When reading Aura, I couldn't help but notice the cats. This is probably a reflection of how we talked in class about creating meaning when it isn't there, but because we read Cat's Cradle earlier in the year, I was drawn to the cats in this novel. When I thought about it, there were actually some similarities to Cat's Cradle The cats in Aura seem to be purposeless, and yet the lady hates them. She tortures them for seemingly no reason, and this wins over the heart of her future lover in a later session of passionate lovemaking? What the fuck?!
However, never mind my disgust, there is clearly something going on here with the cats. They are first mentioned with a sound, "you stop when you hear the painful yowling of a number of cats" (37). Aura dismisses this by saying that there are a lot of rats in this part of the city, but I think that this howling that he hears may be a memory that was triggered, as he is the lady's late husband. In this way then, the cats may be a symbol of illusion. To the reader, they represent the illusion of the "two" women in the house where Felipe lives. Later, the old lady dismisses Felipe's comments about cats to deal with her rat problem as if to dispel his suspicions about the illusion. In addition to this, the cats only seem to come up when Felipe is in the presence of one of the women, which would further support the illusion theory.
I really like your analogy of the cats as being "a symbol of illusion." Going off of this idea, you could also use the moment when the cats are on fire as an example that Felipe is indeed living in an illusion. After our discussion on Wednesday in class, I began to think of more connections between Alice in Wonderland and Aura. In Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat disappears and reappears, just like the cats in Aura, and both vex the main characters in their stories by doing inexplicable things.
ReplyDeleteI liked your connection to Cat's Cradle, but what other connections (other than cats) do you make between the two?
Especially after our class, I'm really impressed by the emphasis you put in the power of the cats as symbols for something greater. While it is easy to discredit many pieces of this novel as being meaningless, it is way harder to fit their meaning into images as they intersect with the plot.
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