Reality in Movement

Maarten Van Delden

Description

In the last couple of decades there has been a surge of interest in Octavio Paz's life and work, and a number of important books have been published on Paz. However, most of these books are of a biographical nature, or they examine Paz's role in the various intellectual initiatives he headed in Mexico, specifically the journals he founded.

Reality in Movement looks at a wide range of topics of interest in Paz's career, including his engagement with the subversive, adversary strain in Western culture; his meditations on questions of cultural identity and intercultural contact; his dialogue with both leftist and conservative ideological traditions; his interest in feminism and psychoanalysis, and his theory of poetry. It concludes with a chapter on Octavio Paz as a literary character—a kind of reception study.

Offering a complex and nuanced portrait of Paz as a writer and thinker—as well as an understanding of the era in which he lived—Reality in Movement will appeal to students of Octavio Paz and of Mexican literature more generally, and to readers with an interest in the many significant literary, cultural, political, and historical topics Paz wrote about over the course of his long career.
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Rebel
Chapter 2: Revolution
Chapter 3: Mexico and the United States
Chapter 4: India
Chapter 5: Psychoanalysis
Chapter 6: Feminism
Chapter 7: The Left
Chapter 8: Conservatism
Chapter 9: Poetics
Chapter 10: Octavio Paz as a Literary Character
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Latin American
• Mexican Revolution
• Caribbean
• Octavio Paz

