In The Shadow Of The Cross: Jesus, before The Christ
Once Upon a Time, there was a Great Empire. At its very For the Exhaustive Review: CLICK HERE>
In The Shadow Of The Cross: Jesus, before The Christ
Once Upon a Time, there was a Great Empire. At its very edges, hardly noticed, was a small region. A minor kingdom in fact. A Theocracy of sorts, now. The Empire was not too concerned about them, but they knew in their hearts that they were the Chosen People. Their religious books and prophesies told them as much. They believed fervently that one day a savior will come and return the kingdom of god and overthrow the alien rule. All they needed was zeal - complete abandonment to belief in god’s words and in the millenarian prophesies.
They might be small and backward but their zeal was great and wave upon wave of revolutions started to crash and break on the great shield of the Empire as the Millennium drew near. Their conditions were bad and oppression was great. But, all this only contributed to their zeal. The corrupt priests, who were supposed to preserve god’s rule in the Holy Land, was also hand-in-glove with the oppressive alien rule. The zealots (filled with zeal) targeted them as much as the alien rule - both were inseparably mixed by now. It was a proletariat uprising of sorts against all oppression and oppressive regimes. All they wanted was their Messiah to come, for the prophesied Davidic descendant to reclaim their throne and restore His rule, The Kingdom Of Heaven.
Unfortunately, the Empire was too strong and crushed every uprising with almost uncaring ease. Zealots were hung up on the cross to die, one after the other. A full procession of them.
One among them was a Jesus, of Nazareth. Born in an oppressed class, believing in the same zeal and crusading with a few followers, against The Temple and The Empire. There was noting much to differentiate him from the rest of the self-professed Messiahs. His story didn’t even fit any known prophesies well enough. To top everything, he himself was just a disciple to the famous John The Baptist. This carried on for a few years, probably in parallel with other zealots and messiahs. He had a decent following and was important enough to be noticed, but not enough to be given much notice on written records. Hardly any written records survive even though many of his predecessors and contemporaries have more detailed histories.
In time, Jesus grew bold and mounted a direct attack on the Temple. Heresy of heresies, he was reported to the Empire. The Empire summarily did what it always does to people like Jesus. It was an act of treason to proclaim oneself Messiah/King as it implies an overthrowing of the current rulers and to be punished in the standard way - death by crucification. Jesus might have been important enough to be given a trial by one of the most notoriously cruel Pontius Pilate, but was judged guilty and sentenced to death.
Jesus was then crucified along with dozens of other ‘bandits’ or revolutionaries in a mound filed with such crosses. He died and was probably picked clean by the vultures.
That is how, on a bald hill covered in crosses, beset by the cries and moans of agony from hundreds of dying criminals, as a murder of crows circled eagerly over his head waiting for him to breathe his last, the messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth would have met the same ignominious end as every other messiah who came before or after him.
Another failed revolutionary dead. With none of his promises even remotely fulfilled. Another Messiah would probably take his place soon, first on the streets and then on the cross. This would continue until the Millenarian zeal passes away and the eternal Empire carries on, as ever, hardly concerned about this small region. The story should have ended there and thus.
It did not.
The Historical Jesus, Or, Jesus as Himself
The Question:
How did Jesus became God? How is it that a scarcely known, itinerant preacher from the rural backwaters of a remote part of the empire, a Jewish prophet who predicted that the end of the world as we know it was soon to come, who angered the powerful religious and civic leaders of Judea and as a result was crucified for sedition against the state—how is it that within a century of his death, people were calling this little-known Jewish peasant God? Saying in fact that he was a divine being who existed before the world began, that he had created the universe, and that he was equal with God Almighty himself? How did Jesus come to be deified, worshipped as the Lord and Creator of all?
That is the real story. Much more interesting and much more adventurous. History was written, modified and made in the construction of this story.
