SURREALISM AND THE MYTH: POETICS OF OCTAVIO PAZ’S OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY
Keywords:
Octavio Paz, Obsidian Butterfly, Aztec mythology, Surrealist woman, Surrealism, myth, metaphor, philosophy of Mexican identity.Abstract
The article focuses on the interaction of the Indian culture and Surrealism in the oeuvre of Octavio Paz. Analyzing the poem in prose Obsidian Butterfly from the book Eagle or Sun? (1951), the author shows how Paz, similarly to the Surrealists, imitates a myth by means of realized metaphors, creating a generalized image of an Indian goddess and at the same time – a Mexican variant of the “surrealist woman”. However, an analogy that Paz puts into practice cannot be perceived as an arbitrary literary technique due to immanence of a peculiar “surrealism” in the creative thinking of the Indians. Shaping a “new myth”, Paz endows it with a universal, as well as specifically Mexican meaning. The historical dynamics of Itzpapalotl’s image gives him a possibility to reveal a synthetic plurality of the generic feminine principle by exploiting one of the characteristic features of the Mesoamerican mythological systems: an interchangeability of the Magna Mater’s hypostases, all of which will be absorbed by the Christian image of the Virgin of Guadalupe during the Colonial period. The title image of the poem can also be interpreted as a personification of the two poles of an archetypical Mexican woman, as Paz describes her in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950, 1959): the heroine can be seen as a «violated Mother», a metaphor of the Spanish Conquest, and at the same time – as a mother-consoler, in whose bosom an original harmony can be attained. Another interpretative level can be metatextual: Obsidian Butterfly is the poetry itself. Here once again a Surrealist meaning conjugates with Indian: “Surrealist butterflies” is the name given to the instructions and maxims spread by the Bureau of Surrealist Research; while in the nahuatl texts an image of a butterfly can be found associated with poetic work.References
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