The Language of Passion
When André Breton died, Octavio Paz said in his tribute that to speak of the founder of surrealism without using the language of passion was impossible. The same could be said of Paz himself, since he lived his whole life, and especially his last decades, enmeshed in controversy, inspiring intense loyalty or fierce rejection in those around him. The polemic surrounding his writings will persist, since his work is deeply embedded in the century in which he lived, a century torn by ideological strife and political inquisitions, cultural guerrilla warfare and intellectual fury.
Paz lived his eighty-four years splendidly, caught up in the maelstrom of his time thanks to a youthful curiosity that he preserved till the end. He participated in all the great historical and cultural debates, aesthetic movements, and artistic revolutions, taking sides and explaining his preferences in essays often dazzling for the excellence of their prose, lucidity of their judgment, and vastness of their learning. He was never a dilettante or a mere observer but always an impassioned actor in what was happening around him, and he was a rarity among his colleagues, unafraid of swimming against the current or braving unpopularity. In 1984, shortly after a group of absolute idiots in Mexico burned him in effigy (chanting, in front of the U.S. embassy, “Reagan, robber, friend of Octavio Paz”) for his criticism of the Sandinista government, I ran into him: instead of being depressed, he was as gleeful as a schoolboy. And three years later, in the middle of a scuffle at the International Congress of Writers, I wasn’t surprised at all to see him rolling up his sleeves as he headed into the fray. Wasn’t it foolish to think of getting into a fistfight at the age of seventy-three? “I wasn’t going to let anybody hit my friend Jorge Semprún,” he explained.
It is dizzying to run through the subjects of his books: the anthropological theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the aesthetic revolution of Marcel Duchamp; pre-Hispanic art, the haiku of Bashō, and the erotic sculptures of Hindu temples; Spanish Golden Age poetry and English lyric poetry; the philosophy of Sartre and Ortega y Gasset; the cultural life of the viceroyalty of New Spain and the Baroque poetry of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz; the intricacies of the Mexican soul and the mechanisms of authoritarian populism established by the PRI; the direction of world affairs after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire. The list, if extended to include prologues, lectures, and articles, could go on for many pages, and it is no exaggeration to say that every one of the great cultural and political developments of his time engaged his imagination and inspired stirring reflections. Though he never lost the passion that seethes between the lines on even his calmest pages, Octavio Paz was first of all a thinker, a man of ideas, a formidable intellectual agitator in the tradition of Ortega y Gasset, who had perhaps the most lasting influence on him of the many writers from whom he profited.
Doubtless he would have liked posterity to remember him first and foremost as a poet, since poetry is the prince of genres, the most creative and the most intense, as he himself proved in his lovely readings of Francisco de Quevedo and Xavier Villaurrutia, of Luis Cernuda, Fernando Pessoa, and so many others and in his admirable translations of English, French, and Eastern poets. And he was certainly a magnificent poet, as I discovered when I was still a student, reading the blazing verse of Sunstone, one of the books I kept by my bed in my youth and always reread with immense pleasure. But I have the sense that a substantial part of his poetry, especially the experimental works (Blanco, Topoemas, and Renga, for example), succumbed to that eagerness for the new that he described in his Harvard lectures, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (1974), as subtly undermining the lasting value of works of art.
In his essays, however, he was perhaps even more daring and original than in his poems. Because he covered such a broad spectrum of topics, I can’t give my opinion on all of them with the same authority, and some are light and superficial. But even the pages he dashed off on India or love, which express nothing very personal or profound, say what they do say with such elegance, clarity, intelligence, and polish that it is impossible not to read them all the way through. He was a top-notch prose stylist, one of the most engaging, clear, and luminous ever in Spanish, a writer who handled language with magnificent certainty, making it express everything concrete or fantastic that occurred to him—sometimes truly wild trains of reasoning, like those that crackle in Conjunctions and Disjunctions—with a wealth of shadings and subtleties that make his texts impressive balancing acts. But unlike José Lezama Lima, he never resorted to jitanjáfora (as Alfonso Reyes dubbed pure verbal exercises without sinew or bone), even when he gave himself over to wordplay. He loved the meaning of words as much as their music, and when words flowed from his pen, they were always obliged to say something, to appeal to the intelligence of the reader as well as to his sensibility and his ear.
