Crónica de una muerte anunciada o la imposibilidad del amor frente a los vestigios del poder

Abstract

In this article about Crónica de una muerte anunciada (A Chronicle of a Death Foretold), we analyze the power logics that trump the possibility of wholesome personal relationships both public and private and conceal the human capacity for love and intimacy. In that endeavor we concentrate in uncovering how the text subscribes the narrative of the persecutor and his logics. We appeal to the aesthetics of the grotesque to unveil the phenomenon of the “unheimlich” that is evident within the text when both the narrator and the characters assume projective views which mirror or duplicate the male chauvinist cultural posture that the text intends to exorcise. That aesthetic serves as theoretical foundation of the irony so characteristic of the author’s narrative whose countersense pursues to subvert the discourse, unveiling al its inconsistencies. In this juncture it is important to underscore the image of the scapegoat in the novel, which uncovers the atrocious violence present in in the male chauvinist system rooted in culture and religion. We shall prove that the text, using the language of power, pulls off the mask of aggressiveness which is sinistrously transferred from generation to generation as repressed profound inherited traumas. In fact, all characters become, to a certain extent, persecutors or persecuted in this cultural system in which everything exists within the bionomies of power. It will be revealed that the novel, in its grotesque endeavor, depicts everything that is not love and personal freedom to eradicate once and for all the formidable obstacles that have been raised against love and freedom.