The Double Refuge 🇲🇽 Señor Locke

Aura 4: Emanations

Vibrations & Auras - A More Rational Lodging - Extrasensory Control

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The title of Fuentes’ novel, Aura, alludes to emanations and hence to the metaphysical or psychological structures that are assumed to make such emanations possible. Oxford defines aura as 1. the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place, and 2. a supposed emanation surrounding the body of a living creature and regarded as an essential part of the individual. The name Aura refers to the 15-year-old girl who Felipe at first believes to be controlled by Consuela, yet by the end of the novel he finds that Aura has become Consuela’s aura or emanation. It seems that Consuela can, through some occult power, incarnate herself inside of Aura. Incarnation here might also be a positive term for possession.

The novel takes the fundamental notion of an aura and pushes it to the point where auras are controlled, superimposed, and possessed. This disturbing notion whereby one self takes over another self is shocking and retrogressive: epistemologically it rejects the past 300 years of science; morally it rejects the last 200 years of individual rights; religiously it rejects the strictures against using occult or metaphysical powers for your own own personal gain.

The link to politics in the novel is not immediately clear, yet Consuela and her General take over the bodies of Aura and Felipe just as Maximillian I took over Mexico as its Emperor from 1864-7, at which point he was assassinated. Fuentes combines the occult and historical in the general notion of any anti-democratic, hierarchical, authoritarian, militaristic power that numbs the people, takes their powers away from them, and turns them into compliant zombies. In other words, just because Consuela gets away with it, doesn’t mean Fuentes approves. Rather, the novel is a scathing indictment of those who enact such predatory schemes, especially when they’re cloaked in the garments of religion.

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In the 20th century evolution and genetics supplied such a convincing explanation of reality that it was hard for rational minds to entertain supernatural explanations. This hasn’t of course stopped people from swooning over vampires, imagining possessions and exorcisms, and depicting hellscapes as creepy as those of Goya, or as meticulous as those of Hieronymus Bosch.

Publishing Aura in 1962, Fuentes is fully aware of the demise of supernatural explanations for our existence, yet he uses the supernatural to great effect. Indeed, it’s because the supernatural no longer explains our existence that he can shock his reader with an incremental and inexorable pull of the occult, from suggestion and coincidence to attraction, obsession, and possession. Whereas intellectual history chronicles the retreat of the supernatural, Fuentes guides his reader backward into an obscure occult mysticism, one which overlaps and finally obliterates the physical world. The reasons he does this are at least two-fold: first, to create a spooky cautionary tale of brutal romance and coercive obsession; second, to critique an outdated mind-set that looks deludedly to past glories instead of to today’s problems.

Fuentes hints in the opening pages at the political motive behind his negative, occult depiction of Consuela. As soon as Felipe enters the building, he perceives its “rotting roots” and its “thick drowsy aroma.” Consuela lives in a decrepit past, yet she imagines that she exists on a higher level. This higher level is given a religious dimension with the inclusion of saints, which we find in the architecture of the second story facade above the street, as well as once we get inside her room, which contains a blinding alter of saints and candles. From the street, that is, from the real world, Felipe sees that the “cheap merchandise on sale along the street doesn’t have any effect on that upper level — on the baroque harmony of the carved stones; on the battered stone saints with pigeons clustering on their shoulders.” This initially seems like a nostalgic description of the building, but bit by bit the pieces of the mysterious mansion come together and it shows itself to be a place of seduction, coercion, and possession.

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Vibrations & Auras

As in most good horror stories, Fuentes’ scenario works by insidious degrees. Despite the increments and obscurities, there are two main signposts along the way. First, there is the occult power of Consuela over her niece, whose name Aura initiates the notion of one self projecting forces or vibrations, in this case with the aim to control and possess. Emanations and possessions are central to the second signpost: Consuela’s power over life and death. Consuela’s occult control over Aura allows her to take control of Felipe, which allows her to incarnate her deceased husband, General Llorente, in Felipe’s body. This isn’t only an extraordinary case of one self jumping into another, as Consuela seems to do. It’s also a case of bringing the general’s self back from the dead and putting it into the body of Felipe, thereby transcending the physical rules of existence and non-existence. Consuela takes control of what might be seen as the ultimate superstructure of the supernatural: the gap between life and death. While in Macbeth Shakespeare talks about the impossibility of jumping the world to come, Consuela takes the general’s world that came and superimposes it onto the world that is.

