Like Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz was one of those superb poets whose brilliance makes nonsense of the notion of lesser minds that taking on the turmoil and conflict in one’s society and its extension in the world, carrying contentious political and social substance up into the sacrosanct ivory tower, corrupts and destroys true creativity.
Octavio Paz risked activism in many ways during Mexico’s recurrent crises. I think of his resignation as his country’s ambassador to India in 1968, when the Mexican government fired upon and killed student protesters in Tlatelolco Plaza.
But the most enduring aspect of his activism – his intellectual activism, if one may make such distinctions in the personality of such a total man – the treasure he bequeaths us along with his poetry, is the ranging ontology of his essays. There, stemming from his philosophy of language, the significance of literature, history, politics and concepts of time interplay in perfect lucidity of discourse on our being. One of my favourite examples of such symbiosis is this one:
Every time the Europeans and their North American descendants have encountered other cultures and civilisations, they have called them backward. This is not the first time a race or a civilisation has imposed its forms on others, but it is certainly the first time one has set up as a universal ideal, not a changeless principle, but change itself. The Muslim or Christian based the alien’s inferiority on a difference of faith: for the Greeks or Toltecs, he was inferior because he was a barbarian, a Chichemecan. Since the eighteenth century, Africans or Asiatics have been inferior because they were not modern. The Western world has identified itself with change and time, and there is no modernity other than that of the West … the new Heathen Dogs can be counted in the millions … they are called ‘underdeveloped peoples’.
‘Underdeveloped’ – this adjective belongs to the anemic and castrated language of the United Nations. The word has no precise meaning in the fields of anthropology and history. It is not a scientific but a bureaucratic term … Its vagueness masks two pseudo-ideas: the first takes for granted that only one civilisation exists, or that different civilisations may be reduced to a single model – modern Western civilisation; the second affirms that changes of societies and cultures … are linear and progressive and that they can be measured.
Yet Octavio Paz was not a pessimist.
The beauty of imagery in his poetry, the elegant joy with which he handles the language whose power he reveres, and which triumphantly survives even translation – these are an affirmative love of life. I quote from one of his poems:
To see, to touch each day’s lovely forms
The light throbs, all arrows and wings.
The wine-stain on the tablecloth smells of blood.
As the coral thrusts branches in the water
I stretch my sense to this living hour;
the moment fulfills itself in a yellow harmony.
Midday, ear of wheat heavy with minutes, eternity’s brimming cup.
This sensibility coexisted in Octavio Paz along with rebellious anger against a succession of corrupt and/or incompetent governments. I quote from another poem:
We have dug up Rage
… The lovers’ park is a dungheap
The library is a nest of killer rats
The university is a muck full of frogs
The Altar is Chanfalla’s swindle
The brains are stained with ink
The doctors dispute in a den of thieves
The businessmen
Fast hands slow thoughts
officiate in the graveyard.
Out of every experience, remote as it might seem to be from inspiration for poetry or imaginative prose, he brought sensuous and intellectual creativity. Out of his formal stint in India came, later, in 1995, a remarkable collection of essays moving, from personal celebration of his days there, through an exploration of India’s art, literature, music and religions, to a comparison of Islamic, Hindu and Western civilisations in the course of world history.
He writes: ‘India did not enter me through my mind but through my senses.’
And yet he quotes an anonymous Indian poet who says:
Admire the art of the archer
he never touches the body and breaks the heart
The collection of essays in this late work is entitled In Light of India. In light of everything Octavio Paz wrote, all of us who read him receive his light.
And his was the art of the poet-archer, that goes straight to the heart and mind, where the centre of being is one.
1999
When Art Meets Politics
Itake it that we are excluding propaganda from our consideration of where and why art meets politics. Propaganda, in word and image, has its necessary justification in conditioning people to go to war, buy things, vote for political parties, but has nothing to do with originality, since it comes from the certainty of orthodoxies; is never a quest, an individual exploration.
Of course, the arts are many, and their expression of social issues springs to mind from Picasso’s Guernica via Goya as the apotheosis of wars, to – in film – Costa-Gavras’s and Semprun’s Z of the Greek colonels as the apotheosis of junta oppression, Schlöndorff’s Tin Drum as that of the social deformations, the dwarfing of humanity during Nazism, to Kusturica’s Underground and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game as that of conflict which continues above ground, even today, and Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing vision of racism in America.
As a writer, however, I naturally concentrate on our subject in relation to the art I myself practise and know best in the work of my fellow writers, dead and alive – literature.
