Aadya Sharma

Roll no-41
TERM PAPER, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Memory in Chronicle Of A Death Foretold.

Memory: the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving
facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous
experiences
I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to
rescue it piece by piece from the memory of others.
Through this quote from the text and various instances, we will try to
establish the reliability of memory as a source of information. Memory,
as defined above, is a mental capacity and hence is different for every
individual. This is exactly why the narrator decides to rely on the
memory of others, hoping it would not be as hazy as his. One
important thing to be noted here is the possibility that the narrators
memory is hazy because he had been intoxicated the previous night
and some effects of this are still present. This however must be taken
into consideration for the whole town, as they were all involved in the
merriment of the night before. If one takes this into account, a shadow
of doubt is cast upon a lot of contributions to the narrative.
Memory implies a past, a lapse in time. The act of recollection involves
an action or event that has already occurred and is hence in the past.
This event, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is Santiago Nasars death.
This death is being recollected twenty seven years after it happened.
This gap in time, especially a gap this long, can cause memory to alter.
Memory goes through a filter- not all events from the past are retained.
The ones that are, are subject to alteration.
The fragmentation of memory is one such case. Memories are most
often just a series of smaller events, which the mind places in logical
order and hence creates into one longer, continuous event. This
continuity is an established one. This fragmentation causes fissures in
the actual occurrence, as it can be wrongly chronicled ie., it can be
sequentially wrong. For example, when we recollect an event, we tend
to mess up the order and start talking about a part of the story towards

the ending in the middle, then realize this mistake and resume from
the correct spot. This is seen in the narrative too. Though it claims to
be a chronicle, its timeline is extremely non-linear. There are plenty of
digressions in the chronology and the story is often picked up from
where it was left. For example, nobody remembers having seen
Santiago go to Flora Miguels house. The events in the house though
are recorded.
Fragmentation, in this text, does not happen only as an effect of time
on memory. There is also a fragmentation in terms of it not being one
mans narrative. It is a compilation of memories. It is rescued piece by
piece from the memories of various people and threaded together to
form one narrative of a death. This makes the narrative more reliable
as it is not possible to gather information about the events of the
whole day from just one person, as he could possibly have not been
present to witness the entire scene. The narrator, by engaging with
various people, provides the best collation of events. He is allowed to
track the events leading to the consummation, even though they occur
at different places, by gathering eyewitness accounts of people present
at different locations. By doing this he is able to know the
simultaneous, parallel moments of the Vicario twins and Santiago
Nasar.
This ties up interestingly with the previous point about fragmentation
of memory. We said that memory is usually a series of smaller
remembered events that we logically arrange into order. This is what
the narrator does except with the memories of various people. He
takes snips of memory from various people and strings it into a longer,
more fluid narrative. He uses the very concept of memory, to create a
memory. This will be further discussed in the point about individual and
collective memory.
The collection of various individual memories is also problematic
because of the very nature of the word individual. The idea of
perception must also be considered. Memory is the retention of an
experience and experience itself is perceived through ones
subjectivity. How we experience a certain event is dependent on how
we feel about or view the people/place corresponding to it. People
close to Santiago would see his death with sympathetic eyes, while the
ones who did not care much for him would not. The objectivity of the
narrative now comes under debate. Had this been the narrative of just
the narrator, we could not expect objectivity as the narrator was a
close friend of Santiago. However, there would be only one subjectivity

to consider and understand the text through. However, with the

collation of memories, we now have various perceptions.
These become a problem because we cannot believe the text to be
completely factual. As the experience itself is marred by subjectivity,
its memory will be too. There will be an imaginative misinterpretation
of the event and this will be retained. As the people of the town would
have an established attitude towards Santiago, his death would be
recorded subjectively in their minds. The fact that his murder was an
honour killing would also affect peoples sentiments. They would view
it as inevitable and correct. They would remember it as an example.
This brings in another way that memory is altered. A subjective
memory is already an incorrect source of information. Add to this the
practice of gossip and rumours. This further affects the memory by
influencing it. The individual memory gets shaped by the rumours and
gossip as it assigns to itself a certain subjectivity that it borrows from
what it hears. Thus the memory of an event isnt merely the
experience of that event but also incorporates the element of how the
event is collectively understood after its occurrence. This becomes the
transformation of an individual memory to a collective memory. This
can also be analysed in the context of the collation of memories to
form a narrative. Through various individual memories, a collective
history is formed.
Divina Flor changes her story after her mothers death. Earlier she
claims that her mother, Victoria Guzman, did not know that Santiago
was going to be killed and hence didnt warn him. However, she later
confesses that her mother had prior knowledge of the proposed
murder and did not warn Santiago because of a feeling of hatred. This
makes the reader question the authenticity of memories that make up
the text. How many people have contributed stories and not true
memories is a question the reader is forced to ask. There is a
possibility that even after twenty seven people would not contribute
facts simply because they would not want to be accused of passive
participation. They can rewrite history through this narrative and hence
come forward with versions of the story that leaves them absolved of
all sin. This is what Divina Flor does and thus one becomes extremely
suspicious of the entire narrative. We also think about Angela Vicarios
insistence that it was Santiago who was her perpetrator. When she
actually names him to her mother, she selects his name as it is the first
to come to her mind. But later, she says it in a sure tone. This becomes

an example of how the thoughts after an event help shape the

memory of the event itself.
As this narrative is written twenty seven years after the murder, there
are many memories that have become inaccessible to us. For example,
Victoria Guzman is dead and cannot contribute to this chronicling even
though she was an eyewitness. Many memories are lost because of the
time in between the occurrence and its review.
Time also rids memories of details. There must be millions of details
that do not get through the filters of memory and get lost. These
details couldve been unimportant, but as this narrative is an
investigative one, their presence would serve as clues. Memory as a
source of information for a form of writing that claims to be highly
factual is extremely unreliable.
The best example of the inconsistency of memory is the confusion
about what the weather was like. While some claim it was funereal,
others claim it was nice. There is no resolution reached. In a journalistic
piece about a murder, this would not be a contested issue. It is the
time lag between the event and its recording that causes this. It is the
inconsistency and the fallacies of memory that cause this. Though the
whole event is reported, it does not follow chronologically.
Memory deforms and selects. It omits and changes. It then, is an
unreliable source. It is subjective, contorted and erroneous. This is in
contradiction to what the narrator hopes to achieve.