SOURCE: "Politics, Literature and the Intellectual in Latin America," in Salmagundi, Vol. 82-83, Spring/Summer, 1989, pp. 92-110.

[In the following essay, Santi explores the "paradox" engendered when Latin American writers are expected to represent their geographical region's entire intellectual community while literature is generally excluded from intellectual discussion.]

Our subject is vast and to attempt to cover it in an essay this size is perhaps mad. The reader may also wonder how a professor of literature can presume to address the complex and tumultuous world of politics and the intellectual in Latin America. I would wonder myself, were it not for the fact that literature and the writer—the poet, the novelist, the playwright, the essayist—continue to play a crucial role in the shaping of that world. In fact, so closely has the institution of literature been identified with the political debates among Latin American intellectuals, that often general discussions on the subject take the terms writer and intellectual to be synonymous, despite their obvious differences. Not too long ago, for example, The New York Times Magazine carried a long and interesting piece by Alan Riding on "Revolution and the Intellectual in Latin America" which featured a number of literary celebrities—notably, García Márquez and Octavio Paz, but also Borges, Cardenal, Cortázar, Fuentes, Rulfo and Vargas Llosa, among others.¹ Despite the comprehensive title, Riding's piece focused exclusively on these writers and their ideological differences without ever mentioning the existence of other Latin American intellectuals who are not literati—artists, economists, historians, journalists, academics—and who presumably participate as well in the same debate. More significant, I think, is that despite this glaring absorption of the intellectual by the writer, Riding's piece contains hardly any discussion of literature per se. The works of these writers indeed provide the background and identity that make their political differences significant, but these works are never discussed. It is only in the final paragraph of the piece, when Riding's need to justify his approach becomes evident, that he mentions how this political debate "has contributed to the region's literature," and concludes, hurriedly and cryptically, that "Latin America's social models may so far have failed, but its writers have made the failures memorable."

I realize of course, that I may be asking of Riding's journalism a scholarly precision which it never intended. Be that as it may, what interests me about his article, and which I would like to make the theme or at least the goal of my essay, is the significance of Riding's omission of literature from his discussion of the role of the writer in the current political debate in Latin America. I wish to explore, in part, the paradox that this omission dramatizes—the virtual exclusion of literature from the concept of the intellectual while at the same time calling upon the writer to represent that intellectual. The paradox is not, to be sure, a cultural phenomenon which is peculiar to Latin America. It constitutes, rather, one more version of the general problematic that binds literature and the intellectual; and even more generally, of the contradictory relationship between the intellectual and his own discipline. About this general relationship I shall have more to say later. My immediate purpose, in citing this telling example from The New York Times, was to demonstrate that literature does play an important role in that debate—indeed, to judge from its systematic exclusion from articles like Riding's—a much more crucial role than would appear at first sight. Consequently, any serious discussion of the relationship between the writer and the intellectual cannot simply chronicle from the outside, as it were, the broad political opinions that writers may or may not share. It must also broach those specific problems, complex and slippery as they are, that are peculiar to the writer and to literature as both human experience and as an institution.

Before attempting to take up the specific literary question that I have just raised, let me begin as broadly as possible and review with you some of the themes that constitute the current political debate among Latin American writers and intellectuals. My comments must be necessarily general, more in an attempt to outline a conceptual framework that would help us understand the various positions than to give a comprehensive or exhaustive survey. It is true that, as Riding points out, at the heart of this debate, "is the search for new political models for a continent . . . viewed as desperately in need of change". Within the growing strategic importance that the Third or underdeveloped world assumes in the East-West conflict, the question of a reliable political and economic model for Latin America has become, to say the least, urgent. The United States and Soviet Union continue to provide, of course, the alternative models of development. But in a continent where democratic political institutions are constantly on the verge of collapse and the local economies suffer from a chronic instability, despite the proximity to and influence of the United States, the prestige of a Western democratic model has waned. At the same time, however, the continuing economic failure, repressive policies and militarization of the Soviet Union have cast doubts on its own viability as a model for Latin America, particularly as that model has already been proven a failure in the areas of economic and ideological dependence, as the case of Cuba demonstrates.

