Paz, Octavio, The Bow and the Lyre, trans Ruth L C Simms from El Arco y la lira, 2nd edition 1967, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1973).
Just before Christmas I downloaded a copy of Auden's reflections on poetry and criticism - The Dyers Hand - as something I should have read long ago if I was serious about writing poetry. However, my eldest daughter bought me Octavia Paz's The Bow and the Lyre as a present, so I read that instead. I will get around to Auden, but I cannot help but feel it will be a different experience having read Paz's work first.
The reason for this is simple and is encapsulated in a single quote:
The Saxons are dissidents of the West, and their most significant creations are eccentric with respect to the central traditions of our civilisation, which is Latin-Germanic (p 68).
Since the only poetry I know is 'Saxon', and every poem I have written draws on the English tradition, and if pushed I woud probably prefer Wordsworth to Blake or Larkin over Dylan Thomas, then the effect of Paz's book was considerable. It was a little like coming across NASA's famous photograph of 'Earthrise' for the first time. The Bow and the Lyre is an ambitious book; it seeks to assert what might be termed a 'Gaia' of the poetic, and to account for mankind's urge towards making poetry in terms of both the psyche and through history.
Impressively these grand intentions rarely lapse into the grandiose or become lost in mystification which is often the allure of the sublime. In a book which does not shy from discussing the supernatural it is the breadth of Paz's knowledge of world literature, clarity in terms of structure, and the author's careful choice of over-arching themes which sustains interest in a book which at times enmeshes the reader in intricate argument. . then challenges through sudden, intuitive flashes.
Paz summarised his approach as follows; 'The three parts into which this book has been divided propose to answer these questions: Is there a poetic utterance -the poem - irreducible to any other form of expression? What do poems say? How is poetic utterance communicated?' (p.15) The nature of poetic language is considered initially. Human conciousness is asserted to to be a state of constant inventiveness, we literally make-up ourselves and the world through language. 'We cannot escape from language [...] we are their (words) world and they are ours, The nets for catching words are made of words.' (p.21)
However poetic language is different to that of prose:
Poetic creation begins as violence to language. The first act in this operation is the uprooting of words. [...] The second act is the return of the word: the poem becomes an object of participation. [...] The poet and the reader are two moments of a single reality. Alternating in a manner that may b aptly cyclical, their rotation engenders the spark: poetry.' (p.18)
The second inherent characteristic ot the poetic is said to be rhythm,; Paz associates this with an archetypal sense of time. He writes ' Time is not outside of us, nor is it something which passes before us like the hands of a clock: we are time and it is not the years that pass but we ourselves.' (p.46) The ideas explored in chapters 3 - 6 so often remind one of Eliot's Four Quartets - The contiguous time present and time past in the opening lines of Little Gidding, or the peasants in East Coker lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, 'keeping time, keeping the rhythm in their dancing'. Exploring the relationship between poetry and the sacred Paz asserts a common root - a sense of 'radical strangeness', but distances poetry from organised religion. He concludes, ' the poet is not a magician, but his conception of language [...] brings him close to magic. The poet bewitches the language by means of rhythm. (p.45)
From this position, having conceived poetry as the 'consecration of the instant', Paz attempts to place this within history. He traces various manifestations of 'the epic,' tracing its development from the early classical era, then contrasting the notion of the tragic found in the Athenian playwrights with later manifestations of the form; Shakespeare and writers of Spanish Golden Age Theatre such as Calderon de la Barca or Lope de Vega, reveals Paz's preference for the epic over the lyric. The central concern of poetry is seen as an exploration of the human condition and it's relationship with notions of the sacred. Examples are drawn largely from the European tradition - Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes - but touch on works from other cultures through a discussion of Aztec myth, The Upanishads and Japanese Noh plays and the haiku of Basho.
