Fantastic Interpretations of Time in Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo", Julio Cortázar's "Rayuela"

and José Lezama Lima's "Paradiso": A Modern Continuity of the Baroque

Author(s): Sharon Lynn Sieber
Source: Hispania, Vol. 91, No. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 331-341
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese
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 Fantastic Interpretations ofTime in Juan Rulfo's Pedro
P?ramo, Julio Cort?zar's Rayuela and Jos? Lezama Lima's
Paradiso: A Modern Continuity of theBaroque1
Sharon Lynn Sieber
Idaho State University

Abstract: This article investigates the treatment of time as a manifestation of the modern phenomenon of
simultaneity and theNeo-Baroque in three Latin American authors of modern literature: Juan Rulfo, Julio Cort?
zar and Jos? Lezama Lima. I compare these authors in terms of the postmodern/Neo-Baroque dialectic in Latin
America and its Northern Hemisphere variation: The transreal movement in North America. Considered on a
theoretical basis, the kind of time that is manifest inmodern Latin American literature is acausal and non-linear.
These non-linear time schemes reflect the changing consciousness of modern authors and connect them to a
syncretism of indigenous and colonial frameworks of time. The works treated in this study represent a kind of
hybrid literature in which the spatialization of time imposes a pattern and sequence that demands a new way of
reading, interpreting and understanding literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Key Words: Baroque, Cort?zar (Julio), Lezama Lima (Jos?), Neo-Baroque, Paradiso, Pedro P?ramo,
Postmodernism, Rayuela, Rulfo (Juan), simultaneity, time, transreal movement

The two hemispheres of theAmericas manifest very different trajectories in their separate
paths toward the phenomenon known as postmodernism. In fact, some critics disagree
thatwhat has been called "postmodern" evermanifested in South America at all. There is
one area, however, inwhich theNew-World literatureof both Northern and Southern hemis
pheres can be grouped together.Both literarytraditionsmanifest a difference from theOld World
in theway that time is represented and perceived, and thatdifference can be summed up under
theheading of a new kind of time: themodern phenomenon of simultaneity. Simultaneous timeas
a foundation for twentieth-centuryliteraryrepresentation is a way forNew-World inhabitants to
redefine and re-vision human psychological experience in both its manifestation and its
representation in the literaryand the visual arts.
The criticwho has written themost about thekind of time thatmanifests itselfthrough simul
taneityhas also written extensively about the [Neo-]Baroque movement inLatin America along
with the Italian critic and novelist, Humberto Eco. In his essay entitled "Barroco," Severo Sarduy
begins with thefollowing epigraph defining theFrench word retomb?e: "achronic causality, non
contiguous isomorphism, or a consequence of something not yetmade, similar to something that
does not yet exist" (translationmine; Obras completas, 1196).2 It is not coincidental that the
French word means a falling back, and for Sarduy and theNeo-Baroque movement, not only a
falling back in time, but a falling into time, turning in upon itself inundecipherable twists and
folds, to reveal thehyperbole and contradiction of thenew, updated andmodern Baroque: a new
timemanifesting itselfvia a space forever altered bymodernity?fantastic time inscribed upon a
fantastic space.

According to Sarduy, even the framework o? retomb?e in the context of theBaroque is an

analogy foranother kind of time indirect contrast to scientific, linear time,which includes finding
results before causes and consequences, and also the simultaneous existence before (after and
during) the acausal, achronic and synchronous events that inspired them in order to compare

Sieber, Sharon Lynn

"Fantastic Interpretations of Time in Juan Rulfo's Pedro P?ramo, Julio Cort?zar 's Rayuela and
Jos? Lezama Lima's Paradiso: A Modern Continuity of the Baroque"
Hispania 91.2 (2008): 331-341

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
332 Hispania 91May 2008
similarities of thingsnot yet inexistence, similar toElena Garro's character inLos recuerdos del
porvenir, Mart?n Moneada, who remembers unlived events far better than those experienced in
hismemory. In fact, thekind of timemanifested through theBaroque has become a foundation for
the literatureofmodernity. And, whether or not it is labeled Postmodern orNeo-Baroque, this
phenomenon constitutes a new foundation of time,which has in turn created a need for a new
philosophy of reading. As Sarduy observes,

Las notas que siguen intentan se?alar la retomb?e de ciertos modelos cient?ficos (cosmol?gicos) en la pro
ducci?n simb?lica no cient?fica, contempor?nea de no. La resonancia de esos modelos se escucha sin noci?n
de contig?idad ni de causalidad: en esta c?mara, a veces el eco precede la voz.
caduca le?da al rev?s; relato sin fechas: dispersi?n de la historia sancionada.
Historia
Boomerang: trazando la agrimensura de la c?mara de eco, el mapa de la repercusi?n, ciertos modelos,
cuya retomb?e se detecta, mostrar?n su reverso: ni esquema puro, operante, sin base, ni unidad cient?fica
m?nima, sino?patente en el c?rculo de Galileo, o en la teor?a del big bang de Lema?tre?n?cleo imaginario,
marca teol?gica. (1197)

In Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, C. G. Jung states that "The causality

asserts that the connection between cause and effect is a necessary one. The syn
principle

chronicity principle asserts that the terms of a meaningful coincidence are connected by
simultaneity and meaning"" (69). Reading has long been understood to be based on causality,
since language is successive and has to be understood in a linear fashion, or as Susanne Langer
states inPhilosophy in a New Key, "words have a linear, discrete, successive order; they are
strungone afteranother like beads on a rosary; beyond thevery limitedmeanings of inflections,
which can indeed be incorporated in thewords themselves, we cannot talk in simultaneous
bunches of names" (80). Concepts, however, have always been understood associatively in
"simultaneous bunches," and the corresponding shift inmodern literature from succession to
meaning requires of the reader the application of the synchronicityprinciple in order forpattern
recognition to occur within Postmodern and Neo-Baroque texts.
Ursula K. Heise, inChronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, recognizes the
fundamental importance of time as the framework fornarrative: "Theorists of narrative generally
agree that time is one of themost fundamental parameters throughwhich narrative as a genre is
organized and understood" (47). That the reader is continually in a process of orientation with
regard to space and time, and thata sense of dis-orientation becomes the standardmode through
which thework is framed by the author in themodern period, causes a rupture in the focus that
can only be described as a shift in the semantic field: Time and space have changed themeaning
and value of what and how reading is carried out and understood in the twentieth and twenty
first centuries. InNeo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Angela Ndalianis
has underscored the importance of intertexuality in themulti-layered time frame of theNeo
Baroque:

Intertextual citation engages the audience in a game that is about paying homage to and renegotiating the

past [...]. The resulting "hyperconsciousness" permits participants to become engrossed in the narration in
a more conventional sense, with the story and themes unraveling along syntagmatic lines; but players are
also encouraged to participate with the work on the paradigmatic level via multi-layered intertextual
references [...]. To return to Eco, it is on this paradigmatic level that "poetic meaning" and engagement
with the infinite work in process occurs. On this level the (Neo-)Baroque concern with virtuosity comes
into play. (72-73)

Further, she suggests that this layering involves a fascination with simultaneous manifestations
of different entities occupying the same space, such as ruins and fragments,which evoke the
whole while manifesting only a part, and which superimpose past and present realities as co
existing: "In a way thatrecalls Benjamin on theBaroque, these entertainmentforms function like
ruins and fragments, evoking the existence of a past in the present while simultaneously trans
forming the ruin intoa restored,majestic structurethatoperates like a richly layered palimpsest"
(73).

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 Fantastic Interpretations of Time 333
to
The fact of the importance of time narrative literature is not in doubt. But the change in
ways of reading, understanding and perceiving time have been insufficientlyaccounted for as
theyhave altered the social consciousness of humanistic study, inpart due to changes and new
possibilities inmedia, technology, and globalization which have profound implications for the
futureof reading and the understanding and representation of the image. According toKathleen
Komar in Pattern and Chaos: Multilinear Novels by Dos Pasos, D?blin, Faulkner and
Koeppen,

The modern artist, then is faced with redefining the essential structural principles of his aesthetic work in
conformity with the new scientific, philosophical, and psychological discoveries. This leads to a recon
sideration of the concepts of time, space, and causality in modern art. Novelists of the Twentieth Century
such as Proust and Joyce, influenced by Bergson, became interested in time experienced as a continuous
flow of existence, in time as it is internally experienced rather than in clock time (10-11).

Octavio Paz goes even furtherinThe Labyrinth of Solitude, citing thefigurative expulsion from
Eden as the end of the "perpetual present" and the beginning of clock time, in this case a time
which coincides with theEuropean, imperial time of the Spanish colonizers:

When man was exiled from that eternity in which all times were one, he entered Chronometrie time and
became a prisoner of the clock and the calendar. As soon as time was divided up into
yesterday, today and
tomorrow, into hours, minutes and seconds, man ceased to flow with time, ceased to coincide with the flow
of reality. These spatial measurements of time separate man from reality?which is a continuous present
?and turn all the presences in which reality manifests itself, as Bergson said, into phantasms (209).

