SOURCE: Jones, Anny Brooksbank. “Utopia and Other Commonplaces in García Márquez's El amor en los tiempos del cólera.” Modern Language Review 89, no. 3 (July 1994): 635-44.

A number of critics have noted what Verity Smith calls García Márquez's ‘growing concern with the position of women in society’ and the shifts in their characterization since Cien años de soledad (1967).¹ For Sandra María Boschetto this process begins with Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981), in which ‘García Márquez undertakes […] a view of women in which, although granted that the outline is more sketchy, the figure is more convincing.’.² Later in the same article Boschetto nevertheless admits to being disturbed by certain episodes in Crónica, for example when Angela Vicario ‘falls madly in love’ on her wedding night ‘with the man who rejects her like a dirty rag’ (p. 130). Apart from a closing observation to the effect that García Márquez fares rather better when he is dealing with art than with life—a more problematic distinction in this context that she acknowledges—Boschetto does not attempt to bring these two observations together.

What follows is an exploration of the tension that Boschetto (half) observes, based on the novel published four years after Crónica, El amor en los tiempos del cólera.³ Reading such tension as symptomatic of the negotiations demanded of each of us as relations between men and women continue to change, the article explores the place of stereotypes in this process, and closes with some thoughts on García Márquez's own much-debated relation to his feminist readers.

According to the dustjacket of the Bruguera edition, El amor sets before the reader ‘una suerte de inventario pasional que consigna tanto las crudas imposiciones de la carne como los meandros sutiles del sentimiento porque “el corazón tiene más cuartos que un hotel de putas”, y porque el amor es un fluido que se expande como los círculos tejidos por una piedra en un estanque’.⁴ The dustjacket also highlights the novel's use of ‘los ingredientes clásicos del género folletinesco’. In an interview published four years later, however, García Márquez emphasizes a rather different source: ‘In reality it's my parents' love story. I heard my father and mother both talk about these love stories. That's why the story is set during the period of their youth, although I put much of the story back even further in time. My father was a telegrapher who also played the violin and wrote love poems’ (Williams, p. 138).

As is so often the case, the exact status of correlations and divergences between García Márquez's ‘facts’ and his ‘fiction’ is questionable. I am talking not about his parents' relationship or their love but about their ‘love story’—a representation that is already inextricable from talk about (other/s') ‘love stories’. Events and details from his parents' marriage and his own marriage may figure in those of his characters, but García Márquez is quite clear that Florentino's concept of love is ‘totally ideal and […] doesn't correspond to reality’; it owes more to ‘bad poetry’ (Williams, p. 131).⁵ In an author who holds that ‘you can only get to good poetry by means of bad poetry’ one would expect ‘bad’ to be a rather flexible term, and a number of El amor's critics have indeed noted that stereotypes from sentimental poetry and popular literature are represented in the novel with considerable sympathy, nostalgia, and attention to detail.⁶ Michael Wood and Stephen Minta take this further: for Minta ‘the novel deals confidently in cliché and improbable exaggeration, searching for truths about emotional life which, the book implies, are as solidly embedded in the language of the popular imagination as in the most subtle language of psychological analysis’.⁷ Wood, however, is unconvinced by the power of such stereotypes to reveal truths, and suggests that García Márquez's fondness for the clichés he deploys is so evident as to undermine or leave little room for irony in their representation:

The novel is not an old-fashioned serial but […] it isn't far enough away for irony. […] If he moves away from his stereotypes, he begins to condescend to them, and to drop their truths for his. If he repeats them, he can only gesture vaguely, as they do, towards those complex truths—can hint that they are there, but not focus on them with any precision.⁸

The implications of Minta's and Wood's assumptions become clear when they are referred to specific stereotypical encounters in the novel. One particularly striking example is Florentino Ariza's affair with Sara Noriega. Although she, too, fails to win a prize at the ‘Juegos Florales’ her disappointment and ‘aflicción sincera’ are reserved exclusively for him (p. 286). Back at her chambers, one kiss from Florentino is enough to bend her entire body, ‘monumental, ávido y cálido’ to his will (p. 286). The climax of the encounter is more like a transfiguration, as the maternal eroticism of her ‘tetamenta astronómica’ is displaced by the ‘chupón de niño’ which Sara ‘tenía que succionar […] para alcanzar la gloria plena’ (p. 289).

