Memoirs of My Meloncholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Essay Example

MELONCHOLY WHORES INTRODUCTION: While the whores are generally supposed to be meant for pleasure, the of Memoirs of My Meloncholy Whores has called it a melancholy daringly on the caption of his novel itself. Through diligent observation of his own life with whores he has put the pathetic plight of whores in a society. To express his strongest views on the matter the author tactfully selected a man of 90 years old who had opted to present his self with a wild love of a 14-year-old virgin whore. The paradoxical usage of the term ‘wild love’ itself is self explanatory in which the lead character’s age and the whore’s age are fused in a relationship that no society is ready to accept. As far as the ages of the two characters are concerned it is more than the gap of a father and daughter. Can a grand father indulge in wild love with his grand daughter? Then, what is love? That is what the creator of the novel has attempted to establish throughout the work. Thus the word ‘melancholy whores’ is best suitable term that fits right to express the author’s experience of a sorrowful joy. Lust is the dais on which love has to be adorned and admired. Unfortunately the empty dais is adorned everywhere. Love is ‘caring’. Anything associated with caring is love but how lust is construed as something connected with love? It is naturally an instinct prevalent in all beings that is meant for mutual attraction. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his Memoirs of My Meloncholy Whores has splendidly marked this difference. To bring about the contrast into the light he has prudently selected a love of an elderly old man falling in love with a young girl that too a whore. A perfect selection to highlight the contrast is personified by the age gap of the lead characters in the fiction. Gabriel put that lust is purely biological for which he portrayed the unnamed protagonist of the fiction to pay for every experience of his aphrodisiac experience. Can one love his pair of shoes, which carries its owner throughout its life? Then how the male dominant society pretends to have loved women who are considered objects of desire? It is utterly mean and non-altruistic. Gabriel in the fiction has softly hinted this apparent contradiction in any society. Gabriel’s conventional style of telling stories not in first person is purposefully over ruled in this case of Memoirs of My Meloncholy Whores. The narrator of this story has been given the complete right to wield his bold stick of tearing the masquerade of the society that cunningly lauds woman hood and exploits women. While bringing out the experiences of a man with prostitutes all over his life, the narrator’s undertone in expressing his yearning for real love is fragrantly dispelled by way of his life-long confrontation with sex and inner urge for ‘love’ which was certainly not the ‘lust’. Self Portrayal: The narrator of this fiction portrays himself as ugly, shy and anachronistic. “I am the end of a line without merit or brilliance”. Behind this humility the author was able to expose his inner self in the character of unnamed protagonist in the form of a newspaper writer. This has facilitated the author of the fiction to plunge freely in to the realm of both sex and love. Because dauntless and pompous characters are necessarily to be carved with certain restrictions of moral and social pressures, which the author might have construed to have veiled the inner urge of every human being including love and perversion. He has “resolved to tell of my free will just what I am like, only to ease my conscience” (p.5). The author has diligently exposed the experiences he had with all the women during his life span of 90 years hitherto were simply physical which gave him pleasure of flesh alone. It never transcended physical aspect for which pleasure he never missed to pay. The pricking of conscience of the narrator is well put in the ‘easing of his conscience’. The author’s deep analytical approach is cleverly put in the usage of “my free will just what I am like”. He has tried to find out whether payment for sex would render equal satisfaction to women as that of men, when the latter indulge in sex only to earn money. The unquenchable thirst of love, which the narrator never got in all the five hundred and odd prostitutes candidly, expresses itself in this phrase. Since in any trade customer satisfaction is the motto of any merchant or service provider, his satisfaction in its complete fleshy nature is certainly a satisfaction as long as he gave money for sex and took the role of a jubilant client. The author’s sorrow over the traditional misconception that love can be bought at brothels is the undertone in this sentence. The narrator’s sorrow is mainly for getting himself engulfed in this foolish trade world where the merchandise wished for could never be bought. Worse of his concern was that the goods procured namely the bodily pleasure was long back been misconstrued as the aspired object, i.e., love. Such goofy involvement in sex pricked the narrator’s inner self that unless he ease his conscience it would be much difficult for him to pull on. While thanking Delgadina for having confrontation with his inner self (p. 65) for