Garcia. Marquez's "Love When the Plague Spreads": It is not the love of happiness that drives the world, but the love of separation and remorse

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"Love When the Plague Spreads"... Strictly speaking, the translation of this title is actually not very good, although we know that this will lead to more people buying the book in the bookstore. But I believe that if those readers read the novel carefully, they will have another deeper feeling for the title of the book.

Compared to the neutrality conveyed by the literal translation "love in the time of cholera", by spreading the verb, this translation greatly strengthens the imagination of the book, romanticizes love in it, and strengthens people's perception that "plague" is like war or war. A brutal imagination like a concentration camp. Those who haven't read the book might think that this novel is describing a place, like China recently, where a terrible plague suddenly occurred, and then tells the joys and sorrows of a couple in it. But in fact, readers have to read much later to understand why Marquis named the book that way. Until then, people will just keep wondering: we see a lot of love, but what is the plague of titles?

What moves people in "Love When the Plague Spreads" is not the joys and sorrows of steadfast love under the plague, but the various states of love displayed in the passage of time. What is more interesting is that the author uses the plague to interpret the effect of love on people, which is not only very special, but also changes and subverts our general romantic fantasy about love. After all, our imagination of love is often poetic, and there are beautiful, happy and harmonious scenes everywhere, just like a garden in a greenhouse.

But on the other hand, you can also ask, isn't the use of the plague as a metaphor for people's madness in love, isn't it just excessive fantasy about love? I think I won't feel this way after reading it, because the love described here is not perfect, but the love that is connected by remorse, separation, old age, and death. In other words, it is precisely because the desire for love is so strong that the situation and fate cannot be combined, which makes people fall into inextricable madness. In this, love is not the antidote that people use to deal with the plague. But love at first sight itself is like a disease, infecting our whole body with a heavy lovesickness in an instant. As long as there is no union, there will never be liberation. At the same time, love is not as stable and harmonious as we imagine it to be, but is often like a cholera full of uncertainty, unsettling and even oscillating between the extremes of rebirth and death. We will want to die for love, and we will live actively for love.

"Inevitably, the smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of the blocked love. As soon as he entered the room, which was still in the dark, Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it."

At the beginning of the book, Marquis hints at the theme of our journey: love, hindrance and destiny.

Next comes death. It describes the sudden suicide of Dr. Urbino in the face of the sudden suicide of Jeremiah, his dear friend whom he regarded as a saint. But what surprised him, besides death, was the letter from Jeremiah to him. The letter revealed that his background was completely different from what Dr. Urbino originally imagined about his past.

"It's not who he was and what he did that I was angry that he lied to us for so many years."

He was also shocked that the woman who used to clean Jeremiah's house once a week turned out to be Jeremiah's lover. In Colombian society, which was still in a conservative period and focused on the status class, this kind of identity gap love was not allowed. Although Urbino was considered open-minded, he still felt depressed. On the one hand, he thought that Jeremiah would fight for love and social ethos in this situation, but he did not expect that they would only continue this taboo love in the form of a sneaky once a week, even if they went out on a date in private, They also pretended to be coincidental on the road, did not sit together in the cinema, and paid for each other. As if there was no relationship between them. This "dating" was different from what he had imagined about Jeremiah's character. On the other hand, the woman, even though she knew her lover was about to commit suicide, chose to let him go without doing anything to stop it. And think this is the proof that they love each other.

Such love baffled Urbino, for him it was like a rudimentary marriage, a commitment to a relationship that emphasized bonding with each other. But the two always maintained a distance in love, which made him see another understanding of Jeremiah's love: through constant obstruction, distance, and constant emotional enthusiasm to burn himself, until the 60-year-old who decided to die forward.

In addition to rethinking what death meant to him, Urbino also began to rethink himself and his wife, Fermina. Dasa's marriage. And he was surprised and even desperate to find:

"They testified bitterly that all they had done was to foster hatred during all these years of feuding husband and wife... Even though they were old and at peace now, they were careful not to mention him, because that just healed The wound will bleed again as if it happened yesterday."

