Octavio Paz, an important public and literary figure in Mexico today, has published several volumes of condensed and highly metaphoric poetry in Spanish that display his close ties to Surrealism…. [In "Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare"] Mr. Paz has revised and extended two essays on Duchamp written over the last 10 years. This short vigorous book shuns the psychoanalytic speculation that weakens many of the 20-odd existing studies and probes deeply into Duchamp's relations to Eastern and Western culture. Even Duchamp cannot escape history.

"The Castle of Purity," the first essay, opens with a consideration of Duchamp's origins and his radical yet calm responses to the modern Midas myth…. The following 60-page description and interpretation of the "Great Glass," or "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (1915–23) treats the two partially painted clear panes … as belonging to the ancient Western tradition of theological art conveying idea and myth. In our era, however, the only powerful idea at hand, according to Mr. Paz, is the antimyth of criticism; Duchamp employs it ironically. Therefore, the meaning of the "Bride" resides in complex allusions to absence (or multiplicity) of meaning. Next to this intellectual complexity, Duchamp's Ready-mades seem simple-minded. (pp. 13, 32)

Mr. Paz's second essay "∗Water Writes Always in∗ Plural," concentrates on the assemblage Duchamp was secretly hatching in his last years…. "Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas" appears to solve the enigma of the "Bride" by showing to the peeping-tom spectator a naked woman sprawled provocatively in a mock-up landscape. In a stunning exegetic performance Mr. Paz connects "Given" to the myth of Diana and Actaeon (virgin and witness), to mathematical optics of perspective and anamorphosis, to modern theories of relativity and the fourth dimension, and to the traditions of courtly love and Giordano Bruno's Neoplatonism. This tour de force sometimes pushes the limits of credibility; a mind as limber as Mr. Paz's could probably extract meaning from a randomly selected column in the telephone book. But overall Mr. Paz's demonstration holds up. Duchamp ceases to be merely the "anesthetician" of modern art and shows some of the markings of a historical and philosophical artist astray in the 20th century.

Mr. Paz leaves a few of his ideas in a somewhat wobbly state. For instance, the dismissal of retinal painting in favor of an art of the mind is not adequately reconciled with the importance of sheer looking in Duchamp. (pp. 32-3)

My principal demurrer concerns Mr. Paz's treatment of the impeccably staged, straightfaced joking that presides over all Duchamp's production. Surely "Given" is the ultimate bluff against art and its whole superstructure, an obscene diorama pawned off on a reputable museum because of the reputation of the "artist" and the brilliant literary apparatus that lends it prestige…. Mr. Paz keeps referring to humor, spoof and play as elements in Duchamp's work, but he can rarely detach himself enough from the task of criticism to laugh outright and point to la blague as the central axis of Duchamp's ethos—more important even than love or language. Still, Mr. Paz does give proper credit to Alfred Jarry, creator of "Ubu Roi" and the science of Pataphysics; Jarry's sense of reality as a cosmic joke of serious proportions deeply influenced Duchamp. And everything Mr. Paz writes in this probing book conveys his awareness of Duchamp as a great cautionary figure in our culture…. (p. 33)