Octavio Paz: Literature, Modernity, Institutions

18
Octavio Paz: Literature, Modernity, Institutions

Maarten van Delden
Introduction
The Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914–1998) had an extraordi-
narily rich and varied career, spanning more than six decades. Working in
the symbolist and modernist traditions, he produced some of the most
enduring poetic works of the modern era in Latin America. As an essayist,
he wrote incisively and elegantly on a vast array of topics, including the
Mexican national character, national and international politics, the visual
arts, pre-Columbian civilizations, poetic theory, modernity and postmo-
dernity, anthropology and religion, love and eroticism, and Asian cultures.
A true public intellectual, Paz engaged constantly in political debates in
Mexico, and many controversies swirled around him as he gradually shifted
from a leftist and prorevolutionary position in the 1930s to a liberal
democratic and promarket outlook in the 1980s and 1990s.1 Although he
was deeply influenced by the romantic tradition in Western culture, he did
not in the least cultivate the image and habits of the solitary genius; on the
contrary, his artistic ethos had a strong social and group-oriented dimen-
sion. As a young man, he helped launch several collective cultural ventures
in Mexico, including the journals Taller and El Hijo Pródigo.2 In his later
years, he founded and directed two journals, Plural (1971–1976) and Vuelta
(1976–1998), which are widely regarded as being among the most impor-
tant cultural publications ever produced in Latin America.3 Octavio Paz
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, the only Mexican
author to have received the prize thus far.
Politics
Paz was the grandson of Ireneo Paz, a prominent liberal newspaper editor
and novelist, and the son of Octavio Paz Solórzano, a lawyer who worked
for the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.4 The young poet came of
age in the 1930s, a highly politicized era, and he was drawn early on to a
Marxist ideology. Although his critics describe him as a neoliberal or
278
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 07 Sep 2021 at 20:19:37, subject to the Cambridge Core
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316163207.019
Octavio Paz: Literature, Modernity, Institutions 279
conservative thinker, Paz’s roots are on the left, and he maintained a strong
attachment to socialist ideals until the very end of his life. Commentators
on Paz’s intellectual career have often tried to determine when he broke
with the Left. Enrique Krauze, for example, argues that the Mexican poet’s
reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1974 made him
break once and for all with leftist ideology (Krauze, 2011: 246–250). Other
critics have suggested different dates for this rupture.5 The truth of the
matter, however, is that Paz remained engaged with leftist ideas through-
out his career. It makes more sense to see him as someone involved in an
intimate but tense ongoing relationship with the Left, marked by frequent
disputes and different degrees of estrangement, rather than view his career
as that of someone who was once a leftist and then suddenly repudiated his
previous ideals.
In 1937, Paz traveled to Spain, in the midst of the country’s brutal civil
war, in order to attend the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist
writers in Valencia. There the young poet received an early lesson in leftist
dogmatism. The renowned French author André Gide had recently
returned from a trip to the Soviet Union and had written a book that
was critical of the country’s communist regime. Congress participants (the
vast majority of whom had never visited the Soviet Union) voted to
repudiate Gide, an act that discomfited Paz, who abstained from the
vote. After his return to Mexico, Paz began writing for the leftist newspaper
El Popular, but when the paper’s editors decided to support Stalin’s
decision to sign a nonaggression pact with Hitler, Paz distanced himself
from his colleagues. By the late 1940s, the Mexican poet had joined his
country’s diplomatic service and was serving as cultural attaché in Paris,
where he followed a notorious polemic pitting Jean Rousset, a French
journalist who denounced the existence of concentration camps in the
Soviet Union, against a group of leftist intellectuals led by Jean-Paul Sartre,
who preferred to denounce Rousset rather than criticize Stalin. Paz sided
with Rousset, and in March 1951 he published a collection of documents
related to the case in the Argentine magazine Sur. It is worth noting,
however, that in his commentary on the Rousset case, Paz stated that the
crimes committed in the Soviet Union were to be attributed to the
bureaucratic regime created by Stalin, not to the socialist project itself
(Paz, 1994: 9, 170).