Among the less attractive features of the encounter is some excruciating feline claw-play, when Florentino ‘tuvo que resignarse a tener en la cama al gato enfurecido’ of his lover (p. 291). Sara's ‘gato’ is only one of the alien elements in this particular encounter. She is as knowledgeable and as available as fantasy requires because she was consigned by her first boyfriend to ‘un limbo de novia burlada’ and left with an illegitimate child (p. 289). This glimmer of social realism is quickly subordinated to erotic fancy: the experience ‘no la dejó ninguna amargura’ and she continues to believe that ‘no valía la pena vivir si no era para tener un hombre en la cama’ (p. 289). Minta may well be right when he observes that the novel ‘constantly challenges the reader to adopt a knowing, cynical, or sophisticated response to the events described, and then works hard to ensure victory for a certain kind of innocence’ (p. 128). The success of this hard work is, however, finally indistinguishable from the failure of distance suggested by Wood: in both cases the reader is confronted with highly dubious but lovingly depicted stereotypical features and no focused or sustained point from which they might be seriously questioned.

Boschetto offers a slightly different perspective on García Márquez's failures and successes when she notes that what is a failure in Crónica at one level (‘the world’), may be a triumph at another (‘art’) (p. 134). The difficulties of this type of distinction, particularly in relation to El amor, have already been suggested; more interesting in this context is the tension that leads Boschetto to posit it. As noted, this tension arises between García Márquez's increasingly detailed and complex female characters and his continuing use from time to time of clichéd encounters between men and women which seem to have very little to redeem them in feminist—and arguably in human—terms. One striking example concerns the ‘negra, joven y bonita’ Leona Cassiani, for example, who having been left ‘tirada sobre las piedras, llena de cortaduras por todo el cuerpe’ after a violent rape, spends the rest of her life seeking out the perpetrator for more of his good, hard ‘amor’ (p. 376).

We cannot simply blame these unreconstructed moments on García Márquez's popular sources and maintain that his own larger vision overrides them: first, because, as noted, the balance does seem to remain largely in favour of popular sources, and second, because the distinction between unreconstructed and reconstructed moments is, in practice, rarely clear cut. Take, for example, the case of Lotario Thugut, ‘que se daba una vida de rey explotando a tres mujeres al mismo tiempo. Las tres le rendían cuentas al amanecer, humilladas a sus pies para hacerse perdonar sus recaudos exiguos, y la única gratificación que anhelaban era que él se acostara con la que llevaba más dinero’ (p. 100).

Having confronted the all too familiar image of exploited and humiliated women with his usual gusto, García Márquez does gesture towards a question. The character's name goes some way to reframing the encounter, and there is a suggestion of further reframing when Florentino speculates that ‘sólo el terror podía inducir a semejante indignidad’ (p. 100). Now if (and only if) Nancy Friday and her disciples are to be believed, erotic fantasies (even feminists' erotic fantasies) bristle with such imagined indignities, any of which would be unthinkable outside their fantasy setting. When García Márquez confronts erotic fantasy with ‘indignidad’ and ‘terror’, there is a brief, jarring recognition of this incoherence. It is smoothed over instantly, however, when one of the women explains that ‘estas cosas […] sólo pueden hacerse por amor’ (p. 101).

This could be read as a victory for Minta's ‘certain kind of innocence’, recidivism, or something else. After all, there may indeed be something to be said for reuniting love and the erotic, so often sundered in certain types of contemporary fiction. That is not the same thing as conflating them, however. Gene Bell-Villada notes:

As has often been commented, there is almost every possible sort of male-female tie in Love—older-younger affair and vice versa, female-on-male rape and vice versa, adultery and masturbation, prostitution, jilting, crime of passion, suicide for love, conjugal affection, unconsummated sexual attraction, young love, elderly love, and a formal courtship complete with chaperone and go-between.

