Risa y penitencia - Luz Aurora Pimentel

originally written as a prologue to a book about laughter. 6 The centre-piece of this meditationon laughter is the little clay head. Around it, like around the sun, are orbited the mostheterogeneous references to different cultures and ages in order to display the various, evencontradictory, meanings of laughter. The sun-like little face radiates in space and time, itsenigmatic smile giving a concrete reality not only to the exploration of abstract ideas onlaughter, on the meaning of life and death, but also to the poet’s cultural and existentialidentity. The main body of the essay is made up of fragmentary information that is graduallyintegrated in a sort of cultural theory of laughter: from the enigmatic, impassive smile of thestatues representing the Greek gods, through the mythic origin of laughter in the Japanesegoddess Uzumé’s obscene dance that forces the sun to rise, to the modern concept of laughterin Baudelaire—laughter as “inseparable from sadness” (129), divided laughter, laughtergnawed by irony or blasphemy (130).Leading this conceptual array, Paz’ scholarly reflections on pre-Columbian art as theembodiment of complex conceptual notions linking laughter with play, ritual, and sacrifice,throw a new light on the concept and cultural function of laughter, unifying notions that havebeen thought of as contradictory: joy and penance, sacrifice and laughter.Si el trabajo exige la abolición de la risa, el rito la congela en rictus. Losdioses juegan y crean el mundo; al repetir ese juego, los hombres danzan ylloran, ríen y derraman sangre. El rito es un juego que reclama víctimas. Noes extraño que la palabra danza, entre los aztecas, significase tambiénpenitencia. Regocijo que es penitencia, fiesta que es pena, la ambivalenciadel rito culmina en el sacrificio. Una alegría sobrehumana ilumina el rostrode la víctima. (128)If work demands the abolition of laughter, ritual freezes it in a grimace. Thegods play and create the world; as they re-enact that game, men dance andcry, laugh and bleed. Ritual is the game that claims victims. It is significantthat the word dance, among the Azteczs, also meant penance. Joy that ispenance, a feast that is sorrow. The ambivalence of ritual ends in sacrifice.A superhuman joy lights up the victim’s face. 76 Magia de la risa: textos de Octavio Paz y Alfonso Medellín Zenil, fotografías de Francisco Berevido.Colección de Arte de la Universidad Veracruzana, México, 1962. (cited in Paz, 1995, 118)7 All English translations of quoted passages are mine