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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780816520909 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Arizona Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2002 |
| Pages: | 89 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
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Chapter One
There is no sense in pursuing a literary career under the impression that one is operating a bombing-plane, Edmund Wilson once said. The life of the mind does not kill enemies, instead, it builds bridges between who we are and who we think we should be. The duty of the intellectual is to serve as a compass, a road map.
More than many in the twentieth-century Hispanic world, Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the Mexican poet and intellectual, was committed to that duty. He was the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man. His complete oeuvre—some 150 titles, which he edited himself and which were released simultaneously in Spain and Mexico as Obras Completas in more than a dozen hefty volumes—is a blueprint, an atlas to that most turbulent century, its dusk colored by the same rancor that permeated its dawn. Our self-deprecating dreams, the evil that we do, our insatiable search for happiness amid incessant technological improvements, the value we place on the word, written and oral—all were explored by Paz's itinerant pen, reflecting on the universe in New Delhi and Paris, Cambridge and Buenos Aires, Madrid and Ciudad de México. Much like Wilson himself, Paz was a genuine polymath, a rediscoverer, and a believer in reason and dreams and poetic invention as our only salvation.
I met him only twice—in Ciudad de México in the mid-eighties at an event that also included Borges, Günter Grass, and Allen Ginsberg; and in New York in 1990—and I spoke to him by phone shortly before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Nothingeven remotely a friendship existed between us. But since first encountering him on the printed page, I have been a devotee and incessant reader. No sooner was an essay of his published in Vuelta or a volume featured in bookstores, than I devoured it without delay.
Paz would surely have preferred to be remembered as a poet, but his prose is a better metronome for our times. I, at least, consider it an apex. I confess to having never much cared for his poetry. Eliot Weinberger's edition, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, is outstanding, but it does not spark my interest. I am intrigued by Paz's experimental poetic drive, by his quest to be a poet engaged with the universe. His poems are about sensations—intangible, ethereal—too close to surrealism, a movement that approached poetry as a form of communion and liberated us all from a tyrannical social order but also let loose the demon of spontaneity. And spontaneity might be a trap: it legitimates chaos and crowns the impetus as supreme ruler.
Jason Wilson argues that "poetry for Paz is not a formal, aesthetic exercise, but it is his very being manifesting itself." Paz did perceive poetry as a soliloquy, a synergy beyond words. Lautréamont, an Uruguayan stationed in France who was a precursor of surrealism, suggested that the day would come when all poetry would be spoken, that people would know it by heart and, thus, it would be lived and not written. Paz agreed: for him poetry was an act of transformation—of himself as poet, of the poems reader, of the world itself. But I am invariably defeated by his invitation to engagement and get lost in his search for communion. His poetry is too loose, too mystical for my taste.
His nonfiction, on the other hand, is sublime. Even those essays in which he elucidates on poetry itself are inspiring. Often deep into the night, when everything else feels banal, I open The Bow and the Lyre, his meditation on poetic revelation, and am quickly hypnotized by it. Sor Juana, or, the Traps of Faith, his masterful biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, takes one through colonial Mexico on a hallucinatory journey almost as mystical in its effect as Sor Juana's own First Dream: it leaps across spheres of wisdom, twisting and turning in ruminations that are crystalline in delivery and sharp in content. And his study of eroticism, The Double Flame, is as thought-provoking as his reflections on the shortcomings of translation. In fact, it would be impossible for me to name my favorite among Paz's books. What seems easy instead is to recognize the vision that unifies them, a vision made of endless communicating vessels. Each time I read him, I am convinced that every human act has a purpose.
His essays gained him acolytes and enemies the world over, turning him invariably into a cause célèbre. His convictions were perpetually clear, even when they were unappealing. He believed in literature not as a business but an act of faith. It never mattered to him how many copies of his books sold, and many sold poorly. Leaves of Grass, he enjoyed remembering, was at first utterly ignored by Whitman's contemporaries, to the point that he himself had to write anonymous reviews of it. Paz was never a best-selling author on the scale of Stephen King, but his influence on our culture and his endurance are infinitely wider and more durable. With erudition and stamina he turned his attention to every aspect of life, from jokes to the paintings of Diego Velázquez, from VCRs to Subcomandante Marcos's upheaval in Chiapas. His style was terse, effulgent, never short of enthralling. By the time he had won the Nobel Prize in literature, he was considered a giant. He was equally at ease discussing T. S. Eliot and Buddhism, the Aztec Empire, Japanese haiku, the balkanization of the former USSR, and the tortuous modernity of Latin America. In an era of obnoxious specialists who know more about less, his cosmopolitanism, his Capacious eye, made him a rara avis. Indeed, Paz, as Morris Dickstein said about somebody else, "showed that the role of the generalist is not simply to know a little bit about many subjects, but to be passionate and knowledgeable about many different things—in a sense, to be a multi-faceted specialist." Paz ought to be credited, along with Borges, with opening up the Hispanic mind and making it savvier and more discerning. Because of them, Latin America is less provincial, less cryptic, less clumsy, and more modern. He himself once argued that it became a contemporary of the rest of the world only after World War II. It did so thanks in to his enthusiasm and intellectual stamina.
But what is an "intellectual"? From Antonio Gramsci to Theodor Adorno, the term is loaded with ambiguity. Dwight Macdonald, in a series of articles published by the periodical Politics, reflected on the responsibility of the intellectual. He wondered to what extent the American people were responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Noam Chomsky, in response to Macdonald, described intellectuals as an elite capable of speaking truth to power but which, because of its own commodity, seldom assumes that role. In fact, Chomsky portrays intellectuals right and left as "manufacturers of consent," indoctrinating society in order to alleviate the excesses of its political figures. "The device of feigned dissent, incorporating the doctrines of the state religion and eliminating rational critical discussion, is one of [their] most subtle means, though cruder techniques are also widely used and are highly effective in protecting us from seeing what we observe, from knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live."
