A Problem of Precipitation
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.11.1.0116
ISSN1755-6333
Autores ResumoIn a 1981 essay in the New York Times, Gabriel García Márquez discusses his artistic patrimony, acknowledging his debt to two “great masters,” William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, that pair of “North American novelists who [seem] to have the least in common.” To Faulkner, García Márquez attributes a nebulous impact on his “soul,” but from Hemingway, he claims to have learned matters of “craftsmanship,” the technical machinery in the “science of writing” (“Gabriel”). The timing of this essay makes it all the more curious that García Márquez should omit any mention of the similar debt that he owes to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to his The Great Gatsby in particular. García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the same year as his New York Times essay, and this short novel reads in many ways as a protracted reworking of and response to Gatsby. The books appear to be so closely counterpointed as to suggest that García Márquez has not two, but three masters from the front ranks of American modernists.García Márquez's Chronicle is, like Gatsby, the story of a murder, a crime that follows from a thwarted romance and hinges on a case of mistaken identity. In Chronicle, Santiago Nasar—a companionable dandy with a doting mother, a respectable fiancée, and a hereditary compulsion to molest the eligible servant in his home—is murdered for allegedly deflowering Angela Vicario, a girl whose family has fallen on hard times and whose marriage to the fabulously wealthy Bayardo San Román is nullified owing to her compromised maidenhead. Although Nasar's guilt is never established indisputably, Angela Vicario's brothers, Pablo and Pedro (butchers by trade, and twins, to boot), slaughter Nasar outside the door of his own home on the morning following the wedding celebration—despite the fact that they announce their criminal intent publicly as if imploring someone to stop them. In this sense, Nasar's death is thoroughly foretold, known even to the victim himself, and yet the crime is consummated despite the best intentions of all concerned.Already, it is easy to detect some broad traces of Gatsby in the plot of Chronicle: Jay Gatsby's idealized but nonetheless illicit romance with Daisy Buchanan likewise ends in his murder. Following the hit-and-run homicide (apparently inadvertent) of Tom Buchanan's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, her husband, George, tracks the perpetrator—the wrong man, as it happens—to his home, kills him, and commits suicide. However, these traces only scratch the surface of the correspondences between the texts. Like Gatsby, Chronicle is narrated from a first-person perspective by someone not directly participating in the unfolding tragedy. In both books we have not the confession of a protagonist, but the account of a witness, and a doubtful one at that. Nick Carraway, Daisy's cousin and occasional facilitator of the lovers' plot, recounts the events of the tragic summer of 1922, albeit dubiously.1 The narrator of Chronicle is never named, though the novel hints at his identification with the author himself, owing to the autobiographical resonance of the names of the narrator's family members (as one example, both the narrator and the author are married to a woman named Mercedes). Compared to Nick, who receives considerable stage time in Gatsby, the narrator of Chronicle remains a shadowy figure throughout. Though he was a close friend of Nasar and had spent part of the night before the murder carousing with the victim, he is absent during the actual commission of the crime, having chosen to pass the early morning hours in the company of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, the proprietress of the local brothel. As a result, this narrator, to an unsettling degree, relies on the testimony of others to piece together the events culminating in the murder, a journalistic quest that occupies him intermittently for twenty-seven years.The narrator of Chronicle shares something else in common with Nick Carraway—a proclivity for manipulating the narrational flow of time. Nasar's murder is the singular event at the center of the novel, yet it spans very little time, requiring only a matinal hour and a half to be completed. Even so, the narrator takes extravagant liberties with the chronology. After setting in motion the timeline pertaining to the murder in chapter 1, he frequently backtracks—as one example, to recount, in chapter 2, San Román's mysterious arrival in the town six months earlier and his courtship of Angela Vicario—and flashes forward, hurdling decades to relate