Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter

The Dance of Love and Death: The Inseparability of the Erotic and the Macabre in Carlos Fuentes

The Dance of Love and Death: The Inseparability of the Erotic and the Macabre in Carlos Fuentes

by

Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter

A Thesis

Submitted for the Merrill Scholarship

November 2021

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT

Anglophone literary criticism frequently confines Latin American literature within reductive postcolonial paradigms, privileging historical and sociopolitical readings over philosophical and psychoanalytic inquiry. This prevailing framework often reduces the essence of Latin American literary production to its colonial legacies, thereby eclipsing its engagement with metaphysical, existential, and ontological themes. Yet, the hallmark features of Latin American literature—such as its experimental narrative forms and seamless interweaving of the fantastic and the real—demand a more nuanced critical lens. By foregrounding philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches, this thesis reclaims Carlos Fuentes, a seminal figure of the Latin American Boom, as a thinker whose works probe the fundamental mysteries of existence, despite his infrequent recognition as a philosopher in his own right.

Fuentes’ oeuvre enacts an striking symbiosis of Eros and Thanatos – the Freudian drives of life and death—articulating an interplay between the erotic and the macabre largely overlooked in Anglophone scholarship. His narratives do not merely juxtapose sex and death; rather, they reveal these forces as inextricably entwined, dual expressions of the same ontological impulse. Death haunts Fuentes’ fictional landscapes, casting its spectral shadow over erotic desire, while the erotic itself bears the imprint of mortality, destruction, and sadistic impulse. This study examines how Fuentes synthesizes these oppositional yet complementary forces, transmuting death into an erotically charged phenomenon and love into a spectral, macabre transcendence. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, the dialectics of creation and destruction, and Indigenous Mesoamerican cosmology, this thesis situates Fuentes within a broader intellectual tradition that interrogates the liminal spaces between unity and dissolution, eros and annihilation.

Through close readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, this thesis elucidates Fuentes’ transformation of love into an existential act of self-abnegation and metaphysical transcendence. In this vision, love mirrors death: the surrender of self in erotic union parallels the final dissolution of the self in the face of mortality. By reconfiguring love and death as cosmic, metaphysical phenomena, Fuentes compels readers to confront their inseparability as primal forces shaping human identity and experience. This study thus repositions Fuentes not merely as a Latin American literary icon but as a philosopher of the human condition, whose explorations of the erotic and the macabre, the sacred and the profane, illuminate the interconnectedness of all phenomena. Within Fuentes’ imaginative universe, love and death emerge as seductive yet sinister forces, locked in an eternal dance–each ceaselessly entwining with the other to form a sublime, unified continuum of transcendence.

Keywords: Eroticism, macabre aesthetics, Postcolonial critique, Eros and Thanatos, psychoanalytic theory, transcendence, metaphysical transfiguration, spiritual ontology, cosmic unity, corporeal dissolution, mortality, existential desire, Gothic hybridity, erotic melancholia, ontological dualism, liminality, spectrality, and the dialectic of creation and destruction.

Short Titles: Artemio Cruz: Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz. Translated by Mac Adam Alfred J, Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2009.

Chapter I: Introduction

Uncontrolled passions are like poison. Dormant, they are vices, they feed the soul, and the soul, deceived, or believing it is being nourished, is in fact being poisoned by its own unknown and unruly passion.

—Carlos Fuentes, Inez

Skeletal cadavers stacked up by the hundreds, starved, lewd, skin, bone, indecent baldness, obscene wounds, shameful sexes, embrace of intolerable eroticism, as if even death desire endured: I love you, I love you, I love you…

—Carlos Fuentes, Inez (2000)

Cry out as if you were going to die loving the very thing that kills you!

—Carlos Fuentes, Inez (2000)

The 1960s and 1970s heralded an unprecedented flourishing of Latin American literature, an era that attained remarkable international renown and forever altered the trajectory of global literary innovation. This period, indelibly shaped by the avant-garde currents of European modernism and the labyrinthine, metafictional resonance of figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, witnessed the advent of a revolutionary literary movement now canonized as the Latin American Boom. Distinguished by its intricate fusion of experimental narrative forms and an almost phantasmagoric prose style, the Boom dismantled conventional literary paradigms, forging a new idiom that seamlessly intertwined the quotidian with the fantastical. By reimagining storytelling as a fluid, malleable and dynamic medium capable of interrogating sociopolitical, cultural, and metaphysical ideologies, this literary efflorescence redefined not only the region’s cultural identity but also its intellectual agency on the global stage. Among the movement’s most illustrious architects, Carlos Fuentes emerges as a towering and enduring figure. His oeuvre, characterized by temporally complex narrative architectures, a profound engagement with Mexico’s historical and cultural palimpsest, and an unflinching exploration of existential and ontological questions, cements his legacy as a master stylist and an intellectual visionary. Fuentes’ literary corpus, much like that of his contemporaries,exemplifies an audacious synthesis of mythic imagination, philosophical inquiry, and sociopolitical critique, traversing ostensibly disparate realms such as corporeality and spectrality, modernity and myth, and the liminal hybridity of postcolonial identity. While his narratives are often celebrated for their incisive commentary on Latin America’s historical traumas and sociopolitical upheavals, critical reception in Anglophone scholarship has frequently confined itself to reductive readings within the frameworks of Postcolonial theory. This interpretative tendency, while illuminating certain dimensions of his work, often obscures the profound ontological, metaphysical, and existential concerns that pervade his fiction. Fuentes’ texts, rich with labyrinthine symbolism and intricate intertextuality, resist simplistic allegorization.They instead evoke a fertile dialectic between Eros and Thanatos, the Freudian life and death drives, positioning love and mortality as central leitmotifs. These thematic preoccupations open his work to psychoanalytic and existential readings, inviting a nuanced exploration of desire, temporality, and the human condition that transcends narrowly political and socioeconomic interpretations.

Carlos Fuentes occupies a singularly pivotal position within the canon of Latin American literature, crafting narratives that expose the deep-seated fractures of socioeconomic inequality and systemic violence while interrogating the fragmented identities of a nation suspended between mythic memory and the inexorable march of modernity. His literary oeuvre traverses the fraught historical arc of Mexico, from the traumatic rupture of the conquest of Tenochtitlan to the frenetic, sprawling modernity of contemporary Mexico City. As Olivier Florence observes, Fuentes’ fiction embodies a nation “in search of its identity between history and myth, between memory and a modernity patterned on that of the First World” (Florence 712). While his politically charged critiques of Mexico’s historical and cultural dissonances remain indispensable to his literary project, critical overemphasis on these dimensions risks circumscribing his oeuvre the reductive frameworks of sociopolitical discourse, often overlooking the philosophical profundity and psychological intricacy that pervade his narratives and define his nuanced exploration of love and death as existential constants that transcend temporal and cultural boundaries. The predominance of Postcolonial frameworks in the critical reception of Fuentes’ literature often diminishes the multifaceted symbolism and metaphysical depth that characterize his texts, confining them to narrow interpretations rooted in national autonomy, cultural hybridity, and class struggle. While these readings provide valuable insights into the sociopolitical dimensions of his work, they risk perpetuating an intellectual marginalization of Latin American literature, relegating its artistic and intellectual contributions to artifacts of postcolonial critique. A more expansive hermeneutic approach to Fuentes’ corpus necessitates an acknowledgment of its historical consciousness while transcending these purely political boundaries to explore its engagement with philosophical and psychoanalytic paradigms. By situating Fuentes’ novels as intricate meditations on universal themes—desire, mortality, identity, and memory—critics can uncover a richer understanding of his oeuvre that not only affirms Fuentes’ position as a profound philosophical thinker but also elevates Latin American literature as a central participant in the global intellectual inquiry into the human condition.

