Author: Chen Xihan
2020, a year of "love you love you", no one expected to start in the national fight against the epidemic. What happens when the pandemic meets love? At the end of Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez has the elderly Alyssa and Fermina lying hugging each other on a river boat with a yellow flag representing cholera on the bow of the boat, announcing that they will never come ashore again. When the captain asked them how long they had been in love, Alyssa said, "53 years, 7 months, 11 days, day and night, a lifetime." "In this ending, before death arrives, love comes to the fore.
Stills from the movie Love in the Time of Cholera
In the face of disaster, under the shadow of death, there are not many literary and artistic works like this, where love burns the light of life. This is because love and death have always been the eternal themes of art. In human history, if there have been many frightening epidemics of infectious diseases, there have been many classics related to them in later generations, and love is always the deeply remembered part of the middle.
This also somewhat explains why some classic films adapted from cholera literature are deeply excavated at the point of love, and at the time of great opening and life and death, the emotional connection between people makes those deadly diseases begin to have a certain deep aesthetic significance.
Who says love is not a cholera
Alyssa's mother said: "The only thing my son has ever had is cholera. "Is this really the case? Wasn't his son's 53-year love affair with Fermina a disease? Psychologist Frank Torres believes that the state of lovesickness is close to mental illness, and that epilepsy, depression, confusion, mania, and delusion are its typical symptoms.
In Love in The Time of Cholera, Alyssa's mother thinks her son has cholera, but it is actually his love for Fermina at first sight. During the days when Alyssa handed the love letter to Fermina and waited for the reply, the tea and dinner did not sleep at night, "he had diarrhea, spit green water, was dizzy, and often fainted." In this story, Márquez could not have been more explicit in constructing the connection between cholera and love: true love is very similar to cholera. It has also been said, "Márquez alludes to love with frightening cholera, as if to tell people that although love is sweet, it tortures people and makes life worse than death." However, without such a life-and-death test, no one can get true love. ”
"The only pain I feel about death is not being able to die for love," a highlight that appears in Love in the Time of Cholera, a watershed in the reality of a writer known for his magic. Love in the Time of Cholera is a work created after Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1982), and its original work was first printed 150 times more than Márquez's other classic masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and the sales of the Chinese edition alone easily exceeded one million copies. Márquez allegedly saw a news in the newspaper one day that a pair of elderly people who had revisited their hometown had been beaten to death with oars by the boatman who had taken them on a trip in order to rob them of the money they had brought. Later, the news broke that they were a pair of secret lovers who had been traveling together for 40 years, but they each had a happy and stable family and a full house of children and grandchildren.
After that, Márquez used the old couple as an entry point and combined the love story of his parents when they were young to write "Love in the Time of Cholera". It tells about an impossible love that spans 53 years and the loneliness of people facing a long time, while Colombian history, such as war and cholera, is interspersed with it, creating the fate of people in the era: even if separation is desperate, it has become the only way out of love.
We can see that although "Love in the Time of Cholera" contains the word "cholera", in fact, the cholera period is only the background of love, death may occur at any time, the forest is swallowed up by the engine of the ship, the manatee is extinct, but the love is still continuing. What an encouraging hint that epidemics have always been a part of our lives, that they came before us, and that even if we are gone, it may continue to exist. The threat of death cannot mask the heat of life. Camus said, "What is the plague?" The plague is just life. ”
When did humanity leave this?
In the face of the plague, love can only be comfort
Before life, old age, illness and death, love must always be magnified. In love in the time of cholera, death can freeze the rekindled love fire, so Walter must die. Otherwise, in the days after the disaster, the overlooked ugliness and shortcomings will still be lost in time. Only by dying can this love be immortalized.
In the Sino-British co-production film "The Veil", the old nun said to the decadent Kitty: "The duty is to wash when the hands are dirty." "Over time, you don't necessarily have feelings, and the love you think of on impulse is not necessarily love." Why do you often feel that he or she is not the right person, because you always want to find in the other person certain qualities that he or she never had, rather than the sparkle that he or she is born with. This makes love always in the distant vicinity, and love is hidden behind the veil.
The movie "The Veil" also tells about a relationship in cholera. In the 1920s, a young British couple came to live in rural China, in this picturesque and cholera-infested remote town, they experienced emotional waves that could never be imagined and experienced in the comfort of their home country of Britain, and realized the true meaning of love.
Stills from the movie "The Veil"
The story begins with the heroine. Kitty is a beautiful but vain girl in a flashy social circle, she accepts the marriage arranged by her parents, and marries walter Finn, a taciturn doctor and bacteriologist. After marriage, Walter took Kitty to Shanghai. The two eventually developed a rift due to differences in personality and lack of common language. Kitty has an extramarital affair with charming married man Charlie Townsend...
