Changing Paradigms : From Existentialism to Post-Existentialism

Vladimir : To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon : They have to talk about it.

(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

There had never been a death more foretold.

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold)

Defining Post-Existentialism :

Existentialism as a connotative label to indicate a certain philosophy that deals with the quintessence of ‘being’, the conceptual category that governed the notion of existence and its formulaic representation took centuries to excogitate. Precisely, the real consciously attributable polemic had been a search for the rational principle, which could postulate ‘oneness’ that would not only explain the linguistic diversity but also the extra-linguistic world of cognition. Probably, this search for single principle was itself a philosophical necessity, a sine qua non that could in one sweep unite the entire multiplicity of appearances into an inseparable unity; the proliferation of endless significations could be transmuted into the suprareal categories of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ by transcending the sequentiality and discreteness of temporal realities into the atemporality of comprehension by processing them through ‘reason’, man’s highest faculty and the only possible channel that could provide with a complete and panoptic knowledge. Modernism replaced the conjunction of ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ with subjectivity, an individual spirit of examination, where the extra-linguistic world becomes a mere conscious, willing projection of the microcosm through the apparatus of will¹. Everything was seen to be derived from, and exist in, the substrata of human consciousness. Moreover, the cogito is not a simple license to unbridled subjectivism, but more of prescriptive (or proscriptive) ideology that denies the veracity of existence to those objects that were beyond the boundary set by reason.² Conversely, reason justified and validated existence and not vice versa.

Existentialism in the Age of Reason – beginning with Kant’s Pure Reason and ending in Sartre’s Nausea – has been a pure product of reason and rationalism. While it was possible for Enlightenment philosophers like Kant to predicate the world into two binary structures of ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’, the noumenon in Kantian system always remains untranslatable and beyond the modes of human understanding. But simultaneously, it can be inferred without questioning the underlying truth that Kant establishes : Pure Existence exists, to be more precise, though unknowable, Pure Reason inheres. Nietzsche, Under the influence of Darwinian establishment of the world as a phenomenal development – that man is a biological product that happens to survive – considers the ‘true world’ as a ‘lie’ and offers the survivalistic attitude as the only possible and fittest way in the ‘world of appearances’³. He privileges the will-to-power and concludes man as a powerful passion. It seems, for him, the world is a lie and the only virtue is to fight it. Here Sartre differs, who accepts the dismissal of any Higher Reality, but simultaneously feels even the power as absurd and meaningless phenomenon and thus announces man as a ‘useless passion’. If there is nothing epistemologically established, the very validity of existence itself is futile and useless. But since there is no exit from this nausea, man has to embrace the world of meaninglessness, has to ‘create’ his own value by ‘living’ and ‘affirming’ it. This leads him to conclude existence as an ‘encounter’ through ‘action’ so that man can ‘tell stories’⁴.

Post-Existentialism consists in the denial of validity of all action. As the entire corpus of ‘actions’ – the willing and conscious projection to ‘create’ and ‘affirm’ existence – is finally governed by the forces that one fails to ‘capture’ and ‘control’ and so the futility of such a projection does not replicate the futility of an objective world, a ‘stable’ and ‘consistent’ narrative (as Sartre agrees) or that of a transcendental world (as Nietzsche or Kirkegaard agrees) but the futile presumption that superimposes such foundational discourses. The category of thought that presumes a ‘cogent’ activity is itself in jeopardy because of its own history of repressions and ‘marginalization’. The Enlightenment basis of such rational thought performing an action is itself questioned in the domain of Post-Existentialism. If thoughts themselves are ‘constructed phenomena’, what the post-existential philosopher seeks to determine is the ‘zone of rupture’ within this apparently seamless category of thought. It is within these ‘absent’ spaces the Post-Existentialism probes its existence.

