The Moral Voice of Octavio Paz
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RECONSIDERATION
The Moral Voice of Octavio Paz
Noel Valis
[The conservative scholar in the twentieth century, as this reconsideration of the
Mexican poet Octavio Paz evinces, will continue to confront the crisis of modernity as it
is crystallized in the claim that we do not yet know what modernity signifies, and that
modern life is “devoid of pastness or future significance.” The moral character of Paz’s
achievement shapes his concern with thevalue he places on the individual,or as Professor
Noel Valis writes, “Human solidarity should not come at the price of human dignity.”
Clearly the rejection of the soul and the desacralization of the body bequeathed by the
twentieth century are conditions that will equally afflict the twenty-first century. The
conservative scholar will need to wrestle strenuously with the singular problem that
Valis’s assessment of Paz brings to our attention: “In the double twilight of modernity and
of the concept of the person.. .it is a troubling thing to find out how, precisely, we are to
recover that moral sense of wholeness and rightness about ourselves and others.” -Ed.]
WHATMAKES IT so HARD to write about a and what we actually do. A high school
moral voice? Why even speak, a t the end election is rigged because of choices
of what has too often been a n unspeak- made (hence, the aptness of the title).
ably horrifymg century, about such a Dictionary definitions tend to collapse
voice? What can a moral voice possibly the two terms together. An etymological
mean? In the film “Election,”a biting dark search comes up with the same basic
comedy of contemporary behavior, a meanings: moral(s) derives from the Latin
teacher asks his high school class: What moralis,which is related to manners and
is the difference between ethics and customs (mores),while ethics goes back
morals? As the relentless overachiever to the Greek ethikos, signifyingof morals,
of the class pops up eager to bestow tidy or moral, but also related to ethos,which
distinctions upon the two, the bell rings means characteristic spirit or usage. Eth-
and we never hear the answer. The rest ics are the principles of morality, the
of the film teasingly plays out the ques- rules of conduct. Morals are right con-
tion, relying on the device of ironic dis- duct, making distinctions between right
parity between what we know is right and wrong. What is moral tends to fall
under the sway of current consensus or
NOELVALIS
is ProfessorofSpanishLiteratureat assumptions. Moral behavior becomes
Yale University.Sheis theauthorof 11 books, the custom, a way of life. Ethics is a code,
including In the Feminine Mode: Essays on often written down, as in the ethics of
Hispanic Women Writers. professional groups. Sometimes, how-
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immoral. The reverse can also occur. But what his body says is that the human spirit
ultimately, both ethics and morals come can sink this low, can bear this torment,
up against the difficulty of connecting can suffer defilement and fear and un-
moral knowledge with moral action.’ speakable hardship and still exist. In our
time the fate of man and the fate of life are
Making morals a matter of subjective
one, and we would be less than wise t o
value simply displaces the question and ignore the survivor’s voice.2
does nothing to dispel our discomfort,
our unease, that something in ourselves Octavio Paz, who died on April 20,
and in our times has gone wrong, pro- 1998at the age of 84, was not, historically
foundly and wildly wrong. speaking, a survivor. Yet he projects the
It is this larger moral sense of a dis- same deep concerns that Des Pres sees
turbed and disordered world as it is re- in t h e twentieth-century figure of the
flected in Octavio Paz’s vision of things survivor. Indeed, it was the fact of Soviet
that I would like to address here. A moral labor camps that, among other things,
voice is an elusive presence. Elusive be- propelled Paz forward into the uncom-
cause it is difficult to state categorically fortable and unpopular position of
what constitutes a moral voice. Dictio- whistleblower in post-World War I1 Latin
nary and philosophical definitions do America. David Rousset, a noted anti-
not help much here. Nor does everyone fascist in the pre-war period, had already
always see in the same writer such a denounced the camps, landing in a legal
voice (this is certainlythecase for Octavio dispute with Les Lettres Frangaises as a
Paz). And yet, somehow we recognize result. H e was accused of falsifying
that special gravity, o r aura, of the moral records and substituting information
voice. In this regard, a moral voice dis- taken from the Nazi camps for the Soviet
plays qualities which are specifically in- experience. Rousset was in t h e end
scribed in the times but manages, in cleared of all charges. Paz meanwhile
some mysterious fashion, t o transcend had collected the documents of the case,
the historical era to which it belongs. intending to publish them in Mexico. N o
Put another way, the moral voice sur- one would touch the article. Finally, the
vives its own temporality. Indeed, some- Buenos-Aires based journal South (Sur)
times a moral voice is also literally a came to the rescue and printed the docu-
survivor, as in the life stories of Elie Wiesel ments along with an accompanying text
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Terrence by Paz in 1951. It was the first time any-
Des Pres’s moving account of survivors’ one had spoken publicly about the gulag
death camp experiences, he writes that in the Latin American presses. The left,
the survivor is the figure who emerges
still heavily committed to the dream of a
from all those who fought for life in the Communist utopia, was unwilling to criti-
concentration camps, and the most sig- cize openly any perceived weaknesses of
nificant fact about their struggle is that it the Soviet regime. What was remarkable
depended on fixed activities: on forms of about Paz’s behavior-moral knowledge
social bondingand interchange, on collec- translated into action, if you will-was
tive resistance, on keeping dignity and his unblinking pursuit of the truth as he
moral sense active. That such thoroughly saw it, even when that truth contradicted
human kinds of behavior were typical in his own socialist leanings.
