Ideograms of the East and the West: Octavio Paz, Blanco, and the Traditions of Modern Poetry

This essay engages two questions: first, it is a response to current attempts to make sense of various literary traditions in an era associated with postmodernity and globalization. I argue for a global but period-specific approach to the study of literary history. Secondly, this essay applies the period-specific theoretical model to the study of one poem: Octavio Paz’s Blanco (1967), known for its global reach and complex structure, but often read as solely focused on India’s ancient past, thus antiquarian and with no relation to our present era. On the contrary, I argue that Blanco can only make sense in the history of conflicts between the East and the West, better known to Paz as the Cold War, a global conflict that involved the former U.S.S.R. and the United States. The multiple and therefore confusing meanings of “East” and “West” best define, I would argue, the need to understand the history of its various connotations from Herodotus and the Crusades, to the Cold War and the current conflicts between the West and the (Islamic) East. Thus, any attempt to define globalization and postmodernity as an age in which all cultural differences and Otherness find their happy resolution can only be read as part of the marketing system of globalization itself, and not as a serious attempt to make sense of literary history at a transnational or global level. A RECENT ANTHOLOGY of world literature places Octavio Paz in an unexpected literary affiliation: not Mexican or Latin American, but in the section “Crossing Cultures: The Example of India.” This correlation is not surprising given that Octavio Paz devoted more than 40 years of his life to the study of the poetry and civilizations of China, India, and Japan, and published poems and essays specifically on India during and after his years of service as Mexico’s ambassador in New Delhi (1962-1968). The editors of this anthology claim that a writer’s ability to dwell in a transnational, global culture is a sign of an emergent “postmodern consciousness” that has allowed writers such as Octavio Paz, Salman Rushdie and, among others, Bahrati Mukherjee, to connect, integrate, and thus reconcile the East and the West. 1 This judgment no doubt would have pleased Paz, in spite of the different historical meanings assigned to the terms “East” and “West” by Paz’s generation. In a Babel-like era in which the (Middle) East and the West have been unable to reach any level of reasonable understanding, bristling instead with fears of terrorist attacks and wars of occupation, the global range of the editors’ argument and their insinuating use of language (“a citizen of many cultures,” “postmodernism,” “an emerging global consciousness,” and so forth) would seem to obstruct or nullify the possibility of a productive critique. Nonetheless, to Dr. Roberto Cantú, Professor of Chicano Studies and English, California State University, Los Angeles. 1 See “Octavio Paz,” in The Bedford Anthology of World Literature, The Twentieth Century, 1900-The Present, Book 6, ed., Paul Davis et al. (New York: Bedford/Sr. Martin’s, 2003): 1292.