Aura / Carlos Fuentes

The fantastic in Bombal or Bioy is easily seen as metaphor; Bombal tends toward the psychological, and Bioy toward the philosophical. For me, Fuentes brings these two approaches together and takes them a huge leap further. The essence of the story is now an expression—not just an analogy—of the nature of being and existence, and returns wonder far beyond charm to a world that is increasingly deadened through mechanical and technological patterns of reliability and predictability, and the worst aspects of rationality. It cannot be insignificant that Senora Llorente and the General are representations of bygone eras (Maximilian/Napoleon III), which were in their primes vastly diminished adulterations of previous heroic eras.

Sartre once said something to the effect that if one reads a story and enters or understands it—not with a wink to the character-accomplices or as if the entire work were an example of mass psychosis—but rather that somehow the absurd becomes credible by opening/expanding the seeming terms of what might be credible, then it achieves a genuine moment of the fantastic, where the opposites of real and unreal (irreal) reign in baffling equality. This seems to apply especially well to this story.

The younger instantiation of Consuela—Aura—is just that: a halo emanation of the old woman’s force and beauty, manifesting outside the realms of time and rationality. The old woman is not a demon-goddess, but is herself a personification of primal forces beyond comprehension, her own as well. –What a marvelous creative expression of the epigraph from Michelet.

Every era wants to believe that it has answered and exhausted the questions of all time; the endless repetition of history can persuade us to remember that the past of which we make fun or that we condemn, is little different than how our truths will appear to future generations.

The epigraph from Michelet can be understood via archetypes—that man will strive (through lifetimes) to find the animating source of his being/love, who is timeless and unfathomably imaginative in her embodiment of the powers and forces that animate all existence (relation to “Invention of Morel”?). Montero is compelled into re-instantiation, or finds himself, as the lover of the beloved who is herself the priestess (cat ritual) of the divine that is both monstrous and holy.

There are Faustian overtones as well as resonation with Turchetti’s “Fosca”—inspiration for “Passion d”amore” and Sondheim’s “Passion”, and Kenneth Branagh’s Hollywood send-up, “Dead Again.” In the first love transcends the ordinary, unconscious attraction of similarities; in the latter it transcends time; in “Aura” it transcends individuals.