Love in the Time of Cholera

Introduction

Like many great novels, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera portrays the tension between illusions and material reality, especially in the context of love. In the novel's final pages, when Florentino and Fermina Daza are finally together in their old age, we are told that love "was more solid the closer it came to death" (p. 345). This statement exemplifies the novel's method—instead of saying what love is, and in this way judging the strength of its characters' grasp of reality, it articulates the relationship between love and something else, giving different perspectives but no definitions. This circling around love gives Love in the Time of Cholera the quality of capturing the ineffable.

Different ways of understanding, experiencing, and representing love are embodied by the novel's three central characters—Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino. For Florentino, love has the properties of a dream; its fullest expression occurs in art (especially in writing), and it stands in opposition to everyday reality, entirely resistant to rational understanding. Like Emma in Madame Bovary, Florentino is filled with notions of love derived from popular literature; he also becomes a comic figure when reality intrudes unexpectedly into the world of his imagination. The bird droppings that fall on Fermina's embroidery when they meet as teenagers in the park and the intestinal disruption that betrays him when they meet following Dr. Urbino's death both testify to the unavoidable fact of the material world. But Florentino's fate suggests neither acquiescence to reality nor the continuation of his belief in a wholly illusory kind of love.

As the relationship between Florentino and Fermina unfolds following Dr. Urbino's death, it might seem enabled by Florentino's emergence from the imaginary world in which he has lived for so long—the very existence of his imaginary world is made possible by Fermina's absence from it. The letters Florentino writes to her after Dr. Urbino's death possess, in Fermina's words, "a foundation in reality" (p. 330), as opposed to the letters of his youth, inspired by "half-baked endearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics" (p. 75). But other aspects of the novel's conclusion complicate this interpretation. Before making love, Florentino tells Fermina, "I've remained a virgin for you" (p. 339). In light of his many trysts and affairs, in what sense could this be true other than an imaginary one? When asked how long their ship will sail, keeping up its deception by flying the yellow cholera flag, Florentino answers, "Forever" (p. 348), as if to specifically deny the reality of death.

Because of his belief in the power of the rational mind, Dr. Urbino often appears more grounded in reality than Florentino. He considers marriage "an absurd invention" (p. 209), and his marriage to Fermina represents a lifelong effort to defeat the absurd and replace it with something that can withstand logical analysis. After his death, Fermina recalls his belief that "the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability" (p. 300). On the night they consummate their marriage, Dr. Urbino readily admits to himself that he does not love Fermina, but "he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love" (p. 159). He thinks of love not as an unruly passion, but as if it can be brought into existence merely by an act of will. But his determination to avoid the chaos of emotion can make Dr. Urbino seem just as divorced from reality as Florentino. In his dissertation, Dr. Urbino asserts that, given the human organism's "many useless or duplicated functions… it could be more simple and by the same token less vulnerable" (p. 158–59). Is this idea any less illusory than the most extravagant of Florentino's ecstatic proclamations of his love for Fermina?

Between the extremes of Florentino and Dr. Urbino is Fermina. When Dr. Urbino first tells her about the importance of stability, she hears in it a "miserable threat," but when she remembers his words after he dies, she thinks of them as "the lodestone that had given them both so many happy hours" (p. 300). She ends her first affair with Florentino by telling him in a letter that "what is between us is nothing more than an illusion" (p. 102). As coldly precise as this declaration is, Fermina is nevertheless open to the emotional upheavals that attend her marriage to Dr. Urbino. When he confirms her suspicion of his adulterous affair with Barbara Lynch, she wishes he had denied it, preferring the illusion of his fidelity to the feeling that "her rage would never end" (p. 251). Sharing memories of Dr. Urbino with Florentino, Fermina "could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures," admitting to Florentino that she does not "really know if it was love or not" (p. 329).

It is tempting to see Fermina as encompassing both the illusory and the real, but such symmetry would reduce her to a thematic device, as opposed to a fully alive character, capable of expecting nothing more from life after her husband dies and then falling in love with Florentino. The fact that neither she nor the novel ever arrive at a fixed definition of love suggests that its elusiveness is part of its very nature.

Discussion Questions

Why does García Márquez use similar terms to describe the effects of love and cholera?
After rejecting Florentino's declaration of love following her husband's funeral, why is Fermina eventually won over by him?
Why does a change in Florentino's writing style make Fermina more receptive to him?
What does Florentino mean when he tells Fermina, before they make love for the first time, “I've remained a virgin for you” ?
(p. 339)
Why does Florentino tell each of his lovers that she is the only one he has had?
What does Florentino's uncle mean when he says, "without river navigation there is no love"? (p. 168)
Do Fermina and Dr. Urbino succeed at "inventing true love"?
(p. 159)
Does Dr. Urbino die a happy man?
Why does García Márquez begin the novel with the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour?
Why is Leona Cassiani "the true woman in [Florentino's] life although neither of them ever knew it and they never made love"? (p. 182)
When Tránsito Ariza tells Florentino he looks as if he were going to a funeral when he is going to visit Fermina, why does he respond by saying, "It's almost the same thing"? (p. 65)

For Further Reflection

Is love rational?
Does age enhance or detract from the experience of love?

About Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is the most celebrated of the writers who emerged during the great boom in Latin American literature in the 1960s—a group that included Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928. While a law student at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, he met thirteen-year-old Mercedes Barcha Pardo. They were married 14 years later. García Márquez left law school in 1950, devoting himself to writing. He worked for several newspapers, writing both fiction and nonfiction. His journalistic work, political engagement, and restlessness took him to various locales in Europe and North America, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean, over the next 15 years.

In 1965 García Márquez began writing One Hundred Years of
Solitude—-the novel that not only put him on the literary map but also established him as one of the world's greatest writers. García Márquez's use of the fantastic, or "magical realism," is one of the most readily identifiable features of his fiction. He tells interviewers, "Reality is not restricted to the price of tomatoes."

García Márquez's writing also incorporates much Latin American social and political history. Many of his books appear on college reading lists that specifically address these topics. His political writing and activism have angered the Colombian government and forced García Márquez to spend much of his adult life in Europe, Venezuela, and Mexico. Colombia welcomed him back in the 1980s. García Márquez skillfully weaves history and politics with the collective soul and intuition of the Colombian people, endearing him to readers throughout Latin America. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.

Related Titles

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (1985): Depicting three generations of a family in an unnamed South American country, this novel established its author as a significant voice among writers extending the use of magical realism and the interweaving of historical fact and fiction.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (1972): This study of the aging process examines the detrimental effects of the contemporary world's attitudes toward the elderly.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-1615): By most accounts the work that established the identity of the genre, this novel chronicles the adventures of an idealistic knight as he pursues his dreams and Dulcinea, his unattainable love.
Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869): A young man's infatuation with an older married woman ultimately leads to disillusionment in a novel that captures the social and political climate of mid-nineteenth-century France.
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (1827): This panoramic novel, a landmark of Italian literature, sets its seventeenth-century story of two young lovers against a backdrop of war, famine, and plague.