RECONSIDERATION
The Moral Voice of Octavio Paz
Noel Valis
[The conservative scholar in the twentieth century, as this reconsideration of the
Mexican poet Octavio Paz evinces, will continue to confront the crisis of modernity as it
is crystallized in the claim that we do not yet know what modernity signifies, and that
modern life is “devoid of pastness or future significance.” The moral character of Paz’s
achievement shapes his concern with thevalue he places on the individual,or as Professor
Noel Valis writes, “Human solidarity should not come at the price of human dignity.”
Clearly the rejection of the soul and the desacralization of the body bequeathed by the
twentieth century are conditions that will equally afflict the twenty-first century. The
conservative scholar will need to wrestle strenuously with the singular problem that
Valis’s assessment of Paz brings to our attention: “In the double twilight of modernity and
of the concept of the person.. .it is a troubling thing to find out how, precisely, we are to
recover that moral sense of wholeness and rightness about ourselves and others.” -Ed.]
WHATMAKES IT so HARD to write about a
moral voice? Why even speak, a t the end
of what has too often been a n unspeakably horrifymg century, about such a
voice? What can a moral voice possibly
mean? In the film “Election,”a biting dark
comedy of contemporary behavior, a
teacher asks his high school class: What
is the difference between ethics and
morals? As the relentless overachiever
of the class pops up eager to bestow tidy
distinctions upon the two, the bell rings
and we never hear the answer. The rest
of the film teasingly plays out the question, relying on the device of ironic disparity between what we know is right
NOELVALIS
is ProfessorofSpanishLiteratureat
Yale University.Sheis theauthorof 11 books,
including In the Feminine Mode: Essays on
Hispanic Women Writers.
and what we actually do. A high school
election is rigged because of choices
made (hence, the aptness of the title).
Dictionary definitions tend to collapse
the two terms together. An etymological
search comes up with the same basic
meanings: moral(s) derives from the Latin
moralis,which is related to manners and
customs (mores),while ethics goes back
to the Greek ethikos, signifyingof morals,
or moral, but also related to ethos,which
means characteristic spirit or usage. Ethics are the principles of morality, the
rules of conduct. Morals are right conduct, making distinctions between right
and wrong. What is moral tends to fall
under the sway of current consensus or
assumptions. Moral behavior becomes
the custom, a way of life. Ethics is a code,
often written down, as in the ethics of
professional groups. Sometimes, how-
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ever, what is ethical in practice may be
immoral. The reverse can also occur. But
ultimately, both ethics and morals come
up against the difficulty of connecting
moral knowledge with moral action.’
Making morals a matter of subjective
value simply displaces the question and
does nothing to dispel our discomfort,
our unease, that something in ourselves
and in our times has gone wrong, profoundly and wildly wrong.
It is this larger moral sense of a disturbed and disordered world as it is reflected in Octavio Paz’s vision of things
that I would like to address here. A moral
voice is an elusive presence. Elusive because it is difficult to state categorically
what constitutes a moral voice. Dictionary and philosophical definitions do
not help much here. Nor does everyone
always see in the same writer such a
voice (this is certainlythecase for Octavio
Paz). And yet, somehow we recognize
that special gravity, o r aura, of the moral
voice. In this regard, a moral voice displays qualities which are specifically inscribed in the times but manages, in
some mysterious fashion, t o transcend
the historical era to which it belongs.
Put another way, the moral voice survives its own temporality. Indeed, sometimes a moral voice is also literally a
survivor, as in the life stories of Elie Wiesel
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Terrence
Des Pres’s moving account of survivors’
death camp experiences, he writes that
the survivor is the figure who emerges
from all those who fought for life in the
concentration camps, and the most significant fact about their struggle is that it
depended on fixed activities: on forms of
social bondingand interchange, on collective resistance, on keeping dignity and
moral sense active. That such thoroughly
human kinds of behavior were typical in
places like Buchenwald and Auschwitz
amounts to a revelation reaching to the
foundation of what man is.
