It is the job of authors to confront some of life’s most troubling questions and to challenge our answers. There may be little more troubling question than why a grown man would consider a sexual relationship with a child. Probably the most famous literary pedophile is Vladimir Nabokov’s ruthless Humbert Humbert from Lolita. Nabokov probed the mind of a calculating and cruel monster that ruins the life of a child for his own selfish reasons. Gabriel García Márquez also explores the mind of a pervert, a sexual deviant and, most specifically for the purposes of this exploration, a pedophile in Love in the Time of Cholera; his protagonist, Florentino Ariza is a man who also ruins the life of a child for his own purposes. When reading these two books one cannot help but wonder why. What was the inspiration for Nabokov and García Márquez?

Lolita begins with Humbert Humbert, writing his story from his jail cell, originally imprisoned for reckless driving but later charged with the murder of Clair Quilty. He recollects his childhood, his days growing up in the “princedom by the sea” (Nabokov 9), his marriage and divorce and his relationship with Lolita. In some ways his entire history is leading up to his relationship with Dolores Haze and subsequent incarceration. It begins with his childhood relationship with Annabel Leigh, a traumatizing relationship as she dies of typhus. He seems to never be able to get past this relationship as all future relationships are affected by its ghost. One example is Monique, the childlike French prostitute. It is here that Nabokov first shows his readers physical pedophilic action taken on the part of Humbert Humbert. Prior to his visit with Monique he admires “nymphets” as he calls them but he does not take action, he is content with just watching, but after his experience with Monique he is no longer content to fantasize from afar. His marriage with Valeria does not work out, of course, and he later moves stateside. After one possible affair doesn’t pan out, he, by pure chance, finds his Lolita. After a long a dramatic relationship he finds her once more, barefoot and pregnant, and the potential for a positive and constructive future washed out of her. Who would she have grown up to be? It is a question Humbert Humbert himself asks. Barring the fact that she is fictional, Nabokov’s readers will never know.

Just as with Humbert Humbert, García Márquez audience is privy to the span of Florentino Ariza’s lifetime. Beginning after Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza had a series of 622 lovers – never able to experience pure love, always dwelling on his love for Fermina. His final love affair is with the 14-year-old América Vicuña. When he leaves her upon learning of the death of his childhood sweetheart’s husband she is left empty and damaged beyond all repair, her life altered. The most damning evidence of the relationship, letters and a house-key found, like Humbert Humbert’s journal, in a wardrobe, seal her fate and she commits suicide.

So what makes the men resort to children and their intimate companions? David Finkelhor and Sharon Araji write that K. Howells states that “the pedophilic fantasy comes to serve as a ‘sense of symbolic mastery over childhood-induced psychological traumas’”. (Finkelhor and Araji 148) Both Humbert Humbert and Florentino Ariza experienced traumatic events in their younger years. Humbert Humbert’s first love dies of typhoid before they can consummate their relationship and Florentino Ariza’s love for Fermina Daza is brushed aside when she decides that their was a relationship based in letters, also before any consummation and when he later goes on a journey in order to rid his mind of Fermina Daza he is raped onboard the vessel.

Both Lolita and Love in the Time of Cholera have very appealing narrations. Humbert Humbert is a brilliant writer, a witty conversationalist and possessed of a remarkable ability to see through the lesser qualities of another person. Nabokov’s readers cannot help but be annoyed by Charlotte Haze and grow just as irritated with her as Humbert Humbert does. Nabokov’s readers fall right into his trap, they emphasize so much with him that when he does the unthinkable they almost allow for it. M. Keith Booker compares this with Florentino Ariza:

Ariza’s numerous love stories (especially the central one involving Fermina) make such attractive narratives that we are tempted to read him as the ideal lover he apparently thinks himself to be, not as a manipulative womanizer who jumps from one bed to another, causing considerable suffering and multiple violent deaths among the objects of this insatiable sexual appetite. (Booker 190)

