The best recipe for a dish to be delicious is preparing it with love – Tita, the heroine of “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel, is sure. That is certainly the formula Esquivel resorts to creating her novel, where love is a key ingredient, and the food for thought produced by the book is savory, hot and rich. “Tita remembered that Nacha had always said that when people argue while preparing tamales, the tamales won’t get cooked. They can be heated day after day and still stay raw, because the tamales are angry. In a case like that, you have to sing to them, which makes them happy, then they’ll cook.” (Esquivel 103).
An incredible combination of humans’ two biggest passions – love and food interweaved so tight – makes a whole new seamless sense, which becomes the core medium of magic realism in the novel (Neibylski 180). Interestingly, many of the readers would find this kind of coupling strange if not absurd at first sight. Normally, the love symptoms introduced in the world literature and well known to all of us include appetite loss and even hunger striking, anyway quite the opposite to food-worship. In “Like water for chocolate”, we come across an exclusive case, where food and its flavor are the only means to show the lover’s affection and care, and more importantly, feel it like one can feel a kiss.
The caution should be mentioned - not to seal the book with a romance novel cliché. Esquivel creates a writing that gently combines sensitivity and style facility with the best Latin American magic realism traditions following Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Amado. It lightens multiple social and historical issues through the prism of women in a man-dominated and moralizing society (Valdés 80). It is a colorful representation of a rich, vibrant and many-sided Mexican culture introduced through myths, phantasmagoria and grotesque. The author is interested in a combination of emotional and intellectual life of a human, the thought and feeling interrelation and harmony. To some extent, this family saga is an attempt to investigate into a deep emotional life of a woman. Finally, it is a humorous woman’s journal parody seasoned with authentic recipes of the Mexican cuisine and mysteries (Valdés 81).
The notion of magic realism is vividly presented in the oxymoron itself referring obviously to the junction of two separate realities – fantastic and matter-of-fact ones. As a literary strategy it possesses a number of features in its arsenal that produce the effect of the paranormal invading the everyday. When the genre was identified by the scholars in 50-70s of the XXth century its main characteristic was designated as having a character of an Indian origin, who is a bearer of the originality distinctive from the European world perception (Flores 187). Nevertheless, the idea and implementation of magic realism has gone far beyond that definition since then. These changes have been brought about by the need for fantasy reasoning, which could go along with the common characters and situation depiction (Neibylski 182). Among the devices making the reasoning possible, one can name dreams, phantoms, ravings and hallucinations, insanity and mysteries. This is how an implicit phantasy appears to the reader leaving a choice of how to interpret the weird occurrence – as probable or irrational. Esquivel offers this choice to the reader describing Tita on the verge of emotional instability because of the hardship she lives through. This way all the abnormal things, like her mother ghost visions, turn out credible. Meanwhile, all the customary things obtain a magical meaning – for example, the meals she shares with Pedro and the family.
In some way, the magic realism in Latin American literature and in particular the one in “Like Water for Chocolate” bears a resemblance to a certain religion, which believes in miracles. Tita is a kind of a priestess in a church or a temple embodied by the kitchen she cooks in. “ Tita was the last link in a chain of cooks who had been passing culinary secrets from generation to generation since ancient times, and she was considered the finest exponent of the marvelous art of cooking.” (Esquivel 17). Apart from using the ingredients to complete the culinary masterpieces, Tita makes a kind of a sacrifice – her tears and blood produce wizard alchemic effects when added to the dishes. People who try them can feel the way she did when preparing the food. “The moment they took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing.” (Esquivel 16). This reminds much of the Biblical verse “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me” (New Jerusalem Bible, John 6:56). Same resemblance can be traced of the Tita’s culinary book, which remains undamaged after the devastating fire and is later inherited by Tita’s niece and her daughter. Tita is not religious; she might believe in God but the strict mandates her mother tries to impose on her encounter incomprehension and opposition. Thus, her one and only belief is in fairness and kindness. When she finds out about Rosaura’s plan to raise her daughter the way Tita has been risen herself, she can hardly hide her irritation and disgust at the stupid seemingly high-minded act but in fact a selfish relic of the past. At that point, she is using the teaching from her culinary “Bible” literary making Rosaura swallow her wicked words. “The anguish she felt! As she tore apart the last little piece of tortilla left in her hand, she wished with all her heart that her sister would be swallowed up by the earth. That was the least she deserved.” (Esquivel 101).
