Alternating Current

Octavio Paz

• Editore: Arcade
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781628721683
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Dissertations littéraires

In its front-page review of Alternating Current, The New York Times Book Review called Octavio Paz "an intellectual literary one-man band" for his ability to write incisively and with dazzling originality about a wide range of subjects. This collection of his essays is divided into three parts. Part 1 sets forth his credo as an artist and poet, steeped in his knowledge of world literature and Mexican art and history and buttressed by readings of writers from Mexican poet Luis Cernuda to D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, André Breton, and Carlos Fuentes. Part 2 deals with themes such as Western individualism versus plurality and flux in Eastern philosophy, atheism versus belief, nihilism, liberated man, and versions of paradise. In Part 3, Paz writes of politics and ethics in essays on revolt and revolution, existentialism, Marxism, the third world, and the new face of Latin America.A scintillating thinker and a prescient voice on emerging world culture, Paz reveals himself here as "a man of electrical passions, paradoxical visions, alternating currents of thoughts, and feeling that runs hot but never cold" ( Christian Science Monitor ).

What Does Poetry Name?

Poetry has been likened to mysticism and to eroticism. The similarities between them are obvious; the differences are no less apparent. The first and most important of these differences is the meaning, or rather the object of poetry: what the poet names. The mystical experience—including that of atheist sects such as primitive Buddhism and Tantrism—is a search for contact with a transcendent good. The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate. This is not to say that the poetic universe lacks meaning or that its meaning is peripheral. I am simply saying that in poetry meaning is inseparable from words, whereas in ordinary discourse, and even in the discourse of the mystic, the meaning lies in what the words point to, in something beyond language. The experience of the poet is above all else a verbal experience; in poetry every experience immediately takes on a verbal quality. This has been true of all poets in every age, but since Romanticism this preoccupation with language has become what we may call a poetic consciousness, an attitude that played no part in the classical tradition. The poets of former times were as keenly aware of the value of words as modern poets; but they were less sensitive to meaning. Góngora’s hermeticism does not imply a criticism of meaning, whereas that of Mallarmé or Joyce is primarily a criticism, and at times a destruction, of meaning. Modern poetry is inseparable from the criticism of language, which in turn is the most radical and the most virulent form of criticism of reality. Language now occupies the place once occupied by the gods or some other external entity or outward reality. The poem does not refer to anything outside itself; what a word refers to is another word. The meaning does not reside outside the poem but within it, not in what the words say, but in what they say to each other.

Góngora and Mallarmé, Donne and Rimbaud cannot be read in the same way. The difficulties in Góngora are external; they are grammatical, linguistic, mythological. Góngora is not obscure: he is complicated. His syntax is unusual, there are veiled mythological and historical allusions, the meaning of each phrase and even each individual word is ambiguous. But once these knotty problems and teasing enigmas have been solved, the meaning is clear. This is also true of Donne, a poet no less difficult than Góngora, who writes in a style that is even more dense. The difficulties presented by Donne’s poetry are linguistic, intellectual, and theological. But once the reader has found the key, the poem opens like a tabernacle. Donne’s best poems embody an erotic, intellectual, and religious paradox. In both these poets, the references are to something outside the poem: to nature, society, art, mythology, theology. The poet speaks of the eye of Polyphemus, the whiteness of Galatea, the horror of death, the presence of a young girl. In Rimbaud’s major works, the attitude is completely different. In the first place, his œuvre is a criticism of reality and of the “values” that support it or justify it: Christianity, morality, beauty; in the second place, it is an attempt to lay the foundations of a new reality: a new fraternity, a new eroticism, a new man. All this is to be the mission of poetry, “the alchemy of the Word.” Mallarmé is even more rigorous. His œuvre—if that is the proper word for a few signs left on a handful of pages, the traces of an unparalleled journey of exploration and a shipwreck—is something more than a criticism and a negation of reality: it is the obverse side of being. The word is the obverse side of reality: not nothingness but the Idea, the pure sign that no longer points to anything and is neither being nor nonbeing. The “theater of the spirit”—the Work or the Word—is not only the “double” of the universe: it is true reality. In Rimbaud and Mallarmé language turns back upon itself, it ceases to designate, it is neither a symbol of, nor does it refer to, external realities, whether physical or suprasensible objects. For Góngora a table is “squared pine,” and for Donne the Christian Trinity is “bones to philosophy but milk to faith.” Rimbaud does not address the world, but rather the Word on which that world rests:

Elle est retrouvée!
Quoi? L’éternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.

