This Close Distance: Octavio Paz, India, And the Dialectic of Travel

Abstract

This article examines representations of some locations in India and Indians in Ladera este and El mono gramático by Octavio Paz, focusing on the relationship between movement and stillness. The analysis takes as a theoretical frame the author's interests in opposites, expressed through oxymoron and paradox, combined with the genre of travel writing to develop two hypotheses. On one hand, it argues that through oxymoron and paradox, these texts present movement and stillness as an open dialectic where the opposing terms imply and contaminate each other without annulling meaning. In practice, this dialectic results in a poetic setting where the traveler is not mobile in opposition to the destination by definition, but rather both the places themselves and the poetic voice that visits them alternate freely between movement and stillness. On the other, the article examines representations of foreign cultures as a way of observing how the author expresses traits of Orientalism according to Said at the same time as suggesting South-South relations free of violent hierarchy. The article examines moments when a productive ambiguity emerges between these two positions vis- -vis Indian cultures.