Love in the Time of Cholera (Criticism)

Criticism

Jeffrey M. Lilburn

In the following essay, Lilburn, a teaching assistant at the University of Western Ontario, examines how García Márquez uses the conventions of sentimental romance stories to explore deeper themes and even satirize popular conceptions of love.

It is tempting to read Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera as a romantic and sentimental story in which love prevails over time and death, and patience and devotion are rewarded with a happy ending. The temptation derives from García Márquez's misleading narrative that invites, or rather deceivingly manipulates readers into believing that Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza's belated union represents a victory over individual and societal adversities, prejudices and conventions. However, disguised beneath the surface of the melodramatic plot lies a critical, sometimes satiric examination of many of the elements that appear to contribute to the novel's charm, but actually undercut much of its romanticism and sentimentality. In addition to the themes of love, aging and disease highlighted in the novel's title, the text also explores issues such as suicide, gerontophobia (the fear of ageing), dishonesty, modernization, and social and environmental responsibility. The novel does celebrate human love and sexuality — at any age — but it does so while revealing many of the repercussions that may result from false or unrealistic notions of what love is.

Critical analyses of García Márquez's novels often include a discussion of magic realism — the interweaving of realism with the fantastic and the surreal. Love in the Time of Cholera does contain certain elements of magic realism, but they are less prominent than in previous works. As a result, it is usually examined without an extensive discussion of magic realism. Instead, most critics tend to agree that the novel blends social realism with elements of sentimental literature. One recent discussion by Claudette Kemper Columbus, for example, has suggested that the novel, which is set in the final decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, is a satire aimed at supposedly enlightened societies on the verge of entering the twenty-first century. And another critic, Robin Fiddian, has read the novel as a reflection on the moral and ideological shortsightedness that threatens the future of South America.

A need for social change is implied through the novel's opening scene. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's suicide is motivated by the fear of growing old and alludes to a difficult and, for some, troubling question: can old age be an exciting and productive period of human life? Jeremiah de Saint-Amour obviously did not think so, and planned years ahead to end his life when he turned sixty. It becomes evident throughout the novel that Saint-Amour's fears about old age are shared by many in his society. Fermina Daza's daughter, Ofelia, becomes extremely upset when she learns that her elderly mother has a "strange friendship" with a man: "love is ridiculous at our age," she shouts to her brother and his wife, "but at theirs it is revolting." Dr. Urbino Daza, Fermina's son, initially supports the relationship because of the "good companionship" it gives his mother and begs Florentino to continue seeing her "for the good of them both and the convenience of all." However, he reveals his true feelings about the elderly when he and Florentino get together over lunch; he explains that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people because "humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest."

The societal attitude towards old age is perhaps best summed up by an "absent-minded voice" which is overheard making a comment about Dr. Urbino's rapidly ripening corpse: "at that age you're half decayed while you're still alive." Florentino and Fermina's union at the novel's end transcends these prejudices and unjust social conventions and suggests that one's later years can be a vital and exciting time in one's life. But transcendence does not induce change, and while Florentino and Fermina do discover that love is "always love, anytime and anyplace," their reluctance to return home at the end of their journey suggests a surrender to societal expectations.

This less than perfect ending puts into question readings of the novel that emphasize the individual happiness of Fermina and Florentino over the state of the world around them. It also forces the reader to reconsider the entire text: what may have initially appeared to be an innocent story about love, may not be. M. Keith Booker has demonstrated that the novel provides warnings against "gullibility in reading," and indeed, there are several incidents early in Love in the Time of Cholera that inform the reader that appearances can be deceiving. For instance, it is only after Saint-Amour's death that Dr. Urbino discovers that his friend was not the man "without a past" he thought him to be, but a fugitive from Cayenne who had eaten human flesh. The lingering aroma of gold cyanide that meets Dr. Urbino when he arrives on the scene of the suicide is also misleading. The scent of bitter almonds always reminds the doctor of unrequited love but, as the reader soon learns, Saint-Amour's suicide is not motivated by love but by submission to an all too common fear — gerontophobia. When discussing the death with his wife, Dr. Urbino reveals that it is not so much what Saint-Amour did that infuriates him, but the deception he practiced on him for so many years. Even Dr. Urbino, a man whose "narrowness of mind was out of tune with his public image," is himself an example of the ease with which appearance may be confused with reality.

Similarly, the spell Florentino Ariza falls under when he meets Fermina Daza is not what it appears to be — it is not an example of romantic love. He does not fall in love with Fermina's true virtues and sentiments, but with an image or illusion he creates by "endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments." In other words, he idealizes her. It is this unrealistic conception of Fermina that leads to a half-century of waiting, watching and stalking. Booker has suggested that such unrealistic visions are what doom Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza's riverboat journey at the end of the novel. Florentino Ariza had often received alarming reports about the state of the river but "never took the trouble to think about it." As a result, his plan to sail "forever" under the yellow quarantine flag is an impossibility because uncontrolled deforestation has left no trees to fuel the boat. Florentino's refusal to consider the reality of imminent environmental devastation destroys both the Magdalena River, and his own happy ending.