Des Pres ends on this note:
[The survivor’s] soul lives in his flesh, and
what his body says is that the human spirit
can sink this low, can bear this torment,
can suffer defilement and fear and unspeakable hardship and still exist. In our
time the fate of man and the fate of life are
one, and we would be less than wise t o
ignore the survivor’s voice.2
Octavio Paz, who died on April 20,
1998at the age of 84, was not, historically
speaking, a survivor. Yet he projects the
same deep concerns that Des Pres sees
in t h e twentieth-century figure of the
survivor. Indeed, it was the fact of Soviet
labor camps that, among other things,
propelled Paz forward into the uncomfortable and unpopular position of
whistleblower in post-World War I1 Latin
America. David Rousset, a noted antifascist in the pre-war period, had already
denounced the camps, landing in a legal
dispute with Les Lettres Frangaises as a
result. H e was accused of falsifying
records and substituting information
taken from the Nazi camps for the Soviet
experience. Rousset was in t h e end
cleared of all charges. Paz meanwhile
had collected the documents of the case,
intending to publish them in Mexico. N o
one would touch the article. Finally, the
Buenos-Aires based journal South (Sur)
came to the rescue and printed the documents along with an accompanying text
by Paz in 1951. It was the first time anyone had spoken publicly about the gulag
in the Latin American presses. The left,
still heavily committed to the dream of a
Communist utopia, was unwilling to criticize openly any perceived weaknesses of
the Soviet regime. What was remarkable
about Paz’s behavior-moral knowledge
translated into action, if you will-was
his unblinking pursuit of the truth as he
saw it, even when that truth contradicted
his own socialist leanings.
By this time Paz had written what was
to become his single most important
book, The Labyrinth of Solitude (€1
laberinto de la soledad, 1950), an essay
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which not only continues to be widely
read and cited but which marks the entire trajectory of Paz’s intellectual development. Arguably, practically all the
themes and thinking of the future Nobel
Prize winner can be found in this work.
To understand more clearly how significant and enduring the influence of The
Labyrinth of Solitude is, I would like to
begin by projecting forward to a much
later essay, Paz’s 1990 Nobel Prize lecture, InSearchofthePresent(Labcisqueda
del presente). Here, the Mexican writer
returns to a moment of his childhood as
a way of explaining, paradoxically, his
feeling of having been expelled from the
present. The sense of being orphaned, or
separated from the present, which Paz
sees as at once a Mexican and a universal
condition, is beautifully framed in a
memory:
Like every child, I built emotional bridges
in the imagination to link me to the world
and to other people. I lived in a town on the
outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house, that had a junglelike garden
and a great room full of books. First games
and first lessons. The garden soon became
the center of my world: the library, an
enchanted cave.... There was a fig tree,
temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three
ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate
tree, wild grass, and prickly plants that
produced purple grazes.Adobe walls.Time
was elastic; space was a spinning wheel.
All time, past or future, real or imaginary,
was pure presence .... The world was limitless yet always within reach, and time,
pliable, weaved a seamless present.
Then Paz interrupts the dream by asking: “When was the spell broken?” He
remembers as a little boy being shown a
photograph of soldiers returning home
from the war. “Ivaguely knew,” he writes,
that somewhere far away a war had ended
and that the soldiers were marching to
celebrate their victory. But for me, that
war had taken place in another time, not
here and now. The photograph refuted
me. I felt dislodged from the present. After
that, time began to fracture more and more.
And space, to multiply. Any piece of information, a harmless phrase, the headline in
a newspaper, proved the outside world’s
existence and my own unreality. I felt that
my world was disintegrating, that the real
present was somewhere else... That was
how my expulsionfrom the present began?
In this small but enchanting self-portrait, Paz mythologizes himself as the
heart of childhood, and then makes us
feel the loss of childhood through the
intrusion of history. He invites us to lose
track of time only to put us backon track,
ridden by history. He envisions a personal, private sense of space, which is
fatally invaded by a collective notion of
time and history as coming from outside
the world he inhabited. But what is individual is also shared by many. The specific details of a garden and house on the
outskirts of Mexico City, in the early part
of the century-the fig tree, the wild
grass, the adobe walls-are evoked as
memories of a lyrical self, which, in the
reflected warmth of poetry’s voice, become, strangely enough, our memories
as well. Poetry and history offer mutually
illuminating views of the same reality.