In the 1960s, Paz was clearly sympathetic to the countercultural move-
ments of the period. It was not only that he wrote about drugs and Eastern
religions; he also explicitly celebrated the rise of the women’s movement,
applauded the civil rights struggles of minorities in the United States, and
280 maarten van delden
expressed support for the liberationist wave in the Third World.6 During
these years, he expressed qualified support for the revolutionary regime in
Cuba, as when he wrote in a letter to the Cuban poet and essayist Roberto
Fernández Retamar that he sympathized with the Cuban Revolution to the
extent that it followed in the footsteps of José Martí rather than in Lenin’s
(1994, 9: 49). He was stirred by the insurrections of 1968 and saw the events
of May 1968 in Paris as deeply promising harbingers of future changes in
Western society. In a May 28, 1968, letter to the book publisher Arnaldo
Orfila Reynal, he stated that the uprising in France could well turn into the
first socialist revolution in a developed nation.7 At the time, Paz was
serving as Mexico’s ambassador to India. When the Mexican government
ruthlessly suppressed its own student movement, and security forces killed
hundreds of demonstrators at the Plaza Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968, Paz
resigned his post, an act of protest that garnered him great prestige in the
world of culture and beyond. Nevertheless, Paz was also critical of the Left
in this phase of his career. In his essays, he repeatedly drew attention to the
failure of Marxist philosophy to accurately predict the course of contem-
porary history, and he regularly attacked the repressive nature of “actually
existing” socialist regimes.8
The 1970s marked a turning point in the history of Paz’s relations with
the Left. There is no doubt that significant shifts occur in his outlook
during these years, even though the claim that Paz fully broke with the Left
is an overstatement. If, at the beginning of the decade, Paz was publishing
leftist thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and Eric Hobsbawm in his journal
Plural, by the early 1980s, the liberal anti-Marxist French political scientist
Raymond Aron had moved to the center of attention. The Padilla affair in
Cuba, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, the Cambodian
genocide perpetrated by the country’s communist rulers, the case of the
Vietnamese boat people, and the descent of many Third World nationalist
revolutions into dictatorial rule, as well as the failure of statist economic
policies in Mexico, were all contributing factors to Paz’s rightward move.9
By this time, he had become a frequent target of attack by leftist thinkers.
Paz’s refusal to denounce the electoral fraud likely perpetrated in 1988 by
Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI); his
support for the free-market policies promoted in the late 1980s and early
’90s by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari; and his unsympathetic
response to the Zapatista uprising in January 1994 all helped solidify
Paz’s image on the left as the ideologue of what had come to be labeled
as “neoliberalism.”10
And yet Paz’s thinking in this period was more complex than these
polemics revealed. His continued identification with the Left (albeit a
moderate left) was evident from statements he made in the 1980s indicating
that if he were Spanish or French, his support would go to socialist
politicians such as Felipe González and François Mitterand. He also
authored essays in these years that were highly critical of what he regarded
as the dehumanizing features of capitalist and free-market systems.11 And
even though his initial response to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas was
unsympathetic, Paz was clearly fascinated by the movement’s leader, sub-
comandante Marcos.12
Mexico
The nationalist fervor of the postrevolutionary decades in Mexico left a
profound imprint on Paz’s work. Not that he was a nationalist himself; on
the contrary, he was often a critic of nationalist thinking. Shortly before the
publication of El laberinto de la soledad,13 Paz stated in a letter to Alfonso
Reyes that he was getting tired of the topic of Mexico, adding that “si yo
mismo incurrí en un libro fue para liberarme de esa enfermedad” (if I
myself incurred in a book it was in order to free myself of that sickness)
(Paz and Reyes, 1998: 117). Nevertheless, Paz remained deeply preoccupied
with his native country throughout his career, as well as with broader
questions of culture and identity.
El laberinto de la soledad offers a reading of the Mexican character and an
interpretation of Mexican history.14 Paz’s reading of the Mexican character
begins in the United States, with a portrait of the pachuco, the flamboyantly
dressed Mexican American gang member the author had encountered in
Southern California when he moved there in 1943. Many readers have
regarded Paz’s depiction of the pachuco as derogatory,15 but in reality, the
passages about him are informed by a deep sense of identification. In later
years, Paz repeatedly stated that as a young Mexican living in California, he
recognized himself in the pachuco, who embodied the experiences of
orphanhood and rebellion that were central to his exploration of the
Mexican character.16
The second and third chapters of El laberinto de la soledad make up the
ethnographic core of the book, focusing on two central aspects of Mexican
society and culture and providing an almost rhythmic sense of their
interaction. On the one hand, Paz asserts that Mexicans are in the habit
of masking themselves and of adopting a reserved, defensive posture
toward the world. On the other hand, Mexicans are profoundly attached
to their communities and express this attachment in the tradition of the
fiesta, which Paz depicts as a subversive event in which social rules and
norms are overturned.17 The paradox of the two sides of the Mexican
character is nicely captured in the opening sentence of the third chapter:
“El solitario mexicano ama las fiestas y las reuniones públicas” (The solitary
Mexican loves fiestas and public gatherings) (1994, 8: 73). The stages in
Paz’s analysis are closely connected: the Mexican’s repression of his inner
experience in everyday existence eventually provokes the explosion of the
fiesta. One senses here a Freudian influence in the echoes of psychoanalytic
notions of the repression and release of buried emotions.18
The Freudian thread is picked up again in the book’s best-known
chapter, “Los hijos de la Malinche,” in which the author goes back to the
conquest of Mexico to explain the sense of solitude (in essence, a metaphor
for the absence of a clear sense of identity) of the modern-day Mexican.