Anglophone literary criticism of Carlos Fuentes has long been dominated by Postcolonial frameworks that foreground his inseparability from “Mexico and its endlessly rethought identity” (Florence 711). Scholars frequently construe Fuentes’ characters and narratives as allegorical embodiments of Mexico’s historical vicissitudes and cultural dualities, often emphasizing tensions between “history and myth” or the emulation of “modernity patterned on that of the First World” (Florence 711). This interpretative tendency is epitomized in The Death of Artemio Cruz (La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962), a canonical work that encapsulates the pervasive disillusionment and ideological erosion of revolutionary idealism that marked post-revolutionary Mexico. Through the eponymous protagonist, Artemio Cruz—a revolutionary soldier turned corrupt hacienda owner—Fuentes crafts a searing critique of the cyclical failures of Mexico’s revolutions, underscoring the moral disintegration and ideological decay that ensues when revolutionary zeal succumbs to the seductions of power and material corruption. As Cruz lies on his deathbed, his fragmented recollections coalesce into a mosaic of betrayal and disillusionment, rendering him a spectral embodiment of post-revolutionary despair and existential futility (Castañeda 143). Similarly, Aura (1962) interrogates the duality of Mexican identity through a dialectical juxtaposition of spectrality and corporeality, emblematic of the enduring tension between Indigenous and Spanish legacies. In Inez (Instinto de Inez, 2000), Fuentes extends his exploration of the interstitial space between love and death, interweaving a contemporary love story within a broader historical tapestry of twentieth-century warfare and violence. The novel’s dual narrative, which contrasts a primordial love story during the rise of dictatorship with the personal struggles of modern protagonists, underscores Fuentes’ preoccupation with the universality of desire and mortality and their their entwinement with power, historical continuity, and existential dread. While works such as The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez are steeped in overt political themes, their deeper philosophical dimensions have often been relegated to the periphery of critical discourse. Gloria Durán, in her incisive study published in Modern Language Review, observes that “few literary critics would deny that Carlos Fuentes is a novelist with an almost obsessive attraction to philosophical themes. In one work after another, his characters delve into the nature of history, of tragedy, of free will, and of fate. Yet few critics have taken him seriously as a philosopher” (Durán 349). Despite Fuentes’ sustained engagement with metaphysical and existential questions, English-language criticism has habitually confined his oeuvre to the reductive category of political allegory. Consequently, his “repeated attempts to elaborate philosophical ideas are ignored by critics or subordinated to the now popular analyses of his archetypal characters” (Durán 349). Artemio Cruz, for instance, transcends his symbolic function as a metaphor for post-revolutionary Mexico, embodying broader existential tensions between agency, morality, and mortality.

Fuentes further distinguishes himself as “the most Gothic of all major Latin American writers” (Gutiérrez Mouat 297). His innovative fusion of Gothic tropes with experimental narrative techniques generates a distinctive and sophisticated aesthetic that has been termed “Latin American Gothic” (Gutiérrez Mouat 297). Yet, much like his philosophical pursuits, the Gothic undercurrents in Fuentes’ oeuvre remain critically undervalued, a neglect symptomatic of the marginalization traditionally ascribed to the Gothic genre within Latin American literary studies. Gutiérrez Mouat attributes this oversight to the genre’s peripheral status, noting that “the vast bibliography on the works of the Mexican author, for example, contains only a handful of articles specifically targeting the Gothic strain in Fuentes’s fiction” (Gutiérrez Mouat 297). Even when acknowledged, the macabre elements in Fuentes’ work are frequently subordinated to political readings that attenuate their thematic richness, reducing them to auxiliary roles. Wendy Faris, for instance, argues that Fuentes’ Gothic “rehearses a twisted reading of the great Mexican theme of solitude,” an interpretation that risks oversimplifying the profound interplay of death, mortality, and the macabre in his texts (Faris 165). Fuentes’ Gothic sensibilities, however, constitute a labyrinthine interplay of interwoven motifs that defy reductive or unidimensional interpretive paradigm, operating as what Gutiérrez Mouat describes as a “dark mirror, buried deep within the larger work,” reflecting existential anxieties and ontological dilemmas that transcend political allegory (Gutiérrez Mouat 298). His engagement with the Gothic becomes inseparable from his philosophical inquiries, wherein the Gothic aesthetic functions as a vehicle to explore liminal spaces—between life and death, Eros and Thanatos, identity and dissolution. In works such as The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez Fuentes’ profound engagement with the dialectics of love and death forms a central axis, challenging readers to grapple with the paradoxical entanglements of humanity’s most primal forces. By repositioning Fuentes as a metaphysical thinker rather than merely a chronicler of sociopolitical realities, his fiction assumes a transcendent dimension, wherein narrative becomes an instrument for interrogating the most elusive and ineffable mysteries of existence.

Throughout his oeuvre, Fuentes delves into the labyrinthine depths of human eroticism, treating desire as an enigmatic force intertwined with psychological depth and metaphysical resonance. Like his Gothic elements, the erotic dimensions of Fuentes’ works frequently suffer from reductive interpretations that confine it to narrow political frameworks. Wendy Faris, in her analysis of eroticism in Fuentes’ literature, contends that the erotic “joins the experimental writer to the political man in a kind of sexual Zapatism, a desire for the return to paradise in the new world,” framing his engagement with sexuality as inextricably tied to the legacies of colonial history (Faris 63). While this perspective illuminates Fuentes’ engagement with Mexico’s historical and cultural palimpsest, it neglects the broader existential and archetypal dimensions of his treatment of eroticism. Faris further contends that Fuentes’ eroticism “evoke[s] the erotic potential of the new world, free from paternal cultural pressure,” an idea she connects to Aura, where Felipe is interpreted as a “pilgrim in ‘the new world’ receiv[ing] directions for its exploration from the lips of a goddess-like woman as [he makes love with Aura]” (Faris 65, 67). This reading, however, risks tethering Fuentes’ characters to archetypal symbols of colonial resistance, thereby obscuring the deeper philosophical underpinnings of his work. The transformation of Consuelo and Felipe at the conclusion of Aura, often read as Fuentes’ attempt to “to turn the inhabitants of civilization and its discontents into dwellers in paradise; in more Mexican terms, to replay and thus to heal the original chingadura, the violation of the conquest,” further demonstrates this pervasive critical tendency to view his themes through a predominantly political lens (Faris 74). Yet, this transformation gestures toward a far deeper, archetypal exploration of the human condition, transcending the confines of colonial allegory to engage with universal questions of identity, mortality, and transcendence. By relegating Fuentes’ Gothic and erotic dimensions to detached, unrelated interpretative frameworks, critics have bifurcated and thus overlooked their inherent interconnectedness within his work. Fuentes’ fiction intricately binds eroticism to the Gothic, positing sexual love as a force both transcendent and macabre, mirroring death in its ability to dismantle and reconstruct the self. In Fuentes’ literary universe, the macabre manifests as an omnipresent specter, encompassing pain, horror, and destruction—an existential confrontation with mortality in its myriad guises.

To fully apprehend the intricate interplay between the erotic and the macabre in the literary corpus of Carlos Fuentes, it is imperative to engage with a theoretical framework that elucidates their profound interconnectedness. This dynamic resonates with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, particularly his formulation of the dualistic instincts of Eros (the life drive) and Thanatos (the death drive). Freud contends that the human psyche is fundamentally governed by these opposing yet interdependent forces: Eros seeks creation, cohesion, and sexual gratification, while Thanatos manifests as dissolution, annihilation, and the inexorable pull toward finality. Fuentes’ oeuvre, steeped in this dialectical tension, dramatizes the convergence of these primal impulses, presenting love and death not as discrete phenomena but as inextricably intertwined existential imperatives. Through his narrative imagination, Fuentes not only affirms Freud’s paradigm of the psyche as a battleground between desire and destruction but also reconfigures this dynamic into a more expansive philosophical meditation. For Fuentes, the interplay of Eros and Thanatos transcends mere psychological conflict, emerging as a luminous paradox at the heart of human existence—a dialectical synthesis that underscores the precarious yet generative interdependence of creation and annihilation. In one of his interviews, Fuentes acknowledged his “longtime fascination with the contest between sin and pleasure as a motivating force behind his writing,” situating sin within the theoretical parameters of the death drive (Faris 63). This admission underscores the extent to which Fuentes conceives the erotic and the macabre as not merely thematic concerns but as fundamental structuring principles of his fiction. However, despite sporadic acknowledgment of the intersection of sex and death in English-language criticism, these elements are seldom examined through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freud’s dialectic of Eros and Thanatos. This critical lacuna has left significant dimensions of Fuentes’ work underexplored, with Inez (Instinto de Inez, 2000) standing as a particularly neglected text which, despite being one of Fuentes’ most penetrating philosophical investigations, has received scant scholarly attention in English criticism, where psychoanalytic approaches to his oeuvre remain virtually absent. In Inez, Fuentes offers his most profound philosophical interrogation of the interdependence of Eros and Thanatos, constructing a narrative in which the erotic and the macabre are not merely juxtaposed but rendered inextricable. The text seamlessly intertwines the drives for union and annihilation, dramatizing their dialectical relationship through characters whose lives are animated by the overwhelming friction between these primal forces. Fuentes’ vision transcends Freud’s binary framework by suggesting that these instincts, far from being oppositional, coalesce into a singular dynamic that defines the human experience. In his fiction, the boundaries between love and death blur, with the desire for erotic fulfillment becoming indistinguishable from the impulse toward self-destruction. The union of Eros and Thanatos becomes not merely a thematic concern but the animating principle of Fuentes’ narrative cosmos, forging a synthesis that underscores the profound paradoxes of existence.

