Octavio Paz and the End of Modernism

Abstract

Against the background of the now bygone Millennium, this article discusses the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz’s ambivalent attitudes to modernity – with specific regard to the question of modernism’s closure. It is argued that Paz’ poetic work begins in a particularly violent and destructive vein of modernism before it turns towards the transcendental potentialities of the modern as present. Yet the problem of how to “realize” this potential remains one of the central predicaments which haunt Paz’ later poetic and metapoetic writings. As regards his poetry, the repeated failures to grasp the present constitute the Pazian oeuvre, whereas his essayistic writings frequently evoke a utopic scenario in which the presence of presences is already at hand. A tension is thus identified between a rather traditional metanarrative of modernity and a more riskful poetical or hybrid thinking of the elusive concepts of the end, presence, poetry, and modernity.