The latter part of the book concerns the challenge to poetry and the role of poets from the growth of the bourgeoisie during the Nineteenth Century. Paz. in the chapter 'Ambiguity of the Novel' consider the rise of the form as an inevitable outcome of the emergence of modern sensibilities: ' Irony and humour are the great inventions of the modern spirit. [...] The novelistic conflict cannot give birth to a tragic art.' The French novel is seen as the apogee the bourgeois form: '..no country has such an uninterrupted succession of great novelists, from Laclos to Proust. French society sees itself in those creations, and alternately, divinizes and examines itself. It extols itself, but also judges and condemns itself.' (p. 210)
At this point poetry becomes esoteric, and poets alienated. 'Condemned to live in the substratum of history, the modern poet is defined by loneliness.' (p.213). Paz traces this isolation starting with Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud; Symbolism is presented as a precursor of surrealism which is cast as the most radical modernist attempt to preserve 'the consecration of the instant': 'The surrealist programme - to transform life into poetry and thus to bring about a decisive revolution in spirits, customs and social life'. (p.225). Paz notes that even the novel, that most bourgeois of forms, took a 'poetic' turn in the early twentieth century, notably in the the work of Kafka and Joyce:
The vastest and most powerful work in modern literature is that of Joyce; [...] the story of the fall , wake and resurrection of Tim Finnegan, who is nobody else but the English language. [...] and the book itself and the author are a single voice that flows in a circular discourse: the word, end and beginning of all history. The poem devours the poet.' (p.255)
For all The Bow and the Lyre's breadth, erudition and flashes of brilliance it could be said that its concerns are typical of mid-twentieth century modernism. The consideration of poetry in relation to received tradition, concerns about the nature of history and the relation between 'time present and time past' and interest in ritual, magic and myth is, as has been previously noted reminiscent of both Eliot and Pound. The exploration of the relationship between creativity and revolution, interest in Buddhism, a focus on surrealism and French symbolists and other anti-bourgeois art, - all this places the work as a product of its time. However, in three aspects at least, the book has proved prescient.
Paz was conscious that 'the modern age' was one which was 'expiring now'. In the Epilogue - Signs in Rotation - the author peers beyond the curtain of his time to speculate upon issues of concern to what we now term a postmodern age. He writes: 'And still submerged are the poetic worlds waiting to be discovered by an adolescent whose face we shall surely never see.' (p.239). He speculates what some of these new circumstances might be: 'One is the loss of the world image; another the appearance of a vocabulary composed of active signs: technology; still another, the crisis of meanings.' (p.239)
Taking each of these circumstances in turn: the loss of 'world image' is associated here with post Newtonian notions of time and space - 'Everything was a whole. Now space expands and breaks apart; time becomes discontinuous; and the world, the whole, explodes into splinters.(p.240) However, the future has a habit of unfolding in unexpected ways. Paz's evocation of time fractured anticipates CERN, but not 'Earthrise'. The image of our blue planet seen from the moon, observed daily from the ISS, or glimpsed as a tiny dot by the Cassini spacecraft as it orbited Saturn has engendered a 'global awareness' unimaginable to Octavio Paz writing in 1955. In relation to technology, Paz's speculations do indeed appear more prescient: 'If the world as image disappears, a new reality covers the whole earth. Technology is a reality so powerfully real - visible, palpable, audible, ubiquitous - that the real reality has ceased to be natural or supernatural: industry is our landscape, our heaven and our hell'. (p.241) Paz associates this new technological reality with a crisis of meaning:
Thus, technology is not properly a language, a system of permanent meanings grounded on a vision of the world. It is a repertoire of signs that possess temporal and variable meanings: a universal vocabulary of activity, applied to the transformation of reality....' (p.243)
The implications of this crisis of meaning for the writer are clear to Paz; though he couches his conclusions more guardedly, they are strikingly similar to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault's writing from a decade later concerning the 'death of the author' and the indeterminacy of the text.
With the disappearance of the one who speaks and the one who answers, language is annulled. A circular nihilism that ends by destroying itself: the sovereignty of noise.
....In reality every poem is a collective. Intervening in its creation as much or more than the active or passive will of the poet is the language of his time...Later, whether the poet may wish it or not, the proof of his poem's existence is the reader or listener, the real repository of the work, who recreates it and gives it its final meaning as he reads.' (p.256).
Ottavio Paz's achievement in The Bow and the Lyre is to spin a thread which traces 'the poetic' from its roots in primitive man's rituals and magic, considers its place within culture from antiquity to the modern era, and speculates about its place within a future that appeared increasingly materialistic and technological. In the final paragraph he asserts a common desire that unites mankind across the ages in his need ' to be at one with his creations, to unite with himself and with his fellows: to be the world without ceasing to be himself'. (p.262) Poetry bridges this 'ancient and perpetual split of being' providing a 'momentary reconcilliation'. The final image of the book remind one that for all his learning, the breadth of his knowledge and depth of his intellect, Octavio Paz primarily was a poet; he writes, 'In the poem, being and desire for being come to terms for an instant, like the fruit and the lips'.
For anyone who is serious about writing poetry The Bow and the Lyre is an inspiration; reading it may not make you a better poet, but it must surely make you a more thoughtful one. It is a profoundly challenging book.
