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Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey

3.55 of 5 stars 3.55 · rating details · 33 ratings · 5 reviews

Itinerary is somewhat autobiographical, for it is the story of the evolution of my political ideas. An intellectual biography but also a sentimental and even passionate one: what I thought and think about my time is inseparable from what I felt and feel. Itinerary is the story and description of a journey through time, from one point to another, from my youth to my present...more

Hardcover, 144 pages

Published November 14th 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published 1995)

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The Poetry of Pablo Neruda by Pablo Neruda

The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings by Octavio Paz

The Collected Poems, 1957-1987 by Octavio Paz

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Sep 15, 2011 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: latin-america, literature, politics

We are so involved in the particular chowder in which we are dog-paddling that we are unable to provide an accurate critique of what is happening to us. I have tried in my blogs to do so, but I must confess that I have my fingers on the scale and cannot always give good weight. That is when I turn to writers from Argentina, Europe, Russia, Asia, and Mexico who are able to see more clearly for the distance that separates us.

Octavio Paz's Itinerary is an intellectual odyssey of sorts, in which the...more We are so involved in the particular chowder in which we are dog-paddling that we are unable to provide an accurate critique of what is happening to us. I have tried in my blogs to do so, but I must confess that I have my fingers on the scale and cannot always give good weight. That is when I turn to writers from Argentina, Europe, Russia, Asia, and Mexico who are able to see more clearly for the distance that separates us.

Octavio Paz's Itinerary is an intellectual odyssey of sorts, in which the author travels around the world testing the waters, looking for a political philosophy in which to believe, and seeing us, Europe, and the former Soviet Union with great perspicacity:

There's a flaw, a secret fissure in the modern intellectual's awareness. Ripped out of the totality and ancient religious absolutes, we feel a nostalguia for totalities and absolutes. This perhaps explains the impulse that led them to convert to communism and defend it. It was a perverse parody of religious communion.

In his early years, especially in Europe, Paz was drawn to communism, but the Stalinist version of it that he encountered during the Spanish Civil War chilled him. When he learned of the Soviet Gulags some years later, it chilled him to the bone:

Our century -- and with ours all the centuries: our entire history -- has faced us with a question that modern reason, from the eighteenth century on, has futilely tried to evade. That question is central and essential: the presence of evil among human beings. An ubiquitous presence that continues from the beginnings of the beginning and that does not depend on external circumstances but on human intimacy. Apart from the religions, who has said anything worthwhile about evil? For Plato and his disciples -- as well as for Saint Augustine -- evil is Nothingness, the opposite of Being. But our planet is full to the brim with the works and acts of Nothingness!Q In the blinking of an eye Milton's devils built the wonderful edifices of Pandemonium. Can Nothingness create? Can negation make something?

It is not just communism that draws brickbats from Paz: He also lambastes the democracies for depending on "the often whimsical swings of public opinion" and being unable to formulate and execute a successful foreign policy.

There is a wisdom in Paz's political thinking from having made the journey. Unlike Odysseus's ten-year voyage across the Mediterranean, it was a long lifetime looking for a political Ithaka, but always, like all of us, being thrown back on his own resources.

Itinerary is admirably translated, though the introduction and rather fusty footnotes can be skipped without penalty.(less)

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Jun 23, 2012 paco rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mexicanos, brooklyn-public-library

Itinerario consiste de dos partes: "La Espiral" sirve como poscripto al Laberinto de la soledad de Paz; "Explicaciones" incorpora entrevistas en las cuales Paz opina sobre varios temas de índole política y social. La mayor parte del libro está dedicada a trazar el itinerario personal y filosófico de su autor, desde su juventud como poeta y fellow traveler izquierdista, a su eventual desilusión con el proyecto sovieta y lo que denomina "las ideologías".

La obra tardía de Paz, como es representada...more Itinerario consiste de dos partes: "La Espiral" sirve como poscripto al Laberinto de la soledad de Paz; "Explicaciones" incorpora entrevistas en las cuales Paz opina sobre varios temas de índole política y social. La mayor parte del libro está dedicada a trazar el itinerario personal y filosófico de su autor, desde su juventud como poeta y fellow traveler izquierdista, a su eventual desilusión con el proyecto sovieta y lo que denomina "las ideologías".

