Toward Octavio Paz

A Reading of His Major Poems, 1957--1976

John M. Fein

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186146
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik in der Dichtkunst

The undisputed intellectual leadership of Octavio Paz, not only in Mexico but throughout Spanish America, rests on achievements in the essay and in poetry. In the field of the essay, he is the author of more than twenty-five books on subjects whose diversity—esthetics, politics, surrealist art, the Mexican character, cultural anthropology, and Eastern philosophy, to cite only a few—is dazzling. In poetry, his creativity has increased in vigor over more than fifty years as he has explored the numerous possibilities open to Hispanic poets from many different sources. The bridge that joins the halves of his writing is a concern for language in general and for the poetic process in particular.

Toward Octavio Paz defines this process of creation through a close examination of the books that represent the summit of the poet's development, three long poems and three collections. It is intended for readers of varied poetic experience who are approaching Paz's work for the first time.

By studying the relationship of the parts of the poem, particularly structure and theme, Fein traces the poet's growth through approaches to the reader, each embodied in a separate work. From the divided circularity of Piedra de sol through the intensification of the subject of Salamandra, the multiple meanings of Blanco, the polarities of Ladera este, and the literary solipsism of Pasado en claro, to the silences of Vuelta, Paz has shaped his audience's responses to his work through suggestion rather than control. The result is not only a new poetry but a new receptivity.

1 Introduction

The title of this book is derived from two studies by Professor Harry Levin that were popular about forty years ago when I was a college student. Toward Stendhal and Toward Balzac suggest an attitude of modesty before a literary giant. Even more important is the implication that every great writer we study is to some degree unattainable, no matter how clear or moving his literary creation may be. This incompleteness, which is perhaps more the reader’s than the author’s, is particularly applicable in the case of Octavio Paz, whose poetic goal is the expression of what he feels to be basically incommunicable. The reader, therefore, can only approach the author’s work and accept with mystery, frustration, or pleasure the realization that his comprehension will be imperfect.

The undisputed intellectual leadership of Paz, not only in Mexico but throughout Spanish America, rests on a dichotomy of achievements. In the field of the essay, he is the author of twenty-five books on subjects whose diversity—esthetics, politics, Surrealist art, the Mexican character, cultural anthropology, and Eastern philosophy, to cite only a few—is dazzling. In twenty-one books of poetry spanning more than fifty years, his creativity has increased in vigor as he has explored the numerous possibilities opened to Hispanic poets from many different sources. His success in diversified fields is heightened by the ways in which his essays and his poetry are complementary: the core of his creativity is a concern for language in general and for the poetic process in particular.

Like most intellectuals, Paz is more the result of his rigorous inquiry and self-discipline than of an educational system. The family into which he was born in Mexico City in 1914 represented, in its combination of indigenous and Spanish heritage and of Catholicism and nonbelief, and in its impoverishment after the Revolution, the history of his country. As a child he led a rather solitary life in a crumbling mansion and attended a French religious school, having been tutored in that language by an aunt. He had access to his grandfather’s library, which introduced him to Latin, Greek, and Spanish classics, nineteenth-century French authors, and writers in Spanish who were popular around the turn of the century.¹

At fourteen he showed the dedication to poetry and the autodidacticism that were to shape his life. Although his family persuaded him to attend the schools of Arts and Letters and Law at the university, he did not receive a degree. His enthusiasm for poetry turned to the Spanish generation of 1927; only later did he discover their predecessors of the post-modernist period. At nineteen, when he published his first book of poems, Luna silvestre, Paz was an active member of literary groups, a contributor to literary reviews, and the founder of two. He was in the center of a productive and eclectic activity that introduced the most innovative French, English, and Spanish writers to Mexico.

A key event in Paz’s life was the invitation, at the suggestion of Pablo Neruda, to attend a congress of anti-fascist writers in Spain in 1937. At the height of the Civil War, he met not only the leading Spanish writers (Cernuda, Alberti, Altolaguirre, Antonio Machado), but also Spanish Americans (Neruda, Huidobro, Vallejo). An even more important result of the experience in Spain was the feeling of solidarity, which Paz was to call, in another context, “communion.”

He continued to express that feeling in his work on behalf of Spanish Republicans, particularly those in exile in Mexico, and in his collaboration in El popular, a politically oriented newspaper sponsored by Mexican workers. In 1940 he broke with El popular and with Neruda as a result of the Russian-German pact. His literary prestige grew through his contributions to three literary journals (Taller, 1938; Tierra nueva, 1940; and El hijo pródigo, 1943) and his role in the introduction of Surrealism to Mexico.

With the support of a Guggenheim grant in 1944, Paz visited the United States, where he began the brilliant essay on Mexican character, El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], that was to attract international attention when it was published in 1950. The first edition of his collected poetry, Libertad bajo palabra, appeared in 1949. His appointment to the diplomatic service took him to Paris, where he strengthened his knowledge of, and connection with, French writers, particularly Breton and the Surrealists.