It is especially suitable to return to the argument of Sarduy, that is, that the literaturecoming
fromLatin America and labeled by critics as Postmodern is actually themodern continuation of
theBaroque, an older fantastic literarytradition,thefirst literarytraditionfromEurope to authen
ticallymigrate and manifest itself in theNew World, during a time of resurgence of what has
become known as "transrealism" in theNorth American literature of the fantastic, and the
blurring or "transcending" of boundaries between all kinds of realism in both "new worlds,"
north and south. This is a trans-movementwhich encompasses both American continents in the
Western Hemisphere, and which represents not only a new understanding of time and space but
of identityand values. In her definitive work on Postmodernism, A Poetics ofPostmodernism:
History, Theory, Fiction, Linda Hutcheon pays homage to Sarduy in the following quotation:
"And almost everyone (e.g. Barth 1980) wants to be sure to includewhat Severo Sarduy (1974)
has labeled?not postmodern?but 'neo-baroque' in a Spanish culture where 'modernism' has a
ratherdifferentmeaning" (4).
The online etymology dictionary defines trans- as a 'across, over, to go
"prefix meaning
beyond'" (www.etymonline.com). This prefix is the original metaphor involving going beyond
oneself and becoming "other," a transportationnot only to otherness, but also a transformation
into the other, even a transcendence of course, the narrative
perhaps beyond "other," and,

transgression of all limits involving "other." If the transrealmeans going beyond the real through
the real, and themagical realmeans to exaggerate themundane and quotidian to such an extent
that themagical appears tobe almost commonplace, thenwe have an idea of just how all encom
passing theblurring of these boundaries is intended to be inadjusting themodern reader's focus.
Hutcheon describes themany heads of thismodern-day hydra we call postmodern?which,
oddly enough, also sounds a great deal like theBaroque fantastic, certainlywhen one thinks
about the self-conscious and burlesque ironic subjectivity of the Spanish Baroque author
Francisco Que vedo:

[o]f all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and contemporary writing on the arts,
postmodernism must be the most over- and under-defined. It is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of
rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation,
negativized decentering, indeterminacy, and
antitotalization. What all of these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing prefixes?dis, de, in,
anti?is incorporate what which they aim to contest?as does I suppose, the term postmodernism itself
(3).

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334 Hispania 91May 2008
It is interesting that the time of themodern places a focus upon an almost Hegelian synthetic
thinking in incorporating opposites, but it is also a case of the sum being greater than itsparts;
themodern world is different from the ancient one, and the acceleration of change causes the
postmodern reader towake up to a differentworld each day in a way that thepre-modern reader
did not. In understanding how life and art interactand have an impact upon changing modes of
reading and understanding, authors such as Jos? Lezama Lima and Julio Cort?zar have incor
porated life intoart and art into life in such a way that the reader has tomake an adjustment to the
kinds of time and space represented therebefore he can embark upon the journey of the "willing
suspension of disbelief and "read" the novel. Hutcheon furtheradds to the above definition
that "[t]he political, social, and intellectual experience of the 1960s helped make itpossible for
postmodernism tobe seen as what Kristeva calls 'writing-as-experience-of-limits' (1980a, 137):
limits of language, of subjectivity, of sexual identity,and we might also add: of systematization
and uniformization" (8).
Certainly significant is the fact thatone element thatbothmovements?Neo-Baroque and
Postmodernism?share, is irony,a quality Octavio Paz has referredto as a "subversion" of irony
inSpanish American Modernism ("modernismo"), andwhich he relates to the longstanding tradi
tion of the Latin American fascination with death, in direct contrast to otherWestern cultures
which seek to avoid the integrationof the endwith thebeginning. According toPaz, "The moder
nista tragicomedy is composed of a dialogue between the body and death, analogy and irony.
[...] Analogy is continuously split open by irony,and verse by prose. The paradox beloved by
Baudelaire reappears: Behind themake-up of fashion, thegrimace of the skull.Modern artknows
itself tobe mortal; there is itsmodernity" (Children 96). It isno accident thatPaz's elaboration of
modernismo is related to the Baroque conceptismo, or the twists and turns of concept and
conceit turned paradox, the contrast and exaggeration of the real and the sublime, and the
blending of parody and the profound.
JuanRulfo's Pedro P?ramo begins with a number of overlays ofmany voices, but even be
fore the fragmentation and disintegration of themain character's perception through death and
the dying process, he comes to a crossroads which represents that it is his existentialist choice to
make the descent into the town of C?mala (whichmeans griddle). This iswhere his dyingmother
has sent him on a something of a wild goose chase to look for his father,who had abandoned
them after taking over his (Preciado's) mother's lands, money and resources.3 Here, Juan Precia

