Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1990
(Translation)
I
begin with two words that all men have uttered since the dawn of humanity: thank
you. The word gratitude has equivalents in every language and in each tongue the
range of meanings is abundant. In the Romance languages this breadth spans the
spiritual and the physical, from the divine grace conceded to men to save them
from error and death, to the bodily grace of the dancing girl or the feline leaping
through the undergrowth. Grace means pardon, forgiveness, favour, benefice, inspiration;
it is a form of address, a pleasing style of speaking or painting, a gesture expressing
politeness, and, in short, an act that reveals spiritual goodness. Grace is gratuitous;
it is a gift. The person who receives it, the favoured one, is grateful for it;
if he is not base, he expresses gratitude. That is what I am doing at this very
moment with these weightless words. I hope my emotion compensates their weightlessness.
If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse
what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement. And also an indefinable mixture of fear,
respect and surprise at finding myself here before you, in this place which is
the home of both Swedish learning and world literature.
Languages
are vast realities that transcend those political and historical entities we call
nations. The European languages we speak in the Americas illustrate this. The
special position of our literatures when compared to those of England, Spain,
Portugal and France depends precisely on this fundamental fact: they are literatures
written in transplanted tongues. Languages are born and grow from the native soil,
nourished by a common history. The European languages were rooted out from their
native soil and their own tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed
world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies
of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different
plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted
languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very
soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the
negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.
In spite of these oscillations the link has never been broken. My classics
are those of my language and I consider myself to be a descendant of Lope and
Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... yet I am not a Spaniard. I think that
most writers of Spanish America, as well as those from the United States, Brazil
and Canada, would say the same as regards the English, Portuguese and French traditions.
To understand more clearly the special position of writers in the Americas, we
should think of the dialogue maintained by Japanese, Chinese or Arabic writers
with the different literatures of Europe. It is a dialogue that cuts across multiple
languages and civilizations. Our dialogue, on the other hand, takes place within
the same language. We are Europeans yet we are not Europeans. What are we then?
It is diffcult to define what we are, but our works speak for us.
In the field of literature, the great novelty of the present century has been
the appearance of the American literatures. The first to appear was that of the
English-speaking part and then, in the second half of the 20th Century, that of
Latin America in its two great branches: Spanish America and Brazil. Although
they are very different, these three literatures have one common feature: the
conflict, which is more ideological than literary, between the cosmopolitan and
nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and Americanism. What is the legacy of
this dispute? The polemics have disappeared; what remain are the works. Apart
from this general resemblance, the differences between the three literatures are
multiple and profound. One of them belongs more to history than to literature:
the development of Anglo-American literature coincides with the rise of the United
States as a world power whereas the rise of our literature coincides with the
political and social misfortunes and upheavals of our nations. This proves once
more the limitations of social and historical determinism: the decline of empires
and social disturbances sometimes coincide with moments of artistic and literary
splendour. Li-Po and Tu Fu witnessed the fall of the Tang dynasty; Velázquez
painted for Felipe IV; Seneca and Lucan were contemporaries and also victims of
Nero. Other differences are of a literary nature and apply more to particular
works than to the character of each literature. But can we say that literatures
have a character? Do they possess a set of shared features that distinguish
them from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by some fanciful,
intangible character; it is a society of unique works united by relations of opposition
and affinity.
The first basic difference between Latin-American and
Anglo-American literature lies in the diversity of their origins. Both begin as
projections of Europe. The projection of an island in the case of North America;
that of a peninsula in our case. Two regions that are geographically, historically
and culturally eccentric. The origins of North America are in England and the
Reformation; ours are in Spain, Portugal and the Counter-Reformation. For the
case of Spanish America I should briefly mention what distinguishes Spain from
other European countries, giving it a particularly original historical identity.
Spain is no less eccentric than England but its eccentricity is of a different
kind. The eccentricity of the English is insular and is characterized by isolation:
an eccentricity that excludes. Hispanic eccentricity is peninsular and consists
of the coexistence of different civilizations and different pasts: an inclusive
eccentricity. In what would later be Catholic Spain, the Visigoths professed the
heresy of Arianism, and we could also speak about the centuries of domination
by Arabic civilization, the influence of Jewish thought, the Reconquest, and other
characteristic features.
Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and
multiplied in America, especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru,
where ancient and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards
encountered history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a
present rather than a past. The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a
pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared;
it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence,
popular art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that
present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it: expressing
it ... After this brief digression we may be able to perceive the peculiar relation
that simultaneously binds us to and separates us from the European tradition.
This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual
history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal
division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times
it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter
others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal
and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth:
as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience
becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all
our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome
the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's
life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct
the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition.
But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling.
I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses
itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and
when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The
reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a
personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely
convincing.
The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest
and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I
built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other
people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated
house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games
and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library,
an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There
was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade,
a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes.
Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future,
real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The
beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours'
patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through,
supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses,
beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought
with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay
forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would
sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept
by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon
as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach;
time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.
When
was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being
betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom
is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process
because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless,
I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it
was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was
a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers
marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the
war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the
end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere
far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching
to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time,
not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.
From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a
plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently.
Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything
proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world
was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating:
real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the
games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon
under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is
sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told
me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time
of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how
my expulsion from the present began.
It may seem paradoxical to say
that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had
at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed
into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit
of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a
real reality. For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own
countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French and the
Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for
it and bring it back home. These years were also the years of my discovery of
literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I was
moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I understood
that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from
the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and
seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning
it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was
doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to
my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea:
I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as many types
of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The word's meaning is uncertain
and arbitrary, like the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle Ages.
If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages
of a future modernity? Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity
is a word in search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history?
Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for sure. It doesn't
matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at that time modernity was fused
with the present or rather produced it: the present was its last supreme flower.
My case is neither unique nor exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern
poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure that fascinates them.
Baudelaire was the first. He was also the first to touch her and discover that
she is nothing but time that crumbles in one's hands. I am not going to relate
my adventures in pursuit of modernity: they are not very different from those
of other 20th-Century poets. Modernity has been a universal passion. Since 1850
she has been our goddess and our demoness. In recent years, there has been an
attempt to exorcise her and there has been much talk of "postmodernism". But what
is postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity?
For us, as
Latin Americans, the search for poetic modernity runs historically parallel to
the repeated attempts to modernize our countries. This tendency begins at the
end of the 18th Century and includes Spain herself. The United States was born
into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the womb of
the future; we were born at a moment when Spain and Portugal were moving away
from modernity. This is why there was frequent talk of "Europeanizing" our countries:
the modern was outside and had to be imported. In Mexican history this process
begins just before the War of Independence. Later it became a great ideological
and political debate that passionately divided Mexican society during the 19th
Century. One event was to call into question not the legitimacy of the reform
movement but the way in which it had been implemented: the Mexican Revolution.
Unlike its 20th-Century counterparts, the Mexican Revolution was not really the
expression of a vaguely utopian ideology but rather the explosion of a reality
that had been historically and psychologically repressed. It was not the work
of a group of ideologists intent on introducing principles derived from a political
theory; it was a popular uprising that unmasked what was hidden. For this very
reason it was more of a revelation than a revolution. Mexico was searching for
the present outside only to find it within, buried but alive. The search for modernity
led us to discover our antiquity, the hidden face of the nation. I am not sure
whether this unexpected historical lesson has been learnt by all: between tradition
and modernity there is a bridge. When they are mutually isolated, tradition stagnates
and modernity vaporizes; when in conjunction, modernity breathes life into tradition,
while the latter replies with depth and gravity.
The search for poetic
modernity was a Quest, in the allegorical and chivalric sense this word had in
the 12th Century. I did not find any Grail although I did cross several waste
lands visiting castles of mirrors and camping among ghostly tribes. But I
did discover the modern tradition. For modernity is not a poetic school but a
lineage, a family dispersed over several continents and which for two centuries
has survived many sudden changes and misfortunes: public indifference, isolation,
and tribunals in the name of religious, political, academic and sexual orthodoxy.
Because it is a tradition and not a doctrine, it has been able to persist and
to change at the same time. This is also why it is so diverse: each poetic adventure
is distinct and each poet has sown a different plant in the miraculous forest
of speaking trees. Yet if the works are diverse and each route is distinct, what
is it that unites all these poets? Not an aesthetic but a search. My search was
not fanciful, even though the idea of modernity is a mirage, a bundle of reflections.
