Many Ways to Remember: Layered Time in Mora's House of Houses

That Pat Mora arranges her memoir House of Houses according to a Western secular calendar seems apparent at first browse. At first reading, however, this orderly notion of a "representative year" breaks down, for the book begins not with January or even with a preface or introduction, but with a title chapter. Immediately, therefore, the essentiality of the Western calendar comes into question. The title chapter establishes that Mora will shed the restrictions of time and logic: her house is a dream house in which the dead walk alongside the living, the past is simultaneous with the present, and the future is so certain that she can name grandchildren yet to be conceived. Why, then, should Mora impose a calendar at all? An answer is suggested in past comments by Mora herself. During an interview conducted by Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak and Nancy Sullivan, Mora reiterates her fascination with concepts of space and geography as they help define a person's psychological landscape, a zone she refers to as "one's internal rooms, issues of the psyche" or "the world of dreams, mental space" (145). In House of Houses, she interjects time into the definition of this region. In response to her own query, "How much does our body know that we know not?" (2), she declares that the inner body, the house of self, knows all because the psyche remembers all. "Through generations," she writes, "sun, wind, rain, hands, voices, and dreams create and alter this place pregnant with possibilities in a landscape as familiar to me as my body" (4). Fluid and accepting, the inner space carries one's knowledge as well as one's still unsettled questions. Within it, the people, stories, fears, joys, doubts, and certainties of many lives rise bidden and unbidden to surround, interpret, and absorb a new experience. This "house" is the repository for all that creates a sense of heritage, belonging, and identity. Mora further concludes that people both influence and are influenced by the psychological construct in which they are raised. The house of self is a living, reciprocating entity impervious to time, a grouping that "nest[s] like bodies inside one another" (3). The notions that time is concentric rather than linear and that all of our past is simultaneously available to us are reiterated throughout House of Houses by the foregrounding of landscape and generations. Insisting that we internalize our pasts, Mora writes, "the landscape imprints itself; and when we can't see the world that is home ... we yearn to see the shapes and vistas that live in our interior" (25). Viewing her family as a "house" in her imagination, she describes a home of concentric design. Orchards surround this home, which itself presents a smooth adobe wall to the outside but allows guests to penetrate increasingly more intimate zones until they reach the very heart of the family. In this house, the rooms open onto a covered porch, which in turn opens onto a garden, which in turn surrounds the family life source, a central fountain. The internal sphere is a separate world of flowing water, living greenery, shifting shade, and timeless intimacy: a personal space, the womb of the family. Investigating such a space presents a significant writing challenge. Mora's readers, receptive as they may be, live outside her body house and must be invited in before they can learn its geography. Even as they learn to accept the cumulative presence of people and influences in her inner world, they need to know which characters and events preceded the others. Mora must consolidate her extended family even while she preserves the family's numerous personalities; their ethnic, social, religious, and political diversity; their sometimes polarized generations; their gender issues; and their levels of information and misinformation. She has to demonstrate that the inner space allows living and dead to exist simultaneously, for the line between corporeality and spirituality is hazy there. …