Chapter II: “Transcendental Unions”: Erotic Love, Desire and Fusion in Fuentes’ Narrative

For Carlos Fuentes, the erotic encounter goes well beyond the corporeal realm, serving as a conduit to ontological transcendence. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, the eponymous protagonist, ensnared within the inexorable grip of mortality, wields the memory of past erotic desires as a vital mechanism for surmounting the corporeal agony and existential dread that pervade his final moments. At the core of these recollections resides Regina, the archetypal locus of Artemio’s erotic fixation, whose spectral presence lingers with a haunting vitality long after her demise. Estranged from her in death, and abandoned in life by his wife and progeny, Artemio retreats into the recesses of his mind, seeking refuge within the labyrinthine corridors of memory. As Britt-Marie Schiller aptly observes, “the dying Artemio cannot control the memories that beset him on his deathbed,” underscoring how nostalgia and erotic yearning function as a transient reprieve from the profound ontological terror of annihilation (Schiller 95). In this vein, Fuentes crafts a meditation on the interplay between desire and memory, articulating their entwined roles as instruments of existential defiance:

You will desire: how you would like your desire and the object desired to be the same thing; how you will dream about instant gratification, about the total identification of desire and what is desired…you will remember, because that way you will make the desired thing yours: back, back, in nostalgia, you will make yours whatever you desire: not forward, back. Memory is satisfied desire. Survive through memory before it’s too late. Before chaos keeps you from remembering. (Fuentes 29)

In Fuentes’ oeuvre, as evidenced in Aura, the confluence of eroticism and temporality assumes an even more enigmatic and phantasmagorical form. The spectral “union which transfigures Felipe and Consuelo/Aura” collapses the dichotomies of past and present, forging a temporal simultaneity that subverts linear chronology (Faris 65). Faris elucidates this phenomenon, asserting that, “in Aura, the duality of past and present is abolished in an eternal time of love, but the two sexes remain separate, though joined in an embrace,” thereby illustrating how Fuentes envisions love as an act of cosmic transfiguration, one capable of destabilizing the axiomatic constructs of time and identity (Faris 67). Felipe, much like Artemio, is propelled by an insatiable erotic drive, which Fuentes establishes from the novel’s opening proclamation: “The gods are like men: they are born, and they die on a woman’s breast.” This declaration not only foregrounds the erotic essence of the narrative but also intimates the cyclical, archetypal omnipresence of desire as an elemental force.

Carlos Fuentes’ depiction of eroticism is imbued with an undercurrent of transgression and moral ambivalence, infusing his narratives with a pervasive aura of perversity and unease. Faris, invoking Gloria Durin’s critique, contends that “Fuentes always falls back into ‘the snare of sex,’ and ‘perhaps that is why there is an air of abnormality in Fuentes’ erotic scenes, an aura of guilt or depravity’” (Durin 246, Faris 68). This recurring “snare” not only underscores the transgressive potency of erotic desire within Fuentes’ fiction but also illuminates its dual nature as a force oscillating between creation and annihilation. For Fuentes, “love is abnormal,” a notion further corroborated by Hall’s assertion that “his stories are filled with incestuous unions or the desire for them” (Hall 246). In works such as Aura, this subversive depiction of love materializes as a metaphysical dissolution of individuality and temporality, wherein erotic unions become conduits for annihilation and rebirth, underscoring the inexorable intertwining of love and death as mutually constitutive forces. Fuentes’ portrayals of abnormal, perverse eroticism can be situated within the broader context of Freud’s death drive, which posits an intrinsic human longing for destruction and a regression to an inanimate state. This destructive impulse collides with the erotic drive, generating a profound tension between the creative and the annihilative. While representing generative unity and death connoting terminal severance—these forces perpetually intersect, reflecting the universal dialectic of opposites. Nature itself demonstrates this paradox, as opposites inexorably attract, collide, and merge, forming the foundational rhythm of existence. Intriguingly, parallels to Fuentes’ thematic concerns can be drawn from quantum entanglement in particle physics, a phenomenon in which two particles collide and become inextricably linked. As Calvin and Michalakis explain, these entangled particles “act together like a single object whose identity lies not with the individual components but in a higher plane,” ultimately forming “something larger than itself” (Clavin, Michalakis). This notion of entanglement metaphorically mirrors the unification of Eros and Thanatos in Fuentes’ works, suggesting that eroticism’s inherent perversity is not merely an aberration but a manifestation of the cosmic synthesis of opposites. Fuentes’ treatment of the erotic, therefore, transcends corporeal boundaries, delving into spiritual and ontological realms that interrogate the philosophy of existence itself.

In Aura, the nexus of love and death crystallizes in Felipe’s complex, often contradictory relationship with Aura/Señora Consuelo. Sexual love is depicted as simultaneously destructive and enchanting, embodying both the allure and the peril of the erotic. The text portrays Felipe as irrevocably driven by his sexual instincts, even as he grapples with the terror such desires evoke. Upon realizing he is ensnared in an occult, macabre entanglement, Felipe remains immobilized, compelled by his conviction that “Aura is waiting for [him] to release her from the chains in which the perverse, insane old lady, for some unknown reason, has bound her” (Fuentes 78). His professed intent to liberate Aura from Señora Consuelo’s sinister grasp—a “secret power over her niece, [keeping her] in [the] dark house against her will”— is, in reality, inextricable from his own carnal desires to “save” Aura for himself (Fuentes 62). he wishes to satisfy his sexual desires by “saving” Aura for himself (Fuentes 62). This duality reveals Felipe’s internal struggle: though he is cognizant of his moral corruption and the looming peril, he is nevertheless ensnared by lust, which supersedes reason and self-preservation. The figure of Aura/Señora Consuelo intensifies this dynamic, her ambiguous and sinful character simultaneously repelling and arousing Felipe. His desire propels him on an existential and erotic trajectory from “innocence to life, from light to darkness, [and] from life to death” (Cull 19). This journey underscores the insidious power of eroticism, which consumes Felipe entirely, rendering him a vessel for the primal, unyielding force of desire. In Fuentes’ narrative cosmos, human beings are not merely driven by their sexual impulses; they are subordinated to them, navigating a liminal space where love and death coalesce in a perpetual, inescapable dance.

The pervasive darkness that envelops the erotic in The Death of Artemio Cruz and Aura reaches its apotheosis in Inez, a philosophical novel that delves deeply into the nexus of love, death, and the destructive nature of desire. Through its exploration of erotic abnormality, Inez encapsulates the disquieting interplay between passion and annihilation. The narrative mirrors The Death of Artemio Cruz in its focus on a protagonist nearing death—Maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrera, a ninety-three-year-old man whose most indelible memory is his love for Inez Prada. This love, however, is not a redemptive force but rather a conduit for ruin, embodying the inseparability of Eros and Thanatos. The novel juxtaposes two parallel love stories: the tragic romance of Atlan-Ferrera and Inez Prada, and the primordial, incestuous tale of Ah-nel and Nel-el. These narratives are emblematically connected by the recurring motif of a mystical crystal seal, which serves as a symbol of the precarious balance between creation and destruction. From the novel’s opening, the crystal seal becomes a focal point for Atlan-Ferrera’s destructive eroticism. Examining the seal, he confesses his overpowering temptation to “love the crystal seal so much that he would destroy it forever with the power of his fist”; his passion, charged with a latent violence, manifests as an urge to annihilate (Fuentes 9). This destructive impulse reaches its zenith in his reflections on Inez, as he envisions holding the seal with the same intensity he desires her:

[To] hold it and squeeze it until he destroyed it; hold it the way he wanted to hold her, tighter, tighter , until she choked, communicating a fiery urgency making her feel that in love -— his for hers, hers for him, theirs for each other — there was a latent violence, a destructive danger, that was the final homage of passion to beauty. To love Inez, to love her death. (Fuentes 10)Atlan-Ferrera’s simultaneous desire to love and destroy suggests that sexual love is destructive. Atlan-Ferrera’s simultaneous longing to love and destroy underscores Fuentes’ recurring motif of erosive passion. His destructive cravings are not merely metaphorical; they manifest concretely in the trajectory of his life, culminating in his self-imposed isolation and irrevocable loss. Despite his desperate and profound love for Inez, Atlan-Ferrera’s neglect and abandonment of her pushes her further and further away, exacerbating the emotional chasm between them and rendering their union perpetually incomplete. The unfulfilled yearning for consummation—a yearning thwarted by their mutual propensity for destruction—condemns both lovers to a lifetime of torment and regret. When they reunite after years of separation, Atlan-Ferrera’s anguished declaration, “You, only you, are the cause for all my tears, for my disillusion and despair,” epitomizes the inextricable link between love and suffering (Fuentes 73). Through the anguished confessions of Atlan-Ferrera, Fuentes constructs a compelling parallel between the erotic and Freud’s Thanatos (death drive). The emotional devastation wrought by love mirrors the death drive’s fundamental impulse toward dissolution and the return to an inanimate state. In Fuentes’ vision, eroticism is shadowed by pain, perversity, and destruction, imbuing love with a macabre essence. The crystal seal, a physical manifestation of this paradoxical union of beauty and annihilation, becomes emblematic of the duality inherent in passion itself. In Inez, the erotic is not merely a celebration of human connection but a harbinger of destruction, affirming Fuentes’ profound assertion that love is, at its core, a form of death.