The difficulty of modern poetry does not stem from its complexity—Rimbaud is far simpler than Góngora or Donne—but rather from the fact that, like mysticism or love, it demands total surrender (and an equally total vigilance). If the word were not ambiguous, I would say that the nature of the difficulty is not intellectual but moral. It is an experience that implies a negation of the outer world, if only a provisional one, as in philosophical reflection. In short, modern poetry is an attempt to do away with all conventional meanings because poetry itself becomes the ultimate meaning of life and of man; therefore, it is at once the destruction and the creation of language—the destruction of words and meanings, the realm of silence, but at the same time, words in search of the Word. Those who dismiss this quest as “utter madness” are legion. Nonetheless, for more than a century a few solitary spirits, among them the noblest and most gifted human beings who have ever trod this earth, have unhesitatingly devoted their entire lives to this absurd undertaking.

Form and Meaning

The real ideas of a poem are not those that occur to the poet before he writes his poem, but rather those that appear in his work afterward, whether by design or by accident. Content stems from form, and not vice versa. Every form produces its own idea, its own vision of the world. Form has meaning; and, what is more, in the realm of art only form possesses meaning. The meaning of a poem does not lie in what the poet wanted to say, but in what the poem actually says. What we think we are saying and what we are really saying are two quite different things.

Homage to Aesop

Everything we name enters the circle of language, and therefore the circle of meaning. The world is a sphere of meanings, a language. But each word has its own particular meaning, which is different from and opposed to that of all other words. Within language, meanings battle among themselves, neutralize each other, annihilate each other. The statement: “Everything is meaningful because it is a part of language” can be reversed: “Nothing is meaningful because everything is language.” The world is a sphere. etc. . . .

Language and Abstraction

For many years now, it has been a commonplace that abstract painting has gone as far as it can go: it has reached its absolute limits. This seems to me to be a misstatement of the facts: what is most characteristic of the great movements in art is their radicalism, their continual surpassing of their own limits, their effort to approach the absolute, to go beyond the outermost boundaries of art. When that furthest limit has been reached, another painter arrives on the scene, makes the crucial leap, discovers yet another free space beyond, and once again is stopped short by a wall— a wall that he must leap over in order to reach the open spaces beyond. Retreat is impossible. Has abstraction become a new academism? It does not matter: all movements become formal schools and all styles mere recipes. What is deplorable is to end up being an academic painter; but making academism a steppingstone is not at all to be deplored. The great Baroque and Mannerist painters did not scorn the art of their predecessors; by exaggerating it, they went beyond it. The same thing is true of Symbolist poetry: Symbolist poets did not deny Romanticism; they made it aware of its real nature. After the classicism of the early abstractionists and the romanticism of “abstract expressionism,” what we need is a Mannerism, a Baroque-abstract.

The real danger of sterility confronting abstract painting lies in its pretension that it is a language sufficient unto itself. By the very fact that it pretends to be totally subjective—since it is the individual painter and he alone who creates and uses this language—it lacks an element essential to all language: a system of signs and symbols with meanings shared by all those who use it. If each artist speaks in his own private language, the result is lack of communication, the death of language. A dialogue between schizophrenics. The best abstract painters arrived at a sort of universal language when they rediscovered certain archetypal forms that represent man’s most ancient and most universal heritage. But was it really a language? It was, rather, a pre-language or a meta-language. Abstract painters waver between stammering and mystical illumination. Though they disdain communication, they occasionally contrive to express communion. The opposite is true of poetry: the only thing at a poet’s disposal is words—each of which has a meaning that is the same for everyone—and it is out of these words that he must try to create a new language. The poet’s words continue to be a language, but: at the same time they are also something else: poetry, something never before heard, never before expressed, something that is language and at the same time something that denies language and goes beyond it. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone. It either falls short of language or goes beyond it, resulting either in silence or in onomatopoeic interjection: Mondrian or Pollock. It is an attempt at expression that implicitly denies what it affirms. Therein perhaps lies its possibility of renewing itself: only that creative work which does not deny its own inner contradiction and brings it into the full light of day is capable of revealing its true nature, which is always twofold. If it were to take this contradiction as its point of departure and refuse to conjure it away, abstract painting might go beyond the limits imposed upon it and realize itself by affirming the very thing that denies it. That was the secret of Baroque art and poetry.

