in his retelling of a tribal legend: Between life and death there is no destiny except memory. Memory weaves the destiny of the world. People perish. Suns succeed suns. Cities fall. Power passes from hand to hand. Princes collapse along with the crumbling stone of their palaces abandoned to the fury of fire, tempest and invading jungle. One time ends and another begins. Only memory keeps death alive, and those who must die know it. The end of memory is the end of the world.

This new reckoning of time is an embodiment of perpetual change that threatens the stagnation of the Old World in the novel. El Señor, the defender of temporal paralysis, recoils at the threat in the last part of the novel and ultimately fails to freeze Hispanic tradition within the confines of the sixteenth century. His decree that the New World, with its nonlinear passage of time, does not exist is repudiated in an exuberant celebration of change in the novel’s conclusion, when the action returns to Paris in the twentieth century.

In addition to the abrupt shifts in time and space that he employs in a particularly radical form in Terra Nostra, Fuentes exploits throughout his fiction other modern literary techniques, such as hallucinatory imagery,stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and numerous devices adapted from the cinema, including flashback, crosscutting, fades, and multiple points of view. When one considers that the twentieth century was the “age of film,” it is not surprising that Fuentes’s works display a thoroughgoing affinity with cinema. In particular, Aura, Holy Place, Distant Relations, and The Death of Artemio Cruz reveal that Fuentes’s vision of modern Mexico is perceived through the camera’s eye.

Aura

The theme of Aura, one of Fuentes’s early novels, is the persistence of the past. Fuentes communicates this theme by means of overlaying, as in cinematographic projections, images of light on darkness and old identities on youthful characters. Theclimax of the story features an astounding and erotic union of personalities as his characters from the twentieth century embody personalities of the nineteenth.

Appropriately enough, the catalyst of this experiment in time is a historian, Felipe Montero, a young man dedicated to preserving the past. Montero’s ambition is to sum up the chronicles of the discoverers and conquistadores in the New World, but financial need forces him to undertake a more modest project. He agrees to edit and publish the papers of a Mexican general who has been dead since the beginning of the twentieth century. Consuelo, the general’s widow, orders Felipe to live in the ancestral mansion, and he must even learn to write in the style of the general in order to complete the assignment. Surrounded by relics of the past, then, Felipe is gradually seduced by them. What adds ardor to the historian’s undertaking is Felipe’s discovery of Aura, Consuelo’s young niece and companion. During the course of the novel, Felipe learns that Aura is indeed an “aura” of Consuelo’s lost youth, a spiritual emanation of the past who is willed into existence to capture Consuelo’s early love for the general.

Through a variety of cinematic techniques such as close-ups and montage, Fuentes has the illusion of Aura’s presence deceive Montero into believing that she is real. The purpose of this deceit is to render, in a visual way, the author’s concept of simultaneity. When Felipe observes how the two women seem to mimic each other at a distance, their separate identities are mirror images of each other. For Fuentes, the two women’s divergent personas are surface manifestations of an underlying unity. Fuentes’s experiment in cinematic fiction is complete when Felipe stares at Aura’s image in photographs from the nineteenth century and discovers his own face superimposed on the image of the general. At the end of the novel, Consuelo has succeeded in uniting past and present in her double identity and in that of Felipe. He now embodies the spirit and flesh of the deceased general.

Distant Relations

In Distant Relations Fuentes carries the cinematic overlaying of past and present one step further than he does in Aura. Fuentes acknowledges his debt to the world of film when he dedicates the novel to the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, with whom he collaborated on a screenplay. In addition to the visual impressions of film in this novel, Fuentes evokes the auditory effect of overdubbing in the recurrent citation of lines from Jules Supervielle’s poem “La Chambre Voisine” (the adjoining room). The poem sets the scene for the juxtaposition of several settings, each with its own temporal reality and cast of characters; Fuentes intertwines the various plots that correspond to the different settings so that the barriers of time and space dissolve.

The title of this novel refers to the phenomenon of secret correspondences between people and to their need to bridge the distances that alienate them from one another. The distant relations (or, more literally from the Spanish, “distant family”) of the title are a French count, a Mexican archaeologist, and a wealthy Frenchman. Fuentes suggests the relationship of the latter two in his choice of a common family name, Heredia. The choice is most fortuitous because it refers to the Spanish word herencia (inheritance) and, more significant, to two poets of the nineteenth century, one French, José Maria de Hérédia, and the other Cuban, José Maréa Heredia, who were cousins. It is curious, then, that Fuentes cites verses from the French Hérédia’s Les Trophées (1893; English translation, 1897) but makes no reference to the work of the Cuban Heredia (who spent several years of his life in Mexico). An apt reference might have been taken from the Cuban’s narrative poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” (upon the temple at Cholula). Heredia’s poem, like Fuentes’s novel, features a surrealistic clashing of realities that leap across the centuries. The narrator of the poem experiences a vivid hallucination of an Aztec human sacrifice that occurred before the arrival of Cortés. Fuentes engages in this kind of novelistic archaeology in Distant Relations when the count’s past and the pasts of the two Heredias come together.