This little bit of memory deeply and deeply hurt the now old him. And let him, a doctor who originally regarded death as an ordinary doctor, have a bottomless despair facing the end of his life. But when Urbino finished recalling his marriage, he tried to catch the parrot from the tree who kept scolding him: "Shameless guy!", but unfortunately stumbled and fell to his death.

Fermina. Daza did not expect her husband to say goodbye to her in such an almost "funny" way of dying. Although she forced her composure and convinced herself that life and death were inevitable, there was no need to be too sad. But she was sad to find that she needed the company of her husband, who had long been bored by her.

Perhaps true love is not a kind of happy giving and satisfaction, but a bond formed by patient and shared pain.

But the story has only just begun here. Daza's first love, Ariza, confessed to her on the day of the funeral that her love for her had remained the same. This bold and even extremely rude behavior caused Daza to blast him out on the spot. But what puzzled her and contradicted her was that she found that among the people she was thinking about in her grief, Ariza had more of her past than her husband.

The story took a sharp turn and began to tell about the encounter and love between Daza and Ariza when they were young. This part is also probably the least sad and most romantic and passionate plot of "Love When the Plague". It mentioned how Ariza fell in love with Daza at first sight when he sent a letter, and how the two communicated behind Daza's father's back and were found to lead to a long-term separation. Finally, because of Ariza's reckless behavior, the two broke up unexpectedly. .

After the breakup, the two lead very different lives. Daza lived a girly life. Until she met her current husband, Urbino's enthusiastic pursuit. As for Ariza, it was a day of frustration and emptiness. In addition to mental restlessness, he often does not eat or drink, and his body is thin. Let the mother think he has "cholera". In my heart, except for the day and night thinking about Daza, it is difficult to get excited about other things. The lust in my heart is unstoppable. He kept having sex with all kinds of women, but the paradox was that he always seemed to have only Daza in his heart, so although he met a few women who were important to him and even loved deeply, he was often unable to be together because of other factors. Facing separation or death.

You will find that Marquis is not only concerned with love itself, but wants to ask how one love after another will affect people to face the next love; and how will separation and death affect one's face For the next paragraph and encounter with others. At the same time you will also notice that Marquis is trying to make us understand that true love makes people understand that separation does not mean that the hearts of two people are far away, on the contrary, separation makes people feel closer to each other than they actually are. Everywhere we went we were thinking of each other, as if seeing ghosts. Just as Ariza could see Daza's phantom in his heart in every sympathy, but at the same time he was also afraid to see her.

The endless love for Daza is the source of this love. Make Ariza's love for Dazar like a great plague. It is constantly infected and spread in every corner and between different characters, echoing the words written by Marquis in the book: "Keep creating love in love".

Milan. Kundera once mentioned that Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a literature that expresses groups, not just a modernist literature expressing individuals. The same is true of "Love When the Plague Spreads", Marquis does not want us to only pay attention to the two protagonists Ariza and Daza in the book, but describes the past of the two to see the different meanings of love to people in that era . By the way, it depicts the cruelty of historical fate hidden behind love.

At the end of the article, when the old Ariza and Daza finally reconciled their friendship and went out on a river trip together in the name of friends...

"Ariza was stunned to find that the towering trees that criss-crossed were gone, replaced by charred flats, the wreckage of entire woods exhausted by steamship boilers, and the rubble of God-forsaken villages...though the war was over. , the plague is no longer prevalent, but the swollen corpses are still floating by in an endless stream... At this time, there is only the boundless silence of the barren land."

The Magdalena River (Río Magdalena) in this article is the big river next to the town where Marquis was born, and it is also the largest river running through Colombia. However, due to development and the endless domestic crimes and social problems, it has lost its vibrant side.

The change of this river is not only a metaphor for the tragic fate of Latin America, but also the sigh in the heart of the old Marquis in 1985 when he wrote "Love When the Plague Spreads", lamenting the cruelty of old age and time to the individual and the world.

Everything seems to have lost its vitality. Although the war and the plague have passed, all we have left seems to be the boundless silence of the barren land and the powerless love for the changes of the years. But even so, for Marquis, that might be enough. As long as people are still willing to love people in remorse and old age, even if the end of people is a disaster, people can still find the meaning beyond love in the love of old age.

(Original post on Blog: Literary Lab)
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