Chapter III: “Death Desire Endured”: Gothic Horror and the Macabre Erotics of Destruction

To illuminate the darker dimensions of eroticism in his works, Carlos Fuentes weaves Gothic motifs and elements of horror into a macabre tableau, underscoring the omnipresence of death as an inexorable force. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, this interplay between eros and mortality is manifest in Artemio’s depiction of Regina as an ethereal, almost spectral figure perpetually shrouded in the shadow of death. Their union is imbued with an unsettling fatalism, as Artemio characterizes Regina’s embrace as “an embrace of dust” (Fuentes 62). The morbid premonition reaches its apotheosis with Regina’s death, which Fuentes renders with grotesque specificity, emphasizing the visceral and psychological aftermath for Artemio. The discovery of Regina’s body unfolds in a chillingly vivid scene:

The finger of young Lieutenant Aparicio pointed to the clump of trees near the ravine. The crude henequen ropes still drew blood from the necks; but the open eyes, purple tongues, and limp bodies barely swaying in the wind blowing down from the mountains proved they were dead. The eyes of the onlookers—some lost, some enraged, most with a sweet expression of disbelief, filled with quiet pain—focused on the muddy huaraches, a child’s bare feet, a woman’s black slippers. He dismounted. He came closer. He clutched Regina’s starched skirt with a broken, choked sound: it was the first time he’d cried since becoming a man. (Fuentes 86)

The grotesque imagery, evoking both horror and pathos, situates Regina’s death within the Gothic tradition, with its fixation on mortality and the sublime terror of human fragility. The “crude henequen ropes,” “purple tongues,” and “limp bodies” transform Regina’s death into a tableau of macabre horror, while Artemio’s anguished response reveals the profound psychological toll wrought by such visceral encounters with death. Through this flashback, Artemio’s confrontation with mortality becomes both external and internal, as he retreats into his memories of Regina to momentarily transcend the inexorable reality of his own impending demise. Fuentes deftly interweaves the erotic and the macabre to reveal Artemio’s futile attempts to navigate the liminal space between life and death—a struggle that defines the very architecture of the novel. At its core, The Death of Artemio Cruz unfolds as an extended meditation on the agony of mortality, embodied in the figure of a dying man desperately seeking to evade death by excavating the profound and painful moments of his life. The deaths of his lover and his son serve as haunting reminders of the inevitability of his own demise, imbuing the narrative with a somber fatalism. The erotic, like death, becomes a pervasive presence, reinforcing Fuentes’ vision of human existence as an interplay between longing and obliteration.

In Aura, the macabre assumes a different guise, intricately entwined with themes of religion, sexual transgression, and the inexorable passage of time. Señora Consuelo’s fear of death mirrors Artemio’s, as she too attempts to evade her mortality by immersing herself in the spectral realm of memory. Through the arcane rituals of witchcraft, Consuelo conjures a younger version of herself, transforming into the enigmatic Aura, while her deceased husband, General Llorente, is resurrected in the form of Felipe, who remains oblivious to his role in this spectral masquerade. In her refusal to confront the realities of aging and death, Consuelo embodies the Gothic trope of the fragmented self, using erotic memory as a means of transcending her grim reality. The duality of Consuelo and Aura, like that of Artemio and Regina, underscores Fuentes’ preoccupation with the ways in which humans resist the finality of death through the prism of desire. Both The Death of Artemio Cruz and Aura reveal the inherently human fear of mortality, exploring how the erotic functions as both an escape and a mirror, reflecting the inexorable pull of death. By intertwining Gothic elements with the macabre, Fuentes constructs a literary universe where love and death are not oppositional forces but inextricably bound in a tragic, cyclical embrace.

In Aura, Carlos Fuentes masterfully weaves Gothic and macabre elements to construct a narrative imbued with unsettling eroticism and pervasive existential dread. The novel’s Gothic atmosphere intensifies its enigmatic and disturbing quality, heightening the omnipresent undertones of perverse sexuality that define its core. Felipe Montero’s arrival at the shadowy, labyrinthine home of Señora Consuelo, spurred by her enigmatic advertisement for a historian to transcribe her late husband’s correspondence, marks the beginning of his descent into a world dominated by obscurity and unease. The oppressive atmosphere of the home is meticulously rendered: “The room feels damp and cold. The four walls are paneled in dark wood, carved in Gothic style, with fretwork arches and large rosettes,” evoking a claustrophobic, eerie setting that situates the narrative firmly within the Gothic tradition (Fuentes 25). This spatial description functions as both a literal and symbolic threshold, establishing a liminal space where the boundaries between life and death, past and present, eros and thanatos, begin to blur. Religion emerges as a pivotal thematic axis in Aura, intertwining with Gothic and erotic motifs to generate an unsettling synthesis of horror and sensuality. In a particularly charged scene, Felipe observes Señora Consuelo engaged in a ritualistic act of fervent devotion, her gestures imbued with a disturbing erotic energy:

The only happy figures in that iconography of sorrow and wrath, happy because they’re jabbing their pitchforks into the flesh of the damned, pouring cauldrons of boiling water on them, violating the women, getting drunk, enjoying all the liberties forbidden to saints. You approach that image: Señora Consuelo, kneeling, threatens them with her firsts. She beats her breast until she collapses in front of the images and candles in a spasm of coughing. (Fuentes 53)

This vivid tableau, with its grotesque inversion of traditional Christian iconography, encapsulates Fuentes’ critique of religion as a site where the macabre and the erotic converge. The imagery of torment and violation, juxtaposed with Consuelo’s physicalized devotion—her beating of her chest and eventual collapse—casts religious symbolism as both a vessel for spiritual horror and a locus of suppressed erotic energy. Christian iconography, often centered on Christ’s suffering and death, already possesses latent macabre undertones, and Fuentes amplifies these by intertwining them with taboo notions of sexuality. The depiction of Consuelo’s ritual reveals an entanglement between sin, sensuality, and the corporeality of faith, suggesting that religious practices, particularly those preoccupied with mortality and the afterlife, inherently bear erotic and macabre dimensions. This fusion of religion and eroticism culminates in the scene of Felipe and Aura’s sexual union, where Aura’s body is explicitly likened to a crucified Christ:

Then you fall on Aura’s naked body, you fall on her naked arms, which are stretched out from one side of the bed to the other like the arms of the crucifix hanging on the wall, the black Christ with that scarlet silk wrapped around his thighs, his spread knees, his wounded side, his crown of thorns set on a tangled black wig with silver spangles. Aura opens up like an altar. (Fuentes 88)

Through this striking imagery, Fuentes constructs a parallel between the sacrificial body of Christ and the sexualized body of Aura, presenting the act of lovemaking as a kind of ritual sacrifice. The religious symbolism embedded in this scene transforms erotic union into an act of spiritual transgression, where the boundaries between sanctity and profanity dissolve. The explicit comparison of Aura’s body to an altar underscores the notion that erotic desire, like religious devotion, functions as a mode of transcendence, albeit one rooted in corporeality and mortality. By fusing Gothic horror, religious symbolism, and eroticism, Fuentes creates a narrative universe where these seemingly disparate elements converge to expose their underlying interconnectedness.

