Love in the Time of Cholera: Latent Love Depictions within a Treatise of Courtly Love

Abstract

The present article aims at displaying the different types of love bonds implicit in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. The relationship of complicity, courting, marriage, wait, and encounter of the lovers are the expressions through which the author represents latent love manifestations within the frame of a treatise of courtly love. This article analyzes the realistic and practical signs of love García Márquez uses to recreate the common situations any couple can live in a relationship. The common patterns found in this novel corroborate the unique writing style of the Colombian Nobel Prize of Literature and the connections with his other novels. The theoretical approaches of Roland Barthes in A lover’s discourse: Fragments and Ovid in The art of love help construct the basis of interpretation of the love relationships represented in this novel. Statements of Gurméndez and Charbonneau also support the concepts of depersonalization and sacrifice inside marriage and the role memories play in the wait. This article pays attention to three different couples present in the novel and researches on the type of relationship they build and the implications and particular conditions they have. All of them with remarkable features to be studied to understand the realism of love in the words of García Márquez.