Roggiano defines the period from 1951 to 1968 as Paz’s most productive and complex.² Not only does it mark his creative and intellectual maturity (eight books of poetry and seven of essays), but also a rise in his diplomatic career, culminating in six years as head of the Mexican Embassy in India. The years in India also brought him personal fulfillment in his second marriage. Above all, Paz became, in both his life and his work, a truly international figure.

The massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968, for which the Mexican government was responsible, was a turning point in Paz’s life. His immediate response was a short but eloquent poem in protest and the submission of his resignation from the diplomatic service. He accepted several short academic appointments at the universities of Cambridge, Pittsburgh, and Texas, and in 1971-72 the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard. His success there led to a regular appointment as Professor of Comparative Literature until 1980, when he retired and was recognized by Harvard with an honorary degree. During these years he directed a lively literary supplement in Mexico, Plural. After political maneuvering forced him and most of Plural’s contributing staff to resign, he founded another journal, Vuelta, which is generally regarded today as the best of its kind in Latin America.

Paz’s numerous books of essays offer ample evidence of his productivity as a thinker. Just as the meaning of history underlies his analyses of society, so does the significance of language connect his numerous essays on Hispanic and French poetry and art. Ranging from El arco y la lira (1956)—a brilliant interpretation of poetry as language, process, and social phenomenon—to his broad history of the evolution of modern poetry, Los hijos del limo: Del romanticismo a la vanguardia (1974) [Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde], he views the distillation of language not as an adornment of mankind but as a key to its comprehension. His seminal study of the French artist, Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza (1968) [Marcel Duchamp, or the Castle of Purity], provides insights into contemporary hermetic expression, including his own work. The massive Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, Las trampas de la fe (1982) is equally revolutionary in its scholarship on the remarkable philosopher, scientist, and authoress, and in its intellectual history of the Colonial period.

Paz’s poetry and prose represent two aspects of a concern for the predicament of modern man, whom he is not unique in viewing as fragmented and mutilated. In fact, all of his work is unified by a utopian wish for the fulfillment of man’s wholeness in individual creativity and in the building of society, offering an ennobling vision of man to an uneasy world. This vision underlies his attempts to reconcile opposites, especially those of passion and reason, linear and circular time, society and the individual, and word and meaning.

My interest in Paz’s poetry began before 1956, when I published an article that may have the merit of being the first extensive critical essay in English on his work. Since that time I have read his books eagerly and analyzed his poems enthusiastically with my students at Duke University. I cannot claim that I have understood completely what I have studied; Paz’s complexity, illuminated so well by Carlos H. Magis in La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz, always leaves something to be explored. In providing explication of most of the longer poems published between 1957 and 1976 (from Piedra de sol through Vuelta), my principal objective is to help those not acquainted with Paz’s poetry to surmount initial difficulties in order to respond personally to his voice. I hope also that scholars may find these new readings useful, or at least that they may understand my response to poems that move me in varied and sometimes puzzling ways.

My basic approach is to study the interrelationship of the parts of the poem, particularly structure and theme, integral to a close reading of the texts. This is not an easy task for Paz’s work or indeed for any poet whose major production has appeared in the last fifty years. The development of poetry in all Western languages away from conventional form seems to have diminished the usefulness of the New Criticism. Nonetheless, that method is productive as a point of departure for understanding contemporary poets, and has the advantage of providing a link with the poetry of earlier generations in showing how traditional devices such as structure, tone, metaphor, and symbolism can be used in innovative ways.

Since Magis’ study cited above covers the early period of Paz’s poetry thoroughly, I have concentrated on the major poems and collections after La estación violenta in the present work. The only exception is the first chapter, on Piedra de sol, a revised version of my article “La estructura de ‘Piedra de sol,’ ” which appeared in the Revista iberoamericana. Its approach to the poem as a whole differs considerably from Magis’ methodology. Separate chapters here are dedicated to two other lengthy works that Paz published separately, Blanco and Pasado en claro. The three chapters on collections of poems, those on Salamandra, Ladera este, and Vuelta, focus on long poems that can be considered characteristic of these volumes.

My chapter titles suggest Paz’s different but complementary attempts to expand the reader’s sensitivity to poetry. They are labels of dominant, rather than exclusive, approaches. The polarities of Ladera este, for example, can be found in much of the poetry before and after its publication. Blanco, likewise, anticipates Pasado en claro by including the poem itself as part of the subject, and all the major poems lead to silence through truncations of the text. The chapter titles, accordingly, emphasize the primary technique of each of the volumes studied in order to delineate Paz’s efforts to create a more responsive reader.

There are two major characteristics of Paz’s work that are particularly challenging to his critics. The first is his relationship to the Surrealists, among whom French poets figure more significantly than their Hispanic counterparts. It is obvious that Paz, who is trilingual in Spanish, English, and French, feels a great affinity with French culture and history of ideas. His veneration of André Breton, for example, clearly delineated in Jason Wilson’s excellent book, suggests that his affiliation with Surrealism is part of the origin of his hermeticism. The difficulties for the critic are obvious: how can one define the theme of a poem that is so intensely personal that its ultimate definition rests within the text itself? How can one assume a common response from readers when the poem in fact invites multiple responses, each of which is justifiable and may conflict with, if not exclude, the alternate readings?

