works is not unusual.

Jung has told us that when dealing with archetypal characters and their attendant myths, the risk of duplication is always present. Pierre Benoit, for example, was accused of plagiarizing H. Rider Haggard "because the accounts of the heroine in Haggard's Wisdom's Daughter and Benoit's L'Atlantide were disconcertingly alike." This is true because in dealing with fantasies of this kind, the details of character are insignificant. Such stories do not deal with individuals as such, but rather with overwhelming forces in the human psyche which are essentially the same in everyone. Their inspiration is philosophical or religious and has little to do with the vagaries of individual personality. Thus Joseph Sommers has stated [in After the Storm, 1968]: "A fair general statement would be that the conceptual basis of Aura is rooted in the eternal mysteries which overcome man." Although he does not mention Pushkin, he traces the work's literary paternity to Edgar Allan Poe and the English gothic novel, and asserts that "despite the indirect vision it projects of the Mexican experience, [it] is more suggestive of European and American heritage than of its Mexican forebears. Fuentes himself in his letter of December 1968 also cites influences in Aura from other Latin American novelists, notably José Donoso's Coronación (which is also based on the archetypal pattern of the young and old female inhabitants of a mansion.)

The fact that Aura is a comment about life, about man's destiny and not about what happened to an individual, Felipe Montero. In an interview with Fuentes [in Books Abroad to (1966)], Sommers contrasts this work to The Death of Artemio Cruz where man, who is capable of rational choice, determines his own destiny. Aura, according to Sommers, is the other face of the coin, where "the blind side of man is portrayed; he is a prisoner of the occult forces of irreality, phantasy and myth." Fuentes concurs in this analysis and adds that in The Death of Artemio Cruz he had relied on the illumination of historical analysis. In Aura, he depended upon "the multilayered suggestivity ofliterary style."

I might add that the two conflicting elements of Fuentes's earliest novel, Where the Air is Clear, the realistic development of character and rational political commentary (the major emphasis) and the minor note of magic and fatalism—to be discussed later in this chapter—are finally isolated in these two separate novels, both published in 1962. The Death of Artemio Cruz carries the major theme in its concern with the Mexican revolution and its development of the character, Artemio Cruz, out of his prototype in Federico Robles. Aura carries out the other theme of modern Mexico born out of the ancient one and returning to it, a theme first interpreted by Emir Rodríguez-Monegal in an article in Número ("El mundo Mágico de Carlos Fuentes," Número, 2d ser. 1 [1963]), which appeared a scant year after the publication of Aura.

Los Días Enmascarados

In the discussion of Aura I shall need to refer to all of its precedents, not only Fuentes's major, first novel, but also his earlier book of short stories, Los días enmascarados (The Masked Days), first published in 1952. We may judge the similarity of this work to Aura by the commentary of Robert Mead, Jr. [in Books Abroad 38 (1964)]: "Los días enmascarados is in the cosmopolitan vein of Jorge Luis Borges, and is written for sophisticated readers. Life is a comedy played against a serious and somber background, in which the author presents man as struggling unsuccessfully against forces far stronger than himself." In one of these stories, "Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes," the similarities with Aura are striking. The story, too, is a tale of an old mansion in Mexico City with a mysterious garden. Told in the first person, it narrates the hero's encounters with an intruder, a wrinkled hag in historical costume. Like the garden in Aura where strange, medicinal herbs are grown, this one is permeated by the odor of Siemprevivas, (literally "alive-forever," the Spanish for forget-me-nots).

The hag or witch, by means of letters, invites the narrator to a midnight tryst in the garden where he feels in her hands the coldness of the tomb. He tries to escape the mansion, but finds the door locked against him. The hag now calls him "Max" as well as "Tlactocatzine," speaks German as well as Nahuatl, and reminds him of their walks in the garden of Flanders. When he examines the shield on the locked door, he perceives a crowned eagle that seems to have the profile of the old woman. The suspicion with respect to her identity is confirmed when he reads the inscription on the shield, "Charlotte, Kaiserin von Mexico."

