Heterogeneity of Being: On Octavio Paz’s Poetics of Similitude by Marco Luis Dorfsman (review)

Octavio Paz was not sympathetic to deconstructionist theory. As editor-in-chief of two prominent Mexican monthly reviews, Plural (1971–1976) and Vuelta (1976– 1998), he never published the work of Jacques Derrida or of his French or American disciples, even though he closely followed intellectual developments in Paris and on the Northeast coast of the United States. When asked about deconstruction, or about deconstruction’s bedfellow, postmodernism, Paz was invariably dismissive. And yet, at an earlier stage of his career, in the 1940s and 1950s, Paz had been drawn to existentialist philosophy, echoing many of its themes in his works from this period. Evodio Escalante has recently explored the profound imprint left by Martin Heidegger’s thinking on Paz’s El arco y la lira (1956), in which the Mexican poet presented his theory of poetry. In short, Paz’s hostility toward deconstruction does not mean that there is no room for a deconstructionist approach to his work, or for an exploration of its possible links with deconstructionist theory. Heidegger, who was perhaps the most important precursor of the deconstructionist movement in the Western philosophical tradition, might profitably be regarded as a bridge connecting Paz with Derrida.

In the book under review, Marco Luis Dorfsman takes up the challenge of reading Octavio Paz as a deconstructionist. Unfortunately, and in spite of occasional flashes of insight, the book is a disappointment. It is poorly organized, with lengthy, unexplained digressions and jarring transitions. Dorfsman neglects to follow key conventions of academic writing: Heterogeneity of Being lacks both an introduction in which the author sets out the book’s aims, and a conclusion in which he sums up what we have learned. He almost entirely ignores the vast bibliography of secondary works on Octavio Paz, an oversight that is especially troubling given the quality of much criticism on Paz, whether it deals with his biography and development as an intellectual, as in Guillermo Sheridan and Enrique Krauze, his ideas about art and politics, as in Yvon Grenier and Armando González Torres, his essays, as in Jorge Aguilar Mora and Enrico Mario Santí,or his poetry, as in Tom Boll and Anthony Stanton. In addition to barely taking into account anything previously written about Paz, Dorfsman writes in an exceptionally opaque prose style and rarely introduces a concept into his argument without failing to explain or define it. The result is that the reader is constantly struggling to understand what the author is talking about.

Chapter One, titled “Turns and Returns, Vueltas y Vueltas,” sets the tone for the rest of the book. It opens with a sweeping and enigmatic statement: “Poetry is always an unforeseeable anticipation” (1). If the reader is not sure what this means, he or she won’t be helped by the similarly obscure assertions the author makes on the next page, where he describes poetry first as “the presentation of the impossible” (2) and shortly thereafter as the response to “an unthinkable presentiment” (2). The least one can gather, at this point, is that the chapter will address the nature of poetry. And yet, this turns out to be a mistaken conclusion, for soon after, the author informs us that the question he wants to pose, a question, he says, “so simple as to be almost banal,” is the question of being itself, or as he puts it, echoing Hamlet, “to be or not to be?” (3). In the following pages, Dorfsman winds his way through discussions of Parmenides, Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Moreiras, Kurt Gödel, and Gaston Bachelard, focusing, among other things, on the circle as a symbol of incompletion and imperfection (7). He also occasionally touches on the work of the ostensible subject of his book, although he erroneously identifies Águila o sol as a poetry collection, and fails to elaborate on his claim that Paz puts forward a “poetics of similitude” (10). Dorfsman offers a few more passing references...