I’m not used to writing about or concerning myself with love, but this entire book is nothing but a love story. Not a romantic love story but an objective situational report on the status love in the lives of the main characters. It is a story about love but it is not a sentimental story about love. I suppose this is why I like the story…or can at least stand it. It’s not about idealized sentimental love. Instead, Love in the Time of Cholera shows us several different types of love and contrasts them to each other.
Like we talked about in class, there are two main types of love in the story. Florentino represents an intensely passionate, fast-paced love. He loves on sight with no hesitation. He is relentless in his pursuits…at first, but most of his flings end unceremoniously with a general loss of interest. He continually replaces his faded glories with a new short-term passion. Florentino’s love is something like a bottle rocket. Starts out big but doesn’t last long.
However, Florentino has this perpetual obsession with Fermina Daza also. Fermina is his emotional passion and obsession and his numerous mistresses are his physical passion in her absence. His affairs combined with his emotional obsession for Fermina make one whole love for Florentino.
He needs both loves to feel whole but he consciously tries to keep them separate in an effort to be faithful to Fermina. There are only two explanations for this behavior. One, Florentino has no true emotional connection to his mistresses and considers them only as purely physical and sexual relationships. Therefore, he must not consider his flings as substantial relationships and feels that they are not comparable to his love for Fermina. Two, he is a lying, deceitful fraud who is totally uncommitted to Fermina. I have no problem with his being a player but his mental disassociation of his love affairs and his love for Fermina even though he wishes to appear faithful is both interesting and startling. Through Florentino, Marquez presents physical love and unattainable love-from-a-distance.
Of course, Urbino and Fermina represent the other type of love. Their type is not passionate. It is not immediate. It can only be described as an acquired taste. They slowly come to depend on each other physically and emotionally but their relationship is almost devoid of physical passion. Yet, it can be considered no less true than any other type of love. Indeed, in many ways it is more real than Florentino’s type of love simply because it has lasted through the years. Urbino and Fermina’s love is the exact opposite of Florentino’s. Their love is slow, emotional and stable. More like a diesel engine--slow to start up but long running. However, neither type of love can be considered inferior.
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Gary--only you would come up with the bottle rocket vs. diesel engine analogy to explain the two major varieties of love in this novel. And, as so often happens with your unusual analogies, you explain it in a way that I find myself, at least in part, agreeing.
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