Text/Li Guangdou
"Years later, Colonel Aureliano stood before the firing squad, remembering the distant afternoon when his father had taken him to visit the ice."
This is a sentence at the beginning of the world famous book "One Hundred Years of Solitude", many people say that with this sentence alone, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" can be rated as an "immortal god work", because in this sentence, Márquez created a nearly unprecedented narrative: the "future tense" and "past tense" are perfectly integrated in one sentence, and the past days are recalled from the perspective of the future, as if colliding with a tunnel through time and space, allowing readers to immerse themselves in it and savor the depth and longevity of time and space.
With nearly 300,000 words, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" has been hailed as "a monumental work that reproduces the historical and social picture of Latin America", and in 1982, Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "One Hundred Years of Solitude".
There is a peculiar phenomenon in the literary world that many writers can no longer write better works after winning the Nobel Prize. But Márquez did not fall into this "strange circle", and three years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Márquez published another of his books, Love in the Time of Cholera.
The plot of the book "Love in the Time of Cholera" is not complicated: the poor boy Florentino Ariza falls in love with a rich lady with no worries, Fermina, and the two love each other through letters. But soon Fermina's father discovered his daughter's early love and sent Fermina to her uncle's house in a distant place. Like all young people who fell in love, the opposition of the family made Florentino and Fermina love more deeply, and the two became "pen pals", conveying love through more correspondence, and even decided to get married.
Fermina's Florentino was perfect, but when the two met again, Fermina found that he was one hundred and eighteen thousand miles away from the "Prince Charming" in her mind, and the book reads: "[Fermina] asked herself in panic how she could let such a phantom occupy her heart so cruelly." Fermina eventually rejected Florentino, but she herself contracted cholera as a result of a major blow. At this time, the male doctor Urbino appeared.
Dr. Urbino is the most famous doctor in the town, and the two are married by treating Fermina for cholera. Soon after, the two married. After Florentino learned that his sweetheart was married, he made up his mind to become a high-class person, and he went all the way from a small employee of the company to the chairman of the board, and the scenery was unlimited. He had been waiting for an opportunity to confess his heart to his goddess, Fermina, once again, but this had been waiting for half a century. For half a century, Florentino indulged in gentleness every day, drunkenly dreaming of death, but mentally, he always maintained his love for Fermina.
The thing that ended his long wait was the unexpected death of Dr. Urbino. One day, an elderly Dr. Urbino accidentally fell to his death while climbing a ladder to catch a parrot. Florentino, who had been faltering, heard the news, dropped everything, and rushed to Fermina's house to confess her heart, Fermina finally promised Florentino to go out with him in a boat, and the two old men fell in love again. But Fermina is very worried that the reunion of the two will turn into a scandal and be spread everywhere, and once their trip is over, real life and gossip will send them to an infinite hell.
The ship belonged to Florentino, and in order for Fermina to continue enjoying the trip, Florentino decided to get everyone else off board, but for a proper reason. The captain was touched by their unwavering love, which spanned more than half a century, and came up with a good idea: it was a cholera epidemic, and if a ship hung a black and yellow flag, it meant that the people on the ship were infected with cholera. Therefore, the captain raised a yellow flag representing the cholera epidemic and successfully drove the other passengers off the ship, allowing the two old men to enjoy a romantic love that belonged only to them.
Interestingly, after some time, Fermina wanted to dock and go home, but because the yellow flag was hanging on the boat, the locals were determined not to allow the boat to come ashore. The two old men had to continue their journey, where to go? In fact, for them, it doesn't matter where they go. As long as they stay with each other, they will continue this love that has been waiting for "51 years, 7 months and 4 days and nights".
Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the most important classic literary masterpieces of the 20th century. The work tells a love epic that spans more than half a century, exhausting all the possibilities of love: loyal, secret, rough, shy, platonic, debauched, fleeting, life and death... It has been hailed as "the greatest romance novel ever written by mankind". Although the plot is relatively simple, the novel spans a very long time span, from the 1880s to the 1930s, with far-reaching ideas. The Washington Post once said of "Love in the Time of Cholera": "A gorgeous and dazzling work, full of themes of love, death, and memory. ”
Gabriel García Márquez
Featuring a half-century of love between Florentino and Fermina, the novel describes three catastrophes that have endangered Colombia: war, cholera, and conflict between the individual and society, and personal loneliness. War and cholera threaten the lives of Latin Americans at all times, and the conflict between individuals and societies makes everyone feel insecure, like seagrass floating in the water, helpless, creating a strong sense of loneliness. Between people, between people and society is like a huge gap between the gap, which cannot be crossed and cannot be communicated. For example, love should not be restricted by social conditions, should not be bound by materials, wealth, etc., but in the real society is just the opposite: love is subject to all factors.
This also forced Florentino to develop a strong sense of loneliness, and in the face of Fermina's father threatening death, Florentino uttered a stunning vow: "There is nothing more glorious than dying for love." But does anyone understand his idea? No, people just find it ridiculous, all communication is ineffective, and the barriers between people sometimes can't even be solved by death.
In that era, cholera was seen as a highly contagious plague, and if it was infected with cholera, the chances of survival were very small. The "cholera" in the novel not only represents an incurable disease like today's cancer, but also has a symbolic meaning: love. Márquez tells the reader through "a long-lasting love in the time of cholera" that people who fall in love are like having cholera, everyone can't be overwhelmed, can't get rid of it, there is no way out, but there are still people who fight for it, break through the shackles of time, the shackles of ethics, and find hope in absurdity and despair.