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826501509
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reality in Movement
Reality in Movement
Octavio Paz as Essayist and Public Intellectual
MAARTEN VAN DELDEN
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2021 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2021
This study was funded in part by the Latin American Institute and the Office of the Dean of Humanities at UCLA.
Cover photo of Octavio Paz ©Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Van Delden, Maarten, 1958– author.
Title: Reality in movement : Octavio Paz as essayist and public intellectual / Maarten van Delden.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Comprehensive study of Octavio Paz's essayistic work and his role as a public intellectual"—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045512 (print) | LCCN 2020045513 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826501493 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826501486 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826501509 (epub) | ISBN 9780826501516 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Paz, Octavio, 1914-1998--Criticism and interpretation. | Mexico—Intellectual life—20th century.
Classification: LCC PQ7297.P285 Z96535 2021 (print) | LCC PQ7297.P285 (ebook) | DDC 861/.62—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045512
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045513
In memory of my mother
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1. The Rebel
2. Revolution
3. Mexico and the United States
4. India
5. Psychoanalysis
6. Feminism
7. The Left
8. Conservatism
9. Poetics
10. Octavio Paz as a Literary Character
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Portions of Chapter 7 appeared previously in “The War on the Left in Octavio Paz’s Plural (1971–76),” Annals of Scholarship 11.1/2 (1996): 133–55. An earlier, shorter version of Chapter 2 was included in Roberto Cantú, ed., The Willow and the Spiral: Essays on Octavio Paz and the Poetic Imagination (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 156–69. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. Other sections of this book appeared previously in Spanish. Chapter 1 of this book has its origin in an essay titled “El rebelde en Paz,” in José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, ed., Aire en libertad: Octavio Paz y la crítica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, 2015), 171–93. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published under the title “¿Dentro o fuera de la historia? El pensamiento de Octavio Paz en torno a México y los Estados Unidos,” translated by Álvaro Uribe, Anuario de la Fundación Octavio Paz 2 (2000), 88–99. A section of Chapter 7 and portions of Chapter 10 appeared in Spanish in Zona Octavio Paz , zonaOctaviopaz.com. I am grateful to Guillermo Sheridan for having opened the (virtual) pages of this website to my work.
Many friends, colleagues, and students shared ideas, offered comments, and suggested readings as I worked on this book. Others gave me the opportunity to publish earlier versions of my work on Octavio Paz or present it in a public setting. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, Maricela Becerra, Roberto Cantú, Adolfo Castañón, Isaura Contreras, Daniel Cooper, Esteban Córdoba, Willivaldo Delgadillo, Roberto Ignacio Díaz, Liesbeth François, Armando González Torres, Manuel Gutiérrez, Robert Lane Kauffmann, Efraín Kristal, Carlos Lechner, Nadia Lie, Miguel Enrique Morales, José Antonio Moreno, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Julio Puente García, and Kristine Vandenberghe. Deserving of special mention are my fellow pacianos Yvon Grenier and Malva Flores, who have been rigorous and perspicacious interlocutors for many years, and Verónica Cortínez, my incomparably generous colleague in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. Support provided by the Office of the Dean of Humanities at Rice University and the Latin American Institute and Academic Senate at UCLA was essential in allowing me to advance my research on Paz. I am grateful to these entities for their confidence in me. I would also like to salute Zack Gresham at Vanderbilt University Press for the expert way in which he guided my manuscript through the review process, as well as the two anonymous readers for the press, who provided invaluable comments and suggestions. My beloved wife, Illa Cha, and our three sons, Reinier, Derek, and Edward, gave me many reasons to persevere with my work. My mother, sadly, passed away as I was working on this book. I dedicate it to her.
Introduction
Octavio Paz (1914–1998) was a towering presence in twentieth-century Mexican literature. Working largely in the symbolist and modernist traditions, he produced a vast poetic oeuvre of uncommon power and innovativeness. His essays, in turn, cover an astonishing range of subjects, including pre-Columbian art, Mexican national identity, international politics, economic reform, Asian religious traditions, avant-garde poetry, structuralist anthropology, utopian socialism, sexuality and eroticism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, the Mexican muralist movement, the nature of poetry, and a host of other topics. He was just as comfortable writing in sweeping terms about issues such as the nature of modernity or the development of Mexican history as he was drawing intimate character sketches of the many well-known people—primarily from the world of literature and the arts—he came to know in the course of his long and extremely active career. He was deeply immersed in Mexican culture, having produced in El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude ) what is perhaps the most enduring interpretation of the Mexican character, while also possessing an extraordinarily cosmopolitan vision, one that encompassed not only a large part of the Western tradition, as one can see from a work such as Los hijos del limo (1974; Children of the Mire ), a history of modern poetry from German Romanticism to the 1960s avantgarde that remains unparalleled in its reach, but also other world civilizations, most notably those of Asia.
Paz participated in crucial political debates, both at home and abroad, from the 1930s to the 1990s. As a young poet, he caught the eye of Pablo Neruda, who in 1937 invited him to participate in a congress of anti-fascist writers in Spain, where a brutal Civil War was raging. 1 From his sojourn in Spain, Paz learned the value of solidarity in the face of the onslaught of fascism, but he also received an early lesson in the dangers of leftist dogmatism. The writers who gathered in the Spanish city of Valencia expressed their opposition to the Francoist rebels who had risen up to overthrow the country’s democratically elected government, but also demonstrated their animosity toward writers such as André Gide, who had dared to criticize the Soviet Union. For Paz, the attack on Gide was the beginning of a long process of disenchantment with a sizeable sector of the international Left. A key episode took place when he was living in Paris in the late 1940s and became embroiled in a dispute surrounding the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union. In an article published in Paris in November 1949, a French writer and political activist named David Rousset called attention to the existence of a vast network of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. Even though Rousset, as a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, appeared to possess a unique authority to speak up on this topic, leading leftist intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, responded by denouncing not the Soviet Union, but Rousset. 2 Paz sided with Rousset, publishing an article on him in the Argentine journal Sur , with extensive documentation on the affair. 3 His support for Rousset left him isolated within the Mexican intellectual world. Yet even while courting controversy with his principled stand against Soviet abuses, Paz was serving quietly in the Mexican diplomatic service in various world capitals, including Paris, New Delhi, and Tokyo, penning thoughtful and generally supportive expositions of the policies—primarily in the economic realm—of Mexico’s post-revolutionary regimes. 4 His career as a diplomat came to an end in 1968 when the Mexican government, led by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, decided to use the army, as well as paramilitary units, to crush the student movement that had emerged that year in Mexico, culminating in a massacre on October 2, 1968, in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco square. Paz submitted his resignation as ambassador to India, where he had been posted since 1962, and after a few years spent mostly at British and American universities, he eventually returned to Mexico City, where he remained, although with frequent sojourns abroad, until his death in 1998. During this period, Paz became a vocal supporter of liberal democracy and free-market economics, as well as a strong critic of Communist regimes around the world. In spite of the fact that he never abandoned the anti-capitalist strain in his thinking, his positions provoked much hostility in Mexican intellectual circles, leading to frequent polemics between Paz and his antagonists, something the Mexican poet often seemed to relish. In sum, for much of his life Paz found himself at the center of key political debates of his era.
Paz was extraordinarily alert to the cultural and philosophical currents flowing through the world around him, and throughout his career