Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #5: latin america 159
of works which do not even mention the concept nevertheless embody it
in their structure or view of the world or both. Is it merely a fashion which
has turned into a tradition? Or simply the infl uence of Jorge Luis Borges
(1899–1986), author of the celebrated Fictions (Ficciones, 1944), who almost
patented these concepts in elaborating his own conception of what reading,
writing, thinking, and culture are? Or that of Octavio Paz (1914–1998), who
has applied the concept archetypally to the question of Latin America’s historical
identity in his infl uential Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)? 9
As we have seen, the colonial origin of “Latin” America left its people
with a traumatic self-conception whose inherent dualism inevitably
heightened the “natural” human tendency to think and advance by means
of contrasts, differences, and opposites. Latin America’s history can thus be
interpreted in retrospect as a fi eld of forking paths, to refashion Borges’s infl
uential metaphor (“The Garden of Forking Paths” is one of his best-known
stories), with the choice between “Europe” and “America” inaugurating
and preordaining a whole series of later choices as the determinants of race,
nation, class and gender construct, reconstruct and deconstruct individual
and collective identities.
Labyrinths and Mirrors
A labyrinth may be natural or man-made, above or below ground—the
Ulyssean or Thesean variants—designed as a puzzle, entertainment, trap
or prison. It may be real or imaginary, metaphor, symbol, or myth. It may
be essentially symmetrical, or spiral, or have no discernible structure: its
outer boundaries may likewise be of any shape. It may have a central focus,
or several, which may or may not be at its topographical heart, which may
give meaning to the whole, or rather to the journey or journeys which it
implies, offers or demands. Most often, perhaps, one associates it with an
underground quest, in the darkness, through spiralling corridors, in which
one may easily get lost, downwards towards some intimidating centre; nocturnal,
the space of our worst dreams but also the arena of our greatest
triumphs and discoveries, including—perhaps above all—our identity and
the meaning of our life. But then we fi nd ourselves asking: is this an origin
and purpose rediscovered or a name conquered for oneself? For Freud, and
above all Jung, the labyrinth is, archetypally, uterine, symbolizing a simultaneous
longing to return to the maternal origin and fear of regression to
the preconscious world of chaos; or, more historically, the site of a journey
from a dark, enveloping matriarchal consciousness into the light of knowledge
and patriarchal civilization. Needless to say, the problem with this for