Intertextual Aspects of the Chronotope of a Murder on the Doorstep in Ivo Andrić and Gabriel García Márquez in the Light of the Semiotics of Culture

Abstract

The unexplored chronotope of a murder at the doorstep in the novels Omer-Pasha Latas by Ivo Andrić and Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, motivated by sexuality, is compared and culturally considered in a semiotic key of the theory of the semiosphere from the aspect of intertextuality. In its system of self-description, every culture regulates relationships in the domain of its crucial interrogative aspects and prescribes what is right and what is wrong. This is also done in the area of sexuality. In cultures that are similar to each other, such as those coded by traditional and patriarchal values in synergy with religious norms, semiospherical self-description, according to the principles of modularity, encodes similar relations towards major aspects of life, including issues of gender relations. Therefore, semiospherical cores (such as the Bosnian one in the mid-nineteenth century and the Latin American one at the beginning of the twentieth century) are seemingly different in appearance. However, in their self-description and establishment, they actually recombine similar modules: cultural patterns towards gender and behavior towards failure to respect customs. A patriarchal family in such cultures emerges as an important agent. In this regard, intertextual aspects are highlighted in structuring the description and narrative settings of the referent texts, as well as important aspects of the poetics of intertextual motifs of the chronotope of the murder at the doorstep as a symbol of protection and shelter. This is an invariant symbol in all cultures, which is surprisingly similar in its rhetorical and dramaturgical aspects in the two Nobel Prize winners Ivo Andrić and Gabriel García Márquez.