places like Buchenwald and Auschwitz By this time Paz had written what was
amounts to a revelation reaching to the
to become his single most important
foundation of what man is.
book, The Labyrinth of Solitude (€1
Des Pres ends on this note: laberinto de la soledad, 1950), an essay
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read and cited but which marks the en- that, time began to fracture more and more.
tire trajectory of Paz’s intellectual devel- And space, to multiply. Any piece of infor-
opment. Arguably, practically all the mation, a harmless phrase, the headline in
themes and thinking of the future Nobel a newspaper, proved the outside world’s
Prize winner can be found in this work. existence and my own unreality. I felt that
my world was disintegrating, that the real
To understand more clearly how signifi- present was somewhere else... That was
cant and enduring the influence of The how my expulsionfrom the present began?
Labyrinth of Solitude is, I would like to
begin by projecting forward to a much In this small but enchanting self-por-
later essay, Paz’s 1990 Nobel Prize lec- trait, Paz mythologizes himself as the
ture, InSearchofthePresent(Labcisqueda heart of childhood, and then makes us
del presente). Here, the Mexican writer feel the loss of childhood through the
returns to a moment of his childhood as intrusion of history. He invites us to lose
a way of explaining, paradoxically, his track of time only to put us backon track,
feeling of having been expelled from the ridden by history. He envisions a per-
present. The sense of being orphaned, or sonal, private sense of space, which is
separated from the present, which Paz fatally invaded by a collective notion of
sees as at once a Mexican and a universal time and history as coming from outside
condition, is beautifully framed in a the world he inhabited. But what is indi-
memory: vidual is also shared by many. The spe-
Like every child, I built emotional bridges
cific details of a garden and house on the
in the imagination to link me to the world outskirts of Mexico City, in the early part
and to other people. I lived in a town on the of the century-the fig tree, the wild
outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapi- grass, the adobe walls-are evoked as
dated house, that had a junglelike garden memories of a lyrical self, which, in the
and a great room full of books. First games reflected warmth of poetry’s voice, be-
and first lessons. The garden soon became come, strangely enough, our memories
the center of my world: the library, an as well. Poetry and history offer mutually
enchanted cave.... There was a fig tree, illuminating views of the same reality.
temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three Poetry may be said to be what history
ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate
often masks or eludes: the innermost
tree, wild grass, and prickly plants that
produced purple grazes.Adobe walls.Time sense of ourselves as uprooted, expelled
was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. from the fullness of time and space,which
All time, past or future, real or imaginary, can be seen as a garden, a library, or even
was pure presence .... The world was limit- a country. Poetry, I hasten to add, is not,
less yet always within reach, and time, in Paz’s writings, simply a matter of
pliable, weaved a seamless present. verses. It is not the poem in itself. Poetry
is a “vision of the otherness that we are
Then Paz interrupts the dream by ask- all made of,the perception of our strange-
ing: “When was the spell broken?” He ness, our alienation, in the ~ o r l d . ” ~
remembers as a little boy being shown a For Paz, whose intellectual roots can
photograph of soldiers returning home be traced back to the romantics and to
from the war. “Ivaguely knew,” he writes, the fin de si3cle Nietzsche and the sym-
that somewhere far away a war had ended bolists, modern life represents, on the
and that the soldiers were marching to one hand, a break with the past and, on
celebrate their victory. But for me, that the other, a search which becomes all-
war had taken place in another time, not consuming, a search for the very present
here and now. The photograph refuted itself. From the romantics on, modernity
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self-conflicted. Even now, poised at the
onset of the new millennium, we do not This preoccupation with the modern
know what modernity is, or even what it selfis a constant in Paz’s writings, reach-
means to live as moderns. If we appear to ingan early high point in TheLabyrinth of
be mourning a dead past, if nostalgia- Solitude as well as in his poetry. What
whether genuine or manufactured-is saves Paz from the black hole of solip-
indeed a major symptom of modern life, sism is his insistence upon the human
how is it that so many of us also experi- need for communion, for solidarity, de-
ence life as a series of present moments spite our radical aloneness in the world.
