Spectator's Journal/Paz in Our Time
Schwartz, Stephen A.
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL PAZ IN OUR TIME by Stephen A. Schwartz ctavio Paz seems to have taken to heart the words of the Russian dissident pioneer, Yevgeny Zamyatin: "True literature can only exist...
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...Paz consistently defended Chamorro's newspaper La Prensa against Sandinista aggression...
...all the classic utopias, from Plato on, provided for repression of dissenters...
...Paz has come to see the modern church as a bulwark of pluralism, and in his 30 Giorni interview he commented: "One cannot profess tolerance and pluralism while simultaneously holding positions which are injurious to an institution [the church] which represents so much in the history and life of Mexicans...
...He came into his own in the decade following the Second World War, with a series of major works...
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...The Communist remedy to social injustice proved worse than the malady...
...He describes the traditionalist social framework with understated but real sympathy: "New Spain had as its ideal neither change nor the modern consequence of change, the cult of progress...
...It [was] the closing Stephen A. Schwartz, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, co-authored a portrait of Sen...
...Asked who he thought was responsible for the human cost of Marxist Leninism's failure in Latin America, Paz said: I would start with the Latin American intellectuals...
...He was always considered a man of the left...
...They should have denounced the aberration of compulsory military service which allowed young men, still children, to be taken from their homes...
...Many recent episodes would have made, in another age, marvelous fodder for novels and essays of self-examination...
...Less obvious is the persistent, passionate fidelity that he has displayed throughout his life to the freedom of the mind...
...It was not always thus: our independence had the Jesuits behind it, our liberals had high Catholic interlocutors...
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...It is his belief that, as a writer, his relationship with culture, language, and profession can only be individualistic, and that genuine inspiration is unclassifiable, unexplainable, and resistant to all imposition...
...In the years that followed, Vuelta removed altogether the "bloody shirt" of Latin leftism...
...At the 1984 Frankfurt Book Fair, Paz served notice on the left in uncompromising terms in a speech on accepting the Peace Prize of the West German Association of Booksellers and Publishers...
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...His collection of surrealist prose, Eagle or Sun...
...It is an unusual study of a seventeenth-century Mexican poetess and mystic in which Paz reveals his fascination with the traditional past...
...Some have recognized almost instinctively that the two could not be reconciled...
...Perhaps the central theme of intellectual life in the twentieth century has been the quest for reconciliation between freedom of the mind and utopia...
...was an emissary of General Zapata to the U.S.—Paz was a defender of the Spanish Republic, a long-time associate of Trotskyists and other extremists, and a champion of student protests in 1968...
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...In addition, he produced two seminal critical works: The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), the greatest analysis of the Mexican character, or, for that matter, the Latin American character, ever published, and The Bow and the Lyre (1956), which continued his exploration of poetry and poetic language...
...Paz established new styles in Spanish poetry, beginning with the Surrealism he learnedfrom the French poets of the 1930s...
...Octavio Paz has always been impelled by an almost irrational belief in the link between freedom and creativity...
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...He went on to defend the 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 opposition, including the contras, of whom he said, "None of them is fighting to restore [Somoza's] dictatorship...
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...Paz emphasized his commitment to the reintroduction of Catholic culture in the open marketplace of ideas in Mexico with a special issue of Vuelta this past May on "The Catholic Tradition and the Mexican Writers...
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...In Paz's case this is clearly not accurate...
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...W hile he has been described as anti-clerical, even atheist, Paz's vision of the pluralistic order and its religious underpinnings in post-Columbian Mexico is a fresh one...
...In the same interview, he referred to those "Catholic Marxists who only listen to themselves, like Ernesto Cardenal...
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...For Paz, utopian temptations were strong...
...He has written with wit and understanding about subjects as diverse as classical Hindu sculpture, Marcel Duchamp, and the culture of the Mayans and other indigenous Americans...
