Octavio Paz – Nobel Lecture
English
Spanish
Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1990
(Translation)
In Search of the Present
I begin with two words that all men have uttered since the dawn of
humanity: thank you. The word gratitude has equivalents in every
language and in each tongue the range of meanings is abundant. In the
Romance languages this breadth spans the spiritual and the physical,
from the divine grace conceded to men to save them from error and
death, to the bodily grace of the dancing girl or the feline leaping
through the undergrowth. Grace means pardon, forgiveness, favour,
benefice, inspiration; it is a form of address, a pleasing style of
speaking or painting, a gesture expressing politeness, and, in short,
an act that reveals spiritual goodness. Grace is gratuitous; it is a
gift. The person who receives it, the favoured one, is grateful for it;
if he is not base, he expresses gratitude. That is what I am doing at
this very moment with these weightless words. I hope my emotion
compensates their weightlessness. If each of my words were a drop of
water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude,
acknowledgement. And also an indefinable mixture of fear, respect and
surprise at finding myself here before you, in this place which is the
home of both Swedish learning and world literature.
Languages are vast realities that
transcend those political and historical entities we call nations. The
European languages we speak in the Americas illustrate this. The
special position of our literatures when compared to those of England,
Spain, Portugal and France depends precisely on this fundamental fact:
they are literatures written in transplanted tongues. Languages are
born and grow from the native soil, nourished by a common history. The
European languages were rooted out from their native soil and their own
tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took
root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of
America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet
also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the
changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in
the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere
transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the
literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.
In spite of these oscillations the link has never been broken. My
classics are those of my language and I consider myself to be a
descendant of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... yet I
am not a Spaniard. I think that most writers of Spanish America, as
well as those from the United States, Brazil and Canada, would say the
same as regards the English, Portuguese and French traditions. To
understand more clearly the special position of writers in the
Americas, we should think of the dialogue maintained by Japanese,
Chinese or Arabic writers with the different literatures of Europe. It
is a dialogue that cuts across multiple languages and civilizations.
Our dialogue, on the other hand, takes place within the same language.
We are Europeans yet we are not Europeans. What are we then? It is
diffcult to define what we are, but our works speak for us.
In the field of literature, the great novelty of the present century
has been the appearance of the American literatures. The first to
appear was that of the English-speaking part and then, in the second
half of the 20th Century, that of Latin America in its two great
branches: Spanish America and Brazil. Although
they are very different, these three literatures have one common
feature: the conflict, which is more ideological than literary, between
the cosmopolitan and nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and
Americanism. What is the legacy of this dispute? The polemics
have disappeared; what remain are the works. Apart from this general
resemblance, the differences between the three literatures are multiple
and profound. One of them belongs more to history than to literature: the development of Anglo-American
literature coincides with the rise of the United States as a world
power whereas the rise of our literature coincides with the political
and social misfortunes and upheavals of our nations. This proves once
more the limitations of social and historical determinism: the decline
of empires and social disturbances sometimes coincide with moments of
artistic and literary splendour. Li-Po and Tu Fu witnessed the
fall of the Tang dynasty; Velázquez painted for Felipe IV; Seneca and
Lucan were contemporaries and also victims of Nero. Other differences
are of a literary nature and apply more to particular works than to the
character of each literature. But can we say that literatures have a
character? Do they possess a set of shared features that distinguish
them from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by
some fanciful, intangible character; it is a society of unique works
united by relations of opposition and affinity.
The first basic difference between Latin-American and Anglo-American
literature lies in the diversity of their origins. Both begin as
projections of Europe. The projection of an island in the case of North
America; that of a peninsula in our case. Two regions that are
geographically, historically and culturally eccentric. The origins of North America are in England
and the Reformation; ours are in Spain, Portugal and the
Counter-Reformation. For the case of Spanish America I should
briefly mention what distinguishes Spain from other European countries,
giving it a particularly original historical identity. Spain is no less
eccentric than England but its eccentricity is of a different kind. The
eccentricity of the English is insular and is characterized by
isolation: an eccentricity that excludes. Hispanic eccentricity is
peninsular and consists of the coexistence of different civilizations
and different pasts: an inclusive eccentricity. In what would later be
Catholic Spain, the Visigoths professed the heresy of Arianism, and we
could also speak about the centuries of domination by Arabic
civilization, the influence of Jewish thought, the Reconquest, and
other characteristic features.
Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and multiplied in America,
especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru, where ancient
and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards encountered
history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a
present rather than a past. The temples and gods of
pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed
life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the
hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence, popular
art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of
that present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it,
deciphering it: expressing it ... After this brief digression we may be
able to perceive the peculiar relation that simultaneously binds us to
and separates us from the European tradition.
This consciousness of being separate
is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes
experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished
awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a
challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter
others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation
is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the
very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall
into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals.
It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and
exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the
separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each
man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as
attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and
endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to
provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing
the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in
historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and
when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into
consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in
the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter:
there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.
The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my
memories: the first cry, the first scare. 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 jungle-like garden and a great room
full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became
the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read
and play with my cousins and schoolmates. 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. Space
transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a
valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books
with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through,
supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors
and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and
with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the
Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In
summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of
a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I
could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as
they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within
reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.
When was the spell broken? Gradually
rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend,
deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask
of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process
because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions.
Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the
first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about
six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North
American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge
avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said.
This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of
the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere
far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were
marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place
in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt
literally dislodged from the present.
From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a
plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more
frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a
newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own
unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not
inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was
somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the
games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the
afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live
coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In
spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to
the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted
the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the
present began.
It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the
present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us
experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into
consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the
pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is
the search for a real reality. For
us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own
countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French
and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to
go and look for it and bring it back home. These years were also the
years of my discovery of literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I
was moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I
understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have
called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry.
Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem,
thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed
present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it.
I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to
my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed
idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as
many types of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The
word's meaning is uncertain and arbitrary, like the name of the period
that precedes it, the Middle Ages. If we are modern when compared to
medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages of a future modernity?
Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity is a word in
search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history?
Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for
sure. It doesn't matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at
that time modernity was fused with the present or rather produced it:
the present was its last supreme flower. My case is neither unique nor
exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern poets have chased
after that magnetic and elusive figure that fascinates them. Baudelaire
was the first. He was also the first to touch her and discover that she
is nothing but time that crumbles in one's hands. I am not going to
relate my adventures in pursuit of modernity: they are not very
different from those of other 20th-Century poets. Modernity has been a
universal passion. Since 1850 she has been our goddess and our
demoness. In recent years, there has been an attempt to exorcise her
and there has been much talk of "postmodernism". But what is
postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity?
For us, as Latin Americans, the search
for poetic modernity runs historically parallel to the repeated
attempts to modernize our countries. This tendency begins at the end of
the 18th Century and includes Spain herself. The United States was born
into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the
womb of the future; we were born at a moment when Spain and Portugal
were moving away from modernity. This is why there was frequent
talk of "Europeanizing" our countries: the modern was outside and had
to be imported. In Mexican history this process begins just before the
War of Independence. Later it became a great ideological and political
debate that passionately divided Mexican society during the 19th
Century. One event was to call into question not the legitimacy of the
reform movement but the way in which it had been implemented: the
Mexican Revolution. Unlike its
20th-Century counterparts, the Mexican Revolution was not really the
expression of a vaguely utopian ideology but rather the explosion of a
reality that had been historically and psychologically repressed. It
was not the work of a group of ideologists intent on introducing
principles derived from a political theory; it was a popular uprising
that unmasked what was hidden. For this very reason it was more
of a revelation than a revolution. Mexico was searching for the present
outside only to find it within, buried but alive. The search for
modernity led us to discover our antiquity, the hidden face of the
nation. I am not sure whether this unexpected historical lesson has
been learnt by all: between tradition and modernity there is a bridge.
When they are mutually isolated, tradition stagnates and modernity
vaporizes; when in conjunction, modernity breathes life into tradition,
while the latter replies with depth and gravity.
The search for poetic modernity was a Quest, in the allegorical and
chivalric sense this word had in the 12th Century. I did not find any
Grail although I did cross several waste lands visiting castles of
mirrors and camping among ghostly tribes. But I did discover the modern
tradition. For modernity is not a poetic school but a lineage, a family
dispersed over several continents and which for two centuries has
survived many sudden changes and misfortunes: public indifference,
isolation, and tribunals in the name of religious, political, academic
and sexual orthodoxy. Because it is a tradition and not a doctrine, it
has been able to persist and to change at the same time. This is also
why it is so diverse: each poetic adventure is distinct and each poet
has sown a different plant in the miraculous forest of speaking trees.