devoid of pastness or futuresignificance? For Paz, the crisscrossing of human lives
How then is Paz justified in saying that is inextricably tied to a specific space
“the present was modernity’s final and and time, as he brilliantly demonstrated
~ use of the past
supreme f l ~ w e r ” ?The in his scholarly yet passionate recre-
tense to describe the present is telling. ation of the seventeenth-century Mexi-
For what Paz is really saying is that belief can writer, Sor Juana I n b de la Cruz, and
in the modern, and all that it implies, is the intricate world of convent and palace
waning fast, and nothing has come to in which she lived.g In The Labyrinth of
replace it. Thus he notes that Solitude, Paz shuttles back and forth be-
the advanced democratic societies have tween two poles: the historically situ-
reached an enviable level of prosperity; at ated Mexicans and a kind of transhistor-
the same time they are islands of abun- ical “universalman”image,which on more
dance in an ocean of universal misery.... than one occasion, arecollapsed together.
Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers, But in none of his writings does he try to
and the forests, but also our souls.... N o cram these two figures of the universal
other society has produced so much waste and t h e specifically Mexican into a re-
as ours has. Material and moral waste.6 ductive globalizing abstraction, as too
often occurs with post-modern critics.
I
In effect, Paz is saying that we do not Paz has been criticized for suggesting
know how to live. In the long view of anachronistic historical parallels be-
things, perhaps this is inevitable, if, as tween, for example, the seventeenth-cen-
Paz suggests, “a human being is never tury colonial experience of Sor Juana,
what he is but the self he ~ e e k s . But
” ~ at forced t o abjure her writings and schol-
the same time such a statement is also arly pursuits, and the Stalinist puppet
intrinsically modern: seek thyself, not trials of the 1930s.lO But Paz carefully
know thyself. Paz ends his Nobel Prize distinguishes between the two events,
speech with these words: stressing a single, shared feature: both
We pursue modernity in her incessant
occurred “in closed societies ruled by an
metamorphoses yet we never catch her. all-powerful bureaucracy governing in
Each encounter ends in flight. We em- the name of orthodoxy.”” Sor Juana may
brace her, but she escapes, disappears not be our “contemporary,”but her suf-
immediately, and we clutch the air. The fering under oppressive circumstances
instant is the bird that is everywhere and draws her closer to us today.
nowhere. We want to trap it alive, but it Taking wider aim, Paz never loses sight
flaps its wings and is gone in a spray of of the historical situatedness of his sub-
syllables. We are left emptyhanded. Then ject, whether it is Sor Juana or modern
the door of perception opens slightly and Mexico. “Man is not simply the result of
the other time appears, the real time we
history,” he writes, “and the forces that
had been seeking without knowing it: the
activate it, as is now claimed; nor is his-
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a belief on which the North American nate, gross and brutal, like those the great
way of life is implicitly predicated. Man, Spanish painters, without the least touch
it seems to me, is not in history: he is of complacency and with an almost flesh-
history.”’*Paz is not a historian, nor does and-bloodrealism,have left us-there was
he claim to be one. You won’t find in The something like a desperate hopefulness,
something very concrete and at the same
Labyrinth of Solitude, for example, the time universal. Since then 1 have never
arsenal of historical facts, anecdotes, and seen the same expression on any face.I4
documents that the professional histo-
rian marshals into a coherent narrative. But Paz, unlike some, refused to shut
That Paz was quite capable of writing his eyes to other realities, the realities of
history is evident from the monumental Bolshevik terror and oppressive Com-
achievement of SorJuana or, The Traps of munist State bureaucracies. Nor could
Faith. Like much of his prose writing, The he accept the heavily deterministic un-
Labyrinth of Solitude is an essay. The derstanding of history which underpins
scholarly apparatus of the historian is Marxism in particular. In TheLabyrinth of
minimal, partly because of the demands Solitude, a characteristic strategy is to
of the essay genre, partly because of present an argument as though it is his,
Paz’s dislike of historical determinism. only to refute it in the next paragraph.
