As I stated in my last blog post, I am going to conclude Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, but I will be figuring out what I want to look at in my final series of blog posts next week and present it the following week. Unlike last post, I mentioned that I was going to look at Paz's work but I did not state why per say. Although my project is looking at how the Day of the Dead represents the Mexico's identification with death, Paz's work looks to understand the various aspects of Mexican identity past and present. His work does an excellent job as it looks as various facets that pertain to Mexican philosophy and I would absolutely recommend this to anyone based solely on its philosophical and poetic discussions. However, I read through the last half of this work and found it focused less on the identification of death and more of the political background to the idea of solitude as it relates to Mexican identity. For the purpose of this blog, I want to focus solely on the aspects that help me understand how death relates to Mexican identity and how this may relate to the Day of the Dead.
One of the big discussions in Chapter Four was about the symbolic representations that death can present to the Mexican in solitude. The first major example I found was how Paz demonstrated that women both represent the beginning of life and have some connection with death themes. As Paz puts it, "She is an image of both fecundity and death. In almost every culture the goddesses of creation are also goddesses of destruction." (Paz 66) He also demonstrates how the Mexican people have to use unconventional ways to express themselves, perhaps the Day of the Dead could be an excellent example. I feel this way because when discussed the opening up of the Mexican expression he said, "It is revealing that our intimacy never flowers in a natural way, only when incited by fiestas, alcohol or death." (Paz 70) With lines such as this, it is no surprise that many of the Mexican people turn to the Day of the Dead for expression.
The last couple of examples reflect how the Mexican people understood death regarding their ancestry with the Mexica and Catholicism. Paz used an example of Jesus' Crucifixion to express the duality of life and death that the Mexican people believe in. With this description Paz believes that, "on the one hand, the wounds are flowers, pledges of resurrection; on the other, they are reiteration that life is the sorrowful mask of death." (Paz 83) The reason Paz uses the example of the Crucifixion of Jesus is because of what Catholicism provided for the Mexican people. According to Paz, "Catholicism re-established their ties with the world and the other world. It gave them back a sense of their place on earth; it nurtured their hopes and justified their lives and deaths." (Paz 102) The Mexica and other groups in colonial Mexico needed a new sense of unity after the fall of the Aztec empire and what they believed as the betrayal of their gods and goddesses. When the Mexica felt the moment of immobility from conquest, "which is also the moment of vertigo, the Aztec people raise their eyes toward the heavens: the celestial omens are adverse, and the people feel the attraction of death." (Paz 94) In other words, the Mexica may have accepted their death and allowed Spanish conquest due to this betrayal.
Yet, Paz believes that there is a way in which the Mexicans can be able to connect with the the Mexica past. This example would revolve around the lost tomb of Cuauhtemoc , the last Mexica emperor before the fall of Tenochtitlan. "The mystery of his burial place is one of their [Mexicans] obsessions. To discover it would mean nothing less than the return to our origins, to reunite ourselves with our ancestry, to break out of our solitude. It would be resurrection." (Paz 84) The idea of uniting with the origins of the ancient past is something that Paz believes was a major factor during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th Century. For the Mexicans, "...it was a movement attempting to reconquer our past, to assimilate it and make it live in the present." (Paz 147)
The final point that Paz focused on was how certain fiestas in Mexico allow the Mexican people to break from the ideas of solitude within their culture. As Paz put it, "myths and fiestas, whether secular or religious, permit man to emerge from his solitudes and become one with creation." (Paz 211) I believe this may indirectly apply to the Day of the Dead, since it is a fiesta within Mexican culture that may be viewed as secular or religious depending on your perspective. Since Paz was always discussing throughout this work that the single Mexican seeks to escape the labyrinth of solitude, it makes since that a fiesta such as the Day of the Dead is a way for everyone to join a communion that embraces and celebrates the dead. For the "...religious ritual, and the constant presence of the dead, create[s] a center of relationships which restrict independent action, thus protecting the individual from solitude and the group from dissolution." (Paz 205) Without the presence of fiestas such as the Day of the Dead, the individual might feel a sense of isolation which may lead that person closer to the realm of death. As Paz said, "permanent exile, then, is the same as a death sentence." (206)
Source cited:
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1961
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