From the very beginning, García Márquez’s readers feel sympathy for Florentino Ariza, a sensitive and romantic boy whose hopes for love are cruelly dashed when Fermina Daza tells him, “Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than illusion”. (García Márquez 102) The reader cannot help but feel sympathy and more importantly empathy for him. García Márquez plays on the readers own experiences being turned away from someone they had feelings towards. How easy it is, then, to feel Florentino Ariza is entirely justified in his later 622 relationships. This however, is what García Márquez warns his readers against when he said, in an interview with Raymond Leslie Williams, “You have to be careful not to fall into my little trap”. (quoted in Booker 181) Naturally, García Márquez’s readers feel a kinship with Florentino Ariza, the slighted lover. When he crosses the lines society constructs his readers identity with him to much that they allow him to, with little thought towards the fact that he began an illicit relationship with his 14-year-old ward. When he ends the relationship and she kills herself because of it, it is difficult to place any blame with him.

Finkelhor and Araji put forth a four factor model which can be applied to both Humbert Humbert and Florentino Ariza. They argue that while most theories on pedophilia address one aspect of the phenomenon, in order to fully understand the pedophile one must understand the four factors leading to their behavior. These factors are emotional congruence, sexual arousal to children, blockage and disinhibition and all can be seen in both Lolita and Love in the Time of Cholera.

The first factor, emotional congruence is mainly concerned with arrested development, the theory that upon experiencing a traumatic event a person’s emotional and/or mental growth is halted. As human experience never ends until mental capacity does the growth of those suffering from arrested development is perverted and they instead find their interests elsewhere, subconsciously dwelling on the event which came to shape their lives. In the case of both Humbert Humbert and Florentino Ariza they are focused always on the vents of their childhood, events which shaped their lives:

Fraser, in another emotional congruence theory, uses the notion of narcissism or identification with the self, contending that the pedophile, as a result of either emotional deprivation or even overprotection as in childhood, “remains in love with the child he then was. This is impossible so he must project his love on to other children of a similar age to his lost childhood who thus become love objects for him”. (Finkelhor and Araji 149)

In a way, Humbert Humbert lost his desire to love when the girl he had his first relationship died. Florentino Ariza as well lost his childhood, his innocence, when Fermina left him as well as and especially when Rosalba “stripped him, without glory, of his virginity”. (García Márquez 142)

There is also a sense of complete egoism in both Humbert Humbert and Florentino Ariza. Both men look to possess their conquests. Humbert Humbert consistently calls Lolita “my darling” or “my fall nymph” and my admitting to depriving Dolores Haze of a childhood he admits to possessing it. This need for possession is mimicked by Florentino Ariza who writes “this pussy is mine” (García Márquez 217) on the belly of Olimpia Zuleta. (Booker 190) Even in his intimate culmination with Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza portrays the role of the possessor, the conqueror, his penis the “weapon” and “war trophy”. (Booker 192) Just as Humbert Humbert is in possession of Lolita’s childhood and being Florentino Ariza takes possession of Fermina Daza sexually, Olimpia Zuleta’s body and s even in the possession of the spirit of the Widow Nazaret, for as she tells him, “I adore you because you made me a whore”. (García Márquez 151) In allowing him to change her she gives herself over to her possessor. In this way both Humbert Humbert and Florentino Ariza can gain control over their pasts. Humbert Humbert can protect Annabel Leigh from her fate, her life resting in the hands of Humbert Humbert. Florentino Ariza can not only regain control in his relationship with Fermina Daza but also of his own sexual organ, the control over which was taken from him when he was raped by Rosalba.