(p. 194)⁹

Yet though this inventorial approach seems to exhaust all options, some—most notably the western liberal ideal of an exclusive, enduring, reciprocal, and symmetrically powered (heterosexual or homosexual) relation—do not figure at all, while others receive disproportionate attention. The reader is reminded more than once, for example, that ‘se puede estar enamorado de varias personas a la vez […] sin traicionar a ninguna’ because ‘el corazón tiene más cuartos que un hotel de putas’ (p. 394). Simply insisting on variety does not guarantee polyvalence, however: the novel's dustjacket confirms that the same sort of thing is happening in every single ‘cuarto’ by reducing all options to either ‘los meandros sutiles del sentimiento’ or ‘las crudas imposiciones de la carne’. Although Fermina is arguably the only recipient of the first kind of ‘amor’, her most virulent detractor (Sara Noriega) restricts even this to something like a subset of the second kind, when she divides love into ‘amor del alma de la cintura para arriba y amor del cuerpo de la cintura para abajo’ (p. 292).

What does tend to unite the head and the body, while further restricting options for the novel's women characters, is the fact that sentimental and fleshly impositions have key features in common. Of these perhaps the most obvious is the gaze with which—chronic myopia (or eyestrain) notwithstanding—Florentino fixes his objects.¹⁰ At one end of the spectrum are the shy or sly glances reserved for Fermina; at the other is the what-the-butler-saw, grand guignol type of encounter reserved for Sara Noriega and others. Of course, Florentino himself is not much to look at: ‘Era escúalido […] con un cabello indio sometido con pomada de olor, y los espejuelos de miope que aumentaban su aspecto de desamparo. Aparte del defecto de la vista, sufría de un estreñimiento crónico que lo obligó a aplicarse lavativas purgantes toda la vida’ (pp. 86-87). This apparent ‘defecto de la vista’ helps to argument his appeal to women: ‘A pesar de su aire desmirriado, de su retraimiento y de su vestimenta sombría, las muchachas de su grupo hacían rifas secretas para jugar a quedarse con él’ (pp. 86-87). Attempts to extend his vision—in the local lighthouse, for example, where ‘aprendió a alimentar la luz […] a dirigirla y a aumentarla con espejos’ (p. 144)—are finally unsatisfying, and when he uses the ‘catalejo’ installed up there to survey ‘las playas de mujeres’ below, ‘no podía verse más ni nada más excitante de lo que podía verse en la calle’ (p. 145).

Without these aids, however, Florentino finds love everywhere he looks. Even Fermina Daza's resistance is finally worn down, apparently by his conviction that the most striking and difficult of women will succumb to the most unprepossessing man if he needs her enough. Throughout this time Florentino's gaze sustains a sentimental attachment that has almost no reciprocal dimension, either verbal or physical. The initial ‘cataclismo de amor’ is triggered by a casual glance—the glance, it seems, of a girl who ‘levantó la vista para ver quién pasaba por la ventana’ (p. 88). Nothing is said about the perceiver of that look, though Florentino will himself have needed rather more than a glance to interpret the ‘visión rara’ of a girl teaching her aunt to read, and to recognize his ideal love object (p. 88). He pursues her obsessively: at first ‘con ver a la niña le bastaba’ but ‘poco a poco fue idealizándola’ until, by his efforts, she becomes a ‘doncella’, transfigured and fixed ‘con la alquimia de la poesía’ (pp. 90, 101).

Others, meanwhile, are constructing Fermina rather differently. Like Florentino, ‘la tía Escolástica’ monitors her niece's every move and does not leave him ‘el menor resquicio para acercarse’ (p. 90). Like the riverboat captain in the novel's closing pages, however, she is won over by Florentino's ability to speak as if ‘por inspiración del Espíritu Santo’ (p. 104). The nuns who watch Fermina in the name of her father are more hard-headed, forcing Florentino to appeal to Lorenzo Daza directly. This time, even ‘el Espíritu Santo’ cannot help him: Daza sends his daughter away ‘aquella misma mañana […] al viaje del olvido’ (p. 127).

