topics: |  essay | latin-america | mexico | nobel-1990

This is a powerful and well written reflection on the identity of
Mexico in particular, but in many ways it could be any of the less dominant
nations of the world. It tries is to identify the basic themes in
which the Mexican is different from the western person, typified by
the Norteamericano. The writing is a delight, especially a typical
trick where a metaphor is insinuated first, and then extended slowly
and cleanly. The writing is on the verge of poetry, and like Russell
says about Bergson: "Analogies and similes form a very large part of
the whole process by which he recommends his views to the reader. The
number of similes for life to be found in his works exceeds the number
in any poet known to me." But then, Paz is perhaps a poet first and an
essayist later.

My main critique of the argument is that a) it builds on stereotypes,
and b) that many of the differences cited are essentially not so much
Mexican (in a racial or geocultural sense) as they are the universal
beacons of poverty.  This latter point is why one immediately finds
parallels with other lesser developed nations.]

The two paragraphs above, as well as the points below, were typed in sometime
in the late 80s.  I remember thinking when he got his Nobel, hah - here's
another person I had read before his Nobel.  The only others I think I had
read before their Nobels are Marquez, Golding, Gordimer, Naipaul, Coetzee and
Pamuk.  No, also had read Wole Soyinka...

Extracts

p.9-10:
The adolescent ... is astonished at the fact of his being, and this
astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his
consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there,
disfigured by the water, is his own...

Much the same thing happens to nations and peoples at a certain critical
moment in their development. They ask themselves: What are we, and how
can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are? The answers we
give to these questions are often belied by history, perhaps because
what is called the "genius of a people" is only a set of reactions to a
given stimulus.

...

At one time I thought that my preoccupation with the significance of my
country's individuality -  a preoccupation I share with many others -
was pointless and even dangerous. Instead of asking ourselves
questions, it would be better, I felt, to create, to work with the
realities of our situation. We could not alter those realities by
contemplation, only by plunging ourselves into them. We could
distinguish ourselves from other peoples by our creations rather than by
the dubious originality of our character, which was the result, perhaps,
of constantly changing circumstances. I believed that a work of art or a
concrete action would do more to define the Mexican - not only to
express him but also, in the process, to recreate him - than the most
penetrating description... I agreed with Samuel Ramos that an
inferiority complex influenced our preference for analysis, and that the
meagerness of our creative output was due not so much to the growth of our
critical faculties at the expense of our creativity as it was due to our
instinctive doubts about our abilities.

Home thoughts from abroad

I should confess that many of the reflections in this essay occured to
me outside of Mexico, during a two-year stay in the United States.  I
remember that whenever I attempted to examine North American life,
anxious to discover its meaning, I encountered my own questioning image.
That image, seen against the glittering background of the United States,
was the first and perhaps the profoundest answer which that country gave
to my questions.  - p.12

    When I commented to a Mexican friend on the loveliness of Berkeley, she
    said: "Yes, it's very lovely, but I don't belong here. Even the birds
    speak English. How can I enjoy a flower if I don't know its right name,
    its English name, the name that has fused with its colors and petals,
    the name that's the same thing as the flower? If I say bugambilia to
    you, you think of the bougainvillaea vines you've seen in your own
    village, climbing around an ash tree or hanging from a wall in the
    afternoon sunlight. They're part of your being, your culture." - p.18

Lies as fantasy

The North Americans are credulous and we are believers; they love fairy
tales and detective stories and we love myths and legends. The Mexican
tells lies because he delights in fantasy, or because he is desperate,
or because he wants to rise above the sordid facts of his life; the
North American does not tell lies, but he substitutes social truth for
the real truth, which is always disagreeable. We get drunk in order to
confess; they get drunk in order to forget... We are suspicious and they
are trusting. We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full
of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate.
They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they
enjoy their inventions. They believe in hygiene, health, work and
contentment, but perhaps they have never experienced true joy, which is
an intoxication, a whirlwind. - p.23-24.