The Burial & The Resurrection: The Anti-Historical Twins
Instead began the centuries long resurrection of Christ and the burial of Jesus. This is the real exploration. The search for the ‘Historical’ Jesus - conveying by the very naming convention that the known Jesus is not historical, but mythical, constructed.
The Aftermath: A Summary
To the revolutionaries, filled with Zeal, Jesus was what he was. A failed Messiah, not to be wasted time on. They continued their zeal and their insurrections, their half-crazed fight against the greatest Empire on Earth, armed only with their complete faith, their Zeal.
Jesus was succeeded by other Messiahs, some more successful, some less but all more and more loud. Then finally culminating in the famous Zealot movement. There was no turning back now. The Jews had just declared war on the greatest empire the world had ever known. Thus, eventually the lumbering Empire turned its head, and decided to swat of the irksome fly. Caught in its own worries, the Empire chose Judaea as a good place to make an example of. Just as they had been exceptionally lenient until now, now they were exceptionally cruel. Somehow, for an Empire that had lost its one enemy, Carthage, long ago, for an Empire that loved to define themselves in opposition to its enemies, The Jew provided a pervasive and hateful figure. Across the Empire the Hate spread, just as the Jews themselves were scattered across, homeland destroyed, banished forever.
Such was the come-down on the Jews that the Jews themselves realized that the only way to survive was to distance themselves from their on violent recent-past. They settled down into their religion, their Torah and became a different species altogether, No longer the millenarian fantasists but just a minority, getting by. The eternally prosecuted, the eternal victims. The image was not just cultivated, it was embraced. But the hatred was too deep-rooted, it never seeped away but collected in rivulets and drains, to explode sporadically in the rest of the violent history of this small ‘promontory’ of Asia.
Meanwhile, the Jews who followed the cult of Jesus, soon to be called Christians, had begun separating themselves entirely from Judaism, and in very creative ways. Survival is the mother of creativity.
The Early Days - The Early Christians (& Jews)
It is not easy to figure out when which distortions began and ended but the direction was already there from the very early days. This is partly reflected in the progression of the gospels - radically departing from the ‘synoptics’ (the first 3 gospels - gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and becoming rapidly spiritualised in each subsequent installment.
As described, the first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern-day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God’s imminent judgment. Many of these so-called false messiahs we know by name. A few are even mentioned in the New Testament.
In the midst of all this, a small cult tried to stay true to the fallen Messiah. The very act of staying true to Jesus meant that the long history of reinterpretation of Jesus’s life had to begin right there - to make sense of the irreconcilable fact that Kingdom of God was NOT upon them. To follow and to gain followers to a failed Messiah, when there was an over-abundance of ‘false’ Messiahs was no easy task.
The earliest manifestation of this tendency must have been the Resurrection. By this single act, Jesus Messianic ambitions are transformed and transposed - from the earthly sphere to a heavenly one.
This was an essential cog in the wheels and absolutely necessary for getting new converts, for who would follow a dead Messiah (read future King). The need for conversions meant that the process of reinterpretation had to be speeded up to build a whole new mythology around Jesus and his message. His life and purpose had to be made part of the ‘prophesy tradition’ and the scriptures. This was not easy Jews happened to be especially well read in the scriptures, especially the city-dwellers. This meant that the first conversions had to be from the rural areas, the ones who were ignorant enough of the traditions, prophesies and scriptures to not question the contradictions in the adapted Jesus story. Stephens is the perfect example for this sort of convert. He accepted Jesus quickly as the Right Hand of God and accepted the reinterpreted version of Kingdom of Heaven as a spiritual kingdom to be established by a Messiah who will ‘return’.
The problem was that this was a big stumbling block for the educated, tradition-immersed city Jews and they cracked down hard on this small cult. Sparking the mutual hatred that was to continue for centuries. Stephen was again the prime example. Stoned to death for his assertions of Jesus as God made flesh, for blaspheming.
One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the zealous Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God.