Since no ‘boundary’ between ‘text and interpretation’ or ‘knowledge and world’ exists, meaning has lost its moorings that further causes multi-interpretationalism, ‘polyglossia’, which decognizes the objective category of judgments that stand on ‘ever-shifting ground’. Instead of ‘freezing the play’ (the grand existential project), this ‘decentred’ ‘jeu’ of ‘optic’ and its temporality signify the ‘free play of language’ that detotalitarianize and deuniversalize and thus insinuates an invariable absence of ‘the metaaltern state of existence’. It further posits reterritorialization of experience through invention of language (codes, concepts and categories) that differs and defers in an endless play of language. Moreover, this ‘decentralization’ or ‘collapse of metanarratives’⁵ causes the ‘anagram’⁶ - ‘indeterminable multiplicity’ and a ‘radical undecidability’ where stable and consistent objectification gets evaporated. This conceptualisation of existential significance and signifiability – epistemological as well as ontological – transmutes the very paradigms of Existentialism. Existence in this regard is seen as a ‘jeu’, ‘language game’ and ‘simulacra’ where “various scenarios (game rules and codifications) are projected only to be cancelled and replaced by other scenarios.”⁷ Any ‘exchange’ with reality is ‘impossible’ since existence is understood and conceived as an endless circulation of signs and information that suffers from a ‘fallen away’ state of reality⁸; existence turns into a level of simulacra that has no ‘connection to the real’, a language production or ‘a congeries of letters’, which in itself is a baffling polysemy that remains real within the structural confines of the simulation (play) but disappears in other discursive formations; existence, now, is understood as ‘a flexible network of language games’⁹ that are played and simulated on local spaces, without having any connectivity with any Grand Narratives (or Ascetic Ideals or Transcendental Principles) and this concept of disjunctional and so simulative narrative encourages the ‘free play of language’ where ‘it is the reality that disappears utterly in the game of reality’¹⁰. Further, these disjunctional narratives postulate existence as a floating locus in the universe having no accessibility to any ‘overarching narrative’, which has been seen as a replacement of ‘mimesis’ with ‘diegesis’, where representation of fragmented reality turns into a mere act of narration. This inaccessibility of overarching narrative further causes the ‘politics of the self’ to rigorously question its own existence, hence create the individual identity with repressions. These (irrational) unconscious structures of human thoughts, the silent and so unexplainable desires, represent the existential identity along with the consciously projected ones and equally remain unsignifiable at the end. How these absences and silences at existential level are reflected and represented in postmodern literature is what the paper attempts to undertake. Moreover, the present study attempts to focalise upon these post-existential thematics in regard to contemporaneous human situatedness in the postmodern locus, not only to its characteristic processes – discontinuity, destabilization, de-universalization, indeterminacy, de-centring, dispersal, displacement – but also of the product – i.e. simulation, jeu, language games; however, Post-Existentialism will be conceptually theorized neither as a provisional rubric of Existentialism, nor as an aftermath of it; rather, the present study would try to locate it as a subversion of Existentialism within the philosophical framework of postmodernism. Further, the paper tries to locate Post-Existentialism within a historical paradigm and tries to investigate the continuities and discontinuities that such a progression involves.

Waiting for Godot : The Existential Dimension…

If we all agree that ontological undermining constitutes the predominant feature of Existentialism, then the entirely undermined perspectivism to represent the notion of seemingly reproducible objective ontology constitutes the quintessential structure of Waiting for Godot. As this ontological undermining was the broad-spectrum undertaking of the Age of Reason, broadly speaking, there was a coherent quest of continual studies observable to the analysis of its functions, its structural relationship to narration, and its representation in modernist and late modernist literary constructions. Intellectuals who have been engaged in the discourse of existence – either inferentially (like Erasmus, Kant, Hegel) or referentially (Like Descartes, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) - cannot help but notice the impenetrability in bridging the insurmountable disruption between the indeterminateness of any metaphysical presence on the one hand and the meagreness of its rhetoric absence (in terms of loss, nothingness, belonginglessness, silence, unrepresentability or more specifically "the other." ‘Absence’, here, marks the other territorial dominion beyond the closure of any thought system) on the other. Hence, the discourse of existence seems to encounter irresolvable questions : How to configure existence and its essentiality when the transcendence finally remains untranslatable (Kant), how to cognize that extra-linguistic world, where there exists nothing beyond the human individuality (Nietzsche) and how to resolve those ‘thou shalts’ when the horizon or beyond is itself disappeared (Kierkegaard)? In this section of the paper, I engage this dialogue between meaninglessness and yet to remain inescapably hopeful, however displaced and dispirited the hope may be, from a Sartrean perspective and within the context of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

