The death of the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) marks the nearing end of the “boom” phase of Latin American fiction which rose in the 1960s. Fuentes stormed the scene with his very first novel published in 1958, Where the Air Is Clear. It is a novel about Mexico City with its sinking revolutionary ideals and the decadent rise of its rich.
Fuentes was a political writer who joined the Communist Party in his university days. His friendship with the late Octavio Paz fell through because of differences over the Sandinistas whom Fuentes supported and Paz did not. Despite their differences, both he and Paz resigned as Mexico’s ambassadors to France and India respectively, in protest against the appointment of former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz as ambassador to Spain in 1997, who had ordered the student massacre in Mexico City.
Ruptures of Desire:
One of Fuentes’s most intriguing themes centre around erotic love. His most complex short novel, Aura, was published in 1962. A young historian, Felipe Montero, accepts the invitation of an old widow Consuelo to edit the memoirs of her husband. In the house, Felipe falls in love with the widow’s green-eyed niece, Aura. The young historian also learns of the old widow’s fantasy of medicinally creating a spiritual child. Felipe dreams of eloping with Aura. One night, spurred by the silhouette of her beauty in flickering lamplight, Felipe ends up making love to Aura, but discovers, to his horror, it is Consuelo. Aura’s aura turns out to be the spiritual demon-child and Felipe, the medicinal fantasy.
Fuentes does not transport the erotic figure of love into mythological time, but inserts mythic time into the profanity of the present. Fuentes asks questions of desire that the fleeting accumulative condition of modernity ignores: Do we realise what time we are in when we desire? How do we slip out of our own time and enter another’s time? What happens to us when we inhabit the time of someone else’s desire?
In Fuentes, says Paz, bodies are “visible hieroglyphs”. The idea of the human being diminishes and is replaced by an animal-lover who re-appears in the form of a phantom. The old Consuelo’s Aura blindfolds Felipe, and the distinction between real and imaginary bodies and times vanishes in a wink. It also creates a rupture within real time.
What is the relationship between old age and desire? Jun’ichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata see it as one of degenerate longing, caught between fantasy and disappointment. Fuentes treats the question outside of the present, where an escape into the heart of desire is possible through a bizarre leap across time. The act of successful consummation, which is elusive in Tanizaki and Kawabata, is the kernel of Fuentes’s riddle. Consuelo is both herself and Aura: both old and young, both desire and unreality. Even the tragicomic in Fuentes leaps into mythic time. The difference between André Breton and Fuentes is that for Breton, desire is a ruse which evades what it seeks. For Fuentes, desire is a giddiness in the presence of a lover as animal incarnate, in whose mirror we lose our face. The loss of the face returns us to the animal.
Myth versus Reality:
The other novel by Fuentes, accused of being pornographic and raising a huge controversy, was Diana. It was a fictional account of Fuentes’s real-life romance with American actress Jean Seberg. The novel begins with the male narrator ruminating about time followed by the sudden arrival of Diana Soren, a film actress, to whom he at once attaches many meanings: “Nocturnal goddess... the huntress... virgin followed by a retinue of nymphs but also mother with a thousand breasts”. But soon, the mythic collapses into reality, and the woman is not what the narrator thinks she is. Desire reduces them to pure bodies trapped in the visceral present. They have sex with fruit creams and other fetish objects, while the narrator, anxious of Diana’s other lovers, muses to himself: “Jealousy kills love, but it leaves desire intact.”
Having a Black Panther as lover and the FBI chasing her, Diana becomes a figure of the hunted huntress: a victim of fantasies who is trapped in her own game. If in Aura the appearance of myth devastates the relationship, in Diana, the dissolution of myth by the tedious and decadent traps of the everyday becomes the facile stage of disaster.
In Diana, Fuentes suddenly pauses to relate the wound that is desire to his craft: “Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things. All our blood can flow out of that hole.”