Poetry may be said to be what history
often masks or eludes: the innermost
sense of ourselves as uprooted, expelled
from the fullness of time and space,which
can be seen as a garden, a library, or even
a country. Poetry, I hasten to add, is not,
in Paz’s writings, simply a matter of
verses. It is not the poem in itself. Poetry
is a “vision of the otherness that we are
all made of,the perception of our strangeness, our alienation, in the ~ o r l d . ” ~
For Paz, whose intellectual roots can
be traced back to the romantics and to
the fin de si3cle Nietzsche and the symbolists, modern life represents, on the
one hand, a break with the past and, on
the other, a search which becomes allconsuming, a search for the very present
itself. From the romantics on, modernity
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is filled with contradictions, unavoidably
self-conflicted. Even now, poised at the
onset of the new millennium, we do not
know what modernity is, or even what it
means to live as moderns. If we appear to
be mourning a dead past, if nostalgiawhether genuine or manufactured-is
indeed a major symptom of modern life,
how is it that so many of us also experience life as a series of present moments
devoid of pastness or futuresignificance?
How then is Paz justified in saying that
“the present was modernity’s final and
supreme f l ~ w e r ” ?The
~ use of the past
tense to describe the present is telling.
For what Paz is really saying is that belief
in the modern, and all that it implies, is
waning fast, and nothing has come to
replace it. Thus he notes that
the advanced democratic societies have
reached an enviable level of prosperity; at
the same time they are islands of abundance in an ocean of universal misery....
Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers,
and the forests, but also our souls.... N o
other society has produced so much waste
as ours has. Material and moral waste.6
I
In effect, Paz is saying that we do not
know how to live. In the long view of
things, perhaps this is inevitable, if, as
Paz suggests, “a human being is never
” ~ at
what he is but the self he ~ e e k s . But
the same time such a statement is also
intrinsically modern: seek thyself, not
know thyself. Paz ends his Nobel Prize
speech with these words:
We pursue modernity in her incessant
metamorphoses yet we never catch her.
Each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her, but she escapes, disappears
immediately, and we clutch the air. The
instant is the bird that is everywhere and
nowhere. We want to trap it alive, but it
flaps its wings and is gone in a spray of
syllables. We are left emptyhanded. Then
the door of perception opens slightly and
the other time appears, the real time we
had been seeking without knowing it: the
present, the presence.8
This preoccupation with the modern
selfis a constant in Paz’s writings, reachingan early high point in TheLabyrinth of
Solitude as well as in his poetry. What
saves Paz from the black hole of solipsism is his insistence upon the human
need for communion, for solidarity, despite our radical aloneness in the world.
For Paz, the crisscrossing of human lives
is inextricably tied to a specific space
and time, as he brilliantly demonstrated
in his scholarly yet passionate recreation of the seventeenth-century Mexican writer, Sor Juana I n b de la Cruz, and
the intricate world of convent and palace
in which she lived.g In The Labyrinth of
Solitude, Paz shuttles back and forth between two poles: the historically situated Mexicans and a kind of transhistorical “universalman”image,which on more
than one occasion, arecollapsed together.
But in none of his writings does he try to
cram these two figures of the universal
and t h e specifically Mexican into a reductive globalizing abstraction, as too
often occurs with post-modern critics.
Paz has been criticized for suggesting
anachronistic historical parallels between, for example, the seventeenth-century colonial experience of Sor Juana,
forced t o abjure her writings and scholarly pursuits, and the Stalinist puppet
trials of the 1930s.lO But Paz carefully
distinguishes between the two events,
stressing a single, shared feature: both
occurred “in closed societies ruled by an
all-powerful bureaucracy governing in
the name of orthodoxy.”” Sor Juana may
not be our “contemporary,”but her suffering under oppressive circumstances
draws her closer to us today.
Taking wider aim, Paz never loses sight
of the historical situatedness of his subject, whether it is Sor Juana or modern
Mexico. “Man is not simply the result of
history,” he writes, “and the forces that
activate it, as is now claimed; nor is his-
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tory simply the result of the human will,
a belief on which the North American
way of life is implicitly predicated. Man,
it seems to me, is not in history: he is
history.”’*Paz is not a historian, nor does
he claim to be one. You won’t find in The
Labyrinth of Solitude, for example, the
arsenal of historical facts, anecdotes, and
documents that the professional historian marshals into a coherent narrative.
That Paz was quite capable of writing
history is evident from the monumental
achievement of SorJuana or, The Traps of
Faith. Like much of his prose writing, The
Labyrinth of Solitude is an essay. The
scholarly apparatus of the historian is
minimal, partly because of the demands
of the essay genre, partly because of
Paz’s dislike of historical determinism.