The Sartrean Existentialism proclaims being above essence and the weight of the world not on the shoulders of any metaphysical entities, but of mere men. Evanescing, feeble, lost bodies come into existence without source of creator, joining the caravan of their predecessors in carrying the entire burden of existence. Sartre seems to draw the conclusion that if the source of creation (god) does not exist, if there is no coherent structure of belief system and sense of the self lagitimatized, if there is nothing ontologically established, then there is nothing which can create an absolute human 'nature' or 'essence'. This state of ‘absurdity’, the ‘futility’ of human existence obviously leads him to say that ‘existence precedes essence’¹¹ and thus 'man first exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, then defines himself afterwards'¹². To be born, for Sartre, is a mere cosmic accident, epiphenomena of matter in Einsteinian term. And being so, man himself is nothing but a mere matter of the same constituents as the entire physical universe. As all things in the universe, man simply exists and that is all. Nothing beyond exists. Both the major characters, ‘two clownish vagabonds’ – Vladimir and Estragon - are removed from time (as they constantly question it, for instance, for them tomorrow is uncertain and yesterday turns out to be more so) and space (as they constantly doubt it, for instance, Vladimir : A -. What are you insinuating? That we’ve come to the wrong place?¹³); we are, however, virtually absolutely unaware about their past and their inner lives; Pozzo and Lucky are mythical characters; the boy who comes to convey the massage of Godot is unknown and claims not to have seen them ever before; and finally, the uncovered, indeterminate location of the action suggests that in this world no one can build an eternal space to exist in. Within this framework of narrative that constantly defers the ‘unveiling’, the final ‘elucidation’, the moment of anagnorasis, within this spaceless and timeless structure, the removal of any transcendence becomes a mere pretentious projection of ‘waiting’. The vacant ‘center’, the absence of Godot, along with the actions performed on the stage by Estragon and Vladimir while ‘waiting’, signifies the central thematization of Sartrean Existentialism : the transcendental that promises the final ‘illumination’, the moment of anagnorasis, remains excluded, untranslatable and thus represents the erasure of any epistemological presence. Distinctively, what intrigues is the relationship between the marginal (existential) presence and the central (essential) absence - the congenital structural relationship between the presence of characters (beings) on the stage and the absence of Godot (Being) beyond the stage, which, ultimately, designates the gap between the signifier and the signified, the fissure and failure of discourse. However, the essential existential necessity is action, though non-traditionally a series of unordered events without beginning, middle or end and having no effectiveness in either language or logic. The only affirmation to purpose is to undertake physical/vocal/visual actions, as the meaning has to be created, however temporal, provisional or momentary, it has to be illusionized : ‘Man must create for himself his own essence’¹⁴. The world cannot be mastered (as Nietzsche believes) or authenticized by ‘jumping into the abyss’ or ‘leaping into the unknown’ (as Kierkegaard suggests) but to be created; this meaning-creation labour through action, however, is in itself a necessity, since the ‘view from nowhere’¹⁵, remains unlocated, uncognizable and in such an ‘alienation’, what contains meaning is the telling of undertaken adventures as Vladimir and Estragon does throughout the play. If there exists ‘no prevenient design’¹⁶, man remains “nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is”¹⁷. Man cannot escape the turmoil that accompanies the sense of purposelessness or belonginglessness. The disjunctionality between thoughts and action can only be reinforced by participating in temporally seemingly meaningful actions and fragmented communication that ultimately leads to ‘nothing’. Waiting immensely for the purpose that might ‘inspire’ a sense of belongingness, the very waiting demands authentication through provisional purposiveness, not only through action, but also through its telling. The existential tension between ‘engagement’ and ‘impotence’ and between ‘logic’ and ‘absurdity’, where the sheer mindfulness of life’s being ultimately meaningless, where the only certainty is the terrible uncertainty, cannot but offers a purposeless, disordered and random existence. However, the need to the assumption that some day, at some moment, the meaning will become manifest, Godot will come and all the answers to the ‘futility’ will be apparent, focalises this paradoxical pursuit in the busyness of on-staged (or in the physical world) protagonists in their ‘waiting’ : “…We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist.”¹⁸ This impression of being existent through a series of actions and their narration balances the paradox and by so doing maintains the existence that ultimately remains in the void. Even the each couple represents and thus balances the two entirely different sides : the wish to rule (Pozzo) and the wish to be sheltered (Lucky), the impotence of consciousness (Vladimir) and the power of unconsciousness (Estragon). However, if the balance suffers from the lack of cohesion, this is so because the lack of cohesion is itself a state of existence; if the actions and fragmented communications that constitute the existence suffers from the lack of incentive, inspiration, motivation, hence repeat themselves, this is so because the lack of incentive, inspiration, motivation, the sense of directionlessness, is motivated by the very vacant ‘center’, the absence of Godot, and thus remains the only ‘facticity’, in Heidegger’s term, for Vladimir and Estragon. For them, Godot is someone/something that would obviate the need of direction to their tentatively purposive actions while ‘waiting’. Waiting, in that sense, is a human condition, in which one constitutes existence that masks the unknowable. Waiting for Godot is a graphic vignette echoing a preponderant waiting that masks the absence of the Necessary Being : man struggling against despondency, man dispirited in his ‘alienation’, man looking for consolation in his ‘abandonment’ that could concede a sense of belongingness, an accordance with the Absolute Presence. In other words, actions and their narration while ‘waiting’ is the only left instrument that can react against the nothingness in a disguised and hence displaced hopefulness. However, as Sartre says, the performance of any action depends on the ‘choice’, which is inevitable, for a man cannot but not choose, and thus the chooser bears the entire responsibility of action and its consequences. Moreover, the choice is not a mere subjective decision but rather an objective pronouncement, as when a man chooses, he chooses for the whole mankind and that involves a responsibility not only to him but also to the entire breed. Vladimir in Act II says, “…To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”¹⁹

