INESCAPABLE PRESENT: TRAUMA AND MEMORY IN OCTAVIO PAZ\'S POETRY (Romance Notes 53.3 Oct. 2013)

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INESCAPABLE PRESENT: TRAUMA AND MEMORY IN OCTAVIO PAZ’S POETRY (Romance Notes 53.3 Oct. 2013) ANGEL DIAZ MIRANDA It is widely acknowledged that both Hindu and Buddhist philosophies influenced Octavio Paz’s literary works. Paz uses these philosophical “resources” as a means to displace linear time and emphasize the possibility of a circular or “alinear” time. The poet has stated that “all civilizations and cultures possess an idea of time and express a vision of time” from “primitive” civilizations to those of Antiquity. Furthermore, Paz insists that: “Time is an illusion, but there is a time outside of time in which temporal contradictions disappear […] time [i]s an illusion, and therefore ignores history” (Quoted by Guibert; 29). In the following pages, I will explore Paz’s lyrical work from a different perspective. While I recognize the “Orientalist” gaze in his work, I intend to move away from the “Orientalism” that the writer claimed for his oeuvre in order to focus on Paz’s interests in time’s discontinuities. As stated above, Paz expressed that there is a “time outside of time” where “time is an illusion.” This vision of time approaches the processes of traumatic memory. He points out in The Bow and the Lyre, that time is not something external, but on the contrary, the internalization of time helps build and declare our own individual identities: “we are time and it is not the years that pass but we ourselves” (46). If we ourselves are the measure of time and time leads to death memory becomes an inescapable “now”, a present that is ineludible. In Paz’s poetry, the illusion of time dissipates and only the instant remains.

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2 I will analyze two representative poems: “¿No hay salida?” (“Is there no way

out?”) and “Piedra de sol” (Sunstone). Both poems present aspects that can be associated with traumatic memory. Throughout his literary trajectory, Paz used elements taken from Surrealism to describe his poetic’s voice perception of the destruction of time. Dominick LaCapra explains that, “at times art departs from ordinary reality to produce surrealistic situations […] that seem to be sublimely irrelevant to ordinary reality but may uncannily provide indirect commentary or insight into that reality” (186). Some of these surreal elements are comparable and almost equivalent to symptoms of trauma. Traumatic events are experienced by way of representations. Susan Brison argues that these representations are sensorial, somatic and linguistic (Aftermath 31). In Paz’s poetry, the representation of the traumatic event is shown through detemporalization. At the same time, the poetic voice fragments itself to emphasize the rupture of the psyche and the irruption of trauma. The poetic voice describes physical and psychic sensations through techniques inherited from Surrealism. These descriptions seesaw from sublime lyricism to personal and historical horrors, to give the readers, its only possible response to the paralyzing situation: the creative act, the amatory experience. Any type of erotic encounter, Paz argues, redeems us from trauma and the horrors of History. The surreal scene gives way to what Brison calls the “linguistic classification” (Aftermath 31). The poetic speaker enunciates and classifies that horrific “something” through words. Paz reiterates the transformation of memory as a “surreal scene” into something approachable through poetic language:

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3 Included in the horror is terror … and the fascination that makes us want to fuse with the presence. The horror paralyzes us … Horror interdicts existence … The universe becomes an abyss and there is nothing before us but the motionless Presence, which does not talk, or move, or affirm this or that, but is only present. And that just being present engenders the horror. (Bow 113)

Paz moves in the direction of trauma as he describes the “Presence” of horror. The impossibility to erase the horrific event makes it fuse with the subject. This description follows the language of traumatic experiences. For example, Mieke Bal equates traumatic events to a “persistence presence.” She discusses these events in terms of memory since they become a vivid spectre that remains engrained in the subject’s psyche (Acts of Memory viii). The aim of the poetic persona is to recuperate its language from the clutch of the traumatic “presence.” The poet gives us a clear example of one of these symptoms in the beginning lines of “Is there no way out?”: “Dozing I hear an incessant / river running between dimly discerned, looming / forms” (Selected poems 24)1. The “river” works as a Heraclitan symbol of the passing of time and of the person. Later, the poetic speaker cannot have access to its own voice. His thoughts “plunge into the stagnant waters of / language” (24). Hence, it is trapped in the moment, the instant. It remains alone in the “eternal present” of trauma. This impossibility to advance, to go forward into the future, translates verbally into the dead-end street that the paradoxes and the oxymoronic techniques convey in the following verses: “Pasó ya el tiempo de esperar la llegada del tiempo, el tiempo de ayer, hoy y mañana, ayer es hoy, mañana es hoy, hoy todo es hoy, salió de pronto