The latter part of the book concerns the challenge to poetry and the role of poets from the growth of the bourgeoisie during the Nineteenth Century. Paz. in the chapter 'Ambiguity of the Novel' consider the rise of the form as an inevitable outcome of the emergence of modern sensibilities: ' Irony and humour are the great inventions of the modern spirit. [...] The novelistic conflict cannot give birth to a tragic art.' The French novel is seen as the apogee the bourgeois form: '..no country has such an uninterrupted succession of great novelists, from Laclos to Proust. French society sees itself in those creations, and alternately, divinizes and examines itself. It extols itself, but also judges and condemns itself.' (p. 210)
At this point poetry becomes esoteric, and poets alienated. 'Condemned to live in the substratum of history, the modern poet is defined by loneliness.' (p.213). Paz traces this isolation starting with Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud; Symbolism is presented as a precursor of surrealism which is cast as the most radical modernist attempt to preserve 'the consecration of the instant': 'The surrealist programme - to transform life into poetry and thus to bring about a decisive revolution in spirits, customs and social life'. (p.225). Paz notes that even the novel, that most bourgeois of forms, took a 'poetic' turn in the early twentieth century, notably in the the work of Kafka and Joyce:
The vastest and most powerful work in modern literature is that of Joyce; [...] the story of the fall , wake and resurrection of Tim Finnegan, who is nobody else but the English language. [...] and the book itself and the author are a single voice that flows in a circular discourse: the word, end and beginning of all history. The poem devours the poet.' (p.255)
For all The Bow and the Lyre's breadth, erudition and flashes of brilliance it could be said that its concerns are typical of mid-twentieth century modernism. The consideration of poetry in relation to received tradition, concerns about the nature of history and the relation between 'time present and time past' and interest in ritual, magic and myth is, as has been previously noted reminiscent of both Eliot and Pound. The exploration of the relationship between creativity and revolution, interest in Buddhism, a focus on surrealism and French symbolists and other anti-bourgeois art, - all this places the work as a product of its time. However, in three aspects at least, the book has proved prescient.
Paz was conscious that 'the modern age' was one which was 'expiring now'. In the Epilogue - Signs in Rotation - the author peers beyond the curtain of his time to speculate upon issues of concern to what we now term a postmodern age. He writes: 'And still submerged are the poetic worlds waiting to be discovered by an adolescent whose face we shall surely never see.' (p.239). He speculates what some of these new circumstances might be: 'One is the loss of the world image; another the appearance of a vocabulary composed of active signs: technology; still another, the crisis of meanings.' (p.239)
Taking each of these circumstances in turn: the loss of 'world image' is associated here with post Newtonian notions of time and space - 'Everything was a whole. Now space expands and breaks apart; time becomes discontinuous; and the world, the whole, explodes into splinters.(p.240) However, the future has a habit of unfolding in unexpected ways. Paz's evocation of time fractured anticipates CERN, but not 'Earthrise'. The image of our blue planet seen from the moon, observed daily from the ISS, or glimpsed as a tiny dot by the Cassini spacecraft as it orbited Saturn has engendered a 'global awareness' unimaginable to Octavio Paz writing in 1955. In relation to technology, Paz's speculations do indeed appear more prescient: 'If the world as image disappears, a new reality covers the whole earth. Technology is a reality so powerfully real - visible, palpable, audible, ubiquitous - that the real reality has ceased to be natural or supernatural: industry is our landscape, our heaven and our hell'. (p.241) Paz associates this new technological reality with a crisis of meaning:
Thus, technology is not properly a language, a system of permanent meanings grounded on a vision of the world. It is a repertoire of signs that possess temporal and variable meanings: a universal vocabulary of activity, applied to the transformation of reality....' (p.243)
The implications of this crisis of meaning for the writer are clear to Paz; though he couches his conclusions more guardedly, they are strikingly similar to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault's writing from a decade later concerning the 'death of the author' and the indeterminacy of the text.
With the disappearance of the one who speaks and the one who answers, language is annulled. A circular nihilism that ends by destroying itself: the sovereignty of noise.
....In reality every poem is a collective. Intervening in its creation as much or more than the active or passive will of the poet is the language of his time...Later, whether the poet may wish it or not, the proof of his poem's existence is the reader or listener, the real repository of the work, who recreates it and gives it its final meaning as he reads.' (p.256).
Ottavio Paz's achievement in The Bow and the Lyre is to spin a thread which traces 'the poetic' from its roots in primitive man's rituals and magic, considers its place within culture from antiquity to the modern era, and speculates about its place within a future that appeared increasingly materialistic and technological. In the final paragraph he asserts a common desire that unites mankind across the ages in his need ' to be at one with his creations, to unite with himself and with his fellows: to be the world without ceasing to be himself'. (p.262) Poetry bridges this 'ancient and perpetual split of being' providing a 'momentary reconcilliation'. The final image of the book remind one that for all his learning, the breadth of his knowledge and depth of his intellect, Octavio Paz primarily was a poet; he writes, 'In the poem, being and desire for being come to terms for an instant, like the fruit and the lips'.
For anyone who is serious about writing poetry The Bow and the Lyre is an inspiration; reading it may not make you a better poet, but it must surely make you a more thoughtful one. It is a profoundly challenging book.
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| Earth from the Cassini spacecraft |
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