Yet if the works are diverse and each route is distinct, what is it
that unites all these poets? Not an aesthetic but a search. My search
was not fanciful, even though the idea of modernity is a mirage, a
bundle of reflections. One day I discovered I was going back to the
starting point instead of advancing: the search for modernity was a
descent to the origins. Modernity led me to the source of my beginning,
to my antiquity. Separation had now become reconciliation. I thus found
out that the poet is a pulse in the rhythmic flow of generations.
*
The idea of modernity is a by-product of our conception of history as a
unique and linear process of succession. Although its origins are in
Judaeo-Christianity, it breaks with Christian doctrine. In
Christianity, the cyclical time of pagan cultures is supplanted by
unrepeatable history, something that has a beginning and will have an
end. Sequential time was the profane time of history, an arena for the
actions of fallen men, yet still governed by a sacred time which had
neither beginning nor end. After Judgement Day there will be no future
either in heaven or in hell. In the realm of eternity there is no
succession because everything is. Being triumphs over becoming. The now
time, our concept of time, is linear like that of Christianity but open
to infinity with no reference to Eternity. Ours is the time of profane
history, an irreversible and perpetually unfinished time that marches
towards the future and not towards its end. History's sun is the future
and Progress is the name of this movement towards the future.
Christians see the world, or what used to be called the siècle or
worldly life, as a place of trial: souls can be either lost or saved in
this world. In the new conception the historical subject is not the
individual soul but the human race, sometimes viewed as a whole and
sometimes through a chosen group that represents it: the developed
nations of the West, the proletariat, the white race, or some other
entity. The pagan and Christian
philosophical tradition had exalted Being as changeless perfection
overflowing with plenitude; we adore Change, the motor of progress and
the model for our societies. Change articulates itself in two
privileged ways: as evolution and as revolution. The trot and the leap.
Modernity is the spearhead of historical movement, the
incarnation of evolution or revolution, the two faces of progress.
Finally, progress takes place thanks to the dual action of science and
technology, applied to the realm of nature and to the use of her
immense resources.
Modern man has defined himself as a historical being. Other societies
chose to define themselves in terms of values and ideas different from
change: the Greeks venerated the polis and the circle yet were unaware
of progress; like all the Stoics, Seneca was much concerned about the
eternal return; Saint Augustine believed that the end of the world was
imminent; Saint Thomas constructed a scale of the degrees of being,
linking the smallest creature to the Creator, and so on. One after the
other these ideas and beliefs were abandoned. It seems to me that the
same decline is beginning to affect our idea of Progress and, as a
result, our vision of time, of history and of ourselves. We are
witnessing the twilight of the future. The decline of the idea of
modernity and the popularity of a notion as dubious as that 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. I have dealt with this
matter at length elsewhere. Here I can only offer a brief summary.
In the first place, the concept of a
process open to infinity and synonymous with endless progress has been
called into question. I need hardly mention what everybody knows:
natural resources are finite and will run out one day. In
addition, we have inflicted what may be irreparable damage on the
natural environment and our own species is endangered. Finally, science
and technology, the instruments of progress, have shown with alarming
clarity that they can easily become destructive forces. The existence
of nuclear weapons is a refutation of the idea that progress is
inherent in history. This refutation, I add, can only be called
devastating.
In the second place, we have the fate
of the historical subject, mankind, in the 20th Century. Seldom
have nations or individuals suffered so much: two world wars, tyrannies
spread over five continents, the atomic bomb and the proliferation of
one of the cruellest and most lethal institutions known by man: the
concentration camp. Modern technology has provided countless benefits,
but it is impossible to close our eyes when confronted by slaughter,
torture, humiliation, degradation, and other wrongs inflicted on
millions of innocent people in our century.
In the third place, the belief in the
necessity of progress has been shaken. For our grandparents and
our parents, the ruins of history (corpses, desolate battlefields,
devastated cities) did not invalidate the underlying goodness of the
historical process. The scaffolds and tyrannies, the conflicts and
savage civil wars were the price to be paid for progress, the blood
money to be offered to the god of history. A god? Yes, reason itself
deified and prodigal in cruel acts of cunning, according to Hegel. The
alleged rationality of history has vanished. In the very domain of
order, regularity and coherence (in pure sciences like physics) the old
notions of accident and catastrophe have reappeared. This disturbing
resurrection reminds me of the terrors that marked the advent of the
millennium, and the anguish of the Aztecs at the end of each cosmic
cycle.