His distinction between being in history and beinghistory has a precedent in
Miguel de Unamuno’s concept of intrahistoty (intrahistoria), which in turn derives from t h e romantic notion of
Volkgeist, a larger spirit of history residing in the people rather than in the
chronicles of kings and queens.Unamuno
associated the mostly unwritten current
of a people’s history with what he called
“living tradition” (la tradicibn viva). Paz
moves beyond Unamunian idealism, his
thinking colored not only by the traumatic events of our century but by the
way other twentieth-century minds have
interpreted and shaped those events.
In the 1930s Paz’s sympathies, like
those of so many intellectuals then, were
left-leaning. His eventual disillusionment
with Marxism was never complete, however. The phantom of the socialist dream
haunts Octavio Paz’s writings, as Roger
it
Bartra has pointed 0 ~ t .Significantly,
I~
was the experience of the Spanish Civil
War that persisted in Paz’s mind as a
metaphor of human solidarity:
I remember that in Spain during the civil
war I had a revelation of “the other man”
and of another kind of solitude:not closed,
not mechanical, but open to the transcen-
dent.... [l]nthose faces-obtuse and obstinate, gross and brutal, like those the great
Spanish painters, without the least touch
of complacency and with an almost fleshand-bloodrealism,have left us-there was
something like a desperate hopefulness,
something very concrete and at the same
time universal. Since then 1 have never
seen the same expression on any face.I4
But Paz, unlike some, refused to shut
his eyes to other realities, the realities of
Bolshevik terror and oppressive Communist State bureaucracies. Nor could
he accept the heavily deterministic understanding of history which underpins
Marxism in particular. In TheLabyrinth of
Solitude, a characteristic strategy is to
present an argument as though it is his,
only to refute it in the next paragraph.
Thus, he first explains the character of
the Mexican as “a product of the social
circumstances that prevail in our country, and the history of Mexico, which is
the history of these circumstances, contains the answer to every question. The
situation that prevailed during the colonial period would thus be the source of
our closed, unstable attitude.” But then
he critiques this position as simplistic,
rejecting the idea of our being “conditioned by historical events.” And he continues: “...historicalevents are something
more than events because they are colored by humanity, which is always
problematical ...any purely historical explanation is insufficient ...which is not the
same as saying it is f a l ~ e . ” ’ ~
In trying, however, to explain why
modern Mexico’s history is fractious and
why the sense of Mexican identity is
elusive and enigmatic, Paz unfolds a curious vacillating vision which is simultaneously historical and mythographical.
He focuses in particular on the symbolic
(and real) relationship between HernAn
Cortes a n d Dofia Marina (or, La
Malinche), the Indian mistress he exploited t o political and personal advantage. As Paz notes, CortCs and La Malinche
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“are something more than historical figures: they are symbols of a secret conflict that [Mexicans] have still not resolved. When he repudiates La Malinche
...the Mexican breaks his ties with the
past, renounces his origins, and lives in
isolation and solitude.”16This violent past
of Spanish colonization marked, of course,
a brutal rupture with the earlier (often no
less brutal) pre-Cortesian cultures.
Paz’s propensity in this essay to take
the historical context of Conquest and
turn it into a moment of archetypal symbolic resonance converts an existing
myth of Mexican identity into a new one,
his own. History is re-made myth in Paz’s
essay, partly because he also relies on
the Christian framework of original sin
and the fall as explanation (without necessarily ascribing to its tenets). For Paz,
“sin” resides in our universal sense of
radical solitude. The Mexican’s entry into
Western history through violence and
bereftment-deprived of an earlier culture symbolically incarnated in the maternal figure of La Malinche, who is both
Virgin Maryand Eve-is, from theoutset,
inscribed as a myth.
History also becomes myth in this
poetic interpretation of modern Mexico’s
origins because Paz conflates the Mexican experience with all human experience. “We are alone,” he writes. “Solitude, the source of anxiety, begins on the
day we are deprived of maternal protection and fall into a strange and hostile
world. We have fallen, and this fall-this
knowledge that we have fallen-makes
us guilty. Of what? Of a nameless wrong:
that of having been born.”” The Labyrinth of Solitude stresses from the very
beginning this universal existential (and
existentialist) note: “All of us, at some
moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious ... Selfdiscovery
is above all the realization that we are
alone ....”I8 This self-consciousness, which
appears so intensely during adolescence,
also leads to questions about identity
and the astonishing singularity of one’s
identity: “...as [theadolescent] leans over
the river of his consciousness, he asks
himself if the face that appears there,
disfigured by the water, is his
The same is true of nations and peoples.