the first time on his 90th birthday, the narrator secretly confessed that he had so far been driven by the instinctual urge whenever he met women especially prostitutes. By allowing the adolescent virgin to sleep under the influence of valerian, the narrator came to know the blissful existence of his own self, although the knowledge came from a confrontation within. The Truth that joy lies not outside but within every one’s self has descended to the narrator in a brothel. The place of enlightenment of a highly valuable Truth may be a bit irrelevant, but the strength of the Truth could never be challenged. The narrator who had so long been going to prostitutes for pleasure has come to a point of realisation that real joy was not emanating from his bed partners but from within his self. Even in sex it was not the woman’s excitement that produced the man’s pleasure, but the awareness that he had made her excited. Thus even the place of the narrator’s enlightenment has acquired validity in the fiction. Defining woman hood: The book splendidly defines woman hood transcending the narcissistic awareness of almost all men. It is generally a blind by birth male, who can excellently identify the exact nature of woman hood. The author of the fiction has selected the reverse osmosis process of this concept in making a woman sleeping and a male observing simply her anatomic existence without even a tinge of sexual excitement. Even her newborn breasts were just in the backdrop of his relishing her feet and toes and eyebrows. The startling start of the fiction in which the narrator wished to present himself with wild love with an adolescent virgin clearly delineates that the narrator’s never fading vigour for eliciting love from any source especially women. The power of imagination of his youth is found never subdued in this usage. Almost all of his sexual experiences with the gone by prostitutes gave him an illusionary assumption that he was unable to derive actual pleasure for his self only because they were not virgins. While seeing the sleeping beauty of Delgadina, although he was able to get pleasure of seeing a girl’s naked body, he could not make her joyful and began to realise that love was not a one way traffic but mutual. Simple gazing and paying for joy never constituted love in the view of the author. The pleasure derived from such gazing has been termed ‘improbable pleasure’ by the author (p. 29) to express the uncertainty of his prolonged enjoyment. The phrase also implies that gazing without any excitement in such proximity with a nude anatomy could be possible only for highly balanced man of artistic prudence. The hero - a writer for the newspaper who admires his own literary performance even in the closed room with a nude whore – is depicted to have fully engulfed in his search for the real self and real love. The narrator did not even wished to know the real name of the adolescent virgin given to him for wild pleasure by the brothel owner Rosa Cabracus. The protagonist writer narrator called her Delgadina (p.68) after the name of a girl in a song. Such abstract naming of a real person in pure blood and flesh denotes the narrator’s liking for solipsism. Mild sarcasm in the depiction: An old man at the age of 90 feeling afresh to restart a life with blooming love – real love – sarcastically hints how people waste their life long struggle in search of love behind lust. Here the author tries to draw the line of demarcation between love and lust. Love is caring for others, while lust is dubious in expecting something from others in exchange of giving away anything unmindful of the fact if the donation is really acknowledged by the receiver. The narrator’s calm gaze of the sleeping beauty of Delgadina, although is viewed as something sordid and perverse by other people, the author tactfully lauded the hero’s act of real love and caring through Madam Rosa Cabarcas who gave him the virgin, Delgadina for a wild delight. The transformation of desire for ‘wild love’ into a gentle ‘gazing love’ is the sarcastic undertone of the entire fiction, in which the futility of wild love is made evident. “I gazed at the phosphorescent sweat on the naked body of the 14-year-old virgin asleep on the bed, and admired the brilliance of my language”. The sarcastic humour in this portrayal of the hero is noteworthy, wherein a client in the brothel admires his own command on the language keeping aside his experience of pleasure with a whore. Poetic imagination: The classical relishing of the full moon climbing to the centre of the sky is definitely poetic. Gabriel’s depiction of the narrator’s memory being filled with the virgin and her self in all his moments of life is superbly tuned in such a manner that an adolescents yearning for calf-love has returned back to a fair old man at his 90 besides his sore and sweet experiences with more than 500 prostitutes. This time the yearning for love has zero expectancy for sex. Expectancy for sex is usually associated with enormous imagination before indulging into the act. For both man and woman it is the first woman/man with whom one indulges in sex who decides the entire perception of sex in the remaining life. As such the narrator’s first experience of sex with a prostitute at his age of twelve has made him opt for whores