Time Travel and History in Carmen Boullosa’s 1991 Llanto, novelas imposibles

Abstract

This chapter examines one of Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s most intriguing and complex fictions: the short novel, Llanto, novelas imposibles of 1992. * The title I have chosen to give to this chapter is deliberately ambiguous; we may choose to insert a hyphen, making the discussion about time-travel, or, on the other hand, we may insert a comma, making the discussion about the epistemological categories of time, travel, and history. This deliberate ambiguity is precisely to bring to the fore the interplay of all these elements in this work of Boullosa’s, namely, how time-travel—the transportation of the figure of Moctezuma 1 to the present day—raises questions about the fundamental concepts of time and travel. This novel, at once a travel narrative, a historical narrative (or, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term, a “historiographic metafiction”), and a science fictional fantasy, engages in a deconstruction of the various discourses that it cannibalizes. In the course of this chapter I will argue that Boullosa’s use of the device of time-travel in this novel is a strategic one, in which time-travel is used to interrogate the established meanings of history and time, and, it also functions as a shorthand for the postmodern condition. My argument, thus, is twofold: first, that time-travel is a device employed by Boullosa in order to interrogate the ways in which historical figures are recuperated and decontextualized by historical accounts; and second, that time-travel stands for the postmodern era of space-time compression.KeywordsTime TravelMexico CityHistorical AccountHistorical SourceNarrative HistoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.