“In Zaid’s manner of thinking—as in any complex manner of thinking, and especially in one that aspires to simplicity—there is a drama without a dramatic solution.”
I
Catholic and modern. When that history of Mexican literature we have dreamed of and called for is someday written, posterity will recall how we denizens of the twentieth century failed to calculate and register its works and days. But there will be regions mapped by critics like Zaid, true geographers of the literary imagination. Tres poetas católicos, a compilation of thirty years of curiosity, outlines the routes, the passages, and the quagmires of an account—that of our Catholic literature—we piously know not.
Starting from the introductory text titled “Muerte y resurrección de la cultura católica,” Zaid faces up to the empire of this mutant with two autophagous heads: Jacobinism and clericalism. The first, vanquisher of the Reformation and executioner during the Cristero War, confined Catholic culture to its most distant extremes: the procession and the seminary. Clericalism, defeated and humiliated, hid behind the miter, growing accustomed to backroom dealings and the fresh air of new millennialisms like liberation theology. The consequences were disastrous: before an anatomy of Mexican spirituality, we got a teratology. Mexico, a Catholic nation founded on a paraenesis—the religious covenant between those who preach and those who are converted—is a country that has, officially, lived free of Catholic culture.
This dramatic simulation overran literary history. With the little-known exceptions of Antonio Estrada (1927–1968) and Jesús Goytortúa (1910–1969), the Cristero novel renounced artistic dignity from the start, in dire need of martyrological justification. A communist, José Revueltas, had to be our great Christian novelist. And our Catholic intellectuals (that beautiful anomaly, unplanned daughter of the French Revolution and romanticism) had to choose between imagination and outrage, to be like discreet brothers Alfonso and Gabriel Méndez Plancarte, to be like old José Vasconcelos, who in his twilight litanies was more Catholic than Christian. Others, like Antonio Caso, Father Ángel María Garibay K., and Antonio Gómez Robledo, opted for prudence, situating themselves as wilfully peripheral figures beside the grand pagan, Masonic, Jacobin, and agnostic chorus, from which shone the bright Phrygian cap of Martín Luis Guzmán, the Socratic toga of Alfonso Reyes, and the metaphysical minds of the Contemporáneos.
The Catholic poets were granted a certain license. The Catholicism of Ramón López Velarde and Carlos Pellicer was tolerated as seemingly inoffensive. The Zacatecan was condescended to for his provincial, reactionary sadness, and the Tabascan was celebrated for his innocent Franciscan joy at the landscape. But Zaid makes an emphatic break with this stale tolerance. Putting together the puzzle of the Partido Católico Nacional, that uncomfortable and then defiling ally of president Francisco I. Madero, Zaid shuts the door on the affected official bard of the Mexican Revolution and introduces him to us as that figure of the Catholic intellectual that modern Mexico has missed—and that existed, prefigured and truncated, in López Velarde. Studying the relationship between the poet and his friend Eduardo J. Correa (as Jean Meyer and Guillermo Sheridan have also done), Zaid presents a different version of intellectual life during the war of 1910.
Tres poetas católicos continues with Pellicer. I will not harp on about Zaid’s most celebrated critical qualities: his ability to teach even prosaic souls like mine how poetry works. Reading Zaid will lead me to return, with greater understanding, to Pellicer’s poems. And beyond his “azules que se caen de morados,” Zaid recalls a matter of paramount importance, put forth by Juan Ramón Jiménez and ignored by literary history: the oblique relationship between Hispano-American poetic modernismo and the homonymous heresy condemned by Pope Pius X, with the encyclical Pascendi, in September of 1907.
Faced with the aberrant condemnation of the modern world proclaimed by Pius IX in the Syllabus (1864), Catholic intellectuals, above all in France, rebelled. Impressed by German metaphysics, the Biblical criticism of Ernest Renan, or their readings of Eastern Catholic traditions, open to modern science and its implications for Catholic dogma, modernists like the great Alfred Loisy, Édouard Le Roy, or the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière wagered on the Church’s aggiornamento at their own risk. Teilhard de Chardin was perhaps the last member of this line, and the Second Vatican Council was perhaps the partial and posthumous victory of those Catholics condemned at the turn of the century.
