[In the following essay, Poirier explores connections between Paz and American poets including William James.]

Responding to a question last evening, Octavio Paz spoke with tolerant amusement of the various “tribes” now occupying the terrain of literary criticism and theory. One of these, for the moment in its ascendancy—the tribe of critical historicists or new historicists—seems to me distinctly at odds with Paz's own sense of what literature is about. They favor a kind of criticism that tends to be rhetorically assured of its global utility while being vociferously anti-imperialist, a criticism confident of its institutional power even as it mourns the ubiquity of institutional networkings. They have pretty much decided that what some of us, including Octavio Paz, would call human creativity or human genius is a product merely of discursive formations, that such outmoded humanistic terminology is itself authored not by persons but by systems of power/knowledge, and that no form of writing can transcend its social embeddedness.

There is something curious, in that respect, about the highly personal stylistic displays of some of those who adhere to such anti-individualist positions, like Jean Baudrillard in his recent book America. Exuding supreme confidence in his own individual prowess as a writer, Baudrillard sets out to annihilate selfhood on the North American continent. Asking to be admired for its authorial audacity, the book all the while denies the possibility of human presence in any disposition of languages. Indeed, insofar as words can mimic the cinematic, kinetic media, Baudrillard wants to show that he can successfully compete with televisual modes that, according to him, have long since made literature itself expendable. And in the bargain, the media have transformed us, so it is alleged, into simulacra, into hyper-real and encoded figments, models of simulation to a point where we can no longer know what simulation is. “The Americans for their part,” he says, “have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language to describe it.”

Baudrillard's book is only one example of how the land of Emerson, Whitman, and William James is being seized by anti-technological pastoralists of the Frankfurt School (really by now the school of Frankfurt/Berkeley), for whom the production of meaning is forever contained and fatally limited by ideological and political constraints inherent in language. This means that any resistance to orthodoxy is treated only as an evidence of the capacities of the dominant culture to co-opt all alternative forms. Adherents to this kind of criticism, while often commendably appalled by the imperialism of the United States, are loath to inquire into their own intellectual imperialism, by which the United States itself, along with its two hundred million people, is so frequently appropriated to the convenience of theory. It is true that some new historicists are aware that if all other work and writing is to be seen as totally politicized, then their own critical work cannot magically be exempt, freed from political or ideological taint. Overall, however, the result of their strategies, in American studies especially, is that the United States, beginning with the European imaginings of a “new world,” is treated little differently from the way the Orient, in Edward Said's incisive analyses, was treated by Western intellectuals in the nineteenth century, or the way the Anglo-northern part of this continent has chosen to dominate the Latin part, and everything to the south of it, acting on the assumption that the many millions of people who live there are, in fact, not “about” themselves at all but only about “US.”

According to Baudrillard, the cultural hegemony of the U.S. or US, wedded now to electronic media, will soon irresistibly dominate the globe. “Modernity” is the future of the world, and “modernity” is Baudrillard's America. Such pessimism, as Paz says of Pound's and Eliot's in an essay on William Carlos Williams, is “instinct with feudal nostalgias and precapitalist concepts,” carefully hidden. Most new historicists would want to divorce themselves from such nostalgias, but they are no less determined than is Baudrillard to de-authorize in every way the classic texts of the literature of the United States, to narrow severely the life-support systems that connect these texts to the rest of Western literature (not thereby suggesting that Western literature is itself less than ideologically contaminated), all so that the language of American literature may the more easily be reduced to and submerged within the linguistic modes of historical and journalistic documentation.

The governing assumption behind this kind of literary-cultural criticism is that the invention of man, as represented in the laboratory experiment called the New World, is a disastrous, irretrievable botch. This would seem to be an absurdly large extrapolation from what is, after all, only a collection of a nation's writings. And yet, if the contention is somehow correct—that there really isn't to be found in the style of these writings a “world elsewhere,” however beset—then surely there can be no chance at all of finding such a “world” within the altogether less self-conscious uses of language that pass among ordinary persons in their daily lives. That is, if even in the form of novels and poems it proves impossible to locate effective linguistic resistance to cultural conformities, then resistance can hardly be expected to flourish within the fragile forms of communal conversation. This is a preoccupation of my own criticism, insofar as I sometimes hope to show that inflections of resistance can in fact be heard within the very compliances of ordinary talk, with its crafty evasions, its self-mocking hyperboles (as with respect, say, to the male will to dominance), its ludic obscenities, its confident vagueness, and the sort of play-acting abuse that can sometimes contribute to social amelioration. These can be heard abundantly in daily speech, but with consequences that are, it should be admitted, very casual, tentative and evanescent. Indeed, the promise and the charm of these inflections consists in their very refusal to relocate themselves within political or social institutions. And should they ever threaten to do so, then surely new-historicist analysis will then set out to prove that these now modified institutions, even more obviously than literary ones, are still complicit with already discredited ideological systems. Where, then, as Emerson asks in the opening sentence of “Experience,” do we find ourselves? By this he can be taken to mean not “where” but “how”: how do we find ourselves in language?