the circumstances under which he interviewed witnesses of and participants in the crime. He also summarizes preemptively, in the fashion of an epilogue, the fates of those affected by the murder; in perhaps the most jarring example, readers learn in chapter 4 that Bayardo and Angela eventually reunite, seventeen years after Nasar's execution, a fact that underscores the pointlessness of the crime they have precipitated. Only in the novel's final chapter does the narrator describe the murder scene itself; the death is not only foretold, but withheld until the book's last pages. By contrast, Nick's distortion of time—his repeated excursions into the past to relate Gatsby's biography, his use of the eternalized present tense to describe Gatsby's parties, and the subtler recurrence of the past in the novel's symmetrical structure (its echoing scenes and settings)—yields a chronological surface that is comparatively compact and orderly. (Time clearly is a vexed issue in Gatsby, and I will consider it more closely later in this essay.)These broad comparisons begin to suggest how closely the two works correspond; however, the intertextual relations grow increasingly interesting when we concentrate on smaller details, local affinities, and echoes. To begin with beginnings, García Márquez famously opens his novel with an unequivocal record of the facts: “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on” (Chronicle 1).2 In this sentence, Nasar's murder is announced no less implacably than it is in the novel's title. Similarly, Nick Carraway neutralizes some of the suspense of his narrative by telling us, prematurely, his conclusions with regard to the events of that 1922 summer: “No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” The revelation that Nick expects never to find again someone with Gatsby's gift of “romantic readiness” partly discloses, in advance, the fact of his death (Gatsby 2). On this point, García Márquez's novel would seem to exaggerate, or exacerbate, a relatively minor feature of Fitzgerald's narration, and this tactic, of strategic exacerbation, typifies the relationship between Chronicle and Gatsby.García Márquez comes closest to an explicit reference to Gatsby in the portrait of Bayardo San Román. Like Jay Gatsby, San Román is a fantastical and mysterious figure: an incalculably wealthy man with a dubious past, embarked on a romantic quest for love. To account for his presence in the town, he tells someone, “I've been going from town to town looking for someone to marry”—a quip that elicits the narrator's remark that “he had a way of speaking that served to conceal rather than to reveal” (28). This trait evokes Gatsby's own habit of speaking evasively; in one comical instance, Gatsby cites “San Francisco” as the “part of the Middle West” from which he hails (65). Likewise, Gatsby adopts the absurd “old sport” as a signature phrase, perhaps in an attempt to authenticate his specious Oxford pedigree. In addition, like Gatsby, San Román purchases a mansion, the home of the widower Xius, to impress his beloved and throws a lavish party in her honor. But while Gatsby turns his mansion into a Trimalchian roadhouse, hoping that Daisy might “wander into one of his [many] parties,” per Jordan Baker's report (79), San Román stages only one spectacular party—to celebrate the nuptials—at the house of his bride.These character portraits converge most closely in the descriptions of the men's respective pasts, and this correspondence offers perhaps the most convincing evidence that the link between the books is something more than coincidence. On the road to New York, Gatsby offers Nick a summary of his hackneyed résumé: “I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago” (65–66). Nick listens skeptically until Gatsby produces a photograph to verify his status as an Oxford man, at which point Nick reflects, disproportionately, “Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart” (67). This sketch of Gatsby's biography bears a striking similarity to the sensational rumors surrounding Bayardo San Román: “It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil's Island, that he'd been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he'd salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Passage” (Chronicle 36). The fantastical account of their exploits binds the two characters together; both men have grossly inflated reputations, enlarged in each case by literary clichés. Fittingly then, both novels adopt a similar means to dispel some of these ludicrous rumors: San Román “put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he produced his entire family” (Chronicle 36). In Gatsby, most pointedly for our purposes, Henry Gatz likewise arrives for