In Inez, Fuentes explores the symbolic dimensions of death through intricate philosophical reflections and evocative narrative imagery. The novel opens with a resonant proclamation from Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara: “we shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death,” a statement that sets the stage for the character’s subsequent meditation on mortality, love, and the human condition (Fuentes 1). This philosophical prelude segues into Atlan-Ferrara’s profound rumination on the talismanic seal, which he contemplates destroying as he murmurs, “dream, prediction, nightmare, diverted desire, unutterable love: they would die together with the talisman and its owner,” imbuing the seal with a multiplicity of meanings and rendering it an emblem of desire, mortality, and erotic love (Fuentes 1). Much like The Death of Artemio Cruz, Inez interrogates the destructive and agonizing dimensions of love, as Atlan-Ferrara recognizes within his own passion a sinister duality. He describes his lips as “the lips of an executioner and of a lover, which promise sensuality, but only in exchange for punishment, and pain only as the price of pleasure,” revealing a profound entanglement of desire, suffering, and destruction (Fuentes 34). By framing pain as a harbinger of both death and annihilation, Fuentes entwines Eros and Thanatos, coupling sex and death together through the fusion of pain and pleasure.

As in Aura, Fuentes employs Gothic and horror elements in Inez to construct a macabre atmosphere that serves as the framework for his exploration of love as a force intertwined with destruction. The story of Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara and Inez unfolds within the allegorical context of Berlioz’s opera The Damnation of Faust, which becomes a recurring intertextual motif. Atlan-Ferrara explicitly refers to Inez as “his Marguerite,” a parallel that underscores the operatic resonance of their tragic relationship. Not only does Inez perform the role of Marguerite in the opera, but their lives also mirror the opera’s narrative arc, blending reality and allegory. This intertextuality reinforces Atlan-Ferrara’s perception of Inez as both his salvation and his doom, the embodiment of love as a force of irreparable destruction. Through this lens, Fuentes positions love not as a redemptive ideal but as a tormenting paradox, a dynamic simultaneously generative and destructive. The operatic allusion to Faust further deepens the narrative’s philosophical and emotional complexity. In Berlioz’s adaptation, Méphistophélès tempts Faust with a vision of Marguerite, a woman whose innocence and purity inspire his obsessive love. Their immediate, unhesitating declaration of mutual affection is tainted by Méphistophélès’ manipulations, leading Faust to believe Marguerite has been sullied. Abandoned and wrongfully accused, Marguerite languishes in prison, condemned to death for a crime she did not commit. Faust, desperate to save her, relinquishes his soul to Méphistophélès, only to find himself ensnared in Hell, eternally separated from Marguerite. The cyclical trajectory of temptation, betrayal, and eternal condemnation parallels Atlan-Ferrara’s own self-destructive tendencies, as his repeated abandonment of Inez, born of an inability to fully commit to her, condemns him to a life of yearning, loneliness, and regret. Fuentes deftly draws on the Faust archetype to illuminate the destructiveness inherent in love, portraying it as a force that elevates only to devastate.

The operatic narrative also introduces elements of visceral horror, which Fuentes seamlessly integrates into the macabre fabric of Inez. Atlan-Ferrara’s conducting of The Damnation of Faust is steeped in apocalyptic imagery that fuses terror with eroticism:

Cry out, cry out with terror, howl like a hurricane, moan like the deepest forest, let rocks crash down and torrents roar, cry out with fear because in this instant you see black horses racing through the skies, bells fall silent, the sun is obscured, dogs are baying, the devil has taken over the world, skeletons have come out of their tombs to hail the passing of the inky steeds of damnation. It’s raining blood from the heavens. (Fuentes 47)

The invocation of religious symbolism—particularly the Devil, Hell, and apocalyptic imagery—further intensifies the Gothic atmosphere, permeating the narrative with death’s spectral presence. The operatic scenes, steeped in horror, resonate with Atlan-Ferrara’s obsessive passion as he uses Faust as a means of exploring themes of lust, pain, and mortality. His artistic obsession with capturing the coupling of death and eros culminates in a profoundly unsettling vision:

Project the film of the discovery of mass graves in the death camps; the terrible, apocalyptic evocation of Berlioz would become visible, skeletal cadavers stacked up by the hundreds, starved, lewd, skin, bone, indecent baldness, obscene woulds, shameful sexes, embrace of intolerable eroticism, as if even death desire endured: I love you, I love you, I love you… (Fuentes 65)

Atlan-Ferrara’s artistic vision juxtaposes the grotesque imagery of mass graves with the hauntingly erotic. The description shifts seamlessly from the morbid—“skeletal cadavers,” “obscene wounds”—to the disturbingly sensual—“shameful sexes,” “embrace of intolerable eroticism,” revealing Fuentes’ preoccupation with the duality of eros and thanatos. The haunting refrain, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” transforms this vision of death into a paradoxical expression of desire, exposing the fragile boundary between the erotic and the macabre. Fuentes further explores this interrelation by suggesting that love is both transcendent and annihilative, dissolving the individual into the collective. This dissolution is echoed in The Death of Artemio Cruz, where Artemio and Regina’s love leads to a figurative merging of their identities, erasing individuality in pursuit of total union. In Inez, the merging of love and death is rendered through the lens of artistic expression, as Atlan-Ferrara strives to embody the simultaneity of these forces. The imagery of “raining blood from the heavens” and “skeletons…hailing damnation” is superimposed onto the erotic, conflating sensuality with mortality in a way that underscores Fuentes’ central thesis: love and death are not oppositional forces but are inherently entwined, each culminating in the other. Ultimately, Fuentes presents love as an ephemeral yet transcendental force, one that invariably concludes in death.

The parallel love story in Inez traces the primordial origins of human affection, presenting a tale of the first lovers in human history. Through this mythic narrative, Carlos Fuentes evokes the precarious nature of love, emphasizing its intrinsic vulnerability and proximity to mortality. In this nascent world, language itself is only beginning to take shape, forcing the lovers, Ah-nel and Neh-el, to communicate through rudimentary sounds. Their initial utterances—“eh-dé” and “eh mé”—are translated by Fuentes into “aidez, aimez, help, love,” encapsulating the dual essence of love as both an act of mutual aid and an existential risk (Fuentes 38). As with Artemio and Regina in The Death of Artemio Cruz, the sexual union of Ah-nel and Neh-el is suffused with an ever-present danger, underscoring love’s fragile equilibrium at the threshold of death. While Atlan-Ferrara in Inez approaches death through psychological disintegration, Ah-nel and Neh-el confront physical peril, their experiences echoing the omnipresent hazards of passion. This parallel narrative is imbued with symbolism that intertwines eroticism and mortality. Ah-nel and Neh-el are mesmerized by the sight of deer mating, even as predators lurk nearby, threatening their survival. The vulnerability of the deer becomes a poignant metaphor for the fragility of lovers, whose intimacy renders them equally susceptible to the inevitability of death. As Ah-nel and Neh-el depict this tableau of animalistic love through their primitive artistry, Fuentes interweaves sensuality with the macabre:

… making the amorous figures of the deer seem to move, it will prolong their tenderness, which is identical, ah-nel, to the strange emotion that will now cause you to speak, trying to find the words and the rhythm that celebrate or reproduce or complete the painting – you cannot explain it – which neh-el will continue to sketch and color with his fingers smeared with a color like dried blood, like the hide of the deer. (Fuentes 64)

The imagery of Neh-el’s fingers “smeared with a color like dried blood” transforms the act of painting into a symbolic fusion of creation and destruction, mirroring the inextricable link between sex and death. The “strange emotion” that compels Ah-nel to speak arises from witnessing “the amorous figures of the deer… prolong[ing] their tenderness,” an act imbued with both erotic and existential resonance. Through the visceral blending of blood and sensuality, Fuentes metaphorizes the coalescence of eros and thanatos, suggesting that the act of love is, at its core, an acknowledgment of life’s transience.In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, Fuentes weaves the macabre into the fabric of human existence, portraying death as an omnipresent force that permeates every act of desire. Across these works, graphic depictions of horror and recurring motifs of mortality form a thematic framework where death remains inescapable, tethered to the erotic. Fuentes meticulously intertwines these primal forces, presenting life as a fragile continuum in which humans strive to love despite the certainty of death. The primeval instincts of sex and death—each an elemental drive—are inexorably bound, rendering attempts to elude mortality through love ultimately futile. However, Fuentes suggests that transcendence arises not from evasion but from an embrace of this paradox. The coupling of love and death, rather than negating erotic desire, amplifies it, granting it a transcendental dimension. By surrendering to human fragility and acknowledging the ever-present shadow of mortality, the lovers in Fuentes’ works achieve a profound climax of existence. Love, though transient and inseparable from death, becomes a means of momentarily transcending the finite. Through this reconciliation of eros and thanatos, Fuentes illuminates the human condition, portraying love as both an affirmation of life and a confrontation with its inevitable end.