It would of course be too simple to say that all of the positions assumed by Latin American writers and intellectuals derive from this debate regarding political models. At the same time, however, one must admit that the implicit choice of models determines not only the various ideological positions but, more importantly, different concepts of the intellectual. Should the writer and intellectual be a dissident and adopt, for example, a constantly negative position toward the State; become a permanent critic of government, as it were, in defense of a universal ethic or morality? Or should he be a public defender instead; attempt to identify, that is, the social and political problems that require immediate redress and thereby take the side of so-called revolutionary governments and national liberation movements which make these problems their object of reform? I put this question in an either/or formula, reductive though I find it, because this is the way that most Latin American intellectuals themselves often pose it. García Márquez will ask, for example, "how can the intellectual enjoy the luxury of debating the destiny of the soul when the problems are of physical survival, health, education, ignorance, and so on?" Octavio Paz, on the other hand, will assert that "as a writer, my duty is to preserve my own marginality before the State, before political parties, before all ideologies and before society itself."² Thus while intellectuals of the left, such as García Márquez or Mario Benedetti, will accuse their liberal counterparts of selling out to American imperialism because of the liberals' occasional criticism of the Cuban and Sandinista Revolutions, liberal intellectuals, such as Octavio Paz or Mario Vargas Llosa, will charge their counterparts on the left with support of so-called revolutionary causes and governments for the sake of opposing United States influence in the area, even while allowing that kind of support to curtail their freedom to criticize those same cases and governments.

I am deliberately overstating the rift between the two sides for the sake of clarity. In reality, the distinctions between the two groups are not as clear-cut, although the issues remain as real. Neither Octavio Paz nor Mario Vargas Llosa spend their days, as García Márquez apparently hints, debating the destiny of the soul. In the current intellectual scene I can think of no more outspoken critic of concrete political and social issues ranging from Mexico's one-party system to birth control—than Octavio Paz. Likewise, Vargas Llosa's actions on behalf of certain causes—like freedom of the press in his native Peru and the fate of Argentina's "disappeared"—is also wellknown. At the same time, both García Márquez and Benedetti, like the late Julio Cortázar, have been able to speak out against Washington's complicity with repressive military dictatorships and in support of the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions precisely because they assume a marginal position both as exiles and as critics. I suspect, therefore, that what divides these groups is more strategy than substance, although there are clear substantial differences, of course. All of these writers oppose dictatorial regimes; all of them criticize, albeit in various degrees, the pervasive influence of the United States; and all of them defend intellectual freedom. What does divide them, I think, is two things: one, localized issues which both determine and reflect their implicit choice of political models; and two, each group's skeptical views of the other's intellectual status. I want to pursue the second of these divisive reasons.

A moment ago, I described the reciprocal opinions of liberal and left intellectuals. We can now refine that description by adding these two statements. First, in suppressing any criticism of the socialist countries that actively support national liberation movements in Latin America, intellectuals of the left are accused by their liberal counterparts of ideological dogma, thus betraying in effect their role as critics and reformers. As Vargas Llosa stated recently, in a spirited debate with Benedetti, "I criticize equally all of those regimes that throw their adversaries into exile (or into jail, or kill them off) while he (Benedetti) seems to think all this is somehow less serious if it's done in the name of Socialism."³ Second, in withholding blanket support of national liberation movements and criticizing all dictatorial regimes equally and without distinction of their ideological sign, the liberal intellectual is accused by his counterpart on the left of diluting any specific criticism of the United States, thus betraying their social conscience. "How can we be content," writes Benedetti in the same debate with Vargas Llosa, "if every minute a Latin American child dies of hunger and disease; if every five minutes there's a political murder in Guatemala; if 30,000 people have disappeared in Argentina?"⁴ As we can see, then, what is at stake in each of these positions is nothing less than the very identity of the intellectual. One ceases being an intellectual as soon as the other side believes you to have betrayed the essence of intellectual identity: unceasing criticism and reform, in the case of the liberal; conscience and solidarity, in the case of the left.

