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Jessica A. Folkart
Cristina Fernández Cubas’s short story “La nueva vida” (La habitación de Nona 2015) foregrounds the play between truth and fiction, past and present, and death and identity, where the widowed protagonist finds meaning not in philosophy, but in physics. Widowed in 2007 at age 62, Fernández Cubas focalized this story through the mind of a sixty-something widowed writer from Barcelona, but narrated in the third person. The almost-merger between author/protagonist reflects the distance between voice and vision, and positions the widow as “other.” The story explores what happens when the other—who is essential to the self—disappears, leaving behind an untenable and undefined self who struggles to find existence in space and time. It posits existential questions: how can the beloved other, who is a fundamental part of our identity, cease to exist while the self lives on? How does space-time, with its distinction between then and there and here and now, impact the presence of identity now? Drawing on a theoretical framework of physics, affect theory, and Judith Butler’s work on mourning, this essay probes Fernández Cubas’s examination of time and memory as a lens to understand identity and grief when death has arrived, yet we are left alive.
