The Bodiless Dust

My concluding thought on the Vonnegut/O’Brien paper was that stories are timeless.  The point of the stories is not when they were written, or the time period about which they were written. The narrative voices, content, feelings, and ideas, provoked become “present” in any moment they are read--and continue to be present in the readers’ minds.

We (readers) think of life as linear—we are born, we grow up, grow old, then die.  Depending on personal beliefs, life can take a cyclical form.  For example, some believe the soul never dies, that it can be reincarnated in another form.  But this still relies on the idea that time is linear, that there is no going back, only forward.  There is change (say, reincarnated as a gecho), but no starting over.

Fuentes takes the “timelessness of stories” to a new level—he blatantly disregards its conventionally defined linearity.  Using magical realism, he creates a world in which time was “invented to disguise the real passage of time, which races with a mortal and insolent swiftness no clock could ever measure” (Fuentes 139).  In the world of Aura, two versions of one person who had to have lived in different times can coexist in the same moment.  In the world of Aura, the same man can be “created” again and again. The story is timeless in the sense that time is manipulated to the point of insignificance.

Vonnegut and O’Brien manipulated time by collapsing their voices into the voices of their narrators to make their stories present.  In Aura, through use of the second person, Fuentes collapses the narrator’s voice with the readers’ to make the story seem present.  By making readers feel like part of the text, Fuentes draws them into the cycle of time he creates, making it harder to find a “point to return to” (as described in Foe) as an anchor.

             I think time can have seemingly different lengths depending on perspective.  Of course, there are always exactly sixty seconds in a minute.  However, time can go by at different speeds, which is a very interesting phenomenon.  As Fuentes put it, “you can’t hold [time]”, it is a “bodiless dust within your hands” (Fuentes 139).  Time is intangible and subjective, which makes it so hard to quantify.