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36 BOOKS ABROAD
1 The kernel of Eco's viewpoints was originally
presented by him in an address entitled "II problema
dell'opera aperta," read at the Twelfth Internation-
al Philosophical Congress in 1958. This was subsequently elaborated into the various essays grouped
under the title of Opera aperta. Some of the objections that were addressed to the author after the
appearance of the original edition were not valid,
but fortunately they prompted him to write out clarifications or additions which were incorporated into
complete than the Italian edition" (ibid.) it is indispensable to take into account as well this further
elaboration of his views. In this article the Italian
edition (Milan, 1962) will be referred to in abbreviation as /*., and the French edition (Paris, 1965) as
Fr.
- Fr., p. 10.
4 Jacques Scherer, he "Livre" de Mallarme
(Premieres recherches sur des documents inedits).
Paris, 1957.
he is continuing to write and the degree to which he is constantly revising and reworking what he has already written.2 Also, his poems have always shown a great
capacity for splitting and coalescing and growing out of one another, which makes
divisions under individual titles sometimes difficult. In all this, Montes de Oca shows
a strong will to totalize and actualize this work, to survey all at once the realms
("reinos") he has created. He strives for an ever-widening circle of acquired territory which the center can and will hold. This new edition, for example, will ignore
chronology and arrange poems alphabetically and by the signs of the zodiac, in an
effort to make a simultaneous statement.
This statement is for the most part strongly affirmative, enthusiastic (vehement ac-
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BROTHERSTON 37
and all that opposes and threatens it (lassitude, decay, injustice and "the infamous
lout of collective death") firmly in favor of the former. Faith "pierces burial boxes
and fills anew the chewed grapeskins," while love "softens the condor's beak, making
it a lip, fond cotton." The miracle of this victory over death, destruction, and evil
But at this stage of Montes de Oca's work, a yet firmer guarantee is available, redemption through Christ crucified:
You, sublime foreseer
who took from Golgotha
not one drop of water,
don't abandon my bones to their depths.
Evil is insidious, hard to check, and obliquely located ("they tell me things are going
too badly"). The sense of our being abused creatures of a moment (he speaks ironically of "the clean joy of our holidays on earth") leads here not to poignancy, as it did
with the Aztecs, but to a skepticism which threatens to be overwhelming, and indeed
is countered only by the almost frantic plea : "Tell me that innocence is not dead,/ that
it is always won, that it is not lost,/ that innocence is never lost." This, and a new
"social" awareness : the desire to be immersed in the "pueblo" and the common love
of man. With some tartness he deplores how we walk on the arm of our privileges,
and he talks of remaking history and giving bread to all, fairly, as it should be given.
His distress at the travail and evil afflicting man goes in overtly militant directions,
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38 BOOKS ABROAD
as when he talks of "the first sparks of justice rising in arms." This skepticism or
lurch from faith, the staple fare of many poets, was marked in his poetry by a (for
him) austere edginess and apparent uncharitableness toward his "enemies" and toward
himself, in poems like "The Fool's Farewell," where with deceptive self-deprecation
he announces : "My clothes are soiled with colored powder, / I have returned my motley to the bottom of the sea."4
of Christian God, and his latest revisions make it absolutely clear that this is so. It
can only sporadically rest on revolutionary conviction, as in his ode to Che Guevara
or his unrelenting "With Fixed Bayonet" :
People, take what you need
From the thief who robbed you:
Air and tools,
Cool oils for your young body;
Galaxies of flour for your pantries,
With these exceptions, his desire to recover what Leiva has termed his "Adamic"
vision, to relocate that "luminous country" and himself within it, has been very much
in evidence in such significantly entitled works as Fundacion del entusiasmo (Foundation of Enthusiasm, 1963, a title taken from a strongly affirmative poem of the
1950s), La parcela en el Eden (The Plot in Eden, 1964), and Vendimia del juglar
(Minstrel's Vintage, 1965), with its palpable search for absolutes. In this last collection, God, in the poem "Sin nombre," is shown as a nameless being that has only a
dubious capacity for reviving the "holy colors of that immense first occasion / When
I wound the spring of my song," i.e., in Contrapunto de la fe and Pliego de testitnonios. A more potent and persistent force is undoubtedly love, a love which in origin
is perhaps Christian but which becomes a force for and from itself. While in Contrapunto de la fe he speaks of love as the "favorite enterprise of faith," in that same book,
in "La fuerza del amor" (The Force of Love), it becomes the power which can enable
lovers to "invent the reverse of time" :
although wild cliffs loom over my wand of glass,
although phantasmal crows chip at your face slowly
and the supreme waters of death slacken with each blow
the most precious plank of our ship.
