Love in the Time of Cholera: Latent Love Depictions within a Treatise of Courtly Love

Eliana Garzón-Duarte

doi:10.36892/ijlls.v2i2.232

Abstract

The present article aims at displaying the different types of love bonds implicit in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. The relationship of complicity, courting, marriage, wait, and encounter of the lovers are the expressions through which the author represents latent love manifestations within the frame of a treatise of courtly love. This article analyzes the realistic and practical signs of love García Márquez uses to recreate the common situations any couple can live in a relationship. The common patterns found in this novel corroborate the unique writing style of the Colombian Nobel Prize of Literature and the connections with his other novels. The theoretical approaches of Roland Barthes in A lover’s discourse: Fragments and Ovid in The art of love help construct the basis of interpretation of the love relationships represented in this novel. Statements of Gurméndez and Charbonneau also support the concepts of depersonalization and sacrifice inside marriage and the role memories play in the wait. This article pays attention to three different couples present in the novel and researches on the type of relationship they build and the implications and particular conditions they have. All of them with remarkable features to be studied to understand the realism of love in the words of García Márquez.

Highlights

Love in the Time of Cholera has been one of the greatest literary works written by Gabriel García Márquez
Courting as a Love Expression The starting point of the immeasurable love between the characters Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza is, precisely, a casual look; a look in which all the feelings a human being might cherish are perceived, as it is manifested in the novel: “The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later” (García Márquez, 1985/1988, p. 39)
Over the time of this courting, Fermina does not accept a single white camellia offered by Florentino to avoid, in this way, some kind of serious commitment: “On several occasions during the preceding six months he had sent her a white camellia, but she would return it to him in her letter so that he would have no doubt that she was disposed to continue writing to him, but without the seriousness of an engagement” (García Márquez, 1985/1988, p. 49)