"Don't lift the veil of depiction, the multitude of sentient beings, call it life." The film "The Veil" is adapted from the novel "Magnificent Veil" by the British novelist Maugham. It is said that maugham's novel was inspired by Shelley's sonnet. When infidelity is discovered, Walter gives Kitty two options: either to follow him to a cholera-infested place in China to treat the sick, or to divorce Townsend and marry Kitty. The reason why he dared to say this was because he was sure that Townsend would not give up his smart and capable wife, and he would not give up the governor's path to choose to be with Kitty.
Unsurprisingly, Kitty was rejected. She had no choice but to go with her husband. The film actually began in the true sense of the word from here: she did not expect that the Meitan Province, which represents the place of death, was the real beginning of her life.
Maugham's vitriol is well known. At the end of The Magnificent Veil, Walter dies without Getting Kitty's love. In the face of the plague, love can only be a comfort, not a saving force, which is what Maugham wants to say. Not only that, but Maugham also offered the most thorough line: a woman will not fall in love with a man because he is morally high.
Is this disillusioning for viewers looking forward to a happy ending? But sorry, Maugham said that's the truth of life.
The movie "The Veil" is obviously trying to make some changes to this and add a little warmth to the film. But it is precisely because of this part of the change that the film finally appears blurry. There is not much ink on the portrayal of Walter in the original work, especially after arriving in Meitan Province, he is more like an invisible male protagonist. The film portrays the tragic character quite completely. First of all, he is blind to Kitty's long-term affection, he does not know what she wants, what he can give her, and he does not know how to express it. But he was not an emotionless man, and he watched his wife accept the heartbreaking reality of her lover's betrayal, and with a body of embarrassment and despair, he followed him to the epidemic area.
After arriving at the epidemic area, Walter's "best man in the world" drama has been staged. He not only showed his righteousness as a doctor, but also spread regret in his wife's heart. In this regard, the drama road began to rush all the way to the traditional Hollywood routine. Meanwhile, in this place of death, Kitty, a vain girl, has faded the exquisite egoism of a noble lady in her rescue and help, she is no longer the queen of the party, and she and Walter begin to look at each other and their marriage again.
The film is a flash in the air that never shied away from Maugham's novels—Walter's last words. In the middle of his last words, we can clearly find that he brought Kitty to Mae Tam Province with the intention of letting her die of cholera here, and that he had already deliberately sought death in his heart when he was betrayed. In the movie, it is the two who re-acquaint themselves with each other, and if it were not for Walter's unfortunate death, they would have begun to fall in love again at any time. But in the novel, Walter is infected while doing experiments, and he has been experimenting with his own body, which shows that he killed himself. His heart was broken and he couldn't put it together again.
Love in the time of cholera, death can freeze the rekindled fire of love. So, whether it's a novel or a movie, Walter must die. Otherwise, in the days after the disaster, the neglected ugliness and lack of regret will still lose no time in Kitty's married life. Only by dying can this love be immortalized.
It can be said that Maugham's transition from indifference, estrangement, and abandonment of Walter and Kitty in "The Veil" to the living conditions in the extreme environment of a foreign country is not a love movie routine in the traditional sense, and he does not even have any pursuit of a complete sense of form. In the original work, compared with the complex characteristics of the times, love seems insignificant from the beginning. The film captures part of Maugham's portrayal of human nature and abandons the almost cruel reality of the original book. Of course, this is obviously more in line with the psychological expectations of watching the film - at the time of life and death, the two people finally unveiled the veil of the emotional world, and Kitty also completed the self-growth of a woman, went to the field, and went to independence.
Crises often consider the artist's ability to analyze human emotions and morals
The significance of the work to put the hero on the roof is that through a one-by-one aerial lens, it provides a rare high-altitude perspective of the plague that occurred in France in the 17th century. The deeper meaning is that the persecution of all kinds of epidemic changes that occur in the depths of people's hearts: the ultimate test brought by disease to mankind is not only the vigilance of disease, the alienation and indifference of people are the real virus, and the greatest fear of human society is the loss of human nature.
When it comes to the epidemic movies that are well-known in the literary circle, "Hussars on the Roof" must be a name that cannot be bypassed. More than a decade ago, the French literary scholar Jean Giono's work was passed on by word of mouth among the Chinese literary youth, not only because its novels were good, but also to a large extent due to its films, thanks to the legendary story of the heroines of the film, Juliet Binoche and Olivier Mathilner, who faked the real scenes and fell in love during the filming of the film.