Holy Place

A more explicit fascination with film imagery forms the basis for Fuentes’s bizarre novel Holy Place. The novel claims that filmmaking creates icons that rival those of classical mythology. One case in point is the charismatic Mexican actor Claudia Nervo. She is depicted as a twentieth century siren who lures men to their doom. Her son, Guillermo (affectionately called Mito, a name derived from the diminutive Guillermito and that also means “myth”), is neurotically attracted to her as well. More a decadent Des Esseintes from the pages of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884; Against the Grain, 1922) than a Ulysses, he surrounds himself with voluptuous furnishings from the belle époque. This is his personal “sacred zone,” his enchanted grotto and refuge, which he needs as an antidote for his mother’s rejection.

In the course of the novel, Fuentes analyzes the thralldom exercised by film images on spectators and the actors themselves. For example, Guillermo pathetically tries to possess his mother by immersing himself in her old films. In this regard, Holy Place deftly captures the hypnotic attraction of films as they create a personal fantasy world for Guillermo, provide an escape from chronological time for him, and indelibly preserve his hallucinatory fantasies in a mythological space.

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Perhaps the most striking example of cinema’s influence on Fuentes’s work is The Death of Artemio Cruz. Written early in his career, it is one of his most successful novels from a technical and thematic standpoint and is widely regarded as a seminal work of modern Spanish American literature. The novel owes some of its fragmented temporal structure and much of its theme of the deterioration of modern life to Orson Welles’s landmark film Citizen Kane (1941). Through the use of such techniques as close-up, flashback, deep focus (a technique that Welles pioneered in Citizen Kane), crosscutting, and recurrent symbolic motifs, Fuentes’s novel matches the visual appeal of Welles’s cinematographic masterpiece, and it should be read and understood as a motion picture in prose.

Fuentes has discussed his indebtedness to films in general and to Welles in particular in an interview published in the Winter, 1981, issue of The Paris Review: I’m a great moviegoer. The greatest day in my life as a child was when I was ten and my father took me to New York City to see the World’s Fair and Citizen Kane. And that struck me in the middle of my imagination and never left me. Since that moment, I’ve always lived with the ghost of Citizen Kane. There are few other great movies which I am conscious of when I write.

Welles’s influence on Fuentes can be seen throughout The Death of Artemio Cruz, in characterization, themes, and filmic techniques.

Artemio Cruz is a Mexican Citizen Kane in several basic respects. Fuentes chronicles Cruz’s rise from an impoverished childhood on the periphery of Mexican society to the heights of power in Mexico City. The mature Artemio becomes the prime mover of a financial empire with holdings in publishing, real estate, banking, and mining. Similarly, Kane, a New York power broker with interests in mining, publishing, real estate, and manufacturing, traces his origins to a simple family in Colorado. During the course of their lives, both men reverse their beliefs from a proletarian admiration for the common person to an authoritarianism that ultimately destroys their relationships with family and friends. Furthermore, their opportunism and cynicism mirror the moral decay of their times. The degeneration of moral values finds its greatest manifestation in the failure of their respective newspapers to print the truth. In this regard, the most salient feature of their resemblance is their manipulation of the press. Both men, thinly veiled replicas of William Randolph Hearst, are publishers who resort to slander for personal gain and to yellow journalism to support their right-wing political causes.

In addition to the characterization of hisprotagonist, Fuentes borrows various film techniques from Citizen Kane. This adaptation of material from the film adds to the novel’s complexity and visual richness. For example, one of the most successful reflections of the film is the novel’s tightly knit fabric of fragmentary reminiscences. In Citizen Kane, Welles breaks up the linearnarrative into overlapping vignettes. Here, newsreel footage and interviews with the people who knew Kane best flesh out the portrait of the vulnerable man behind the image of grandeur. Kane’s dying word, “rosebud,” forces the editors of the newsreel to discover some unifying quality in Kane’s life, and it is the quest for the meaning of “rosebud” that serves as the focus of the film. Artemio’s conscious and unconscious alternations among past, present, and future tenses and his strange obsession with his son Lorenzo offer a fragmentary record of his life. By deciphering the mysterious relationships among these fragments, deftly scattered throughout the novel, the reader reconstructs the world of Artemio Cruz.

