The Writings of Carlos Fuentes

PART III Rereading Fuentes

Name /T4984/T4984_CH03 06/18/04 06:53AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 109 # 1 P A R T I I I 109 Rereading Fuentes Spanish American literature . . . is both a return and a search for tradition. In searching for it, it invents it. But invention and discovery are not terms that best describe its purest creations. A desire for incarnation, a literature of foundations. — O C T A V I O P A Z Terra Nostra and El Escorial are central to an understanding of Fuentes. Nevertheless, the importance of Fuentes as a major writer of the century rests not in this one work only but in the entirety of his oeuvre. Terra Nostra contributes to the significance of his total work, and vice versa. Terra Nostra elucidates much of his other fiction , while an awareness of his other works affects the reading of Terra Nostra. Fuentes’ other fiction and this mutual interaction are the subject of Part III. Terra Nostra is a major foundational work in the history of Latin American literature; Fuentes’ total work should be seen, to cite Paz, as a ‘‘literature of foundations.’’ In rereading Fuentes in light of El Escorial and Terra Nostra, it is evident that many of the concerns, issues, and themes of Terra Nostra can be found early in his work. The beginnings of Terra Nostra can be located in the story ‘‘Tlactocatzine, del Jardı́n de Flandes’’ (from Los dı́as enmascarados), Aura, and Holy Place. Works written after Terra Nostra, such as Distant Relations, Christopher Unborn, and The Orange Tree, further elaborate many of the topics of Terra Nostra. Name /T4984/T4984_CH03 06/18/04 06:53AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 110 # 2 ‘‘La Edad del Tiempo’’ Since the mid-1980s, Fuentes himself has conceptualized his total fiction in fourteen cycles titled ‘‘La Edad del Tiempo,’’ which consists of twenty-eight volumes of fiction, eighteen of which he had published by the end of 1993.1 Few other modern writers have constructed such a broad master scheme of their work, although Jean Paul Sartre, an extremely influential figure for Fuentes’ generation of Latin American writers, had conceived Les chemins de la Liberte ́, and Fuentes has mentioned others.2 ‘‘La Edad del Tiempo’’ has a circular structure, with the foundational text, Terra Nostra, near the beginning of the cycle and The Orange Tree at the end; this last book in the cycle also probes into the historical origins of Hispanic culture and politics, as does The Campaign. Fuentes presents himself as Fuentes-historian, for the fourteen cycles appear, generally speaking , in historical chronological order. (The work also negates history, however, opening and closing with a set of books that seek atemporality in a variety of ways.) This is the history about which one of the sons of Hernán Cortés, Martı́n, says in The Orange Tree: ‘‘The true history, not the dusty archives, will tell it all one day. The living history of memory and desire . . . which always takes place right now, not yesterday, not tomorrow’’ (62). According to Fuentes’ own explanation , ‘‘La Edad del Tiempo’’ is a lengthy reflection on time.3 He views his total work as an ongoing consideration of a series of temporal issues, such as how we situate ourselves in time, why some time seems so short, why some time seems so long, and numerous others matters related to time.4 (1) El Mal del Tiempo The four works that Fuentes has described as ‘‘El Mal del Tiempo,’’ which open the cycle, deal with the problem of time itself. They play with the past, the present, and the future in such a way that, in the end, any sense of Western linear time is blurred. In different ways, they undermine and destroy time. According to Fuentes, in El Mal del Tiempo ‘‘I want to announce that my concept of time is linear. It is at times circular, at times of eternal returns, at times spirals like those in Joyce.’’5 If it were not for the obvious importance of this 110 T H E W R I T I N G S O F C A R L O S F U E N T E S Name /T4984/T4984_CH03 06/18/04 06:53AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 111 # 3 announcement, this first cycle of four books could have been called ‘‘Distant Relations’’ just as well. This first...