Outline for “The Labyrinths of Modernity:  Mexico -- Mid 20th Century “

Bruce-Novoa

 

Reading:  Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, May 23-4

 

I.  The Post-Revolution Official Discourse created a Mexican School of Expression

1. "Mexican Nation” represented in its “popular” identity:

            a. Rural spirit, of lower, “noble” classes

            b. “Social(ist) realism”—didactic, political, committed to reformists social issues,

 figurative base.

2.  History read as progress based on material improvement:

            a. The Revolution saved Mexico and gave it back its propuse.

            b. Drawinian “Survival of fittest” was replaced by Marxist Class Struggle

            c. Socialism was the new ideal

d.  Mexico constantly struggled against outside influences:  Local vs. Foreign

 

II. Muralism as a major means of conveying Government's ideology

            Case example:  Rivera

1.      Key national building were transformed to teach the lesson of the

successful revolution as the logical fulfillment of history.

     2.  Muralism exported the image of Revolutionary Mexico.

     3.  Rivera made commercial compromises with capitalist sponsors.

4.      Muralism became an attraction for international audience: tourism, students,

           Converts, academics.

5.      Commercialization of murals

 

III.  Mexico's Golden Age of Film:  Same ideology.

 

IV. Mid-Century Reaction:  desire to reread Mexico through a different lens.

 

V. Octavio Paz' The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950.  General Concerns

1.      Misreadings as history or anthropology.

2.      Paz was a poet/intellectual and a great synthesizer of contemporary thought.

3.      His style is never direct.

a.       The essay's surface features the same characteristics as Paz finds in Mexicans:  indirect, guarded, secretive, revealing only at special moments, but then in images that can be mislead.

b.      Prose vs. Poetry:  Paz prefers the poetry as more dynamic, so he uses poetic imagery in the essay to create a net of interrelated images that convey the secret message.

c.       Paz rejects "history" as a simple list of events with cause-effect narratives.

d.      Paz favors psycho-mythological history:  a rereading of the past through a culture's archetypal elements.

e.       Paz believes all cultures participate in universal patterns of life, but each  in its particular space/time and with its own attitudes.

f.        History only makes sense when read through these culturally specific archetypal elements.

 

VI. The Labyrinth of Solitude, Chapter Analysis

  1. The Pachuco and Other Extremes
    1. Paz sets up the book within the Narcissus myth:  Mexico looks at itself to see and understand itself—of course this is already within the title image of the labyrinth—the voyage into the unknown to confront the monster.
    2. Then he evokes the United States to create a sense of Mexican identity by contrast.
    3. Each has its own masks of conformity; neither can reconcile itself to life as change and free flow—a return to the chaos of the natural condition.
    4. Mexicans, as all men, are alone, but they seek communion.       

 

  1. Mexican Masks – Life as Combat
    1. Everything Mexicans do constitutes a defensive mask to avoid opening themselves to others:  both men and women are hermetic. 
    2. Pretend to be something or someone else to avoid revelation.
    3. Love is no remedy, because there is never revelation, only substitution of the image of love.
    4. Deny existence to other and to themselves:  Nobody, invisible, silent.

 

  1. Ch.3 Day of the DEAD
    1. Fiestas suspend normal time to allow the eruption of the usually repressed expression of emotion, of life—hence they are supposedly liberating and regenerative.  "Fiesta denies society as an organic system of differentiated forms and principles, but affirms it as a source of creative energy . . .  re-creation, the opposite of recreation. . ."
    2. But Mexican fiestas are destructive explosions, without communion;

like skyrockets: noisy explosions, but they disappear without producing or changing anything.

    1. DEATH:  meaningful in old religions, both Aztec and Catholic, but modern death is not--no personal death because there is no personal life.

 

  1. CH. 4 The Sons of La Malinche.
    1. Explore forbidden words for clues to Mexican character.

                                                              i.       Chingar, to wound, kill, ruin, rip open, violate, fuck.

                                                            ii.      Gran Chingón:  the Macho male—closed:  Father.

                                                          iii.      Chingada:  female, opened by male: Mother.

                                                          iv.      In Mexico you either Chingar or you are Chingado.

    1. Chingón similar to the Conquistador—all men of power in Mexico.
    2. Christ is the positive Male:  He sacrificed himself for the suffering people.
    3. Christ equals Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, who was killed by Cortes, the Chingón/Conquistador.
    4. To return to Cuauhtémoc/Christ would constitute the resurrection of the lost connection to the pre-European Mexico.
    5. Guadalupe, the Virgin Mother who consoles the orphaned Mexican, is  opposed to the Chingada, the violated, abject mother, abject. 
    6. Chingada:  the incarnation of the feminine condition, always open to violation.
    7. In the Conquest, the Chingada was the historical figure of Cortes' interpretor, La Malinche
    8. In rejecting Cortes and Malinche, Mexicans reject their origins, and return to solitude.

 

  1. Ch. 5.  The Conquest and Colonialism
    1. The Aztecs, an advanced society in its youthful prime, accepted the Spaniards' arrival as a sign of having been abandoned, orphaned by their gods.
    2. Spain, while subjugating the Indians, brought Catholicism, a universal order open to Indian participation.
    3. Indians created a mixture of old and new religious systems.
    4. Spain, vital at the start, later imposed an order that ossified over time.
    5. 17th Century Mexico was peaking in creativity when Spain had shut down to change or innovation.
    6. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:  Writer of genius.

                                                               i.      Intellectual of liberal, modern scope

                                                             ii.      Explores life's irresolvable problems for sheer joy.

                                                            iii.      Seeks a total order of knowledge, yet acknowledges its impossibility.

    1. Sor Juana was condemned, isolated, and orphaned.
    2. Sor Juana is the aperture to the lost colonial world, and through her to Cuauhtémoc and the lost pre-Columbian source of the original Mexico.

 

VI. The Labyrinth of Solitude, Poetic Analysis

1.      Paz begins early to circulate a set of key images that he will modulate through the text, weaving an intricate web of references beneath the prosaic mask of the prose information.

a.       Mirror/water--Narcissus

b.      Mask

c.       Wound

d.      Fireworks or Skyrocket

e.       Shout.

f.        Flower

2.      These images function like the secret center of communion:  the aperture to the natural world of harmony often seen as chaos from the perspective of order.

3.      A sub-textual or palimpsestic line of revelation in which the underlying problem in Mexico—as everywhere in modern society—is the inability of man to communicate with his other in a full loving way.

4.      Loves is to become one with the other in mutual giving and without fear or reservation

5.      Models of redemptive communication are the Pachuco, women, Sor Juana, Cuauhtemoc, Christ.