His distinction between being in his- Thus, he first explains the character of
tory and beinghistory has a precedent in the Mexican as “a product of the social
Miguel de Unamuno’s concept of intra- circumstances that prevail in our coun-
histoty (intrahistoria), which in turn de- try, and the history of Mexico, which is
rives from t h e romantic notion of the history of these circumstances, con-
Volkgeist, a larger spirit of history resid- tains the answer to every question. The
ing in the people rather than in the situation that prevailed during the colo-
chronicles of kings and queens.Unamuno nial period would thus be the source of
associated the mostly unwritten current our closed, unstable attitude.” But then
of a people’s history with what he called he critiques this position as simplistic,
“living tradition” (la tradicibn viva). Paz rejecting the idea of our being “condi-
moves beyond Unamunian idealism, his tioned by historical events.” And he con-
thinking colored not only by the trau- tinues: “...historicalevents are something
matic events of our century but by the more than events because they are col-
way other twentieth-century minds have ored by humanity, which is always
interpreted and shaped those events. problematical ...any purely historical ex-
In the 1930s Paz’s sympathies, like planation is insufficient ...which is not the
those of so many intellectuals then, were same as saying it is f a l ~ e . ” ’ ~
left-leaning. His eventual disillusionment In trying, however, to explain why
with Marxism was never complete, how- modern Mexico’s history is fractious and
ever. The phantom of the socialist dream why the sense of Mexican identity is
haunts Octavio Paz’s writings, as Roger elusive and enigmatic, Paz unfolds a cu-
Bartra has pointed 0 ~ t .Significantly,
I~ it rious vacillating vision which is simulta-
was the experience of the Spanish Civil neously historical and mythographical.
War that persisted in Paz’s mind as a He focuses in particular on the symbolic
metaphor of human solidarity: (and real) relationship between HernAn
I remember that in Spain during the civil Cortes a n d Dofia Marina (or, La
war I had a revelation of “the other man” Malinche), the Indian mistress he ex-
and of another kind of solitude:not closed, ploited t o political and personal advan-
not mechanical, but open to the transcen- tage. As Paz notes, CortCs and La Malinche
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ures: they are symbols of a secret con- and the astonishing singularity of one’s
flict that [Mexicans] have still not re- identity: “...as [theadolescent] leans over
solved. When he repudiates La Malinche the river of his consciousness, he asks
...the Mexican breaks his ties with the himself if the face that appears there,
past, renounces his origins, and lives in disfigured by the water, is his
isolation and solitude.”16This violent past The same is true of nations and peoples.
of Spanish colonization marked, of course, For Paz, “To become aware of our history
a brutal rupture with the earlier (often no is t o become aware of our singularity.”20
less brutal) pre-Cortesian cultures. This constant play between singular-
Paz’s propensity in this essay to take ity and universality runs through the
the historical context of Conquest and entire essay. What starts out as univer-
turn it into a moment of archetypal sym- sal-“all of us”-is also individual (“some
bolic resonance converts an existing thing unique, untransferable”). What is
myth of Mexican identity into a new one, individual (the adolescent) is converted
his own. History is re-made myth in Paz’s into the collective (the nation). The Nar-
essay, partly because he also relies on cissus myth provides a key link between
the Christian framework of original sin the histories of persons and societies: it
and the fall as explanation (without nec- is the continually changing mask at once
essarily ascribing to its tenets). For Paz, petrified and unstable, as external facade
“sin” resides in our universal sense of and internal fluidity.