do enters and inhabits a space that largely determines and dictates how time can manifest itself:
Juan is not lost in space, but in time, just as Kurt Vonnegut has stated through another well
known character inmodern literature,Billy Pilgrim, inSlaughterhouse-Five: He is "unstuck in
time" (29). Not only does the reader experience the extreme disorientation of being unable to
identifythenarrative fragmentsof voice since theycome from alternate and alternating narrators,
or even parallel narrators,but also he cannot identifywhere theyare in time.We discover that the
multiple narrators "fast-forward" and "re-wind" the telling of their respective stories so that the
narrative perspective correspondingly moves or "wanders" in time; the intermittentnarrators
focus on the same event fromdifferenttime lineswithin a single flashback?not chronologically,
but collec-tively in a way that injects thepresiding narrator's present reflection on the flashback
in a self-conscious way. In the following fragment fromPedro P?ramo, Pedro asks his mother,
"Why are you crying,Mam??" As his mother answers, "Your father is dead," the partially
omniscient and disembodied third-personnarrative thread continues: "And then, as if the coiled
springs of her grief had broken loose, she said the same thing over again, over and over again,
until hands grasped her shoulders and stopped her trembling. 'They've killed your father'" (22).
Pedro, the child, fast-forwarding to a future point of his own recollection, then poses the
rhetorical question, "And who killed you,Mother?" (22), combining these two perspectives from
different times in one space, of child and adult, almost engaging the twomanifestations of this
same character at differenttimes inhis life ina dialogue. Jos?Carlos Gonz?lez Boixo, inhis critical
edition of Pedro P?ramo, notes the following of this passage: "Se trata de una reflexi?n de P.
P?ramo, ya viejo, que se superpone en este momento de la narraci?n, como si el personaje

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 Fantastic
Interpretations of Time 335
hubiese tenido opci?n a la propia lectura de estos fragmentos e incluyese sus pensamientos
sobre ellos" (89-90).
This novel also manifests a certain circularity of time, also common to indigenous cosmolo
gies, but in this sense it is through thenarrative continuity of the central narrator, JuanPreciado.
Preciado could be described as thenovel's center,with every voice in thenarrative coming back
tohim inone way or another, almost in themanner of a family tree,with Preciado in thecenter.As
we trytomap his journey, or at least orient ourselves in tracing Preciado's steps and narrative
thread or trail, it is helpful to see Juan Preciado as the center,with lines going out in terms of
action and characters, a complete mixture of the living and thedead, all revolving around Precia
do's narrative voice. It isperhaps the strong emotional content thatdisorients the reader as well,
since Preciado's journey is based on thedeathbed wish of his mother, and lands him in the town
where his father, long dead, once resided. The first person he meets is his own half-brother,
Abundio, Paramo's son,who ironically carries out (or has already carried out) thewish of Precia
do's mother to "charge" ormake Pedro P?ramo pay dearly forabandoning them: "El abandono en
que nos tuvo,mi hijo, c?braselo caro" (84). Preciado becomes themedium throughwhom the
other dead speak, going through themotion of circularity once again of all thedescribed actions,
and which the reader seems to know will continue for an eternity.The beginning of thenovel is
poignantly charged with the strong emotional content of Juan Preciado's mother dying and the
injustices she bitterly recounts at the hands of Juan's father,Pedro P?ramo?Pedro's legitimate
son does not carryhis surname,while his illegitimate son,Miguel, does carryhis father's name,4
and thus the novel captures the real-life experiences of thepoor during theMexican revolution
and theCristero war. It also seems to endorse, with the incongruities of narrative andmeaning in
the characters' lives (including the rich Pedro P?ramo), the gist of theMexican refrainwhich
Carlos Fuentes cites in the beginning of his book, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (and whose main
character is also based on the character of Pedro P?ramo): "Nada vale la vida; la vida no vale na
da." This scene also creates an overlay of timeperiods in the real and fictional worlds so that the
times resonate together and end in the death of everyone involved, and so thatat the end of the
storyno one dies in the story line (except in a circular way because the flashbacks and flash
forwards are continuous and seem to have an independent existence to the story line) because
they're already dead, and with the exception of our narrator,have been dead since the beginning
of the narrative.

The reader, however, does not realize thatall of thenarrative fragments,except forthatof the
main character in thebeginning of thenovel, Juan Preciado, are told from theperspective of the
people who are already dead. In the beginning, when Juan enters C?mala, he speaks only with
ghosts (and not real people) who are the only inhabitants of the streets and houses, and later,
afterhe dies, he hears differentspeakers and is able to identifythem according to theirproximity
to his own crowded and uncomfortable burial space?the crypts are shared spaces, and thedead
are superimposed over one another, even as they lie disintegrating and
decomposing. Not only
is thisnot told as a fantastic narrative; Rulfo makes the state of death and the souls, who both talk
to themselves and to each other, appear ordinary, bleak, and incredibly tedious; infact,one
might
describe them as transreal?the ordinary here being the state of death, and the fantastic
being the
element of complete believability in termsof theireveryday, prosaic andmonotonous reality.The
fantastic is that such a reality could be presented or represented as ordinary. The heavy
weight
of boredom on the decomposing bodies, which are stuck in theircurrentcoordinates in time and
space, continues in another kind of existence. The dead who are buried in the crypts, apparently
so close together that they're almost touching, pass the time, as itwere,
by talking and thinking
aloud?even Juan Preciado seems to become confused about whose thoughts are his. Pre
sumably they thinkand speak aloud to ease the tedium and the decrepitude which also serves to
ease the reader into a complacent acceptance of death as a mundane occurrence.
Interestingly,
JuanRulfo uses the church bells, the symbol of European conquest, to demarcate how time has
changed in thisnovel, completely inkeeping with theBaroque conception of time: "The church
clock rang the hours, one after another, one after another, as if somehow time had shriveled"

