ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Jorge Miguel Cocom-Pech’s J-nool Gregorioe’: juntúul miatsil maaya / Don Gregorio: un sabio maya [Grandfather Gregorio, a Maya Sage], an autobiographical novel that describes how the author’s grandfather initiated him into esoteric lore. The core argument is that the novel enacts a vision of human becoming that resonates closely with Peirce’s concept of the soul, namely, as existing at the dialogic interface between self and other. In this light, rather than constituting a Cartesian dualism, the interplay between “body” and “soul” in the novel can be understood as the transition from actuality to potentiality. The chapter engages laterally with Chapter 5 in arguing that Cocom-Pech’s novel serves as a roadmap to curing soul blindness. It also discusses how Cocom-Pech presents an interpretation of literature as emergent from a general creativity in nature, represented by the key concept of wayak’ (dreaming), and as a rite of passage that is homologous with ritual. The chapter thereby recapitulates key elements of the framework of literary inhabitation developed in Chapter 1, bringing the book back full circle to its point of departure, in accordance with the cyclical interpretation of time in Maya thought.