It would perhaps seem obvious to us, standing safely outside of the debate, that the figure of the intellectual includes or should include both of these functions. The intellectual should be, at once, the unceasing critic of society and of the state, ever alert to point out deceit, irresponsibility or mismanagement in the public domain; but the intellectual should also be the conscience of society and the state, the keeper of cultural and social values, the mirror in which society reflects itself in order to legitimize the status quo. The first, critical or reformist function determines a negative, marginal position before society at large. The intellectual points out problems and wrongdoings and suggests ways of resolving them. The second, moral function determines a positive, central position in society. The intellectual defends policies and actions and justifies their implementation. I would venture, however, that it would be difficult to get Latin American intellectuals to agree on the distribution of functions which I am offering here. Whereas the liberal (certainly Paz and Vargas Llosa) would be the first to describe him/herself as the true conscience, the first to appropriate a moral function to his or her criticism, though not necessarily a central position in society, the intellectual of the left (García Márquez or Benedetti), on the other hand, would argue instead that in denouncing the hidden complicity between Washington and military regimes, for example, it is s/he who fulfills a truly critical, negative position. The problem, of course, is that both positions are correct because descriptions of the type that I have made rest ultimately on the point of view chosen to evaluate the debate.

One can gather, then, that much of the problem of discussing the subject of the intellectual in Latin America revolves around our lack of an adequate vocabulary to describe such a figure. It would certainly be tempting, in this regard, to apply concepts about the intellectual developed in Europe to a description of the Latin American version. I am thinking in particular of the categories formulated by Antonio Gramsci, the first (and in my opinion the most acute) modern Marxist to make the intellectual the central part of his sociopolitical analyses. As we know, Gramsci says that intellectuals are usually of two kinds: organic intellectuals, who appear in connection with an emergent social class and who prepare the way for that class's conquest of civil society by preparing it ideologically; and traditional intellectuals, those who seem to be unconnected with social change and who occupy positions in society designed to conserve the traditional processes by which ideas are produced—teachers, writers, artists, priests and so forth.⁵ But if we were seriously to apply these Gramscian categories we would immediately run into problems. The organic intellectual's ideological work on behalf of the emergent class would certainly fit certain aspects of the intellectual of the left. But the defensive, almost reactionary dogma with which the left guards its political advances would seem to draw them closer to Gramsci's definition of the traditional intellectual. Conversely, the traditional intellectual's established position in society would seem to describe the liberal intellectual's privileged status; and yet, the pluralism which the liberal intellectual advocates would seem to counter the traditional conservative process by which ideas are produced in the underdeveloped societies of Latin America.

Compounding the difficulty attendant to the lack of a general theory of intellectual production in the Latin American tradition are the intrinsic difficulties stemming from the concept of the intellectual itself, what I earlier referred to as the general paradoxical relationship between the intellectual and his discipline. "The intellectual," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in one of his many meddling essays, "is someone who meddles in what is not his business."⁶ Indeed, in order to qualify as an intellectual, what Sartre calls "a specialist in practical knowledge," one must stand apart from one's particular specialization, take cognizance of its universal implications, and discuss these implications publicly. Charles Oppenheimer and Carl Sagan, for example, were a physicist and is an astronomer, respectively; but it was only when both scientists began to discuss publicly the implications of their research for the threat of nuclear war that they actually joined the ranks of the intellectual. (Noam Chomsky and Andrei Sakharov are two other names that come to mind.) How does this paradox work in the case of the writer? Must the writer, along with the physicist, the astronomer and the linguist, stand apart from his particular work and take cognizance of its universal implications before s/he can become an intellectual? For Sartre, whose views on the subject are revealing, the answer is no. 'The writer," he says, "is not an intellectual accidentally, like others, but essentially."⁷ That is, unlike the physicist, the astronomer or the linguist, the writer, by the very nature of his work, is always engaged in the contradiction between the particular exigencies of his craft and the universal implications of his message. Moreover, the writer makes of that contradiction the theme and substance of his work.