his son's funeral, verifying Jay Gatsby's humble Dakotan roots in the process. San Román's family is not as comically deflating as Gatsby's; he proves to be the son of a famous and feared military man, which explains his wealth. Differences notwithstanding, García Márquez appears to have taken Gatsby for a model in the portrait of Bayardo San Román.One confounding consideration here—something that would potentially nullify the relationship between the two texts—is that the Gatsby influence on Chronicle might well be secondhand, traceable through García Márquez's affinity for Faulkner rather than deriving directly from Fitzgerald. Further, this problem begs a second, underlying question: why should the particulars in Chronicle be attributable to influence at all? On the second point, García Márquez himself offers a firm answer in his interviews and journalistic writings; beyond his remarks in the New York Times, García Márquez is unequivocal on the subject of influence, which, for him, is something salutary to be cultivated, not shunned. As early as 1950, he wrote, “A novel unmistakably and fortunately influenced by Joyce, Faulkner or Virginia Woolf has yet to be written in Colombia.” He continued, “I say ‘fortunately’ because I don't think that Colombians can, at this time, be exceptions to the game of influence” (qtd. in Cohn 60). And indeed, numerous studies have traced the imprint of Faulkner in García Márquez's work; the borrowings are often “unmistakably” exact. John S. Christie has noted how Chronicle draws on both Faulkner's Light in August (1932; primarily) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936; secondarily). From the former, García Márquez acquired much of his plot and theme—the martyrdom of Santiago Nasar and the power of the word to warp reality. From the latter, he acquired something of his narrational method: in Faulkner's work “events are never verifiable since they are only filtered down through various narrators,” and likewise, “García Márquez is equally concerned with denying narrative authority” (Christie 22–23). However, Christie's sketch of these intertextual relations does not quite convey the exactitude of the borrowings, particularly with regard to the latter novel.Anyone who chances to read Chronicle alongside Faulkner's Light in August will be struck, even astounded, by the affinities that emerge between the works (call it a sublime experience of déjà vu). Consider the opening lines of Faulkner's chapter 19, in which the fugitive Joe Christmas is cornered and executed: About the suppertables on that Monday night, what the town wondered was not so much how Christmas escaped but why when free, he had taken refuge in the place which he did, where he must have known he would be certainly run to earth, and why when that occurred he neither surrendered nor resisted. It was as though he had set out and made his plans to passively commit suicide.There were many reasons, opinions, as to why he had fled to Hightower's house at the last. (August 419)This passage would be perfectly at home in Chronicle as it evokes, broadly, the collective speculations of García Marquéz's citizens and anticipates, more precisely, the residential anxieties of Cristo Bedoya, who “never managed to explain to himself why he gave in to the impulse to spend two hours at his grandparents' house until the bishop came instead of going to rest at his parents', who had been waiting for him since dawn to warn him” (Chronicle 113). Similarly, the narrator of Chronicle speculates that Nasar's death, like Christmas's, “could have been suicide” (118). While the influence of Light in August is especially pronounced, global, and pervasive in Chronicle, the borrowings from Absalom, Absalom! are perhaps equally striking for their precision and resonance. From Absalom, García Márquez appears to inherit his book's preoccupation with codes of honor, the notional abstractions that necessitate Nasar's murder and which might have been inspired by these passages in Faulkner's work: “I watched the miragy antics of men and women … called honor, principle, marriage, love, bereavement, death” and “if you haven't got honor and pride, then nothing matters” (Absalom 131, 279). And perhaps the complacent comment on Nasar's death, “Honor is love” (Chronicle 114), can also be read as a rejoinder to Quentin Compson's appraisal of the love triangle involving Charles Bon and the Sutpen siblings—“it's not love” (Absalom 258). Given that García Márquez makes no secret of his debt to Faulkner, his portrait of Bayardo San Román might well derive from Faulkner's cast of Thomas Sutpen, another character with “no discernible past” who also settles in a new town with the intention of marrying (Absalom 7).This genealogical