Catching sight of the mature Fermina on her return home Florentino ‘se sintió sacudido por un estremecimiento sísmico’ (p. 150): ‘La espiaba’, ‘en estado natural’; ‘la perseguía sin aliento’, ‘sin dejarse ver’ (pp. 151-53). When Fermina finally intercepts his gaze, ‘despertó del hechizo. […] En un instante se le reveló completa la magnitud de su propio engaño’ (p. 155). Years later, when Fermina is still refusing to see him, Florentino watches her reflection in a restaurant mirror and buys it ‘no por los primores del marco, sino por el espacio interior, que había sido ocupado durante dos horas por la imagen amada’ (p. 334). As he scans it for a glimpse of his love the mirror does not crack, and nor does the novelistic world. Not until she finally responds to his solicitations will he see Fermina's image in the glass. Until then the reader cannot even be sure he sees his own, for with the help of Fermina and his supplementary loves, Florentino is ‘todo amor’ (p. 193): without it he is a slightly sinister ‘necesitado de amor’ (p. 226) who, like Fantomas, Mr Hyde, or Cortázar's Laurent, hunts ‘pajaritas’ by night (p. 256), and is notable chiefly for ‘his shadowy unreality, his apparent nothingness’.¹¹

This preference for illicit watching leads Florentino to exercise custody of the eyes in the one place where ‘ver y dejarse ver’ are actively promoted as ‘refinamientos de príncipes en Europa’ and accommodated in ‘cubículos de cartón con agujeros de alfileres, que lo mismo se alquilaban para hacer que para ver’ (p. 100). In the local bordello it is, perversely, ‘la lectura’ (p. 116) in a room reserved for the purpose that is his ‘vicio insaciable’ (p. 101). He also discovered ‘los secretos del amor sin amor’, though it has to be said that accounts of his initiation—the fully dressed male revelling in a ‘paraíso de la desnudez [femenina]’, for example—are rooted in equally familiar fantasies (p. 118). One particularly striking encounter involves a woman whose marginal character echoes his own. The ‘encargada de la limpieza’ is ‘joven’ but ‘envejecida’; dressed like a ‘penitente en la gloria de la desnudez’ she collects ‘preservativos usados’ and other refuse of ‘amor’ (p. 120). He sees her ‘a diario sin sentirse visto’, until one day she mistakes his own preserved love for leftovers and tries to lay hands on it: ‘pasó cerca de la cama y él sintió la mano tibia y tierna’, fetishistically severed from the desiring body, ‘en la cruz de su vientre’, ‘la sintió buscándolo, la sintió encontrarlo, la sintió soltándole los botones’ (p. 120). This is perhaps another familiar fantasy, but this time with no climax; for the moment at least Florentino has eyes only for Fermina. He nevertheless pretends to read until his own desire becomes strikingly visible and ‘tuvo que esquivar el cuerpo’ (p. 120). By keeping his mind (half) on the sentimental pleasures of fidelity he can enjoy the woman's bodily desire without returning it, and in the process have his own desirability affirmed. This initiation prefigures all Florentino's subsequent affairs: in Fermina's case he is described as cultivating his obsession until her husband is dead; in all other cases it is the image of Fermina and the act of cultivation that distract him.

Later, having decided to preserve only sentimental love for Fermina, Florentino can indulge his ‘ojo certero para conocer de inmediato a la mujer que lo esperaba, así fuera en medio de una muchedumbre’ (pp. 225-26). There appears to be no shortage of takers: Josefa Zúñiga is ‘loca de amor por él’; Prudencia Pitre ‘le habría vendido el alma al diablo por casarse con él’; Sara Noriega ‘abandonaba lo que estuviera haciendo, fuera lo que fuera, y se consagraba el cuerpo entero a tratar de hacerlo feliz’ (pp. 393, 416, 290). And this is all because ‘lo identificaban de inmediato como […] un menesteroso de la calle con una humildad de perro apaleado que las rendía sin condiciones, sin pedir nada, sin esperar nada de él, aparte de la tranquilidad de conciencia de haberle hecho el favor’ (p. 226).

