ABSTRACT
Lia Chara’s Agua (2021) follows an unnamed narrator–protagonist as she moves between social worlds: the first is a medical institution, in which she visits Flora, a mentally unstable dependant. The other is aquatic: a public pool where she meets another woman, who sexually and psychologically reconnects the narrator with herself. During days and nights together, the narrator’s subjective time coheres and accelerates; like the novella’s title, her time doesn’t fly but flows. This engenders a dynamic temporality embedded in explicit reflections, as well as discourse, structure, and aquatic imagescape, which mobilises the ‘stream of consciousness’ Jamesian metaphor, describing time as it flows through conscious experience. This chapter argues that the interlocking halves of the novella and the character transformation which takes place across them should be understood through intersubjective time, produced by interactions between the narrator and her lover, ‘medusa’ (jellyfish), in a movement which traverses queer desire in the Latin American space. Similarly pivoting on these axes of time and desire, tense and tension, ‘Water’ by Ellen van Neerven offers a productive parallel. In each narrative, the erotically charged interactions between the protagonists and their lovers create a shift in time which defines each character and their story.