Another important detail of magical realism in the novel is of course Tita’s virgin breast-feeding, which can be interpreted in many ways. Getting back to the kitchen-church unification – Tita devotes herself to nourishing and fostering the family giving all of her to the very last drop even when it might seem impossible. Another interpretation might be that the lactation inability shows how empty Rosaura is inside, even though she is the mother and Tita is not. All and all, this image is a very strong representation of magic realism in effect.
Dwelling on the other magic realism means put forth by Esquivel it is impossible not to talk about the bright similes and metaphors personifying the objects of Tita’s usage. Certainly, food and dishes occupy the first position in this pattern. Everybody who read the book remembers the episode at the very beginning when Pedro gave Tita the first look of love and passion. “She turned her head, and her eyes met Pedro's. It was then she understood how dough feels when it is plunged into boiling oil. The heat that invaded her body was so real she was afraid she would start to bubble-her face, her stomach, her heart, her breasts-like batter” (Esquivel 6). The dough is described as a living being suffering from the heat, which brightly illustrates Tita’s blushing with ecstasy. Another example is hidden in the title, which has been read, allegorized and explained many times. The most common of explanations is that in Mexico the word chocolate is associated with the cacao powder for a drink, which requires extremely hot water to dissolve. The boiling hot water is Tita, the critics say, because of the raising anger and overwhelming passion (Neibylski 195). No doubt, this holds true. Although, there is another way of reading the simile in the title, which seemed interesting. Pedro sacrifices his freedom and marries Rosaura in order to stay close to the woman he loves but can never get as a wife. It gives him some comfort, though the exchange of this kind is no better than changing chocolate for water in a recipe. Chencha gives another example of such an exchange: "Isn't that something? Your ma talks about being ready for marriage like she was dishing up a plate of enchiladas! And the worse thing is, they're completely different! You can't just switch tacos and enchiladas like that!" (Esquivel 5). Mama Elena plays humans’ fates as easily as she would chop the onions, and it does not only concern Tita but also Rosaura, whose consent is not even asked for when Pedro makes a proposal. A clear manifestation of her disrespect for people, and men in particular, is the following quotation: “Men aren't that important in this life, Father"- she said emphatically- "nor is the revolution as dangerous as you make it out! It's worse to have chiles with no water around!" (Esquivel 37). Again – a perfectly worded simile with food involved. Yet, these are not only the food products that make up nice transformations. We find out through the novel that Tita likes knitting, and during the sleepless nights, the latter becomes her only distraction. When Doctor Brown finds Tita hiding in the dovecote silent and detached, he rescues her and takes away from the rancho. When they ride off in a carriage Tita grabs the bedspread she has knitted. That bedcover contains all her tears and mourning, as if embodying her sorrow. Being not ready to drop it together with all the bad memories Tita drags it behind until the time comes to set herself free. “It was so large and heavy it didn't fit inside the carriage. Tita grabbed it so tightly that there was no choice but to let it drag behind the carriage like the huge train of a wedding gown that stretched for a full kilometer.” (Esquivel 46)
Works cited
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub, Copyright 1994. Web. 17 May 2016.
Flores, Angel. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” Hispania Feb. 1955: 187-192. Web. 15 May 2016.
Neibylski, Dianna. “Humor and Hyperbole in Like Water for Chocolate.” Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts. Psychology Press (1997): 179-198. Web. 14 May 2016.
Valdés, Maria Elena. “Verbal and Visual Representation of Women: Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate”. World Literature Today Winter 1995: 78-82. Web. 17 May.