In the face of natural and man-made disasters, human beings are small and fragile, but this does not mean that people are numb and resigned. The more difficult the conditions, the more it can arouse the sense of resistance of human beings. As Hemingway said in The Old Man and the Sea, "A man can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated." "The Plague, the novel by the French writer Albert Camus, tells the story of a human being who struggles to fight against the plague.
The Plague is a work by Camus published in 1947. Camus is a representative of "absurd literature" and one of the youngest Nobel Prize-winning writers of all time, Camus is world-famous for his absurd literature "The Outsider". The protagonist of "The Outsider", Mosol, is numb, cold, and his attitude towards the world is desperate and indifferent. In the novel, Mossol has an outsider's attitude towards the death of his mother and even his own death.
At the end of the novel, Mossol kills a person by mistake, but no judge in the court discusses the objectivity and reality of the case, and the real reason the judges sentenced Mossol to death is that Mossol does not remember the day of his mother's death, so he must be a heinous and damn criminal. The world in which Mossol lived was absurd, ridiculous, and incomprehensible, and this was the reflection of Camus's thoughts at that stage: the absurdity of the whole world was hopelessly incurable. But in The Plague, Camus's thinking shifts: there may still be truth, a glimmer of hope, in this absurd world.
"Plague" mainly tells the different attitudes and final choices of doctor Rieux, volunteer Tarou, priest Panaru, reporter Lambert, small clerk Gran and criminal Kotal in the face of the plague. In the novel, a plague occurs in the Oran region of Algeria, and the sudden plague overwhelms everyone. On the one hand, the local government told everyone not to panic, but on the other hand, it trapped everyone in the city, and even tried to take advantage of the disaster to make a windfall. The people of the city are either panicked and helpless; they are cooperating with the black market and the government for personal gain; or they are living by and waiting for death to come.
Dr. Michael, the master, has always adhered to the professional ethics of the doctor to "cure the sick and save people", he disagrees with the view of the priest Panaru that "the plague is god's collective punishment of mankind", in the face of the absurd world and the plague that is as threatening as the torrent, Dr. Rieux is no longer numb and cold, does not let the plague run rampant, but does his best to fight, although sometimes lonely and desperate, but will eventually stand up to fight the plague. Taru actively campaigned and established a voluntary organization for health and epidemic prevention.
Both paid a heavy price for the fight against the plague, with Rieux's wife contracting the plague, and Rieux not being able to see her until his wife died; Tarou dying of the plague. Eventually the plague receded, and the people cheered, the gongs and drums were loud, and the excitement was overflowing, but the plague that took the lives of countless relatives has become an eternal nightmare for the People of Oran.
French writer Albert Camus
Plague not only conveys a great liberal humanitarian spirit of resistance and justice in despair, but also explores some profound philosophical questions. For example, the conflict between personal happiness and social obligations. In the book, the journalist Lambert wants Dr. Rieux to issue him a certificate that he has not contracted the plague so that he can escape the plague and date his lover, but Rieux refuses this request, and Lambert accuses the doctor of "living in an abstract mind". Volunteer Taru reminds him that he must "choose" between personal happiness and fighting the plague. Lambert asked, "Have you made your own choices, or have you given up on happiness?" To this question, "neither Tarou nor Rieux answered", and the two "remained silent for a long time", and finally Rieux "laboriously straightened his body" and said: "Forgive me, Lambert, I do not know this question," adding: "There is nothing in the world worthy of people giving up their love for it." But I don't know why, and I also abandoned what I loved."
This fragment shows the paradoxes and contradictions of Camus's personal thought, when personal happiness and objective reality are in a fierce conflict, how to choose is the right one? Camus also "can't say clearly" and "doesn't know why". But in the end, Camus still used Dr. Rieux's statement to find a "temporary" answer to this question, dr. Rieux said: "Man cannot cure the disease again and know everything at the same time." Then let's cure others as soon as possible. That is the top priority." Camus eventually chose to resist the absurd by fighting.
At the same time, Camus's "Plague" is not only "a plague", but also uses the "plague" to express his disgust and condemnation of war. The idea of "Plague" began to brew in 1940 after the occupation of Paris by German fascists. In 1942 Camus, suffering a recurrence of lung disease, camus was transferred from the hot orlands of Oran to the mountains of Panarière in southern France, and soon the Germans occupied southern France. Camus once compared the overbearing German army to "like a rat" in his diary. Camus believed that the French people at that time were under the rule of fascist authoritarian powers, just like during the plague epidemic in the European Middle Ages, living a long-term life of captivity isolated from the outside world, and he himself was suffering from the loss of information from his family and loneliness and helplessness.
Camus's use of rats to map "fascism", while the plague symbolizes the unbearable war, provided the real material for Camus to create The Plague. He once wrote in his novels, "There are as many plagues in the world as there are wars, and in the face of plague and war, people are always equally overwhelmed."
Whether it is cholera or plague, the disasters in literary works are actually metaphors for the disasters of war, plague, disease and so on in the real society, from which human beings cannot get rid of in the past, now and even in the future; they remind human beings all the time that there is no reason to be blindly arrogant and conceited, and there is no reason to wantonly destroy the nature on which it depends. Of course, when the "plague" really arrives, don't panic, maybe you can also encounter a "love during the plague period", just like the "SARS" in Beijing that year, which opened the golden age of e-commerce online shopping.
(Some of the pictures are from the Internet, the copyright belongs to the original author)
The author of this article is Li Guangdou: the first person of Chinese brand, CCTV brand consultant, famous brand strategy expert, founder of brand competitiveness school, founder of Huasheng Zhiye Li Guangdou brand marketing agency.