To summarize, therefore, we have in this story an atmosphere of increasing unreality. The mansion, which at first is merely beautiful and archaic, actually could exist in Mexico City. But when we discover that it rains always in the garden when the sun is shining in the outside world, we are put on guard. The tale becomes increasingly less real and more subjective. The creature who inhabits the garden is merely hinted at in the first reference: "one might almost say that slow steps are heard with the weight of breath among the fallen leaves."

But gradually, she grows to a certainty. At the conclusion her personality invades the entire house and imprisons the narrator forever. There is no escape from this symbol of the past who seems to be part Aztec princess and part Charlotte, wife of the emperor Maximilian. The latter figure is superimposed on the former. In a way, Charlotte is almost as much a prisoner of the earlier primitive archetype as is the narrator. She too has been caught by history and in turn must prey on others, must find new Maximilians, new victims. For the narrator she embodies "the satisfaction of the jailer, of eternal prison, satisfaction of shared solitudes".

The probability that "Tlactocatzine," which we know was written together with the other stories of the collection "in some haste" as reported by Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann (Into the Mainstream [New York: Harper and Row, 1967]) was in fact the rough draft for Aura is suggested by the December letter from Fuentes (included in the Appendix) in which he discusses the germinal idea for the novel.

After enumerating the long line of witches who appear in his works from "Tlactocatzine" to "the old Ludivinia," shut up in the only room of a burned down mansion in The Death of Artemio Cruz, he adds:

But if I am totally frank, this obsession was born in me when I was seven years old and, after visiting the castle of Chapultepec and seeing the portrait of the young Charlotte of Belgium, I found in the Casasola Archive the photograph of this same woman, now old, dead, placed inside her cushioned, iron coffin, dressed in the nightcap of a little girl; the Charlotte who died, insane in a castle, the same year I was born. The two Charlottes, Aura and Consuelo. Perhaps Charlotte never found out that she was growing old. Until the very end she wrote love letters to Maximillian. A correspondence between ghosts.

The empress Cariota (Charlotte) is clearly the inspiration for both these tales. And how well she conforms to the idea of the animal! She is youth and age (since Fuentes sees her image at both extremes of life); as an empress she represents power; and as a woman insane she is the perfect symbol of our irrational, hidden nature. For Fuentes as a Mexican, moreover, Carlota would represent the European domination of the past, and would thus repel him. Yet as a beautiful and tragic woman, she could not help but also attract a sensitive child of cosmopolitan background.

Jung has told us that the first manifestation of archetypes is often identified with personal experience; that in the case of archetypes in children under the influence of therapy, "the identity breaks down and is accompanied by intensification of the fantasy, with the result that the archaic or mythological features become increasingly apparent." ["The Psychology of the Child Archetype," Essays on a Science of Mythology, 1969.]

This obviously is the case history of Carlota in her metamorphosis in Fuentes's mind from portrait to ghost. His brief commentary on the role of Carlota, "correspondence between ghosts," indicates his very subjective relationship to the archetypal character. In Fuentes's mind Carlota is already a ghost corresponding with the "real" ghost of her husband. In "Tlactocatzine" Charlotte is even aware, momentarily, that hers is a correspondence between ghosts: "Ah, Max, answer me, the forget-me-nots that I take you in the afternoon to the Capuchin crypt, don't they smell fresh?"

Again, in commenting on Aura to Harss and Dohmann [in Into the Mainstream, 1967] Fuentes uses the same word, fantasma, ghost. "Every story is written with a ghost at your shoulder." In Aura the ghost is Woman. What does the word ghost mean or suggest to Fuentes, that he repeatedly applies it to the archetypal figure of Carlota-Aura? It has, of course, many connotations, but perhaps chief among them are death, the past, and the supernatural, ideas which are also associated with the anima.