A particularly striking counterpart to Welles’s rosebud motif is the recurrent reference to Lorenzo, Artemio’s only son. Artemio repeatedly recalls the scene when he and Lorenzo rode on horseback through the hacienda in Vera Cruz near his birthplace. Lorenzo confesses that he must leave Mexico to fight for the Republican cause in Spain. This is their last time together because, as the reader learns in another fragment, Lorenzo dies in the Spanish Civil War. Although the significance of this scene becomes clear only gradually, references to Artemio’s last meeting with Lorenzo symbolize a tragic defeat in the same way “rosebud” signifies Kane’s disillusionment and his exile from his family. In Lorenzo, Artemio might have been able to combine his own instinct for survival with his son’s idealism to produce a morally correct life; with Lorenzo’s death, this opportunity is forever lost. Both Kane and Artemio immerse themselves in painful memories that they masochistically cultivate to the end of their lives.

The novel also captures the visual starkness of the film in passages that depict characters and situations through a camera’s eye, highlighting grotesque detail and situations through close-ups and other pictorial techniques. For example, Welles’s stumbling, bloated Charles Foster Kane is mirrored in Artemio Cruz, described as a walking mummy at his last New Year’s Eve party. Cruz’s fall from greatness—a counterpart to Kane’s collapse during the opening scenes of the film—is captured in a clinical description of his decaying body in close-up: “He must sense this odor of dead scales, of vomit and blood; he must look at this caved-in chest, this matted gray beard, these waxy ears, this fluid oozing from his nose, this dry spit on his lips and chin, these wandering eyes that must attempt another glance.”

Fuentes reasserts the cinematographic close-up throughout the novel by means of a tight focus on Cruz in direct descriptions reflected in mirrors. Mirrors and reflections are useful for the narrator to witness his own physical deterioration and for the author to practice his virtuosity in manipulating “camera angles” for special effects. Early in the novel, the prosperous Artemio glances in a storefront window to straighten his tie. What he sees is his reflection, “a man identical to himself but so distant, he also was adjusting his tie, with the same fingers stained with nicotine, the same suit, but colorless.” Cruz contemplates his image at a distance, as though he were watching a film of himself. In the reflection—as distant as images on a film screen—he sees himself surrounded by beggars and vendors whom he ignores. Through this cinematographic technique, Fuentes projects the image of a solitary Artemio Cruz, cast in the mold of Charles Kane, divorced from the common folk and insensitive to their suffering.

Other mirror images in the novel emphasize the theme of alienation and disintegration of the protagonist, particularly in the hospital scenes where Cruz stares at his twin image in the fragmented mirrors of his wife’s and daughter’s purses. The doubling of Artemio in mirror images has its source in one of the most important scenes in Citizen Kane, a scene that associates the multiple images of the protagonist with a corresponding fragmentation of his personality. At the end of the film, after his second wife leaves him, Kane breaks up her bedroom, smashing pictures and china and yanking down draperies. From the rubble of her belongings, he picks up a small glass ball that, when shaken, produces within it a miniature snowstorm around a white rose. He utters the word “rosebud” and then strolls leisurely from the room, his face empty of turmoil. Kane then passes between two facing mirrors that reflect his image in infinite series. This scene indicates the extent of Kane’s deterioration as he seems to put on a mask of indifference and serenity while he feels his inner self tossed about by failure.

Cruz similarly stands between such facing mirrors in a key scene following the longest fragment of the novel, which deals with Artemio’s imprisonment during the Mexican Revolution. Captured by Pancho Villa’s forces, Cruz, Gonzalo Bernal (the brother of the woman Cruz will later marry), and his friend Tobias, a Yaqui Indian, face execution by a firing squad. Cruz alone survives by giving false information to his captors. The mirror scene following this episode sums up Artemio’s instinct for survival, the aspect of his personality that has won out over whatever charitable impulses he may have had earlier in his life. Artemio now wears the impassible mask of indifference to others, Kane’s frozen persona in the mirrors: to recognize yourself; to recognize the rest and let them recognize you: and to know that you oppose each individual, because each individual is yet another obstacle to reach your goal: you will choose, in order to survive you will choose, you will choose from among the infinite mirrors one alone, one alone which will reflect you irrevocably, that will cast a black shadow on the other mirrors, you will shatter them rather than surrender.

Fuentes offsets the tight focus in these mirror close-ups with long shots or general establishing shots elsewhere in the novel. His technique of capturing several planes of action occurring simultaneously has its origin in the deep focus of Citizen Kane, where this technique is used to juxtapose several characters and situations that impinge on one another. Perhaps the most remarkable example of deep focus in the film shows Charles Kane’s parents arranging for their son’s enrollment in a boarding school. Framed by the window in the center of the screen, the young Charles plays outside in the snow with his Rosebud sled, oblivious to events indoors before the camera. In a tight shot, with Charles still in focus, his mother signs the power of attorney that establishes a trust fund for him and that symbolizes his entry into high society. Juxtaposed here are the innocent boy and his parents, who prepare his ticket to the good life. The two planes of action make a harsh visual statement about power. Charles, seen from a distance, is surrounded and overwhelmed by his elders and their financial dealings. Later in the film, in another example of deep focus, a gigantic Kane, in the foreground, dwarfs all the other characters in the scene, emblematic of his monumental power.

