Gospel & Universe ⛱️ Señor Locke

Aura 4: In the Shadow of Macbeth

Supernatural Emanations - Vibrations & Auras - A More Rational Lodging - Extrasensory Control - More Spooks in London: More Things Than Are Dreamt Of? - Jumping the Life to Come

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Supernatural Emanations

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. Incarnate here is of course a polite term for possess.

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, and 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 tursn them into compliant zombies. In other words, just because Consuela gets away with it, doesn’t meant hat Fuentes approves. Rather, the novel is a scathing indictment of those who go along with such extreme conservative and religious schemes.

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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: to create a spooky story of brutal romance and coercive obsession, and 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 rotting, decrepid 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 fundamental 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 the political horror stories of Shame and The Satanic Verses, which I look at in The Poet & the Three Weird Sisters and Flight of Angels, both Salman Rushdie: The Fiction of Doubt. The link to Shame is most clear, given that it also begins in a claustrophobic world of gothic horrors and occult female powers. Here, however, I’d like to make a point which spans centuries, bringing 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 argued 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 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 with Dickens, my interest isn’t so much in making an Age appear one way or the other, but rather in bringing to light its shades of grey, the tensions between its various directions, as well as its contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities. Just as Dickens lies on the edge of a scientific agnosticism, so Shakespeare lies on the edges of the Age of Reason. Shakespeare brings up the supernatural world of ghosts and possession, yet he uses this world more as a plot device than as a metaphysical or theological assertion. 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 relgiion 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 one might note that there is clearly a material philosophy to contend with the older Medieval one. This 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 an agnostic who appears long before Huxley. He is also the one who warns Hamlet against the disastrous duel with Laertes, a warning which Hamlet sloughs off with an odd 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 skepticism when Hamlet sees the ghost in his mother’s chamber, but she does not see it. Here the reality of a ghost goes from a communal one to a personal one, from verificaction 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 religiously epistemological. The ghost is more a sign of Macbeth’s psychological guilt than of a supernatural order. For instance, 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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Hamlet and Macbeth straddle the line between the Medieval assumption of the supernatural and the Modern shift toward science and the physical. This isn’t surprising, since Shakespeare is writing around 1600, which is somewhere between the Medieval and the Modern world. It’s also a time when the scientific method was being developed, a time between Galileo’s On Motion  (1590) and his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632).

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More Spooks in London: More Things Than Are Dreamt Of?

In Shakespeare’s day the horror of supernatural occurances could be blood-curdling because people were still surrounded by a religious philosophy which encouraged the belief in the supernatural. Several centuries later, the same creepy possibilities survive, yet they are approached with a great degree of skepticism, and framed in a lexicon that’s largely scientific and empirical. In Dickens’ 1852-3 novel Bleak House characters are still frightened of ghosts, which fits into the timeline that I develop more fully in the next section, At the Wild & Fog: the 1850s were a turning point in the power of the scientific explanation, but up until Darwin’s Origins in 1859 the power of scientific thinking wasn’t capable of erasing the occult phantoms of the past.

As an agnostic I’d argue that we still haven’t extinguished the possibility, yet what I’m getting at here is a point about intellectual history and the eclipse of the religious explanation. We see this quasi-eclipse in Bleak House in the empirical “chords of the human mind” and in the focus on the overwrought sensitivities that make realistic people imagine ghosts: “So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the air is full of these phantoms”:

“Besides its being calculated to serve that friend in those chords of the human mind which--which need not be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion--your friend is no fool. What's that?"

"It's eleven o'clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul's. Listen and you'll hear all the bells in the city jangling."

Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound — strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the air is full of these phantoms, and the two look over their shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut.

"As to dead men, Tony," proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal, "there have been dead men in most rooms."

"I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and — and they let you alone," Tony answers.

For a more in-depth discussion of naturalism vs. supernaturalism in Bleak House, see “If the Walls Could Talk” in At the Fog & Wild [this chapter will be online soon]. Here I want to note that Fuentes’ novel isn’t couched in the 19th century pre-agnostic quasi-scientific terms we find in Bleak House. Rather, it brings us back to older religious terms of dread and horror, as if Fuentes is taking the witches and ghosts that even Shakespeare seems to question, and makes them come alive in all their Medieval power.

Fuentes’s Consuela uses the old world of forbidden pagan sorcery, mixing it blasphemously with Christianity. We see this in her ambiguous action of shaking her fists at the images on her altar. The reason I say ambiguously is that we can’t be sure what she’s shaking her fists at. Note that the description of her altar focuses more on the demons who are free to explore the violent and sexual aspects of life than on the saints from whom this “freedom” is hidden:

Cristo, María, San Sebastián, Santa Lucía, el Arcángel Miguel, los demonios sonrientes, los únicos sonrientes en esta iconografía del dolor y la cólera: sonrientes porque, en el viejo grabado iluminado por las veladoras, ensartan los tridentes en la piel de los condenados, les vacían calderones de agua hirviente, violan a las mujeres, se embriagan, gozan de la libertad vedada a los santos.