First a look back at works in which most obviously art meets politics, on different levels and in differing ways. One should begin with the Bible, of course, both Old Testament and New; the lyrical source-books of politics secular – the politics of tribal succession – and politics religious – the power struggles for the soul, between human beings and God. Then I pass over the centuries, the ancient Greeks and Dante, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cry, The Beloved Country. These last two show how a sentimental story can be an effective form of expression of a social issue, since, a century apart, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Alan Paton’s Reverend Kumalo brought the issues of slavery and racism into the consciousness of millions of readers who might not have admitted these if presented any other way.
Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin despised sentiment as inadequate to express the realities of race prejudice, revealing the black persona as the one of whom Nobody Knows My Name, the ‘Invisible Man’ rejected by whites.
Joseph Roth used the picaresque mode to epitomise patriotic hubris and the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the von Trotta generations in The Radetzky March.
Malraux gave expression to the mood of Days of Hope in the doomed early resistance to fascism in the Spanish Civil War, while Hemingway proposed the sexual stimulus of war as a social phenomenon – the earth moved by orgasm rather than by bombs.
Thomas Mann used the snowy isolation of the very place we find ourselves in today – Davos – to signify the complacency of a Europe skiing towards disaster, from which to pitch his anti-hero, Hans Castorp, into the ‘universal feast of Death’ which Mann saw as the 1914 war.
Milan Kundera took his art from a Communist regime that turned the writer into window-washer, away to the labyrinth of exile, returning always upon itself in the sense that Life Is Elsewhere, and Ariel Dorfman, also from exile, writing Death and the Maiden, revealed the social situation of a woman in the reconciliation of an emerging democracy, confronted with her former torturer as house-guest. I myself sought understanding for self and others through writing of the predetermination of a father’s political faith on the life of the next generation, in my novel Burger’s Daughter, and lately, with The House Gun explored the social significance of a crime passionnel in the world climate of urban violence we live in now. Jorge Semprun is one who has interiorised the social and ideological
conflicts of our time as autobiography in the valediction Adieu, vive clarté.
Why have these writers, and many others, taken on themselves the meeting of art with socio-politics?
We are fatally linked to the political and social consequences of whatever our society, our country, that country’s politics, may be, and further, to the flux and reflux of the globalisation we are beginning to live through. That is why original expression is inexorably linked to politics. It is, as Kafka wrote, ‘a leap out of murderers’ row, it is a seeing of what is really taking place’.84
The next question is what is the effect of the writer’s original expression of social issues on the individual consciousness of society? I am told that one of the criteria for the Nobel Prize in Literature, apart from the quality of the means of expression, is that the works of the writer should be of ‘benefit to mankind’. The way in which art’s original expression of social and political issues is of benefit to mankind lies surely in the engagement of the artist with these issues at his or her deepest level of independent, searching understanding, the ability of the creative imagination to mine for the unexpressed in human motivation, the unadmitted, the necessary insights that the facts can never reveal.
Now this is not to deny that writers themselves have been and are hotly divided on whether or not art should be involved with an imperative of political and social issues. Proust judged that such issues as ‘whether the Dreyfus affair or the war’ simply ‘furnished excuses to the writers for not deciphering … that book within them’.85 The Marxist critic, Ernst Fischer, cuttingly pronounced, ‘The feature common to all significant artists and writers in the capitalist world is their inability to come to terms with the social reality that surrounds them.’86 Picasso – never at a loss for words: ‘What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet … Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it … painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.’87 While Flaubert complains: ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it … it’s not a question of politics but of the mental state of France.’88
George Steiner, speaking of writing under totalitarian rule, calls for the writer to stop writing ‘a few miles down the road from the death camp … when the words in the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem’.89 But hear Neruda: ‘Can poetry serve our fellow men? Can it find a place in man’s struggles? … I felt a pressing need to write a central poem that would bring together the historical events, the geographical situations, the life … of our peoples.’90 And Rilke, looking at a Cézanne painting, exclaims: ‘Suddenly one has the right eyes’,91 and Kundera sees writers and artists as vital witnesses of the twentieth century as an age marked by tyranny, saying: ‘People regard those days as an era of political trials, persecutions, forbidden books and legalised murder. But we who remember must bear witness; it was not only an epoch of terror, but also an epoch of lyricism, ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.’92
Finally, for us – writers and artists bringing original expression to politics and social issues at the end of this century where neither socialism nor capitalism has achieved justice and human fulfilment for all – Czeslaw Milosz has the rubric:
Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic
In the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.93
1999
A Letter to Future Generations
Dear citizens of the twenty-first century,
There is no escaping the past, and so one must take an honest look at your inheritance from the twentieth century. There are many aspects; I choose that of the new, never-before concepts that arose during my life as a child of the time. One that is of great significance to your lives as you take over is the concept of globalisation.