Fuentes operates much like Poe in his use of a realistic context into which enters a weird and disturbing scenario. He also operates like Latin American magic realists such as Marquez, and like the more recent magic realism in Salman Rushdie — most notably in Shame and The Satanic Verses (I look at these in The Poet & the Three Weird Sisters and Flight of Angels). The link to Shame is most clear, given that it also begins in a claustrophobic world of gothic horrors and occult female powers.

I’d like here to diverge slightly, in order to make a point which spans centuries. I’d like to bring in two authors who are by and large realistic but who also deal with notions of the occult and the supernatural: Dickens and Shakespeare.

By comparing Fuentes’ take on the supernatural with that of Dickens and Shakespeare we can see how unnerving, uncompromising, and anachronistic Fuentes’ tale is — and why it so powerfully indicts those who are obsessed with the imaginary past. Fuentes doesn’t directly discuss philosophy, history, or politics; instead, he drives his readers emotionally into a world without logic, and lets the setting and interactions make his point. This contrasts with the approaches taken by Shakespeare and Dickens, who confront the problems of society and philosophy more directly, largely because they have to, since their intellectual worlds haven’t already decided that the most likely epistemological and metaphysical answers lie in the direction of science and empiricism, a direction long established by the time Fuentes writes Aura in 1962. While Shakespeare and Dickens take us away from supernaturalism toward a Modern sensibility, one that we recognize historically in terms of intellectual history, Fuentes takes us backwards into a negative and coercive supernaturalism we left behind. Implicitly, he uses the coercion of Consuela to indict a way of thinking that is ultra-conservative, hierarchical, religion-obsessed, and coercive in its willingness to take over the minds — and even the bodies — of others.

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A More Rational Lodging

As I argue in the next section At the Wild & Fog, Dickens’ 1852-3 novel Bleak House helps us get at the moment before the scientific explanation of Darwin became more rationally convincing than any religious explanation. We see many departures from the supernatural in Bleak House, and often these are accompanied with ambiguity and with a mix of reason and religious charity. While Dickens champions traditional Christian moral virtues, he’s skeptical about the mystical and supernatural elements that have accompanied religion from its earliest days. We can see his skepticism in two instances that relate to forces and essences that lie outside the bounds of the natural or physical world, the first involving extrasensory expression and perception, and the second involving ghosts.

In Chapter 29 of Bleak House we find Sir Leicester Dedlock sitting comfortably in his library while his wife is in the middle of a traumatic discovery in another room. Lady Dedlock has just been told that her sister had decades ago stolen her daughter from her in the first hour after she gave birth. Sir Leicester loves his wife deeply, yet this depth of feeling isn’t enough for him to feel or intuit her grief, even though she is in the same house:

As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very armour stir?

No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester's ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees.

Dickens refers to Shakespeare in his rejection of the type of Medieval supernaturalism in which humans are capable of extrasensory expression or extrasensory perception. Where people once saw omens in the natural world (as in Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth), such thinking becomes in Dickens a pathetic fallacy which is unable to “make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms.” Dickens borrows his imagery from Macbeth to suggest that this type of extrasensory messaging is an outdated Medieval fantasy: you must be actually “trumpet-tongued,” not a silent medium, to make yourself heard through a solid wall. This scenario is opposite to the scenario in Aura, where the home of Consuela, especially her bedroom with its glowing alter, becomes the prime location of her mystic powers, which can work through walls and can transcend the space/time continuum itself.