For Paz, “To become aware of our history
is t o become aware of our singularity.”20
This constant play between singularity and universality runs through the
entire essay. What starts out as universal-“all of us”-is also individual (“some
thing unique, untransferable”). What is
individual (the adolescent) is converted
into the collective (the nation). The Narcissus myth provides a key link between
the histories of persons and societies: it
is the continually changing mask at once
petrified and unstable, as external facade
and internal fluidity.
Likewise for Paz, the mask that the
Mexican character wears is the universal
disguise that all of us don to hide our
secret selves. More specifically, Paz’s
meditations on Mexico also have a great
deal t o d o with the United States. First,
much of The Labyrinth of Solitude originated in a two-year stay in the United
States. On the streets of Los Angeles he
encountered the pachuco phenomenon
of the late 1940s, gangs of young males
who were neither Mexican nor American. And yet, writes Paz, they are “one of
the extremes at which the Mexican can
arrive.” Indeed, what the writer found in
general was a “floating”.Mexicanness:
1say“f1oats”because [Mexicanness]never
mixes or unites with the other world, the
North American world based on precision
and efficiency. It floats, without offering
any opposition; it hovers, blown here and
there by the wind, sometimes breaking up
like a cloud, sometimes standing erect like
a rising skyrocket. It creeps, it wrinkles, it
expands and contracts;it sleeps or dreams;
it is ragged but beautiful. It floats, never
quite existing, never quite vanishing.21
Despite the massive sociocultural and
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demographic changes of the past fifty
years, the Mexican-American, like other
Hispanics, still “floats,” drifting sometimes invisibly, sometimes uncomfortably, over a North American culture
which has yet to come t o terms with its
own hybrid nature. One is reminded here
of John Sayles’s 1995 film, “Lone Star,”
and the earlier Orson Welles’s “A Touch
of Evil” (1958), both of which explore the
tensions between Mexicans and Americans in bordertowns. Paz saw clearly
that, historically, culturally and economically, for good and bad, the histories of
Mexico and the United States were
wrapped together like pieces of cellophane.
But The Labyrinth of Solitude is about
both the United States and Mexico in a
larger sense as well. Paz’s Mexico becomes a metaphor of modern alienation,
the feeling of displacement and dispossession which flooded the geographies
and hearts of the post-World War I1 era.
As Paz notes, “we Mexicans have always
lived on the periphery of history. Now
the center or nucleus of world society
has disintegrated and everyone-including the European and t h e North American-is a peripheral being. We are all
living on the margin because there is no
longer any center.”22
The condition of marginality derives
significantly not only from specific historical and cultural circumstances but
from an essential state of self-estrangement in humankind. For this condition,
Paz develops the image of the mask of
identity, the mask which is the same yet
different for every person, every society.
Similarly, Orson Welles played with the
notion of the maskin “ATouch of Evil” by
casting the unlikely Charleton Heston as
aMexican narcotics investigator. In “Lone
Star,” Sayles brilliantly reveals layer after layer of deceptions and disguises,
disclosing only at the end that the same
Texan fathered both the anglo son and
the Mexican daughter, who unknowingly
commit incest together and, in a surprising, uneasy twist, decide later to ignore
their blood ties. We are the Mexicans in
all these versions of national and personal identity. And we are all living in
bordertowns, in the sense that what is
foreign, or other, is no longer simply “out
there,” but an intimate part of our lives.
More specifically, Paz criticizes the
culture of the United States for not recognizing that peripheral groups and nations are not simply “outside” our borders, but reside within, in our towns and
cities and in ourselves. In “Mexico and
the United States,”anessaywritten nearly
thirty years after The Labyrinth of Solitude, he says:
Today, the United States faces very powerful enemies, but the mortal danger comes
from within: not from Moscow but from
that mixture of arrogance and opportunism, blindness and short-term Machiavellianism, volubility and stubbornness
which has characterized its foreign policies during recent years .... To conquer its
enemies, the United States must first conquer itself-return to its origins. Not t o
repeat them but t o rectify them: the “others”-the minorities inside as well as the
marginal countries and nations outsided o exist. Not only d o we “others” make up
the majority of the human race, but also
each marginal society, poor though it may
be, represents a unique and precious version of mankind. If the United States is to
recover fortitude and lucidity, it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the “others”-the outcasts of the
Western World.23
The communion that Paz seeks-recovering the ‘‘other”-is the new myth of
modern man, a necessary myth, he emphasizes, because there is nothing else
left which will redeem us as a species.