One day I discovered I was going back to the starting point instead of advancing:
the search for modernity was a descent to the origins. Modernity led me to the
source of my beginning, to my antiquity. Separation had now become reconciliation.
I thus found out that the poet is a pulse in the rhythmic flow of generations.
*
The
idea of modernity is a by-product of our conception of history as a unique and
linear process of succession. Although its origins are in Judaeo-Christianity,
it breaks with Christian doctrine. In Christianity, the cyclical time of pagan
cultures is supplanted by unrepeatable history, something that has a beginning
and will have an end. Sequential time was the profane time of history, an arena
for the actions of fallen men, yet still governed by a sacred time which had neither
beginning nor end. After Judgement Day there will be no future either in heaven
or in hell. In the realm of eternity there is no succession because everything
is. Being triumphs over becoming. The now time, our concept of time, is linear
like that of Christianity but open to infinity with no reference to Eternity.
Ours is the time of profane history, an irreversible and perpetually unfinished
time that marches towards the future and not towards its end. History's sun is
the future and Progress is the name of this movement towards the future.
Christians see the world, or what used to be called the siècle
or worldly life, as a place of trial: souls can be either lost or saved in this
world. In the new conception the historical subject is not the individual soul
but the human race, sometimes viewed as a whole and sometimes through a chosen
group that represents it: the developed nations of the West, the proletariat,
the white race, or some other entity. The pagan and Christian philosophical tradition
had exalted Being as changeless perfection overflowing with plenitude; we adore
Change, the motor of progress and the model for our societies. Change articulates
itself in two privileged ways: as evolution and as revolution. The trot and the
leap. Modernity is the spearhead of historical movement, the incarnation of evolution
or revolution, the two faces of progress. Finally, progress takes place thanks
to the dual action of science and technology, applied to the realm of nature and
to the use of her immense resources.
Modern man has defined himself
as a historical being. Other societies chose to define themselves in terms of
values and ideas different from change: the Greeks venerated the polis
and the circle yet were unaware of progress; like all the Stoics, Seneca was much
concerned about the eternal return; Saint Augustine believed that the end of the
world was imminent; Saint Thomas constructed a scale of the degrees of being,
linking the smallest creature to the Creator, and so on. One after the other these
ideas and beliefs were abandoned. It seems to me that the same decline is beginning
to affect our idea of Progress and, as a result, our vision of time, of history
and of ourselves. We are witnessing the twilight of the future. The decline of
the idea of modernity and the popularity of a notion as dubious as that of "postmodernism"
are phenomena that affect not only literature and the arts: we are experiencing
the crisis of the essential ideas and beliefs that have guided mankind for over
two centuries. I have dealt with this matter at length elsewhere. Here I can only
offer a brief summary.
In the first place, the concept of a process
open to infinity and synonymous with endless progress has been called into question.
I need hardly mention what everybody knows: natural resources are finite and will
run out one day. In addition, we have inflicted what may be irreparable damage
on the natural environment and our own species is endangered. Finally, science
and technology, the instruments of progress, have shown with alarming clarity
that they can easily become destructive forces. The existence of nuclear weapons
is a refutation of the idea that progress is inherent in history. This refutation,
I add, can only be called devastating.
In the second place, we have
the fate of the historical subject, mankind, in the 20th Century. Seldom have
nations or individuals suffered so much: two world wars, tyrannies spread over
five continents, the atomic bomb and the proliferation of one of the cruellest
and most lethal institutions known by man: the concentration camp. Modern technology
has provided countless benefits, but it is impossible to close our eyes when confronted
by slaughter, torture, humiliation, degradation, and other wrongs inflicted on
millions of innocent people in our century.
In the third place, the
belief in the necessity of progress has been shaken. For our grandparents and
our parents, the ruins of history (corpses, desolate battlefields, devastated
cities) did not invalidate the underlying goodness of the historical process.
The scaffolds and tyrannies, the conflicts and savage civil wars were the price
to be paid for progress, the blood money to be offered to the god of history.
A god? Yes, reason itself deified and prodigal in cruel acts of cunning, according
to Hegel. The alleged rationality of history has vanished. In the very domain
of order, regularity and coherence (in pure sciences like physics) the old notions
of accident and catastrophe have reappeared. This disturbing resurrection reminds
me of the terrors that marked the advent of the millennium, and the anguish of
the Aztecs at the end of each cosmic cycle.