The process was accelerated by the Diaspora Jews who spread out and started preaching the Gospel (good news) of Jesus far and wide, far also from the Temple. The repression only fueled the more fanatic believers in the new religion to fan out further and further.
The Temple persecution continued, the preaching continued, but most importantly the insurrection by the new Messiah’s continued.
Finally came the first-century Jewish revolutionary party (of the Essene sect) known as the Zealots, who helped launched a bloody war against Rome; and the fearsome bandit-assassins whom the Romans dubbed the Sicarii - who together brought embarrassment on the Roman Empire. And the Grand Retaliation that blew the Holy City off the face of the planet.
Now we can finally come to the question - Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s message and movement?
To answer this question we must first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after this Jewish rebellion against Rome of 66 C.E, after the destruction.
The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged.
The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but also because, with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s evangelism. Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity was born.
The last link in the chain was The James Vs Paul showdown:
James, Jesus’s brother was the last link to the original movement. He stayed true, as much as possible and despite the necessary modifications, to Jesus’s message and intent. But Saul (later Paul) represented a new breed - an entirely new Christian.
With Jerusalem despoiled, the early Christians could either maintain their cultic connections to their parent religion and thus share in Rome’s enmity (Rome’s enmity toward Christians would peak much later), or they could divorce themselves from Judaism and transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world. Also, Christianity was no longer a tiny Jewish sect. After 70 C.E., the center of the Christian movement shifted from Jewish Jerusalem to the Graeco-Roman cities of the Mediterranean: Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Damascus, Antioch, Rome. A generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, his non-Jewish followers outnumbered and overshadowed the Jewish ones. By the end of the first century, when the bulk of the gospels were being written, Rome—in particular the Roman intellectual elite—had become the primary target of Christian evangelism.
Reaching out to this particular audience required a bit of creativity on the part of the evangelists. Paul was the man to do it. In open revolt against James, Saul went in the face of almost all of Jesus’s teachings and invented his own new religion - Christianity.
Preaching almost exclusively to the Diaspora Jews and soon to the Roman citizens plus the Gentiles, Paul had an audience who had no idea about the traditions he was supposed to be talking about. He could basically make up the story on the fly. And, he did.
Thus,it was Paul who finally solved the great dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews - by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ.
Also, in accordance with the doctrine of Virgin Birth, James, the now prohibited Brother, too fades away after his death.
Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.
From then on, the rest was history. Divorced from history, but yet history.
Historian Vs Theologian: Settling a Stupid Dispute
How can a Muslim write about Christianity? Sorry, but Muslims are allowed to write History too.
Serious historians of the early Christian movement - all of them, no matter what their religion - have to spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and often Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic, not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, both pagan and Jewish, knowledge of the history of the Christian church and the development of its social life and theology, and, well, lots of other things.
Scholars who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications are the ones who are truly qualified and respected by their peers. Your religion is not a qualification required at the university for conducting historical research. So, shelve that argument. Or should we go about redacting every historical research conducted by any scholar on any historical piece with religious implications that did not meet the exacting requirement of religious qualification. The field would be much poorer for this.
Doubts & Minor Critiques:
Reza Aslan could (and should) have been much more exhaustive in the presentation to really bring in all the facets of his research and reinforce the conclusions. But, there is the need for an accessible yet scholarly work on this and Aslan has stepped up admirably. But in that quest, he leaves a few holes and makes a few sweeping assertions that makes the serious reader slightly uncomfortable in accepting all the assertions, especially when a good deal of them, by necessity, have to be conjectures. Intelligent and well-grounded conjectures, the very basis of historical study, but still conjectures.
For example, consider the following assertions:
Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus of Nazareth was first and finally a Jew.
If one knew nothing else about Jesus of Nazareth save that he was crucified by Rome, one would know practically all that was needed to uncover who he was, what he was, and why he ended up nailed to a cross. His offense, in the eyes of Rome, is self-evident. It was etched upon a plaque and placed above his head for all to see: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. His crime was daring to assume kingly ambitions.