Christ, Mary, Saint Sebastian, Saint Lucy, the Archangel Michael, the smiling demons, the only smiling ones in this iconography of pain and anger: smiling because, in the old picture illuminated by candles, they insert tridents into the skin of the condemned, empty cauldrons of boiling water, rape the women, get drunk, and relish the liberty denied the saints.

Implicit in this pagan/Christian world is that black magic can not only influence the present but can transcend time, bringing back the past — in the form of the general who Consuela loves.

When Felipe climbs the steps into this world, ever-more seduced by the beauty of Aura, he enters a world that’s ancient, in fact much more ancient than Consuela and her late 19th century love for the general (a relationship that Felipe is paid by Consuela to research). The world is one where powers operate outside of yet also onto the physical world of practicality and science. Fuentes is entering here into a second and deeper level of metaphysics, one where spirit operates separately yet with the physical world, and also where the spiritual transcends time and space, when Consuela brings back the spirit of her dead husband.

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Jumping the Life to Come

A furthewr comparison with Shakespeare shows the horrific, forbidden, blasphemous nature of Fuentes’ scenario. In one of the great soliloquies, Macbeth notes that he can’t avoid a punishing afterlife if he assassinates King Duncan. Macbeth notes the Christian, Stoic, karmic principle of divine law operates once we have shuffled off the mortal coil that nature has supplied us. Shakespeare begins by using a deft pun on the word done to signal his immediate situation — agonizing about whether or not he should do it:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If th’assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.

In Hamlet’s Claudius we don’t get to see the type of agonized forethought we see in Macbeth, since most of the famous equivocation in the play is reserved for Hamlet himself. Yet in one scene, Claudius kneels at an altar and tries to confess for committing both fratricide and regicide. Kneeling at the altar, he is all too aware that no trick of legal reasoning can save him from the iron-clad law of otherworldy or karmic justice that governs the universe.

Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what's in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon'd being down? Then I'll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?
That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare cleverly dramatizes this larger structure of universal even-handed justice, but with a poetic twist. Claudius symbolically drinks the poisoned chalice by murdering Hamlet’s father, but he also literally drinks a poisoned chalice at the end of the play. Prior to the dual between Hamlet and Laertes, Claudius poisons a chalice of wine that he intends to give to Hamlet. Yet Gertrude unexpectedly drinks from the chalice. Claudius thus loses the love of his life, about whom he earlier tells Laertes:“She is so conjunctive to my life and soul / That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, / I could not but by her.” At the very end of the play, Hamlet shoves the chalice into Claudius’ mouth. He then drowns in the poisonous mix of blood-red wine and poison that he himself put into the drink. As horrible as this is to Claudius, this is only a prelude to the after-world horrors that await him.

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While Shakespeare gives voice to a deep and abiding view of afterlife justice, Hamlet and Macbeth also have striking degrees of ambiguity in regard to the ultimate question of metaphysics: do we enter a realm of essences after we die? The ghost in Hamlet comes from a sulpherous Purgatory, yet Hamlet argues while we may see the afterlife in terms of dreaming, this is just a conceit, for the afterlife lies beyond “that bourne from where no traveller returns.” Most tellingly, he says, “Perchance to dream.” This implies an alternative: perhaps we enter an afterlife or perhaps we merely sleep, without dreaming. Macbeth and his witchy wife summon all the powers of Hell, yet this Hell is a realm of blackness and emptiness, more akin to Augustine’s lack of being than to an actual place or dimension. This empty Hell is like the empty promises of the three weird sisters, and like Macbeth’s view of life as “a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Perhaps ironically, this Modern Renaissance version of Hell resembles the oldest version of Hell, that of the Sumerians and early Greeks: more an empty realm of dusty meaningless than any scenario of fire or light.

Shakeseare may shock some conservatives with his questioning of Christian doctrine, yet by and large he keeps within it. Mostly, he edges toward doubt, and toward questions that by and large resemble the doubts and questions of the Greek world that was being re-discovered or re-born in the Renaissance or rebirth of his Age. Fuentes, on the other hand, shocks his 20th century reader by returning to that old world of Medieval mysticism, as if the Renaissance and Enlightenment had never taken place.

The stairway Felipe climbs takes him into another dimension, starting with the strange coincidences which lead him into the apartment, then continuing with the strange aura of the apartment — the aura that surrounds the young girl and seems to possess her — and climaxing with the possession of his body by the general who transcends both space and time, coming back from the grave to have sex with his old love Consuela, who herself seems to be more witch than woman.

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