Abstract
In September 1974, Octavio Paz published in issue 38 of Plural an autobiographical poem, “Nocturno de San Ildefonso” (“Nocturne of San Ildefonso”), in which a mature poet—Paz was sixty at the time of writing—looks back, through a memory tunnel, to Mexico City, circa 1932 and discovers his seventeen-year-old self walking from the Zócalo in central Mexico City to the Preparatory School in San Ildefonso. Paz adds a footnote to the title and explains that, “In 1932, The National Preparatory School was housed in San Ildefonso, a building that that formerly been a Jesuit school.”1 We will see later in this book that in 1974 Paz was immersed in a very intense reappraisal of the impact of revolutionary thought in Mexico and in the wider world, in particular pointing out the harmful effects of Soviet communism which, he felt, still beguiled the young. This poem therefore, is an attempt to explore—on a sleepless night, as his wife lies sleeping by his side—his own personal political (and poetic) journey that had begun some forty years earlier.
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1 Mapping the Field: Paz, Politics, and Little Magazines, 1931–1968
Octavio Paz, “Nocturno de San Ildefonso,” Plural 38 (September 1974): 24–27.
Enrique Krauze, “Octavio Paz: Facing the Century. A Reading of Tiempo nublado,” Salmagundi 70–71 (1986): 130.
Enrique Krauze, “Octavio Paz. Y el mantel olía a pólvora …,” in Mexicanos eminentes (Mexico City: Tusquets, 1999): 154.
The best single guide to the world of Vasconcelos is Claude Fell, José Vasconcelos: los años del águila (1920–1925) (Mexico City: UNAM, 1989).
Lorenzo Meyer, “Mexico in the 1920s,” in Mexico Since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 207–210.
Guillermo Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2004), 126.
Octavio Paz, “Itinerario,” in Ideas y costumbres I. La letra y el cetro. Obras Completas 9 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995): 20.
For Paz’s views on Gide and an analysis of this episode, see Octavio Paz, “La verdad frente al compromiso,” introduction to Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Tristeza de la verdad: André Gideregresa de Rusia (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1991).
See in particular Sebastiaan Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002).
Diana Ylizarriturri, “Entrevista con Octavio Paz, editor de revistas,” Letras Libres 7 (July 1999): 54.
Octavio Paz, “Profesión de fe,” in El peregrino en su patria, Obras Completas 8 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994): 569.
Octavio Paz, “Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión,” El Hijo Pródigo 5 (15 August 1943): 278.
Octavio Paz, “Un catálogo descabellado” and “Cronología del surrealismo,” Plural 17 (February 1973): 36–42.
Octavio Paz, ¿Aguila o sol? (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951): 117.
Kristal argues that one must see Paz’s writings in their totality at every stage in his career. Here he teases out the affinities between Paz’s own poetry and his reading of the paintings of Rufino Tamayo. See Efraín Kristal, “La palabra y la mirada de Octavio Paz: eros y transfiguración,” Boletín de la Fundación Federico García Lorca 9 (June 1991): 125.
Quoted in Mariella Balbi, Szyszlo: Travesía (Lima: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, 2001), 55.
For an excessive and passionate account of the Paz-Garro-Bioy triangle from a daughter’s point of view, see Helena Paz Garro, Memorias (Mexico City: Océano, 2004).
Octavio Paz, “De Octavio Paz,” Sur 346 (January-June 1980): 92.
Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz: Las palabras del árbol (Barcelona: Plaza Janés, 1998), 58.
Quotations from José Luis Martínez, “Esquema de la cultura mexicana actual,” Revista Mexicana de Literatura 8 (November-December 1956): 39–45 and 55–56.
José Emilio Pacheco, “El Puente de Nonalco y el avión de balderas,” La Jornada, 8 October 1995.
T. Segovia, “Periodistas y escritores,” Revista de la Universidad de México 12, 10 (June 1959): 28.
Gabriel Zaid, “Tres momentos de la cultura en México,” Plural 43 (April 1975): 14.
G. Zaid, Como leer en bicicleta: problemas de la cultura y el poder en México (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1975), 189.
Annick Lempérière, Intellectuels, États et Sociétéau Mexique. Les Clercs de la Nation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992).
For an analysis of the Joaquín Mortiz publishing house, see Danny J. Anderson, “Creating Cultural Prestige: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz,” Latin American Research Review 31, 2 (1996): 3–37.
Juan García Ponce, Pasado presente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993).
For an account of the activities of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, see Martha Domínguez, Los becarios del Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexico: Aldus, 1999).
Huberto Batis, Lo que ‘Cuadernos de Viento’ nos dejó (Mexico City: Diógenes, 1984), 27.
Michael K. Schuster, Elenísima: Ingenio y figura de Elena Poniatowska (Mexico City: Diana, 2003).
Carlos Monsiváis, La Cultura en México 202 (1965): 4.
Kristine Vanden Berghe, “Los mafiosos del boom. Literatura y mercado en los años setenta,” in Literatura y dinero en Hispanoamérica, eds. N. Lie and Y. Montalvo Aponte (Brussels: Vlaams kennis-en Cultuurforum, 2000), 54–55.
For a thorough study of the development of counterculture in Mexico, see, Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Gerald Martin, “The Boom of Spanish American Fiction and the 1960s Revolutions,” in The Blackwell Companion to Latin American Culture and Literature, ed. Sara Castro Klaren (New York: Blackwell, 2007, forthcoming).
Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971).
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 33.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 73.
Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For an analysis of U.S. cultural policies toward the arts in the sixties, see, J. King, El Di Tella.
Quoted in Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930–1960 (London: Verso, 2000), 244.
Angel Rama, “El boom en perspectiva,” in Más allá del boom. Literatura y mercado (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1981), 98.
Gabriel García Márquez, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002), 137–138.
José Donoso, Historia personal del boom (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1972), 113.
For extracts from this correspondence see María Eugenia Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo: Cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1997), 11–13.
Octavio Paz and Arnaldo Orfila, Cartas cruzadas (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2005), 145. I am very grateful to Adolfo Castañon for sending me this book and other material relating to Plural.
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© 2007 John King
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King, J. (2007). Mapping the Field: Paz, Politics, and Little Magazines, 1931–1968. In: The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609686_2
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