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Extrasensory Control

For a mind to emanate or perceive extrasensory vibrations is one thing; for a mind to control such emanations is another. In Dickens’ day witchery and possession were largely unthinkable, yet one doesn’t have to go too far back in history to a time when they were very thinkable: the Salem witch trials occurred in the late 1600s, and the years around Shakespeare seem to mark a highpoint: “The period of the European witch trials, with the most active phase and which saw the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630. The period between 1560 and 1670 saw more than 40,000 deaths” (Wikipedia). Given this time-line, it’s reasonable to see Fuentes’ witchy Consuela in terms of a world like that of Shakespeare, which is a Renaissance one, yet which retains deep vestiges of the Medieval period.

As in my analysis of Bleak House, my aim in The Double Refuge isn’t so much to make an Age appear one way or the other, but rather to scan its shades of grey, its tensions between various directions, as well as its contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities. Just as Dickens wrote prior to scientific agnosticism, so Shakespeare wrote prior to the Age of Reason. Shakespeare brings up the supernatural world of ghosts and possession, yet he uses magic more as plot device than theological structure. Shakespeare even hints in Hamlet and Macbeth that while the old Medieval world of emanations, ghosts, and occult power struggles may exist, this world is starting to be eclipsed by a Modern frame of mind.

Hamlet suggests a rather individualistic and Modern sensibility when he argues that reality is what our minds make of it it: he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” A more obvious clash of Medieval and Modern epistemologies occurs when Hamlet uses an overtly empirical model of the mind to stress that he’ll remember the overtly supernatural words of the ghost: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, / That youth and observation copied there; / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain.” A similar mix of religion and empiricism can be seen in Hamlet’s advice to his mother about not sleeping with her regicidal husband:

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

The ghost scene at the beginning of Hamlet validates the supernatural over Horatio’s material philosophy, yet the way Hamlet talks about the supernatural suggests an empirical model of the mind, almost a century before Locke. This rational empirical philosophy is held by the play’s most sane and trusted character, who acts cautiously and reasonably at all times, and who is even receptive to ideas that don’t appear compatible with his rationalistic philosophy. In this sense, Horatio is an example of a double refugee who appears long before Huxley.

Horatio warns Hamlet against the disastrous duel with Laertes, a warning which Hamlet sloughs off with a curious combination of rationality (against augury) and mysticism (in favour of providence):

Horatio: If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit.

Hamlet: Not a whit, we defy augury. There's special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

Horatio’s advice would have been worth following, for what providence is there in Hamlet’s death? One might also see Horatio’s type of skepticism operating when Hamlet sees the ghost in his mother’s chamber, but his mother doesn’t see it. Here the reality of a ghost goes from a communal one to a personal one, from verification by many people to the possible hallucination of one person.

Likewise, in Macbeth the ghost of Banquo is seen only by Macbeth and not by the others around the dinner table. It may well be a ghost, for Shakespeare (like his rational philosopher Horatio) isn’t against entertaining the supernatural. Yet, again, the supernatural seems more psychologically dramatic than epistemologically religious. The ghost is more a sign of Macbeth’s psychological guilt than of a supernatural order.

Macbeth’s psychological state after he kills Duncan picks up on empirical suggestions made before the murder: Macbeth questions the nature of his fears, ascribing a purely psychological nature to the image of the dagger he sees before him. After Macbeth swaps this imaginary dagger for a real one and commits regicide, his wife scolds him for being haunted by the horrifying scene of his own making: “Infirm of purpose! / Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil.”

Lady’s Macbeth’s cold-blooded words constitute a shocking manipulation in two ways. First, her rejection of the dimension of evil is contradictory, coming as it does from a woman who earlier summoned the powers of Hell, pleading, “Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, / Wherever, in your sightless substances, / You wait on nature's mischief.” Her words are also a shocking manipulation because she uses supernatural notions when she thinks she can get power from them, then discards such notions when she can get power from a less occult view of the world.

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Next: 🇲🇽 Aura 5: Progressions

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