"Not all intellectuals are writers," writes Octavio Paz, "but all (or almost all) writers are intellectuals."⁸ To Paz's succinct formula, with which I agree, of course, I would simply add the following: Indeed, all writers are intellectuals but their intellectual status will be recognized insofar as they address something other than their writing, insofar as they meddle, that is, in what is not their business, namely literature. This is not, incidentally, my own personal opinion; I am merely describing an institutional reality. Nobody would deny, for example, that Jorge Luis Borges was an intellectual; and yet, the fact that in his last few years Borges devoted himself almost exclusively to literary concerns and no longer wrote about politics—and when he did speak about politics it was to thank an honoring regime like Pinochet's Chile or to praise democratic elections, like the recent ones that ousted the Argentine junta and put Alfonsin in power—cast Borges, in the public eye at least, as a curious non-intellectual of sorts. Is it by chance, I wonder, that in his piece Riding refers to Borges as a poet ("the continent's greatest living poet") or that he should barely mention Borges, or Juan Rulfo, another famous non-meddler, in the course of his discussion of other literary celebrities whom he does not hesitate to call "intellectuals"? Thus, while the writer would seem to be the essential, rather than the accidental, intellectual, still he appears to fall prey to the same paradox that riddles the figure of the intellectual in general. Indeed, in the case of the writer that paradox seems to loom even larger. For when the physicist and the astronomer discuss publicly the universal implications of their work, they punctuate their discussion with precise details of their research for the simple reason that everyone expects them to share those details. And yet, when the writer discusses publicly the universal implications of his writing, or of literature in general, how can he possibly do this without risking a loss of his status as an intellectual? The question, in other words, is how can a writer be an intellectual and still remain a writer?

Facing this particular quandary of the writer as intellectual, liberals like Octavio Paz and Vargas Llosa have given an answer with which I happen to sympathize. The essence of the writer as intellectual, they say, is determined by his creative use of language, which thereby presupposes his undertaking a critique of language—precisely the medium that intellectuals must use in order to exchange ideas. Such a critique does not necessarily produce, as opponents from both left and right have charged, an irresponsibly aestheticist or solipsistic form of literature—texts that comment on their own aesthetics while excluding all historical and existential issues. Rather, in making language the object of his criticism, the writer opens himself and his work to the realm of systematic inquiry, to an analytical reason and doubt that necessarily binds his writing to his historical and political context. In this sense, writing, like politics, becomes as Octavio Paz points out, "the space where political freedom is displayed—circus, arena, theatre, tribunal, philosophical academy, scientific laboratory and open-air church, all rolled into one."⁹ Vargas Llosa, less lyrically perhaps, has put it this way: "The literary vocation is born out of one man's disagreement with the world, out of his detection of the deficiency, the emptiness and the rubbish that surround him."¹⁰ If statements such as Paz's and Vargas Llosa's sound primitive and perhaps even naive to an American or European ear, it may be because they advocate the kind of minimal level of intellectual freedom which already forms part of a modern Western consciousness but which in Latin America, languishing on the margins of the West, has been the exception. On the other hand, by posing such a primitive position, in restating the minimal conditions of intellectual activity, one achieves a distinct advantage over Western discussions of the intellectual which, in the case of the writer at least, as we have seen, lead to a quandary. Such a restatement restores, that is, the intellectual essence of the writer by pointing to the centrality of language—the medium that embodies the writer, identifies the intellectual and allows for the critical exchange of ideas.