The last element in this
hasty enumeration is the collapse of all the philosophical and historical hypotheses
that claimed to reveal the laws governing the course of history. The believers,
confident that they held the keys to history, erected powerful states over pyramids
of corpses. These arrogant constructions, destined in theory to liberate men,
were very quickly transformed into gigantic prisons. Today we have seen them fall,
overthrown not by their ideological enemies but by the impatience and the desire
for freedom of the new generations. Is this the end of all Utopias? It is rather
the end of the idea of history as a phenomenon, the outcome of which can be known
in advance. Historical determinism has been a costly and bloodstained fantasy.
History is unpredictable because its agent, mankind, is the personification of
indeterminism.
This short review shows that we are very probably
at the end of a historical period and at the beginning of another. The end of
the Modern Age or just a mutation? It is difficult to tell. In any case, the collapse
of Utopian schemes has left a great void, not in the countries where this ideology
has proved to have failed but in those where many embraced it with enthusiasm
and hope. For the first time in history mankind lives in a sort of spiritual wilderness
and not, as before, in the shadow of those religious and political systems that
consoled us at the same time as they oppressed us. Although all societies are
historical, each one has lived under the guidance and inspiration of a set of
metahistorical beliefs and ideas. Ours is the first age that is ready to live
without a metahistorical doctrine; whether they be religious or philosophical,
moral or aesthetic, our absolutes are not collective but private. It is a dangerous
experience. It is also impossible to know whether the tensions and conflicts unleashed
in this privatization of ideas, practices and beliefs that belonged traditionally
to the public domain will not end up by destroying the social fabric. Men could
then become possessed once more by ancient religious fury or by fanatical nationalism.
It would be terrible if the fall of the abstract idol of ideology were to foreshadow
the resurrection of the buried passions of tribes, sects and churches. The signs,
unfortunately, are disturbing.
The decline of the ideologies I have
called metahistorical, by which I mean those that assign to history a goal and
a direction, implies first the tacit abandonment of global solutions. With good
sense, we tend more and more towards limited remedies to solve concrete problems.
It is prudent to abstain from legislating about the future. Yet the present requires
much more than attention to its immediate needs: it demands a more rigorous global
reflection. For a long time I have firmly believed that the twilight of the future
heralds the advent of the now. To think about the now implies first of all to
recover the critical vision. For example, the triumph of the market economy (a
triumph due to the adversary's default) cannot be simply a cause for joy. As a
mechanism the market is efficient, but like all mechanisms it lacks both conscience
and compassion. We must find a way of integrating it into society so that it expresses
the social contract and becomes an instrument of justice and fairness. The advanced
democratic societies have reached an enviable level of prosperity; at the same
time they are islands of abundance in the ocean of universal misery. The topic
of the market is intricately related to the deterioration of the environment.
Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers and the forests but also our souls.
A society possessed by the frantic need to produce more in order to consume more
tends to reduce ideas, feelings, art, love, friendship and people themselves to
consumer products. Everything becomes a thing to be bought, used and then thrown
in the rubbish dump. No other society has produced so much waste as ours has.
Material and moral waste.
Reflecting on the now does not imply relinquishing
the future or forgetting the past: the present is the meeting place for the three
directions of time. Neither can it be confused with facile hedonism. The tree
of pleasure does not grow in the past or in the future but at this very moment.
Yet death is also a fruit of the present. It cannot be rejected, for it is part
of life. Living well implies dying well. We have to learn how to look death in
the face. The present is alternatively luminous and sombre, like a sphere that
unites the two halves of action and contemplation. Thus, just as we have had philosophies
of the past and of the future, of eternity and of the void, tomorrow we shall
have a philosophy of the present. The poetic experience could be one of its foundations.
What do we know about the present? Nothing or almost nothing. Yet the poets do
know one thing: the present is the source of presences.
In this pilgrimage
in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again.
I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within
us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning
of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl,
draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen.
This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles
and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality
of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover
an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into
our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never
manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace
her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant,
that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps
its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed.
Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real
one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.
Translated by Anthony Stanton.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993
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