Statements, nay grand assertions, such as these makes one slightly doubtful and want to consult other historians. It hinges on too few concrete facts in the end.
Another Exception:
Ultimately, the only point to ponder is the historicity of the narrative. Aslan constructs an almost leakproof argument but there are grey areas - the biggest one being “Why Jesus? - Why of all the zealots that roamed, pick Jesus?
What differentiated Jesus from the rest?
Aslan does not explore this angle fully. To me, the answer could lie in the “messianic secret” that Aslan explains away as pure subterfuge on Jesus’s part, born from a desire to avoid direct confrontation, not entertaining the possibility that Jesus might actually have had different ambitions and hence tried to avoid this expectation. Jesus’s could actually have been a genuinely different teaching - still an outgrowth of the times but something could have marked Jesus out from the ‘zealots’ and hence qualified him for being the symbol of peace and love when required. So the resurrected jesus might not then have been so far off from the historical Jesus after all. I accept most of Aslan’s historiography. But, I would like to preserve for myself the personality of Jesus that I have always found admirable even when far removed from any theology - and this conclusion to the review is an attempt to salvage that from my reading.
It might be quite vital to entertain this possibility....more
“Why did I dislike him so much, she asked herself? Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all.”
~ Dina, A Fine Balance
Lear’s Patchwork Quilt
A Fine Balance is a true modern epic, built on the ordinary. If one could read only one book about India, this would make a very good choice. On city, one village, one town, three families - this is the tight canvas in which Mistry paints, or rather, is the quilt that he weaves. They fit together to form a Persian carpet that captures within it an entire country’s desolation. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, Mistry creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state, at once unsettling, pitiful, and maddening in its clarity.
Never dramatic, never superfluous, the details keep getting added to the quilt, no stray piece left untended, every discarded cloth-piece added and stitched in with exquisite care. Mistry’s quilt is perhaps among the greatest novels composed on modern India, at least in terms of sheer ambition of the construction and the constrained canvas in which it is accomplished.
Every anguish, spread across four generations, every tumult and gasp of a country is squeezed into the harrowing tales of a few poignantly realized figures. Indeed, the whole drama is almost Shakespearean in scope - with distinct echoes of King Lear in it - in the pride and distance of each character; in their imaginary walls, which crumple with closeness.
Lear’s Storm, Writ Larger
Mistry is often compared to Dickens, the archetypal author of the Uncaring State. For me, the comparison that kept forcing itself was with Shakespeare. As I mentioned above, I could hear distinct echoes of King Lear as I was reading this magnificent book. However, I was not sure if I was reading this into Mistry since I had just gone very deep into Lear (in which I was reading too much of Plato, to be honest). I did not trust myself and decided to investigate - and I found (to my relief) that Mistry loves King Lear - he had even made an entire novel out of it (not this one, but ‘Family Matters’). It thus turned out to be a very lucky coincidence that I read King Lear almost in parallel with Mistry.
In any case, I now feel justified in elaborating on this theme - on the logic that a possibility of a King Lear influence having contributed to 'A Fine Balance' cannot be discounted.
I have to confess that once I made this discovery, I became overzealous and did make an attempt to draw the plot of King Lear directly into Mistry’s novel, but Mistry is too much the master for that. I tried to connect the abiding theme of love in both, trying to imagine Dina as an abandoned Cordelia. I tried to think of Maneck as a proxy-Edgar, one who was spared tragedy - but only the obvious hard-hitting ones that we dignify by the word ‘tragedy’, not the creeping disenchantment with life that can be even more cruel. I tried to deconstruct and see if the intermixing story lines of Fine Balance serve the same function as in Lear, the two story lines, the two tragedies mixed into one, joining to form a single base line to the symphony, echoing and reaching the same notes - a ritornello, of sorts. None of this worked satisfactorily.