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336 Hispania 91May 2008
(13).5
In Julio Cort?zar's Rayuela, the author returns to the ordinary (if slightly eccentric) person
as themain characters for his novel, persons who have real coordinates in time and space, but he
undermines these boundaries, blurring them imperceptibly for the reader until the reader under
stands, through his participation in the transreal, thathis own boundaries have been violated.
This can particularly be seen inhis short stories "Continuidad de los parques," "La noche boca
arriba," and "La casa tomada." As Giuseppe Bellini notes inHistoria de la literatura hispano
americana,

En Rayuela, obra abierta, modelo de "contranovela," la denuncia de la inautenticidad de la vida y de la lite

rature est?tica y psicol?gica se produce por medio de la iron?a, de la incongruencia, de la autocr?tica. El
lector es c?mplice de la b?squeda. Se ha definido a este libro como una bomba de relojer?a. Destinado a
arrasar con todo lo viejo y lo inaut?ntico es, en esencia, la historia de la renuncia a la acci?n como protesta
contra el conformismo. Representa la situaci?n del intelectual que, por no someterse a las circunstancias,
permanece pasivo. Es la posici?n de Oliveira. Pero Rayuela es tambi?n, seg?n el autor, una "novela

puente" entre lo que est? perdido y lo que es recuperable. (547)

Thus we might say that inhis novel (or anti-novel), Rayuela, Cort?zar not only completely under
mines the narrative conventions of space and time, but also he violates the sequential norms of
reading, permanently rupturingreader expectation of beginning,middle and end. In fact,Cort?zar
so "de-centers" and "de-constructs" themeaning of life and the relevance of authenticity, that
the narrative thread becomes frayed by the waning and wandering attention of the reader/
accomplice in alliance with these fleeting, and somewhat wandering, narrative bridges to other
dimensions of being and understanding. As the title suggests, the reader has to "hopscotch"
through the chapters via the use of an elaborate guide, or if the reader chooses to ignore the
hopscotching of chapters, he may read all the chapters sequentially, but in that case, the book
ends at chapter 56.6 In the second reading, the parallel narrative of the protagonist's alter ego,
so that the
parallel self or double and theprotagonist are intertwinedwith thenovelist's character
boundaries between fiction and reality are deliberately blurred and eroded. Cort?zar inserts a
"table of instructions,"where he informs the reader of the following:

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. [...] The first can be read in a
normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which
stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.
The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the
end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list, (n.pag.)

Horacio Oliveira and La Maga do not have traditionally drawn or developed characterization,
which is part of their"reading" as "signs," and also part of their significance inhow they appear
as mere pattern indicating theiractivities in space and time; in effect, theover-arching pattern is
the diagrammatic hopscotching. In fact,we see La Maga throughHoracio's perspective, as if
through a nostalgic, backward look at the earlier events of their relationship, framed and tainted
by the laterknowledge of her absence. It is here that the reader begins to realize that s/he cannot
look for continuities in the form of a narrative thread on a line innon-contiguous fragmentation,
but ratherhe must seek continuity and pattern innarrative pulses and waves as a series of uncon
nected and disjunctive presents. The many levels of alternate readings (which accompany any
one reading that the reader selects) are presented as a game, as the reader hopscotches through
causal, and later,acausal, layers ofmeaning. The unconscious collusion of the reader is complete
when, having read thefirst alternative, the reader has something of a zen realization that if s/he
chooses to read the novel in the conventional way, s/hewill be responsible for the death of the
main character. S/he can participate inone of themany ways to read thisnovel, and continue the
life of the character, but if s/hedoes not continue to read, s/he condemns Horacio to a somewhat
once
abrupt and untimely death, initiating the play on the reader's sympathies, hopscotching
the As as one is the events
again, to bring her/him back into the land of living. long reading,
remain inplay; in thisway, thenovel mirrors a form ofmodern entertainment,or video game. As