In order to exchange ideas critically we must have, as a minimum, a willingness to establish a dialogue with others—those whose ideas are opposite, or at least different from, ours. Dialogue means sharpening our language in order to communicate our ideas, sharpening our reason in order to question those ideas with which we happen to disagree, and sharpening our conscience in order to have the courage to modify ideas whenever we are persuaded by the dialogue. These truisms are the staple of any liberal intellectual establishment, such as that of the American university, but unfortunately not those that prevail in Latin America. The predicament of the intellectual in Latin America, I fear, is that while differences of opinion do abound, very little face to face exchange of these differences actually takes place. Disagreements either with the State or among intellectuals themselves are taken as betrayals, breaches of conduct and personal affronts, rather than as the necessary and healthy differences stemming from one's intellectual and moral conscience. Simply to understand, as he does, the important issues of his history, society and culture is not enough for the intellectual. Such understanding often stagnates for the lack of a meaningful circuit of exchange. And yet, as C. Wright Mills wrote once about the predicament faced by the post-War American intellectual:

Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning the mind sour, and finally of being forgotten. For the sake of the integrity, discovery must be effectively communicated. Such communication is also a necessary element in the search for clear understanding, including the understanding of one's self. For only through the social confirmation of others whom we believe adequately equipped do we earn the right of feeling secure in our knowledge.¹¹

The historical roots of this tragic absence of intellectual dialogue in Latin America are well known. A heritage of violent conquest and colonization; a climate of authoritarianism stemming from the anti-modern spirit of the Counter-Reformation; the fracture of a single culture into twenty-one artificial republics; the endemic weakness, since Independence, of democratic institutions; the wholesale absence of liberal values. With this desolate background, it is no surprise that since Independence the Latin American intellectual has pursued the question of his or her cultural identity, and that he should have pursued it, by and large, in exile. What exactly is Latin America, who exactly is the Latin American and what do these things mean, are the questions that underlie much of the literature written in Latin America, from Simón Bolívar to Carlos Fuentes, during the 19th and 20th centuries. The questioning itself, however, has often suffered under the very fragmentation that elicits it. For usually the question is not who exactly is the Latin American, but rather who exactly is the Argentine, the Brazilian, or the Cuban? What is the national psychology of the Peruvian? Or, how do we arrive at an ontology of the Mexican? Such questions may seem silly to us jaded Americans, but they have been felt to be and are of course necessary to Latin Americans; and they are interesting and useful insofar as they stem from and refer back to the broader cultural context which they attempt to interrogate. Such questions about cultural identity reflect, in turn, other more fundamental, less rarefied questions. Why are we so bad off, how did we get this way, and how do we get out of this mess? The question about identity—the ontological question, if you will—thus becomes indistinguishable from the question about process—the historical question; and these two questions, in turn, merge into one broad social question: what is the history of relations not only among the Latin American nations themselves, but between Latin America and the rest of the world?

Such a monumental history, essential though it is, still awaits its Arnold Toynbee—and I am certainly not it. But whereas Latin America has lacked encyclopaedic historians of the breadth and talent of Toynbee it does have a tradition of equally encyclopaedic writers whose work makes up in visionary depth what it has lacked in scholarly breadth. In other words, it has been in the language of literature, rather than in that of strict scholarship, that the Latin American intellectual has always asked the fundamental questions about his or her cultural identity. Which thus means that the answers that literature has provided have themselves posed other (or perhaps the same) questions in a perhaps endless chain of historical interpretation. The late visionary style of a writer like José Martí—Cuba's foremost 19th century poet and one of the principal figures of Latin American intellectual history—stems, for example, from a desperate attempt, toward the end of his short life, to synthesize historical wisdom, moral judgment, political action and poetic insight. The argument of an essay like "Nuestra América" (Our America) (1891), in which Martí pleas for the self-knowledge and self-government of Latin America through original ideas and original institutions, cannot be divorced from its rhetorically-charged language and visionary sweep. It would not be excessive to say that in this particular essay Martí's critique of the dual faults of provincialism and servile imitation, so rampant in the politics and culture of 19th century Latin America, is couched in an intricate poetic logic where ideology becomes indistinguishable from metaphor. In my own literal and surely crude translation of two of the essay's memorable sentences: "We were but a mask: underwear made in Britain, vest made in Paris, coat from the United States, and a little beret made in Spain. . . . Let our wine be made of bananas; it may turn out bitter but it is still our wine." Of course, banana wine exists only in language, in Martí's metaphor for cultural independence; but the metaphor itself embodies a will to invent, or invent anew, a synthesis which Martí found lacking in the fractured colonial mask of 19th century Latin American society. Intellectuals of the left today claim Martí, with all good reason, as a precursor of their own anti-imperialism; but they somehow always manage to overlook that Martí's revolution, carried out throughout a lifetime of exile, actually takes place in language, and therefore that his contributions to ideology presuppose a linguistic critique of certain received ideas of his time.