Eventually, my reconciliation is that Mistry has set his novel in an in-between place - between the lunacy of self-inflicting suffering and the self-wrought tragedy of the end, of Lear. Instead, this epic unfolds in the forest, in the storm, the characters thrown into it directly, with no semblance of a ‘why’ or a question of ‘deserving’ anything. Unlike the Shakespearean tragedy, where there is at least an apparent causation for the tragedies that befall each, the condition of the storm, of wild uncaring nature is the default here. All are equal in this world, the same storm lashes them all.
One of the major themes in King Lear is the path to understanding (and salvation), forged in the wild under this wild buffeting of nature’s storms - where the ships of varying fates are lashed against each other, making them realize the ‘equality of pathetic mortals’, the only salvation allowed to them to be extracted from the whole tragedy.
“You know—things falling apart, centre not holding, anarchy loosed upon the world, and all that sort of thing.”
In Mistry’s world too, the blind force of the Government and the ‘Emergency’ looms large and ominous in the background - affecting these characters, with no personal enmity or malicious intent - almost like a primal force of nature, grabbing, destroying or sparing the lives and joys of the actors - just like wild nature in King Lear.
Mistry also works in a lot of political criticism of the Indian political system. Let us pick a phrase from Mistry to summarize this: A house with suicidal tendencies. The path seems inexorable. Once tyranny makes an entrance, it allows the government to become more and more authoritative, insensitive, even casual in how they treat human lives (and dreams), without any real conscious intent - like the blind pagan gods of Shakespeare. Thus, maybe a step beyond nature then - as powerful, all-pervading and unreadable as the Gods themselves.
It makes one wonder how unreasonably powerful our modern governments are - capable of reaching in and snuffing out even the minutest blooms of happiness, at random. Isn’t it scary to have such gods amongst us?
“Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn’t He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He was managing a corporation, the things He allowed to happen …”
Set against this blind force, the characters of Mistry too blunder blindly through the vast forces of ‘nature’ in search of some reconciliation - their lives too seem to present glimmers of hope until the next wild gust, or random malice, sweeps it away - but finding each other, giving what support they can, realizing that the straws are all that matters to the drowning man, finding what little joys they can in the occasional beauty of their fraying tapestry of a quilt.
“But how firm to stand, how much to bend? Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness. She could draw it on this side, but they might see it on that side.”
If you think about it, that is almost a primal question for a civilized society… From asking a question like that to reaching a point in which the line is erased altogether, at least when seen, at a certain angle, from both sides - that is the only trajectory that deserves the name “progress”. Emergency is an almost comical word, but it is poignant since, as Mistry shows, most stumble from one Emergency to the next, uncomprehending. Some may escape the blindness and see each other, but perhaps only in the minds of visionary authors.
All this parallels the distinct evolutionary trajectory of the characters in King Lear too, as the Kings and Nobles realize that underneath their garbs, the thin veneer of civilization, we are all equal. And when fates and ‘higher powers’ tear us apart and smite us with lightening, the poor and the rich can see each other, and their equality, in that fateful flash.
The Finely Balanced
So we come back to this: Indeed, the whole drama is almost Shakespearean in scope - with distinct echoes of King Lear in it - in the pride and distance of each character; in their imaginary walls, which crumple with closeness.
The real fine balance, the real circus act, is the flimsily constructed wall that balances so finely between people, between families, between castes, between classes, between societies - but it cannot stand up to personal acquaintance. Which is why we use emotions of fear and disgust to prop it up.
This wall, a mere figment of imagination, is made up of stories, fictional ones - the moment it encounters real stories, it tumbles down. Authors like Mistry are the modern equivalents of the quixotic hero, trying to crumple these walls, reaching across thousands of miles, through the pages of a book.
Of course, we can see in figures like Nusswan those people who manage to keep the walls of fine balance erected throughout their lives - we see in them ourselves. Can we dare to see ourselves in Nusswan? In a character like Maneck we can see someone who was perhaps lucky to escape childhood without erecting them. In the other poor souls who haunt the book, we see the ones on the other side of our well-tended walls. Then, in Dina we can see the ones who do break free of these finely balanced walls. And we might even aspire to their tragedy - so that we can be free of these walls too.
