The gathered tessels: "Agamemnon" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"

Abstract

This paper is an enquiry into the limits of intertextuality as put forward by Harold Bloom. According to Bloom a text doesn't have a meaning in itself, but in another text. In its turn, this other text has to be one that was written by the ephebe or belated poet's precursor, and it makes no difference whether he actual1y read it or not. This Oedipal relationship between precursor and ephebe can be traced and has its own pattern. But its outcome, except for Shakespeare, is always the same: the ephebe looses in the fight for priority -both in time and imaginative greatness-.

Two texts were called in order to show the kind of disruption that this one-sided view brings along. Aeschylus' Agamemnon and García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold share a similar structure as well as a topic, and both belong to the same tradition, but neither of them loose their facticity. For this last reason intertextuality can be said to be a necessary means to approach a literary text, but not an exclusive one.