In his reading of the conquest, Paz settles on a revised version of Freud’s
parricide-incest theme as offering a path into the Mexican psyche.
According to Paz, the Spanish conquistador is the Mexican’s symbolic
father, while the indigenous woman (specifically, La Malinche, Hernán
Cortés’s interpreter) represents the mother. Whereas the male child in
Freud’s scheme feels rivalry toward his father and is attracted to his mother,
the Mexican in Paz’s interpretation rejects both his parents. Lacking
meaningful links with his progenitors, the Mexican feels cut off from the
world and suffers from a sense of existential orphanhood (1994, 8: 87–103).
In the second half of the book, Paz projects the themes of the mask and
the fiesta onto a historical plane. Just as the Mexican’s everyday existence
oscillates between periods of reserve and concealment on the one hand and
moments of explosive joy on the other, Mexican history is characterized by
an extended period of simulation and inauthenticity – which is finally
overturned during the Mexican Revolution, described by Paz as a kind of
sociopolitical fiesta. Whereas the key stages of nineteenth-century Mexican
history – the War of Independence, the Reform era, and the Porfiriato – are
all characterized by the failure to develop economic and political structures
that match Mexico’s social and cultural reality, in the revolution of 1910,
the Mexican finally rips off his mask and connects with his origins and his
identity (1994, 8: 145–146). This utopian reading of the Mexican
Revolution, most fully embodied for Paz in the Zapatista movement,
was an enduring element in the poet’s thinking about the history of his
country. Even in the 1980s, when he had experienced a rightward shift in
his ideological outlook, Paz reiterated his intense admiration for Emiliano
Zapata and his revolutionary movement.19
Paz’s next major foray into Mexican history and the Mexican psyche
was Postdata (1970), an extended essay explicitly conceived as a post-
script to El laberinto de la soledad. Written in the wake of the
Tlatelolco massacre, Posdata includes commentary on political and
economic conditions in the Mexico of the late 1960s, as well as on
the student movements of 1968. It offers a diagnosis of the ills of
modern societies in general and a call for Mexico to democratize –
that is, to become more modern. The most controversial section of the
book comes toward the end, where Paz develops an interpretation of
the Tlatelolco massacre that again resorts to a loosely Freudian meth-
odology. Paz posits the existence of a Mexican subconscious in which a
hierarchical view of society and an obsession with sacrifice – both
rooted in Aztec culture, and symbolized in the architectural form of
the pyramid – combine to precipitate the events of October 2, 1968
(1994, 8: 303–324). Paz was widely criticized for his mythical view of
Mexican history.20 He, of course, would argue that his purpose was
precisely to destroy myths (by exposing them), not to erect them.21
Read today, the section of the essay analyzing the relations between
present-day Mexico and the Aztec past comes across as a fascinating
intellectual performance more than a convincing account of the causes
of the Tlatelolco massacre.
Paz wrote no further book-length essays on Mexican national iden-
tity. Yet he authored innumerable shorter works on Mexican literature,
history, and culture. He wrote extensively about pre-Columbian civi-
lizations and about the colonial period. His monumental book on the
colonial poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz includes a lengthy and
meticulous reconstruction of the social, cultural, and political context
in which Sor Juana lived and worked. Paz also wrote many important
essays about Mexican poets and painters. At different moments of his
career, he wrote compelling meditations on the differences between
Mexico and the United States. Toward the end of his life, he published
an important book on India, which includes intriguing sections com-
paring the South Asian country with Mexico. It is interesting to note
that Paz expressed grave concern about the resurgence of nationalism
in the late twentieth century. His support for NAFTA (the North
American Free Trade Agreement) in the early 1990s was as much a
vindication of his cosmopolitan stance as it was an expression of
support for specific economic policies. And yet, Paz returned again
and again to the idea that there are broad civilizational differences that
separate nations and regions from each other.
Theory and Criticism of Poetry
Paz began writing about art at an early age. In 1931, when he was only
seventeen years old, he published an essay titled “Ética del artista” in which
he tackles one of the key artistic debates of the era: the opposition between
pure art and committed art. In the end, the young Paz opts for the latter,
since art that serves some extra-artistic purpose seems grander and nobler
than art for art’s sake. And what is the larger purpose toward which art
should be directing its energies, in Paz’s opinion? Interestingly, Paz does
not suggest that art should aim to bring about specific social or political
changes. Instead, he argues that art at this particular point in time should
help to build a common culture – in other words, that it should serve the
goal of “la futura realización de una cultura en América” (the future
realization of an American culture) (1994, 13: 187). No doubt, Paz’s think-
ing in “Ética del artista” was informed by the nationalist cultural ferment
that had erupted in Mexico in the 1920s, after the conclusion of the
country’s revolution.