But the use of the word ghost is unfortunate in that Harss and Dohmann then proceed to judge Aura as a ghost story, a genre whose requirements of suspense it fails to fulfill. "For a meaning to be revealed," they say, "it must first be withheld." One of the problems with Aura seems to be that the "ghost" is too close to the archetypal figure, and although the meaning may not be "handed out," as the critics charge, it is suspected by the reader from the beginning.

The Themes in Aura

The problem at hand, therefore, is why Fuentes, with all his literary dexterity, uses in Aura (and elsewhere) an undisguised archetypal figure which is so vulnerable to criticism. I would postulate that at least part of the reason lies in his didacticism. Since the significance of the archetypal figure is more obvious than that of a character complicated by an involved personal history, Fuentes, when he wishes to be sure of making a point, utilizes the former as a kind of literary shorthand. And this point, to which he sacrifices character development, is usually of a philosophical or social nature. If this postulation is correct, I am in opposition to Robert Mead, who, in commenting upon Los dias enmascarados, asserts that "absent from it is the intense preoccupation with social problems which characterize most of his later work" [Books Abroad 38 (1964)].

In support of my interpretation of the motivation behind Fuentes's less realistic fiction is a statement Fuentes made to Sommers [Books Abroad 40 (1966)]: "Aura, despite its basis in a highly subjective, even phantasmagoric view of reality, ultimately implies and reveals an external world." The fact that many of Fuentes's works do not reflect the external world as we know it does not indicate, therefore, . . . that they are not concerned with reality or with social problems. Even Harss and Dohmann recognized that Aura was intended as a parable (as well as a ghost story). And Emir Rodríguez-Monegal in the already referred to article from Número, found that Aura symbolized "the reconstruction of the Mexico of the old days of privilege upon the structure of today's modern and insolent Mexico."

This theme of the old built upon the new, the old returning to haunt the new, is again the theme of ghosts. And although Aura may not be a good ghost story, it is, I believe, intended as very much more than a mere ghost story. External reality, as in the case of "Tlactocatzine," gradually withers away. But the attempt is not so much to shock, as to make the reader more fully aware of only half-suspected truths.

The Problem of Reality: Conscious Versus Unconscious. Our first intimation that Aura will not deal with the recognizable world of Mexico City in 1962 is provided by the narrator's observation that the house in question is located in the old center of the city! "You always thought that nobody lived in the old center of the city."

Thus he discovers that the past lives on, generally unnoticed, in the heart of the city—and by implication, in the hearts of its inhabitants. The theme of superimposition of personalities and cultures is also foreshadowed by Felipe's discovery that in this old barrio house numbers have been changed many times, new ones superimposed on the old which are nevertheless still visible.

The normal world of today begins to fade rapidly as he relates:

before going in you take a last look over your shoulder, frowning at the long line of stalled buses and cars that groan, honk and pour forth the crazy smoke of their haste. You try, uselessly, to retain a single image of this outside indifferentiated world.

The last adjective, "indifferentiated," suggests the fuzziness, the unreality of the normal, daylight world Felipe has left to enter the real, but shadowy, one of the old mansion. Once inside its portals, the borderline between real life and the world of dreams becomes increasingly tenuous. According to Robert Mead, "the reader ends by thinking that the entire story, from beginning to end, is a long dream, a chain of events which are born, live and die in the imagination of Felipe Montero."

But the problem is not dream versus reality, but dream versus consciousness. Felipe in this dream world is learning truths to which the daylight world of the conscious ego may blind us. Thus the theme of La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) is clearly echoed in Aura; we learn from our dreams, and dreams themselves reveal an often hidden and fundamental part of reality. But there is a significant difference in the basic assumptions of Calderón and of Fuentes. In the great drama of the Golden Age life may be a dream, but the consequences of man's behavior in his dream are awesome. It is a dream dreamed in order to allocate to each of us our final place in eternity, whether this be paradise or eternal condemnation. It is a dream which is a vestibule to a permanent reality. Thus Calderón's conception of the dream is predicated on free will and personal responsibility. There is an imperative need to act wisely and generously in the knowledge that one is being judged.

