Octavio Paz, born in Mexico in 1914, is the latest Nobel laureate in literature. A poet, essayist, editor, and diplomat, he has also proved to be, in such works of cultural criticism as The Labyrinth of Solitude, the master analyst of the Mexican temper. Foreign readers seeking the essence of Spanish North America, and Mexican readers seeking a sense of their country’s relation to the modern world, can have no better guide on their journey than Paz. And there is no better place to begin with Paz than here, in his address last year to the Swedish Academy, for here he speaks not only of Mexico but of himself, and not only of the forces that shaped his world but of those that shaped him as a poet, a Mexican poet, a writer bound to the European tradition by the accident of the Spanish language yet separated from it by historical circumstance.
Paz’s story is that of the search of a Third World intellectual for the very center of Western culture and for a purchase, however slippery, on the present. (“I wanted to be a modern poet,” he writes. “I wanted to belong to my time and to my century.”) It is also the story of his return—from New York, London, and Paris—to Mexico City, the place he started out from and the source of what he calls his “antiquity.” He returned not only to bring his discoveries in modernism to Mexico but to live out the lesson he had learned from the moderns: “that between tradition and modernity there is a bridge. When they are mutually isolated, tradition stagnates and modernity vaporizes; when joined, modernity breathes new life into tradition, and tradition responds by providing depth and gravity.” His poetic task, he realized, was not only to master the modern style, but to fuse it with his country’s pre-Columbian and colonial heritage and the language of his Spanish-speaking forebears—Lope, Quevedo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. “The search for modernity,” writes Paz, “was a return to the origins. . . . Separation now became reconciliation.”
“Separation now became reconciliation.”
It is precisely this great lesson of the moderns, says Paz, that has not been learned by the present generation. Worse still, the majority of our younger artists and critics insist that the lesson can have no meaning for today’s world and indeed must be rejected. The bridge between tradition and modernity, which for decades had been rotting due to the negligence of its supposed caretakers, is now being torn up, plank by plank. But “the decline of the idea of modernity,” writes Paz, “and the popularity of the dubious notion of ‘postmodernism’ are phenomena that affect not only literature and the arts. We are experiencing the crisis of the essential ideas and beliefs that have guided mankind for over two centuries.” We live in a spiritual wilderness in which our absolutes, “whether they be religious or philosophical, moral or aesthetic, are not collective but private.” Will this making private the ideas that once bound mankind together—this dividing of society, so to speak, into sects of one—end in the complete destruction of our common civilization, or even of Man? Perhaps. The best hope for the future, Paz suggests, is for each of us to learn the lesson of modernity for himself, to re- build the bridge within. This may not forestall what Paz calls “the end of the Modern Age,” but it may lead us, or at least enough of us, from a false sense of separation from history to a new philosophy of the present, a present that would embrace the greatness of our past, a present made meaningful by the truth of that greatness.
—Christopher Carduff