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4 de sí mismo y me mira, no viene del pasado, no va a ninguna parte, hoy está aquí, no es la muerte —nadie se muere de la muerte, todos morimos de la vida—, no es la vida (Poemas 249) ………………………………………………………………… The time is past already for hoping for time’s arrival, the time of yesterday, today and tomorrow, yesterday is today, tomorrow is today, today all is today, suddenly it came forth from itself, and it’s watching me, it does not come from the past, it is not going anywhere, today is here, it is not death— no one dies of death, everyone dies of life—it is not life… (Selected Poems 24-5)2

The rupture of linear time happens simultaneously as the speaker is paralyzed by the knowledge of death. As the poetic voice realizes its own mortality; it is trapped because his memory is disrupted. The impossibility to escape, to understand the flow of time, results in what Susan Brison understands as “the undoing of the self in trauma” correlated to a shift in speech, as “being the object or medium of someone else’s speech.” (Acts of Memory 39) The poem continues with a reflection of the “undoing” of both the self and time in the past: no queda ni

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una brizna del pasado, toda la infancia se la trago este instante y todo el porvenir son estos muebles clavados en su sitio (250) pesan los pensamientos, todos los años son este minuto desplomándose interminablemente, (251) ……………………………………………………………...... not one splintered fragment of the past is left, all childhood has brought itself to this instant and the whole future is these pieces of furniture nailed to their places (25) thoughts are heave, all the years are this minute that is dropping interminably down, (26) These examples reinforce the idea of being trapped. The only way to escape from that “eternal present” is to find a new language. In this poem, the “instant” is personified and becomes a mirror of the poetic voice. It is an effective resource because it shows the multiple fragmentations of the “self” and the different temporal planes that it inhabits. The poetic voice seems to go deeper in trauma and the trappings of its own unconscious, retreating farther away from life. The traumatic elements surround it and become more extreme. For example: que sonido remoto tiene la palabra vida, no estoy aquí, no hay aquí, este cuarto está en otra parte, aquí es ninguna parte, poco a poco me he ido cerrando y no

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6 encuentro salida que no dé a este instante, (251) ……..………………………………………… what a remote sound the word “life” has, I am not here, there is not here, this room is somewhere else, here is nowhere, little by little I have been shutting myself and I find no exit that doesn’t give onto this instant, (26)

The poetic speaker retreats “inside” of himself, into the “rooms” of the unconscious where trauma resides. As it goes in these “rooms”, it will not be able to escape. The poem, in its structure, is also fragmented. In the original Spanish version, it is divided in half by a stanza written in italics. It is here where the poetic voice gestures toward a way out of trauma. Love or the creative act redeems us from death. The use of italics as a graphic element creates a pause in the chaos of the event. This element seeks redemption through a visual image. The speaker guides us to the “other side” of trauma. Allá, del otro lado, se extienden las playas inmensas como una mirada de amor … el río entra cantando por el llano dormido y moja las raíces de la palabra libertad, somos dos reflejos.... …y la fijeza del instante en todo su esplendor. (250) ………………………………………………………. Way off there, on the other side, shores extend, immense as a look of love …