Chapter IV: “The Eyes of Love See a Beautiful Death”: The Macabre Symbiosis of Love and Death

Carlos Fuentes’ literature articulates a profound philosophical theory: that sex and death form the twin pillars of human existence, inseparably intertwined and omnipresent in the universal order. The omnipotence of these forces necessitates their superimposition, creating an intricate nexus through which they manifest in myriad forms. Sex materializes through the erotic, encompassing sexual love and pleasure, while death emerges through the macabre, encompassing pain and destruction. This interplay allows Fuentes to depict their union in infinite configurations. Wendy Faris, in her analysis of Fuentes’ works, observes, “For Fuentes, as for the surrealists, eroticism serves as an opening to a reality beyond everyday life, not so much to the individual unconscious as to supra-individual forces in the universe” (Faris 71). Faris’ insight underscores the cosmic significance of the erotic, a force of such magnitude that it inevitably converges with death, the only comparable universal power. Faris elaborates on this confluence in her discussion of Fuentes’ Aura:

The presence of death in scenes of love also reflects a long tradition. Aura is of course the most striking example of this conflation in Fuentes’ work. As Jaime Alazraki has recently pointed out, Octavio Paz characterized this aspect of Aura early on: “Through love Fuentes perceives death; through death, he perceives that zone we once called sacred or poetic…. The eroticism is in- separable from the horror.” Though the experience is not a rational one, the reasoning here is that if death is the loss of the self, then losing oneself in another resembles dying. (Faris 71, Alazraki 95, Paz 49)

Faris’ assertion—that the intertwining of sex and death in Fuentes’ work reflects the existential act of self-dissolution—positions love as a metaphorical death, a surrender to forces greater than the self. Whether emotionally through love or physically through sex, this act of losing oneself mirrors the annihilation inherent in death, drawing individuals into what Faris describes as the “sacred or poetic zone.” This zone is one of cosmic and transfiguring union, where eroticism, inseparable from horror, reaches its zenith (Faris 71). If, as Fuentes demonstrates, “eroticism is inseparable from the horror,” and horror manifests through macabre imagery, then sex and death remain inextricably bound in his literary universe. In Fuentes’ works, to love is, in essence, to die. The act of love renders one as fragile and vulnerable as the deer that recur as a motif in Inez. These deer serve as a metaphor for human love, their vulnerability a reflection of the inherent risks of intimacy. Falling in love, Fuentes suggests, exposes individuals to psychological destruction, with danger ever-present, like predators lurking in the periphery. Yet, like the deer, humans pursue love despite its perils, compelled by an innate drive. For Fuentes, love’s inherent vulnerability is an expression of the death wish—the human impulse toward self-annihilation through surrender. Fuentes’ characters often embody this death wish, engaging in acts of self-destruction that bring them closer to a figurative death. Their attempts to transcend mortality through sexual love are futile, as this very love draws them nearer to pain, horror, and eventual annihilation. The love they experience, steeped in perversity and destruction, becomes a reflection of the indissoluble bond between Eros and Thanatos.

In the works of Carlos Fuentes, sexual love is inextricably tied to pain, and, inevitably, to death. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, the deaths of Regina, General Llorente, Neh-El, and Inez exemplify Fuentes’ assertion of the ancient truism: all love ends, whether through physical death or emotional self-destruction. Paradoxically, Fuentes suggests that death, far from extinguishing love, often amplifies its intensity. Regina’s death in The Death of Artemio Cruz renders her “more alive than ever” in Artemio’s fevered imagination, as her absence transforms her into an indelible presence (Fuentes 74). Her memory becomes a locus of erotic longing, intertwining love and death into a singular, consuming force. Fuentes writes:

Perhaps, during their brief months of love, he’d never seen the beauty of her eyes with such emotion, nor could he have compared them, as he could now, with their brilliant twins—black jewels, the deep, calm sea under the sun, their depths like sand mixed in time, dark cherries from the tree of flesh and hot entrails. He’d never told her that. Who knows if memory can really prolong existence, entwine their legs, open windows to the dawn, comb her hair, revive smell, noise, touch. (Fuentes 74)

In Artemio’s fragmented recollection, the sensuous imagery of Regina’s “black jewels” and “dark cherries” merges her physicality with an almost mythic beauty, her memory taking on an otherworldly permanence. His inability to articulate these feelings in life underscores the transformative power of death in magnifying love. Regina’s death heightens Artemio’s erotic desire, entwining his grief with the memory of their intimacy: “Who knows if memory can really prolong existence, entwine their legs” (Fuentes 74). Through Artemio’s yearning to preserve Regina’s memory in the face of his own mortality, Fuentes explores the notion that death intensifies love, imbuing it with an almost sacred quality that transcends corporeal boundaries.

As Artemio approaches his final moments, Regina’s memory consumes him entirely, manifesting as a relentless stream of consciousness that merges love, pain, and death into an inseparable triad. In his last seconds of life, Artemio’s thoughts spiral into a desperate invocation of Regina:

I had Regina do you hear me? I loved Regina her name was Regina and she loved me loved me without money followed me gave me life down below Regina, Regina how I love you how I love you today without having to have you near me how you fill my chest with this warm satisfaction how you flood me with your old, forgotten perfume, Regina I remembered you see? look carefully I remembered you before I could remember you just as you are as you love me as I loved you in the world that no one can take away from us Regina, the world that I carry with me and save protecting it with my two hands as if it were a fire a small, living fire that you gave to me you gave to me you gave to me I may have taken but I gave to you oh black eyes; oh dark, aromatic skin, oh black lips, oh dark love I cannot touch, name, repeat: oh your hands, Regina your hands on my neck and the oblivion of finding you the oblivion of all that existed outside you and me oh Regina without thinking without speaking existing in the dark thighs of timeless abundance oh my unrepeatable pride the pride of having loved you the unanswered challenge what can the world tell us Regina what could it add to that what logic could speak to the madness of our love? … How shall I name you love how shall I bring you close to my breath how shall I beg you to give yourself how shall I caress your cheeks how shall I kiss your ears how shall I breathe you in between your legs how shall I say your eyes how shall I touch your taste how shall I abandon the solitude of myself to lose myself in the solitude of ourselves how shall I repeat that I love you how shall I exile your memory so I can wait for your return? Regina Regina that stabbing pain is coming back, Regina, I’m waking up from that half sleep the sedative induced I’m waking up with the pain in the center of my guts, Regina, give me your hand, don’t abandon me, I don’t want to wake up and not find you next to me… (Fuentes 299)

The rapid, unpunctuated rhythm mirrors the turbulence of Artemio’s psyche, as Regina’s presence overwhelms him with a tempest of longing and regret. The repetitive invocations—“Regina, Regina”—reflect a futile attempt to hold onto her memory as his own life slips away. Fuentes crafts a poignant tension between physical torment and psychological anguish, as Artemio oscillates between visceral pain—“the pain in the center of my guts”—and a hallucinatory yearning for Regina’s touch: “Regina, give me your hand, don’t abandon me” (Fuentes 299). The convergence of love, pain, and death becomes totalizing, erasing any boundaries between them. Regina’s memory devours Artemio, consuming his dying moments and underscoring the erotic intensity of his longing. Fuentes’ use of stream of consciousness heightens the chaotic interplay between love and death, portraying them as forces that are not merely interconnected but indistinguishable. Artemio’s inability to separate his physical suffering from his yearning for Regina reflects Fuentes’ assertion that love and death are, and always have been, intrinsically linked.

