Aura's Tension

Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, much like Octavia Butler’s Kindred, deals with a dredging and smudging of the past, albeit in a very different manner with different intent. Instead of returning to the antebellum South with Dana, the reader, after being introduced to the second person tense of Aura, actually becomes Felipe Montero, a schoolteacher and nascent historian who accepts a job editing the documents of frail, old Consuelo’s late husband, General Llorente. What Fuentes achieves through this stylistic choice is a somnambulant, hypnotic hold on the reader, one that further contributes to, as Jessi mentioned, Aura’s magical realism. Time becomes irrelevant once the reader, through the eyes of Felipe, enters the darkened walls of Consuelo’s domain. There is an intoxicating sense of being led by a host of unseen and unknown forces through the text. Each event the reader experiences as Felipe seems highly inevitable yet not precisely foreseeable, and, unlike Kindred, tension arises from these forces as they grind against one another. Aura’s very existence, or lack there of, for example, begs the question of her origin: Where did she come from and how? Does Felipe play a part in her creation / projection? The interesting part of this reaction, for me at least, was that it only occurred after I had finished reading Aura. Maybe this is just an indication that I am a poor reader, or perhaps Fuentes’ intent was to immerse his readers in the perplexing, disarming sense of chronology that Felipe experiences as he pores over his own past in a decaying house inhabited by a dying woman and the ghost of her youth.