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7 the river enters singing along the sleeping plain and moistens the roots of the word freedom, we are two reflections … … and the transfixion of the instant held within itself in its splendor. (25-6) It is possible to cancel out death through love. This act is also instantaneous and it

frees the voice from death. Here the speaker counterpoints the sublime to trauma. LaCapra explains the tension between trauma and the sublime as “two vanishing points of an extreme that threatens to disrupt all continua and disfigure all mediation” (Writing History 190). The sublime encloses the perfect instant as well. That instant is the relationship between the lovers. By accepting that “this instant is I” (26), the poetic voice reaffirms that the “I” is a reflection of time facing death. That instantaneous “I” is a fragmentation like the one produced by trauma in the psyche. The multiplicity of “I’s” shows the fractures produced by trauma. This process of fragmentation continues in the next verse “I am here, cast at my feet, looking at myself / looking to see myself seen” (251; my emphasis). Without a doubt, these number of “I’s” meet in the “moment”. The phrase “everything is today and forever” (25) becomes irrefutable in the poem. This instantaneity of time is traumatic, but it leads both the speaker and the readers to the redemption of the “self” by means of the erotic or poetic. Octavio Paz always equated the erotic with the poetic. In The Double Flame, the poet points out that “[t]he relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism

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of language” (2). Victoria Carpenter clarifies this statement by arguing that the poet creates a relationship between the somatic and emotional aspects of love with sexual ones as a communal drive that pushes humanity forward (494). Likewise, Paz’s poem, “Sunstone” could be read as the merging of personal and historical events that leads to a traumatic rupture of the poetic subject’s psyche. My following analysis will showcase how the different “temporal planes” (Carpenter, 495) in the poem represent a binary construction between traumatic memory and the redeeming power of the erotic act. The paratextual image of the sunstone evokes traumatic references. It is not only a calendar but also a sacrificial altar. Hence, we expect a confrontation between death and the instant3. Paz explains that the calendar as a trope is dual: “[i]n every society there are two calendars” one “is a division of time in equal parts.” The other, the “sacred calendar”, shatters any “continuity” (Bow 50). Elizabeth Jelin affirms that even though representations of time and space vary in different cultures “these representations−and consequently, the very idea of what is past and what is present−are culturally variable and historically constructed” (13). This dichotomic condition introduces the surreal elements of the poem. The oneiric landscape of the first “stanzas” gives way to the recognition of the loved one and then falls into a type of traumatic trance. In the following “sections”, the poetic “self” becomes fragmented: recojo mis fragmentos uno a uno y prosigo sin cuerpo, busco a tientas, corredores sin fin de la memoria, puertas abiertas a un salón vacío

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9 donde se pudren todos los veranos (262) …………..……………………………… …and I gather the pieces, and go with no body, groping my way, the endless corridors of memory, the doors that open into an empty room where all the summers have come to rot (7) The poetic voice once again uses memory as a room in which a negative event

happens, where his memories “come to rot.” Falling back into the cycle of trauma, where the “temporal planes” crisscross into an ineludible present of which it cannot escape. The frantic search and the solitude that accompanies the poetic speaker make this a violent struggle for its sanity. This frantic search continues throughout the poem: busco sin encontrar, escribo a solas no hay nadie, cae el día, cae el año, caigo con el instante, caigo a fondo, invisible camino sobre espejos que repiten mi imagen destrozada, piso días, instantes caminados, piso los pensamientos de mi sombra, piso mi sombra en busca de un instante (262) ……………….………………………………. I search without finding, I write alone, there’s no one here, and the day falls,

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10 the year falls, I fall with the moment, I fall to the depths, invisible path over mirrors repeating my shattered image, I walk through the days, the trampled moments, I walk through all the thoughts of my shadow, I walk through my shadow in search of a moment, (7) The lack of control of the search gestures toward a permanence of the poetic voice

inside of trauma. The poetic speaker uses its “reflection” to point towards the “I.” While the poetic voice goes through moments of its childhood, the fragmentation of the self becomes enhanced and the feeling of impending doom grows: el instante se abisma y sobrenada rodeado de muerte, amenazado, por la noche y su lúgubre bostezo, amenazado por la algarabía de la muerte vivaz y enmascarada (265) ……………………………………………. the moment plunges into itself and floats surrounded by death, threatened by night’s lugubrious yawn, threatened by death that is masked and alive, (11) At this point, the poem turns to the personal history of the poetic voice. Paz warns us that “utterance” is what characterizes the “poetic operation.” He then follows this statement by merging History with the personal and the social. Paz goes as far as to