But if life becomes merely a dream, as in Aura, if there is no hereafter of an extra-worldly nature, but only a perpetual reincarnation in this dream world (a theme to be discussed shortly), there is no need to assume free will. In fact the idea suggested by the word dream is diametrically opposed, for the modern mind, to the ideas of free will and individual responsibility. If something is only a dream, we are not responsible for our actions—which are viewed as the automatic product of our unconscious. In dreams the course of events often seems predetermined, therefore, with little place for the dreamer's personal choice. Thus Aura is far closer to the dream as we know it than is La vida es sueño.

There is a shadow of fate, of inevitability, of nightmare at times rather than dream, in Aura from beginning to end. In the third sentence of the novel, we read that the newspaper advertisement that sends the hero to the old mansion "seems directed to you and only you."

The Matter of Fate. The narrator walks into the trap which is first baited by money (his need for the salary of nine hundred pesos) and secondly by Aura, whose green eyes enchant him immediately. He says to himself: "Don't fool yourself; these eyes flow, they are transformed, as if they were offering you a landscape that only you could guess or desire. Yes, I am going to live with you."

Then the trap is sprung. Felipe understands that "this house will always be in darkness." He hears the plaintive cries of the cats, whose very existence, as well as that of the garden where drug-producing plants are grown, the old woman denies; he surprises Consuelo muttering secret words before her altar with its picture of hell, and still he does not seem to react. He is apparently overwhelmed by curiosity as well as infatuation. In the last scene we may recall that Felipe is in bed with the old hag and makes no attempt to escape. Yet by this time all illusion of beauty is gone. Nevertheless, he embraces her: "You plunge your face, your open eyes, into Consuelo's silver-white hair, and Consuelo will embrace you again when the moon is out of sight.

The Role of Love in Aura. We have already seen in the discussion of the anima that this archetype always carries a suggestion of fate, of inevitability. In Aura, she draws Felipe to her home and, in part through her incarnation of Aura, keeps him there. He is troubled by attraction to Aura and on the conscious level rationalizes and tells himself that he really wishes to rescue her from the spell of the old woman. But on the unconscious level he understands that his real motive for remaining is his need for Aura.

Felipe, we must remember, is a modern man, a rootless intellectual who lives in the "labyrinth of solitude" that Octavio Paz describes, where each man is keenly aware of his isolation from other individuals. In Paz's chapter entitled "The Dialectic of Solitude" he states:

What we ask of love (which, being desire, is a hunger for communion, a will to fall and to die as well as to be reborn) is that it give us a bit of true life, of true death. We do not ask it for happiness or repose, but simply for an instant of that full life in which opposites vanish, in which life and death, time and eternity are united. . . . Creation and destruction become one in the act of love, and during a fraction of a second man has a glimpse of a more perfect state of being [The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961].

Such a penetrating analysis of love by a writer who has had a profound influence on Fuentes does much to explain the pull of fate on Felipe Montero.

For Felipe, Aura symbolizes the therapy of love, a fusion with someone outside himself. And since his desire is in itself part of the masochistic desire for self-destruction (also studied by both Freud and Jung), the "desire to fall and to die" of which Paz speaks, the dual figure of Aura-Consuelo satisfies both sides of Felipe's craving. Paz has also called this "hunger for communion," and the religious aspect of the sexual act is underlined by Fuentes. Aura's bedroom becomes a church in metaphor: "And you enter this empty bedroom where a circle of light illuminates the bed, the huge Mexican crucifix . . . ."

And again:

You fall on Aura's nude body, on her open arms, stretched out from one end to the other of the bed, like the black Christ that hangs from the wall with his scarlet silk wrapped around his things, his knees open, his wounded side, his crown of thorns set up on a tangled black wig with silver spangles. Aura opens up like an altar.

Sommers, too, points out the black Christ and the analogy between sexual intercourse and Christian communion. Aura even places on her thighs a thin wheat biscuit suggestive of the holy wafer. Summarizing this scene, Sommers comments:

Blacks arts, expressed in distorted religious symbols, generate a power superior to that of the intellect . . . The stature of man is diminished for he commands no resources to cope with the mysterious forces which intrude on his consciousness and on his life.

