Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Wizards, Arcanes and Hippies: Esotersim and Counterculture in It s Getting Late (En in Lagoon) by José Agustín
Department
Modern Languages & Literatures
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2011-2012
Abstract
It's Getting Late (End in Lagoon) (1973) by Mexican writer José Agustín is one of the most representative novels of Mexican counterculture. The plot condenses 24 hours of a frenzied trip to Acapulco, a Mexican beach in the Pacific coast. Through the trip, the text creates an ontological fracture that motivates a personal search that is circumscribed in the countercultural context of the time. What does this fracture reveals about Mexican counterculture and cultural hegemony? How does identity articulate in relation to this fracture? My essay explores the role of the Esoteric in this context of search and fracture. In the novel, the Esoteric is a subtext that reveals the chaos that emerges from the contemporary discourses from which reality is read, a hippie philosophy and the Mexican modernity discourse. The novel presents the Esoteric as a real countercultural discourse because it reveals the political inaction of hippies and the contradictions in the discourse of modernity. Through the presence of the tarot and the I Ching, Agustín's text questions the limits and fissures of the hegemonic countercultural discourses of the moment, revealing a deep disconnection between man and his environment that ultimately results in a problematic construction of subjectivity.
Conference Name
XXX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association: Toward a Third Century of Independence in Latin America
Conference Location
San Francisco, California
ScholarWorks Citation
Fortes Gonzalez, Mayra, "Wizards, Arcanes and Hippies: Esotersim and Counterculture in It s Getting Late (En in Lagoon) by José Agustín" (2011). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 224.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/224