At first glance this arrangement looks satisfactory for all concerned: a certain absence of qualities means that Florentino has nothing women can demand of him, while boundless compassion on their part ensures that they would not want it if he had. ‘Menesterosas’ like the ‘encargada de la limpieza’ will be disappointed, but this need not stop them playing their part alongside Florentino's other women, helping him to forget his ideal love, and to prove that he cannot forget her. In the process these supplementary ‘amores’ punish Fermina, yet they give Florentino the self-confidence to aspire to her; they keep him fit and sexually active for her; they help him accept the aging process and their aging competitor as a sexual partner; they bring him a certain status and wealth to pass on to her when the moment of union comes.

The (seemingly paradoxical) notion that women construct their self-image in the selfless service of others is distinctly unpromising for women who are not so inclined, and even, it could be argued, for those who are. This novel's version of it—that women find dependency in men attractive and derive their own pleasure from engaging with it—is potentially less objectionable, particularly when it is linked with a principal character who depends explicitly on women for his own sense of self. Once again, however, the narrative model he has chosen prevents García Márquez from developing the potential he registers. By the time Florentino is in a position to take the hand of the strong-willed woman who rejected him for his weakness, the narrative-drive towards consummation is flattening all other stories and possibilities. When Florentino reflects that ‘había hecho y pensado todo lo que había hecho en la vida, llegaba a la cumbre sin otra causa que la determinación encarnizada de estar vivo y en buen estado de salud en el momento de asumir su destino’ (p. 391) he makes no mention of the team pulling him from above. Indeed, ‘seiscientos veintidós […] amores continuados’ after their first meeting he tells Fermina: ‘sin un temblor en la voz: Es que me he conservado virgen para ti’ (p. 490).

At first sight her lover's lifelong habit of duplicity and non-reciprocity make the prognosis for Fermina less than promising. Yet if, as the narrative sometimes suggests, adventures of ‘sentimiento’ and ‘carne’ are generically incommensurable and thus discontinuous, there is a sense in which he is not lying when he says he has remained a virgin for her. It would be rather easier to sustain this line, however, if his lists of conquests did not include fleshly attachments that were also romantic: there is the dazzling Angeles Alfaro, ‘la efímera y la más amada de todas’ (p. 393); there is the affair with Olimpia Zuleta, ‘la única vez, desde los primeros tiempos del primer amor en que sintió atravesado por una lanza’ (p. 317); there is ‘la viuda de Nazaret’, ‘la única que irradiaba ternura de sobra como para sustituir a Fermina’ (p. 392). With the widow in particular, the distance between Fermina and her rival, sentiment and body, has narrowed almost to nothing, and must be reaffirmed by other means: ‘lograron ser amantes intermitentes durante casi treinta años gracias a su divisa de mosqueteros: Infieles, pero no desleales’ (p. 393). Since ‘desleal’, according to the Vox Diccionario General de la Lengua Española, signifies ‘que no guarda la debida fidelidad’ and ‘infiel’ may be defined as ‘falto de fidelidad’ this reaffirmation is less persuasive than it seems. It is further undermined by Florentino's reaction to the death of Olimpia Zuleta: hearing that his lover's throat has been cut by her husband. ‘no le temía tanta la navaja en el cuello, ni el escándalo público, como a la mala suerte de que Fermina se enterara de su deslealtad’ (p. 318). It seems that the narrative, itself wilfully ‘infiel’ or ‘falto de exactitud’, is once again positing distinctions it cannot sustain.

I have already made some observations concerning Florentino's supplementary relations, but before I examine the effects of these clashing disloyalties in the novel's closing pages, something needs to be said about Fermina's own past loves. There is little evidence of romance in her marriage to Dr Juvenal Urbino, though it appears to bring her all the economic security, social power, and respectability her disreputable father had hoped for. Minta describes this marriage as:

A world of happiness from which there is no escape, in which she has largely ceased to exist except as the source of happiness and security for another, her husband's shield against the terrors of life and death. It is a relationship that has found its best moments in a carefully contrived harmony of apparently mutual support, but it has never quite passed beyond that.

