11 - Free-play of fore-play: the fiction of non-consummation: speculations on Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Summary

‘Speculations – On Freud’

In his text something must answer for the speculation of which he speaks … I also maintain that speculation is not only a mode of research named by Freud, not only the object of his discourse, but also the operation of his writing, what he is doing in writing what he is writing here, that which makes him do it and that which he causes to be done, that which makes him write and that which he causes to be written.

(Jacques Derrida)

García Márquez's text, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, also opens with an epigraph, from the sixteenth-century Portuguese playwright Gil Vicente: ‘La caza de amor/es de altanería’ (translated by Gregory Rabassa as ‘the hunt for love is haughty falconry’). A first speculation concerns the multiple pun(ning) which opens the novel, for ‘altaneria’ means height, high flight, falconry, haughtiness and pride; ‘de amor’ might also mean ‘of love’ and the second ‘de’, too, might mean ‘of’ or ‘for’. To the Colombian ear, ‘la caza (casa) de amor(es)’, too, might prefigure the brothel of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes. ‘Opens the novel’, then, in all senses, invites open reading rather than interpretative closure. This study of Chronicle draws upon several of the speculations applied by Derrida to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and, in its turn, extends the mirroring process of ‘speculary reflection’ by adducing others.