This insistence on the universality of the
myth is both a strength and a weakness
in Paz’s thought. Interest in myth is a
long-standing intellectual pursuit among
moderns, from Frazier through Jung to
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Eliade and L6vi-Straws. Myth-making
may compensate for the disappointments
of history (and asecularized world). What
it can’t do is replace the historical. The
conversion of history into myth in Paz’s
writings parallels a similar metamorphosis of the singular into the universal. As a
result, sometimes Paz falls into the trap
of cliches and stereotypes, particularly
in The Labyrinth of Solitude when he establishes a series of contrasts between
the national character of Mexico and
that of the United States. For example, he
says that “North Americans want to understand and we [Mexicans] want to contemplate. They are activists and we are
quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they
enjoy their invention^."^^
Even more limiting t h a n t h e s e
essentializing, somewhat reductive archetypes of both national cultures is the
way such mythologizing prevents Paz
from moving beyond myth. There is, as
the constant conversion and interchange
ability between myth and history, singularity and universality, suggest, a certain
circularity in Paz’s thinking, which while
it provides a lifelong consistency of outlook, as we have seen even in a late essay
like the 1990 Nobel Prize lecture, also
prevents him, 1 believe, from developing
beyond the initial argument presented in
TheLabyrinth ofsolitude.
Having said this, however, 1 would
reiterate that Paz’s contribution may be
less intellectual and more of a moral
character in the long run. Perhaps the
single most important concern which
infuses his poetry and prose is the value
he places upon the individual. Human
solidarity should not come at the price of
human dignity. Hence, his passionate
rejection of the repressive machinery of
State bureaucracies of any kind and of the
soullessness of modern societies, whether
socialist or capitalist. In his later years
Paz’s specific criticism of the Castro regime and the Sandinistas, as well as his
defense of the democratic process in El
Salvador, came under heavy attack. He
was labeled a traitor of the left, mainly for
not being “left enough” in his criticism.25
In 1984, his remarks on Nicaragua and El
Salvador, astonishingly, provoked a massive demonstration of over 5,000 people
inMexicoCitystreets,withhiseffigydoused
in gasoline and publicly burned. (He was of
course equally feted, especially for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.)
Paz was never afraid to take a strong
political position even when it proved
unpopular. But what will be remembered
more, finally, than his take on current
events is his unwavering moral voice. In
one of his last books, The Double Flame.
Love and Eroticism (1993), the Mexican
poet delivers what could be considered,
in part, an answer to his vision of modern
aloneness and soul-destroying alienation.
In The Labyrinth of Solitude, he remarks
that “[iln our world, love is an almost
inaccessible experience.”26Love emerges
from the intricate relationship between
solitude and communion; it breaks
through our solitude forging communion
with another. But, Paz says, “[tlhe problem of love in our world reveals how the
dialectic of solitude, in its deepest manifestation, is frustrated by society. Our
social life prevents almost every possibility of achieving true erotic c o m r n ~ n i o n . ” ~ ~
Nearly forty years after The Labyrinth
ofsolitude,he returned to the problem of
modern love in The Double Flame. Our
notion of love, says Paz, is based on the
primacy of the private individual as a
being of body and soul. But in the late
twentieth century we are witnessing, on
the one hand, the rejection of the soul
and, on the other, the desacralization of
the body. The uniqueness of the person
is “the embodiment of a mystery that it is
no exaggeration to call sacred.”28This
mystery of the person is most intimately
encountered in love, but it is so basic a
concept to Western values that we cannot conceive of community without it.
