From Word To Word

I have often made this point in conversation, and I have implied it in various posts before, but let me make it a little more formally now:  we need to reject the assumption that one must be a writer, either by profession or by special vocation, in order to write.

As with so much else in our culture, we have come to believe that writing is best left to the experts, to those with the credentials or the publications that certify them as real writers, and our choice has become either to acquire these credentials and these publications so that we too can be real writers or to stop writing altogether.  Rather than accept this choice, a choice that assigns writing to the realm of the expert no matter how it is answered, we need to reclaim the place of amateur writing, not a writing that only accepts amateurism for a time as a means to pursue a future professionalism, but a writing that celebrates amateurism as such.  We need to reclaim a writing that addresses its own place, its own locality, its own community.  We need to write poetry for our spouses and stories for our children and letters for our friends, not because these things might one day be published, but because they will not be published, because their purpose is already fulfilled when they are received by those we love, and because it is precisely this that makes them valuable.

This kind of amateurism is not an excuse to write poorly, to write hastily, to write carelessly.  Quite the opposite: to write as a true amateur, to write out of love for writing and out of love for the one that writing addresses, is always to write with the utmost care.  It is precisely because I write for the one I love rather than for a public that I do not even know, precisely because I write as an amateur, that I write as best I can, always and in every case, as best I can.  Whether or not this writing meets the standards imposed by the world of publication is entirely beside the point.  These are the standards of professionalism, and they cannot measure what is written by the amateur.  The writing of the amateur finds its measure only in the relation between the one who writes and the one who receives, because the writing of the amateur is always this: a gift.  It is and can be nothing else.

She is an island awash in sweet water, and her shores are the rocks of the north, sedimented and petrified and shattered, beautiful with the beauty of all things that are carved by glaciers and vast waters, with the beauty of all things that grow deep roots on shallow soils and wave-pitted rocks.  This is a beauty that lasts through long ages, through the rising and subsiding of seasons under high northern skies.  It is the beauty of sweet water lapping at the foundations of island stone and at the roots of tenuous cedars that bend in worship beneath the heavens.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is a tidy little book.  Its narrative wanders, but only in the most precise and deliberate ways.  Its events are scattered unchronologically, but they have been placed by hand rather than flung indiscriminately.  It is the kind of book that feels light at first but grows heavier the longer it is carried.  It is short and deft and nimble and effortless, a lovely little book.

The death in the title is foretold in several ways.  Structurally, much of the book is spent foretelling Santiago Nasar’s murder, announcing it in the first line and describing the events leading up to it, all before it ever takes place. The murder is also foretold within the narrative itself, as the murderers alert almost the whole town to their intention and the reasons for it, so that virtually everyone but Santiago is aware of the impending murder before it happens. Santiago also has a dream about his own death, though it is misinterpreted and ignored both by his mother and by himself.

The force of the book comes from the ways that these three kinds of foretelling come to inform each other. For example, the dream has a kind of inevitability about it.  Dreams are the signs of fate.  They can be interpreted, but they cannot be avoided.  A death foretold in a dream is a death that will certainly come to pass.  The novel itself moves according to a similarly unavoidable logic.  Once the author has foretold that the death will take place, has written about it as if it has already occurred, the death must inevitably come.  There is no escaping it.  This sense of inevitability then comes to inform how the murderers themselves foretell the crime they will commit.  Though it would normally seem impossible that a murder could be committed after the killers have alerted a whole town, the inevitability of the dream and of the novel seem to make their intentions equally unavoidable.  They take on the quality of prophecies.

Yet, these foretellings also combine to undermine the very idea of foretelling as such. The dream had initially been interpreted as a good omen, and the warnings of the murderers were interpreted as mere drunken ravings, and both would have remained interpreted in this way had the murder not occurred. They are reinterpreted as true foretellings only after the fact, much the same way as the narrative of the novel itself is able to foretell the murder only because it has in a sense already been accomplished. The foretelling only becomes apparent, perhaps only becomes created, after the event that it foretells.

In this way, the novel recreates the structure and the problem of prophecy as such, and does so on several parallel levels.  It embodies the paradox that a foretelling is only certain after the fact, only once it has come to pass, only when it is no longer a foretelling, only at a time when it has the inevitability of history.  Perhaps this is a function that the supernatural sign, the social movement, and the literary work all have in common: they all prophesy something that has already come.  They all foretell, but only after the fact.