My Life With the Wave

“My Life with the Wave” was first published in the volume Eagle or Sun?, which is a collection of Paz’s prose poems. On its own, the piece is not explicitly about Mexico, but it is a striking example of the author’s surrealist work. The surrealist movement began in France following World War I, and in the 1940s, Paz met André Breton (considered the “father” of surrealist literature) in Paris while he lived there as a Mexican diplomat. In art and literature, Surrealists utilize juxtaposition and striking imagery to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, and between conscious and unconscious thought. As a result, surrealist work exists in a realm of confusion, where it is difficult to distinguish what is true or possible. The narrator’s love affair with the wave exists in precisely this space, and Paz’s imagery is so vivid and tangible and the lovers’ deep emotions are on such transparent display that it reads like a real relationship between a man and a woman.

The story serves as an allegory for tumultuous love, as forceful and unpredictable as an ocean wave. The turbulence of the relationship leads to chaos and violence, and the relationship is something the narrator must flee rather than dive into. Though Paz writes the feminine emotionality in stereotyped and problematic ways—the wave is fickle and destructive and eventually loses her value to the narrator—he does create an atypical power dynamic in which the woman (the wave) holds more physical and emotional power over the man.

The narrator, meanwhile, exists in a place of fear and confusion, much like Paz’s readers were at the time of this volume’s publication. In 1951, the world was recovering from the Second World War. Readers could likely relate to “My Life with the Wave” for its portrayal of an exhilarating but violent love affair, but also for its parallel of emotionally draining confusion. World War II left countries devastated, and in the 1950s many were still trying to figure out how to move on after everything they had known was destroyed. In using this surrealist allegory, Paz took simple and familiar concepts (a man, a wave, love) and create a fantastical but identifiable world of instability that directly echoed his readers’ realities.