Fictions of Difficult Love in García Márquez

Abstract

Abstract Following Denis de Rougemont’s pithy assertion at the beginning of his influential Love in the Western World: “Happy love has no history,” Gabriel García Márquez explores through much of his work what he calls “difficult loves” and the artistic as well as ethical paradoxes they entail. As De Rougemont suggests, the first and most obvious way in which love can be “difficult” is the unhappiness and pain caused by love as eros, or amorous passion. The Swiss thinker then contrasts eros with the Christian concept of agape, or brotherly love, which he views as a remedy to the often-destructive effects of passion. This article argues, however, that García Márquez’s concept of “difficult loves” encompasses both forms of love, and with regard to agape, underscores that the search for empathy in a world ruled by violence and power can be just as fraught as the passion of erotic love to those who seek it out. Can literature give rise to empathy, or is fiction condemned to merely repeat violence even while denouncing it? Through a succinct commentary on the love theme in works from García Márquez’s middle and late periods, from One Hundred Years of Solitude and Innocent Eréndira to Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and News of a Kidnapping, this article traces the Colombian Nobel Prize winner’s implicit reflections about literature’s possible role in fostering social harmony and human empathy in the face of violence, political oppression, and selfishness.