A Peruvian Painter

After many years, I have had the chance to see once again the works of Fernando de Szyszlo, for some of his latest paintings have recently been shown in Mexico City (1959). Szyszlo is Peru’s best painter, or at any rate the Peruvian painter whose works are best known outside his own country. He was one of the first practitioners of abstract painting in Hispano-America, and he has not changed very much. I have a series of engravings entitled Homage to César Vallejo, dating from the years Szyszlo and I spent in Paris together, the period in his life when he managed to earn the praise of a severe judge, Hans Hartung. On comparing these works of Szyszlo’s with his recent oil painting, I find that he is more the master of his craft, freer and more venturesome, though still the same; his style is still difficult and austere, at once violent and lyrical. It is painting that is not outgoing, that looks inward toward intimate truths, that disdains the complicity of the senses and demands a more ascetic contemplation on the part of the viewer. Among Mexican painters, Soriano would represent the opposite pole, all immediate impulse and effusion, a great fountain of dizzying colors and forms. I do not mean to say that Szyszlo’s painting is only an intellectual construction. There is a visible struggle between rigorous discipline and spontaneity; he is not merely an intellectual painter: he has sensitivity. His taut, swooping forms can be aggressive and cruel; at other times, they are such dense concentrations of color that they give off sparks of boundless energy. A flight captured on canvas, an explosion, reserve. Many painters—spurred on by the example of Picasso—change style from one day to the next; but Szyszlo does not change: he matures. He explores more and more remote regions within himself.

Notes on La realidad y el deseo*

In recent months (of the year 1958), a one-volume edition of Luis Cernuda’s collected poems has been published. Cernuda has been faithful to himself all his life, and his book, which has grown slowly and steadily, as living things grow, has an internal consistency that is quite unusual in modern poetry. There are so many new poems in this latest edition, and they shed such revealing light on those published in the past, that for the first time we begin to catch a glimpse of the real significance of his œuvre. Like the voyager who sees the real outline of an unknown land gradually take shape before his eyes as he draws closer and closer to its coast, so in the space of the last twenty-five years our generation has witnessed the gradual revelation of a new poetic continent.

* [Reality and Desire.]

If we except Cernuda’s critical essays and a number of his occasional fictional pieces—all written as an offshoot of his poetry—he is the author of a single book. It requires a great faith in one’s own powers (or a proud despair) to thus gamble everything on a single card. Despair, faith, pride: contradictory words that nonetheless naturally go together. All of them are related to yet another word that acts as a tenuous support for them: fate or necessity. Cernuda is one of the rare poets of our time marked with the brand of fate. He writes because he must write. To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals. A demon, Cernuda’s poetic conscience, refuses to loose its grip on him, demanding that he put into words what he has to say, come what may. Cernuda is fond of citing a phrase from Heraclitus: “Character is destiny.”

Examples of different sorts of loyalty to the poetic demon: Eluard, the author of many books of poems, wrote only one poem all his life, and each of his books contains countless versions of this one poem; Cernuda, the author of a single book, is a poet of many poems.