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express that “The poet always consecrates a historical experience, which can be personal, social or both at once” (Bow 173). The poem connects the poetic voice’s personal history to a world history where violent events never cease to take place. As the poetic voice intertwines both realms, personal horrors mirror traumatic historical events. The inevitability of death unifies our individualities and makes us a community. From here on, the poetic speaker lists an ambiguous series of places where traumatic events happened. The “traumatic” code for this “section” is explained by “Carmen”; a reference to the victim of jealous rage. This character reminds our speaker: “‘aquí siempre es octubre’” (268)4. The simplicity of this utterance hides one of the responses to trauma that Paz posits as above the rest, the amorous relationship. For Paz there is no difference between the erotic and the poetic. Both are sublime experiences and make us alive, “in the moment.” This “in the moment” serves as a counterpoint to the elements of horror that begin to appear in the poem and affects the consecration of the erotic in the poetic voice. It is this process that sparks the need in the poetic voice, once again, to continue his search for the sublime. The traumatized “self” cannot let go of the “blow” that the event inflicted upon it. The poetic speaker reminds us that: no hay nada en mí sino una larga herida, una oquedad que ya nadie recorre, un presente sin ventanas… (266) ……………………………………………… there is nothing inside me but a large wound, a hollow place where no one goes,

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12 a windowless present, … (15)

This stanza describes the “inescapable present” where the poetic voice is not allowed to leave the “rooms” of its psyche. This “wound” becomes deeper as soon as it remembers the Spanish Civil War: Madrid, 1937 […] sonó la alarma y hubo gritos, casas arrodilladas en el polvo, torres hendidas, frentes escupidas y el huracán de los motores, fijo: (268-69; My emphasis) .……………………………………………………… Madrid, 1937, […] the sirens wailed and the screaming, houses brought to their knees in the dust, towers cracked, facades spat out and the hurricane drone of the engines, (19) The horror of war is “fixed” in the present5. Trauma is ever-present and traumatic memories and flashbacks come without warning. Patients that suffer trauma repeat the event once and again. Elizabeth Waites explains that victims of trauma are “[u]nable to assimilate trauma in a coherent self [and] the affected individual becomes fixated in the trauma and reenacts it over and over” (Memory Quest 255). But the poetic speaker gives itself the opportunity to move away from this trauma: the colon moves the readers away from this “fixation” into an atemporal plane using the same technique as in “Is there no way out?” where the amorous act becomes the only alternative to horror. Paradoxically,

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after this immobility “the two took off their clothes and made love” (Collected Poems 19), and six lines later, “the two took off their clothes and kissed/ because two bodies, naked and entwined/ leap over time, they are invulnerable” (19; My emphasis) These verses point toward the poetic speaker’s moment of redemption, it emerges from trauma to transform into an erotic instant. The poetic voice then takes us directly to the traumas of history, literature and religion/mythology by enumerating murders and violent deaths inscribing us, the readers, in the violence of the world. It mentions: The Book of Genesis, Socrates, Agamemnon, Brutus, Moctezuma, Robespierre, Lincoln, Trotsky and Mexican President Madero. After listing murderers and victims, the poetic speaker asks itself “the silence that speaks without ever speaking / does it say nothing? or cries nothing? / does nothing happen as time passes by?” And instantly replies “−nothing happens, only a blink” (29). Later on, the poetic voice finds another answer “where I am you, we are us/ the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined” (33). These verses show how the erotic merges with the linguistic, opening the possibility of understanding Paz’s poetics as a verbal eroticism. As Paz affirms in The Bow and the Lyre: “[t]he poet does not escape from history, even if he denies it or attempts to ignore it. His most secret or personal experiences are transformed into social, historical words” (171). Trauma in “Sunstone” is shared by society and the poetic speaker. In The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz writes about the “hijos de la chingada”, literally the children of the “fucked one” or the “violated Mother” and how violence is intrinsic to Mexican identity: “If the Chingada is a representation of the violated Mother, it is appropriate to associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation, not only in the

