Symbols and Mythical Meanings in Fuentes Chac Mool - Essay Example

Symbols and Mythical Meanings in Fuentes’ “Chac Mool” As one of the most original and prestigious Latin American Carlos Fuentes exemplifiesin his works the use of highly symbolic imagery that reflects not only the history of Mexico, but also its deep and mystical past. As a precursor to the literary El Boom era of the 1960s, and to the works of such noted authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fuentes work surely falls into that category known in literary circles as magical realism. A story is kept alive by generations of readers interpreting and reinterpreting its main symbols. By identifying and understanding symbols, readers gain new interpretations of the story each time they read it. Beyond its genre as a rather frightening horror story, “Chac Mool,” perhaps Fuentes most famous short story as most of his work is rife with symbolism. The story, while undoubtedly surrealistic, is structured as a narrator reading from the main character’s [Filiberto’s] diary. The diary tells the story of Filiberto’s acquisition of a Chac Mool statue, its subsequent coming to life, and its ultimate dire impact on Filiberto. In the end, it is the reader who must decide what the reality of the symbolism contained in the story may be. Filiberto is presented as a rather sad, unsuccessful and alienated figure, one who has never reached his potential and is constantly musing as to why. He lives alone in a large crumbling house his parents have left him as inheritance, a symbol of his inability to part with the past. “But I can’t leave this big old house, certainly too big for me alone, a bit mournful in its Porfirian architecture, but it’s the only inheritance and memory of my parents. I don’t think I could stand to see a soda-fountain with a jukebox in the basement and a house of decorations on the ground floor” (Fuentes 3). The latter statement is clearly symbolic of Filiberto’s unwillingness to let go of the past. Filiberto here is a symbolic euphemism for Mexico itself, which he often presents as a nation unfulfilled—once glorious but now past its prime and stuck in its past. Upon his death from drowning, told at the beginning of the story, the narrator writes, “Clearly, we know that in his youth he had swum well, but now, at forty, and in as bad shape as he seemed to be...” (Fuentes 1). Chac Mool, as a creature from Mexico’s past is the symbol of a vicious civilization to which modern Mexico is still very much tied. The Mayan god as depicted in the story is: “a cruel implacable taskmaster, eats human flesh and finally ends up revealing himself as a grotesque, painted caricature of human sensuality and narcissism” (Jaeck 312). Fuentes also uses the image as a symbol of the country’s backwardness, acknowledging the power Pre-Columbian gods and old primitive ideas have on the progress of modern Mexican society. “As Filiberto can not bring himself to leave the old house...so Mexico can not forsake the gods, myths and superstitions...residing just below the surface of a contemporary reality” (Jaeck 314). He is also using Chac Mool as “cruel implacable taskmaster who eats human flesh” as a connecting symbol to Mexico’s Catholicism. He [Filiberto], a backward sort, criticizes his friend for speaking ill of the religion and insisting that Mexicans wouldn’t worship Christ if it were not for the blood and gore involved in the image of the crucifixion. In this sense Chac Mool as a religious icon is a symbolic replacement for Christianity. Other authors reinforce Fuentes’ use of this symbolism in the story as a true measure of his place in the Mexican literary establishment. "The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present, that presence" (Octavio Paz from his 1990 Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, para. 6). Fuentes meets this expectation with ease and a seemingly natural sense. As the story progresses we see Chac Mool evolving from a stone idol of myth to a exaggerated symbol of everything wrong and false in modern Mexico. The narrator, upon arriving at the house after Filiberto’s untimely death, is shocked at the visage who answers his door. “A yellow Indian appeared, in a house robe, with a scarf. His appearance couldn’t have been more repulsive; he gave forth an odor of cheap lotion; his face, powdered, trying to cover the wrinkles...” (Fuentes 7). Conversely, during the course of the story, Filiberto, on the other hand seems to devolve, becoming more childlike, more primitive--his writing is scribbled, he uses a simple notebook that a child might use to keep a class journal. He and Chac Mool are in role reversal--symbols as it were of Mexico still primitive but struggle to put on a modern face. In Filiberto’s case, he is a modern man unfulfilled and sinking irrevocably back into his primitive roots toward death. The conclusion: “they are both [Mexico of the past and present] ruined” (Hernandez, Day 9). A less esoteric and easier to follow symbolism is perhaps Filiberto’s tragic end in drowning, a reference, no doubt, to the rain god. The use of the rain god by Fuentes symbolizes another of the author’s views that he explores not only in “Chac Mool” but in other of this works as well. That is the disjunction between man and nature and the notion that man depends on nature for his survival but must also exploit it, “and in doing so he also violates it” (van Deldan 53). Ancient Mayan religion relied heavily upon nature for survival. Filiberto then represents the symbol of modern resistance to that cycle. The universe, too, functions in a logical, cyclical, and predictable way. If humans do not make an effort to fit into the cycle, the cycle will destroy them, as Chac Mool does Filiberto. Filiberto does not like the fact that Chac Mool rants when it does not rain, and goes about making “terrible noises... He complains all day, he has the faucets running, there isn’t a dry centimeter left in the house. I have to sleep all bundled up, and I’ve asked him not to drench the hall any more” (Fuentes 5). This passage symbolizes man’s past battles with nature as well as his modern ones as he seeks to thwart the natural processes. It was not really Chac Mool who destroyed Filiberto, but his own resistance to nature. He resists the future, stagnates in the present, and dwells in the past. Because Chac Mool is the rain god he is the symbol of something Filiberto needs, whether he likes it or not. That over time Chac Mool turns into a mirror image of the consummate and vacuous modern man is an interesting symbolic twist—nature giving in to the modernity and not appearing very attractive in the process. Fuentes often writes of mirrors into history, and his use here of this concept is not surprising in the symbolic sense. While Filiberto is ultimately destroyed, he has also in reality destroyed Chac Mool. Mexico has neither succeeded in becoming a working modern nation; nor has it succeeded in preservation in any real sense its past. Conclusion One of the basic elements of magic realism is obviously text that is very heavy in symbolism. In the case of “Chac Mool” the symbolism is largely historically and socially-based. Some are fairly obvious; some takes a form more esoteric that needs a bit of historical background to decipher. However, when it comes to man and nature, past and present, beliefs and myths, symbolic or not, are difficult to relinquish and provide us with a sense of who we are and what we are worth in anonymous modern society, Works Cited Fuentes, Carlos. Chac Mool. Trans. Jonah Katz. No city, publisher, date. Published online from web site: http://web.mit.edu/jikatz/www/ChacMool.pdf Hernandez, Jorge. G. Sun, Stone and Shadows. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, The Big Read (June 16, 2008). Retrieved April 13, 2010 from: Jaeck, Lois Marie. Houses of Horror, or Magical Kingdoms: Past Times Revisited with Miguel Angel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortazar. Ciencia Ergo Sum. 6:3, (November, 1999 312-318. Retrieved April 15, 2010 from: Paz, Octavio. Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990. Trans. Anthony Stanton. Ed. Sture Allén. Singapore:World Scientific Publishing Co. (1993). Retrieved April 15, 2010 from: Nobel Prize.org: Van Deldan, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico and Modernity. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Read More