A Change of Skin by Carlos Fuentes

First published:Cambio de piel, 1967 (English translation, 1968)

Type of plot: Experimental

Time of work: April 11, 1965

Locale: Mexico City, Xochicalco, and Cholula

Principal Characters:

• Javier, a Mexican would-be writer
• Elizabeth, his wife
• Franz, a Czechoslovakian emigré to Mexico
• Isabel, his young Mexican lover
• Freddy Lambert, the narrator

The Novel

Carlos Fuentes’s A Change of Skin is a difficult novel when judged by almost any standards. At least part of its difficulty lies in the fact that it continually frustrates the reader’s expectations of what a novel should be, and of how a novel should be constructed. The average reader expects the novel to “tell a story,” to recount in some intelligible way events which at least could have happened in the “real world.” The reader expects the novel, in a word, to be mimetic. Yet in A Change of Skin, Fuentes constructs a world that is absolutely and self-reflexively fictional and then deliberately destroys this world, causing it to collapse, like the Cholula pyramid of its final scene, under the weight of its own artifice.

The story of A Change of Skin is fairly straightforward. Javier, a frustrated Mexican writer, and his American Jewish wife, Elizabeth, are traveling from Mexico City to Veracruz to spend a holiday. They are accompanied by Franz, a Czechoslovakian who aided in the construction of the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then fled to Mexico after the war, and his young Mexican mistress, Isabel. After leaving Mexico City, the couples stop to see the pre-Columbian ruins at Xochicalco and then continue to Cholula to see the pyramids. Their car is sabotaged and they are forced to spend the night in Cholula. There they are joined by the ubiquitous Narrator, who has been traveling to Cholula by the more direct superhighway in the company of a group of young beatniks who refer to themselves as “the Monks.” At Isabel’s suggestion, the two couples visit the Cholula pyramid at midnight. Here Franz, and perhaps Elizabeth, are killed in a cave-in, or, according to another contradictory version immediately following the first, Franz is murdered in the pyramid by one of the Monks to atone for his war crimes. The survivors then return to Mexico City. The story is thus in itself fairly simple. The complications and expansions that occur in the narrative presentation of this story (which include lengthy flashbacks, insertion of extraneous newspaper accounts and other real or imagined events) prolong these events, which take place in a single day, through a dizzying 462 pages and ultimately question the objective occurrence of any of the events and characters of the story by suggesting that the entire account may merely represent a demented delusion of the mad narrator who last appears incarcerated in the insane asylum in Cholula.

The Characters

The artifice characteristic of A Change of Skin is particularly obvious in the portrayal of its characters, who represent doubles or paired opposites in continual conflict rather than fully developed, believable personalities. Ironically, Javier is first attracted to Elizabeth because he sees her as his opposite, as a person who possesses the strength he lacks. It is only during their idyllic honeymoon in Greece that, at least in Elizabeth’s later reflections, their duality is briefly transcended. Their marriage later becomes a battleground where they play out their opposition in even the most trivial of gestures. As they enter the hotel room in Cholula, Javier draws the curtains, but Elizabeth immediately opens them complaining of Javier’s obsession with darkened rooms.

The fragmentation and conflict in their lives cripple Javier and Elizabeth. Javier becomes the stereotypical artist manqué, incapable of producing any work of substance. Like her husband, Elizabeth too lacks the wholeness that would enable her to create. The child she aborts stands as the tragic sign of her failure. The couple’s fragmentation and alienation is further manifested in the narrative itself as it records their disjointed conversations, which often degenerate into futile monologues or impossible dialogues between people who cannot hear each other.

While Elizabeth and Javier each represent the other’s opposing double, Fuentes’s doubling artifice extends to the other characters as well. Isabel is clearly Elizabeth’s double. Fuentes underlines this fact by duplicating their names (Isabel is the Spanish equivalent of Elizabeth). Isabel seems to represent a younger Elizabeth, a sort of alternative possibility for her life. Javier is also Franz’s double, but their relationship is far more complex. On one level they are opposites since Franz represents the active strength that the passive Javier lacks. Yet on another level, the two men are almost identical. Javier himself realizes that he is another Franz; his personality is simply latent, not yet fully realized.

