MFAH Book Club 2018/2019

µ˙The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston WINTER MFAH Book Club 2018/2019 Love in the Time of Cholera A novel by Gabriel García Márquez With humorous sagacity and consummate craft, García Márquez traces an exceptional half-century story of unrequited love. Though it seems never to be conveniently contained, love flows through the novel in many wonderful guises—joyful, melancholy, enriching, ever surprising. —Love in the Time of Cholera book cover How to Use This Discussion Guide How to Book an MFAH Book Club Tour All art—whether literary or visual—arises from the context For book clubs and other groups of six or more confirmed of its time. Creating bridges between the literary and participants, tours related to García Márquez’s Love in the visual arts is what makes the MFAH Book Club unique. Time of Cholera are available on select days and times November 1, 2018–February 28, 2019. Tours are led by This discussion guide features questions about broad Museum docents and feature excerpts from the book to themes—love, memory, nostalgia, aging, and the advent drive discussion about works on view at the Museum. of new technologies—all addressed in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, as well as questions about If you are not a member of a formal book club, but are works of art in the Museum’s collections and exhibitions. interested in participating in engaging art and literature discussions inspired by this book, consider joining the Read the book, discuss some or all of the questions MFAH Digital Book Club on the Goodreads web platform: with your group, and then reserve an MFAH Book Club mfah.org/goodreads. tour online. For more information, visit mfah.org/bookclub. Please email [email protected] with any questions. 1 Between Love and Obsession Love is defined in many different ways throughout this book. Descriptive words likebitter, unrequited, devastating, impossible, noble, obsession, and illusion are all used to describe sentiments of love experienced by the different characters throughout the narrative. What does love mean to you? Has your definition of love changed or evolved over time? Do you relate with any of the characters’ plights? Consider the descriptive words noted above, and reflect on the artwork below. In the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, Theseus escapes the Minotaur’s labyrinth with the help of his lover, Ariadne, whom he later abandons on the Aegean island of Naxos. On the top left, Angelica Kauffmann portrays the forsaken woman at the moment Theseus’s ship sails away. In this painting (center), the fabled musician Orpheus—who beguiled the Greek gods to allow him to retrieve his beloved wife, who had been fatally bitten by a snake—leads her tenderly from the underworld. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a great music lover, has imbued this work with a sense of melancholy lyricism that hints at the tragic end of the story: Orpheus loses Eurydice forever when he turns to look at her before reaching the world of the living. In the work on the lower left, Pablo Picasso highlights the differences between these two figures by painting them in quite different styles. One can identify the figure on the left as a hard, angular woman (perhaps Picasso’s wife Olga), and the one on the right as a more sensuous woman (Marie-Thérèse Walter, his lover at the time). Whereas the left figure is sharp and concrete, the right figure is inviting, delicate, and ghost-like, appearing as if in a dream. Which words, either from the list above, or any others that come to mind, would you attribute to the relationships represented in these paintings? Do the subjects or artists remind you of particular characters from the book? Top to bottom: Angelica Kauffmann, Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus, 1774, oil on canvas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harris Masterson III in memory of Neill Turner Masterson, Jr. 69.23. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861, oil on canvas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Agnes Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund, 87.190. Pablo Picasso, Two Women in Front of a Window, 1927, oil on canvas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore N. Law, 64.17. © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2 Memory and Nostalgia “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.” [p. 106] What do you think the author means when he suggests that Florentino Ariza has fallen victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia? Robert Rauschenberg, V (Apogamy Pods) def. – Apogamy: A sourceless pollinizing without contact fertilization, 2000, vegetable dye transfer, acrylic, and graphite on polylaminate, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Caroline Wiess Law, 2001.151.A, .B. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY In this painting, the largest of the Apogamy series, Robert Rauschenberg transferred photographs, but separated them by large expanses of white surface. The artist explains, “I was really trying not to make narratives, to keep the images apart and have them relate the way real memories relate to one another, by their look, by their shape or their transparency, by their colors and their atmospheres.” Consider Rauschenberg’s comment above regarding the relationship between narrative, image, and memories. He uses words like shape, transparency, color, and atmosphere to describe the disjointed relations of memories to one another. In what ways are these connections reflected in the book? As a third-party reader, we are afforded the luxury of a narrative to help string together the remembrances of featured characters, but think about your own relationship to your most vivid and distinct memories. What role does narrative play in the process of remembering? If the colors and shapes in this work of art are meant in some way to represent memories, what does the white expanse in between signify? “In a very short while Fermina Daza realized that the memory of her dead husband was as resistant to the fire as it seemed to be to the passage of time.” [p. 281] While there are nostalgic moments in our lives that we long to forever remember, there are also inevitable moments that we someday hope to forget. In what ways do memories and nostalgia hold the book’s characters captive? 3 The Ravages of Time Damien Hirst, End Game, 2000– 2004, glass, stainless steel, human skeletons, and medical equipment, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Jereann and Holland Chaney in memory of Robert H. Chaney, 2008.533. © 2014 Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, Artists Rights Society At once repellent and beautiful, the sculpture above focuses on two human skeletons, male and female. Flanking the skeletons are two cases containing an array of the kind of medical equipment commonly used in an operating theater or morgue. End Game reinvents the conventions of the vanitas picture for modern times, insisting that viewers recognize the fragility of life and their own reluctance to acknowledge death. The notion of aging is measured and perceived in different ways by the characters in this book. Consider the passages below. “A long time ago, on a deserted beach in Haiti where the two of them lay naked after love, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had sighed: ‘I will never be old.’ She interpreted this as a heroic determination to struggle without quarter against the ravages of time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life when he was sixty years old.” [p. 15] “Little by little, as [Dr. Juvenal Urbino] lay with his eyes closed after his daily siesta, he had begun to feel them, one by one, inside his body, feel the shape of his insomniac heart, his mysterious liver, his hermetic pancreas, and he had slowly discovered that even the oldest people were younger than he was and that he had become the only survivor of his generation’s legendary group portraits.” [p. 40] “For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.” [p. 260] In what ways do these three reflections on aging relate to Damien Hirst’s sculptureEnd Game shown above? How do the men and women in the book experience and interpret the aging process differently? For Hirst, the surgical instruments in his piece represent both the miracle and horror of modern medicine. Reflect on the roles that medicine and illness play throughout the book. How has medicine in the modern age affected our relationships to our bodies, and the aging process? In what ways do our modern perspectives differ from the realities faced by the book characters? 4 New Technologies “Years later, a typed personal letter would be considered almost an insult, but at that time the typewriter was still an office animal without its own code of ethics, and its domestication for personal use was not foreseen in the books on etiquette.

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