Archetypal Patterns in Carlos Fuentes' ''La muñeca reina"

Abstract

The common experience of humanity is expressed in its myths. Although myths are universal in their meaning, each new age must reinvent their content in order to vivify the culture. Thus the mythmaker and the poet are closely allied. Mythical stories become transformed into imaginative fiction or incorporated as substructure in works of literature. Nineteenth-century Romantic writers frequently availed themselves of specific mythological correspondences for the ennobling effect to be achieved by thus associating the creatures of their invention with culture héroes of earlier civilizations. By contrast, contemporary mythopoeic works (writings that re-create the ancient myths in renewed symbolic form) exercise an inspirational function:The perennial appeal and vitality of mythic thinking stem from the fact that it makes us feel that in ali civilizations men face analogous situations, undergo similar experience. . . . The myth is of particular import for the modem artist who feels himself estranged from the divisiveness and uniformity of our age.' Carlos Fuentes, in his essay La nueva novela hispanoamericana, makes it clear that he attaches exceptional importance to the use of mythic or archetypal patterns as prefigurative structuring devices.^The presence of