The concepts of temporality and spatiality reoccur throughout Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. Both issues arise in the initial pages of the text, when the narrator writes, “I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me” (2). As Auxilio introduces herself, immediately the reader is introduced simultaneously to transnationalism, seeing as she is from another country and now lives in Mexico. “My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I am Urugayan—I come from Montevideo—although when I get nostalgic…I say I’m a Charrúa…and it confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans too” (2). This confusion surrounding time and space engages the reader at the very commencement of the novel, demonstrating perhaps the lack of importance of specificity in regards to the when and where about which people are so often concerned, as well as the dynamic, innovative, and unusual structure to the text. While utilizing the first person is considered “normal” to texts, the narrator subverts this norm by expressing her thoughts in a manner more akin to a stream of consciousness, and later, expressing dialogue without quotation marks (as we saw in Cole’s Open City).
The narrator begins to explain her involvement in the events of 1968 on page 21, as she sits in the bathroom in the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Yet after realizing the chaos that was occurring outside of the restroom, Auxilio specifically notes that “five seconds later, someone, maybe the son of a b**** who had spoken before, opened the door of the bathroom and came in” (27). So at this point, time and even space as Auxilio (“I estimate that I must have spent about three hours sitting there” (31)) sits in the stall are clearly marked for the reader; however, her time remaining in the bathroom becomes speculative. “Time folded and unfolded itself like a dream” (32). Auxilio’s memories (if the reader can be assured of the authenticity of said memories since she mentions over and over her confusion regarding them) become skewed, changing from the 60’s to 1956 to the 1970’s, and she leaves the reader hanging in the balance of the time spent in the bathroom, as she moves her narrative along, changing in time and space to discuss her specific rendezvous with Arturo Belano at the Encrucijada Veracruzana in 1970.
The reader is returned to that unspecified amount of time, thus a vague temporality, spent in the bathroom (here, a place firmly entrenched in spatiality) in September 1968, this time through the narrator’s own personal transnational lens: “I thought about those Asians crossing the Bering Strait, I thought about the solitude of America, I thought about how strange it is to emigrate eastward rather than westward” (54). Auxilio’s transnational lens (here, her affinity for British poets) reappears in her thoughts concerning poets, those who were teachers and pupils and those who didn’t live to become either. “I thought about the dead poets, like Darío and Huidobro, and about all the encounters that never occurred. The truth is that our history is full of encounters that never occurred. We didn’t have our Pound or our Yeats; we had Huidobro and Darío instead” (63).
Auxilio also touches on the idea of transnationalism in a paragraph discussing Mexico City’s poets’ voices. “No one could understand those voices, which were saying: We’re not from this part of Mexico City, we come from the subway, the underworld, the sewers, we live in the darkest, dirtiest places…” (78). Clearly, this vision of transnationalism does involve crossing countries’ borders, but rather focuses on the idea of a completely different culture of people (poets) living within Mexico City, explicitly different from the city’s other citizens.
Returning again to the concepts of temporality and spatiality, Auxilio’s use of the word “frozen” seems to represent a sort of “time standing still” situation. “The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds” (105). In taking apart the phrase, the reader recognizes aspects of time and space, i.e. “everyday” as something temporal, “frozen” in regards to space, and also “transparency,” which relates again to spatiality in that the everyday may exist, but if it’s transparent, ergo no one can see it, is it truly there? Does it, in fact, belong in the genre of spatiality? This confusion regarding space and time arises yet again in Auxilio’s thought process later on. “And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still…” (126). While time here can once again be “frozen,” as noted before (an impossible characteristic of temporality), it is called an “image.” An image can be interpreted as a picture or a photo, and if viewed as such, the image therefore becomes a concrete object, thus rooted in the concept of spatiality.
I get engaged with both concepts of temporality and spatiality in Amulet and your analysis made me think even more about them. I would like to extend these concepts a little bit more and point out the word “frozen” because for me it is significantly related to temporality. Although the protagonist mentions several years throughout the novel, Auxilio reconstructs her life from 1968. This year became her past, present and future. “Y así llegué al año 1968. O el año 1968 llegó a mí. Yo ahora podría decir que lo presentí.” (18). “And so I came to the year 1968. Or 1968 came to me. With the benefit of hindsight I could say I left it coming”. From a temporary distance, Auxilio was able to “sense” this year as a frozen event. And at the same time, 1968 is the starting point of many of her subsequent memories/years. For instance, when Auxilio wanted to remember some memory of ’71 or’72, she went back to that moment in the bathroom at the UNAM: “Desde mi atalaya, desde mi vagón de metro que sangra, desde mi inmenso día de lluvia. Desde el lavabo de mujeres de la cuarta planta de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, mi nave del tiempo desde la que puedo observar todos los tiempos en donde aliente Auxilio Lacouture, que no son muchos, pero que son.”(42). “From my watchtower, my bloody subway carriage, from my gigantic rainy day. From the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, the timeship from which I can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are.” Thus, the moment in the bathroom is not just a trauma but an image (as you well mentioned) that became an allegory of temporality and also spatiality.
As Jameson argues in his article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, all the third-world texts (Latin America is a third kind of development according to him) are to be read as “national allegories” due to the cultural forms and differences with the first world. Therefore, from Jameson’s point of view, 1968 would represent, literarily speaking, a national allegory of Mexico, and Amulet could be contemplated as a machine of the representation of it. However, from my point of view, I would categorize Amulet as a first-world allegorical novel.