CONVERGENCES
Essays on Art and Literature
Octavio Paz
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987
320 pp., $19.95
This collection of essays once again confirms that in addition to being the greatest living poet in the Spanish language, Octavio Paz is one of the most brilliant and original essayists in any language. Indeed, his interests and sensibility transcend any one language or culture. Paz reminds one, as did Borges, of those cosmopolitan, omnivorous intellectuals of the Middle Ages: the Arab Averroes, the Frenchman Abelard, the Jew Maimonides.
These essays, splendidly translated by Helen Lane, communicate that vanishing sense of learning as enchantment--the state we recognize in the complete absorption of the child, the artist, and the genius, for whom work is a form of play, and knowledge a miracle of the imagination. Paz leads us into each new theme as if into a great wilderness, his wide-ranging erudition anticipating the alien landscape, his imagination a guiding light that reveals the most unexpected connections, a road here, a fork there, and over what we thought was an unsurmountable abyss, a bridge that leads to the breathtaking landscape of a new understanding.
Art of Rupture and Art of Convergences
The title of the collection, Convergences, is an allusion to a theme that runs through the essays: "While the art of the immediate past had developed under the sign of rupture, the art of our era is one of convergences, the intersecting of times, spaces, and forms." The art of rupture is discussed in a notable essay--"Picasso: Hand-to-Hand Combat With Painting"--in which Paz points out how Picasso's art embodies with a sort of ferocious fidelity "the aesthetics of rupture that has been the ruling one in our century." The art of convergences, on the other hand, is exemplified by Latin American literature, which Paz regards as the great new literature of our century--just as the nineteenth was the century of two other great and, until then, unknown literatures: American and Russian.
In his essay "A Literature of Convergences," the writer notes the preeminent fact about the literatures of our hemisphere, whether North, Central, or South American: the use of a European language transplanted to the New World. "This fact has marked the literatures of the Americas in a more profound and radical way than their economic structures and technological and political changes. The three literatures attempted from the beginning to break the ties of dependency that linked them with the literature of England, Portugal, and Spain." The twofold process of convergence involved adopting the literary forms and styles in vogue in the Old World and articulating the uniqueness of the New World: cosmopolitanism and nativism, the Europeanizing Henry James and the Americanizing Walt Whitman in the North; the Europeanizing Ruben Dario and the Americanizing D.F. Sarmiento in the South. Thus, cosmopolitanism and Americanism are the two
"modalities of the American conscience, torn between two worlds … cosmopolitanism is the sallying forth of ourselves and our reality; Americanism the return to what we are and to our origin. In order to return, one
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