Sartrean Existentialism considers that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose in human life – the unfathomability of existence to be transmuted into any single principle denotes pure purposelessness : boots won’t come off, people can’t be identified, place can’t be recognized, mysterious and shadowy figures beat one at night without one’s being able to know the reason, and there is nothing to be done. Further, the evaporation of ‘presence’ has caused ‘alienation’, where nothing contains meaning; nothing has value since it cannot be transcended; there are no thou shalts; no Godot can ever arrive and answer the existential ‘futility’, provide direction, ‘inspire’ existence and existential belongingness, rather Godot as the reference of signification both defies and defines the meaning of their deferred existence and their alienation. The protagonists in the play are ‘forlorn’, ‘abandoned’ in this world to ‘look after themselves’, to take actions, tell stories, create their own essence (reality) through the stories they tell and ultimately find all the experiential and existential encounter absurd and meaningless, a futile collection of the existential authenticity. In a nutshell, their existential reality remains, in Sartre’s words, “All existing beings are born for no reason, continue through weakness, and die by accident… man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die.”²⁰

Chronicle of a Death Foretold : The Post-Existential Dimension…

It was probably the 1960s that marks the recognition of the Post-cognitive questions - “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?”²¹ - which are distinctly subversive to the cognitive questions previously encountered, specifically in modern and late modern era. In an interview with Marlise Simons, Gabriel Garcia Márquez stated, “The era of Sartre and Camus has definitely passed.”²² That is truer when one reads Chronicle of a Death Foretold in the light of these Post-cognitive questions that shapes the foundational post-existential thematics; they do not only signify the denial of validity of all actions, but also simultaneously constitute the fragmentations of an individual self, the self, as Docherty notes, that itself has turned into a problematic in postmodern world :

“It has become difficult to make proposition ‘I know the meaning of postmodernism - not only because the postmodern is a fraught topic, but also because the ‘I’ who supposedly knows is itself the site of postmodern problematic.”²³