The poetic logic and visionary sweep of a writer like Martí therefore deceive us into dismissing his work as unscientific and perhaps even politically useless. Indeed, Martí was a critic of Positivism, so we can expect his style to reflect an abiding distrust of scientific method and a sympathy for intuitive understanding. And yet his work, like that of any writer and thinker, has limits and problems—particularly insofar as that work both unveils and conceals the broader question of cultural identity. In this sense Martí is no different from most 19th century Latin American intellectuals, whose anti-analytical prejudice left an equivocal legacy. They urge us, on the one hand, to assume our cultural identity, but they never inform us, on the other, about how exactly that identity came about, let alone what that identity means in relation to other cultures. They urge, in other words, the pursuit of ontology, without pursuing the more significant details of history, and ultimately ignore, for the sake of self-definition, the social context that necessarily determines that identity.

One can find a useful corrective to such a legacy, I believe, in the historical meditations of a writer like Octavio Paz. In a series of essays on the subject of history and society—starting with the classic Labyrinth of Solitude, which dates from 1950, and on with the Critique of the Pyramid (1969), El ogro filantrópico (1978), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1982), and Tiempo nublado (1983)—Paz has sought to uncover the hidden traumas, so to speak, of Latin American history. I use the word trauma advisedly, for Paz's intention in these and other essays has been nothing less than to psychoanalyze Latin American history; to do psychohistorical interpretations of certain moments and institutions in the hope that such interpretations might effect an eventual therapy. Paz himself would prefer calling his essays "moral criticism," "the description of a harmful, hidden reality," as he has stated, rather than a straight psychohistory, and there is good cause to follow him on this.¹²The Labyrinth of Solitude, for example, describes certain traits of the Mexican character—hermeticism, hypocrisy, formality, the death wish, violence, etc.—which are explained as symptoms of psychic conflicts caused by historical traumas—the violence of the Spanish Conquest, the humiliation of the Indian during the Colonial period, the ensuing bad faith of Mexican intellectual and political movements like the Porfirato and even the Mexican revolution. In this sense, the history of Mexico, from the Aztecs to the present, becomes a kind of text which the poet, as a privileged reader, can decipher in terms of the traumas found in the day-to-day behavior of today's Mexican.

One may or may not agree with Paz's original and at times inventive links between symptoms and traumas in the course of his argument. But one cannot deny that unlike earlier attempts to describe the Mexican character, such as Samuel Ramos's Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1934), Paz's solid grounding in history represents a breakthrough. Such a breakthrough is possible, moreover, because unlike previous attempts to deal with the subject, undertaken mostly by academics (philosophers or social scientists), The Labyrinth of Solitude was the work of a writer, and specifically of a poet. In fact, Paz has stated on occasion that his original plan was to write a novel about Mexican history, but that once he wrote it he decided to change it into an essay because the only good thing about the novel turned out to be the characters' dialogue, which of course discussed ideas about Mexico. Even the title—El laberinto de la soledad—is poetic, let alone the goal of the book: one poet's reading of history for the sole purpose of feeling himself (and making others feel) less lonely. Although the influence of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche is evident throughout the book, what is ultimately interesting about it is the personal, almost intimate attitude that Paz assumes toward his subject. Neither Marx, nor Freud, nor Nietzsche, not even the Sartre of Being and Nothingness—had ever granted loneliness the status of a separate philosophical category. But Paz had, if not as a philosophical category at least as an existential reality, scrutinized it in his early introspective poetry as well as in a brilliant earlier essay entitled "Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion", partly devoted to Saint John of the Cross. As the central formula of that early essay had been that "the poet starts out from loneliness, and guided by desire, goes toward communion," so Paz's reading of Mexican history follows such an itinerary to end, finally, in the discovery of loneliness as a universal human problem rather than a specifically Mexican trauma. To quote from the haunting lines of the last chapter: "There in open loneliness, transcendence awaits us too: the hands of other lonely people. For the first time in our history, we are the contemporaries of all men."¹³