In a 1942 essay titled “Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión,”
Paz’s starting point is not an inquiry into the purpose of poetry, but
rather the question of the relationship poetry establishes with the
world. He outlines an opposition between technical knowledge, in
which the goal is to control reality, and poetic knowledge, where
what is sought is a union with reality. The first attitude is utilitarian,
the second disinterested. In seeking to define the specificity of poetry,
Paz compares it to religion and to love. Poetry offers both a mystical
fusion with the world and a return to what Paz calls “nuestra natur-
aleza paradisíaca” (our paradisiacal nature) (1994, 1: 236). Yet poetry
also differs in an important respect from religion, for whereas religion
is conservative, poetry is subversive. In the final pages of the essay, Paz
develops a defense of the tradition of the poètes maudits – Novalis,
Nerval, Baudelaire, and Lautréamont – whose explorations of the
darker side of reality implied a far-reaching criticism of modern
society. The “poetry of solitude” is therefore both one of the poles
toward which poetry can orient itself, at any time and in any place, and
the defining characteristic of modern poetry. At one point in his essay,
Paz argues that the unity between poetry and society was definitively
lost in the eighteenth century, and that since then all poetry has been
forced to adopt an attitude of dissidence toward society. In short, it has
become a poetry of solitude, but this poetry of solitude offers the only
way back to authenticity and communion.
Although Paz used different sets of concepts in “Ética del artista” and
“Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión,” the two essays share a deep
commitment to demonstrating the crucial importance of poetry to human
existence. Indeed, everything Paz wrote on the subject of poetry can be
regarded as part of an extended “defense of poetry.” A key work in this
regard is El arco y la lira, first published in 1956 and subsequently reissued
in a revised and expanded edition in 1967. El arco y la lira belongs to the era
of text-immanent approaches to literature, such as the various formalist
schools that developed in Europe in the early to mid-twentieth century and
New Criticism in the United States. This is both a matter of method and of
object. In terms of method, Paz is adamant in his rejection of external
approaches to poetry, arguing that neither psychoanalysis nor Marxism
(two influential currents of thought frequently applied to the interpreta-
tion of literature at the time Paz was writing El arco y la lira) can explain
how nonpoetic forces such as “the unconscious” or “the march of history”
are transformed into actual poems (1994, 1: 170–172). A poem is not a
translation of something else, and therefore it ought not to be approached
as if it were. The critic’s method needs to fit the object under consideration.
According to Paz, a poem is “una unidad autosuficiente” (a self-sufficient
entity) (1994, 1: 43), “un objeto único” (a unique object) (1994, 1: 44), “una
totalidad viviente, hecha de elementos irreemplazables” (a living totality,
made up of irreplaceable elements) (1994, 1: 70). Poems do not express
ideas or opinions, nor do they describe or represent the world outside the
poem. Ultimately, a poem is a self-sustaining entity that creates its own
reality as it is being written. What Paz is arguing for is the autonomy of
poetry, an autonomy that guarantees its importance, for its importance
derives from the fact that it does not depend on anything outside itself.
Even while emphasizing poetry’s separateness from other domains of
human existence, Paz argues in El arco y la lira that poetry is the most
fundamental of all human activities. In the course of the book, the Mexican
poet develops an existentialist view of human life, with frequent references
to the work of Martin Heidegger – emphasizing the temporal nature of
being, the sense of being “thrown” into the world, the human sense of
insubstantiality, and the need to always create oneself anew.22 More than
any other human endeavor – more so even than religion and love, two
experiences with which Paz often compares it – poetry reveals “nuestra
condición original” (our original condition) (1994, 1: 162), opening up “la
posibilidad de ser que entraña todo nacer” (the possibility of being that
every birth entails) (1994, 1: 164). Yet Paz turns away from the full
implications of the existentialist themes he explores, insisting (in a criticism
of Sartre) that man (I follow Paz’s terminology) is not “una pasión inútil”
(a useless passion) (1994, 1: 207), as the French philosopher had claimed at
the end of Being and Nothingness. Indeed, Paz’s argument at this point
veers in the direction of a surrealist position, with its exalted view of poetry
as the place where all contraries are reconciled and a sense of plenitude
might be achieved. One might recall here that Paz was not only an admirer
but also a personal friend of André Breton, whose surrealist movement he
viewed not simply as an artistic movement, but rather as a spiritual
condition with profoundly revolutionary implications for Western
societies.23
In the 1960s and ’70s, while continuing to write about poetry an sich,
Paz became increasingly interested in the history of poetry, especially
modern poetry, which he characterizes as a “tradición de la ruptura”
(tradition of rupture), a paradoxical tradition marked by reiterated turns
against the past and a strong preference for change and novelty. Paz’s fullest
exploration of this tradition appears in Los hijos del limo (1974), a book that
had its origin in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University.