(p. 140)

For Minta, Urbino is the novel's principal character, ‘the centre of authority against which the book so joyously rebels’ (p. 140). Given Fermina's economic dependence, however, rebellion against domestic attrition and her husband's infidelity is available to her only in a very limited form. It is not clear what happiness for an independent-minded woman might be in these circumstances, but describing their relationship as one of ‘apparently mutual support’ is rather like tying someone's legs to a tree and calling it a crutch. For all this, the detailed accounts of social and domestic irritations, the small joys and larger incomprehensions, suggest that the novel's model of married love is the ‘middle’ of the story, for which García Márquez turned from his parents' ‘love stories’ to his own ‘life’.¹² For all its shortcomings, there is a sense in which infatuation sustained by sentimental fantasy and non-consummation is hardly more attractive, yet almost as soon as her husband is off the scene Florentino inherits ‘el amor que se le había quedado sin dueño’ (p. 476).

Fermina is eased through this transition by the supplement to Florentino's Secrelario de los enamorados, which contains the insights of a lifetime, ‘con base en sus ideas y experiencias de las relaciones entre hombre y mujer’ (p. 425). The status of these ‘relations’ has already been questioned and is highlighted in the novel's closing pages in a way which suggests that women who restrict their aspirations to crudely imposed flesh may be lucky to get even that. When Florentino fails to achieve an erection during the long-awaited union with Fermina, the Barcelona first edition states that ‘le ocurrió siempre la primera vez, con todas, desde siempre’ (p. 491). This goes some way to explaining the exclusion of one-night stands from his twenty-five little black books. But the effect of Florentino's admission on less understanding readers is modified in the Penguin translation of the first Colombian edition, and simply observes that ‘it had happened to him sometimes’.¹³ In both accounts another telling mismatch precedes (and is presumably implicated in) this non-consummation. Gazing for the first time on her nakedness, Florentino notes Fermina's ‘hombros arrugados, los senos caídos y el costillar forrado de un pellejo pálido y frío como el de una rana’ (p. 490). He, on the other hand, appears before her as ‘un hombre sin edad, de piel oscura, lúcida y tensa como un paraguas abierto […] que no se dejaba ver el arma por casualidad, sino que la exhibía como un trofeo de guerra’ (p. 492).

Fermina has exchanged a life in which ‘lo más importante [no era] la felicidad sino la estabilidad’ (p. 435) for one in which ‘el amor [era] un origin y un fin en sí mismo’ (p. 425), in which the unprepossessing young man she had rejected is himself transfigured by love. She, however, is not. What is heralded as an affirmation of love in old age looks increasingly like the substitution of one fantasy for another, another case of ‘deslealtad’. Fermina takes her place in his fantasy no longer as idealized love, nor yet as equal partner, but as an elderly, surrogate wife. Since he need now look no further, she wears his spectacles to sew buttons on his shirt, becomes as it were his pupil, and learns to see things his way. The vanishing-point of the seer and the seen is represented as ‘más allá de las burlas brutales de las ilusiones y los espejismos de los desengaños: más allá del amor’ (p. 499) or, as the Penguin translation puts it, at the very ‘heart of love’ (p. 345). The voice of her lover is once again ‘iluminada por la gracia del Espíritu Santo’, while the boat's captain speaks as ‘el destino’ (p. 502). Yet while ‘destino’ looks in awe on Florentino's ‘dominio invencible, su amor impávido’, when the captain glances in Fermina's direction he sees on an old lady's eyelashes ‘los primeros destellos de escarcha invernal’ (p. 348).

Once the radical disjunction between Florentino and Fermina is evident to third parties, it can no longer be attributed to her assumption of his idealizing gaze. Instead, her depreciation seems to represent the continuing possibility of irony, a reminder that even if a place beyond illusion is itself inaccessible to irony one can nevertheless be deluded about being there.

