of a paradise – is still calculating exactly how much the previous night’s wedding celebrations have cost the bridegroom.
Nevertheless everyone in the story (in life was it different?) has another dimension, a dignity which has nothing to do with power, but with the way they live their fate. This implies neither passivity nor the abnegation of choice. The notion of fate confuses the western novelist only because he conceives of it as existing in the same time as free will. It exists in a different time where, quite literally, all has been said and done.
To put it now very simply: this is a story about people and told to people who still believe that life is a story. Nobody chooses their story. Yet, by definition, a story whether lived or heard has a meaning. To ask whether this meaning is objective or subjective is already to move outside the circle of listeners. To ask what the meaning is is to ask for the unsayable. Nevertheless the faith in meaning promises one thing: meaning has to be shareable. Such stories begin with mortality but they never end with solitude. When Santiago Nasar cries for the last time for his mother he is suffering a terrible loneliness. For more than twenty years Angela will live alone with her secret and her memories. Finally her wronged and unhappy husband who has received from her thousands of letters, not one of which he opened, comes back to live with her – such was their loneliness during those years. There is bitter loneliness but there is no solitude, for all are engaged in an unending common struggle to glimpse through and beyond the absurd. Everyone is reading, but not a book. As I am reading the life of my friend who killed himself, I think, when he was happiest.
1982