line of descent becomes increasingly likely when we consider that Faulkner's Absalom has itself been argued to descend from Fitzgerald's Gatsby. In 1975, F. A. Rodewald was among the first to identify the Gatsby DNA in Faulkner's patriarch, Thomas Sutpen, and to articulate the case for an influence, a kinship, that has subsequently attracted other scholars, including Walter Benn Michaels and John D. Rockefeller V. Rodewald accurately notes the characters' common traits—their mysterious origins, their contempt for time and reality, their colossal dreams, their catastrophic innocence, and their absurdly pretentious speech—but he makes perhaps too little of the manner in which Sutpen's biography emerges belatedly and incrementally (in conversations with Quentin's grandfather), exactly as Nick disburses Gatsby's life story. The account includes this description of the young, impecunious Sutpen, who resembles the penniless Jay Gatsby: “[H]e was at this time completely the slave of his secret and furious impatience, his conviction gained from whatever that recent experience had been—that fever mental or physical—of a need for haste, of time fleeing beneath him, which was to drive him for the next five years” (Absalom 25). And Rodewald also neglects to cite this passage in Absalom, which appears to be culled from the world of Gatsby: “Beautiful lives—women [lead]. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts … move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture” (171). Given the Gatsby imprint in Faulkner's novel, it is possible that here, predictably in Yoknapatawpha, we have located the antecedent for García Márquez's text. The wild rumors surrounding San Román's origins might reflect an inspired retread of the citizens' speculations about Sutpen, “ranging from the ones who believed that the plantation was just a blind to his actual dark avocation, through the ones who believed that he had found some way to juggle the cotton market itself and so get more per bale for his cotton than honest men could, to the ones who believed apparently that the wild niggers which he had brought there had the power to actually conjure more cotton per acre from the soil” (Absalom 56–57). In this case, García Márquez's reconfiguration of Faulkner's book would lead him by the back door to something like the character portrait of Jay Gatsby.Such a reading is, admittedly, possible—and all of this, without impugning the beauty and, yes, originality of García Márquez's work. Whether the Colombian is drawing on Faulkner or Fitzgerald or both, as I would argue, this is not to say that his fiction is derivative in a pejorative sense. Indeed, even the most casual reading of Chronicle will reveal the work's distinctive genius (the pistol-shot force of its dialogue, the telescoping of time, the carnival of identity, its murmuring narration of enormities, by turns lyrical and grotesque). Where influence manifests in the text, it tends to do so sporadically, at times with eerie precision, only to be rapidly subsumed within the sweep of García Márquez's vision (the modernists do not eclipse the work, but haunt it). Nevertheless, the closeness of the counterpointing between Gatsby and San Román, the identically sudden and conclusive arrival of the men's family members (which never happens in Sutpen's case): these details strongly suggest the impress of Fitzgerald alongside, at the least, the homage to Faulkner. Consider the first description of San Román's character in Chronicle: “He was around thirty years old, but they were well-concealed, because he had the waist of a novice bullfighter, golden eyes, and a skin slowly roasted by saltpeter. He arrived wearing a short jacket and very tight trousers, both of natural calfskin, and kid gloves of the same color” (27). The character's ambiguous age and the tonality of his wardrobe's description both evoke West Egg's most prominent citizen more clearly than the overlord of Sutpen's Hundred. And while Angela Vicario might paint San Román as a “devil” (Chronicle 30), echoing Rosa Coldfield's view of Sutpen as a “demon” (Absalom 135), García Márquez's character is equal parts “fairy” (Chronicle 27), suggesting he resides at least in part in the same aesthetic plane as Fitzgerald's Daisy Fay Buchanan.Given that García Márquez appears to have Gatsby on his mind at least as much as Sutpen, we have cause to push the relation between Chronicle and Gatsby even further, where we find that the specter of Gatsby inheres not just in his clearest counterpart, the paramour San Román. In fact, García Márquez appears to have fractured the Gatsby persona and to have distributed important facets of that persona among three of his novel's characters. Those qualities that