‘Absence’ of any overarching truth that further causes ‘indeterminacy’ of any possible transcendence, any solution to the ‘futility’ of any foundational discourse, cannot but signify the signifier (as the participants in the novel), whose very signification in itself is unsignifiable because of the inescapability from existence’s being a series of ‘simulacra’ – language games - and thus the signifier unable to signify the transcendental signified, the ground for such a possibility being ‘absent’, becomes local. As Baudrillard proposes in The Illusion of End, ‘actions’ and their ‘telling’ have become impossible because that telling signifies by its ‘definition the promising recurrence of a sequence of meaning’, and the sequence cannot be constituted in the post-cognitive world of ‘Indetermanence’, which suffers from a huge ‘semantic instability’. The total dissemination and transmission has stimulated every event having been granted its own emancipation. And being disseminated, it has fragmented like molecule. Moreover, this further achieves a velocity of ‘no-return’ to ‘reality’, to any Finished Word that carries it out of history conclusively; this state of ‘no-return’ transmits in its definition the impossibility of the escape from history into memory either. In this regard, Post-Existentialism exists in ‘passing beyond a point of no-return’²⁴; it probes its existence on these ‘absent’ and ‘silence’ spaces, where existence remains a mere simulative passion.

If one examines from the generic perspective, Chronicle of a Death foretold seems to be an exercise in futility. One would also identify that, rather than logical or teleological drive, the novel is guided aboriginally by a performative drive; assembled from instances of repeated information, it constitutes an orchestrated collage that ‘consists of nine citations from the written record and a total of 102 quotations from the thirty-seven characters’²⁵. From the narrative point of view, the text can be divided into three layers – first, the narrative of the narrator within whose narrative voice the story is circumscribed; second, the narrative of the protagonist, Santiago Nasar, whose murder constitutes the central action and around which all the sub-narratives revolve; and third layer consists of the micro narratives – tales that are ‘revealed’ to guide the narrator to investigate the crime committed almost before three decades. Raymond Williams rightly points out, “Contrary to what has been announced in the title, this novel is not a chronicle.”²⁶ It’s true, firstly, as the narrator ‘pieces together’ the event; he intertwines the weft of the gathered tales and builds his own interpretative enterprise. However, this interpretative enterprise of the narrator within the framework of the novel ultimately remains an ‘open reading’ to the reader rather than any ‘interpretative closure’, as there is no final revelation that can even be ‘inferred’ at the end regarding why the murder was perpetrated. Secondly, the apocalyptic nature of the narrative as the word ‘chronicle’ signifies – a promise of ‘unveiling’, the final ‘illumination’, the moment of anagnorasis – is framed within the spatio-temporal coordinates of the present, but this present, however, is itself removed in ‘time’ as well as ‘space’ : firstly, it is recovered from the journalistic piece, which ‘inspired’ its telling; secondly, it is distanced in its moment of telling – the narrator has come back to the scene of violence after almost three decades that makes the ‘telling’ a “speech after a long silence”; and finally, and most interestingly, the characters themselves are unlocated, living almost in a historical vacuum : Santiago Nasar’s genealogy is unknown as though he belongs to a mythical Arabic domain; Bayardo San Roman is an outsider without history; the bishop does not halt at their small town thus not even granting a theological space to the town, his role is restricted – just making “the sign of the cross because he has to”; the mother is an ancient woman; Angela Vicario has a timeless and spaceless lover; the twins are almost mythical in their dimensions. It is on this event of spaceless and timeless existence that the journalist narrator intends to impose a sequential temporality; he wants to forge a ‘chronicle’. Márquez fractures the time sequence, the story moves freely in the past and in the present, which creates a ‘mix-up’ of the death. Moreover, if it is a ‘chronicle’, if cannot be ‘foretold’ and once it is ‘foretold’, it doesn’t remain ‘chronicle’ any more. In this sense, Chronicle seems not as much about Santiago Nasar’s death, as his death is established in the very first sentence - “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on”²⁷ – as about the story’s coming into being through numerous pieces. Márquez seems to lead the reader into this maze of conflicting realities and leaves him suspended in a temporal