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historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women” (86). This violation is the originary trauma of “Mexicanness”, and the author cannot be left outside of it. Since Mexican culture develops from this violence, from “chingar”, Mexicans —Paz seems to argue— are traumatized beings. Paz reaffirms that “…the true inheritors of the assassins of the pre-Hispanic World are not Peninsular Spanish but us, Mexicans that speak Spanish, either “creole”, “mestizo” or indigenous” (Posdata 147; My translation). These “inheritors” are at once victims of the Conquest and present-day Mexicans. Paz prescribes a moving away from the “hijo de la chingada” identity. The erotic act obliterates the violent act: “in eroticism, aggression ceases […]” (Double Flame 4). The poet presents trauma and its possible answers as a surreal space that we all could inhabit. It is in this space —where Octavio Paz’ poetry resides— where the erotic and the traumatic merge to find, to take us closer to, the sublimely aesthetic. Emory University

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15 Works Cited Bal, Mieke. “Introduction” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Bal, Crewe, Spitzer. Hanover: UP of New England, 1999. vii-xvii. Brison, Susan. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. __. “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Bal, Crewe, Spitzer. Hanover: UP of New England, 1999. 39-54. Carpenter, Victoria. “Dream-Sex and Time Travel: Paz’s ‘Piedra de sol’” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Oct 2001: 78 (4): 493-513. Guibert, Rita. “Paz on Himself and his writing: elections from an Interview”. The Perpetual Present: the Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz. Ed. I. Ivask. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. 25-34. Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Trans. Godoy-Anativia, Rein. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. LaCapra, Dominick. “Conclusion: Writing (about) Trauma” Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. 181-220. Pacheco, José Emilio. “Descripción de ‘Piedra del Sol’”. Octavio Paz. Ed. A. Roggiano. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1979. 111-24. Paz, Octavio. El arco y a lira: el poema; la revelación poética; poesía e historia. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1956. __. El laberinto de la soledad. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973. __. La llama doble. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993.

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16 __. Libertad bajo palabra. Madrid: Cátedra, 1998. __. Los hijos del limo; del romanticismo a la vanguardia. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974. __. Poemas (1935-1975). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979. __. Posdata. México: Siglo veintiuno, 1970. __. Selected Poems. Trans. G. Aroul, Eliot Weinberger, New York; New Directions, 1984. __. The Bow and the Lyre. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas, 1973. __. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 1990. __. The Double Flame. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996. __. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove, 1961. Waites, Elizabeth. Memory Quest: Trauma and the Search for Personal History. New York: Norton, 1997.

1NOTES In the original poem, Paz uses the phrase “En duermevela” which implies restless sleep and agitation. I believe that the translator used “Dozing” because there is no equivalent in the English language for the negative “charge” that the phrase in Spanish conveys. 2 The poems “¿No hay salida?” and “Piedra de sol” will be quoted from Poemas (1935-1975) Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979. While the English translation for the former will be quoted from Selected Poems Trans. G. Aroul, Eliot Weinberger, New York; New Directions, 1984. The latter will be quoted from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987 Ed. Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 1990. Weinberger changed and varied the positioning of words and lines of some poems with the author’s consent. 3 “Sunstone” contains 584 verses in Iambic pentameter to form one continuous stanza, in order to represent Venus’ orbit round the sun. The poem finishes with the same verses that it starts with, attempting circularity. Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco, explains that Nerval’s epigraph, is a reference to Tarot’s card # XIII, Death as a knight. From here on, I will divide the poem into “sections” in order to read it closely and analyze it. 4 This utterance also anticipates and serves as a sort of future reference to the events of the student massacre in Tlatelolco that occurred on October 2nd, 1968. This “future reference” further complicates Paz’s conception of time since it anticipates the State-sponsored bloodshed by 11 years. 5 In the English version, the translator omits the word “fijo”, which means “fixed”, or immovable. The “droning” of the sounds of war are then fixed in the poetic speaker’s memory.