link Gatsby to Sutpen—as eternal innocent and martyr (Sutpen dies too, at the hands and scythe of his underling Wash Jones)—now resonate with the portrait of Santiago Nasar. Both Gatsby and Nasar are murdered at home: one privately in his pool, the other—Nasar—impaled against his front door before a sizeable crowd. And neither man, it bears repeating, is guilty of the crime for which he is killed. Of course, one might insist that Nasar's gruesome death echoes the mutilation of Joe Christmas's body in Light in August, as Christie does (22). However, what argues perhaps most urgently for the influence of Gatsby is that both deaths are infected by an air of irreality.In Gatsby, Nick veers into surrealism when he imagines the murder scene: after speculating that Gatsby's dream might have burst, that he might no longer care if Daisy calls him in the wake of Myrtle's death, Nick writes, If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (Gatsby 161; emphasis added) Ironically, the moment at which Gatsby's illusions have been punctured by reality is precisely the moment at which the world seems least real to him, by Nick's account. In Chronicle, no such insight is attributed to Nasar; the narrator merely summarizes his conclusion: “My personal impression is that he died without understanding his death” (Chronicle 118). Nevertheless, as the murder unfolds, the action grows increasingly fantastic or surreal: the twins, for example, claim that their pig-killing knives repeatedly come out “clean” from Nasar's body, and the victim himself does not fall immediately, but survives the attack long enough to circumnavigate his house, passing through a neighbor's home, while bearing his entrails in his hands (139). These events are strange enough; however, the access of the surreal is even more direct in the vision of Divina Flor, the servant in Nasar's house and victim of his seignorial advances. She claims to have seen Nasar, alive and well, passing into the house moments before the murder, while carrying in his hands a bouquet of flowers (137–38). Flor's vision appears to be a distorted account of the more gruesome events then transpiring, the flowers substituting brutally for Nasar's intestines. In any case, both works, at this crucial juncture, feature a glimpse of a ghost, one the murderer, the other the victim.Finally, shades of Gatsby also inhere in the portrait of Angela Vicario in Chronicle. Like Gastby, Angela reveals an obdurate devotion to her one-time husband, a fidelity immune to the passage of time; however, this devotion does not emerge until after San Román has rejected and returned her, like defective merchandise, to her family's home in the middle of the night. Over the next seventeen years, Angela writes weekly letters to him, reflecting a constancy that ultimately proves persuasive. Faulkner's Rosa Coldfield is also a possible precursor of Angela Vicario and her extraordinary constancy: Coldfield even trumps Vicario on this point as she nurtures her rancor against the Sutpen clan for forty-three years. However, in his staging of the reunion between Vicario and San Román, García Márquez again appears to evoke Fitzgerald's novel, not Faulkner's. As San Román, now balding and fat, surfaces on Vicario's doorstep, with a suitcase, the couple's reunion is pointedly anticlimactic: Angela “knew he was seeing her just as diminished as she saw him, and she didn't think he had as much love inside as she to bear up under it” (Chronicle 110–11). In Gatsby, Nick describes a similar disillusionment in the Gatsby-Daisy reunion sequence in these terms: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (95).The parallel between the two scenes appears to be self-evident, but once we establish the link between García Márquez and Fitzgerald (with or without an admixture of Faulkner), the comparison might lead us to see Gatsby's purported devotion with fresh eyes. Angela remains unwaveringly faithful to Bayardo for seventeen years; compare this with the “[a]lmost five years!” that separate Gatsby from Daisy (95). By Nick's account, Gatsby's devotion to Daisy verges on the preternatural: “[His illusion] had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (95–96). The hyperbolic language suggests that Gatsby has constructed an image of Daisy that transcends time, that his passion spans an eternity rather than the comparatively slight five years that have passed. So perhaps here, as elsewhere, we see evidence of Nick mythologizing Gatsby, distorting and enlarging his character, rather than giving readers a clear-eyed account of his tale.In addition to the parallels among the cast of characters, Gatsby and Chronicle also hold in common several conspicuous motifs, and, perhaps not surprisingly, given