Rupture here referred again to the break with one’s precursors, yet Paz was
concerned with a much wider range of ruptures. Most prominently, the
modern poetry explored in Los hijos del limo adopts a critical and subversive
stance toward modernity, understood in broad social, political, and phi-
losophical terms. According to Paz, modern poetry is hostile toward critical
reason, bourgeois society, and the ideology of progress, but also toward the
revolutions of the modern era – with which it shares its vanguardist
outlook, but with which it ultimately collided. Poetry, then, offers the
furthest-reaching alternative to the foundations of modernity. And yet, in
an argument that reprises points already made in “Poesía de soledad y
poesía de comunión,” Paz argues that poetry also clashes with religion,
offering a different, more subjective relationship to the realm of the sacred
(1994, 1: 321–484).
Toward the end of Los hijos del limo, Paz suggests that the tradition of
rupture had by the 1960s and ’70s reached a point of exhaustion. The speed
with which changes occurred, as well as the fact that the process of
innovation had itself become routine, took the edge off the experience of
novelty and ended up undermining the avant-garde project. With the end
of the tradition of rupture, modern poetry comes to a close. The idea of the
end of modernity – not only in poetry but in other domains as well –
exercised a powerful hold on Paz’s imagination.24 And yet, Paz consistently
responded with scorn to the notion of postmodernity. He charged that the
term itself was incoherent. It is more likely, however, that the extreme
relativism and antifoundationalism of postmodern philosophy repelled
Paz, who continued to put forward a redemptive view of poetry until the
end of his career.
Poetry
Although there is more critical commentary on his essays than on his
poetry, Paz saw himself first and foremost as a poet. He published his
first book of poetry, titled Luna silvestre, in 1933, at age nineteen. In the
decades that followed, he produced a vast poetic oeuvre, including several
books that are among the most important in twentieth-century Latin
American poetry. Key titles are Libertad bajo palabra, first published in
1949 and subsequently reissued in several revised and expanded editions;
Salamandra (1962); Blanco (1967); Ladera este (1969); Pasado en claro
(1974); Vuelta (1976); and Árbol adentro (1987). Over the course of his
long career, the fundamental concerns of Paz’s poetry remained essentially
the same, although one can certainly identify shifts and detours along the
way. Much of his poetry seeks to give the reader the experience of being
itself, or of the presence of the world. Paz does not view poetry as a vehicle
for expressing ideas or opinions, offering explanations, or pronouncing
judgments, although his poems occasionally do these things too.
If Paz’s focus in his poetry is on the nature of being, what aspects of
being does he highlight? To try to answer this question, it might be helpful
to examine a passage from “Pasado en claro,” a long autobiographical poem
Paz wrote in the 1970s. In explaining the orientation toward life he
developed in his youth, the poet comments that he rejected many of the
things human beings are attracted to, including power, money, and
religion: “ni mando, ni ganancia. La santidad tampoco: / el cielo para mí
pronto fue un cielo / deshabitado, una hermosura hueca” (neither com-
mand, nor profit. Not sainthood either: / heaven soon became for me a
heaven / uninhabited, an empty loveliness). He was drawn instead to
something different, something he describes as “Presencia suficiente, /
cambiante, el tiempo y sus epifanías” (sufficient and changing presence, /
time and its epiphanies) (1994, 12: 84–85). The phrase presencia suficiente
evokes the immediate thereness of the world, beyond which there is no
need to go, although the adjective that follows – cambiante – also suggests
that this presence is not something static or fixed. The allusion to time’s
epiphanies places Paz in a long romantic and modernist tradition – from
Wordsworth to Eliot, Joyce and Proust – in which authors seek to break
out of what Walter Benjamin called the “empty and homogeneous” time of
modernity.25 The epiphany is a moment of great intensity, experienced in a
profoundly subjective manner, in which a difficult-to-define truth about
the world is disclosed. It is a religious experience for a nonreligious age.
Paz’s poetry is replete with these powerful moments of vision, which would
appear to embody for him the meaning of poetry itself.
In Paz’s poems, again and again, time appears in the form of the instant.
These instants are powerful and expansive, as when the poet speaks of
“un instante enorme, diáfano” (an enormous, diaphanous instant) (1994,
11: 41) or of “un instante inmenso” (an immense instant) (1994, 11: 132).
