Thursday, March 26, 2020

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


An analysis of the title:

Chronicle: related to past or record of past
Foretell: predict the future or a future event; oriented to future.
Therefore , the two words pull into different directions and destabilize the meaning.
The title also for the same reason creates suspense – how is the death foretold and how is it chronicled?
If the death is foretold , is the chronicle going to be predictive as the title suggests or retrospective.


What is a chronicle?

chronicle (Latinchronica, from Greek χρονικά chroniká, from χρόνοςchrónos – "time") is a historical account of facts and events arranged in chronological order, as in a time line

According to the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, a  ‘chronicle’ is a ‘register of events in order of time, often composed contemporaneously with the events it records’(Cuddon. 124).

Typically,
equal weight is given for historically important events and local events,
the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the chronicler.

Characteristics: 
This is in contrast to a narrative or history, which sets selected events in a meaningful interpretive context and excludes those the author does not see as important.


Live chronicles

Usually, a ‘live chronicle’ is a chronicle is recorded as the events happen.
This chronicle, is however, a narrative of events that took place twenty-seven years earlier.
At the same time, the chronicle mentions the very feelings and words that the characters uttered around the focal event.

Reliability of Chronicles:  The information sources vary; some chronicles are written from first-hand knowledge, some are from witnesses or participants in events, still others are accounts passed mouth to mouth prior to being written down.

Some used written material: Charters, letters, or the works of earlier chroniclers.
Still others are tales of such unknown origins so as to hold mythical status.
The reliability of a particular chronicle is an important determination for modern historians.
Connection to text:
  In Marquez’s Chronicle  eye-witness accounts as well as versions collected from different participants feature.

Novels-I Lessons for MA(English) I Year


Subject: Novels-I

Lesson: The Novel

Novel as a term

The word 'novel' is an adjective, it stands for that which is  'new'  and does not resemble anything formerly 'known or used'. It suggests a thing or process 'not previously identified' just as the transmission of a novel corona virus.

Furthermore,  the word denotes something  'original and striking in conception or style'. For instance, the Indian government's novel strategies to combat the corona pandemic. Refer to: Merriam Webster.
But 'novel' is also a noun. It is a term used to label 'an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events. It refers to a literary genre.

Now, we deal with the term 'Novel' considering  its literary meaning  at some length.

What is a Novel?

A novel is a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length. As a genre, a novel defies definition. For Terry Eagleton then, a novel is 'less a genre than an anti-genre'( The English Novel: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell).

Eagleton asserts that a novel as a literary genre ' cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes bits and pieces promiscuously together'(1). He adds that the novel 'quotes, parodies and transforms other genres'. The novel is a 'mighty melting pot, a mongrel among literary thoroughbreds' remarks Eagleton.

The form of a novel is 'particularly associated with the middle class, it is partly because the ideology of that class centres on a dream of freedom' from old conventions- the old certainties of God and old autocratic order.

Nature

Most commentators agree that the novel has its roots in the literary form identified as 'romance' (2). The romance of the bourgeoisie-which is the novel-  is different. It is a 'disenchanted' romance that  has to 'negotiate  the prosaic world of modern civilization' where 'money and marriage / Sex and property' are the themes from start to finish.

History and Associations

The novel was born at the same time as modern science, and shares its sober, secular, hard-headed, investigative spirit, along with its suspicion of classical authority.

In The Rise of the Novel Ian Watt finds the reasons for emergence of the novel in the eighteenth-century( as modern English novel) in the middle-class interest in individual psychology, its secular and empiricist view of the world  nd its devotion to the concrete and specific (11. qtd . Eagleton).

For many eighteenth -century commentators the novel was a 'trashy piece of fiction fit only for servants and females' observes Eagleton.  The label stood for writing that was merely somekind of 'sensationalist fantasy' and  due to this notoriety Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson called their works 'histories' instead.

The 'new' at this time meant either 'bogus or trivial'. The novel was not considered 'literature' or 'art' at all but inferior sort of production.

If the novel is the modern epic , it is, in Georg Lukacs's famous phrase , 'the epic of a world abandoned by God'. As the novel evolves it starts to shun the earlier attempts to represent a 'coherent or logical ' universe and starts reflecting the incoherent and fragmented world of man , especially in the aftermath of the First World War. This is visible in the break-up of language, the collapse of narrative, the dissolution of character and the disappearance of plot. Moreover, the new devices foregrounding the unreliability of reports and the clash of subjective standpoints, the fragility of value, and the elusiveness of meaning make the novel a literary counterpart of the suffering humanity and its failure to understand existence.

Examples for:

1. Break-up of language: Cervantes draws attention to the pomposity of language used in 'romances' by constantly applying  hyperbole and underlining it with humour not only in the content of the dialogue but also in the farcical action and slapstick comedy that makes the romance of Don Quixote descend to the level of a picareque novel or an anti-bildungsroman.

2.The collapse of narrative: Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold where the ambiguity and equivocation is so great that all versions contradict each other; In Don Quixote, the narrator constantly asks the reader to doubt to the author and the whole narrative endeavour beginning at the outset.

3. Clash of subjective viewpoints: Cervantes' Don Quixote; Marquez' Chronicle.

4. The fragility of value: Don Quixote- he rescues the odd-job boy but the rescue leads to greater problem as his master beats him more after the knight leaves; the chivalric code does not mention money or routine requirements but Don Quixote must pay  for his shelter and food; In Crime and Punishment  Raskolnikov who kills an old pawnbroker to deliver humanity just as Napolean would have done.

