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. It seemed more like bold modernity, which was how Fermina Daza must have understood it, for in her second letter to Florentino Ariza, she began by begging his pardon for any difficulties in reading her handwriting, since she did not have at her disposal any means more advanced than her steel pen.” [p. 293]

“Nevertheless, the rapid progress of aviation was a real threat to all of them. She tried to console him: boats would always exist because there were not many people crazy enough to get into a contraption that seemed to go against nature. Then Florentino Ariza spoke of improvements in mail service, transportation as well as delivery, in an effort to have her talk about his letters.” [p. 307]

Love in the Time of Cholera traces technological advances over time, in fields of communication and travel.Consider the passages above, how are the technological advances described? Think about the phrases “bold modernity” and “rapid progress”—to which modern-day technologies or practices might you ascribe these descriptors?

Would you consider technological advances a pursuit toward an ideal?

Constantin Brancusi, A Muse, 1917, polished bronze with limestone base, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Mrs. Herman Brown and Mrs. William Stamps Farish, 62.1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Constantin Brancusi believed in basic forms as a path to truth. In A Muse, he explores the classical form of ideal female beauty, rendered in the simplified shapes of Cycladic art (forms characteristic of artwork from the Aegean Cyclades islands). This version in highly polished bronze displays a hard, streamlined beauty forecasting the machine aesthetics of modern art.

5 Notions of ideal beauty, and ideal technology, have shifted and evolved over time. In what ways do the pared-down features of Brancusi’s sculpture reflect the trajectory of modern technology? How do you envision our current technology evolving over the next 20 years?

These three works shown below, by artist Dorothy Hood, were created using the relatively traditional method of applying ink to paper. They were assembled in this triptych formation as a part of The Larger Canvas project in 1971. This was a public art initiative in Houston wherein Houston National Bank underwrote the placement of a series of five highway billboards displaying fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot enlargements of works of art created by five different artists.

Consider these pieces, and try to envision them as a large billboard that you might encounter on your daily commute. Does the different location and approach to installation change the way you experience the art?

Left and far right: Dorothy Hood, Untitled Time Machine, 1971, ink over graphite on colored wove paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Houston National Bank, 72.70, .71. © Estate of Dorothy Hood

Center: Dorothy Hood, Untitled, alternate title: Time of Farewell, 1971, ink over graphite on colored wove paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Houston National Bank, 72.72. © Estate of Dorothy Hood

The two drawings on the left and far right are part of Dorothy Hood’s larger Time Machine series, and were likely created first. The composition in the center, titledTime of Farewell, was created later. Consider each piece independently, and then together as a series. In what ways do the drawings evoke the passage of time, “bold modernity,” and “rapid progress?”

If each of these works were to represent major instances from the book, which moments would you ascribe to them?

6 Seeking the Human Spirit: Transformation The Museum is partnering again with Houston Grand Opera on the second iteration of a six-year multidisciplinary initiative, Seeking the Human Spirit. The initiative is designed to highlight the universal spiritual themes raised in opera and to expand and deepen Houstonians’ connections to opera and art. As a part of this collaboration, the Museum has connected with HGO to trace links between the opera Florencia en el Amazonas; the winter 2018/2019 MFAH Book Club selection, Love in the Time of Cholera; and artwork from the Museum’s collections.

Through these comparisons, the question is asked: why does art speak to us on a deep spiritual level?

Florencia en el Amazonas, L.A. Opera, 2014 Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

After leaving South America 20 years ago to pursue a music career, legendary opera singer Florencia Grimaldi jour- neys home to give a concert and to find Cristóbal, the true love she left all those years ago. Reality and fantasy come together for Florencia and her fellow passengers on the riverboat El Dorado as they travel down the mysterious Amazon toward uncharted fates.

Consider the passage below, taken from the opera’s libretto.

Florencia: I am not just my name. Here, twenty years ago, I met you, Cristóbal. Through you, my body learned to feel passion and my soul took shape in your hands. From this passion, my voice was born, Cristóbal, like that butterfly you sought in the jungle. You offered me your life and I scorned it. I wished to seduce the crowds with my voice. I promised to return when I had triumphed in Europe, America, Asia. That was the world. This river was a quagmire of snakes, a suffocating atmosphere. You said you would wait for me forever, that love sets one free, and you would never hold me back. I left, I triumphed, and I forgot my promises.

Are there any characters from García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera who you think would relate to Florencia’s yearning for Cristóbal? How do Florencia and Cristóbal’s circumstances differ from the relationships illustrated in the book?

At the end of the opera, Florencia is mystically transformed into a butterfly, and reunited spiritually with her love. In what ways is the idea of transformation embodied throughout Love in the Time of Cholera?

7 Author Biography Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, situated in a tropical region of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. He grew up with his maternal grandparent—his grandfather was a pensioned colonel from the civil war at the beginning of the century. He went to a Jesuit college and began to read law, but his studies were soon broken off for his work as a journalist. In 1954 he was sent to Rome on an assignment for his newspaper, and since then he has mostly lived abroad—in Paris, New York, Barcelona, and Mexico—in a more or less compulsory exile. Besides his large output of fiction he has written screenplays and has continued to work as a journalist.

From Nobel Lectures in Literature 1981–1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993

Learning and Interpretation programs receive generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services; MD Anderson Cancer Center; Sharon G. Dies; the Sterling-Turner Foundation; Houston Junior Woman’s Club; Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo; the Kress Foundation; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; the Susan Vaughan Foundation; and additional generous donors. 8