In citing the examples from Martí and Paz I have attempted to show how the cultural and political meditations of the Latin American intellectual necessarily involve a literary consciousness. This consciousness flares up, as Martí's daring metaphors dramatize for us, even at those moments when the notion of literature seems to be furthest removed from the writer's mind, involved as he is in the unmediated moral reading of his society. There is something of this in Paz's statement that historical knowledge, being neither quantitative nor subject to constant laws, falls halfway between science and poetry. "The historian," says Paz, "makes descriptions like a scientist and has the visions of the poet. History allows us to understand the past, and also, at times, the present. More than a form of knowledge, history is a form of wisdom."¹⁴ Thus poetry or literature would seem to constitute not just the formal or rhetorical framework of the historical text—its "mode of encodement", to use Hayden White's handy term—but the very essence and justification of the historian's task, the very source of its meaning, as it were. The historian, just like the writer as intellectual, would therefore appear to be constituted by a literary or poetic consciousness which he does not and indeed cannot acknowledge, but without which—without "visions" and "wisdom" in Paz's view—his identity would not be possible.

We readily accept the opposite view, of course—literature can be historical, philosophical, or political without any loss of its specificity. In fact, the more historical, philosophical or political, the more modern and indeed the more literary we believe that literature to be. The appeal to modernity is in fact that—an appeal to immediacy, to action, to the anti-historical moment that can be experienced through the senses, through sentiment, through any medium that is not language. Literature feeds upon its own self-denying gestures, and the abandonment of literature (as in Cervantes and Flaubert) is itself one of the greatest literary themes. It is significant that some of the most representative texts of modern Latin American literature also dramatize this paradox. Pablo Neruda's Heights of Macchu Picchu, for example (a poem I always like to come back to), narrates a flight out of the alienation of the modern world and into the pre-Columbian past that the ruins of the famous Incan city represent. The speaker, whom I now take to be a figure of the Latin American intellectual, ascends to the ruins searching for an unmediated contact with a past untouched by the distortions wrought by five centuries of Western domination. And yet, the poem shows us not only that the speaker's flight cannot be a flight out of time, for he remains locked into the present, but that the very meaning of the ruins he so anxiously sought is constituted by the very history he attempted to avoid. That history includes, of course, the speaker's own literary consciousness, held to be an accomplice of Western cultural domination; and the poem goes on to implement that consciousness as a subversion of the Western library.¹⁵ The poem's flight out of literature and into the mode of historical action ends up affirming the role that literature plays in the realization of that action. A similar pattern emerges from Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps, the novel of an alienated Latin American musicologist's voyage from New York City to the South American jungle in search of primitive musical instruments. After locating the instruments in a remote jungle village where he feels at home at last with himself and his context—he decides to return to civilization one last time in order to bring back the paper that will allow him to write down his musical magnum opus. When the musicologist returns to the jungle, however, he discovers that the signs that marked the way to the village have been covered over by the torrential rains, and therefore that this flight into the jungle, and the implicit rejection of the historical world, is impossible. The only world given to the intellectual is the present, however corrupt and disenchanting he may find it. I want to quote you from the last lines of the novel: "The gloomy mansions of romanticism, with its doomed loves, are still open. But none of this was for me, because the only human race to which it is forbidden to sever the bonds of time is the race of those who create art. They not only must move ahead of the immediate yesterday, represented by tangible witness, but must anticipate the song and the form of others who will follow them, creating new tangible witness with full awareness of what has been done up to that moment."¹⁶

