Each story holds a caveat for the Latin American to acknowledge, recognize, and be loyal to one’s own culture over the temptation to give in to outside forces, especially those brought about by capitalist greed (Barnett 68). And finally, in each instance the consequence of the characters’ actions result in his or her demise, leading the reader to a social message. Secondly, in each work the conflict comes about because the protagonist fails to properly recognize or acknowledge the fantastic. The conflict in each story centers around a fantastic force portrayed as a pre-Columbian deity, an allegorical figure, or symbolic entity. With this understanding of the fantastic in mind, a structural relationship becomes evident throughout the collection. Most remembered for the often anthologized short story “Chac Mool,” The Masked Days initiates Fuentes’ vision of the fantastic as a destructive force that controls the character's destiny and serves to elicit a social reading of the text. Like other stories in The Masked Days (1954), “Litany” offers a strange blend of the fantastic and social realism. To understand “Litany of the Orchid” more fully, it is important to situate it within the context of the seminal collection in which it first appeared. But the story has been dismissed too quickly: “Litany” offers great insight into the early mindset of Fuentes and, more importantly, frames the discussion of Panama with a unique voice. At a first reading, “Litany” may seem to be a hermetic text, a failed avant-garde experiment that obfuscates its cryptic meaning within an over-stylized prose. The ensuing actions carry a symbolic warning for Panama, which turns out to be both victim and culprit in Fuentes’ socially-minded, moralistic parable.
In typical Fuentes fashion, the fantastic serves to shroud an allegory that holds social significance. In “Litany of the Orchid,” Carlos Fuentes delves into the fantastic to confront the reader with a seemingly absurd circumstance: the main character, Muriel, awakens one morning to find a beautiful orchid has sprouted from his coccyx. Impaled on an Orchid: Carlos Fuentes' Panamanian Allegory
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