ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 notes that Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) has elicited largely two responses from literary critics: those who see Santiago Nasar’s death inscribed by fate, and those for whom the death is the result of collective societal failure. Literary critics on either side of this divide fail to connect the novel to the reality of Latin American politics of the day. However, the novel’s publication marked the end of Márquez’s self-imposed literary embargo: before publishing the novel, he had resolved not to publish anything until after Augusto Pinochet, the brutal dictator, lost power in Chile. The chapter argues then that the ostensible silence of the text resonates against Márquez’s spoken declaration of political commitment, and is in fact a facet of its political activism. The chapter also suggests that the text gains a markedly emancipatory dimension when read through Adorno’s understanding of language as saturated by historical and material forces, and that the novel’s silence expresses a liberatory potential.
