Indeed, perhaps the Holocaust was the first really harrowing example of such things being captured on film for the world, and posterity, to see. In the modern age, we are virtually all familiar with the experience of helplessly watching tragedy and disaster unfold on the rolling television news: separated by a screen, we are unable to do anything except watch in horror.
‘The other side of life’ is a key phrase in the story, and Allende does much here with the symbolism of the television screen and the news cameras. But even with the two of them separated by the glass of that screen, she can tell that ‘something fundamental had changed in him.’ Indeed, she sees a new side to him which he had never shared with her. Indeed, Carlé is literally on the television, with Eva watching him via a television screen: ‘the other side of life’, as she puts it at one point. In ‘And of Clay We Are Created’, we are convinced of the sincerity and profundity of Carlé’s emotional change, despite the fact that we, via his lover Eva, are witnessing the change from the outside. Epiphanies in modern fiction are often open to interpretation and analysis: ambiguous in their significance, they can be taken as heartfelt and permanent changes of perspective or (more cynically) as short-lived and even performative shifts in response to an immediate experience, with the implication being that once the immediacy of the experience is past, the character will forget its lessons and revert to their earlier attitudes. Can we label Carlé’s emotional response to Azecuna’s plight an epiphany: that coming to consciousness, or realisation, which characters in modern short stories often experience? Perhaps.
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