The interaction between literature and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an important factor in the transition from realism to modernism. Empirical psychology, as developed by William James and Ernst Mach, unmasked the traditional concept of “self” as a delusion, replacing it by a new emphasis on the intentionality of consciousness. Writers such as Henry James, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch had direct contact with empirical psychology and experimented overtly with modes of rendering this new understanding of consciousness; others, like Alfred Doblin or Virginia Woolf, while less directly influenced by empiricism, nonetheless reflect in their novels a similar attempt to abolish the “self” as a discrete entity. In this respect they differ radically from other modern novelists (e.g., Joyce and Faulkner), and they also resolve quite differently the technical problem of presenting consciousness in fiction.

Mystery and mystery texts dominate Terra nostra, Fuentes’ novel about absolute authority. Both El Señor, the protagonist who covets eternal power, and Fuentes, the author who appears to assert his privilege through the fiction, are betrayed by their own strategies. Failing to recognize his inability to exert absolute control over history, El Señor, trying to master a set of mysterious texts he believes hold the key to his power, attempts to mold reality to his own desires. Although Fuentes understands the impossibility of creating a truly simultaneous text, he nevertheless tries to realize his plan through the novel’s complex narrative network. That network, however, needs the support of a linear mystery fiction, which thwarts the reader’s desire for solutions but fails to triumph over the bounds of literature itself. Thus the assertions of absolute authority by El Señor and Fuentes reveal the very powerlessness they would disprove.