La obra tardía de Paz, como es representada en esta colección, padece de una debilidad verdaderamente entristecedora para aquellos que valoran su obra poética y aprecian la importancia de la misma en las letras mexicanas. Esta debilidad nace, según mi estimación, de dos fuentes. La primera es el gran rechazo y concomitante resentimiento que sufrió Paz tras su denuncia del estalinismo y relacionados totalitarismos dizque comunistas. En las secciones, por ejemplo, donde narra su regreso a México después de su renuncia al puesto de embajador a la India, evidencia su enojo y rencor para con los intelectuales de izquierda. Enumera los abusos e injurias que sufrió a mano de estos, mencionandolos insistentemente, como signos de su entereza moral. Empero, lo que revela es mas bien su capitulación ética e intelectual a los régimenes neoliberales y dizque democráticos. La segunda fuente me parece ser el empeño de Paz a defender a los que consideraba ser los victores de la guerra fria: los régimenes occidentales pseudo-democracias representativas capitalistas. Insiste, sobre todo en la segunda parte del libro, en excusar a los gobiernos no socialistas, argumentando por un gradualismo oficialista frente a las hegemonias de centro-derecha al mismo tiempo que tacha a las izquierdas de hacer compromisos éticos injustificables.

A través de sus escritos, Paz consistentemente sostiene que es "la crítica" la característica primordial de la vera modernidad. Bajo el signo de "crítica", interroga las ideologías revolucionarias de izquierda, inclusive a la oposición política Méxicana, por turnos alegando o insinuando que sufren de inclinaciones totalitarias, oscurantistas, o netamente anti-democráticas y despóticas. En sí, sería esto comprehensible y digno de un intelectual que, como Paz, mantuvo una estrechez con los movimientos liberatorios de izquierdas. Sin embargo, a la vez que interroga a la izquierda, Paz defiende los mecanismos del mercado capitalista, intima su opinion favorable de los Estados Unidos como modelo de nación "lista para la democrácia", y argumenta que la cultura mesoamericana, al igual que todas las culturas indígenas de las américas, deben ser consideradas como muertas. Algunos de estos malos pasos de Paz, especialmente en torno al ser mexicano y a la interpretación de la historia nacional, ya son generalmente bien conocidas en el intelectualismo chicano, pero sigue necesitandose una mayor elaboración y amplia difunsión de los contra-arugmentos del chicanismo crítico.

En ciertos momentos, Paz presenta a México un espejo en las questiones políticas, filosóficas, y poéticas. Pero al mismo tiempo, y sobre todo en momentos donde ingentilmente ignora a sus interlocutores y opta por responder sus propias preguntas, demuestra que el pensador se ha perdido en su propio espiral. Ignora las querellas intelectuales legítimas, en vez interrogándose de manera facil y desmerecedora de un verdadero compromiso intelectual. Aparenta ignorar, o desvalorar, la capacidad crítica propia del lector, optando por un estilo dídactico y francamente injurioso a la crítica que él mismo tanto proclama.

Los errores intelectuales y los compromisos éticos de Paz van desde lo meramente risibles -- como son sus demasiado ingenuos festejos de los Estados Unidos y la tradición occidental -- hasta lo verdaderamente lamentable y condenable, en el caso de su apologética de Carlos Salinas de
Gortari, la privatización de industrias nacionales, y la apertura de México a los estragos del capital financiero internacional. Itinerario termina con fecha de 1993. A menos de un año, en forma del estallo del levantamiento zapatista, la nación desmintió a uno de sus mas grandes poetas y principales pensadores, quien por propia voluntad se paró en el lado equivocado de la historia.(less)

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Apr 30, 2011 Aaron Terrazas rated it 5 of 5 stars

I first read this book between my junior and senior years of high school in summer 2002. I have taken it with me wherever I move since then. I periodically reopen it and always find something new.

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Dec 12, 2012 Emma rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: around-the-world-in-52-books-readin, read-in-2012

Octavio Paz’s Itinerary through space was varied: time in Spain (an educative time where he discovered Criticism), 10 years in the US, then post-war years in Paris, where he met the French giant writers of the time (Aragon, Eluard, Mauriac, Malraux, René Char and Sartre, to list a few), and finally some time in South East Asia as a diplomat.

So this short book is rich of his diversified experience, in areas of philosophy, literature and politics.

This led to what I would call a haunting questionne...more

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Aug 17, 2008 Christopher Flynn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: polemic

I'm reading this in Spanish - no facing page translation (a different edition from the one listed here, bought in a bookstore in Mexico, so maybe it doesn't sell elsewhere). It's interesting (I think) - personal essays about Paz's own experiences as an artist and politically involved person. I'm slogging through a lot of pages about fights between communists in the 1940s right now, and if I'm reading it right, Paz is more of a Trotskyite, but with definite religious and other less communistic sy...more

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May 15, 2013 Theotherlemon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 15, 2013 Joanne marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: latin-america

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Apr 14, 2013 Miguel Zavala rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Mar 29, 2013 Hillary rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, nonfiction, lit-like

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Dec 15, 2012 Ishita rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Nov 11, 2012 Natasha Kaufman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Oct 18, 2012 Bernhard Bruhnke rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Feb 28, 2012 Jez marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: own, mexicanidad

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About Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano(March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature ("for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.")

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The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

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