aporia. The reader cannot make sense without the chronicalization; but the ‘chronicle’ itself does not exist beyond its temporally created framework. All the micro-narratives, which supply and share the information regarding how the murder was perpetrated, speak their own versions of the committed crime, each creating an entirely different story. There are no facts, as Nietzsche says, and what exists is interpretation constituted by the individual’s perspective and so it is ‘optic’, a way of seeing. And that can clearly be seen in Chronicle that the fuzzing of time and space create a multiplicity of interpretations of what actually had happened. Moreover, perhaps, Márquez discloses the ‘important revelations’ and leaves the reader to his susceptibility to interpret the unexplained elements of the Chronicle and reach any value judgment; the text presents the impossibility of mimesis in favour of diagesis – the judgmental reflection cannot exist beyond the ‘subjective’, ‘original’ interpretation, which the constantly deferred voice of the narratorial interpretation prevents. The reader is confronted with various versions among these micro narratives, where characters mostly contradict one another rather than providing any profound information that can lead to the Fixed Reality. This contradiction among micro narratives further denotes ‘locality’ that ultimately signifies nothing since the coherent whole that the narrative of the journalist seeks to encase is proscribed any determinism by these little and disjunctional tales. Instead of ‘freezing the play’ for attaining the moment of anagnorasis, the objective signification, what the collected micro narratives produce is ‘the free play of the words’ containing contradictions and differences that further shapes collage leading to instability, ambiguity and confusions. The question of their legitimation remains unresolved, since all the ‘obtained’ ‘pieces’ of information may have evidence and proof to be real, but what, in Lyotard’s phrase, proof is there that their proof is true. However, Márquez seems to say, these disjunctive tales are real – however momentary, temporal and inconsistent – the reality to themselves is unquestionable, though their subjective reality may not lead to any objectification at the end. These micro-narratives, disjunctional tales go ‘beyond the criterion of truth’ and they do not require any further legitimation because they legitimate themselves. They are the ‘chronicle’ – unsynchronised narratives that come into existence at the moments of their ‘telling’ and disappear leaving ‘traces’ of meaning, a profound sense of investigative aporia that the narrator tries to fathom. They create the post-existential simulacra through their explosion, not creating but negating all existences. The utter contradiction of the same chronicles regarding the same ontological object – the Kantian Phenomena – have equal validity according to their own perceptions because what their way of seeing endow with them is an interpretation, which is true in itself. And thus all these micro narratives, these little and disjunctive tales, leading to no Final Reality, signify an endless play of language games, with the subjective categories of interpretation its only referent. Thus, the reality – the how and why of the murder – can only be analysed in terms of what Lyotard calls, “discontinuity, plurality and paralogy”²⁸ : discontinuity in the form of non-sequential chronicalization that leads to incoherence and destabilization; plurality in the form of these micro narratives, disseminated tales, that ultimately ‘tell’ nothing (‘no explanation explains anything’²⁹, as Brian McHale observes), the ‘anagram’ that indicates ‘indeterminable multiplicity’ and a ‘radical undecidability’; and paralogy in the form of logically unjustifiable conclusion. Micro narratives, being temporal and self-oriented, thus become separate pieces that cannot be organized into any coherent whole and so, at the end, remain undecidable and constantly ‘self-effacing’. In this sense, the novella seems to be a simulacra, where all the participants perform their roles in a simulated situation of reality created through words with the mask of a spatio-temporal ‘truth-value’, performing their roles and ultimately remaining unsignifiable because the reality itself gets lost in the act of simulation and what is left is a ‘constructed reality’ of the narrative situation. It signifies the Physics of participation (that man is a simulative passion) since nothing enables transcendence and prohibits even the continuity and thus turns the search of singularity of the ‘presence’, transcendental signified, into dispersal, signifiable only to where they belong without having any connectivity with any Bigger Story. Simulation becomes the channel of representing absence: representation of absence becomes nothing else than absence of representation.