In my earlier discussion of irony and cliché Michael Wood was cited to the effect that García Márquez can gesture towards stereotypes' complex truths ‘but not focus on them with any precision’. There are alternatives to Wood's implied deficit model, however, and they include the possibility that there are nothing but stereotypes to describe existing relations between men and women. Wood and Minta both assume that there are truths behind stereotypes which García Márquez may or may not be able to retrieve. For Luce Irigaray, the most subtle of so-called utopian feminists, it is not a question of revealing, so much as producing truths there. In her view, the repertoire of socially sanctioned representations of relations between men and women is a limited one and heavily dependent on stereotype. Since it nevertheless offers the only terms in which we can talk about these relations and be understood, Irigaray proposes that we assume these terms and hollow them out, as it were, from within to make room for new possibilities. As Rosi Braidotti notes, Irigaray's exploitation of stereotypes, this ‘apparent mimesis’, is ‘tactical and aims at producing difference’.¹⁴ It is possible to trace something like a tactical mimesis in El amor, a half-ironic dramatization of the conflict between a yearning for the familiar and a desire to make something new of the old, jaded terms. Florentino's relationship with Ausencia Santander, the apotheosis of incomprehensible (‘sin-entender’) absence, seems to typify this process. At nearly fifty, Ausencia has ‘un instinto tan personal para el amor, que no había teorías artesanales ni científicas capaces de entorpecerlo’ (p. 260). She strips off Florentino's clothes as soon as he puts his head round the door:

Lo asaltaba sin darle tiempo de nada, ya fuera en el mismo sofá donde acababa de desnudarlo […]. Se le metía debajo y se apoderaba de todo él para ella, encerrada dentro de sí misma, tanteando con los ojos cerrados en su absoluta oscuridad interior, avanzando por aquí, retrocediendo, corrigiendo su rumbo invisible, intentando otra vía más intensa, otra forma de andar sin naufragar en la marisma de mucílago que fluía de su vientre, preguntándose y contestándose a sí misma con un zumbido de moscardón en su jerga nativa dóndo estaba ese algo en las tinieblas que sólo ella conocía y ansiaba sólo para ella, hasta que sucumbía sin esperar a nadie, se desbarrancaba sola en su abismo con una explosión jubilosa de victoria total que hacía temblar el mundo.

(pp. 261-62)

Florentino, however, ‘se quedaba exhausto, incompleto, flotando en el charco de sudores de ambos, pero con la impresión de no ser más que un instrumento de gozo’ (p. 262).

This is, arguably, the text's only example of a self-seeking woman, and its only suggestion that there is ‘algo’, an ‘absoluta oscuridad’, in certain women at least, that is inaccessible to Florentino. Readers may, however, recognize in this ‘algo’ and in his response to it, echoes of Nietzsche and Freud on the narcissistic woman. As Florentino contemplates the abyss of women's sexuality he thinks he glimpses in all its terrible fascination the form of a dark continent, or the black hole that declares the absence of the phallus. Framed by this exquisite anxiety, ‘amor ensimismado’ becomes ‘una trampa de la felicidad que él aborrecía y anhelaba al mismo tiempo’ (p. 262).

These words signal the risks involved in remotivating old terms. Florentino's mixed loathing and longing are stirred by the possibility of ‘ese algo’ irreducible to existing models. Yet when a stereotype is hollowed out to suggest an ‘oscuridad interior’—the space left, for example, when an old representation is abandoned—it can instantly be refilled by speculation on the old (male) fear of and desire of self-loss (p. 262). As long as Ausencia figures exclusively as the object of Florentino's reflections, the possibility of a non-stereotypical representation of her desire remains secondary to his concerns about that possibility, and about the possibility of losing the marker of his own desire.

The affair with Ausencia Santander allows the reader to explore certain apparently more promising aspects of the stereotype, but it is neither female desire nor male that concerns me here so much as the changing relations between them. This article began with the negotiations that these changes demand, and cited the novel's dustjacket to the effect that ‘el amor es un fluido que se expande como los círculos tejidos por una piedra on un estanque’. It closes with another watery metaphor, negotiated relations, and their place in the novel's ending.

