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avalindasutter 's review for:
Aura
by Carlos Fuentes
The erotic love between Felipe and Aura/Señora Consuelo in Aura shatters traditional notions of time and reality, manifesting in a supernatural “union which transfigures Felipe and Consuelo/Aura” (Faris 65). Literary critic Wendy Faris says, “in Aura, the duality of past and present is abolished in an eternal time of love, but the two sexes remain separate, though joined in an embrace,” indicating that Fuentes once again portrays a love that transfigures universal axioms like time when lovers unite in a cosmic erotic embrace (67). Like Artemio, Felipe is intrinsically driven by his sexual desires. Aura begins with the expression, “the gods are like men: they are born, and they die on a woman’s breast,” immediately establishing the amorous essence of the novel and insinuating the cyclical psychological ubiquity of eroticism. Moreover, there is the overarching presence of perversity that accompany Fuentes’ erotic domains. Faris cites Gloria Durin, claiming “Fuentes always falls back into ‘the snare of sex,’ and ‘perhaps that is why there is an air of abnormality in Fuentes’ erotic scenes, an aura of guilt or depravity’” (Durin 246, Faris 68). For Fuentes, “love is abnormal”; throughout his work, “his stories are filled with incestuous unions or the desire for them” (Hall 246).
Sex and death are found within each other, constructed inside the theoretical framework of Eros and Thanatos. For Fuentes, love is destructive and fatal; and yet, his characters choose to love regardless. This choice is not from a desire to self-destruct but a desire to fuse Eros and Thanatos. Even in Freudian theory, the result of the fusion of Eros and Thanatos is ultimately the emergence of a union greater than the individual concepts. Both Eros and Thanatos transcend their definition and become one drive. The desire to destroy and come together establishes the basis for existence. Destruction and creation manifest in physics, psychology, and philosophy. For Fuentes, the psychological, romantic manifestation of destruction and creation is like a dance between love and death. Amidst the labyrinthine of Carlos Fuentes’ literature lies the philosophical premise that everything can be traced back to the human desire to be loved, and the opposite desire to self-destruct. Thus, Fuentes concludes that love is a kind of death, and dying is the same erotic, transcendental experience that love is. The ancient dance of love and death eternally defines human nature.
Sex and death are found within each other, constructed inside the theoretical framework of Eros and Thanatos. For Fuentes, love is destructive and fatal; and yet, his characters choose to love regardless. This choice is not from a desire to self-destruct but a desire to fuse Eros and Thanatos. Even in Freudian theory, the result of the fusion of Eros and Thanatos is ultimately the emergence of a union greater than the individual concepts. Both Eros and Thanatos transcend their definition and become one drive. The desire to destroy and come together establishes the basis for existence. Destruction and creation manifest in physics, psychology, and philosophy. For Fuentes, the psychological, romantic manifestation of destruction and creation is like a dance between love and death. Amidst the labyrinthine of Carlos Fuentes’ literature lies the philosophical premise that everything can be traced back to the human desire to be loved, and the opposite desire to self-destruct. Thus, Fuentes concludes that love is a kind of death, and dying is the same erotic, transcendental experience that love is. The ancient dance of love and death eternally defines human nature.