I referred just now to “a world elsewhere,” because in the book to which I gave that title some years ago, I claim that we can indeed find ourselves in the language of desire and resistance but only provisionally and for moments at a time. Why only for moments? Because, precious as these moments are, they could not ever permanently free us from the constraints to which, the rest of the time, language seems to commit us. Any “world elsewhere” exists only by the contrivances of writing and then only for those who in the writing and reading of a work want to believe such a world into momentary existence. In the effort to do this, the writer/reader cannot avoid deconstructions of language; he or she must in fact initiate them. But the effort is only initial, harboring as it does a countereffort which may at some point turn or trope the words in a creative direction, so as to make what James refers to in Pragmatism as “additions to reality.”

Language connects all of us to the past; it need not, however, be a historically determined past. It can be a past in which, leaving aside mere sequence, we recognize performative efforts with words that give us a clue as to how we may now move and act in our own sentences. Paz remarks in The Other Mexico that “the real past is not the same as ‘what took place.’” That, he says, will indeed pass away. The real past, he continues, is “something that does not pass away, something that takes place but does not wholly recede into the past.” It is, he says, “a constantly returning present” (p. 289). I hear in these remarks both a rejection of historical determinism and something profoundly consonant with the least understood aspects of the pragmatism that links Emerson and James to their poetic inheritors in this century. Consistent with the spirit of that pragmatism I would say not that Paz is echoing James, but that James is echoing him, this great Spanish poet of a much older culture. Appositively, James writes in Pragmatism that “The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face verification—those of past history, for example, as of Cain and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with everything that's present. True as the present is, the past was also.”

As the passage a bit murkily suggests, “coherence,” or the “guarantee” that the past existed, can be found only by the most active involvement with the inheritance which is language, a poetic involvement. Indeed, as Paz himself has argued, it is the poetry created in each age that assures us that the past actually can be a “constantly returning present.” The past is made true not by our accepting it merely, but by our changing it, troping it; it was indeed only by an equivalent activity that the “past” was in itself effectively created. By its own logic, this idea of the past cannot have a clear genealogy. That is, what James is saying had been said before but somewhat differently, and it will be said soon again, somewhat differently, by Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he wants to pretend that Pater as well as James had not said it before him; it will be given yet another twist by Harold Bloom, a severe critic of Eliot, in The Anxiety of Influence, where I do not recall his citing the passage in Emerson's “Intellect” which recommends that one “wrestle” with one's forebears until “the excess of influence is withdrawn.”

“Anxiety” has always seemed to me too strong a word to describe our poetic commerce with the past, and it is to be better understood, I suspect, on the analogy of sexual loving. The analogy need not be tinged with James's masculinist metaphor of “mounting” or Emerson's “wrestling”; it can instead be imagined, with Robert Frost, that the figure a poem makes is the same as the figure for love. Paz would know this conceit, and his account in On Poets and Others of an afternoon's conversation with Frost in Vermont catches the old poet's voice with amazing precision. Everywhere in his own work, however, Paz had already discovered in erotic love the proper metaphor for poetic transmission and creation. It resides in what Wordsworth called the “perception of similitude in dissimilitude,” and for one rare and never to be repeated moment in his work Wordsworth relates this perception, in “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” not only to poetic pleasure but, in his phrase, to “the direction of the sexual appetite.”

More manifestly in Paz, this perception of “similitude in dissimilitude” becomes a reason for seeing acts of poetry as also, and of necessity, acts of love. And it is this perception which helps him to turn alienation, the inescapable condition of man, away from mere disaffection. Seen under the aspect of love, oppositions in Paz's poetry gradually blossom into constellations; as two things hold their place, one against the other, they generate, as in D. H. Lawrence, unexpected fields of energy and illumination in which particular differences are subsumed. Thus, while allowing that national literatures do exist, each different from any other, Paz can nonetheless find a common identity in all Western poetry. He can move past trivial national differences to a more imposing common destiny, discovered in those difficulties encountered by all literature alike. There is no poetry, for example, in which words are or ever can be the things they represent. The different languages of poetry come to recognize a kinship in their attempts to compensate for this shared estrangement, and it is a more stimulating one than any of the estrangements they may feel among themselves. Alienation in Paz thus gives way to the discovery of pleasurable connections. How liberating, for example, to think of cathedrals, as he does in the essay on William Carlos Williams, as “the ruins of Christian eternity” (20). Figurations of this kind can make us feel more at home in the world, with some assurance that it is at least possible to find a way to bring together things that would otherwise be left sullenly apart.