Something has already been said about the vision of Fermina as an aging but indispensable object of transcendental love in an unending vista of semi-domestic concubinage. Florentino could not marry her even if he wanted to, because the only models on offer are the unfaithful wife/vengeful husband, or the straitjacket of official love. Like the captain of the riverboat, Florentino ‘no encontraba cómo salir del embrollo en que se había metido’ (p. 502). This moment, when stereotypes are finally exhausted, appears as the culmination of their—or his—love story: ‘sigamos derecho’, Florentino orders the captain, ‘derecho, derecho’ (p. 502). Readers less inclined to give García Márquez the benefit of the doubt may read this as the point at which the retreat from contemporary turmoil to fantasies of ‘amor inquebrantable’ finally runs out of river, and is left endlessly repeating itself. Among more sympathetic readings is one in which ‘el amor’ is left to expand, while the novel waits in watery suspense until an alternative ending can be found, one that requires neither domestic drudgery nor exploitation, nor escapist fantasy, ‘más allá del amor’ in its existing forms. Until then (and, no doubt, even then) the old stereotypes will remain in evidence as the ground against which changes are registered.

Whether or not one subscribes to this view of the novel's radical possibilities it would be a pity to overlook the more direct appeal of El amor. There will be those who prefer to leave García Márquez to his ducks and drakes and other more or less innocent pleasures; and there will be others who opt to follow the text's example, indulge themselves, and exploit any utopian or other possibilities as they seem to arise. Given the complexity and inconsistencies of El amor, the choice made will depend more on our own critical and personal priorities than on García Márquez's supposed ‘feminism’ or otherwise.

Notes

1. Review of Kathleen McNerney's Understanding Gabriel García Márquez, MLR, 85 (1990), 774-75 (p. 775).

2. ‘The Demythication of Matriarchy and Image of Women in Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, in Critical Perspectives on Gabriel García Márquez, ed. by B. A. Shaw and N. Vera-Godwin (Lincoln, NB: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1986), pp. 125-37 (p. 125). The novel is hereafter referred to as ‘Crónica’.

3. (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1985), hereafter referred to as El amor. All further textual references are to this edition.

4. As the author confirms in Raymond Leslie Williams, ‘The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel García Márquez’, PMLA, 104 (1989), 131-40 (p. 136), the setting is modelled on Cartagena, Colombia, with occasional additions (such as the Café de la Parroquia) from Veracruz and elsewhere. Significantly, in this context, he recalls the time spent in Cartagena as ‘the best year of my life, the most mature [in] the sense of feeling an absolute emotional stability’ (p. 137).

5. Consider also: ‘When I saw how, past the age of seventy, [my parents] were still sweethearts, I was sure they would make a good novel […]. The big problem was the middle, but life teaches you about the centre of things’ (interview with Holly Aylett, ‘Of Love and Levitation’, in Times Literary Supplement, 4516, October, 1989, pp. 1152, 65 (p. 1152)).

6. See, for example, Gene Bell-Villada, García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 191-202.

7. Stephen Minta, Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia (London: Cape, 1987), p. 126.

8. Michael Wood, García Márquez: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, Landmarks of World Literature Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 78.

9. For an even longer list, see M. Palencia-Roth's ‘Gabriel García Márquez; Labyrinths of Love and History’. World Literature Today, 65 (1991), pp. 54-58 (p. 55).

10. It could be argued that this voyeurism affirms what Luce Irigaray, in her early work Speculum: De l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), calls the ‘hommosexual’ character of the male gaze. To schematize, she characterizes woman as the mirror in which the male observer looks in search of himself, and finds his own phallic image returned to him. Invisible herself, the woman reaffirms this image, guaranteeing the possibility of representation in general and of narrative as one mode of representation.

11. Minta, p. 140. Note also how this coincides with Irigaray's view of men's interest in women as a crucial element in the construction of their own self-image and thus, finally, as self-regarding.

12. See note 5 above.

13. Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. by Edith Grossman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 340.

14. ‘The Politics of Ontological Difference’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Teresa Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89-105 (p. 99).