García Márquez is a writer endowed with moral imagination and much knowledge of the world--in particular, of the Colombia of yesteryear. He possesses, besides, a strong sense of the comical: With Democritus, he would rather laugh than cry. The life of the individual human being is brief and troubled; the human condition is tragic. Let us laugh at the vanity of human wishes!
In the swift journey from infancy to senescence, a longing for love is known. It may be a yearning for the love of God, or a desire for spiritual and intellectual comradeship, or the procreative impulse that perpetuates the species and brings about the union of man with woman. In this novel, García Márquez is concerned with the third sort of love. He knows that some loves are false and some true, and he gives us in detail two instances of the love that endures until death--and conceivably beyond. He is saying that we all live under sentence of death--cholera, if you will--and that those who love truly may exclaim with the Apostle Paul, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
That is what I mean when I declare that García Márquez, a picturesque, skillful, and convincing novelist, is endowed with moral imagination. But he seems afflicted by a fascination with the genito-urinary tract: Copulation and urination, described in rich detail, loom so large in this novel that lines from T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes may come to the reader's mind:
Birth, and copulation and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
Let it be said for García Márquez, nevertheless, that his obsessive carnality is neither perverse nor cruel. He is not Sade, or even Proust; many of his sexual episodes are genuinely comical. He heaps upon his readers bawdry, rather than foul obscenity. The legendary amorous influence of a Caribbean climate may be advanced as some defense of the successive erotic capers that will insure good sales for this piece of fiction. And, one supposes, it may be said of García Márquez as it has been said of Boccaccio, that his intent was not primarily lascivious; he takes the manners of Colombia as they are (or were), not as they ought to be, much as Boccaccio took the mores of Naples in the fourteenth century.
For the voyeur
All the same, Love in the Time of Cholera is a salacious novel, apparently intended to please the voyeur. One might think that the pornography industry would have diminished the market for printed impudicity. Yet print retains a power of indecency that still attracts people who are able to conjure up mental pictures; and a provocative phrase within the covers of a book may be more erotic for some natures than a hundred photographs. Love in the Time of Cholera is on a level with Edmund Wilson's Hecate County: The literate voyeur can feel justified by the fact that he obtains his delectations from a respectable author's well-bound and costly novel, distributed by a reputable publisher. Wasn't it well-reviewed in the right papers?
Why do persons so talented as García Márquez serve up to their readers a clever, piquant, but often cloying salacity? Is this a type of the
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