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 Fantastic Interpretations of Time 337
soon as one puts down the game, the inevitable de-centering of the characters in themind of the
reader takes on the qualities of life in time; the disintegration of the characters and their
intellectual pursuits are lost once again inmemory.
Of course, the ever-present conceptismo, or literaryconceit that isCort?zar's play of ideas,
taking Baroque twists and turns in narrative that appears with no narrator (and similarly, de
liberatelywithout any transitionwhatsoever to orient the reader in space and time), plays a role
in the overall structuringof the reader's concept of timewithin the novel's bizarrely structured
alternate readings which are simultaneously present.We know thatwhatever reading we take
from thisnovel is itselfalways in flux,or inplay, de-centering itselfthrough these past and future
alternate readings which also represent a continual play of hierarchical events which place the
plot and story line in continual flux as well. Perhaps no other novel takes intoaccount sowell the
influence of popular culture on narrative and the creative process. While there are certainly no
accidents in any of Cort?zar's works, the authentic day-to-day representation ofmass media and
its effect upon mass consciousness is portrayed as farmore philosophical through its dis
jointedness, which perfectlymirrors the transitionless present of popular entertainment; news,
advertisements and soap operas are all wrapped intoone neat package, where theonly orienting
frame is thatof the television set.
Moving to the least accessible, characterized as nearly un-readable, novel in this study, Jos?
Lezama Lima's Paradiso, modern readers are confrontedwith a veritable monolith of time in a
curious overlay of classical Greece, modern culture and the island of Cuba, all tied up in the
madness of a narrative voice that is so far from ordinary reality that itproblematizes the reader's
identificationwith any systematic or authoritative authorial voice. The conceptismo or Baroque
aspect of this novel is characterized by its striking use of metaphors which are intertextual
references, and thefragmentsof culturewhich act as ruins, implyinga deeper,more inclusive past
than the Spanish one thatCuba has known since its incorporation into the imperial process. The
following passage from Paradiso incorporates a plurality of traditions: "And the tenacious
pursuers of theball, sweaty still, laughedwith the surprise of a flock thatsees an animal strangely
standing out,with the jubilation of dogfish when they surround a Homeric salmon, or theDoric
surprise of curly sea horses at the shadowy wedge of lobsters" (83). The monolith breaks down
at the level of narrative,however, since itbecomes impossible to integrateand assimilate thenon
sequitur sentences in a sequential way. However, Lezama Lima's narrative
third-person
addresses explicitly thepassage of time:

Time, a liquid substance, as mask goes on covering the faces of the most remote ancestors, or, just the
opposite, time drags along, almost lets itself be absorbed by earthly games, and enlarges a figure until it
receives the texture of a Desmoulins or a Marat with clenched fists beating on the variants, the echoes, or
the tedium of a Thermidor assembly. It seems that after those imprecations they will disappear under the
sea, or at last freeze when they react like the drops of blood that live after them, giving a great slap to the
star reflected in the bathroom mirror. But these are moments of false abundance. Quite soon we see them
anchored in a style, looking for the support of a cane stand; they bump into a box of colored pencils; their
eyes, like doors blown open by a smiling Aeolus, focus on a china closet, draw back, afraid that the breath
of air opening the door for them will blow on the crystal, and they are resting on a carnival Circassian hat,
covered with frost and feathers. Was that the only expression of those long lives that took on relief? Or,
on the contrary, the brutal paint remover of time was reducing them, making them smaller, until it de
posited them in that one expression, as if itwere a cage with a door open to trap an errant bird. (77)

Similar toAlejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, wherein the structureof thenovel ismodeled
after a melody inwhich themusical phrase is repeated like a chorus, theBaroque, labyrinthine
structureo? Paradiso embraces alternate realities impinging on one another in a way thatmakes
the extraction of standardmeaning from thewhole both impossible and undesirable. Certainly,
the question the reader has to ask iswhether or not the purpose of reading is entertainment or
enlightenment, and if it is neither,where, and towhom, in the land of postmodern, labyrinthine
signs, does themessage go? The incomprehensible letterfromAlberto Olaya to his uncle, Dr.
Demetrio, as well as the self-conscious overlay of another tradition ofmythology and mythos

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338 Hispania 91May 2008
makes thiswork seem farmore related to the automatic writing of the Surrealists than to the
carefully constructed, if obtuse, Neo-Baroque. Here, the "trans-real" helps to transcend the