That is the power of a work like this - it makes us crave even for tragedy, if only to let us escape our self-constructed prisons! How powerful is that?...more
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels. Which is why, when I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera, one of the things I noticed immediately was the lack of the subtle brand of magic that I had so enjoyed. I missed it and was on the lookout for it. I wanted it badly and went around every corner with the expectation of a cheerful reunion. But it was not to be.
As Pynchon says: the “reality” of love and the possibility of its ultimate extinction become Love’s “indispensable driving forces,” whereas magic in all its guises and forms becomes peripheralized or “at least more thoughtfully deployed in the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no less clement”.
Why this marginalization of the extraordinary? Why this deliberate move towards realism? Why no Magic?
I kept asking myself this as I read, and beyond. Was I to understand that it is because Love in itself is Magic? That was too cheesy, even for Márquez who never shies from telling me a cheesy sub-story if it needs to be told.
Or is it because Love in the Time of Cholera is to seen as the product of a more experienced author, who no longer needs the resources of magic realism and hyperbole to surprise the reader?
One thing was sure, Love in the Time of Cholera is not only about Love, even when it pervades every page. Indeed, it covers, through its characters’ wide amorous and business interests, an entire era and all the social classes, spanning over fifty years of Latin American life, from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the first two or three of the twentieth.
Love in the Time of Cholera, while on a much smaller scale than One Hundred Years of Solitude, deals with the Colombian civil wars of this period and the violence left in its wake. Márquez however wants these historical and political concerns to be passed largely unnoticed by the reader. While One Hundred Years of Solitude disguises the political themes through the uses of myth, fantasy, hyperbole, and magic realism, Love in the Time of Cholera disguises them through its depiction of an eternal, sometimes exasperating, almost unrealistic love affair, one which flouts the conventions of every love story the reader might have come across.
Love in the Time of Cholera is often quite bleak due to this veering towards stark Realism, to this occasional historical invasion of the narrative. Much of this realism arises from Death and Decay - the central themes of the novel. However, Márquez does not completely give up on Idealism either. In fact he is neither an Idealistic or a Realistic author - he is just a supremely eloquent voice speaking from the vantage-point of his own old age and wisdom.
To me, Love in the Time of Cholera is a magnificently gloomy novel though Márquez’s masterful sorcery masks it well, with his verbal cascades of descriptions and his narrative’s seductiveness.
Márquez’s novels are almost invariably gloomy. They are apocalyptic. They are decadence distilled.
Then why the popularity? Why do we love them? Why are we uplifted? Is it because of Márquez’s enthusiastic exuberance?
I think it is because of the Quixotic Heroism of the people who populate these doomed worlds.
It is this heroism that veils the Apocalyptic forebodings that pack so densely like storm clouds throughout the firmament his novels.
After all, Consider how during the entire time he waits to talk to Fermina again (fifty-one years, nine months, and four days) Florentine Ariza is dauntless and never ever gives up even the slightest sliver of hope. Nothing could shake this man:
“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
“Forever,” he said.
The Heart of Darkness: Death & Decay
There is so much I would like to say about this amazing novel. There are so many themes that could be explored. But in this review I will try to focus on the Beginning and the Ending of this intricately structured novel, and try to tease out the the thread that explains the absence of Magic.
The whole novel is too broad a canvas to be explored in a review. For this, I limit myself to the broad themes of Death, Decay & Redemption, and allow the political, ecological, societal and personal aspects of these themes to play themselves out below the current, so to speak.
The Institutions of Love: Inventing Love
He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.
The theme of Juvenal’s love story is about the incompatibility of love and social convention, the conflict between desire and social life. It is quite easily the crucial conundrum the novel wants to solve - the 'other' to the novel's essence. Security, order, happiness - can these when added together in the right proportions provide an equation for Love?