The influence of this Catholic modernism was essential in Mexico. As much or more than dogmatic positivism, it nourished the frank Christian heterodoxy of the young Amado Nervo and José Juan Tablada, the skepticism of Reyes and Guzmán, the insatiable religious unease of Vasconcelos, the spiritism of Madero and the spiritualism of Caso, the (proto-) Christian democracy of López Velarde, and, as Zaid points out, the Christian optimism of Pellicer, doubtless of Franciscan stock, but doubly modernist as both lyrical and Catholic. But I do not believe, as Zaid seems to suppose in one of his appendices, that the odd few Christian poems modify even a speck of Reyes’s unabashed paganism.
The third Catholic poet Zaid examines is Father Manuel Ponce (1913–1994), whom Zaid himself introduced to profane literary society in the late seventies. With Ponce—author of the unforgettable Ciclo de vírgenes (1940), one of the few Mexican Catholic poems that surprises even nonbelievers—Zaid concludes a book that proves that Catholicism had a place in revolutionary politics (with López Velarde), in modern poetry (Pellicer), and at the pulpit itself. You almost wish these Tres poetas católicos might become four, five, or six, going back to Father Alfredo R. Plascencia and continuing on to Concha Urquiza—our Simone Weil, according to Zaid—Francisco Alday, and the group behind the magazine Trento (1943–1968), which Ponce directed, including even younger figures like Javier Sicilia.
Tres poetas católicos is an essential piece of the literary resurrection of our Catholic culture. Much more remains to be done, but the starting point is Zaid, who presents himself as a double-sided parishioner: a citizen who upholds his Catholic beliefs in civil society and a believer who asserts himself as a layperson in the Catholic world. I must say, Zaid is an unusual sort of Catholic critic: Cardinal Newman and the early Blanco White would have concurred with such a modernist who, at the end of the twentieth century, has so thoroughly denounced improductive progress, such as the fantasies of the university.
A book like Tres poetas católicos is an example of literary criticism as open-air thought, a feast of pleasantness in the house of research, a time of questions over certainties, an invitation to read poetry cast in the same mould as Zaid’s story of the Christmastime births of Pellicer, whose animus was the light that allows one to sense the orphanhood of the celestial vault and the inexplicable joy brought about by the world in miniature. Zaid, as the scholastic of a threatened, wounded tradition, has found the way to be—more even than his three chosen poets—both Catholic and modern. (Servidumbre y grandeza de la vida literaria, 1998)
II
Scope and limitations of a method. As the years go by, to read, reread, or just leaf through Plural and Vuelta is enough to unfurl in one’s memory the nuanced richness of the group behind said magazines. The heft of Octavio Paz in world literature, the political ill will that surrounded these publications, and the desire to see them swiftly forgotten—as well as the disdainful spirits of their leading players—has prevented their being thoroughly recorded as a collective experience in the history of Hispano-American literature. Just as important as Paz to the intellectual design of Plural and Vuelta were Alejandro Rossi, Zaid, and, later, Enrique Krauze. These three writers, in turn, are of the utmost importance when it comes to understanding the political methods and intellectual certainties with which Paz, late in his career, came to dominate Mexican culture.
Within Plural and Vuelta, Zaid occupied an eccentric position—that of the only Catholic in a group of agnostics and unbelievers. Juan García Ponce and Salvador Elizondo presented themselves as feuding brothers, with a shared genealogy developed through the aesthetics of transgression with Bataille and the accursed part of Western literature. A poet like Tomás Segovia is legible through the legacy of Juan Ramón Jiménez and the criticism and complicity of the Generation of ‘27, while Rossi’s stories and essays are a branch off the tree of Borges, Bioy Casares, and José Bianco. And while Zaid’s poetry—so joyful—counts amongst its clarities that of being thoroughly traced, his role as a critic of poetry, of the publishing world, and of political power appeals to a complex intellectual configuration, which began to blossom in the sixties through articles and reviews in La cultura en México, Diálogos, and Cuadernos del viento. Before authoring two essential anthologies (the Ómnibus de poesía mexicana in 1970 and the Asamblea de poetas jóvenes de México in 1980), Zaid wrote memorable readings and polemics on poets like Alfonso Reyes, Pellicer, José Carlos Becerra, Luis Cernuda, Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, and José Emilio Pacheco, and on literary scum and the role of anthologies. And with his column “La cinta de Moebius” in Plural, Zaid become of the the sharpest critics of the institutional revolution’s regime, then obsessed with recovering, among the intellectuals, the legitimacy is had lost in 1968 and once again jeopardized after the Halconazo of 1971.