Another significant critical problem is posed by Paz’s concept of poetry, which has developed over the period of many years and can be seen most clearly in his essays. These, as has often been observed, are the basis for comparing him to the late Alfonso Reyes, not only in their breadth and brilliance, but particularly in their contribution to critical theory and to an understanding of the role of poetry in society. Paz’s first effort in this field, “Poesía de comunión y poesía de soledad,” is as meaningful today as when it first appeared in El hijo pródigo in 1943. Some of the ideas outlined there were the nucleus for the best developed and most readable volume on poetic theory that Latin America has produced, El arco y la lira (1956). The observation of Paz’s evolution as a critic is in itself an educational process. Paz himself is the first to note rectifications and clarifications (see Rodríguez Monegal’s article on the differences between the editions of El arco y la lira), but the concepts underlying his theories remain basically unchanged. Central to his critical thought are the desire to make poetry more meaningful to man and the conviction that poetry must go beyond the text to (and through) the individual’s response. The essence of the poem, he believes, is unwritten, and therefore silent. It is analogous to the pauses in musical composition that express as much meaning as the sounds. If the poem ends in silence, the critic is reluctant to intrude with his own interpretation of meaning.

The constants of Paz’s concept of poetry can be stated in a series of paradoxes. The poet writes only for himself but must communicate to an audience. The poem is a mystery whose creation can never be accurately described, yet man cannot receive it without thinking about the process that created it. Language is a defective but indispensable instrument for conveying what is incommunicable. Poetry is an ecstasy that both denies and transforms reality; although it cannot be grasped, it is essential to man’s concept of himself and to the functioning of society.

Perhaps the most troublesome of Paz’s paradoxes is his rejection of analysis as an aid to understanding contemporary poetry. Even his notes to Ladera este, limited to geographical and historical explanations, are regarded by Paz with reluctance and suspicion:

Como en algunos pasajes aparecen palabras y alusiones a personas, ideas y cosas que podrían extrañar al lector no familiarizado con esa región del mundo, varios amigos me aconsejaron incluir, al final de este volumen, unas cuantas notas que aclarasen esas oscuridades—y otras no menos superfluas. Los obedezco, con el temor (¿la esperanza?) de que estas notas, lejos de disiparlos, aumenten los enigmas.³

[Since in some passages there appear words and allusions to people, ideas, and things that might puzzle the reader who is not familiar with that part of the world, several friends advised me to include at the end of this volume a few notes to clear up those difficulties—and others not less superfluous. I accede to them with the fear (hope?) that these notes, far from dissipating the enigmas, will increase them.]

It is significant that the notes are omitted in the collected poetry of Poemas. A more important distrust of critical interpretation appears in Paz’s essay “Hablar y decir,” in which he supports Maistre’s observation that thought and word are synonymous and Breton’s similar belief that poetry is the perfect equivalence between sound and meaning, rendering any further statement superfluous. It is, Paz maintains, meaningless to ask what a poem means: “Los poemas no se explican ni se interpretan; en ellos el signo cesa de significar: es” [Poems cannot be explained or interpreted; in them the sign stops signifying: it is]. The clearest summary of Paz’s anticritical stance is the conclusion of his introduction to Poesía en movimiento: “La significación de la poesía, si alguna tiene, no está ni en los juicios del crítico ni en las opiniones del poeta. La significación es cambiante y momentánea: brota del encuentro entre el poema y el lector” [The meaning of poetry, if it has any, is neither in the judgments of the critic nor in the opinions of the poet. The meaning is changing and momentary: it comes from the encounter between the poem and the reader].

The diminishment, if not the elimination, of criticism’s role in understanding poetry results in increased responsibilities for the reader. In the same way that contemporary drama experiments with the location of the stage and with the distinction between actors and audience to abolish the latter’s passivity, so does Paz seek to enable the reader not only to respond to the poem, but to assist in its creation. His objective is to reduce the differences between poet and reader, so that the two can work together in a common purpose. He is aware, of course, of the paradoxical nature of his mission: just as to reach ultimate expression he must abolish words, so must the reader and poet communicate by transcending the poem. As early as 1938, Paz referred to “el lector de poesía, que cada día más es un verdadero reconstructor de ella” [the reader of poetry who is more and more a true reconstructor of it]. In recent years he has developed this concept to its logical conclusion, transforming the reader into a poet by confronting him with demanding literature: “According to this view of reader participation, the interpretive act becomes synonymous with the creative process itself.”⁴

In her very perceptive essay, Ruth Needleman traces the origin of Paz’s concept of the reader to the fundamental change in his view of language that took place between the two editions of El arco y la lira in 1956 and 1967. In the first he denied the possibility of separating language from its human context. In the second he notes the loss of that context...