For the sort of Love that can stop the decay that seems to have beset the entire world? Apparently not. It is not enough.
Through Juvenal’s invented Love, Márquez is not simply criticizing the institution of marriage, instead he is criticizing the very illusion that allows this - the illusion that the world and the worldly goods and pleasures can produce Love.
Instead Márquez wants to show that it is Love that can create (or recreate) the world.
Ultimately Love is love of Love itself, not merely the desire for its actual attainment or even the act of its fulfillment. Passion is its own object.
Pitted against such an impossible ideal, all convention or institutionalization obstructs love’s ultimate goal, which is to forestall death and decay.
The ultimate goal of Love is to save the world, to create it anew.
Gerontophobia & Ecocide: Destroying Love
So why is this world so much in need of saving?
The cosmic decline in Love seems to be the cause for alarm, the cause for the pervasive decay that invades the world of the novel:
Everything in this novel, from the environment, to the city, to the rebels, to the civil wars, to the people, to the pets are ancient - as if they were part of this earth from the very beginning, but everybody is in the throes of love. And everything ancient is also decaying, sliding slowly towards the final end of death - so is the sadness and the conventional love represented by Juvenal.
But it is not just about the human lives. Márquez writes as much about places as about people. This one is also about the death of a river, of a town, of a society… or murder, rather. Of Nature’s Old Age inflicted prematurely by youthful humanity.
This is the ecological sub-theme of the novel - It is the river, finally, the Great Magdalena (in Spanish, the “river of life”) that highlights this for us. The abundant nature that surrounds the town is caught in a process of irreversible decay. Alligators, manatees, monkeys, and birds disappear from the jungle; toward the end, the riverboats have difficulty finding enough wood for their boilers. While the political urgency of this topic is clear, cosmic decline in Love in the Time of Cholera has a different meaning and is linked to the theme of the interruption of love discussed before.
Paralleling the old age of his characters with the decay envisioned by this ecological wasteland (of their own making), Márquez is pointing out to us the true nature of Decay - of Humans and their self inflicted sufferings bringing the decay of old age upon themselves and upon the whole of nature.
This is the central tenet of the novel - Love in the Time of Decay.
However, there is more. And Márquezis not afraid to set this counter theme out in the very opening scene itself:
The Sweet Smell of Bitter Almonds
Counter to the dark theme of decay that is to be developed for most of the rest of the plot, early in the novel, an act of brave revolt against this inevitability establishes the counter-current against the steady march of decay.
Jérémiah de Saint-Amour (soon forgotten and never again mentioned) takes this revolutionary step (again drawing our attention the continuous revolution in which the political life of the novel is set) by choosing to die before decay sets in. This act initiates the long debate that runs throughout the novel about Love and its objective - are we to preserve Love at the expense of Life or to preserve Life through Love? By raising this question so early, by calculating his suicide long beforehand, by choosing to end the world than to let it go to rot, to see it rot, Saint-Amour stays alive through the rest of the novel, haunting it.
Being a witness to the decay of love was the most unbearable to Saint-Amour, the Saint of Love?
What we see dramatized at the end of the book, however, is the possibility of genuine passion and romance in old age. There is a clear contrast between Saint-Amour’s suicide and the protracted love life of Florentino Ariza, but it is a contrast that conceals a profound affinity. Saint-Amour kills himself to preserve his body from decay, to fix its image, as it were, through death.
Love and decay, then, constitute the double focus of this novel, the former being present in countless ways throughout.
Love in The Time of Cholera: The Post-Apocalyptic Paradise
… his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera.
Every page of this novel is rammed full of love, beyond the capacity of any reader to fully comprehend. Love is in the air like Malaria; and in the water, like Cholera - its infections are inescapable!
All aspects of love are covered in exquisite detail - from teenage love to old age; from sexual to rapine to platonic; from formal courtship to marital to unconsummated; to unrequited love to the excesses of suicide and adultery; from the mundane normalcy of love to the incestuous abnormalities.
