TIME,MEMORY, AND MELANCHOLIA IN ELENA GARRO’S LOS RECUERDOS DEL PORVENIR Isaac Gabriel Salgado Bard College at Simon’s Rock Abstract Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir presents a time that appears to be stuck and characters desperate to break free. Aspects of the novel’s use of time and memory have been traditionally read as representative of either indigenous or feminine temporalities, but while Recuerdos has been described as melancholic there has not been a thorough analysis of the text in terms of this aspect. This paper will present an argument for Recuerdos as a text largely marked by a melancholic tendency, as well as an exposition of what this tendency signifies. Time and memory, beyond merely reflecting alternate subject positions, create an anxious desire to live new possibilities while at the same time abolishing any space where these may occur. I hope that by focusing on how the novel is structured through melancholia, I can highlight the way in which Garro deploys these concepts in service of its tragic finale. Scholarship on Latin American magical realist texts has noted the pres- ence of their particular engagements with time as a common way that the magical dispositif is enacted. Writing specifically on Recuerdos del por- venir in Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, Jean Franco comments “The novel often shifts into a different time warp, and this is evocative of Latin American temporality where different temporal modes (cyclical, linear) and different historical modes often coexist” (134). What appears as the “Latin American” use of time has been attributed to the dual existence of Western and indigenous cosmologies in works of magical re- alism (Hart and Ouyang 6–7; Schroeder 6–8). In the case of Recuerdos, the question of whether its use of time reflects a particular feminine tempo- rality has also been raised (Kaminsky 39–80). Amy Kaminsky’s excellent Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writ- ers follows a psychoanalytic approach drawn from Kristeva to explore various presentations of time within the novel. She identifies three tempo- ralities which she articulates through the framework of the semiotic and the symbolic. Monumental and cyclical times roughly correspond with the undifferentiated world of the semiotic whereas linear time is associated with gendered symbolic existence. Kaminsky is quick to warn about the facility with which these binaries seem to fit together. Her argument is pre- cisely against certain feminist interpretations that misread Kristeva and tie C  2015 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 77