5. Bare plot: Marquez's Chronicle does not have a fully-developed ploy but a host of narratives and reports surrounding a particular horrific incident; Similarly, Kafka's stories like 'The Metamorphosis'  do not bank on plot but a pathological state of mind visible in a transformed world that appears surreal and apparently illogical.

6. Dissolution of character: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. No character is comprehensible, not even Santiago Nasar whose death is the focus of the narrative as all reports and versions contradict each other leaving nothing certain about the character of either the protagonists or the other characters in the novella. Similarly, Raskolnikov's motives are so mixed up and diverse that even he has difficulty pinning down his thoughts or expressing his convictions. He constantly revises, reviews and contradicts his positions to the extent that when he commits the murder it is more mechanical than voluntarily done. The deed does not seem to be executed out of freewill but because of a wheel set in motion and a series of coincidences and accidents propelling the character to carry out a theory in practice.

Summary and Pre-requisites:

Novel is a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.

Required terms/concepts:

1.      Difference between prose and poetry/verse.
2.      Meaning of narrative
3.      Character
4.      Action
5.      Realism

Eagleton asserts, 'Not all novels are realist, but realism is the dominant style of the modern English novel'. Realistic characters are credible, well-rounded and psychologically complex. Realism is organic to the bourgeoisie world with its belief in the material realities of everyday existence; its impatience withthe formal, ceremonial and metaphysical; its love for the palpable, measurable and utilitarian and its insatiable curiosity about the individual self and its robust faith in historical progress.

End  notes:
Bildungsroman
/ˈbɪldʊŋzrəʊˌmɑːn/

noun
1.      a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education.
"the book is a bildungsroman of sorts, as Tull overcomes his abused childhood and learns about love".

picaresque
/ˌpɪkəˈrɛsk/

adjective
adjective: picaresque
1.      relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero.
"a picaresque adventure novel"
Origin
https://www.gstatic.com/onebox/dictionary/etymology/en/desktop/f1c2365ef99770bd3b2c5185b2115a7e96a1039753fdaa08ee820ac232a715fd.png
early 19th century: from French, from Spanish picaresco, from pícaro ‘rogue’.







Saturday, February 8, 2020

Concept Note for Simulacra -the Digital Magazine on Visual Arts in Europe:and Asia







The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Media Studies proposes to launch a quarterly digital magazine ‘Simulacra’- art as a simulation of life or events- that will prompt exploration and put forth perspectives of visual arts in Europe and Asia.

The magazine will disseminate ideas about art that evolved on the continent and must have been influenced by cultures across the globe. We hope to motivate the academia, scholars and practitioners in the discipline to endorse this endeavour by contributing their articles and reviews. 

Furthermore, the magazine will be sustained by Lab inputs from ‘Visual Arts in Europe’ which is a subject included in 2nd Semester of MA (English) and Graphic novel which is offered as lab in 1st semester of MA (English).

For the first issues, we plan to collect material through both solicitation and in form of submissions/contests:


Since the quarterly issues will be digital, the magazine entails no cost except for any contests/prizes.
If the first year production is successful, a print magazine of 60 pages may be brought out after due approval.

The following is a concept note for the magazine SIMULACRA:

Investigations on social and economic contexts that lead to fermentation of creative ideas and art movements will enlighten the readers on the deep engagement of art with society. Even when art ostensibly exists for its own sake, it has resonates with the concerns of those who claim to represent society.

The Sistine Chapel, Hogarth’s caricatures and William Blake's engravings tell stories of diverse nature but the language used is not of words.

Had the masons and architects of the tower of babel ‘talked' using drawings, they may have succeeded better. Art has its own tongue- it speaks with shapes, lines and colour.

Art has its own way of keeping historical accounts- it leaves interpretation to the discerning eye and the meaning to those who make effort to decipher. A painting could catch the spectacular energy of a revolution, the grandeur of a national ruin or the despondency of a house cursed by feud- all in a medium embracing dimensions that go beyond geometry and symmetry.

Edouard Manet asserts, ‘there are not lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another’. We may agree or disagree but it is a matter worth investigating.

Within the rubric of visual arts in Europe, it is proposed to explore the following themes:

1. Social life as witnessed in a particular period from the visual representations of chosen artists.
2. Economic life
3. Art and propaganda
4. Gender divide
5. Social Values
6. Idea of god
7. Religion and profanity
8. Depiction of various professions
9. Representations of Industrial Revolution and Industrialization
10. Emergence of Romanticism
11. Caricature and political commentary in Europe
12. Revival of Greek classics and Renaissance
13. Renaissance concept of man
14. History and evolution of visual arts in Europe
15. Impact of other cultures on European art.
16. Techniques and their relation to time.
17. Perspectives in visual arts
18. Anomalous representations
19. Illusion and its importance to realism in European art
20. Digital media art
21. Discourse surrounding Visual Arts
22. Visual Arts in India

The list is by no means exhaustive and articles that introduce fresh ideas are welcome. We shall be grateful to the contributors for enlivening the pages with their insights and sidelights on creative ventures ranging from sculptures to photography by European masters, artists and schools.

You may send your entries at : divyajyotsnasingh@gmail.com




                                                                                                                            Programme Coordinator