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of
reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable
process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas,
are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches and the
schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American
mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant
in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature. This sort of
conspiracy cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions.
Spontaneity revenges itself in a thousand subtle or terrible ways. The
mask that replaces the dramatic mobility of the human face is benevolent
and courteous but empty of emotion, and its set smile is almost
lugubrious: it shows the extent to which intimacy can be devastated by
the arid victory of principles over instincts. - p.25

quoting Jose Gorostiza, about the solitude of the North American:
Lost in a "wilderness of mirrors." - p.21

The rule of law: Sometimes form chokes us

Sometimes form chokes us. During the past century the liberals tried
vainly to force the realities of the country into the straitjacket of
the constitution of 1857. The results were the dictatorship of Porfirio
Diaz and the Revolution of 1910. In a certain sense the history of
Mexico, like that of every Mexican, is a struggle between the forms and
formulas that have been imposed on us and the explosions with which our
individuality avenges itself. Form has rarely been an original creation,
an equilibrium arrived at through our instincts and desires rather than
at their expense. On the contrary, our moral and juridical forms often
conflict with our nature, preventing us from expressing ourselves and
frustrating our true wishes. - p.32-3

--
[About the constitutions of Spanish American countries]

In Europe and the United States these principles corresponded to
historical reality, for they were an expression of the rise of the
bourgeoisie, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the
destruction of the old regime. In Spanish America they merely served as
modern trappings for the survival of the colonial system. This liberal,
democratic ideology, far from expressing our concrete historical
situation, disguised it, and the political lie established itself almost
constitutionally. The moral damage it has caused is incalculable; it has
affected profound areas of our existence. We move about this lie with
complete naturalness. For over a hundred years we have suffered from
regimes that have been at the service of feudal oligarchies but have
utilized the language of freedom.  - p.122

[The point about evolving a national consensus form of government is
perhaps the most powerful - to a large extent is Japan's evolution of
its own way of doing things is at least a natural outcome of its own
thinking, and not under any artificially imposed intellectual climate.
In this connection, Hiren Gosain (book on 19th c. Bengali culture)
makes the point that the growth of the intelligentsia in a subject
country is inevitably alienated from the corpus of the people; hence
the decisions that were made and the concepts of self-government as
they evolved during the freedom struggle and immediately after
independence were largely aloof from the overall reality of India.
(With the possible exception of Gandhi, and that also in this early
years, most Indian leaders had very little connection with the Indian
peasant.) Also, Russell on the effect of Rome on Greek thought: "Under
the Roman domination the Greeks lost the self-confidence that belongs
to political liberty, and in losing it acquired a paralysing respect
for their predecessors. The Roman soldier who killed Archimedes was a
symbol of the death of original thought that Rome caused throughout
the Hellenic World."]

We can see now what the revolution undertook to accomplish. It tried,
within a short time and with a minimum of human sacrifice, to complete a
task that had taken the European bourgeoisie more than a hundred and
fifty years. -p.177

[What are the differences with the Meiji Restoration of Japan in the
1860's? ]

Desire and loss: the sense of solitude

[Pretense] eventually becomes a superior - because more artistic - form
of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both
what we are not and what we would like to be. - p.40

The foetus is at one with the world around it... When we are born we
break the ties that joined us to the blind life we lived in the maternal
womb, where there is no gap between desire and satisfaction. We sense
the change as a separation and loss, an abandonment, as a fall into a
strange or hostile atmosphere. Later this primitive sense of loss
becomes a feeling of solitude, and still later it becomes awareness...
All our forces strive to abolish our solitude. - 192

--

When I was in India, witnessing the never-ending quarrels between Hindus
and Muslims, I asked myself more than once this question: What accident
or misfortune of history cause two religions so obviously irreconcilable
as Hinduism and Muhammadanism to coexist in the same society? The
presence of the purest and most intransigent form of monotheism in the
bosom of a civilization that has elaborated the most complex polytheism
seemed to me a verification of the indifference with which history
perpetrates its paradoxes. - Mexico and the United States (p.357),
originally in The New Yorker magazine, Sept 17, 1979.

Festivals

[Other points: The fiesta's role in the preservation and the release of
the Mexican soul (Chapter: The day of the dead).
Marriage is preferred by society, and love and its
testimony, poetry, is persecuted; prostitution is either tolerated or
given official blessing (p.192).]