Yet the stature of man does not seem to be relevant in Aura. Felipe is not concerned about stature. Like Paz's lonely Mexican, he is concerned about reality and real existence, and his one way of achieving this is by fusion with something outside himself.

This fusion in the minds of today's young students is found in sex and religion. That this is the key to meaning in life is also mentioned by Father Greeley [in New York Times Magazine, June 1, 1969]. He quotes one student as saying: "The only place where we are going to find ourselves is in deep relationships with others and that means either religion or sex and maybe both." Father Greeley comments:

The religious experience in the final analysis is seen as 'ecstatic,' that is to say, that it, like sex, takes a person out of himself and brings him into contact not only with other human beings but with the 'creative powers' which presumably underpin the cosmos.

But if Sommers emphasizes the negative aspect of Felipe's religious and sexual experience, it is only natural in that Fuentes himself has laden it with many of the ninteenth-century, romantic symbols of the Black Mass, the description of the wafer, the black Christ, etc. As a demonologist, he has not, in fact, clearly defined the nature of Consuelo's powers and thus has confused the moral significance of Felipe's love relationship with her. Talking to Harss and Dohmann [in Into the Mainstream, 1967], Fuentes seems to equate Consuelo with the ghost of Woman, "the keeper of secret knowledge, which is true knowledge, general knowledge, universal knowledge." And yet, Consuelo, as we have seen, acts very much like a fairy tale witch with her casting of spells and her sacrifice of cats. There are even innuendos that through black magic she is casting an evil spell on Felipe:

You eat mechanically, with the doll in your hand . . . without realizing, at first, your own hypnotized attitude, only later glimpsing a reason for your oppressive nap, your nightmare, finally identifying your somnambulist movements with those of Aura, with those of the old woman: staring with disgust at this horrid little doll that your fingers caress, where you begin to suspect there may be a secret sickness, a contagion.

Thus Consuelo uses effigies for magic purposes; also the presence of the rabbit Saga (sagacious?) strongly suggests the familiar or witch's assistant, whose historic function has been to focus the witch's power. There is also the implication that Consuelo has fallen into the sin of rebelling against God. General Llorente, in his memoirs, writes: "Consuelo, don't tempt God .. . the devil was once also an angel."

Does all this indicate that Consuelo is in fact a witch? And if so, what would this signify with respect to the spiritual development of Felipe?

A Definition of the Witch. This question can only be answered by recourse to a stricter definition of the term witch than I have hitherto provided. According to Hill and Williams, authors of The Supernatural, the term should really be applied only to a very limited group of individuals. As they understand the term, even if Consuelo had sold her soul to the Devil by means of a pact, she would still not necessarily be a witch. Rather she seems to belong to the ancient tradition of sorceresses "who may cast spells, charms, and hexes and stir up love potions." "Providing his end is selfish . . . that the sorcerer's motive is to gain riches, power or pleasure for himself, in this world," he is sorcerer and not witch [Douglas Hill and Put Williams, The Supernatural, 1965].

Such sorcerers, they say, are pagan, not anti-Christian, and were in fact critically regarded by the church as private practitioners of magic, but not seriously persecuted until the mid-fifteenth century.

In order to distinguish between these suspicious but not really demonic women and real witches, Hill and Williams use the yardstick of intent. The real witch was an agent of the devil, "not one of his customers, used her magic to serve the devil's own purposes, not her own. . . . Her principal function was the worship of the devil, which involved the conscious repudiation of God and the Christian faith.