The reader has to consider carefully in the midst of this overwhelming abundance and variety the treatment that Márquez gives to love in this novel. Love in the novel is not the purely romantic love -carefree, easy flowing, spontaneous, and idealized.
Instead, the novel’s great affirmation of romance, is in the face not just of a hostile or prosaic world, but of the darker side of romance itself.
It is Operatic, Quixotic & Dionysian Love that is celebrated. It is Love as the Second Coming!
Sailing The River of Love: The Voyage of Re-Birth
Youth, Love, Old Age & Death - The Four Unknowns. This should have been the order of Life.
However, in this world of Márquez, the only ages that can hope to be able love/live seem to the Young and the Old. In between lies the desert - the only time we are allowed to live - when not capable of love. It is a paradox on which the very survival of this fictional universe seems to depend on.
Love and Life cannot coexist then - The solution is to give up the life they know for Love. To take the ultimate leap of faith.
So hoist a yellow flag on the Ship of your Life (Second Fidelity) and sail on the Great Magdalena (in Spanish, the “river of life”) in a State of Emergency! Let Love in the Time of Cholera be the entirety of the River of Life. Love should now destroy that earlier Life instead, just as Cholera can squeeze it out. And then be reborn, afresh.
The novel ends with the central characters challenging their entire social world and the very conditions of their existence by their grand romantic gesture, by their final, and what seems like eternal, trip on the Magdalena river. This is the necessary reaction to the decay that is fast on the route to complete extinction, to death.
Love and Cholera will both go extinct otherwise, rooted out by Life.
Love is shown as the redeeming force that saves both humanity, nature, culture and history. It appears as a divine force that defies everything. As if in biblical terms, the novel seems to assert that it is not yet too late to stop the end of humanity and to reach out for grace and happiness.
Most importantly, never allow the Yellow Flag to be questioned. Sustain the ardor. Maintain the symptoms of Cholera/Love. The pestilence is to be maintained at all costs! Only then will the world let you sail on.
Of course, the novel ends with the reader wondering if Fermina and Florentino will ever be able to come ashore and exercise their second chance.
We are left to question this act for ourselves: How do we save the world? By Escape into an Unrealistic Fantasy? Or is love more real? The answer, at least inside Márquez’s world is quite clear.
This final triumph is exquisitely multi-layered. Fermina and Florentino will remain isolated from the real contagion of their earlier Life by allowing their Love to be disguised as Cholera.
They are not rejecting the world, they are allowing the world to reject them instead.
The quarantine is really against love, the sickness that society will not, can not tolerate, the sickness that society fear as much as a deadly epidemic, the sickness that the society fears will wipe it out.
Instead it is that very sickness, which is recognized by conventional society as its biggest scourge, that saves the characters from extinction, along with the manatees, the alligators, and the monkeys.
It is Love that saves all in the end - at least we are left to imagine that possibility. Now, in this Post-Apocalyptic Paradise, age is of no consequence; Life has been transmuted and preserved by Love, like Saint-Amour’s Love by death.
Life has been reborn in the Second Coming of Love!
Love, in short, will always be in the time of cholera, under the Yellow Flag’s protection.
THE INFINITE CAPACITY FOR ILLUSION: The Will to Lyricism
So, now we can come back to the question we started with - of the Absence of Magic.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the apocalypse came in spite of Magic, in Love in the Time of Cholera, redemption comes despite its absence!
Unlike the death that starts off One Hundred Years of Solitude, here that death, the suicide, is ultimately sublimated into love - and decay is arrested in its unreality!
In fact reality has instead been reinvented in their own terms, where previous reality was rejected outright.
The capacity for illusion is magic enough to save the world, and our souls. This Infinite Capacity for Illusion can bring on the required apocalypse and we can live as if the Kingdom of Heaven/Cholera was already here on earth, under that banner of protection!
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