In all three novels, Carlos Fuentes “forge[s] a haunting tale of seemingly irreconcilable opposites that are nevertheless masterfully interwoven: reality and fantasy, past and present, sex and death” (Cull 19). This intricate fusion, exemplified by Artemio Cruz’s dying moments, also permeates Aura, where Fuentes repeatedly demonstrates the inseparability of eros and thanatos. One of the novella’s most strikingly erotic and macabre scenes occurs when Consuelo’s husband witnesses her torturing a cat while consumed by sadistic sexual pleasure. Felipe recounts the incident through the diary of Consuelo’s husband, who describes discovering her with “the cat clasped between her legs, with her crinoline skirt pulled up… it excited him so much that if you can believe what he wrote, he made love to her that night with extraordinary passion” (Fuentes 46). Here, the grotesque act intensifies the husband’s erotic desire, illustrating how macabre experiences amplify the sexual passions of Fuentes’ characters. Sadism, often regarded as the physical embodiment of the union between Eros and Thanatos, becomes the mechanism through which destruction and pain are eroticized. Through Consuelo’s sadistic behavior, Fuentes underscores the mutual intensification of sex and death, revealing their profound interdependence. A similarly unsettling scene occurs when Felipe encounters Aura miming the slaughter of a goat, her actions imbued with an eerie, erotic delight. Felipe describes Aura “performing a ritual with the empty air… as if holding something up… striking again and again at the same place” before watching her “wipe her hands against her breast… as if she were skinning an animal” (Fuentes 68). This act, rich in symbolic resonance, can be interpreted as a form of symbolic castration, as “to pagan antiquity the goat generally symbolizes lust” (Cull 20). Castration, inherently both macabre and erotic, becomes a site of sadistic arousal for Aura, who derives a perverse sexual pleasure from her ritualistic cravings. Much like Consuelo, Aura exhibits an insatiable appetite for sexual sadism, finding erotic fulfillment in acts steeped in destruction and simulated violence. As Felipe’s desire for Aura intensifies, he becomes fully ensnared in her web of sexual perversity, losing his innocence in the process. This transformation reaches its apex during their climactic act of lovemaking, when Felipe discovers he is merely a spectral projection of the deceased General Llorente. His sexual awakening is inextricably linked to his confrontation with mortality. As John T. Cull astutely observes:

[Felipe] must confront his own mortality precisely at the moment he awakens into manhood and sexual initiation. The beginning marks his end. Mexican mythology, of course, is particularly rich in associations between death, fertility, and sexuality, as Cuervo Hewitt has shown for Aura. The true horror of Fuentes’ text lies in the reader’s final realization that sex and death are inextricably bound: “every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. (Cull 25, Malleus 52)

Fuentes’ exploration of sin and pleasure lies at the heart of this connection between eros and thanatos. Sin, aligned with Thanatos, and pleasure, aligned with Eros, converge in acts of sadism and destruction, blurring the boundaries between desire and annihilation. The characters’ embrace of sin becomes a pathway to understanding the profound relationship between sex and death. Just as Artemio experiences a psychosexual climax in the throes of death, Felipe’s literal, physical climax coincides with the realization of his mortality. In this way, the consummation of sex and death in Aura mirrors the fusion of these forces in The Death of Artemio Cruz. Fuentes uses these parallel moments to demonstrate that the entwining of love and death is not merely thematic but an inescapable truth of human existence, where the erotic and the macabre converge into a singular, transcendental experience.

Carlos Fuentes postulates that in the apex of love—manifested through the erotic act—death is omnipresent; conversely, in the culmination of life—marked by death—sex is equally pervasive. Aura concludes with what Gutiérrez Mouat aptly describes as a “double revelation of uncanny identity” (Gutiérrez Mouat 304). Felipe, believing himself to be making passionate love to Aura in the dimly lit bedroom, discovers by moonlight that “the body in his arms is that of the decrepit and shriveled widow” (Gutiérrez Mouat 305). This moment is both terrifying and erotically charged, forcing Felipe to confront the inextricable intertwining of sex and death. Ensnared by the dual forces of eros and thanatos, Felipe submits to their inevitable fusion, continuing his lovemaking even as the spectral reality of Aura’s mortality becomes undeniable. Fuentes suggests that Felipe, like Artemio Cruz and Regina, embraces the finite nature of love, recognizing that mortality is the threshold through which cosmic eroticism is consummated. In Fuentes’ literary cosmos, death is not an end but a transformative force that completes the lovers’ journey into transcendence.

Fuentes’ own musings on the genesis of Aura further illuminate his fascination with the entanglement of beauty, mortality, and eroticism. In his article On Reading and Writing Myself: How I Wrote Aura, Fuentes recounts his inspiration: an encounter with a girl he first met at fourteen and later saw at twenty. This fleeting connection awakened in him a profound awareness of time’s passage, as he observed her beauty persisting even as she moved closer to death. This paradox inspired him to write Aura, a novella centered on a dying woman’s longing to preserve her beauty and vitality. Fuentes writes:

The light possessed the girl, the light made love to the girl before I could, and I was only, that afternoon, “a strange guest in the kingdom of love” … and knew that the eyes of love can also see us with once more I quote Quevedo — “a beautiful Death”. The next morning I started writing Aura…. (Fuentes 531)As Fuentes describes the girl, he observes, “the light that had been struggling against the clouds also fought against her flesh, took it, sketched it, granted her a shadow of years, sculpted a death in her eyes, tore the smile from her lips, waned through her hair with the floating melancholy of madness” (Fuentes 531). In this ephemeral yet profound moment, Fuentes recognized that his erotic desire was inexorably linked to death. The interplay of the girl’s ephemeral beauty with the shadow of mortality became a revelation, one that crystallized the concept of Aura. The “eyes of love,” Fuentes suggests, inevitably perceive death as an inseparable companion to beauty, encouraging an appreciation of the enigmatic connection between eros and thanatos. This realization forms the conceptual foundation not only of Aura but also of Fuentes’ broader oeuvre. The acknowledgment that the “eyes of love” can also perceive “a beautiful Death” encapsulates the philosophy that permeates his narratives, where the union of love and death constitutes the essence of human existence (Fuentes 531). Through his inquiries into the nature of eros and thanatos, Fuentes constructs a framework in which the two are not merely linked but are facets of the same fundamental truth. He concludes that sex and death, far from being oppositional forces, are inextricably bound, entwined in an eternal dance that shapes the fabric of human life.

Chapter V: “The Dance of Love and Death”: The Erotics of Destruction and Creation

The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez are united by their exploration of the manifold intersections between eros and thanatos, wherein the union of sex and death often culminates in acts of sacrifice. Among the recurring motifs in Fuentes’ works, the theme of human sacrifice stands as a profound metaphor for the entwined forces of love and mortality. The sexual love between Fuentes’ characters frequently necessitates sacrifice, underscoring the inescapable cost of passion. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Regina’s death serves as both a literal and symbolic offering. Sacrificed at the hands of the Federales, Regina becomes a catalyst for Artemio’s survival, and her memory endures as a spectral presence that haunts his psyche. As Artemio reflects in his final moments: “Regina, I realize it hurts: Regina, come so that I can survive again; Regina, exchange your life for mine again; Regina, die again so I can live; Regina. Soldier. Regina. Embrace me, both of you” (Fuentes 299). Through this invocation, Artemio acknowledges Regina’s role as both a lover and a sacrificial figure, recognizing that her death has given his life meaning and vitality.

Artemio’s declaration, “Soldier. Regina. Embrace me, both of you,” suggests a symbolic merging of identities, wherein the boundaries between himself, the soldier, and Regina dissolve into a singular entity (Fuentes 299). Regina, immortalized through sacrifice, becomes an indelible part of Artemio’s being, consuming his dying thoughts and granting his life its ultimate significance. By demonstrating the persistence of love and desire through memory, Fuentes posits that death imbues love with an intensified potency, elevating it beyond the corporeal. Scholar Teresa Longo draws a compelling parallel between Regina’s sacrifice and Aztec cosmology, which hinges on the belief that the Sun’s survival requires the offering of human life. Longo asserts that “Regina is not only a lover, but she is also a sacrificial victim,” aligning her death with the sacrificial logic that sustains cosmic balance (Longo 63). The “metaphysical basis of Aztec thought” identifies fire (the Sun) and water (blood) as opposing yet complementary forces, united in the sacrificial act (Longo 60). In this schema, Artemio embodies fire while Regina represents water; their union—both in love and in death—becomes a convergence of opposites, affirming their cosmic interconnectedness. Fuentes suggests that love, in its ultimate expression, demands sacrifice, with death serving as the requisite offering that sanctifies the lovers’ transcendental union.

In Inez, the motif of sacrifice manifests in the brutal ritualistic death of Neh-el and Ah-nel’s daughter. When their tribe’s leader enacts laws to prohibit incestuous unions, the lovers—who later discover they are siblings—are compelled to surrender their child in an act of violent retribution. Fuentes narrates the harrowing event with unflinching detail:

In a single unforeseeable instant and with the lethal strike of the lightning bolt, the men in the service of the tongue chief pinioned Neh-el’s arms, took the girl from him, jerked her legs apart, and with a single stone knife sawed out her clitoris and threw it in [Ah-nel’s] face. (Fuentes 87)

This horrific sacrifice, steeped in macabre imagery, underscores the destructive consequences of illicit sexual desire. The daughter’s death becomes an act of atonement for her parents’ transgressive love, yet it also immortalizes their bond. The savagery of the ritual transforms the sexual into the sacrificial, accentuating the inextricable relationship between eros and thanatos in Fuentes’ narrative universe. Through this act of annihilation, love persists, albeit transfigured into a force that transcends corporeal limitations.