The second factor, sexual arousal to children cannot just be defined as the fact that both Florentino Ariza and Humbert Humbert have sexual relationships with children of a young age. It is often taken for granted the attraction to these children – however Finkelhor and Araji warn against taking the sexual attraction towards a child for granted. For both Florentino Ariza and Humbert Humbert their sexual attraction to Dolores Haze and América Vicuña lies in their resemblance to their childhood counterparts as well as what they symbolize to both men. Nabokov writes through Humbert Humbert’s pen that “without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses”. (Nabokov 39) García Márquez writes that the resemblance between Fermina Daza and América Vicuña is “more than casual and not based only on their age, their school uniform, their braid, their untamed walk, and even their haughty and unpredictable character”. (García Márquez 272) These resemblances are glossed over and the reader easily falls into one of the many traps in both novels, that these men are with their respective child lovers for who they are and not who they resemble. The girls are also seen by their lovers as the fountain of youth – having cured them of what ails them most, old age. As Margaret Morganroth Gullette states:

Making Humbert Humbert a man who is imprisoned in his aging skin was one of Nabokov’s most subtle and brilliant inventions in Lolita. In representing Humbert’s anguished sense of time passing (which might have been more ordinary material), the story of a pedophile offered him dazzling opportunities of hyperbole. Pedophilia, in his version of it, exaggerates the normal dislike of aging, the normal anxiety over the passage of time. (Morganroth Gullette 225)

This can also be applied to Florentino Ariza who “chose to behave like what he had most feared being in his life: a senile lover”. (García Márquez 272) His disgust with the effects of his age are again addressed his first night in bed with Fermina Daza. When he can’t obtain an erection he “was ashamed, furious with himself, longing for some reason to blame her fir his failure”. (García Márquez 340) Florentino Ariza is embarrassed and ashamed not just of his impotence but what it represents – his age.

Both men also experience the third factor, blockage. This theory states that pedophiles do not partake in mature and socially acceptable relationships because the circumstances do not allow for it. There is a sense of displacement, the “normal tendencies are blocked, and thus the sexual interest in children develops”. (Finkelhor and Araji 153) With Humbert Humbert, his normal tendencies are blocked by his memory of Annabel Leigh. He knows he physically needs a sexual relationship however; his memory of Annabel Leigh and the resulting sexual dysfunction prohibit him from having an adult heterosexual relationship. The blockage Florentino Ariza experiences is slightly more tangible. The woman he loves is married and over time he begins to need her more and more and resorts to having a relationship with her doppelganger.

Finally, the theory of disinhibition plays a part in the psyche of both Humbert Humbert and Florentino Ariza, mainly concerned with the fact that due to specific situations the participants in incestuous relations feel a lessening in the natural inhibitions they are faced with:

Men are seen as engaging in sexual acts with the girls in their family because these girls are stepdaughters or because the men were away from the family during the child’s early like. Being a stepdaughter or being separated presumably works to reduce the ordinary inhibition that would exist against sex between a natural father and a daughter who had lived with each other continuously since the child’s birth. (Finkelhor and Araji 155)

The factors are the same in both Love in the Time of Cholera and Lolita. Humbert Humbert is the step-father of Dolores Haze and so spent little time with her before he “solipsized” her. Just like Humbert Humbert, Florentino Ariza came into his victim’s life when she was very young, their relationship beginning when she was 14. Having spent no time with their child partners before their attraction began they did not have, or at least had few barriers against having familial relations.

There are more than a few casual coincidences in the behaviors of Florentino Ariza and Humbert Humbert. It would appear that both authors, Nabokov and García Márquez were channeling the depravity of the human organism and also testing the depths of their readers. Both are exquisite narrations which plumb the depths of the worst of the human soul. What the reader must decide is whether or not they can give into the beauty of its narration or to be repulsed by it.

Works Cited
Booker, M. Keith. “The Dangers of Gullible Reading: Narrative as Seduction in García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera.” Studies in 20th Century Literature Vol. 17 No. 2 (1993): 181-195.
Finkelhor, David, and Sharon Araji. “Explanations of Pedophilia: A Four Factor Model.” The Journal of Sex Research Vol. 22 No. 2 (1986): 145-161.
García Márquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. New York and Toronto: Vintage Books, 2003.
Morganroth Gullette, Margaret. “The Exile of Adulthood: Pedophilia in the Midlife Novel.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction Vol. 17 No. 3 (Spring 1984): 215-232.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Alfred Appel, Jr.. New York and Toronto: Vintage Books, 1991.