Frequently, in phrases such as “es un minuto todo lo vivido” (all that has
been lived is contained in a minute) (1994, 11: 81) or “todos los siglos son un
solo instante” (all centuries are a single instant) (1994, 11: 221), it appears as
if all of time has become compressed in one brief instant, in a manner that
deliberately defies logic. The instant is often associated with light, or with
fire, or it may be described as a phenomenon possessing a special kind of
brilliance. Paz speaks of the instant’s “esplendor” (splendor) (1994, 11: 209),
and he compares a series of instants to “racimos encendidos” (burning
clusters) (1994, 11: 337). In “Pequeña variación,” he describes the instant as
“tiempo puro” (pure time) (1994, 12: 136). Insofar as “Piedra de sol” –
probably Paz’s best-known poem – depicts the poet as engaged in a quest,
what he is seeking is un instante. In a poem in which Paz addresses the
Spanish poet León Felipe, he states that “Aprender a ver oír decir / lo
instantáneo / es nuestro oficio” (Learning how to see hear speak / the
instantaneous / is our occupation) (1994, 11: 386), by which he means that
paying attention to what he calls the “advenimiento del instante” (the
advent of the instant) is the poet’s special task (1994, 11: 371). The keen
concern with apprehending the passing instant in its full intensity surely
helps explain the frequency with which Paz speaks in his poems of the
experience of vertigo.26
The value that Paz attaches to the instant has to do with the fact that it –
the instant – is when life is experienced in its truest, most authentic, and
most concrete form. The idea of the concreteness of experience takes us
back to the key notion of presence and accounts for the intense focus in
Paz’s poetry on the elemental qualities of the world. Paz’s poems are replete
with images of light and dark, the wind, rivers, clouds, trees, the ocean’s
waves, fountains, the sun, shadows, and so on. He wants his poetry to
convey what he calls “el poder” (the power) and “la plenitud del mundo”
(the plenitude of the world) (1994, 11: 34, 36) or the world’s “fiebre de
formas” (fever of forms) (1994, 11: 369). In this search for presence, Paz is
drawn again and again to the human body, specifically to the body of his
lover. His poetry is infused with an intense eroticism, and his frequent
references to “la sangre” (blood) as a metaphor for sexuality remind us that
Paz was from early on an admirer of D. H. Lawrence. In Paz’s poetry, the
female body becomes the truest image of a possible reconciliation with the
world. In “Cuerpo a la vista,” the lover’s body allows for an escape from
time – the poet speaks of her hair, mouth, skin, and eyes as “sitios donde el
tiempo no transcurre” (places where time does not pass) and of her sex as a
“patria de sangre” (homeland of blood) and “única puerta al infinito” (only
gateway to the infinite) (1994, 11: 116 and 117). In “Hermosura que vuelve,”
the poet describes the woman he loves as “un pausado chorro de belleza” (a
gentle stream of beauty) and recognizes in her a self-sufficient existence that
needs nothing beyond itself: “Tú nada más estás” (You are simply there)
(1994, 11: 132). In “Piedra de sol,” the kiss of the lovers brings the world into
existence – “el mundo nace cuando dos se besan” (the world is born when
two people kiss) – and seemingly allows history to be negated: “los dos se
desnudaron y besaron / porque las desnudeces enlazadas / saltan el tiempo y
son invulnerables” (they undressed and kissed each other / because two
intertwined naked bodies / leap over time and are invulnerable) (1994, 11:
224 and 225). In “Nocturno de San Ildefonso,” the poet concludes a
lengthy meditation on his life with the image of his wife sleeping beside
him: “Mujer: / fuente en la noche / Yo me fío a su fluir sosegado” (Woman:
/ fountain in the night / I entrust myself to her quiet flowing) (1994, 12: 71).
In short, Paz’s epiphanies are often amorous and erotic in nature.
Paz, however, is a complex poet, and the emphasis on being as presence
is countered by an opposite current in his work. In Paz’s poems, presence is
always haunted by absence, and being is constantly subject to erasure or
dispersal. Although his writing conveys a powerful sense of the concrete,
material qualities of the world, one of Paz’s preferred words is impalpable.
In the natural world, he is fascinated by things that have only a fleeting
substance, such as clouds, moving water, foam, or lightning. It is perhaps
not surprising that many of the poems Paz wrote in India speak of this void
at the heart of existence. In “El balcón,” in which the poet depicts himself
on the balcony of a hotel room in New Delhi meditating on his life, a
powerful sense of place is juxtaposed with a pervasive feeling of emptiness:
“Estuve allá / no sé adonde / Estoy aquí / no sé es donde” (I was there / I
don’t know where / I am here / I don’t know is where) (1994–2003, 11: 346).
The theme of thereness in combination with what we might call not-
thereness appears frequently in Paz’s Indian period, as in “Vrindaban,”
where the poet speaks of how “[t]odo está y no está” (All is here and is not
here) (1994–2003, 11: 367). But the encounter with Buddhism and other
Asian religions only strengthened a tendency that already existed in Paz’s
poetry. From his earliest poems, Paz’s mind was engaged by images of
movement and stillness, light and dark, form and formlessness. The con-
stant resort to paradoxes was a way of blocking a too-easy passage from
words to reality and of restoring a sense of the mobile, changeable nature of
the world, of its simultaneous presence and absence.