Both Heights of Macchu Picchu and The Lost Steps are allegories of the plight of the Latin American intellectual called upon to explore his cultural identity, tempted to abandon literature for the world of committed action, and forced always to return to literature as the ground of his personal identity and the field of that action. Both texts narrate a process of conversion to the cause of that historical action, only their common argument further describes that conversion as an open, infinite process, ever subject to eventual scrutiny and revision, as if anticipating, as the end of The Lost Steps tells us, "the song and form of others that will follow." Both Heights of Macchu Picchu and The Lost Steps are classics, to be sure, of modern Latin American literature. And yet the knowledge—and the wisdom, as Paz would have it—including political knowledge and wisdom, that these two classics, among other texts, have to offer, have been little heeded by most Latin American intellectuals, including, alas, Neruda and Carpentier themselves. Throughout the twenty odd years following the publication of his poem, Neruda remained an obedient Stalinist, a virtual accomplice of the Soviet mass murders, persecutions and the Gulag. Carpentier, in turn, went on to become a solemn, respectful bureaucrat in Paris, where he lived for the better part of his last twenty years, enjoying all the comforts and luxuries that he so piously denounced as an echo of the regime that he served.

Fortunately, however, the wisdom of literature is distinct from the human foibles of its authors, and literature tells us things that authors themselves are incapable of articulating, except of course in the very literary language which they seem condemned to ignore, or at least to misunderstand. If literature constitutes, as I have tried to argue, a separate valid mode of knowledge or wisdom, then it will be necessary to develop a reading method that would respect that mode and not simply reduce it to another master discourse. Philosophers, historians, politicians, social scientists, journalists like Alan Riding, and even some literary critics, are fond of invoking and using literary texts for the purpose of illustrating ideas and theories/Literature, in this restricted sense, becomes an object to be interpreted and decided upon by the master discourse of other disciplines—which thereby become the subject that decides where meaning lies and what to make of it. A reversal of such a scheme whereby philosophy, history, politics, The New York Times and even literary criticism itself would become the object of interpretation of literature would not only allow literature to be heard, but also would probably uncover the arbitrary and ultimately fictional strategies that are at work in preserving the power structures of those disciplines. Literature, in this other, unrestricted sense, would become that "minor horror" which Jorge Luis Borges, our intellectual nonintellectual par excellence, once invoked as his idea of Paradise: "a vast, contradictory library, whose vertical deserts of books run the incessant risk of metamorphosis, which affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything—like a raving God."¹⁷

¹The New York Times Magazine (March 13, 1983), pp. 29-40.

²El ogro filantrópico (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1979), p. 306. All translations, here and elsewhere, are mine.

³Vuelta, 92 (July, 1984), p. 51.

⁴ Ibid., p. 48.

⁵ See "The Function of the Intellectuals" and "The Different Position of Urban and Rural-Type Intellectuals", in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Horare and G. M. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 3-23.

⁶Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 230.

⁷ Ibid., p. 284.

⁸El ogro filantrópico, p. 20.

⁹ Ibid., p. 302.

¹⁰Contra viento y marea (1962-1982) (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1983), p. 135.

¹¹Power, Politics and People, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 300.

¹²El ogro filantrópico, p. 20.

¹³ My translation from El laberinto de la soledad (1950; Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973), p. 174. Incidentally, I would prefer to translate Paz's soledad as "loneliness" instead of "solitude", as it is usually rendered. Loneliness refers more precisely to Paz's theme of the lack of intimate association with, rather than a wilful separation from, others.

¹⁴El ogro filantrópico, p. 21.

¹⁵ For such a reading of the poem, see my Pablo Neruda: The Poetics of Prophecy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), especially pp. 104-75.

¹⁶The Lost Steps, 2nd ed. Trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971).

¹⁷ 'The Total Library", in Borges: A Reader, ed. E. Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), p. 96.