One of the sources of confusion as to the love ritual in Aura seems to be that sex also played a fundamental role in all witch ceremonies, as did various involved perversions and obscenities. But this was pure sex, often grotesque, with no question of love. We need only read accounts of witches' covens and black masses to see how radically different they were from anything found in Aura. (Fuentes confuses the picture by his references to the desecration of the Host and the Black Christ—elements of the Black Mass, which according to many authorities is virtually a literary creation and did not grow directly out of the tradition of witchcraft.) Like all sorceresses, therefore, Consuelo uses magic for her own selfish purposes, in this case to reincarnate her youth and thereby recreate love. Richard Callan [in Kentucky Romance Quarterly 18 (1971)] compares her to the Greek fertility goddess, Hecate, mother of witchcraft who had as her symbols dogs, goats, mice, and torches—all the items we find in the cavelike abode of Consuelo. Rather than exacting Felipe's soul, she gives him a new one, or rather reveals through her love his true soul and his true face which also had belonged to her husband, the general.

The Theme of Personal Identity. Harss and Dohmann attribute Aura's popularity with its author to its frontal attack on the theme of personal identity. As we see in Felipe's metamorphosis, this attack certainly exists. But it is an attack that denies the problem rather than wrestling with it. Felipe, when he understands that he is in fact the general, experiences a crisis of vanity, or initial horror that his hitherto private face is really that of someone else. "You hide your face in the pillow trying to keep the air from tearing away your features which are yours, which you want for yourself. But he seems to accept without a struggle his psychic identity with the general, "waiting for what has to come, what you can't prevent."

His confidence in the rational world where I am I and not someone else is entirely gone. On one level we may know, as Professor René Dubos points out [in Columbia Forum 12 (Spring 1969)], that "the individuality of a person living now is different from that of anyone who has ever lived in the past or will live in the future," that our personalities are shaped by the peculiarities of genetic endowment and the individual response to the total environment. But on the deeper, unconscious level that Felipe has entered, all this is irrelevant. Almost with relief he accepts the idea that he is the general, and speculates on the nature of time which has given him an identity out of the past.

The Nature of Time inAura. Through spiritual and bodily fusion with Aura, Felipe has apparently experienced something positive, ineffable, which can be compared not to the Black Mass but to the Mass itself. The real Mass, if properly understood, is, in the words of Jung [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959] "a participation in the transcendence of life which overcomes all bonds of space and time, it is a moment of eternity in time."

In like manner, Paz and Father Greeley have told us, man seeks fusion in love with the outside world. And he desires not only fusion in space, but also fusion in time. The dichotomy between chronological "normal" time with its generative feeling of unreality and subjective, eternal time, Paz says, "is expressed in the opposition between history and myth, or history and poetry." Love is "only an instant of real life in which the opposites of life and death, time and eternity, fuse."

The love scene between Aura and Felipe, therefore, is dominated, as is the entire novel, not by a search for identity but rather by a secret longing to lose our painful identities in an eternal world of space and time outside previous experience. In the anima, young and old, maiden and mother, is incarnated a magical conception of time which finally penetrates Felipe's being. Realizing he is now a new person, Felipe says:

You don't look at your watch again. It is a useless object falsely measuring a time determined by human vanity, these little hands that tediously measure off the long hours invented in order to disguise the real passage of time, which races with an insulting and mortal swiftness that no clock could measure.

He seems in these words to regard himself from a vantage point outside time, a vantage point that makes normal concepts absurd: "A life, a century, fifty years, it will no longer be possible for you to imagine such lying measurements."

The ending of the novel is ambiguous, and although we realize that normal concepts of time are displaced, precisely what we are to substitute in their stead is left to the reader's imagination. There is, of course, the possibility that Felipe is only a ghost summoned by Consuelo, much as Aura has been materialized by her; that, like the narrator in Borges's "The Circular Ruins," he is himself only a dream. There is also the postulation of Richard Callan [Kentucky Romance Quarterly 18 (1971)] that the whole story is a "hypnagogic drama of Felipe Montero, similar to the fantasies studied by Jung. My own feeling is that it is almost useless to divide Fuentes's characters into "real" and "unreal" categories since they all participate equally of the world of myth, are all outside time and inside immortality. Specifically, Felipe is a new reincarnation of a prototype that had previously existed as General Llorente. In one of his conversations with Aura, for example, there is talk of death and rebirth: "You have to be reborn, Aura," he says. And she replies, "One must die first in order to be reborn". Reincarnation is also the assumption in many other stories dealing with the anima (as for example H. Rider Haggard's She and Poe's "Ligeia"), and, perhaps even more important in dealing with Fuentes, it is also to be found in the ideas of Nietzsche.