The last element in this hasty enumeration is the collapse of all the
philosophical and historical hypotheses that claimed to reveal the laws
governing the course of history. The believers, confident that they
held the keys to history, erected powerful states over pyramids of
corpses. These arrogant constructions, destined in theory to liberate
men, were very quickly transformed into gigantic prisons. Today we have
seen them fall, overthrown not by their ideological enemies but by the
impatience and the desire for freedom of the new generations. Is this
the end of all Utopias? It is rather the end of the idea of history as
a phenomenon, the outcome of which can be known in advance. Historical
determinism has been a costly and bloodstained fantasy. History is unpredictable because its agent,
mankind, is the personification of indeterminism.
This short review shows that we are very probably at the end of a
historical period and at the beginning of another. The end of the
Modern Age or just a mutation? It is difficult to tell. In any case,
the collapse of Utopian schemes has left a great void, not in the
countries where this ideology has proved to have failed but in those
where many embraced it with enthusiasm and hope. For the first time in
history mankind lives in a sort of spiritual wilderness and not, as
before, in the shadow of those religious and political systems that
consoled us at the same time as they oppressed us. Although all
societies are historical, each one has lived under the guidance and
inspiration of a set of metahistorical beliefs and ideas. Ours is the first age that is ready to live
without a metahistorical doctrine; whether they be religious or
philosophical, moral or aesthetic, our absolutes are not collective but
private. It is a dangerous experience. It is also impossible to
know whether the tensions and conflicts unleashed in this privatization
of ideas, practices and beliefs that belonged traditionally to the
public domain will not end up by destroying the social fabric. Men
could then become possessed once more by ancient religious fury or by
fanatical nationalism. It would be terrible if the fall of the abstract
idol of ideology were to foreshadow the resurrection of the buried
passions of tribes, sects and churches. The signs, unfortunately, are
disturbing.
The decline of the ideologies I have
called metahistorical, by which I mean those that assign to history a
goal and a direction, implies first the tacit abandonment of global
solutions. With good sense, we tend more and more towards limited
remedies to solve concrete problems. It is prudent to abstain
from legislating about the future. Yet the present requires much more
than attention to its immediate needs: it demands a more rigorous
global reflection. For a long time I have firmly believed that the
twilight of the future heralds the advent of the now. To think about
the now implies first of all to recover the critical vision. For
example, the triumph of the market economy (a triumph due to the
adversary's default) cannot be simply a cause for joy. As a mechanism
the market is efficient, but like all mechanisms it lacks both
conscience and compassion. We must find a way of integrating it into
society so that it expresses the social contract and becomes an
instrument of justice and fairness. The advanced democratic societies
have reached an enviable level of prosperity; at the same time they are
islands of abundance in the ocean of universal misery. The topic of the
market is intricately related to the deterioration of the environment.
Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers and the forests but also
our souls. A society possessed by the frantic need to produce more in
order to consume more tends to reduce ideas, feelings, art, love,
friendship and people themselves to consumer products. Everything
becomes a thing to be bought, used and then thrown in the rubbish dump.
No other society has produced so much waste as ours has. Material and
moral waste.
Reflecting on the now does not imply relinquishing the future or
forgetting the past: the present is the meeting place for the three
directions of time. Neither can it be confused with facile hedonism.
The tree of pleasure does not grow in the past or in the future but at
this very moment. Yet death is also a fruit of the present. It cannot
be rejected, for it is part of life. Living well implies dying well. We
have to learn how to look death in the face. The present is
alternatively luminous and sombre, like a sphere that unites the two
halves of action and contemplation. Thus, just as we have had
philosophies of the past and of the future, of eternity and of the
void, tomorrow we shall have a philosophy of the present. The poetic
experience could be one of its foundations. What do we know about the
present? Nothing or almost nothing. Yet the poets do know one thing:
the present is the source of presences.
In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points
only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that
modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most
ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is
a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws
Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television
screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of
centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the
window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks
with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a
tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We
pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to
trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace
her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the
instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it
alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of
syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open
slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for
without knowing it: the present, the presence.
Translated by Anthony Stanton.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore
Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co.,
Singapore, 1993