The Nietzschean ‘gaze’ is projected towards a historical reconstruction – the narrator looks at every piece and tries to arrange them in a logical whole. He searches for the objective facts of the crime, attempts to achieve the truth and that is why it is ‘chronicle’ that can lead to attain an ordered view of reality. Instead, what the story does is that the subjective self of the narrator is divided into various micro narratives, which provide only fragmentations and these disjunctions lead to an ever-shifting reality, which may or may not be ‘real’ according to other pieces. Thus, what this progressive deconstruction provides is an intersubjective agreement (or disagreement), consensus (or discensus), and perhaps that is why it is a ‘foretold’ story in which only partial reality in a momentary vision is achievable, atemporal and inconsistent. This intersubjective is what I call the ‘absence’ because there is nothing ‘beyond’ to agree upon.

The promise of the final revelation is transformed into an irrelevant question. The implicit act of ‘telling’ constitutes the event, and not what the ‘telling’ leads to. The phenomenal world of Kant can no more be aesthetically recovered through either ‘judgement’ or ‘practical reason’. The framework of the story discussed earlier, in its centered and concentric structure, finally becomes a conflict of voices (polyglossia) where every ‘same’ is in an antagonistic (and therefore, collusive) relationship with the ‘other’. What the journalist seeks to redeem is a philosophy of the ‘same’ – a world of certainties, a world where temporalization indicates an apocalyptic moment – which the narrative constantly defers by inserting an ‘other’. After all, the ‘same’ comes into existence through the ‘other’, though that ‘other may be fundamentally subversive. The narrator thus, can only ‘begin’ with the ‘end’ – the murder of Santiago Nasar – and all his attempts to retrieve the ‘beginning’, the original moment, the essence, are thwarted. All ‘chronicles’ in a post-existential world are ‘always already’ ‘foretold’.

Notes

1. Please refer to these major texts that deal with this concept : Erasmus, (The Praise of Folly) and Descartes, (Discourse on Method, 1637).

2. Please refer to Michel Foucault’s survey, Madness and Civilization (London and New York : Routledge, 1989).

3. Nietzsche, Fredric, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York : Viking Press, 1968) Page 418.

4. Sartre, Jean Paul, Nausea, Trans. Llyod Alexander (London : Hamish Hamilton, 1962) Page 56.

5. Lyotard, Jean-Franois, The Postmodern Condition : A Report on Knowledge, Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1984.

6. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism, Page 10.

7. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Novel, (London and New York : Routledge, 1987) Page 101.

8. Baudrillard, Jean, Impossible Exchange, Trans. Chris Turner (London : Verso, 2001). The first Chapter discusses the impossible exchange with reality in detail.

9. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition : A Report on Knowledge, Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1984)

10. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulation, Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, (New York : Semiotext(e), 1983) Page 142-56.

11. Sartre, Jean Paul, Existentialism and Humanism, Trans. Philip Mairet (London : Eyre Methuen, 1973)

12. Ibid.

13. Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (London and Boston : Faber and Faber, 1956) Page 14.

14. Sartre, Jean Paul, Existentialism and Humanism, Trans. Philip Mairet (London : Eyre Methuen, 1973)

15. Docherty, Thomas, Postmodernism : A Reader (Great Britain : Cambridge University Press, 1993)

16. Sartre, Jean Paul.

17. Ibid.

18. Samuel, Beckett, Page 69.

19. Ibid, Page 79.

20. Sartre, Jean Paul, Being and Nothingness, (London : Routledge, 1990).

21. Higgins, Dick, A Dialectic of Century, 1978.

22. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, New York Times Book Review, in an Interview with Marlise Simons, (New York : New York Times Company, December 1982) Page 19.

23. Docherty, Thomas (Ed.), Page 05.

24. Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner, (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1994) Page 02.

25. Williams, Raymond L., Gabriel Garcia Márquez, (Boston : Twayne, 1984) Page 137.

26. Ibid.

27. Garcia Márquez, Gabriel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, (London : Penguin Books, 1981) Page 1.

28. Lyotard, Jean-Francois,

29. McHale, Brian, Page 102.