Abstract
But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
I read Love in the Time of Cholera when I was twenty-four. It seemed to me a paean to romantic love, the kind that, at that unripe age, I could still idealize. I was also captivated by the adventures of the main characters. I recently read it again. Coincidentally, I read it several months before the 2019 coronavirus showed up in Wuhan. I jumped into the book with the expectation of being taken along for a rollicking ride where the main characters’ undying passion for one another would swirl and swoop in and around me. What I found, thirty years’ of experience and a psychoanalysis later, was a much more twisted sort of love story than I had remembered it to be, where a melodramatic notion of love, the kind of adolescent—or even infantile—love that likely appealed to me in my young adulthood was pockmarked with acts of cruelty and mendacity, with exploitation and prejudice aimed at those with less power. Despite the pleasure I took in taking in Márquez’s vivid writing, I found it hard to get through. I hung in there, perhaps brought along by the book’s poeticism and Márquez’s way of telling tales that wend in intertwining serpentine strands. But it left me sad and wondering whether I had participated in something hurtful, something exploitative.
During the current pandemic, many newspaper articles, scientific papers, and TV news programs, as well as psychoanalytic conferences, have echoed the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s highly acclaimed novel, Love in the Time of Cholera (1988). An online search brings up nearly four hundred news and journal article titles using the phrase “in the time of Covid,” from “Co-ops in the Time of Covid” (Chen 2020) to “The Need for Data Innovation in the Time of Covid” (Heggeness 2020). In addition, just ten months into the pandemic there were already a number of psychoanalytic presentations and two published journal articles listed on PEP-Web (Birksted-Breen 2020; Haylett 2020) using the phrase.
Despite these repeated allusions to Márquez’s title, few if any of these articles or presentations refer to the novel itself, or to the disturbing contradictions it contains and, in my opinion, refuses to reconcile: that sexual and environmental rape often exist side by side with romantic, seemingly pure and idyllic love. That very love, like cholera, can be a deadly illness from which one can not only die but with which one can also infect others, sickening and even killing them. Thus, how might we understand this novel’s becoming an inadvertent—or, we might say, an unconscious—anchor point in our attempts to make meaning of the calamities we find ourselves subjected to during this “time of Covid”?
The Story
The backdrop to the novel is a raging cholera epidemic, so deadly that in the city of the novel the churches and convent cloisters are filled with dead bodies. On a nearby cattle ranch, bodies are buried three deep in the pastures until the soil literally oozes with blood. The book tells the story of a young man, Florentino Ariza, who falls madly in love with Fermina Daza, herself just a teenager. From a park across the street from her home, he plays a violin concerto titled The Crowned Goddess. He also sends her love letters overflowing with expressions of a love of almost inhuman intensity. Finally, against her will, she falls madly in love with him.
But Florentino’s heart is crushed when Fermina marries the staid, cultured, and respected physician, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino lives his life waiting, in a desert of unrequited love, for Fermina’s husband to die so he can fulfill his dream of sharing his love with her. Meanwhile, though, while waiting for this moment he fills his life with sex. The number of his sexual encounters runs, by his own count (detailed in a ledger he titles “Women”) to 622.
The last person on this list, before the opportunity to fulfill his dream of having Fermina to himself arises, is a girl named America Vicuña, still in elementary school. Her parents have sent her to the city to attend the convent school there, and have entrusted Florentino with her care. He picks her up from the school each weekend, during which he has sex with her (more precisely, given her age, he rapes her). When he drops her without a word to be with the newly widowed Fermina, the girl, infatuated with Florentino, becomes morbidly depressed. She stops sleeping, eating, or attending school and finally commits suicide.
When he is not having sex, Florentino runs his uncle’s shipping company. Thus, it is he who decides, without apparent thought about the consequences, to run steamships up and down the river, burning wood until the mangroves and jungles along the river have been destroyed. He is too obsessed with his unrequited love for Fermina, and too preoccupied with the sexual experiences he seeks out in her absence, to notice that his company is raping the natural world.
The book closes with the two of them, having rekindled their love in old age, on a steamboat owned by his company. They are finally content. However, it occurs to them that, to protect this state of love and contentment, they must remain on the boat. So Florentino convinces the captain to fly a yellow flag indicating that someone with cholera is on board and the boat cannot take on passengers. Thus, the boat can sail back and forth, from port to port, past the destroyed wetlands and the dead choleric bodies floating in the water, allowing Florentino and Fermina to enjoy the lives they have spent their lifetimes anticipating.
Dissociation and Disavowal
In Spanish, the word cholera (cólera) has a number of meanings, including intense rage or outrage (the word derives from cholé, ancient Greek for bile). In English the words choler and choleric bear similar meanings. Like America Vicuña, the trees are destroyed—perhaps in an unconscious act of misogynistic violence toward the woman who has jilted him. Only by distancing himself from the narcissistic rage of losing the love of his life to an oedipal victor, the exceedingly more mature Urbino, can he preserve his love for Fermina.
Although Márquez does not hide or excuse Florentino’s immorality, neither does he describe his behavior with any sense of outrage, disgust, or condemnation. Márquez’s narrator comes across as a disconnected observer, someone numb or indifferent to the immorality of the acts he describes, neither approving nor condemning them. This matter-of-fact reportorial style (earlier in his career, Márquez worked as a journalist), the style that perhaps seduced me and many others into seeing the story as primarily a love story, renders grotesque his character’s careless violence toward women and the environment.