“Zaid has no interest in condemning the modern world, and, in this regard, Paz was wrong to call him a traditionalist. We find in Zaid an evangelical optimism—that of Pellicer and Father Manuel Ponce, more his chosen poets than López Velarde.”
To get to the bottom of Zaid’s critical methods, it is not enough to point to his Catholic partisanship—which, besides, he made public only gradually until releasing Tres poetas católicos (1997). Zaid presented himself as a literary critic strangely distant, in appearance, from all essentialism, a sort of practical moralist who would have been easy to associate with a certain Protestant spirit. In an intellectual environment saturated by the theological brawls of all schools of marxists, Zaid, in Leer poesía (1972) and Cómo leer en bicicleta (1975), chose to examine— in a solitary, seemingly eccentric endeavor—the material conditions in which literary life and literature itself were produced. His goal was not to postulate a system or establish some sociology of reception (although he somehow shed light on this path too), but rather to clear away all the dead leaves of metaphysics and ideology that covered up the literary act, revealing the workings of poetry as La máquina de cantar, as he would title his well known 1967 book.
But Zaid’s criticism, even more surprisingly, was not only disconnected from the academy; it was, in fact, pointed against the practices and mythologies of academic knowledge. From his exhibition of the mechanisms of inspiration, Zaid moved on to a radical (and, ultimately, exaggerated) critique of the university class as creator and beneficiary of cultural power. Only then, through books like El progreso improductivo (1979) and De los libros al poder (1988), could the moral nature of Zaid’s criticism be understood: writing literary criticism without euphuism—the adornment of opulence and its ellipses—was but a single step in his crusade to free public life from the superstition of improductive progress that the denizens of the university offered society as a panacea.
As it turns out, the mechanism Zaid uses to analyze a poetic anthology is the same one he uses to analyze a Central American revolution: that of breaking a circumstance down into its constituent parts, stripping that whole of its artistic, metaphysical, ideological, or humanitarian prestige, and exposing it in the light of common sense—and, on more than a few occasions, of reductio ad absurdum. But, while Zaid’s literary criticism is a utilitarianism of limited scope, since it does not seek to postulate laws (if it did, we would have an Emerson or even a Chernyshevsky on our hands), his political criticism showed itself to be devastating and unerring given the moral magnitude of the imposture he was condemning. Upon analyzing the Sandinista government or the Salvadoran guerrilla war using the same pattern as Silvio Zavala in Los intereses particulares en la Conquista de la Nueva España (1991), Zaid made a novel application of certain theories of the political elites, and he did so with surprising journalistic efficacy. His utilitarian goal was a moral demonstration: based on Marxism-Leninism, Jesuitism, and nationalism, the Central American guerrillas sought, just as they invented popular will, to usurp it. After the Sandinistas’ defeat at the ballot box (1990) and the Chapultepec Accords between the Salvadoran government and the guerrillas (1991), even Joaquín Villalobos (the guerrilla chief who murdered poet Roque Dalton, and Zaid’s main target in these memorable texts) had to accept that political democracy was the only shared space in which to resolve the elites’ ambitions. Paz himself had critiqued totalitarianism for ideological reasons, while Zaid offered a more pragmatic explanation for this moral reservation. Unlike Paz, Rossi, or Krauze, Zaid is a democrat before he is a liberal: he is interested not in all-inclusive political traditions, but rather in ideal communities of citizens
Zaid’s method has clear limitations: in many of his critiques of cultural power and the publishing industry, the circumstance at hand palpably resists the mode d’emploi to which the critic attempts to submit it. In other cases, Zaid gives the impression of being just another example of a mutation long since recorded in the annals: the intellectual who hates intellectuals. And the fact that one of Zaid’s first (and best known) poems is dedicated “to the Larousse dictionary” is no coincidence: for this new form of Catholic humanist, the world should take the shape not of an encyclopedia, but rather of a pocket dictionary whose definitions are not always so convincing.