radical solitude. The Mexican’s entry into Likewise for Paz, the mask that the
Western history through violence and Mexican character wears is the universal
bereftment-deprived of an earlier cul- disguise that all of us don to hide our
ture symbolically incarnated in the ma- secret selves. More specifically, Paz’s
ternal figure of La Malinche, who is both meditations on Mexico also have a great
Virgin Maryand Eve-is, from theoutset, deal t o d o with the United States. First,
inscribed as a myth. much of The Labyrinth of Solitude origi-
History also becomes myth in this nated in a two-year stay in the United
poetic interpretation of modern Mexico’s States. On the streets of Los Angeles he
origins because Paz conflates the Mexi- encountered the pachuco phenomenon
can experience with all human experi- of the late 1940s, gangs of young males
ence. “We are alone,” he writes. “Soli- who were neither Mexican nor Ameri-
tude, the source of anxiety, begins on the can. And yet, writes Paz, they are “one of
day we are deprived of maternal protec- the extremes at which the Mexican can
tion and fall into a strange and hostile arrive.” Indeed, what the writer found in
world. We have fallen, and this fall-this general was a “floating”.Mexicanness:
knowledge that we have fallen-makes 1say“f1oats”because [Mexicanness]never
us guilty. Of what? Of a nameless wrong: mixes or unites with the other world, the
that of having been born.”” The Laby- North American world based on precision
rinth of Solitude stresses from the very and efficiency. It floats, without offering
beginning this universal existential (and any opposition; it hovers, blown here and
existentialist) note: “All of us, at some there by the wind, sometimes breaking up
moment, have had a vision of our exist- like a cloud, sometimes standing erect like
ence as something unique, untransfer- a rising skyrocket. It creeps, it wrinkles, it
able and very precious ... Selfdiscovery expands and contracts;it sleeps or dreams;
is above all the realization that we are it is ragged but beautiful. It floats, never
quite existing, never quite vanishing.21
alone ....”I8 This self-consciousness, which
appears so intensely during adolescence, Despite the massive sociocultural and
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years, the Mexican-American, like other ing, uneasy twist, decide later to ignore
Hispanics, still “floats,” drifting some- their blood ties. We are the Mexicans in
times invisibly, sometimes uncomfort- all these versions of national and per-
ably, over a North American culture sonal identity. And we are all living in
which has yet to come t o terms with its bordertowns, in the sense that what is
own hybrid nature. One is reminded here foreign, or other, is no longer simply “out
of John Sayles’s 1995 film, “Lone Star,” there,” but an intimate part of our lives.
and the earlier Orson Welles’s “A Touch More specifically, Paz criticizes the
of Evil” (1958), both of which explore the culture of the United States for not rec-
tensions between Mexicans and Ameri- ognizing that peripheral groups and na-
cans in bordertowns. Paz saw clearly tions are not simply “outside” our bor-
that, historically, culturally and economi- ders, but reside within, in our towns and
cally, for good and bad, the histories of cities and in ourselves. In “Mexico and
Mexico and the United States were the United States,”anessaywritten nearly
wrapped together like pieces of cello- thirty years after The Labyrinth of Soli-
phane. tude, he says:
But The Labyrinth of Solitude is about Today, the United States faces very pow-
both the United States and Mexico in a erful enemies, but the mortal danger comes
larger sense as well. Paz’s Mexico be- from within: not from Moscow but from
comes a metaphor of modern alienation, that mixture of arrogance and opportun-
the feeling of displacement and dispos- ism, blindness and short-term Machiavel-
session which flooded the geographies lianism, volubility and stubbornness
and hearts of the post-World War I1 era. which has characterized its foreign poli-
As Paz notes, “we Mexicans have always cies during recent years .... To conquer its
lived on the periphery of history. Now enemies, the United States must first con-
the center or nucleus of world society quer itself-return to its origins. Not t o
repeat them but t o rectify them: the “oth-
has disintegrated and everyone-includ-
ers”-the minorities inside as well as the
ing the European and t h e North Ameri- marginal countries and nations outside-
can-is a peripheral being. We are all d o exist. Not only d o we “others” make up
living on the margin because there is no the majority of the human race, but also
longer any center.”22 each marginal society, poor though it may
The condition of marginality derives be, represents a unique and precious ver-
significantly not only from specific his- sion of mankind. If the United States is to
torical and cultural circumstances but recover fortitude and lucidity, it must re-
from an essential state of self-estrange- cover itself, and to recover itself it must
ment in humankind. For this condition, recover the “others”-the outcasts of the
Paz develops the image of the mask of Western World.23
identity, the mask which is the same yet
different for every person, every society. The communion that Paz seeks-re-
Similarly, Orson Welles played with the covering the ‘‘other”-is the new myth of
notion of the maskin “ATouch of Evil” by modern man, a necessary myth, he em-
casting the unlikely Charleton Heston as phasizes, because there is nothing else
aMexican narcotics investigator. In “Lone left which will redeem us as a species.
