Technologies of the Self and the Body in Octavio Paz's "The Works of the Poet"

Technologies of the Self and the Body in Octavio Paz’s ‘‘The Works of the Poet’’ daniel chávez university of virginia  The collection of prose poems ‘‘The Works of the Poet’’ included in Octavio Paz’s seminal book Libertad bajo palabra represents the first sustained effort, across several texts, to grapple with the complexities of the ‘‘mission’’ of the modern poet through meta-poetry in contemporary Mexican literature. Paz’s critics have overlooked the singularity of this collection of poems as a system of aesthetic and discursive devices of experimental character.1 The combined qualities of experimental, meta-discursive, and playful expressions are conveyed through the invention of a poetic self that manipulates representations of the world and the body in the text as if they were malleable materials. In the following pages I explain, in reference to socio-historical context and philosophical ideas, how certain angst before modernity is the apparent motivation for such experiments. I also aim to demonstrate how the social and aesthetic preoccupations of the first half of the twentieth century are central to the discourse of the late Latin American avant-garde and especially important in Paz’s literary work.2 I The poetic discourse of the late avant-garde does not bear the signs of liberation, but of a profound pessimism where the possible unity of the self in the world has become devaluated and has lost ground. The poetic self is perceived as insignificant , compressed by the ideological and institutional arrangements of society. Here, a new hermeneutic conception of the body is at work. Since the material 1 Even though Wilson (108), Philips (97–101), Schärer-Nussberger (48–54), and Quiroga (42) have devoted some comments to the collection, their discussions are general at best. They aim to account for the variety and complexity in Libertad bajo palabra rather than attempting to pin down the philosophical and poetic challenges deployed by these texts vis-àvis Western thought and the practice of the prose poem in Mexico. 2 I borrow and stretch here the classification proposed by Paz himself, who placed Vicente Huidobro, Macedonio Fernández and Carlos Pellicer in a first moment of the avant-garde and then he recognizes ‘‘two bright zeniths’’ of the movement. The first comprises Neruda and Vallejo, while the second includes, among others, José Lezama Lima, Alberto Girri, Nicanor Parra, Cintio Vitier, and Paz himself (‘‘Los nuevos acólitos’’ 38). I include Girondo in the final list and identify the latter group as the ‘‘late Latin American avant-garde.’’ 16  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.1 (2007) world under the instrumental reason of modernity exerts a power of destruction and violence against the body, the theoretical reason accompanying the former must be exposed and disarticulated.3 To that effect, the poetic voice in late avantgarde poetry acquires a performative character and invents a persona dissociated from the Romantic-Symbolist self and other poetic constructions of the past. At the same time, this poetic actor turns language into a weapon against past notions of the relationship of the body to the soul. To follow closer these transformations in some of the sixteen prose poems of Paz’s collection, I borrow Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘‘technologies of the self,’’ which permits individuals: By their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (18) One can argue that in many ways late avant-garde poetry is exploring this possibility of transforming the self in response to the changing conditions imposed by modern societies. The poem is often looking for a new state of wisdom, purity or perfection by exerting a series of imaginary operations on the body represented in the text. In this sense ‘‘The Works of the Poet’’ proposes some technologies of its own, including: a) The evaporation of the self in the poetic voice. This allows for the poetic discourse to approach material and abstract entities as if they were equivalent . However, this apparent dissolution or evaporation also reflects...