Needless to say, things have changed. What has happened is that my attitude to reading has changed. My colleagues are convinced that I have become an unrepentant deconstructionist. A potential student of my graduate seminar in literary theory put it more acidly: I had been perverted. I certainly am unrepentant; but I am not sure that I am an out and out deconstructionist, since I do not know what that would be. If it means not critical, then it is wrong. The change can best be summed up, I believe, by saying that I have a revised view of the pleasure principle of reading. Roland Barthes2 suggests that the principle ofdeconstructive reading is re-reading, and that our pleasure in first reading is conditioned by ideology, an ideology of consumerism, to put it crudely. Re-reading is defined as unpleasurable; it is so clearly tedious. A whole view of the academy and profession of letters (an anti-intellectual view) is adumbrated. The ideology of reading suggests that re-reading cannot give us anything both new and useful. We re-read classic texts in classrooms with our students to give them the virtues of what is old—for motives that Marquez might well describe as nostalgic, or reactionary. Deconstruction a la Derrida leads us to recognise that there can never be an identically re-iterated reading, so that the process of re-reading goes on and on. This means that the reader can have no comfortable identification with the text—or if he develops one it will require to be re-read, resisted, deconstructed. What I am about to offer, then, is a re-reading of Marquez, made as I realised that I shouldn't allow my lack of pleasure, or my desire, to interfere. Made under the influence of Derrida, Freud, Paul de Man, Camus. Just a note to indicate that I was led to Camus by a comment I read on Marquez's reading;4 and the connection there between Camus and Derrida (one can think first of their nationality) suggests that such influences could well be productive. It may, in the technical sense of the word, seem preposterous to begin this analysis with the late work Chronicle of a Death Foretold5 but it is itself a preposterous work so perhaps there is reason to begin at the end—as preposterous means having its posterior in the front. Chronicle is preposterous because we know how it is going to end before we reach the end. In this we are like the townspeople, who are also preposterous in that they know the death of Santiago Nasar is going to occur and do nothing to stop it. Their doing nothing is not preposterous perhaps; in many ways we might think it is perfectly reasonable. Indeed the narrative gives us many reasons why various individuals do not act. Primarily, they seem to believe that it is impossible for the Vicarios to actually kill Santiago. Even if we disbelieve them, we might still think that their desire to see the outcome is reasonable. The preposteriority enters into it when we consider the epistemological question : for their knowledge to be valid, it must be preposterous knowledge; that is, the outcome must precede itself, the future must be available in the present. Otherwise, we cannot really say that they know. They are merely guessing. Or, they are desiring an event so that it can become 60 January-June 1985