Fuentes’s equivalent of deep focus can be found throughout the novel in fragments that juxtapose characters and situations. One of these fragments depicts Artemio’s arrival at the hacienda of Gamaliel Bernal. A masterful juxtaposition of narrative planes focuses on Artemio—the survivor—telling the family of Gonzalo Bernal how their loved one perished in the Villista execution. Crosscutting from Artemio’s explanation at the dinner table to his arrival in town and then to his meeting Gamaliel and Catalina Bernal, Fuentes superimposes several moments in time and space in a single scene. The reader thus sees, in the foreground, the conniving Artemio as he ingratiates himself with the Bernal family; in the background, his arrival in Puebla and the rooting out of information about the Bernals; and in the middle ground, the sumptuous furnishings that Artemio will soon possess.

Here, Fuentes achieves effects of simultaneity that compel the reader/spectator to superimpose the planes of action and modify each event in the light of what precedes and what follows it. Such is the effect of other fragments in the novel that depict Artemio’s rise to power after he marries Catalina and after he takes over the hacienda after Gamaliel’s death. In a scene that depicts Artemio’s campaign for political office, he and Catalina ride their buggy through the dusty countryside. They come upon a procession of religious zealots, penitentes, who impede their passage. As the narrator describes the grotesque physical deformities of the penitentes and their mortification of themselves, he juxtaposes their bloody parade to the religious sanctuary with Artemio’s exalted and indifferent ride through their seething masses. The various planes of action appear linked for ironic purposes. In the background, the dust of the arid fields mixes with the clouds of dust raised by the buggy and that of the penitentes. The cinematic impact of this scene rivals that of similar settings in Mariano Azuela’s photographic Los de Abajo (1916; The Underdogs, 1929). In the middle ground, the sincerity of the zealots, symbolized by their bloody footprints, is counterbalanced by the cynicism of Artemio’s political campaign, which is motivated by hunger for power alone.

Fuentes has said that in all of his works, he offers Mexicans “a mirror in which they can see how they look, how they act, in a country which is a masked country.” Fuentes offers Mexicans more than a mirror, however, for his fiction cinematically projects the spectacle of Mexican life and history on a broad screen in order to preserve and highlight the past.

La voluntad y la fortuna

Fuentes has stated that his 2008 coming-of-age novel La voluntad y la fortuna is his best novel so far. Written in a poetical and clean prose, it closes the historical cycle the author began fifty years before with Wherethe Air Is Clear. In La voluntad y la fortuna, Fuentes once more turns his eyes toward Mexico and its history, but this time it is contemporary history, the history of a “narconation.” Drawing from Mexico’s bloody reality, Fuentes expresses his preoccupation with the conflict between the Mexican state and the drug mafia, a conflict that has escalated almost into civil war.

To re-create this tragedy, Fuentes uses the biblical story of Cain and Abel in the form of the story of the rivalry between Josue Nadal and his friend Jerico. In their youth, Josue and Jerico agreed that they would not to belong to the masses, that they would make a difference. The competition between them starts as they grow up and they begin to keep secrets from each other. They contend for the love of Asunta Jordan—a dark, predatory woman and principal assistant to Max Monroy, the richest man in Mexico—and for political and economical connections. The novel’s tragedy resembles that of Cain and Abel, but it is not an archetypical tragedy, in which the hero dies to cleanse his faults; rather, in this tragedy, both men betray each other.

The novel begins at a beach in Acapulco, on the coast of the state of Guerrero, in the Mexican Pacific. The severed head of Josue lies on the sand afraid of being seen by passersby because of its horrific appearance. The narrator—the head—introduces the reader to the story, tells about the violent events that led to his death, and reflects on his condition as a head without his corpse and about the possibility of having a soul in this condition. Josue describes himself as a twenty-nine-year-old, dark-skinned man who just happens to be the one thousandth person decapitated this year alone in Mexico.

As in The Years with Laura Diaz and Instinto de Inéz, in this novel Fuentes revisits one of his main philosophical veins through the character of Concepcion, the matriarch. This novel proposes that men contend for power when in reality power belongs to women. Among the other characters are Filopater, the rebellious priest; Antonio Sangines, the lawyer who acts as intermediary between the state and the business; and Miguel Aparecido, who is incarcerated on his own will. The head of Josue knows that the nation of Mexico cannot offer jobs, food, or education to even half of its population. He knows that is why crime reigns and, as if that were not enough, he also knows that evil is celebrated as the greater good, as the natural consequence of will and fortune.