Paz maintains that “the twilight of the
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concept of the person in our society
[is]... the principal reason for the political disasters of the twentieth century
and of the general debasement of our
~ivilization.’’~~
This is a large claim indeed. But listen t o what he has to say
about the fall of Communism and what it
means to the West. The collapse of the
Soviet Union was stunning, but for Paz,
the regime “was a fortress built on quicksand.” “The rigidity of the doctrine,” he
continues, “asimplistic version of Marxism, was a straitjacket forced on the
Russian people.”30 And a s he has remarked elsewhere, the ideology of Marxism was relentlessly refractory to notions of uniqueness, whether of individuals or works of art.31“The end of Communism,” he suggests,
foundation of our political institutions and
our ideas of what justice, solidarity, and
social coexistence ought to be.32
But a person without freedom is not a
person. Hence the moral necessity to
make choices, to make the present into a
positive act of presence. In the double
twilight of modernity and of the concept
of the person, however, it is a troubling
thing to find out how, precisely, we are to
recover that moral sense of wholeness
and rightness about ourselves and others. The masks we wear-and person
originally meant the mask of an actorhave so incrusted our modern faces, allowing us only flashes of what lies beneath, as in these lines from one of Paz’s
finest poems, ”Sunstone”(“Piedra de sol”):
forces us t o look at the moral situation of
our society with greater critical rigor. Its
ills are not exclusively economic, but, as
always, also political, in the positive sense
of the word-that is, moral. They have to
do with freedom, justice, fraternity, and,
finally, with what we ordinarily call values. At the center of these ideals is the
notion of the person. The person is the
The rotten masks that divide one man
from another, one man fromhimself,
they crumble
forone enormous moment and weglimpse
the unity that welost, the desolation
of being man, and all its glories,
sharing breadandsun and death,
the forgottenastonishment ofbeingalive.33
1. Elmer Sprague, What is Philosophy? (New York,
196l), 104;Reginald E. Allen, Introd., CreekPhilosophy: Thales toAristotle (New York, 1966), 18-19.2.
TheSurvivor.An AnatomyofLife in theDeath Camps
(Oxford, 1976),vii,209.3.InSearchofthePresent, tr.
Anthony Stanton (New York, 1991), 12-13, 14-15.4.
Paz, “Suma y sigue (Conversaci6n con Julio
Scherer)” (1977), in Obras completas (Complete
Works), Vol. 8 (Mexico City, 1996),371 (my trans.).
5. InSearchofthePresent, 18.6. Ibid., 131-32.7. The
Double Flame. Love and Eroticism, tr. Helen Lane
(NewYork, 1995). 175.8.In Search of the Present, 3334. 9. See Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith, tr.
Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, 1988). 10. AnthonyStanton,rev. of SorJuana, LiteraturaMexicana,
Vol. 1,No.1 (1990), 247; GeorginaSabat-Rivers, rev.
of SorJuana, SigIoXX,,ZOth Century, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2
(1990-91), 161.11. SorJuana or, The Traps ofFaith,
469.12. TheLabyrinthofSolitudeand Other Writings,
tr. Lysander Kemp (New York, 1985),25.13. Bartra,
La dernocraciaausente(Mexico City, 1986), 153.14.
The Labyrinth of Solitude, 27. 15. Ibid., 71-72. 16.
Ibid.,87.17. Ibid., 80.18. Ibid., 9.19. Ibid., 9.20. Ibid.,
lO.%l.lbid.,13-14.22.Ibid., 170.23.“Mexicoand the
United States,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude and
Other Writings, tr. Rachel Phillips Belash, 376.24.
TheLabyrinth ofSolitode, 24.25. For examples, see
Enrique Gonz6lez Rojo, El rey va desnudo. Los
ensayospoliticos de OctavioPaz(MexicoCity, 1989),
302; Xavier Rodriguez Ledesma, El pensamiento
politico de Octavio Paz.Las trampas dela ideologia
(Mexico City, 1996), 271, 432; and the especially
virulent anti-Pazattack of William Anthony Nericcio,
“iNobel Paz?: A Pre- and Post-Nobel Survey of a
Mexican Writer’s Evolving Views of Mexico, the
United States and Other Na[rra]tions,” Siglo Xu/
20th Century,Vol. 10,Nos. 1-2(1992),165-94.26. The
Labyrinth of Solitude, 197. 27. Ibid., 202. 28. The
Double Flame, 114. 29. Ibid., 157. 30. Ibid., 191-92.
31. Corriente alterna (1967) (Mexico City, 1990),
TheCollected
201.32. TheDoubleFlame,201-02.33.
Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987,ed. and tr. Eliot
Weinberger (New York, 1991). 21.
57
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