Lacanian Textuality in Carlos Fuentes's Aura and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw

This study offers a new reading of Carlos Fuentes's Gothic novella Aura with an intertextual approach that focuses on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and, in particular, on Shoshana Felman's seminal essay on that text. Concentrating on Fuentes's use of the second-person singular narrative — the most striking formal aspect of the text — my reading argues against the common tendency of critics to resolve the identity of the narrator. Instead, this study contends that Fuentes's persistence with the second-person narrative is aimed at replicating a textual practice akin to the Lacanian notion of the text as the Unconscious or the Other. In a way that profoundly echoes Felman's reading of James — the latter an acknowledged influence on Aura — the metamorphoses of the characters and, crucially, the narrator in Fuentes's text, can be read as metaphors for transference and, therefore, as an exploration of the process of identity construction via language.