Critics have interpreted "the time of cholera" in the novel's title in various ways. Many equate the time of cholera with the time of romantic love and suggest that, in this text, love is a disease. The title might also be a metaphor for what Claudette Kemper Columbus describes as a "diseased society and social irresponsibility." And it is true that both Florentino Ariza and Dr. Urbino are guilty of social obliviousness and neglect. Dr. Urbino is a man of refined tastes who is up to date with all the latest European ideas and who is, as suggested by Mabel Morana, associated with modernization. But he is often blind to the realities that surround him because, for him, reality exists someplace else. Upon his return from Europe, for example, he subscribes "to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality." Florentino's social obliviousness can be explained, in part, by his susceptibility to the influence of sentimental love poetry. His letters to Fermina Daza are "inspired by the books he had learned by heart" and reveal a man who has become buried in the values of the past. But Florentino is guilty of more than simple neglect. His selfishness is often the direct cause of other people's suffering and death.

The narrator only describes a very small fraction of his six hundred and twenty-two long-term affairs, but of the ones he does relate, several offer a picture of a man less than deserving of Fermina's — or any woman's — love. It might be argued that Florentino's numerous affairs provide a positive model for free love, but he does more than fill his time with one-night-stands. One of Florentino's lovers, Olimpia Zuleta, is murdered by her husband when she inadvertently shows him the possessive inscription that Florentino painted on her belly. It is also revealed late in the novel that Florentino is a rapist who, after impregnating a maid behind his house, bribes her to put the blame on her innocent sweetheart. Perhaps most condemning is Florentino's seduction of América Vicuñia, his fourteen-year-old blood relative who is entrusted to him while she attends secondary school. What is most disturbing in his relationship with this girl is the manipulation he uses to create the illusion of acquiescence. When he meets her, she is still a little girl with "the scrapes of elementary school on her knees," but Florentino spends a year cultivating her with ice cream and childish afternoons, until finally winning her confidence and affection. She commits suicide while he is on the riverboat with Fermina Daza — another of the women he manipulates.

From the time he receives Fermina's letter of insults, Florentino begins to devise a new strategy — a "new method of seduction." He plans everything "down to the last detail, as if it were the final battle." He departs from his usual imitative writing style and composes an extensive meditation on life which he disguises in the patriarchal style of an old man's memories. The letters help Fermina find new reasons to go on living, but Florentino's cunning plans complicate what she interprets as heartfelt emotions. He is also dishonest with her in person; when she asks him why he never competed in the Poetic Festivals, he "lies to her" and says that he "wrote only for her." It is true that part of his intention is to give Fermina the courage to "discard the prejudices" of society, and to "think of love as a state of grace," but his contemptible past makes it impossible to differentiate his good motives from his selfish, destructive ones.

Despite Florentino's manipulations, Fermina is the one character who recognizes that something is not quite right in her relationship with Florentino. Although she defies social conventions by entering into a romantic relationship at an age most people consider too old for such things, her repeated thoughts about another elderly couple who are murdered while vacationing on board a boat invite comparisons between the two couples. The murdered couple were clandestine lovers who maintained a relationship for forty years despite the fact that each of them was happily married to someone else. Contrasted with the love between Florentino and Fermina, a love that Fermina recognized was illusory over fifty years ago, the other couple's long-lasting relationship recalls the illicit love described by Saint-Amour's lover: hers was a life shared with a man who was never completely hers but in which she "often knew the sudden explosion of happiness." Moreover, their story shows that Florentino's plan to evade reality by refusing to ever go back home is not a viable solution. The fact that the other elderly couple are murdered on board a boat suggests that an idealistic, neverending river cruise that does nothing to break down the conventions and beliefs of the rest of society will not protect Fermina and Florentino from the prejudices that continue to exist along the shores. Eventually, those prejudices will come to them.

Source: Jeffrey M. Lilburn, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• For an excellent study of old age, with considerable attention given to sexuality, see Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age (1972).
• In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), García Márquez's best known and highly acclaimed novel, the author employs the technique of "magical realism," which blends the real with the fantastic in a comic masterpiece that chronicles six generations of a family in the town of Macondo, a microcosm of Colombia.
• The Autumn of the Patriarch is García Márquez's 1975 novel about the evils of despotism as embodied in a solitary dictator.
• One of his collections of short stories, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968) features García Márquez's short fiction written during the early 1960s. Critics often commend the stories in this volume.
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) is García Márquez's fictionalized journalistic investigation of Chile's Pinochet regime. The novella profiles a society trapped in its own myths.
• In The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1987), Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean novelist and playwright, combines the real and the surreal in this novel about love, tyranny, freedom, and the anguish of exile.
• Violence, Conflict and Politics in Colombia (1980), by Paul H. Oquist offers some insights into the history and politics that shaped the fiction of García Márquez.