That year, sixteen-year-old Guo Xiang came out to walk the rivers and lakes alone, and the great hero in her mind gave her three golden needles of wishing, and from then on, "once she saw Yang Guo mistakenly for life", she watched from afar in addition to Yang Guo's vigorous love with her aunt, and accompanied by green lanterns...
That year, Gatsby, who returned from the army, found that his beloved fiancée had married someone else, and he gritted his teeth and started from illegal trafficking, hoping only to win wealth and stand on a class with his sweetheart...
These "one-man loves" always make us regret, but they happen all the time. Today we still want to talk about such a story - "Love in the Time of Cholera".
This book tells the story of a literary and artistic young Alyssa who endured for 51 years, went from a postman to a boss, and finally survived the death of a love enemy and won the first love goddess at the end of her life.
The author of the book is García Márquez, a national treasure of Colombia, and his masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" not only won him the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, but also brought about a cultural phenomenon that made Latin American magic realism literature extremely popular!
"Love in the Time of Cholera" was published in the third year after he won the award, breaking the spell of "it is difficult to produce a good work after winning the award" by previous writers, and the limelight was unheard of, it was simply a "gifted" player!
Some say that this book is "the greatest love novel ever written by mankind", and it exhausts all the possibilities of love: loyal, secret, rough, shy, debauched...
But what we all know is that behind this book is the author's interpretation of three themes that have nothing to do with love through these specious "love appearances"—magic, death, and loneliness.
Stills from Love in the Time of Cholera
Love is nothing but madness. — Shakespeare
When the poor boy Alyssa went to the rich Lady Fermina's house for the first time to deliver a letter, she was like Guo Xiang to his goddess "at first sight"! Since then, she has been working hard all her life to "be with her", even if she is married to a woman, she is silently guarding it without abandoning it.
It wasn't until 51 years later, when Fermina's husband died in an accident, that she finally had the opportunity to renew her frontier with the goddess...
In this half-century-long guardianship, "love" is more like a "cholera" in life, once contaminated, it will be painful and have nowhere to escape!
The book is called the "Encyclopedia of Love", but after careful consideration, it is found that there is no shadow of love throughout the text, and the so-called loyal, rough, and debauched "love" is just Alyssa's act of deflecting her love for the "first love goddess" Fermina.
Maybe these "comforts" can cure loneliness for a short time, but there is nothing they can do about "Vibrio cholerae", and cholera symptoms continue!
Some people will be moved that even though Alyssa has as many as 622 "dew lovers" and records them all, she still has a firm "love" for Fermina in her heart.
However, this kind of waiting in a magic way is, in a way, more like the "unwillingness" of a man who "can't ask for it". All the chases, guards, and pains add to this unwilling weight, making him even more unable to give up this goal of life, and never die!
This kind of attachment that is close to "paranoia" if placed in reality, it will most likely be regarded as a "pervert" by girls...
So, after he finally survived the death of his love enemy, he rushed to Fermina and said to the woman who had just lost her husband: "I have always maintained your virginity for you!" When Fermina did the most normal reaction of all women, shouted at him: "Roll! ”
Márquez said, "Love, first and foremost, is an instinct, 'either born or never.' ' ”
Fermina was the one who "wouldn't love", and the original Alyssa was nothing more than a young lady in a high wall who was curious about the outside world, and during the three years that they were forcibly quarantined and could only keep in touch by writing letters, Alyssa was more like a "shadow" of her own imagination.
So when she saw Alyssa again, she suddenly found that his appearance in reality was no longer what she imagined, and more importantly, Alyssa's identity as an illegitimate child could not bring her the life she wanted, which was the conclusion that she had lived outside the high wall for three years.
As a doctor, Urbino's superior family situation, noble status can bring her a sense of worldly security and happiness, this kind of "love-like" thing. So she chose Urbino, a doctor whose mission is to "treat cholera", so that the "cholera virus" produced by her love is indirectly suppressed...
These so-called "loves" are, in the final analysis, nothing more than a magical performance.
The world is the inn, and death is the end of the journey – Jo Drayton
This novel about love, full of "death" breath, begins with Urbino's good friend Amor committing suicide with hydrated gold gas.
There are also more than one woman in the middle because of Alyssa's death, including the pigeon girl who was killed when her husband found out about him, and the last little lover who chose to die quietly in his own home because he was reunited with Fermina!
Not to mention the cholera scenes that often appear in it, which are dirty and decayed, and corpses are strewn across the field...
