. Spinning .

I’m having a less than ideal experience with Marquez in this novel in that I am not having those moments of awe and elation that I recall from 100 Years of Solitude.  Just when I am writing it off to it merely being a lesser novel, Steve persists in seeing more in a passage than I can conceive, even in my determined effort to find it.

I want to be surprised, I want that element of layers in reading that grants the pleasure of discovery.  It may be more necessary for me to explore instead the frame of mind of the reader rather than the writer right now, and how it affects reading and story.  Maybe, as much control over story as Barthes hopes to lay in the hands (mind) of the reader, bears a burden not only of desire and experience, but one of mood, or openness and focus as well. 

In other words, is it possible for the reader to experience a particular story in many different ways dependent upon time and circumstance?  Certainly this would be true in poetry. Is this what broadens the possibility of paths that the more elaborate interactivity of new media methods allows by conscious choice rather than mental state alone?

Obviously, what Florentino Ariza discovers about women through his liaisons with prostitutes is never applied to ladies such as his beloved Fermina Daza, but this observation is interesting:

It was in those days that he devised his rather simplistic theories concerning the relationship between a woman’s appearance and her aptitude for love.  He distrusted the sensual type, the ones who looked as if they could eat an alligator raw and tended to be the most passive in bed.  The type he preferred was just the opposite:  those skinny little tadpoles that no one bothered to turn around and look at in the street, who seemed to disappear when they took of their clothes, who made you feel sorry for them when their bones cracked at the first impact, and yet who could leave the man who bragged the most about virility ready for the trashcan.  (p. 175)

Marquez portrays his characters as very sexual beings, in both this novel and in 100 Years of Solitude, the men in particular do quite a bit of wandering about, and their women are of different stations, a line drawn between respectably married and paid whore, with a middle ground of sorts where the married ladies may dally and the mistresses gain a certain amount of respectability.

It is an old fashioned standard that is certainly within its time period, and while not the norm by today’s looser beliefs, I cannot help but feel that in the mind of man, some beliefs die hard.  Action is not always telling of prejudice.

Marquez slips in some food for thought:

His (Florentino Ariza’s) uncle was angry with him because of the manner in which he had thrown away the good position of telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.  (p. 165)

Now there are several ways perhaps to take this.  In one line of thought, we see man’s potential to change according to life experience and free will.  This is likely Marquez’s meaning.  But then I recall in his 100 Years of Solitude various references along the theory of eternal life of the soul, reincarnation occuring as a repeated span of physical life in which also, the purpose is to learn and grow, or change.

I do wonder to which, if either, he hints.