Felipe seems to know his role and to accept it fatalistically because it is a repetition. He has done it all before. Thus the "tú," the second person, familiar form in which the story is written, may be interpreted as his older, wiser, unconscious self who is privy to the secret of fate, who observes Felipe's movements from the vantage point of past experience. He knows precisely what Felipe is going to do because he has already done it in a previous existence. Thus, although the narrator speaks frequently in the future tense, there is a strong element of the past; it is an inevitable future.

Summary of Conclusions Relating to Aura

On the psychological plane, therefore, the character of Aura-Consuelo is an excellent example of Jung's anima, the archetype of life. Aura, with her green eyes, pictured against a green sea (the photo taken of her by General Llorente), youthful, ancient, wise and seductive, is a composite of life-giving symbols. Offering Felipe the hidden powers of the unconscious as femme inspiratrice, she at first spurs him on to a burst of energy in his research and writing. But as Richard Callan points out, Felipe fails the challenge offered him by the anima, fails to slay the dragon of Consuelo, who represents the fatal attraction of the unconscious. Instead of reasserting his ego, Felipe Montero, whose name means hunter, fails the test. (Given Fuentes's fatalism, of course, this was predictable from the start.) Montero succumbs to the consolation (epitomized by Consuelo whose name means consolation) of the Great Mother figure. Unable to rescue the anima from the engulfing form of the great feminine unconscious, he enters the world of Aura, whose name can mean vulture, gentle breeze, breath, or dawn. But Felipe chooses the dark side of her nature and pays for his choice by loss of personal identity.

On the level of historical symbolism, the theme of Aura implies the takeover of the new by the old, and specifically the reconquest of modern Mexico by the ghosts of her past, a theme that Fuentes had already developed in Where the Air is Clear, and repeats again and again. So viewed, the resemblance of Aura to the figure of witch is emphasized, and she can only be regarded negatively.

Yet the meaning of Aura goes beyond the parochial experience of Mexico. The roots of Aura, as I have pointed out, are universal. The message has an almost biblical theme. As Jung says of the anima [in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious], she "is full of snares and traps in order that man should fall, should reach the earth and entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived."

Herein lies the great danger of the anima figure. Though she is irresistible as muse and young maiden, we have seen that she has as her negative pole the all-embracing figure of the Great Mother. (The relationship between anima and the other denizens of the collective unconscious are traced in detail by Erich Neumann, one of Jung's leading disciples, in The Great Mother [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.]) As Neumann points out, the anima stands like a beacon on the threshold of the collective unconscious, and her blinding light conceals the dark form of the elemental female who lurks behind her. In psychoanalytical terms, Felipe succumbs to the pull of the uroboric unconscious represented by Consuelo, the Great Mother, relinquishes his precious ego with hardly a struggle and slips back with relief into the original state of unconsciousness and death.

In conclusion, therefore, whether we designate Aura as witch or sorceress, it is clear that her powers are both destructive and creative. This is the reason why Fuentes's attitude to the anima figure is ambiguous. She both attracts and repels him. He feels a compulsion to repeat her image again and again, perhaps hoping that some day she can be seized and tamed. Aura is the model for a later short story, "La Muñeca Reina" ("The Queen Doll") from Cantar deciegos (Song of the Blind, 1964), which gives a fairly realistic treatment of the deformation by time of a beautiful young girl who becomes a thing of repulsion. Still another story in the same collection, "Las Dos Elenas," has its roots in Aura, with its treatment of the dual attraction of the old mother-in-law and the young bride for the modern, but confused, young Mexican narrator.