Felipe emerges as a symbolic sacrificial lamb in Aura, subjected to the desires of Aura/Consuelo and offered up on the altar of erotic longing and memory. Consuelo conjures Felipe’s double to fulfill her carnal desires and relive the passions of her youth, manipulating him into becoming a vessel for her longing. Felipe’s ignorance of his role underscores his vulnerability, as he is ensnared in Consuelo’s web of sexual perversity and exploitation. He is portrayed as “a sacrificial virgin magically drawn to some pagan altar,” the altar being his insatiable desire for Aura (Cull 19). This descent into torment, where he is corrupted and subjected to psychological death, results in the dissolution of his innocence. Felipe metaphorically “dies” and assumes the identity of General Llorente, enabling the spectral love between Consuelo and her husband to endure. Through the motif of human sacrifice as a requisite for the endurance of erotic love, Fuentes suggests that death is not merely an end but a necessary counterpart to love, a condition for its transcendence.

Finally, Felipe can be considered a sacrificial lamb for the sexual desires of Aura/Consuelo. Consuelo creates the duplicate of Felipe to fulfill her sexual desires and relive the eroticism of her youth. She keeps Felipe ignorant and uses him to sexually satisfy her, even though he suffers as a result. Felipe is portrayed like a “sacrificial virgin magically drawn to some pagan altar,” that pagan altar being the object of his desire: Aura (Cull 19). He is tormented by his confusion, subjected to perversity, and corrupted, undergoing a sort of psychological death as he loses his innocence for the sake of Consuelo. Felipe “dies” and becomes General Llorente once again; the sacrifice of innocent Felipe allows for the love between Consuelo and her husband to persist. Through the motif of human sacrifice for erotic endurance, Fuentes suggests that death is necessary for love.

For Fuentes, death constitutes the ultimate climax of life, just as sexual love and death are mirrors of each other. These two forces—eros and thanatos—are woven seamlessly into the fabric of his novels, existing within a framework where the erotic and the macabre are indistinguishable. His characters, driven by the dual instincts of the life drive (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos), exemplify Freud’s metapsychological framework. These drives, as Freud argues, form the ontological foundation of human existence. Eros, the force of union and creation, encompasses the erotic, sexual love, and lust; Thanatos, in contrast, represents the instinctual pull toward entropy and dissolution, the desire to return to an inanimate state. The complexity of Thanatos manifests in myriad forms, including destruction, pain, and violence. Like the laws of entropy, Thanatos embodies a universal inclination toward disorder. Freud contends that these two drives perpetually conflict and coincide within the human psyche, shaping the paradoxical interplay of creation and annihilation. Fuentes situates this Freudian dialectic at the heart of his narratives, exploring the ontological dimensions of Eros and Thanatos as they converge in his characters’ lives. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud posits that “the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two fundamental drives (Urtriebe), Eros and Thanatos, are supposed to explain the phenomena of life” (Freud 45). Just as physical laws dictate that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, so too do human drives adhere to this dualistic principle. If Eros seeks fusion and unity—yearning to transcend the self through love—Thanatos counters by striving for dissolution and a return to primordial stillness. Freud characterizes Thanatos as “the contrary drive seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state” (Freud 45). In Fuentes’ works, the poetic convergence of these drives raises a central question: how do two seemingly opposing forces coalesce in such a profoundly harmonious manner?

Timofei Gerber, in his analysis of Eros and Thanatos, expands upon this Freudian concept, suggesting that individuals oscillate between these drives throughout life, culminating in their eventual union. Gerber argues that love’s inherent conditionality—its impermanence—reveals the presence of Thanatos within Eros. “Once the child realizes that it won’t be loved unconditionally,” Gerber writes, “and what is the conditionality of love, if not the realization that love necessarily dies, that Eros itself is imbued with Thanatos,” the ability to love emerges. Fuentes’ characters embody this paradox: the awareness of mortality and the finitude of love becomes the crucible through which Eros and Thanatos merge, creating a heightened emotional and existential state. Freud further illustrates this dynamic in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, referencing the Platonic myth from Symposium, which posits that humans were originally “double beings with two heads, four arms and four legs and two genitals that were then cut apart by Zeus and which then desired to reunite with each other” (Gerber). This ancient myth aligns with the concept of a “soulmate,” the belief in an intrinsic other half that completes one’s being. Freud identifies Eros as the drive to create “higher entities,” a yearning for union that transcends individuality and strives for cosmic significance. As Freud explains in Civilization and Its Discontents:

Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state—admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological—in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. (Freud 1)

This dissolution of the self in the apex of love requires, as Fuentes symbolizes through his recurring motif of human sacrifice, a figurative death of individuality. To love another, in Fuentes’ philosophy, is to relinquish one’s prior conception of selfhood, embracing a death that facilitates the ascension into a transcendent unity. Love, therefore, becomes a dual act of surrender and creation: the death of the self enables the birth of a higher, cosmic being. For Fuentes, the ultimate consummation of love lies in its simultaneous destruction, affirming that to love is, indeed, to die—and through this death, love attains its highest transcendence.

Throughout The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and Inez, Carlos Fuentes’ lovers seek to transcend the inevitability of death through the act of love, using eroticism as a momentary reprieve from their existential finitude. Artemio clings to the memory of past passions to momentarily escape the imminence of his mortality; Aura/Consuelo confronts the specter of death through occult rituals and the reincarnation of her youthful desires; Ah-nel and Neh-el immerse themselves in their sexual union to elude the perils of their fatalistic reality; and Atlan-Ferrara resists death by recounting his love for Inez, attempting to revive their lost intimacy. Yet, despite their relentless attempts at evasion, Fuentes’ characters are ultimately compelled to face death, revealing that love’s transcendence is inherently transient, enduring only until the inescapable moment of final surrender. At the climactic intersection of these forces, the co-dependent drives of Eros and Thanatos merge in an ultimate act of union. Fuentes depicts death as the most profound erotic experience, a moment where the individual dissolves into the cosmos and achieves a state of spiritual and corporeal transfiguration. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Artemio’s final moments are marked by an erotic psychosexual climax, where he perceives himself and Regina as a singular entity. This fusion underscores Fuentes’ vision of death as intrinsically erotic, wherein the boundaries between self and other dissolve, and the physical and metaphysical become one.

Furthermore, Fuentes asserts that the acknowledgment of mortality intensifies Eros, fortifying the life drive as it converges with Thanatos. As his characters embrace the inescapable interplay of love and death, they undergo spiritual metamorphosis, entering a liminal state where these dual drives unify. Artemio’s acceptance of death in his final moments allows him to merge with Regina, dying not in isolation but as part of an eternal union. Similarly, when Felipe consummates his love with Aura upon realizing she is dying, he transcends individuality, becoming General Llorente, while Aura becomes Consuelo, two lovers untethered from temporal constraints. In contrast, Inez depicts lovers on the verge of transcendence, yet incapable of fully embracing the synthesis of Eros and Thanatos. Atlan-Ferrara, despite his acute awareness of the inextricable bond between love and death, remains trapped in his self-destructive tendencies, channeling his unfulfilled desire into artistic expressions that never achieve resolution. His inability to reconcile these drives renders his love unfulfilled and destructive, perpetuating a cycle of longing and despair.

In Fuentes’ literary cosmos, sex and death are inexorably entwined, each constructing the other within the theoretical framework of Eros and Thanatos. Love is both destructive and fatal, yet Fuentes’ characters persist in their pursuit of it—not out of a desire for annihilation, but out of a compulsion to merge the creative and destructive forces that define existence. Even within Freudian theory, the fusion of Eros and Thanatos culminates in the emergence of a force greater than the sum of its parts. When these drives converge, their contradictions dissolve, forming a singular, transcendent unity. This duality underpins the very fabric of existence, manifesting across disciplines—physics, psychology, and philosophy—as the interplay of creation and destruction. For Fuentes, this dynamic is expressed most vividly in the psychological and romantic dimensions of human experience. Love and death enact a perpetual dance, where destruction facilitates creation and selfhood dissolves into union. Beneath the labyrinthine layers of Fuentes’ narratives lies a singular philosophical premise: the human condition is shaped by the competing desires to be loved and to self-destruct. Fuentes concludes that love itself is a form of death, and dying is imbued with the same erotic, transcendental significance as love. Thus, the eternal dance of love and death becomes a defining feature of human nature, a universal truth that echoes through the ancient corridors of existence.

“Dream of total union: everyone says this dream is impossible, and yet it persists. I do not abandon it.”

— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977)

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