Some psychologists have shown that people's fear stems from the fear of death from the source of life. When human ancestors were still living in trees, due to the need to jump back and forth, the little ape on their backs was afraid of being thrown down and died, and could only hold their mother tightly, and this fear psychology rooted in genes, even if it evolved for millions of years, could not be eliminated, but was more abundant.
In García Márquez's book, "death" and "love" are intertwined, and can even be said to be another form of each other!
When Alyssa is white-haired, the 27-year-old lover uses his own death to prove his "love" for Alyssa; and Alyssa uses "love" as a way to fight "death": in his opinion, as long as he grasps the actual love, he can transcend the threat of death.
So at the end of the book, the author asks Alyssa and Fermina, who have been together through all odds, to choose to board the ship to experience their hard-won love, and let Alyssa, as the captain of the ship, command the crew: This ship will never dock!
Using the "ship that does not dock" to pin his expectations for illusory love, as if as long as they do not dock and will not be connected with the world, then their "love" will always exist, even beyond death!
This idea of "death" and "love" as one is not uncommon in literature: in "The Rose for Miss Emily", Emily, in order to be able to stay with her sweetheart, does not hesitate to poison the other party with arsenic and use his corpse to accompany herself;
In "Romeo and Juliet", two young people who love each other finally use death as a proof of love, and in "Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai", the good wishes of a lover who transform into butterflies after death continue the expectations of countless people for love...
People's attitudes toward "death and love" are borrowed from Uncle Alyssa in the book: "The only pain I feel about death is that I cannot die for love." ”
If there is only one word to describe the work of García Márquez, it must be: loneliness! Even the core of the "magic realism" that made him famous is a kind of bitter loneliness.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is his masterpiece, in which he creates a Buendia family, in which almost no trust and understanding is shared between everyone, and even if someone tries to do it, it will eventually fail, and then everyone will still be like a scattered sand, isolated from each other.
The situation of this family is like the small town of "Macondo": this ancient town tries to integrate into the new civilized world, but is threatened by the invasion and annexation of the other side, and finally can only be "lonely for a hundred years" in an open civilization world...
García Márquez's pen has all kinds of "loneliness": in dreams, in distress, in fear, etc., "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a metaphor for the thick loneliness of Latin America in the entire civilized world, while "Love in the Time of Cholera" is more inclined to "loneliness in love" between people!
The novel is set in Colombia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, when the whole world was not at peace, just after the Sino-Japanese War in China, the October Revolution in Russia was breaking out, and Colombia was facing three major disasters: cholera, war and vandalism.
People living in this environment are displaced by internal and external troubles, and there is a danger of death at any time, and the fear of the end times hangs over everyone's head.
The harsh social environment makes the trust between people and people almost to a freezing point, and the estrangement is getting bigger and bigger, and almost every character in the book is trying to escape loneliness:
Urbino, unable to understand, turned around and derailed the loneliness in the marriage; Fermina was happy on the surface but empty inside, facing the betrayal of her husband, she could only choose to run away from home to escape the harm he caused to herself, there seemed to be two people in the marriage, but they were still lonely!
And Alyssa was a lonely watchman for 51 years, although she used 622 dew love affairs to continuously divert the pain of lovesickness, but she still had to accept the regurgitation of indulgence after the passion.
This "loneliness in love" reflects the mentality of the whole society at that time, in the face of this social loneliness, the meaning of life and self-worth are illusory, almost everything in this world has become opposed, and human society seems to be banished by God...
But the author is not just preaching loneliness in gray, on the contrary, he hopes to awaken people's reflection on the current state of society and change the relationship between people, society, and nature, which stems from his love for the world!
On the other hand, we are now far from the 19th century shown in the novel, but this social loneliness does not seem to have improved much, there is a saying: "Television, an entertainment medium that can make countless people laugh at the same joke at the same time, still makes people feel lonely." ”
In fact, not only television, but also mobile phones, computers and more and more "humanized" services, making it possible for people to survive without leaving home, the connection between people has fallen to the weakest in history, even marriage and partners have become optional, civilization is becoming more and more progressive, and people are becoming more and more lonely...
Loneliness runs through human beings at all times and becomes the fate of human beings.
"Love in the Time of Cholera", a novel from decades ago, is still very interesting to read today. Some people see love in it, some people see obscenity, some people see compassion, some people see love, and these opposite attitudes all appear in this book at the same time.
What do you see in this book?
Resources:
Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez
"Love in the Cholera Period from a Feminist Perspective" Zhu Xishi, Qi Shuqin
"The Utopia of Love" talks about Qingyan
"The Paradox of Love" Zhang Ning