The doubling of characters is further complicated by the fact that the characters continually change roles within the novel, Javier becoming Isabel’s lover, and Franz making love to Elizabeth. This change is only one of the innumerable “changes of skin” the characters undergo as they search for the ultimate change of skin, the rebirth that would resolve the dualities that they have come to embody.

Fuentes frequently extends his obsessive doubling of characters to include the narrator himself, who undergoes several “changes of skin” in his relationship to his protagonists. The narrator first appears as an invisible witness who observes the characters entering Cholula and describes their actions. He later appears as a character himself and participates in the lives of Elizabeth and Isabel. Indeed, much of the content of the novel consists of the retelling of incidents which the two female characters have previously related to the narrator or vice versa. The intimate nature of the information the narrator recounts and his degree of knowledge of the women’s lives combine to give the narrator at least the illusion of a limited omniscience in this role. Yet by the novel’s end, the narrator again shifts posture and becomes personified as Freddy Lambert, who manipulates and attempts to control the lives of the four characters who appear merely as his puppets. The narrator appears ultimately as a composite of various narrative possibilities. This shifting narrative stance underlines the artifice inherent in the act of narrating and again points self-referentially to the artificiality of the fictional construct.

Critical Context

A Change of Skin is most noteworthy as Fuentes’s best-known attempt to create an antinovel, a novel diametrically opposed to the traditional realistic novel. Everything about the novel points to its artifice, to its existence as a pure literary fiction with no relationship to the “real world.” The novel’s almost complete chronological disjunction is one obvious mark of artifice. Fuentes’s exaggerated use of flashbacks and disjointed narrative sequences continually reminds the reader that what he is reading is a “story”—an artful, fictional construct which does not in any way attempt to imitate the normal, chronological flow of events. The narrative jumps back and forth, mixing what seem to be factual accounts of Franz’s youth in Czechoslovakia with accounts of Javier’s youth in Mexico, Elizabeth’s childhood in New York, and events of their married life. Yet these “facts” are often impossible to distinguish from the “fictions” of the characters’ imaginings or the pseudofacts of the newspaper accounts that are seemingly arbitrarily interpolated.

The shifting posture of the novel’s narrator and the doubling of its characters are, as has been noted, still other ways in which Fuentes deliberately points out the total artificiality, the total fictitiousness of his tale. The two alternate endings are simply the ultimate rhetorical exaggeration and constitute the final parody of rhetorical technique and subversion of the mimetic principle. The reader is left with a sort of fictional model kit providing him with a number of possible characters, motifs, narrators and endings which he must structure in order to create his own version of the novel. It is finally this demand that the reader become creator/author that distinguishes A Change of Skin and makes it one of the most daring of the “new novels” of contemporary fiction.

Bibliography

Duran, Victor Manuel. A Marxist Reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Puig. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. An interesting study comparing the politics in the writings of these three important Latin American authors. Many of Fuentes’s works are examined in detail.

Helmuth, Chalene. The Postmodern Fuentes. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. A solid overview of Fuentes’s work from a postmodern point of view. Several individual works are discussed, focusing on the issues of identity, national and narrative control, and reconsiderations of the past.

Ibsen, Kristine. Author, Text, and Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Concentrating on four novels, including A Change of Skin, Ibsen offers valuable insight into the problem of communication, which remains one of the central preoccupations throughout the work of Fuentes. Her analysis focuses on the means of textualization by which Fuentes activates his reader and how this coincides with his notions of the role of literature in society.

Pollard, Scott. “Canonizing Revision: Literary History and the Postmodern Latin American Writer.” College Literature 20 (October, 1993): 133-147. Scott analyzes the impact of Latin American narrative on Western literary history after World War II. Focusing on authors Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and Lezama Lima, Scott discusses narratives of conquest and exploration, international modernism, the fashioning of cultural identity, and the primacy of European culture. Offers valuable insight into several of Fuentes’s works.

Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Using Fuentes’s writings as a springboard for his discussion, Van Delden presents a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes’s intellectual development in the context of modern Mexican political and cultural life. Includes extensive notes and a helpful bibliography.