SOURCE: "Short Fiction and Theater: Magical Realism, Symbolic Action," in Carlos Fuentes, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1983, pp. 69-100.

Faris is an American critic and educator. In this excerpt from her book-length study of Fuentes's work, she comments on the elements of magical realism that she detects in Aura and in Fuentes's short fiction collection Burnt Water.

Fuentes has always been fascinated by what he calls "the world of the second reality": "I have always attempted to perceive behind the spectral appearance of things a more tangible, more solid reality than the obvious everyday reality." He claims that this continuing interest stems from his childhood taste for authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe [quoted in Emmanuel Carballo's Diecinueve Protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX, 1965]. For him, "reality is reality plus its mirrors. . . . All reality duplicates and prolongs itself magically." In this kind of...