Is Love in the Time of Cholera a Spoilt Novel?

The unending thoughts on love

The unification of the lovers is sometimes seen as a blemish in an otherwise perfect romantic novel

On 28 December 2019 in Kerala, the 65 year old Lakshmi Ammal and Kochaniyan Menon aged 67, got married after falling in love at an old age home in Thrissur district of Kerala. The social media went on to celebrate this “unusual” love story as a subversion of the concept of age in love. While it is not rare that elder couples get married, what makes Ammal and Menon a favorite of the media is that they “fell in love” when they had nothing except the four walls of the old age home and the loneliness that accompanied it.

The example of Ammal and Menon draws attention to two apparently distinct concepts: old age and love. The concept of love has often been understood as the interest of young people, who either succeed in it or die desperately in their pursuit of unrequited love. In either way, old age and unrequited love seems to be at odds until occasionally few couples like Ammal and Menon proves that one can live and love without being constrained by the limits of age and time.

Love has always been the favourite domain of poets and novelists and ‘unrequited love’ is their most favourite amongst all. Of all those examples in literature that epitomizes unrequited love, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera stands apart in its own space, subverting the limits of love and time not to mention the looming presence of cholera.

However it is not the unrequited love of Florentino Ariza that gives the novel its subversive quality; rather it is the (i) realization of love as an end in itself, which transcends the popular concepts of love and (ii) exploration of the dynamics of love that change with time and the fine balance between them that makes it a romantic with a subversive quality. It is this conceptualization of love that Marquez brings in when he unites Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza at the end of the novel.

By popular concepts I mostly mean the way in which unrequited love and death are represented as inter-related to each other. Literatures of love are considered poignant only when they are tragic and the most celebrated lovers are often victims of unrequited love (Heathcliff and Cathy from Wuthering Heights). Death in love or liebestod as David M. Koeninger suggests is the only way by which infinite love can be represented in the finite space of the novel.

However, Marquez subverts this tradition of the West that objectifies infinite love as the cause of death; instead he presents Florentino Ariza and his love that lasts “fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights” which signifies the intensity of his love that even stands against death: “As he was falling he had enough lucidity to think that he was not going to die of this accident because the logic of life would not allow two men, who had loved the same woman so much for so many years, to die in the same way within a year of each other” (Love in the Time of Cholera). Florentino, as Marquez represents, does not consider love’s validation through death, instead he proves that it is love that can draw people towards life itself.

Again, Love in the Time of Cholera is a “meditation on life, love, old age, death”. While life, love and death occupy the three-dimensions of romantic stories, love in old age should match the poignancy of death in love without being tampered by the desire and lust that accompanies it. Florentino and Fermina exemplify this poignancy even during the initial days of their love. But it is only when they meet after “fifty-one years, nine months and four days” that they begin to realize the contradictions of love in old age.

This is particularly notable in Fermina, whose convictions about love always had a meditative quality that had slowly started to degenerate after the death of her husband Urbino. But the mutual friendship that she and Florentino develops allows her to see “for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren.”

It is this realization which invades the idea that love is fleeting that gives Fermina the strength to oppose the “mean minded moralism” of her daughter. So when Marquez says that “love is love in any period and in any place, but that it increases in intensity the closer we are to death” he emphasizes their love as not only a romantic story, but also a meditation on love itself.

Florentino Ariza’s and Fermina Daza’s unification at the end of the novel does not diminish its position as a romantic novel. Love in the Time of Cholera on the other hand is not just a love story, instead it exemplifies love not as a binding force, something that is narrow and compartmentalized, but as a liberating entity, from either death or old age, that few people like Ammal and Menon have realized.

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