Professor Mabel Morana of Washington University in St. Louis, professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, explains that Garcia Marquez is a genius at restoring the "time-honored mission of entertaining by means of the mere act of narrating" (Morana, 1990). In other words, Garcia Marquez's writing is so effective it really isn't crucially important who or what he is writing about. Just jump on board and enjoy the ride. Getting older? Garcia Marquez will enliven and energize a person. Feeling grumpy and experiencing some forgetfulness? Garcia Marquez knows just the cure for what ails you -- his wonderfully coherent and riveting storyline and narrative.
Writing in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Morana asserts that Garcia Marquez's brilliant narrative intermingles the "real and imaginary, the autobiographical and the collective" in life, and has "no justification beyond the revival of the 'forgotten art of telling stories'" (Morana, 1990). Storytelling is a gift that many can engage in but few can match Garcia Marquez's abilities. The author, Morana continues, has the ability to deftly link "love and old age" -- in a thematic "emphasis of the narrative." That sets him apart from other fine authors, Morana believes, and she takes her praise a step further by stating that Garcia Marquez is so confident of his skills that he takes a "seemingly worn-out theme" and moves the theme into the "third age."
And the narrative is so effective, according to Morana that it "seems to float off in a sumptuous exercise of virtuosity into the freedom of lyrical pleasure." And so Morana launches her essay based not on what is beneath the surface of the novel, but rather on the "scope of the narrative," which she is so clearly and thoroughly mesmerized by.
As has been mentioned previously, highly important to the theme of the novel is of course the prospect that every reader and every human being must face, old age, and the various medicinal cures or hoped-for cures that accompany the transition from youth to middle age and then to the elderly phase. But it should be stated beyond the aging issue, that there are three other distinct themes in this novel: love, health / medicine and patience. And a big part of the "health / medicine" theme is the aging process along with the theme of Cholera.
So, two years of wooing the widow Fermina -- once her wealthy doctor husband Urbino had passed away -- following fifty-plus years of waiting for Urbino to die, have finally paid off for the love-struck Florentino. He has talked Fermina to take a trip with him, up the Magdalena River on a vessel called "New Fidelity," not a very subtle metaphoric image but then it works well. It calls to mind the fact that notwithstanding fifty-one years of pining for the married Fermina, Florentino has helped himself to the sexual charms of hundreds of women. He can claim all he wants that all that really mattered in his heart was Fermina, but nonetheless he got down into the most heated bedroom scenarios because he was driven to need a lot of sexual intercourse.
The trip up the Magdalena River brings out several health / medicine issues that dovetail perfectly with the conclusion of this book. Fermina Daza (every time Garcia Marquez writes her or his name it is in full) and Florentino Ariza are having their own health issues but the landscape on either side of the river is also very unhealthy. The "god-forsaken villages" were flooded and it was one of the "cruelest droughts"; Cholera was obviously the culprit that caused them to be awakened at night because "nauseating stench of corpses" were floating down the river. How cruel that the captain of the boat had orders to tell passengers those rotting, stinking dead human bodies were "drowning victims."
The health of the planet is clearly part of Garcia Marquez's narrative. The river trip passed by "calcinated flatlands" that were "stripped of entire forests." Wood was needed to fire the boilers of the riverboats, and the "tangle of colossal trees" that Florentino had remembered seeing in years past were gone. The monkeys and parrots that once made "riotous noise" in those...
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