A Mestizo of the Mind: Maodun in the Writings of Octavio Paz

In his Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz describes the pachuco as “a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything. It is a strange word with no definite meaning; or, to be more exact, it is charged like all popular creations with a diversity of meanings” (Labyrinth 14). “The pachuco,” Paz tells us, “has lost his whole inheritance: language, religion, customs, beliefs. He is left with only a body and a soul with which to confront the elements, defenseless against the stares of everyone. His disguise is a protection, but it also differentiates and isolates him: it both hides him and points him out” (15). The logic of “saying nothing and saying everything,” and of the pachuco’s disguise that “both hides him and points him out” is precisely the logic of non-contradictory opposites, the logic of maodun. Another example of maodun, both ontological as well as epistemological, is Paz’s analysis of pachuco fashion: “The pachuco carries fashion to its ultimate consequences and turns it into something aesthetic. One of the principles that rules in North American fashions is that clothing must be comfortable, and the pachuco, by changing ordinary apparel into art, makes it ‘impractical.’ Hence it negates the very principles of the model that inspired it” (15). Negating the very principle of its inspiration involves the irony of self-contradiction, or maodun.

This co-efficient of self-contradiction, which logic persuades us is not possible—that one is and is not at the same time refers to a pervasive phenomena both in life and in human nature. Maodun involves self-contradiction. It entails two opposite yet complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, categories.

In a paper presented in 2000, and published in 2002,² I wrote that Contemporary China illustrates neither modernism nor postmodernism, but rather a maodun-ism far more fascinating (and original) than the cultured “pearls” that are being so assiduously cultivated in the chimerical fever of post-modernism.

(Eoyang, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective” 131)

In another paper I have developed the notion of maodun or maodunism not as “contradiction,” as it is usually rendered, but as “paradoxical opposites” and as a “contradictory unity.”³ I suggested that “the study of postmodernism is now, it seems to me, an exhausted endeavor; the analyses of post-modernism have also become stale and arid. What I would like to see is the start of a much more fecund and fascinating field: the study of maodunism!” (Eoyang, “Of ‘Invincible Spears’” 57).

This paper provides a study of maodunism in Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. It traces “a suprarational truth that unifies paradoxical opposites” (Bertens 36 [quoting Wasson]). It is the belief that reconcilable rather than irreconcilable opposites prevail in the world that marks the modern maodunist. One of the implications that the study of maodunists among modern or postmodern writers might provoke would entail a revamping of traditional notions of what is real in life; that, contrary to the empiricists—logical or pragmatic—the essence of life is precisely the illogical, or, more familiarly, the psychological and the human.

What I propose to illustrate in this paper is the homology between, on the one hand, an ontology of maodun, manifest in the concepts of hybridity, racial mixing, and dual identities, and, on the other, an epistemology of maodun, reflected in the cast of mind that entertains non-contradictory opposites, complementary dualities, and dialectical harmonies. I will elide the considerable commentary on hybridity from scholars like Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, in favor of Paz’s own reminders that the tradition of the mestizo is long standing, and dates from centuries before the Conquistadors. Indeed, as Michael Palencia-Roth has stated, “hybridity or mestizaje has been part of Latin American reality since about 1496, when the Spanish crown advocated it as part of the colonizing process.” Palencia-Roth reminds us that “there has been a long tradition of mestizaje (and writings about it) in Latin America (including Brazil): from Simon Bolivar to José Vasconcelos to Alejo...