‘The terrible convention known as time’: Chronological distortions in the narrative of Cristina Fernández Cubas

One of the fundamental means of expressing the fantastic is through a transgression of our conventional vision of time as inevitably successive. Such temporal transgressions also challenge the very notion of causality, itself an essential means of understanding and representation in the real. Time is a central theme in the works of Cristina Fernández Cubas, where it features in the exploration of memory and in portrayals of the past as being in a conflictual relationship with the present. This confrontation with memory in the writing of Fernández Cubas often results in different interpretations of the past and, as a consequence, of the present inhabited by the characters in her stories. In these works, time is also frequently associated with the motif of the journey in the subversion of a chronological order. The journey into the fantastic thus becomes a method of introspection and a means by which to search for a lost identity. In illustrating these points, this article will focus primarily on the novel El columpio and the short stories ‘Los altillos de Brumal’ and ‘La nueva vida’.