I wrote: a poetic continent. Perhaps the expression is more applicable to Neruda, given the physical immensity, the natural massiveness, the awesome geographical monotony of that Chilean’s poetry. Geography is of little concern to Cernuda, and in his poems all of nature, from the sea and nameless rocky cliffs to the Castilian plateau, is steeped in history. Cernuda’s æuvre is a spiritual biography, that is to say the precise opposite of a geography: a human world, a universe at whose center we find that managed to earn the praise of a severe judge, Hans Hartung. On comparing these works of Szyszlo’s with his recent oil painting, I find that he is more the master of his craft, freer and more venturesome, though still the same; his style is still difficult and austere, at once violent and lyrical. It is painting that is not outgoing, that looks inward toward intimate truths, that disdains the complicity of the senses and demands a more ascetic contemplation on the part of the viewer. Among Mexican painters, Soriano would represent the opposite pole, all immediate impulse and effusion, a great fountain of dizzying colors and forms. I do not mean to say that Szyszlo’s painting is only an intellectual construction. There is a visible struggle between rigorous discipline and spontaneity; he is not merely an intellectual painter: he has sensitivity. His taut, swooping forms can be aggressive and cruel; at other times, they are such dense concentrations of color that they give off sparks of boundless energy. A flight captured on canvas, an explosion, reserve. Many painters—spurred on by the example of Picasso—change style from one day to the next; but Szyszlo does not change: he matures. He explores more and more remote regions within himself.

Notes on La realidad y el deseo*

In recent months (of the year 1958), a one-volume edition of Luis Cernuda’s collected poems has been published. Cernuda has been faithful to himself all his life, and his book, which has grown slowly and steadily, as living things grow, has an internal consistency that is quite unusual in modern poetry. There are so many new poems in this latest edition, and they shed such revealing light on those published in the past, that for the first time we begin to catch a glimpse of the real significance of his æuvre. Like the voyager who sees the real outline of an unknown land gradually take shape before his eyes as he draws closer and closer to its coast, so in the space of the last twenty-five years our generation has witnessed the gradual revelation of a new poetic continent.

* [Reality and Desire.]

If we except Cernuda’s critical essays and a number of his occasional fictional pieces—all written as an offshoot of his poetry—he is the author of a single book. It requires a great faith in one’s own powers (or a proud despair) to thus gamble everything on a single card. Despair, faith, pride: contradictory words that nonetheless naturally go together. All of them are related to yet another word that acts as a tenuous support for them: fate or necessity. Cernuda is one of the rare poets of our time marked with the brand of fate. He writes because he must write. To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals. A demon, Cernuda’s poetic conscience, refuses to loose its grip on him, demanding that he put into words what he has to say, come what may. Cernuda is fond of citing a phrase from Heraclitus: “Character is destiny.”

Examples of different sorts of loyalty to the poetic demon: Eluard, the author of many books of poems, wrote only one poem all his life, and each of his books contains countless versions of this one poem; Cernuda, the author of a single book, is a poet of many poems.

I wrote: a poetic continent. Perhaps the expression is more applicable to Neruda, given the physical immensity, the natural massiveness, the awesome geographical monotony of that Chilean’s poetry. Geography is of little concern to Cernuda, and in his poems all of nature, from the sea and nameless rocky cliffs to the Castilian plateau, is steeped in history. Cernuda’s æuvre is a spiritual biography, that is to say the precise opposite of a geography: a human world, a universe at whose center we find that half comic, half tragic creature, man. Lilting song and probing analysis, soliloquy and supplication, frenzy and irony, confession and circumspection, all governed by a consciousness seeking to transform lived experience into spiritual wisdom.

Critics have either said nothing about Cernuda’s book, or they have heaped empty praise upon it—which is another way of saying nothing. As has happened with other great poets in the past, the critics’ coolness toward Cernuda’s poetry, their uneasiness and insecurity, are due to the unintentionally moral nature of his inspiration. His book does not point a moral, to be sure; nonetheless, it puts before us a vision of reality that is a threat to the fragile edifice that goes by the name of Good and Evil. Blake said that every true poet, wittingly or unwittingly, is on the devil’s side.

As a love-poet, Cernuda resembles Bécquer. As a poet of poetry, he is Baudelaire’s descendant, having inherited his awareness of the loneliness of the poet, his vision of the modern city and its bestial powers, his split personality as lyric poet and critic. The two poets share the same desperate, mad yearning for happiness on earth and the same certain...