Since he was never a Communist or a fellow traveler, and never had qualms about criticizing intellectuals who, whether out of conviction, opportunism, or cowardice, were complicit with dictatorships (in other words, four-fifths of his colleagues), a picture of him as conservative and reactionary was painted by those who envied his talent, the prizes showered on him, and his constant presence at the center of events. It is one I fear will be a long time in fading: the carrion seekers have already begun to devour his remains. But the paradoxical truth is that in political affairs, from his first book of essays in 1950, The Labyrinth of Solitude, to his last on the subject, Pequeña crónica de grandes días (Small Chronicle of Great Days; 1990), Paz’s thought was always closer to democratic socialism than to conservatism or even the liberal doctrine of our age. From the surrealism-influenced Trotskyist and anarchist sympathies of his youth he proceeded to the defense of political democracy, or rather, pluralism and the state of law. But he always had an instinctive distrust of the free market—he was convinced that broad realms of culture, like poetry, would disappear if their existence depended solely on the free play of supply and demand—and he therefore came out in favor of prudent state intervention in the economy to correct social imbalances and excessive inequalities (the perennial argument of social democrats). That someone who thought this way, and who strongly condemned all armed U.S. actions in Latin America, including the invasion of Panama, should have been equated with Ronald Reagan and made the victim of an inquisition staged by the progressive left speaks volumes about the levels of sectarianism and idiocy that have taken over political debate south of the Rio Grande.
It is true, however, that his political image was slightly tarnished in recent years by his relationship with various PRI administrations, for the benefit of which he moderated his critical stance. This was neither gratuitous nor, as has been alleged, a capitulation to the praise and tribute heaped on him by those in power with the intent of bribing him. He was obeying a conviction, one I believed was mistaken—it was the source of the only dispute that cast a slight shadow over our long friendship—but one Paz defended with coherent arguments. Ever since 1970, in Posdata (Postscript), his splendid analysis of Mexico’s political realities, he had maintained that the ideal way for the country to begin inevitable democratization was through evolution, not revolution, a gradual process of reform undertaken from inside the existing Mexican system. This was something which, according to him, had begun under the administration of Miguel de la Madrid and gathered critical momentum later under his successor, Carlos Salinas. Not even the great corruption scandals and crimes of Salinas’s administration led Paz to revise his thesis that the PRI itself—this time under the then-president Ernesto Zedillo—would put an end to the political monopoly of the ruling party and bring democracy to Mexico.
Many times over the years I asked myself how the Latin American intellectual who had most bluntly autopsied the phenomenon of dictatorship (in The Philanthropic Ogre, 1979) and the Mexican version of authoritarianism could display such naïveté in this case. One possible answer is the following: Paz sustained his thesis less because he believed in the PRI’s ability to metamorphose into a genuinely democratic party than because he actively distrusted the alternative political forces, the PAN (National Action Party) and the PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party). He never believed that either group was capable of realizing the political transformation of Mexico. The PAN seemed to him a provincial party, Catholic in origin, too conservative. And the PRD was a collection of ex-PRI members and ex-Communists, without democratic credentials, which upon gaining power would probably restore the authoritarianism and cronyism that it pretended to combat. Let’s knock on wood that events won’t confirm this somber prophecy.
Since everyone is saying so, I, too, feel impelled to declare that Octavio Paz, poet and writer open to all the vagaries of the spirit, and citizen of the world if ever there was one, was at the same time a quintessential Mexican—though I confess I haven’t the slightest idea what this means. I know many Mexicans, and no two of them are alike, which means that as far as national identity is concerned, I wholly concur with something Paz himself once said: “The famous search for identity is an intellectual pastime, and sometimes also the occupation of sociologists with time on their hands.” Except, of course, that being a quintessential Mexican means loving Mexico intensely—its landscape, history, art, problems, and people—which, incidentally, would also make Malcolm Lowry and John Huston Mexicans. Paz loved Mexico and he spent a great deal of time pondering it, studying its past and discussing its present, analyzing its poets and its painters; in his immense body of work Mexico glows with a fiery light, as reality, myth, and a thousand metaphors. Evident as it may seem that this Mexico is the fantasy and invention of the imagination and pen of an extraordinary writer rather than the unadorned and prosaic Mexico of impoverished reality, such a truth is only transitory. If we may be sure of anything, it is that the gap between the two will slowly close with the inexorable passage of time and that the literary myth will enfold and devour reality. Sooner rather than later, from inside and out, Mexico will be seen, dreamed, loved, and hated as Octavio Paz portrayed it.