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...Paz used the occasion to deliver a thorough condemnation of sandinismo: "The acts of the Sandinista regime are proof of its determination to set up in Nicaragua a bureaucratic-military dictatorship following the Havana model...
...More polemically but typically, Vuelta called novelist and Harvard professor Carlos Fuentes a "fake Mexican" who has fabricated his personality for the entertainment of foreign leftists...
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...Zamyatin makes clear that, in our era, politics has impoverished rather than ennobled the life of the mind, in literature as in institutional rhetoric...
...Members of America's diplomatic corps are assigned to U.S...
...He wrote, "The Nicaraguan election dealt the all-but-final blow to Marxist-Leninist revolution in this hemisphere...
...Alan Cranston in TAS (April 1990) under the pen-name Buck Long...
...But Paz has come to reject the neo-Rousseauian outlook, popular on university campuses on both sides of the Rio Grande, that treats pre-Columbian Mexico as a lost paradise, and its Hispanicized successor culture as, in his words, "a vacuum in which nothing of importance occurred . . . the period of the Mexican nation's bondage...
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...The constitution of 1917 specifically bars priests from appearing in public in religious uniform, and prohibits public religious processions, as well as imposing other curbs...
...But his alienation took an increasingly open cast in the middle eighties...
...It would be hard to find an individual who, better than Paz, exemplifies the Latin American literary experience over the past half-century...
...Vuelta has taken a tone more than a little reminiscent of the anti-Communist liberal periodicals of the 1950s...
...Most of today's writers embrace politics as a public pursuit, but aside from a few hysterical anti-Americans, feminists, and racial pamphleteers, authors tend to eschew it as a subject for creative work...
...Unlike many modern artists, Paz draws his inspiration not from the Spiritual Void, but from the almost extinct idea of spiritual strength...
...Now our challenge is to find the political imagination to address those injustices that have outlived their untenable solution...
...Popular Mexican Catholicism moves me profoundly...
...The marginalization [of the church] must end...
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...Paz's obsession with kindness among individuals is yet more notable given its context in current Mexican politics...
...It has taken him some decades to work through these contradictions, but he has done so, recognizing in the process that freedom is the highest of values...
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...they should have demanded that the opposition be given a fairer chance...
...However, for one world literary figure, the Chamorro victory provided an opportunity for serious criticism of left-wing intellectuals both in the U.S...
...Paz has forthrightly condemned the maintenance of these laws...
...Unfortunately, we can expect few such works from the American intelligentsia...
...Some weeks after the Chamorro victory, Paz contributed an even more remarkable declaration to the Italian Catholic magazine 30 Giorni...
...It is the source of much popular creativity and also of kindness among individuals...
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...Even in its design, it has repudiated much of Latin American art and literature, which had revived the worst drudgeries of social realism...
...It is an interesting and unexamined fact that, like Paz, the French surrealist Andre Breton, a radical in his youth, ended up a fervent anti-Communist and loving defender of the U.S...
...A campaign is now underway to free the church from these bonds, but the anticlerical tradition remains strong among the Mexican intelligentsia...
...He became a culture hero comparable to the other Latin literary stars, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa...
...Aesthetically, it shows a firm commitment to Modernism, with translations of T. S. Eliot and cover reproductions by artists like Max Ernst typically mixing with critical and literary works by leading Hispanic writers...
...T he remarkable transformation of 1 Octavio Paz was, to North Americans, one of the least-known chapters in the political struggle that convulsed Central America during the 1980s...
...Such is a struggle recapitulated in modern times by competing elites throughout Latin America—the leadership of revolutionary groups has come almost unfailingly from the university-educated bourgeoisie, rather than from the humble peasantry...
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...there is a paradoxical element in his discovery of intellectual freedom through the pluralistic traditional order of New Spain...
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...It could be argued that, although largely neglected by North American observers, Paz's political sea change was as significant a marker of Marxism's end in the Hispanic world as the Chamorro election...