My own view is not as radical: I also see the intellectual as an enlightened mind capable of exploring the nature and place of ideas. But unlike Chomsky, I do not believe intellectuals have a duty to any power other than themselves. To survey the territory, the intellectual must take risks, wander about and around with eyes wide open, venture into unforeseen lands, make connections, make use of any tools at his disposal, and not take anything for granted in order to seize the meaning of his environment in full scope.
Full scope. Paz's odyssey is a map to the artistic ups and downs of the twentieth century. He never vacillated in his scrutiny of the ideological trends that came before him (Marxism, communism, surrealism, utopianism, liberalism, etc.). He was an adventurer who might have grown inflexible and exasperated by the modes of his age, but he never ceased to articulate his thoughts on them—to make a map of the currents and countercurrents that shaped him and his environment. It was not always easy to empathize with him. The self-congratulatory trait of his personality became more evident in his old age, and so did his stubbornness. Still, it is impossible not to admire his scope.
This essay is not by any stretch an introduction to Paz, although I hope it brings the uninitiated to his work the way his essays on the Marquis de Sade led me to Justine, and The Labyrinth of Solitude (a book I have read so many times I have almost memorized it) attracted me to the works of José Vasconcelos and Samuel Ramos. My objective is to trace the roots of Paz's thought using a biographical template, to place him in context—to make his odyssey meaningful. More than anything else, I want to understand his legacy by explaining its pros and cons to myself.
* * *
Paz was born into a typical middle-class Catholic household, just as the peasant revolution of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa was getting under way. Modernism was bubbling in Europe at the time, and so was modernismo in Spanish poetry—a romantic literary movement that started in 1885 and included authors such as Ruben Darío and Julián del Casal. A few years earlier, Marcel Duchamp, about whom Paz would write a slim theoretical volume in 1968, shocked the world with Nude Descending a Staircase. (In Spanish Paz's book is part of volume 6 of Obras Completas; in English the essay is titled Marcel Duchamp: Or the Castle of Purity and was released in 1970.) Igor Stravinsky had just finished The Rite of Spring, and D. W. Griffith was about to release The Birth of a Nation. When he was only a few months old, his father joined Zapata's forces while his mother took refuge, with him, in Mixcoac, in the house of his paternal grandfather. Decades later, Paz would describe Zapata's project as an attempt to return to origins. The paradox of Zapatismo, he would argue, "was that it was a profoundly traditionalist movement; and precisely in that traditionalism its revolutionary might resides." Later on, as a poet, he turned Zapata into an inspiration.
With the exception of a few years in the United States, where his father, a lawyer and journalist, sought political asylum, Paz spent much of his childhood and adolescence in that house in Mixcoac. When he was a schoolboy it was obligatory to attend mass, but Paz's temperament was not a religious one. For more than three decades, Mexico had lived under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, considered until very recently a tyrant who nonetheless brought prosperity and foreign investment into the nation and helped transform it from a rural landscape to a vibrant republic by building a complex railroad network. The woman Paz's father married was a pious, uncultivated Catholic, affectionate and supportive, who was descended from Spanish immigrants. The child would come to describe his mother as "a love letter with grammatical errors." Later his father became an alcoholic and died in a train crash in 1935. The family owned a substantial library. It was a place where the future poet found escape and early solace, a place that for a while he perceived as a map of the universe.
The adolescent Paz was a passionate student who would fervently discuss politics in the streets, loved Dostoyevski, and joined a student strike in 1929. French culture, too, was essential in his upbringing. During the late nineteenth century, Parisian culture, glamorous and romantic, was glorified from the Rio Grande to the Argentine pampas. The modernistas emulated the decadent romanticism of J. K. Huysmans. Latin American poets and painters imitated the rhyme and taste of art nouveau, while the bourgeois saw the tongue of Victor Hugo and Flaubert as a sign of sophistication. This transatlantic influence left an indelible mark on Paz. As a young man, he dreamed of a visit to Paris, and he would eventually live there for three years (from 1959 to 1962) and become a devotee of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
Were the Americas ever authentic? This is a difficult question. I have tried to tackle it from a personal standpoint in my memoir, On Borrowed Words. The Oxford English Dictionary, never bashful in its definitions, depicts authenticity as the "quality of being authentic, or entitled to acceptance ... as being authoritative or duly authorized." But where does authority derive from in a hemisphere that became part of Western civilization in a forceful, haphazard fashion? The pre-Columbian legacy and the incoming European culture interbred. The result was a hybrid mix, an either/or impossible to solve. This explains why the collective soul in the region is always divided.
Throughout his life Paz was overwhelmed by this duality. But he never endorsed nostalgia, not even in his most fervently rebellious student years. On the contrary, he invariably took the side of cosmopolitanism. He viewed the European presence in Mexican culture in particular as a necessary evil. Despite the many attacks on his position, Paz always sought to rehabilitate the image of the conquerors. He saw little point in a one-sided portrayal of Spaniards and other transatlantic newcomers as "abusers." After all, their impact on native culture was ubiquitous, undeniable, and indelible. He did not settle for the easy liberal polarity oppressor/oppressed but attempted to understand the side effects of the
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Octavio Paz by Ilan Stavans. Copyright © 2001 by Ilan Stavans. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.