In later collections love is clearly the gratuitous and liberating force it was for
the surrealists,6 with their faith in the ultimate goodness of man and in his affective
remarkably close to Paz in what is probably one of his best poems, "El corazon de
la flauta" (The Heart of the Flute). It begins:
Into an animal of love magic changes me
And now I know no master other than love
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BROTHERSTON 39
This poem is also notable for the way it integrates autobiographical presence,
which otherwise often seems even anecdotal in his work, or on the other hand, overrepressed. In fact it could be argued that Montes de Oca is at his most brilliant when
his persona and tone are being defined by his address in love, when his lines of start-
ling images have the cumulative effect of incantatory or ritual praise to a "You"
("Tu"), be it the Ana Luisa of his poems and life, or simply presence that is initially
other. In a passage like the following, it is as irrelevant to object to his "elementary
poetic structures" or his overprolific metaphors (as some critics have done7) as it would
be to find fault with the "Song of Songs," or the "Nahua Grecas" which it interestingly
resembles in many ways.
You are the sea star sown in the clear sky
The invisible metal whose only weight is its name
The wave on shoulders of wheat
With some of the effect that Pound achieved in his translations from Chinese, these
the mother word"), there being no doubt about their individual splendor ("Not in vain
do the burnt eyes of the peacock's tail shine on your breasts") .
Images, mere images whipped together at random,
Tied like a ladder of yellow tresses
Dropped from the highest snow-capped tower
To the bottom of buried ships.8
These images excite each other to incandescence ("my images, my burning crystal
cliffs") in a ritualistic context which allows the poet to realize his wish that there
should "be no possible armor between my blood and the poppies," that in defining
his own identity in address he should become "one with the world."
In his recent poem "The Heart of the Flute," Montes de Oca laments the things
that have made his friends grow old: money, calculation, and against them he ranges
the things which have remained precious for him as a poet: "fish flowers pictures."
This seems an accurate perception, and again surprisingly close in the practice it
would suggest to the phrase his Nahua ancestors used for "poetry": "in xochitl in
cuicatl," "flower song." Rather than in the meticulous registering of shifts of tone and
attitude and in the complex vertical structuring of thought dear to Leavisite or New
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40 BOOKS ABROAD
Criticism, Montes de Oca excels in bestowing a realm of flowers, flutes, birds, threatened by the horror of sunless death, and saved by love for the "You" on whom it is
bestowed. How Montes de Oca himself reacts to the occasional meanness with which
his generosity has been paid can be seen in one of his prose poems, "Advice to a
Shy Girl or In Defense of a Style." It begins :
I like walking out along the branches. There's no better way of reaching
the tip of the tree. In any case straight lines make me giddy; I prefer squibs and
their feverish light-flowered zigzagging. And when I dream, I see walls studded
with jewels where vegetable lightning stays long enough for me to thread on to
it conches irridescent with the deepest joy. To hell with sparse ornamentation and
the severe norms with which academies prune the splendor of the world.9
University of Essex
1 "Marco Antonio Montes de Oca," most readily
available in Puertas al campo, Mexico, 1966, where
it is dated Paris, 10 August 1959. Detente de la luz
cantan los pajaros includes, in revised form, Montes
de Oca's previous work: Ruina de la infame Babi-
chissement made possible by love" (J. H. Matthews), which I discussed earlier, is remarkably
BOTH SIDES
For Jean Franco
who taught me London
I open the dictionary
and don't find a word, damn it, which doesn't have a left side
and an equally famous right side.
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