Poster for the movie Hussars on the Roof
The story takes place in the 1830s when a cavalry colonel from Italy, Angelo Patti, was imprisoned for being betrayed by his childhood friend and had to flee to Provence, southern France, where he was unfortunately confronted with an extinct cholera outbreak. The city was littered with corpses, crows flew from death-filled windows to the treetops, distant fires burned piles of corpses, the sky was a terrible haze, soldiers set up barriers to prevent outsiders from entering the plague area, and set up quarantine areas to detain people from the epidemic area.
Forced to do so, Angelo hid on the vast eaves of the French countryside, crisscrossed by Gothic and Romanesque buildings, becoming a veritable hussar on the roof, overlooking what was happening beneath his feet—dignity and conscience were extinguished under the threat of death, and suspicion and cannibalism led to one tragedy after another.
In literary history, crises often consider the ability of artists to analyze human emotions and morals, and how they will develop their narratives from what perspective. In Jean Giono's pen, the significance of putting the hero on the roof is that through a bird's-eye view, it provides a rare high-altitude perspective of the plague that occurred in France in the 19th century. Its deeper meaning is that through Angelo's observation, the epidemic changes that are happening in the depths of people's hearts are depicted, thus pointing out the ultimate test that disease brings to mankind - I must not only be alert to diseases, but also be alert to the alienation and indifference of people in disasters, which is a real virus! As the book's publisher, the French Garimard Press, wrote in the executive summary: "We see only a young hussar traveling a long distance in the midst of endless tragedies... We would think that Stendhal and Balzac had found their successors", a trait often found in many classic works of literature – a masterpiece is eternal by one person.
To escape the heavy rain, Angelo climbed into a farmhouse from the skylight on the roof and met Paulina, the Marquise, who was waiting for her husband to return from the epidemic area. In the silver candlelight, the marquise's long skirt dragged to the ground, dignified and beautiful. At the sight of the Colonel descending from the sky, Madame became unfazed, gave him food and water, and gave him strength. At the long French table, Madame was full of laughter and elegance, but who knew that she silently held a pistol aimed at the Colonel under the tablecloth...
The Hussars were always writing to their mother, "You taught me how to live. I thank you every day for that... In order to meet you again, I will fight alone to liberate Italy. This is not so much a letter to his mother as it is to himself, and in Angelo's heart there is an ideal of helping the world, which makes him always have others in his heart, and he never cares about himself in order to save the sick. He promised to help Paulina cross the blockade and return north to find her husband. In this way, he escorted her all the way, and they rode their horses on the vast grasslands.
This is destined to be the story of Angelo and Paulina, taking place under the surging revolutionary wave, in the era of cholera outbreaks. One day they stopped at an old castle, and he made a warm fire, burned tea and wine, and she dressed him in the dress they had when they first met. By the warm fire, she said, "You're really weird, you followed me from Manos, no matter the time, but now you're in a hurry to pack your bags as if you're going to run away," and he just smiled wordlessly, and with grace and sadness in his eyes, he refused to grow in love, and he said, "Forgive me." "He can't promise anything, because a man who is ready to die at any time doesn't deserve love, much less promises."
The plague struck like a storm, and Paulina fell down the stairs infected with cholera and struggled on the line of death. At this time, Angelo changed his itinerary again, and at the risk of infection, he used the native method of a country doctor to rub the marquise's purple body with alcohol, and saved Paulina's life on the verge of despair. While the plague brought suffering to the world, it also achieved the most sincere, beautiful, and uninspired love in the world. In the end, this love did not become a bond and mutual possession, and with noble chivalry, Angelo escorted Paulina all the way to find her elderly, wealthy husband. And he himself chose to leave on horseback and ran to the fiery revolution... Although Paulina's life has returned to its former tranquility, in the depths of her heart, Angelo can no longer be forgotten, and across the snow-capped Alps, she often runs far away from where Angelo runs.
Somewhat similar to "Love in the Time of Cholera", the object depicted in the movie "Hussars on the Roof" is not the epidemic itself, and the symbolism and metaphor of the epidemic are greatly highlighted when telling a moving love story during a cholera epidemic. Reading the original novel, perhaps this feeling will be stronger, and the situation of cholera infection is very unrealistic in Jean Gionor's pen, such as Angelo's contact with patients, helping them to clean up, and even living in a large house that was destroyed by cholera for a while, but never being infected. Cholera magnifies the characteristics of selfishness, hatred, fear, passivity, etc., and as long as people with these characteristics are successively put down by cholera. Angelo, on the other hand, despises the contagion and is unharmed. So, what the author wants to say is that it was the fear of cholera that created the outbreak, not cholera itself. In fact, author Jean Giono confirmed this view in an interview, saying: "Cholera is like a chemical element that makes the most despicable and noble emotions manifest themselves nakedly before our eyes." (Chen Xihan)