This reportorial indifference, this absence of commitment to a morality, reminds me of the kind of dissociation that often drapes itself over abuse, that in clinical contexts I have often observed in both perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse. Often the psychic violence of abuse is committed in a mundane context where the line between right and wrong is smudged if not erased outright. Frequently people who mistreat others shroud themselves in the righteousness of an ideal: true love (for a partner, for a child), caretaking, fairness, morality. As Leonard Shengold (1989) has described so convincingly in Soul Murder, abuse of others always entails some form of mind control: all involved are encouraged to believe that the abuse did not happen or that what did happen was not hurtful or that other factors necessitated the hurt.
Some have seen Márquez (as did my young man self) as having written a glorious love story. For example, Merle Rubin (1988), writing in the Christian Science Monitor, described the book as “a boldly romantic . . . work of fiction that expands our sense of life’s infinite possibilities.” Others have suggested that Márquez is complicit in disavowing the impact of Florentino’s exploitation of others and of the world around him. In particular, an incisive essay by the novelist Richard Gwyn (2020) highlights Márquez’s minimization of Florentino’s exploitation and abuse of América Vicuña, describing their relationship as something “that elsewhere (outside of a García Márquez novel, that is) would be termed paedophilic.” I would suggest that the author’s taking the position of the reporter re-creates the all-too-frequent reality that surrounds abuse, the sense of not knowing what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, who is innocent and who is guilty. Is it Marquez who romanticizes Florentino and Fermina’s love and thus minimizes the sexual and environmental violence that surrounds it? Or is it we, his readers, who choose to do so? Are we complicit in choosing the ideal of love over the reality of exploitation?
Love in the Time of Cholera illustrates how a dissociated exploitativeness can serve the effort to preserve one’s connection with an idealized object. That is, to sustain life and love by disavowing one’s own hurtfulness is to perpetuate and magnify hurtfulness and to live and love in a way that is, at its core, perverse. In Kleinian terms, the idealization of the good maternal object (i.e., Fermina) allows Florentino to split off his choler, his rage at being denied unfettered access to this object. Thus, he is able to rape a child, to use hundreds of women for sex, to destroy the land, to pray for the death of his oedipal rival—all without guilt, all under the shadow of his unrequited romantic love, and behind the badge of his broken heart. Without the ambivalence that colors mature relating with others, that allows for a love that is not perfect but is good enough, the idealized object outshines—and is thus valued over—all other (i.e., real) objects. Thus, anything that threatens to breach the seamless surface of idealization cannot be tolerated and must be destroyed or ignored. For Florentino, such threats are represented not only by Fermina’s husband, but also by the laws of morality and decency.
In our so frequently referring to the Covid-19 crisis in a way that alludes to this book’s title, perhaps we are unconsciously acknowledging the endemic use of disavowal that this viral pandemic has brought to light. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed as a myth the idea that “we are all in this together.” Throughout even the worst days of the pandemic, one could walk past any restaurant with indoor dining and see unmasked customers giving their orders and perhaps making small talk with their masked servers. The servers, we might imagine, must act as if they are not scared for their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, of what might be carried on the breath of their customers as they go about the quotidian business of placing an order or chatting about the weather. The customers are engaging here in a perverse disavowal of the danger to which they are subjecting their servers in this seemingly innocent interchange. The servers, performing their roles, pretend not to be scared and the customers choose (likely unconsciously) to pretend that the performance is a genuine reflection of their servers’ experience.
A biological virus dominates the land at this moment, our cholera. But we are also facing a dramatic intensification in the U.S. of the other cólera: rage and outrage, the unadulterated spewing of bile resulting from a magnified tendency to split in order to protect an idealized object, an unambivalently loved mother or worshipped father. For a clear example of this we need only look at the rioters who on January 6 broke into the Capitol building, sanctimoniously shouting “This is our house!” while smashing windows with flagpoles from which hung the American flag, who broke into the Senate chamber and, while ransacking senators’ desks, fell silent in reverence as one of the men stood on the dais, thanked Jesus, and launched into a prayer of gratitude.
In every sphere—political, racial, gender, economic—sickness is everywhere we turn. It has always been there, although some of us are only now becoming aware of its ubiquity. And we each, in our own way, have justified our infecting others with the sickness of racism, of sexism, of classism (Eskin 2020). We do so in the service of getting or holding on to something we seek to love in a fantastical, unadulterated way, where feelings of aggression, hatred, and envy are absent.
By continually stressing that this period is “a time of Covid,” we are most certainly reminding ourselves that we are living in an era that is unusual, that normality is something different from what we are experiencing and that nothing lasts forever. That is, it is a way to help us keep in mind a good object when faced with a plethora of persecutory part-objects (coronavirus, election conspiracy theories, presidential tantrums, Proud Boys). That said, it is an act of disavowal to suggest that the rationalization and minimization of abusiveness and hurtfulness occurs in a discrete time, that it will at some point ebb on its own or be vaccinated away and that we will return to a time after physical and mental sickness, after the proliferation of disavowal to excuse one’s own hurtfulness.
Today, more than at any other period in the adult lives of many of us, the events around us, their enormity, press in on us and on our so-called private lives. Love in the Time of Cholera suggests that the life of a couple (including what Bion [1962] termed the internalized thinking couple that creatively generates symbolic meaning, that constitutes the psychic container) is deeply and sometimes deleteriously impacted, impinged upon, by larger matters—plagues, paternalistic racism, authoritarian control—that infect the space between each member of the couple, that engender hurtfulness toward each other, that marry the pleasure of love with the pain of exploitative and objectifying sex. We wish to believe our lives and loves are our own, that we can define them and guard them from the bigger events around us. But Márquez shows us that, especially in “times” of unthinkable societal anguish and turmoil of the sort we find ourselves in today, such a belief is a myth. In times like this, protecting the coupled space, the internalized containing function, requires enormous creativity, persistence, and sacrifice. If it is protected by deceit and mendacity in order to live in an artificial bubble, by waving one’s martyrdom flag in order to keep the real world at bay, that love is itself a lie.