In such a process of thinking and writing, Paz evinces an Emersonian/pragmatist delight in the benefits that can come from apparent loss and impoverishment, which is also one of the great themes of Frost and Stevens. Emerson in Nature has no regrets for the passing of old mythologies, in part because he can maintain that the steamboat “realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag.” This optimistic transformationalism finds an equivalent in that part of Paz's lecture where, in praise of Whitman's poem to a locomotive, he speaks of how a new age's worship of the train or steamer is a quotation, with a difference, of an ancient veneration of the horse and sailing ship. So that as terrible as the present century has proved to be, Paz's litany of the changes that define its modernity is fired by an imagination which dares acknowledge the magnificence as much as the horror of these changes. No poet has been more intimate with the degradations of the twentieth century, and yet who could ever say of his poetry what Orwell, in Inside the Whale, said of “Sweeney Agonistes”: that Eliot had managed “the difficult feat of making modern life out to be [even] worse than it is”?

For Octavio Paz, poetry is a place where one may discover the truths that reside in common sense. I don't mean common sense as usually understood, that is, as something which depends on the sanction of near neighbors. Rather it is a sense held in common with the past, very often the remote past, a sense that in addition to sharing a language we also share the need to change and renew it, both within itself and by bringing other languages to bear upon it. The past is there to tell us that the most essential of traditions is the desire to disown tradition. In his poem, “San Ildefonso Nocturne,” he writes:

Between seeing and making,
          contemplation or action
I chose the act of words:
          to make them, to inhabit them,
to give eyes to the language.
          Poetry is not truth:
it is the resurrection of presences,
          history
transfigured in the truth of undated time.
Poetry,
          like history, is made;
                                        poetry,
like truth, is seen.
                              Poetry:
                                        incarnation
of the-sun-on-the-stones in a name,
                                        dissolution
of the name in a beyond of stones.
Poetry,
          suspension bridge between history and truth,
is not a path toward this or that:
                                        it is to see
the stillness in motion,
                                        change
in stillness.
          History is the path:
it goes nowhere,
                              we all walk it.
truth is to walk it.
                              We neither go nor come:
we are in the hands of time.
                              Truth:
to know ourselves,
                              from the beginning,
                                                            hung.
Brotherhood over the void.

I would call the mind exhibited here inferrably pragmatist—a word seldom associated with poetry—because it is a mind that takes pleasure in the fact that the truth revealed in poetry consists only in the effort to arrive at a truth through actions taken with words, their arrangements, their rhythm. Truth itself is forever postponed. As James puts it in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “The poet's words and the philosopher's phrases thus are helps of the most genuine sort, giving to all of us hereafter the freedom of the trails they made.” These “trails” recall Paz's “suspension bridges.” And although, as James continues, “they create nothing”—like the “dissolution / of the name in a beyond of stones” in Paz's poem—“yet for this marking and fixing function of theirs, we bless their names and keep them on our lips, even whilst the thin and spotty and half-casual character of their operation is evident to the eye.”

This tentative effort of mine to adduce a connection between Octavio Paz and the pragmatism of William James is a way of suggesting that Paz belongs to us, to the mostly Anglo north of this shared continent, as much as we have been made to belong, by virtue of his writing, to him and to Mexico. If Ernest Fenollosa, in the notebooks Ezra Pound found instructive, could implicate Emerson in the Chinese ideograms, surely I can now, nearly a century later, implicate Paz in American pragmatism. The modernism in which he participates is not that of Eliot or Pound, however. Leaving aside his many Spanish and French and Indian and Asian and South American affiliations, it is a kind of modernism, mostly ignored even when infrequently recognized in the Anglo-American academy, a modernism that exists in a pragmatist succession running from Emerson, Whitman, and James to their many heirs in the twentieth century. These all share in what Paz, in “Return to The Labyrinth of Solitude,” calls the “creator's attitude toward language.” It is, he says, “the lover's attitude. An attitude of fidelity and, at the same time, of lack of respect toward the loved object. The writer should love language but ought to have the courage to transgress it.” Or as James would have it, in “Pragmatism and Humanism,” “We add, both to the subject and predicate part of reality. … Man engenders truths upon it.”

I will end by briefly noting how James, no less an enemy of imperialism that Paz—he was in fact at one time a founder and vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League—exhibited a unique alertness to the ways imperialism does its work even in the structure of our sentences. Long before his detestations of imperialism were brought into focus by the Spanish-American War, they were evident in a passage he wrote in 1884, apropos the dominance within our sentences of nouns or substantives, with their capacity to control and obliterate transitives and connectives, like prepositions and verbs. “All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been cooly suppressed,” he complains, “or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts ‘about’ this object or ‘about’ that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound.” As poet, critic, historian, citizen of Mexico and of the world, Octavio Paz acts on the side of those who refuse merely to be “about” something else, “about” the rivalries of the super-powers, for example, or “about” the career of a spouse or even one's children. “Song dawns on the turrets of your mind,” he writes in “Toward a Poem,” “Poetic justice burns fields of shame; there is no room for nostalgia, for the I, for proper nouns.”