Goodness, balance, gentleness, and generosity were the virtues of the perfect man according to Renaissance humanism. And, for this spiritual machinery to produce a Catholic humanist like Erasmus, Christian docility was needed before the divinity of all human endeavors. The young Zaid who offered his countrymen in Monterrey that inaugural critical text—“La ciudad y los poetas,” in 1963—would show himself to be that Catholic humanist called upon to prolong the literary experience that Reyes—in a mutation that would have fascinated George Santayana—had left behind in his pagan phase. The mature Zaid’s efforts to pull Don Alfonso out of limbo, thanks to the doubly revealing evidence his Catholicism supposedly left in some of his religious poems, are therefore logical, if somewhat abusive and counter-productive.
The poet who addresses the city is a Catholic humanist speaking to the Philistines with the Erasmian conviction that no one can be left out from reading what is written, nor from communion with a poetic word that Zaid associates, with methodological modesty proper to Santayana, with the root of religion. Throughout his career as a critic, Zaid has remained on this medieval student’s path, a concealment strategy more Epicurean than Christian that allows him to pitch his tent as he pleases among laypersons and the secular, with no fixed course, extracting the humanities from their academic cloisters and their ivory towers. This explains the breadth as well as the restrictions that Zaid seeks and self-imposes, displaying that false modesty that Chamfort considers the most tolerable of worldly sins: publishing in widely sold didactic magazines while refusing to overstep the limits of the written word, as he who adds science adds suffering, and the vanity of knowledge is a heavy enough burden without adding the vanity of the world.
This Christian humanist’s project came up against a world—the world of the 1960s—in which certain Renaissance norms were fated to clash with the harshness of new wars of religion. The climate of the Second Vatican Council, which found in Zaid one of its subtlest cultural interpreters, gave way in Latin America to the conversion of ecclesiastical reformers into guerrilla priests. Zaid’s crushing critique of the university types in power in Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador demonstrates the Erasmian character of the wise man who sees former scholastics transformed into Lutherans, Calvinists, and Zwinglians—feverish prophets divvying up what should be indivisible: the Catholic whole.
Zaid has no interest in condemning the modern world, and, in this regard, Paz was wrong to call him a traditionalist. We find in Zaid an evangelical optimism—that of Pellicer and Father Manuel Ponce, more his chosen poets than López Velarde. And this joy sees the reactionary spirit in every millennialism, be it from the left or the right. Instead, Zaid perceives the utopian construction of the city of God as an everyday task based on the permanent redesigning of the humanity of laws, the Legum humanitas that, in the twenty-first century, can only be expressed through a conservative anarchism that shows solidarity with small businesses, self-sufficient agricultural communities, and cultural consumption as the custom house separating barbarism from civilization.
In Zaid’s manner of thinking—as in any complex manner of thinking, and especially in one that aspires to simplicity—there is a drama without a dramatic solution. In his conceptual refusal to impose a given system, there is a deep utopian need, and in offering practical solutions to complex problems, Zaid can hit the mark a thousand times and still remain a utopian whose diminutive designs strive toward a vast feat of social engineering that is, in appearance, not of this world. Faced with the problem of free will that separated Rome from the Reformation, Erasmus left both sides unsatisfied; he had neither the postulation of a theology nor the presentation of a dogmatic solution in his spirit. But, from the ashes of the wars of religion, the Erasmian vocation of proving that grace and free will work together happily in the everyday divinity of the human was worth more than any treatise, anathema, or sophism. It fell to Zaid to speak neither from the pulpit nor from the public gallery, but rather from literature, the only position in which the contemporary world could guarantee his freedom. His is a utilitarian conception of literature in which inspiration and common sense have theologally cooperated to create one of those unusual oeuvres in which the nobility of an intelligence redeems an age from its iniquities.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Christopher Domínguez Michael, Diccionario crítico de la literatura mexicana, 1955-2011
(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012), 618-631.