the intervening influence of Faulkner, they explore nearly identical thematic terrain. Gatsby shares an interest in those two modernist cynosures, time and reality—the twin poles of an existential crisis—which surface regularly in the book's images and motifs. Water imagery is especially pervasive in Gatsby—from the sweat on the lip of Nick's Midwestern girlfriend (58), to the mentions of Gatsby's hydroplane (47, 53, 64, 92), to the sweat that stains Nick's train ticket in chapter 7 (115), to the heavy rains that drench chapters 5 and 9, to the aqueous site of the murder and the ubiquitous presence of Long Island Sound. In every case, water appears to be implicitly associated with the press of the real—the wet marker of reality asserting itself and dispelling the competing illusions of the characters. It is the image of sweat that conveys Nick's distaste for his former girlfriend, proving her inimical to the illusions of love. And when the rain falls over the scene of Gatsby's and Daisy's reunion, its arrival perfectly coincides with the process of disenchantment—the reality check—there begun: Nick speculates about Gatsby's emotional state during the scene, commenting, “Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that [green] light had now vanished forever…. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (93). By the same symbolic logic, it seems fitting that the highest compliment that Daisy can pay Gatsby, her declaration of love, is that he “always look[s] so cool” (119), immune to the perspiration that attaches to the ambitions of lesser mortals, and Gatsby, even in death and burial, floats above (or is insulated against) the element that nevertheless claims him as a victim.Water is likewise a central motif in García Márquez's Chronicle, although it functions in a way precisely opposite to its function in Gatsby: it appears to mark the assertion of irreality. The image surfaces immediately in the book's first paragraphs, as Santiago Nasar awakes from a dream of a gentle rain, f eeling as if he has been spattered in “bird shit” (Chronicle 1). Here, the drenching in the dream world leaves a palpable impression on Nasar's reality, collapsing the distinction between the two domains. In fact, this dream shower appears to fall more generally over the novel, as the narrator and his sources are unable to determine unequivocally if it was raining or not on the morning of the murder; characters routinely offer conflicting weather reports, with some claiming that the day was sublimely clear and others contending that it was raining steadily if unobtrusively (2). In this instance, the water imagery signals an elemental ambivalence in the novel, an inability to reconcile competing versions of reality: the term itself appears to be fluid, in flux.This motif recurs throughout the book, acquiring further nuance and underscoring its resonance: as the bishop, a visiting dignitary, passes by on a steamboat and administers an inattentive blessing to the town, there are reports that a blast from the whistle drenches the crowds on the shore (Chronicle 18–19). Like Nasar's dream and the dubious rain, this whistle supplies what we can call an imaginary soaking. And later, during the murder itself, the Vicario brothers are ultimately “soaked” in Nasar's blood (139), but even more strikingly, the narrator claims that the entire town suffers from another kind of drenching, this one synesthetic, olfactory: “Everything continued smelling of Santiago Nasar that day” (90). Straining the bounds of logic, this affliction disrupts the narrator's mourning tryst with Maria Alejandrina Cervantes; it oppresses the Vicario twins after their arrest; and it leads Poncho Lanao, Nasar's neighbor, to remark conclusively, “What I'll never forget was the terrible smell of shit,” a gruesome reference to the stench from Nasar's exposed intestines (142). Together, these imaginary soakings seem to suggest the town's collective sense of guilt for its failure to prevent the crime—“a death for which we all could have been to blame,” the narrator remarks (94). In this chain of associations, the text points teasingly to a connection between the precipitation of the clouds and the precipitation of a murder—points, too, to the conclusion that Gatsby has precipitated the novel's imagistic vocabulary.The water imagery in Chronicle is, at the same time, expertly interwoven with another of the book's prominent motifs: flowers. Two of the female characters, including Nasar's fiancée, Flora Miguel, are named for flowers, and here, yet another connection to Gatsby surfaces: while cataloguing the West Egg partygoers, Nick mentions the women whose “last names were … the melodio
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