Even though Paz’s poetry in many ways appears to put into practice
the famous symbolist/modernist dictum of American poet Archibald
MacLeish – that poetry “should not mean, but be” – he occasionally
violated his own strictures against using poetry to make statements about
the world, and produced a number of poems containing explicit political
messages. The most notable instance of such a poem – and of the artistic
struggle it provoked in Paz – is “Elegía a un compañero muerto en el
frente de Aragón,” in which the poet mourns the death of a friend in the
Spanish Civil War (1994, 11: 92–94). It was included in the second
edition of Libertad bajo palabra, but removed from the third, with Paz
explaining that it appeared to him “tributario de una retórica que
repruebo” (burdened with a rhetoric that I reject) only to be included
again in the fourth and fifth editions. But Paz’s very public doubts about
this particular poem should not lead us to overlook the fact that he
wrote many other poems in which he engaged in social and political
rhetoric. A good example from the 1930s is “Entre la piedra y la flor,” a
powerful denunciation of the capitalist exploitation of the henequen
workers of the Yucatán in Mexico (1994, 11: 86–92). Later in his career,
the political statements are of a very different nature, with Paz using his
poetry to criticize certain political figures and to deplore the support
many intellectuals gave to the century’s worst regimes. In “Aunque es de
noche,” Paz wonders whether Stalin had a face and a soul, and he mocks
Trotsky’s idea that the Party was never wrong (1994, 12: 122–123). In
“Nocturno de San Ildefonso,” the poet laments the willingness of leftist
intellectuals of his generation to let the ends justify the means in their
pursuit of a revolutionary transformation of the world, as well as taking
them to task for their intolerance: “levantar la casa con ladrillos de
crimen / decretar la comunión obligatoria” (to build the house with
bricks of crime / to decree compulsory communion) (1994, 12: 67).
Nevertheless, the question of the relationship between Paz’s poetry and
his politics is a complicated one.27 Even though Paz did occasionally
write poems that were vehicles for his political ideas, most of his poetry
existed in a realm far removed from the concerns of his political essays.
Indeed, in contemplating Paz’s career as a whole, one goes away with the
impression of someone with a truly exceptional ability to pursue, simul-
taneously, a variety of artistic and intellectual tracks. Whereas his poetry
was written predominantly in an intensely subjective mode, his essays
tackled many of the key social, political, and economic issues of his day,
and did so in an often assertive and polemical fashion.
Notes
1. Armando González Torres offers an excellent overview in Las guerras cultur-
ales de Octavio Paz of the many polemics in which Paz was involved.
2. The best account of the early part of Paz’s career is provided by Guillermo
Sheridan in Poeta con paisaje.
3. For a discussion of Plural, see John King, The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin
American Literary and Political Culture. On Vuelta, see Malva Flores, Viaje de
Vuelta. Also worth consulting is Jaime Perales Contreras, Octavio Paz y su
círculo intelectual.
4. An excellent account of Paz’s family background is provided by Enrique
Krauze in Redentores, 137–160.
5. Fernando Vizcaíno, for example, believes that the break with the Left occurs
in the early 1950s. See Vizcaíno, Biografía política de Octavio Paz, 73.
6. In Corriente alterna (1967), Paz describes the women’s liberation movement as
the most important phenomenon of the period. See Obras completas, vol. 10, 609.
7. See Paz and Reynal, Cartas cruzadas, 165.
8. On the failure of Marxist historical predictions, see “Postdata,” Obras com-
pletas, vol. 8, 301. On the repressive nature of communist regimes, see Paz’s
commentary on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in “Archipiélago
de tinta y bilis,” Obras completas, vol. 9, 182–186.
9. The shift in Paz’s thinking can be observed in El ogro filantrópico (1979) and
Tiempo nublado (1983). See Obras completas, vol. 9.
10. For a critique of Paz from the Left in this period, see two books by Enrique
González Rojo: Cuando el rey se hace cortesano and El rey va desnudo. Xavier
Rodríguez Ledesma also provides a critical assessment of Paz’s political ideas
in El pensamiento político de Octavio Paz.
11. See “La otra voz,” Obras completas, vol. 1, 583.
12. For Paz’s writings on the Zapatatista uprising, see “Días de prueba,” Obras
completas, vol. 14, 244–280.
13. El laberinto de la soledad was first published in 1950. A revised and expanded
edition appeared in 1959.
14. For an excellent reading of El laberinto, see Stanton, “Introduction.”
15. See, for example, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “El laberinto fabricado por
Octavio Paz,” 11.
16. See Enrique Krauze, “La soledad del laberinto,” 106.
17. David Brading rightly points out that El laberinto is remarkable for its
exuberant celebration of Mexican singularity, a singularity most strikingly
embodied in the tradition of the fiesta. See Brading, Octavio Paz, 69–70.
