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As the third-world countries develop, they seek an identity to give them direction, to give their development meaning, to point up what might be hindering their development. In the search for national identity, creative writers play a major role. Freud often noted that artists discovered the unconscious and had perceptions into the operations of the mind. Of particular note in the third-world is V. S. Naipaul, who has written extensively on the Indian personality. Closer to home, there are the Mexican writers, Octavio Paz, a well-known diplomat, essayist, and poet, and Carlos Fuentes, an important contemporary novelist.
Both Paz and Fuentes explore what it means to be a Mexican, or, more exactly, what a Mexican is. They are concerned with what personality traits distinguish the Mexican, especially the male, and make him who he is. Paz tackles this subject in two major book-length essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (1961) and The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid (1972). His intent to discover the national character of the Mexican and to focus on unconscious psychodynamics is stated clearly and directly; he seeks, “reality formed by the beliefs, fragments of beliefs, images, and concepts which history deposits in the subsoil of the social psyche … (and) the existence … of certain complexes, presuppositions, and mental structures that are generally unconscious and that stubbornly resist the erosions of history and its changes” (p. 74-75). Fuentes, in contrast, embodies his search for Mexican character in his novels, particularly The Death of Artemio Cruz (1964) and A Change of Skin (1967). In the former, the psychic life of a Mexican entrepreneur is explored, while in the latter the complex