Octavio Paz
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by Philip Gambone

"The man could not walk the streets of Mexico City without being stopped by every other citizen and thanked profusely," wrote Maria Arana-Ward in the Washington Post a few days after the death of Octavio Paz in 1998. She called him "Mexico's Great Ideas Man."

Paz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, was indeed one of the Titans of twentieth-century Mexican letters. In dozens of books of poetry, biography, essays, literary criticism and translations, he represented "the high demand for a literature still capable of dealing with larger issues—love, time, truth," writes Peruvian writer Julio Ortega. "We Latin American writers owe Octavio Paz part of our literary identity."

Until 1950, Paz had only published poetry, but in that year one of his best-known works, The Labyrinth of Solitude, appeared, a collection of essays in which he examined Mexican history and culture.  From then on, his stature as a Renaissance man of letters grew. In 1987, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich brought out a collection of Paz's essays on art and literature, entitled Convergences, all of them translated by Helen Lane. The anthology, still readily available, beautifully conveys the dazzling mind of this breathtaking thinker and writer.

The subtitle of the collection, "Essays on Art and Literature," does not begin to suggest the wide range of subjects that engaged Paz's attention. And while several do, in fact, fall under the rubric of art and literature, every Paz essay ends up spinning off into a much more expansive universe of ideas. An essay ostensibly on Picasso, for example, compares him to the Spanish baroque poet and playwright Lope de Vega. "Neither of the two," he wrote, "conceived of art as a sentimental confession."

The collection includes pieces on television and culture; the tradition of the haiku; the spiritual dimension of art, gastronomy and eroticism; the dehumanization brought on by technology; American painting; and at least two on the art and philosophy of translation. "Translation," he wrote, "is also a civilizing activity: it presents us with an image of the other and thus forces us to recognize that the world does not end in ourselves and that each human being is humanity."

Throughout his career, Paz wrote many essays on poetry, a few of which are included in Convergences. In one essay, on the 17th-century Spanish poet Francisco Quevado—"one of my gods"—Paz says that Quevado's love sonnets "figure rightfully among the most intense of all European lyric poetry. One must read him to know what the nights and days of the loner are really like, the goad of unsatisfied appetite, the weight of the shadow of death on a man's conscience, the sleepless nights of rancor, the depths of melancholy, the mood swings from burning anger to cold contempt—in short, the whole gamut of feelings and sensations ranging from desperation to proud resignation." That's a typical Paz sentence. (There are others even more fulsome.) The subtlety of his thinking and the effervescence of his mind are on full display in these gorgeously (occasionally inscrutably) dense essays.

Francisco Quevedo - "one of my gods"
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Paz read and spoke several languages, and the breadth of his knowledge of world literature is astonishing. He makes more than passing reference to a wide range of literatures: classical (Plato, Plotinus, Heraclitus), English from the Gothic romance to James Joyce, French (Rousseau, Baudelaire, Fourier, Choderlos de Laclos), Italian, Chinese and Japanese. He was also well versed in philosophy and linguistics.

Much of Paz's poetry is erotic, and eroticism and love feature prominently in these essays. In an essay titled "A Table and a Bed," he writes: "To love does not mean to feel an attraction for a mortal body or for an immortal soul but for a person: an indefinable alloy of corporeal and spiritual elements. Love commingles not only matter and spirit, flesh and soul, but the two forms of time: eternity and the present moment."

Karl Marx
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As a young man, Paz gravitated toward the Left. His mature thinking and writing continued to pay homage to Marxism. "Reading Marx is refreshing and invigorating; it is an exercise in intellectual fearlessness that enriches us." But he was not shy about criticizing the turn that Marxism had taken. "In the past it helped us to think freely, but today it's an obstacle to freedom of thought."

Paz also had mixed feelings for the United States. He admired the U.S. faith in science and reason, but he also saw America's curious overlapping of science and Puritan morality as permitting "the imposition of rules that condemn peculiarities, exceptions and deviations." In a 1971 essay delivered at Harvard, he identified America's tendency to impose a "pattern of normality" on society: "the extirpation or the separation of what is alien, different, ambiguous, impure. One and the same condemnation applies to blacks, Chicanos, sodomites, and spices." Words that ring chillingly true today.

Throughout these essays, Mexico—and Latin America in general—were never far from his mind. He emphasized and celebrated the rich and complex ethnic mix of his native land, a plurality of cultures, nations and languages. "Many of us Mexicans are contemporaries of Montezuma, and others of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, without thereby, in certain cases, ceasing to be citizens of the twentieth century." Similarly, about Latin American poetry, in writes: "We Latin American writers, like those of the United States, live somewhere between the European tradition to which we belong by virtue of our language and civilization, and the reality of America…. Our roots are European, but our horizon is the land and history of the Americas."

Paz was a passionate torchbearer for the enriching function of diversity. In 1980, he wrote, "Either the coming civilization will be a dialogue of national cultures or there will be no civilization. If uniformity reigns, all of us will have the same face, a death mask. But I believe the contrary: I believe in the diversity that is plurality that is life." Call these "woke" words, if you want. I call them a clarion call for sanity, humanity, and truth.

Paz receives the Nobel Prize
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In one of the last essays in Convergences—on André Breton and Joan Miró—Paz wrote: "The mission of art … is not to reflect history mechanically or to make it the spokesman of a given ideology, but to voice, in opposition to systems, their functionaries and executioners, the invincible Yes of life." Throughout his long career as a writer, Octavio Paz never failed to give a glorious and resounding Yes to life. We need him more than ever in these dark and shameful days so full of small-minded functionaries and their executioners.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon, at the Aurora Bookstore, and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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