18. For a discussion of Paz’s relationship to Freud, see Gallo, “Octavio Paz reads
Moses and Monotheism.”
19. See Krauze, “Octavio Paz. De la revolución a la crítica,” 686.
20. See, for example, Jorge Aguilar Mora, La divina pareja.
21. Diana Sorensen offers a reading of Postdata that follows Paz’s own conception
of his task as a critic of Mexico’s myths. See Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade
Remembered, 64–67.
22. On the relationship between Paz and Heidegger, see Escalante, Las sendas
perdidas de Octavio Paz, 11–56.
23. See Paz, “André Breton o la búsqueda del comienzo,” Obras completas, vol. 2,
215–224. On the relationship between Paz and surrealism, see Escalante, Las
sendas perdidas, 57–76, and Wilson, Octavio Paz, 8–43.
24. For a discussion of the topic of the end of modernity in Paz, see Maarten van
Delden, “The Incomplete End of Modernity of Octavio Paz.”
25. On Paz’s relationship to T. S. Eliot, see Boll, Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot.
26. On the importance of the instant in Paz, see Escalante, Las sendas perdidas de
Octavio Paz, 147–161.
27. For an approach to this question that stresses the continuity between Paz’s
aesthetics and his politics, see Grenier, From Art to Politics.
References
Primary Sources
Paz, Octavio. Obras completas. Fifteen volumes. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1994–2003.
Paz, Octavio, and Alfonso Reyes. Correspondencia (1939–1959). Mexico: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1998.
Paz, Octavio, and Arnaldo Orfila. Cartas cruzadas. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2005.
Secondary Sources
Aguilar Mora, Jorge. La divina pareja: historia y mito en Octavio Paz. Mexico:
Ediciones Era, 1978.
Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos. “El laberinto fabricado por Octavio Paz.” In De
mitólogos y novelistas. Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1971.
Boll, Tom. Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of
Influence. London: Legenda, 2012.
Brading, David. Octavio Paz y la poética de la historia mexicana. Mexico: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 2002.
Escalante, Evodio. Las sendas perdidas de Octavio Paz. Mexico: Ediciones Sin
Nombre, 2013.
Flores, Malva. Viaje de Vuelta: estampas de una revista. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2011.
Gallo, Rubén. “Octavio Paz reads Moses and Monotheism.” In Octavio Paz:
Humanism and Critique, edited by Oliver Kozlarek, 65–85. London:
Transaction Publishers, 2009.
González Rojo, Enrique. El rey va desnudo: los ensayos políticos de Octavio Paz.
Mexico: Editorial Posada, 1989.
Cuando el rey se hace cortesano: Octavio Paz y el salinismo. Mexico: Editorial
Posada, 1990.
González Torres, Armando. Las guerras culturales de Octavio Paz. Mexico:
Ediciones Colibrí, 2002.
Grenier, Yvon. From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
King, John. The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political
Culture: From Tlatelolco to the “Philanthropic Ogre.” New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2007.
Kozlarek, Oliver (ed.). Octavio Paz: Humanism and Critique. London:
Transaction Publishers, 2009.
Krauze, Enrique. “La soledad del laberinto.” Anuario de la fundación Octavio Paz 3
(2001): 98–112.
“Octavio Paz. De la revolución a la crítica.” Interview. In Luz espejeante: Octavio
Paz ante la crítica, by Enrico Mario Santí, 673–690. Mexico: Ediciones Era,
2009.
Redentores. Ideas y poder en América Latina. Mexico: Random House
Mondadori, 2011.
Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1973.
The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. Translated by Lysander Kemp.
New York: Grove Press, 1985.
Perales Contreras, Jaime. Octavio Paz y su círculo intelectual. Mexico: Ediciones
Coayacá 2013.
Rodríguez Ledesma, Xavier. El pensamiento político de Octavio Paz: las trampas de
la ideología. Mexico: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1996.
Santí, Enrico Mario. Luz espejeante: Octavio Paz ante la crítica. Mexico: Ediciones
Era, 2009.
Sheridan, Guillermo. Poeta con paisaje: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz.
Mexico: Ediciones Era, 2004.
Sorensen, Diana. A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American
Sixties. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Stanton, Anthony. Introduction. El laberinto de la soledad, by Octavio Paz.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Van Delden, Maarten. “The Incomplete End of Modernity of Octavio Paz.” In
Gunshots at the Fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America, edited by
Maarten van Delden and Yvon Grenier. Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2009.
Vizcaíno, Fernando. Biografía política de Octavio Paz, o, La razón ardiente. Málaga:
Algazara, 1993.
Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979.

Octavio Paz: Literature, Modernity, Institutions

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Octavio Paz: Literature, Modernity, Institutions

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

18

Octavio Paz: Literature, Modernity, Institutions

You might also like