The feasibility of globalisation has been made possible by the huge technological advances of the twentieth century, particularly in means of communication, from the satellite up among the stars to the computer on every office table. Information may be exchanged across the world in real time; distance means nothing so long as jet aircraft have the fuel to overcome it. Globalisation has all the means of efficiency to regulate itself as it is conceived so far: primarily as a one-world of investment, a super-tool of international finance.
Has it a human face?
The real necessity for globalisation – which you will have to tackle – is nothing less than the question of whether the gap between rich and poor countries can be narrowed by it. What role can globalisation play in eradicating world poverty? For poverty puts an inhuman, outcast mask on more than three billion of our world’s population.
If globalisation is to have a human face in your century its premise is that development is about people in interaction on the planet we have occupied, so far, without sharing.
This will not be achieved, however, through worldwide shopping by internet. In the twentieth century consumption has grown unprecedentedly, reaching around $24 trillion in 1998, but the spending and devouring spree, far from widely benefiting the poor, in some aspects undermined the truly human prospects for globalisation: sustainable development for all.
Runaway consumption by the developed world has eroded renewable resources such as fossil fuels, forests and fishing grounds, polluted local and global environments, and pandered to promotion of needs for conspicuous display in place of the legitimate needs of life.
While those of us who have been the generations of big consumers need to consume less, for more than one billion of the world’s poorest people increased consumption is a matter of life and death and a basic right – the right to freedom from want. And this is not want of food and clean water alone; there are other forms of want – illiteracy, lack of technological skills: the basic qualifications for benefiting from the concept of globalisation. Illiteracy is the basis of global cultural deprivation, and it exists among great numbers of the world’s population. From it comes isolation from many of the forms of culture that are essential to the human right to develop individual potential for a full life. There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries.
Then there is the matter of translation of the world’s munificent store of literary enlightenment. With all the ease of technological reproduction of the written word now attained there remains the fact that the human process of translating creative literature from one language to another – which certainly, so far, cannot be achieved by any electronic brain – is not recognised as a highly important means of bringing about the ideal of global understanding; which surely must be the underlying philosophy of globalisation?
In the new millennium there will be the need to remedy this by establishing schools of translation in universities (they are rare in the twentieth century); by the action of publishers to cooperate in joint enterprise across language boundaries; for government ministries of arts and culture to provide subsidies for this work; and for the ministries of foreign affairs to wake up and realise that this is an initiative of diplomacy effective beyond the conventional cultural limits of providing cultural exchange mainly in the form of scholarships abroad.
Consumption is necessary for human development when, as cultural consumption does, it enlarges the capabilities of and improves people’s lives without adversely affecting the lives of others. And a brake on material consumption need not, as some fear, bring about closed industries and shops if the power of becoming consumers is extended among the population of the globe.
That of many, international and national.
It is the responsibility of the European Community, which flouts the principles of globalisation through its blatant protectionism. It is the responsibility of national governments to bring about just consumerism. Theirs is a legal one: the framing of laws in each country for justice in the access to and share of its resources. And it is the responsibility of international law, an aspect of globalisation long contested in respect of fishing rights, for example, and towards the end of the twentieth century, at last, in the essential process of establishing an international criminal court. For globalisation, we must admit, posits the most difficult secular morality possible: a moral authority above all those individual ones of the global concept’s component countries.
Non-governmental and civic organisations have the responsibility both in building human capability and in ensuring that a development philosophy prevails that projects are not imposed upon people according to others’ ideas of their needs, but are planned and brought into being only with the beneficiaries themselves, according to their knowledge of their community and environment. Let the remnants of the age of social engineering be deeply buried in the twentieth century, not with a backward glance, but a shudder.
Now if we are realistic we have to see that on the doorstep of the new century there is delivered a new threat to globalisation with a human face. Thirty-five per cent of our world is in recession as the old century ends. Many countries are in strife. This means more millions of refugees, driven homeless and starving to swell the count of the globe’s three billion poor, calculated before the tragedies of Kosovo and Angola, to name only two. In Russia the winter of 1988–9 froze over impoverished people in their disillusion with international openness in trade and investment; these elements of globalisation as it has been evidenced so far have not shown them a human face.
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