...The Chamorro election, a disaster for the left comparable to the Hitler-Stalin pact, marked a climax in the recent tragicomedy of morals, political and literary, in our republic...
...But Paz's real masterpiece is his most recent major work, Sor Juana...
...Obviously, much of Paz's evolution What sort of people need to learn a foreign language as quickly and effectively as possible...
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...one such might have derived from the victory of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro in Nicaragua's election of February 1990...
...His latest book is Miracle in Managua, on the election of Violeta Chamorra to be published in early 1991 by the Institute for Contemporary Studies...
...One might have imagined that such a study of a "person of color" (not to mention a "person of gender") would parrot familiar attacks on Western values and traditions...
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...The individual in question was the 1990 Nobel laureate in literature, Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL PAZ IN OUR TIME by Stephen A. Schwartz ctavio Paz seems to have taken to heart the words of the Russian dissident pioneer, Yevgeny Zamyatin: "True literature can only exist where it is created not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics...
...I am thinking of the Spanish theologists of the sixteenth century...
...Paz actually broke with the left more than a decade ago, when he recognized the failure of the state as a medium for human happiness, a view elaborated in El ogro filantropico ("The Philanthropic Ogre"), published in the late seventies...
...Like Vargas Llosa, he ended the decade fully in the anti-revolutionary camp...
...It has been commonplace to ascribe such "conversions," on the part of radical intellectuals, to a spiritual void within the individual, and an attempt to fill it...
...Thankfully, this part of the world has finally given up Marx for Montesquieu...
...He began as a leftist, "socially conscious" poet, then moved to Surrealism after several visits to France...
...His is a position diametrically opposed to that adopted by the Soviets in the 1920s, which hr 'led the placing of "artists in uniform...
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...If they had criticized the Sandinista revolution while defending it they would have done a greater service...
...The Sandinista defeat, like the defeat of the Marxist left generally, is the defeat of fantasy...
...Paz has in fact been particularly eloquent on Nicaragua: The task . . . of economic reconstruction can be successfully resolved only through broad integration—not only with the rest of Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico, but with the heretofore customarily vilified United States as well...
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...1951), was followed by a group of long, epical poems culminating in Sun Stone (1957...
...But this turn was no less predictable, especially for those who followed Hispanic literary and political events up close, than the anti-Sandinista vote in Nicaragua...
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...Son of a Mexican revolutionary—Octavio Paz, Sr...
...In an interview therein, Paz said, "At one time it was necessary to laicize Mexican political life...
...It was based on antagonisms between competing factions at the top of society: the Mexican-born of European descent, or criollos, vs...
...The church has been the object of strict anti-religious legislation since the revolution...
...H is stance on the church is proof that Paz has undergone a genuine conversion, from an aggressive secularism to a respect for conservative political and spiritual conceptions...
...As he writes, "Although official [Mexico's] PRI government opinion does not accept it, there are greater affinities between [modern] independent Mexico and New Spain than between them and pre-Hispanic societies...
...episode of the tumultuous era that began in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution...
...In that interview he also declared his love for those aspects of Catholicism that united it with the most profound elements of Mexican existence...
...He and his widely respected monthly magazine, Vuelta, assumed a forward position in defense of free expression in newly revolutionized Nicaragua and oldly revolutionized Cuba...
...Along with acceptance of the balance that characterized that society comes a fuller appreciation of the failure of the egalitarian project: "The contradiction that corrodes universalist ideologies and inevitably ends by destroying them is that they do not, in fact, transcend the specific social entities we call nations, classes, peoples, and ethnic and cultural groups...
...Its essential contradiction was "not based on the antagonisms between rich and poor or between subjected natives and European oppressors, as is so often claimed in pseudo-Marxist arguments...
...Q ince Paz emerged in the 1930s, his la works have shown a remarkable variety...
...In New Spain, Paz discovered a pluralistic kingdom equal in rights to theother constituents in the empire, "an enormous land, prosperous and peaceful...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
