Felipe’s reaction when he sees himself and Aura in the pictures of General LLorente and Consuelo reminded me of Juliana’s experience in The Man in the High Castle. The exposure of a lie in one aspect of both characters lives causes them to question larger parts of their reality.
When Felipe discovers that he is in fact Consuelo’s husband, General Llorente, he holds his face in his hands “as if [he] were afraid that some invisible hand had ripped off the mask [he’d] been wearing for 27 years” (Fuentes 137). He has just found out that he has been living a lie for 27 years and is having a personal crisis, lying on his bed for hours with his face in the pillow. This revelation that he is not who he thought he was causes him to question other parts of his reality. He rejects the concept of chronological time, claiming it was “invented to disguise the real passage of time, which races with a mortal and insolent swiftness no clock could ever measure” (Fuentes 139). Believing that his former reality is false, Felipe settles into a new one, accepting his identity as Consuelo’s husband.
Similarly, when Juliana discovers that her lover is not an Italian truck driver but a German hit man trying to use her to assassinate Hawthorne Abendsen, she has a nervous breakdown. She loses how to function in her former reality. She gets into the shower with her clothes on, tries to leave the room naked, and forgets that she killed the German man. The realization that someone she thought she knew was in fact someone very different makes her question her entire reality. Juliana seeks the truth by asking the oracle, and like Felipe, comes to accept that the reality she has been living in is a fake.
Both novels expose how humanity’s search for the truth can reveal the instability of our alleged reality.
This is a really interesting point you bring up. While both are connected, I would choose to focus more on the iChing leading Juliana to believe that the Axis powers lost the war is more significant than discovering the truth about the Italian truck driver. In The Man In the High Castle Abendsen and his family chose not to embrace their new reality, believing it would be better to continue living in the old one. What would happen if Felipe did this too? Certainly it would've changed the whole ending. Would Aura not have been able to make the complete 'transformation' into Consuelo when he was in bed with her? If Felipe refused to believe what was happening around him, perhaps the lady he laid in bed with would not have become old and withered. This comments on the power of perception. Felipe would not have become engulfed in the 'truth' had he chose to remain ignorant of it. Abendsen glimpses the truth but refuses to embrace it as Juliana did. Life for him and his family is allowed to continue on without interruption.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really great comparison! However, I don't think think you can say that Juliana and Felipe searched for truth in these scenarios. In both novels, the characters unknowingly discover that their realties are actually false. So maybe a different theme would work better for these examples such as humans will inevitably experience distortion of reality throughout their lives.
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