only to use for sexual urge whenever he felt. The narrator vividly expressed this as his first sexual experience being “initiated by force in to the art of love” (p. 109) by a prostitute at his age before 12. The life long journey in search of love is explained in this phrase where the initiation of the journey was fixed or mis-fixed in the shape of a prostitute and the narrator had been obligated to derive pleasure only with whores and finally got enlightened by an adolescent whore. A perfect outlook on life and love: Gabriel although begins his fiction with a startling opening of wild love at 90, he encompasses his mild feministic outlook on love and life. The author’s attempt to define love is something connected with caring for others that germinate within the self-nurturing humanity. Romance is something that develops love partly in a route of possessiveness. Thus ‘love’ is feminine and ‘romance’ is masculine. The authors has tried much to fix that masculine romance exploits the feminine love and consequently degrades both love and romance reducing them to mere myth. The domination of males is depicted in such a strong mode. Need for a woman for the purpose of sex is in no way balanced with wanting a man for sex. Acceptability, in fact with pain, of this injustice by women is mislabelled as justice. Really this is a ‘cruel justice’. Acceptability of this ‘justice’ by many women is still the unresolved phenomenon. The following lines of the fiction splendidly reveal the author’s out look on love, lust, passion and life: “You fool” spat Rosa. “She will be insulted you did not care enough about her to abuse her”. But I did not care: I had detected the fragrance of Delgadina’s soul and had realised that sex was the consolation we receive for the absence of love. The term ‘consolation’ too is likely to have been used by the narrator to express his thanks for the 500 numbers of whores he already met, albeit the facts that he received no perfect delight in them. The exact and full meaning of love is abruptly endorsed in the statement of Rosa, the brothel owner: “Others may consider you a sordid, delusional old man, but Delgadina loves you. She wanted to save herself for you”. The hero of the fiction clearly has spelt what love means in pure action. The traditional concept that whores are simply to indulge in sex for the customers is smashed. Here the author sees beyond the fleshy bodies of the whores. He actually sees the inner self of the females who are destined to opt for whoredom as their livelihood. A Social outlook on whoredom: When all the activities attempted to conceal the weakness of male cult fail, men resort to attack women. The fear of dismissal, divorce and violence on personal, sexual and economic arena is made to be persisting in the minds of women. This tool of intimidation is used to rule women by men in almost all culture. However there exist several discussions and debates that decry against discrimination and oppression against women; but the masculine society adopts fascinating techniques to divert all sympathy for itself. Masculinity that considers the menstrual flow of women as something unchaste and un-sanctified never treats nocturnal emission even as ugly. The double standards adopted by masculine society are thus illustrated in a fantastic way.. In sex too every man fears that his virility and subsequent masculinity would be suspected or under weighed or paid no notice of by the woman whom he proposes to impregnate or just enjoy with. Out of this fear, he often spreads scores of lies in the minds of woman and sometimes threatens her to get his wish of having coitus fulfilled. The hypocrisy of male community is well established in either condoning their weakness and ugliness or exaggerating the tell-tale flamboyance. Gabriel’s creation of the protagonist in Memoirs of My melancholy Whores is a perfect alternate masculine character with all the matured feministic traits. He imagines her blood as it circulates “through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love”. Conclusion: Gabriel Garcia Marquez while publishing the fiction Memoirs of My Meloncholy Whores was around 79 years. His interest in eliciting old people’s state of minds is clearly knit in the fiction. The great driving force of human life – love – which had very long back been misconstrued as sex has an indelible impact on the author’s presentation. In the view of the author natural biological instinct of sexual urge has been given undue importance. Although all the five senses are to be focussed during sexual experiences, the author’s different approach of gazing a virgin’s nude physique has enlightened him to sense the fragrance of a woman’s soul. He, the narrator, who claims his self to be non-brilliant, was brilliant enough to feel the rhythmic notes in the blood circulation of the sleeping girl. Finally the narrator was found to enjoy the detached attachment in sex, which he believed to have given him enormous source of energy and refreshment enabling him to live a decade more. "When I woke alive on the first morning of my 90s in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another 90 years.” The author has elegantly put this as he became charged with lively forces at a time when all the mortals are bound to die. * * * * * Read More