narrative, which is involved in deconstructing the reader's norms and con-ventions from the
beginning, and the novel makes much more sense if one is a reader of Roland Barthes and
Jacques Derrida; somuch depends upon the reader's "de-centering" in order to free him/herself
of constraints of binary opposition and simple hierarchy in order to come to termswith the
novel's multi-linear andmulti-spatial verisimilitude.
Sharon D. King asserts that the usefulness of Rucker's term "transreal," taken from the
transrealmanifesto, does not come from its realistic depiction of the ordinary aspects of the
fantastic,but rather itsuse as a critical apparatus fromwhich toview the construct of the fantastic
from archetypal modes of perception.7 This allows the trans-real to transpose into the trans
modern, which breaks down the boundaries of all fictions into speculative fictions, since as
Scholes and Kellogg point out inThe Nature ofNarrative, fiction is neither true since itdoes not
claim tobe fact,nor is ita lie since itdoes not claim tobe true. Interestinglyenough, and like Jorge
Luis Borges, all three authors show a propensity formirrors as a reflective device to copy and
imitate,but also to store, reflect and produce a time thatbelongs to another continuity in another
labyrinth,which isnot the fragmented imperial time of thepostmodernists, but ratherthe original
time lost in the circumlocuities (to borrow another term fromPaz) of themodern Baroque. The
transreal and themagical real are ways of dealing with the complexities of time, and the super
impositions of new, indigenous and old values systems in the new world.
Just as Latin America claims the use of the term "magical realism" as a phenomenon
belonging exclusively to an expression of Latin American reality and culture, so the traditionof
theNeo-Baroque is an attempt toplace thePan-American traditionfirmlywithin thegeographical
confines of Spanish-speaking America, embodying not only a cultural perspective, but also a
value framework. Itmay be more accurate to call both movements trans-American: we have
certainly seen elements of the principles or tenets ofwhat we consider to be magical realism in
European works such as Kafka's Metamorphosis. Here, he portrays a fantastic event,which is
not the transformation itself,but rather thehopeless manipulations ofGregor's many legs trying
to adjust the comforter just right so that it covers all of his now-oddly-shaped insect body, and
which seems to be wired completely differentlyfrom the one he used before his transformation.
The exquisite detail thatKafka provides in figuring out themechanical process of all of those
moving legs ina synchronizedmanner make this extraordinary event seem as ordinary and banal
as any other event, with a certain level of hopelessness and ennui. On another con
everyday
tinent, the extreme exaggeration of themundane into the realm of the fantastic also seems to
mirror Dostoevsky's use of defamiliarization. However, in comparing magical realism toRudy
Rucker's coinage of the term"transrealism" inwhich he asserts that"The essence of transrealism
is towrite about one's real life infantastic terms,"one can see how much thenew transrealism has
borrowed from the old magical real. A North American authorwho embodies thisnotion of the
transreal isKurt Vonnegut, particularly inSlaughterhouse Five and Sirens of Titan, as well as
William Faulkner inThe Sound and theFury. However familiar the similarities between the trans
real and themagical realmay seem on the surface (as immediately apparent or transparentas the
case may be), thereare real differences in termsof how these narrativeswork forward through the
process or backward toward the event, depending on theNorth and South axis of their con
tinents. If the crux ofmagical realism has been the exaggeration of everyday (quotidian) events
and reality in a cultural context that supports not only a belief system but a value systemwhich
reifies the possibility of themagical through seeing the extraordinary real in everyday events
(and also politicizes these events), then the distinguishing features from the transrealwould
seem to be those of praxis and not of theory; the result, however, is very different.
As we acknowledge the interplay of the other arts and the cross-pollinating influence of
other disciplines, such authors as Jacques Derrida in philosophy and Hayden White in history
clearly have redesigned academic discourse, and have helped to re-structureand re-define their
own disciplines from self-proclaimed centers of objectivity, and allowed us to see them as mere

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 Fantastic Interpretations of Time 339
frameworks from which our subjectivity was viewed. Both authors have established the
importance and undermining influence of language in all aspects of narrative in reasoning and
narrative in history, in the context of a critical discourse which was previously considered the
hallowed domain of "science." Even the disciplines in the so-called hard sciences now are
coming to termswith elements of thefantastic, from quantum mechanics inphysics to all kinds of
anomalies inbiology andmathematics. From thisperspective, perhaps some of themost striking
examples of theBaroque movement can be found in its architecturalmanifestations, since it is
here that one can see its spatial manifestation, what may be referred to as a "still-life" of
spatialized time,particularly in the churches ofMexico. These Baroque images are thephysical
interpretationof the literarymovement inwhich irony,exaggeration and subversion allmanifest
in the ornate reality that embodies a cosmogony, which Ndalianis refers to as "Virtuosity,
Special-Effects Spectacles, and Architectures of the Senses" (152).
More importantly, it is here thatone can envision themodern aspect of theBaroque that
continues its tradition inLatin American authors: themodernization of time as the authors pre
sent theirreaderswith a spatialized time, for example inGarc?a M?rquez's Cien a?os de soledad,
where a manuscript read by the characters "mirrors" theiractions in the double universe of the
text, so thatdeciphered manuscript becomes the "speaking mirror" of the narrative, and deter
mines all thatwill take place in thenovel. In demonstrating how this conceptualization of time is
made manifest in currentauthors, overall structureand content have to be analyzed with regard
to the larger patterns that these authors display as a continuation.
The fact that the transreal arrives at its definition (and likeness to themagical real) not
through surpassing or escaping the real, but ratherexaggerating it to such an extent that itarrives
at its goal through an almost mirrored cross-step is quite significant to each of these literary
movements. As the"magical real" is claimed as the sole province ofLatin American authors, and
as a movement indigenous to the South American continent, so the transrealhas been labeled a
movement indigenous to theNorth American continent. Each of the novels examined in this
study (JuanRulfo' sPedro P?ramo, JulioCort?zar' sRayuela and Jos?Lezama Lima's Paradiso)
explores alternate perspectives of time and perception with regard to alternate presentations of
narrative continuities within the time-space continuum. The fact that the transreal is a slight
adaptation of the tenets ofmagical realism which works backwards from thepremise of treating
fantastic events as though theywere ordinary?or the exaggeration of these events from a banal
activity such as folding sheets to a fantastic activity (as for example, ascending intoheaven as
thewind makes a sail of the sheets, takingGarc?a M?rquez's Remedios theBeautiful away even
as her sister-in-law, Fernanda, complains about the loss of the sheets) suggests a kind of
mirroring in theparallel development of thesemovements on theirrespective continents.
These works are not simply adaptations ofEuropean andNorth American Postmodernism in
Mexico, Central and South America (and theCarribean), but instead represent an extension of an
older tradition,as Sarduy has pointed out, which continues to have an impact on modern His
panic authors in the same way thatRomanticism continues tomanifest in subsequent European
andNorth American traditions,particularly as chronicled byM. H. Abrams inTheMirror and the
Lamp. And, if theRomantics break with previous literaryand artistic representations because
theyattempt to represent a new realism throughportraying interior,as opposed to exterior, reali
ties (as Abrams suggests, 50), then themagical realists break with European models of ordinary
reality (as outlined by IanWatt inThe Rise of theNovel 17-21) inportraying the extraordinary
realities of theNew World. As Alejo Carpentier points out in his famous essay, "On the
Marvelous Real inAmerica," there is no need to embellish the reality that is being represented,
this "marvelous real" in theNew World is extraordinary to theEuropeans who are hungry for
news from thisnew and unsuspected and unknown other side of theirplanet
(86). These novels
present the reader with alternate ways of reading events and realities, and undermine surface
continuities through their rupturewith traditional chronologies, which also serve to undermine
and expand the reader's concept of time.As Hutcheon elucidates:

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340 Hispania 91May 2008
[w]hat postmodernism does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding or
recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no search for transcendent timeless meaning,
but rather a re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present. We could call this, once
again, "the presence of the past" or perhaps its "present-ification" (Hassan 1983; cited by Hutcheon). It
does not deny the existence of the past; it does question whether we can ever know that past other than

through its textualized remains. (20)

In theLatin American literarycontext,we examine how theneo-colonial and postcolonial periods

play a role in the subjugation of the subaltern indigenous societies, and how these emerging
societies manifest the synchrony of values and cosmologies of the conquered and conquerors.
Octavio Paz sees this concept of time in terms of the creative force inherent in destruction and
new beginnings: "Differentmodes of dehumanization: Capitalism treatedmen likemachines; the
postindustrial society treats them like signs. They [young people] have the instinctive but con
fused hope that the destruction of this present will bring about the sudden appearance of the
other present with its corporal, intuitive,and magical values. Always that search for the other
time, the real time" {Children 153-54). Again, working from the analogy that transreal isbeyond
real, inblurring theboundaries between magical realism and the transreal,we also break down the
boundaries between modernismo and theBaroque, the neo-baroque and postmodernism. The
two hemispheres function, as Jungmight suggest, in "the meaningful coincidence of simul
taneity and meaning" in the representation and search for that "other time, the real time" of the
fantastic in the arts (Jung 69).

NOTES
'This article has been produced in part with a release-time grant from the Office of Research at Idaho State

University.
2I translate these passages only when the meaning is part of my theoretical argument. I also provide the

original Spanish from Sarduy: "retomb?e: causalidad acr?nica, isomorf?a no contigua, o, consecuencia de algo
que a?n no se ha producido, parecido con algo que a?n no existe" (1196).
3Comala also represents a physical descent into hell, as the road goes down toward a valley and the narrator
tells us that when the comparison is made between C?mala and Hell, those people who had gone to hell ex

perienced such coldness that they came back to C?mala to get their blankets. At this crossroads, he meets his
half-brother, Abundio, a mule-driver, so that we have an overlay of the charioteer who represents not only the
passage of time, but also its dispersion, as the mule driver necessarily has a relationship to the sun's revolution
in the sky, as well as the passage of a day's time.
interestingly, this is the exact opposite of the European practice of giving everything to the first-born
son, the primog?nito; in this case, everything is lavished on the bastard son (whose matrilineage is not known
to the reader). See Octavio Paz's discussion of the role of the bastard in Mexican history in The Labyrinth of
Solitude.
5Here, the Spanish reflects more authentically what actually happens to time in the novel?the church bell,
in incorporating time, literally shrinks and contracts it: "El reloj de la iglesia dio las horas, una tras otra, una tras
otra, como si se hubiera encogido el tiempo" (79).
6Not incidentally, this hopscotching is accompanied by an enormous sense of nostalgia, not only for the
childhood game, but for the memories which are retrieved naturally by the reader in this way, as reader/
accomplice and author go hopscotching through the minefield of memory.
7Paper given at the 2005 Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, entitled "Black Eyes and Overpriced
Shoes: The Transreal of Early Protestant Mysticism," Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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