Star,” Sayles brilliantly reveals layer af- This insistence on the universality of the
ter layer of deceptions and disguises, myth is both a strength and a weakness
disclosing only at the end that the same in Paz’s thought. Interest in myth is a
Texan fathered both the anglo son and long-standing intellectual pursuit among
the Mexican daughter, who unknowingly moderns, from Frazier through Jung to
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may compensate for the disappointments was labeled a traitor of the left, mainly for
of history (and asecularized world). What not being “left enough” in his criticism.25
it can’t do is replace the historical. The In 1984, his remarks on Nicaragua and El
conversion of history into myth in Paz’s Salvador, astonishingly, provoked a mas-
writings parallels a similar metamorpho- sive demonstration of over 5,000 people
sis of the singular into the universal. As a inMexicoCitystreets,withhiseffigydoused
result, sometimes Paz falls into the trap in gasoline and publicly burned. (He was of
of cliches and stereotypes, particularly course equally feted, especially for win-
in The Labyrinth of Solitude when he es- ning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.)
tablishes a series of contrasts between Paz was never afraid to take a strong
the national character of Mexico and political position even when it proved
that of the United States. For example, he unpopular. But what will be remembered
says that “North Americans want to un- more, finally, than his take on current
derstand and we [Mexicans] want to con- events is his unwavering moral voice. In
template. They are activists and we are one of his last books, The Double Flame.
quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they Love and Eroticism (1993), the Mexican
enjoy their invention^."^^ poet delivers what could be considered,
Even more limiting t h a n t h e s e in part, an answer to his vision of modern
essentializing, somewhat reductive ar- aloneness and soul-destroying alienation.
chetypes of both national cultures is the In The Labyrinth of Solitude, he remarks
way such mythologizing prevents Paz that “[iln our world, love is an almost
from moving beyond myth. There is, as inaccessible experience.”26Love emerges
the constant conversion and interchange from the intricate relationship between
ability between myth and history, singu- solitude and communion; it breaks
larity and universality, suggest, a certain through our solitude forging communion
circularity in Paz’s thinking, which while with another. But, Paz says, “[tlhe prob-
it provides a lifelong consistency of out- lem of love in our world reveals how the
look, as we have seen even in a late essay dialectic of solitude, in its deepest mani-
like the 1990 Nobel Prize lecture, also festation, is frustrated by society. Our
prevents him, 1 believe, from developing social life prevents almost every possibil-
beyond the initial argument presented in ity of achieving true erotic c o m r n ~ n i o n . ” ~ ~
TheLabyrinth ofsolitude. Nearly forty years after The Labyrinth
Having said this, however, 1 would ofsolitude,he returned to the problem of
reiterate that Paz’s contribution may be modern love in The Double Flame. Our
less intellectual and more of a moral notion of love, says Paz, is based on the
character in the long run. Perhaps the primacy of the private individual as a
single most important concern which being of body and soul. But in the late
infuses his poetry and prose is the value twentieth century we are witnessing, on
he places upon the individual. Human the one hand, the rejection of the soul
solidarity should not come at the price of and, on the other, the desacralization of
human dignity. Hence, his passionate the body. The uniqueness of the person
rejection of the repressive machinery of is “the embodiment of a mystery that it is
State bureaucracies of any kind and of the no exaggeration to call sacred.”28This
soullessness of modern societies, whether mystery of the person is most intimately
socialist or capitalist. In his later years encountered in love, but it is so basic a
Paz’s specific criticism of the Castro re- concept to Western values that we can-
gime and the Sandinistas, as well as his not conceive of community without it.
defense of the democratic process in El Paz maintains that “the twilight of the
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[is]... the principal reason for the politi- our ideas of what justice, solidarity, and
cal disasters of the twentieth century social coexistence ought to be.32
and of the general debasement of our
~ivilization.’’~~This is a large claim in- But a person without freedom is not a
deed. But listen t o what he has to say person. Hence the moral necessity to
about the fall of Communism and what it make choices, to make the present into a
means to the West. The collapse of the positive act of presence. In the double
Soviet Union was stunning, but for Paz, twilight of modernity and of the concept
the regime “was a fortress built on quick- of the person, however, it is a troubling
sand.” “The rigidity of the doctrine,” he thing to find out how, precisely, we are to
continues, “asimplistic version of Marx- recover that moral sense of wholeness
ism, was a straitjacket forced on the and rightness about ourselves and oth-
Russian people.”30 And a s he has re- ers. The masks we wear-and person
marked elsewhere, the ideology of Marx- originally meant the mask of an actor-
ism was relentlessly refractory to no- have so incrusted our modern faces, al-
tions of uniqueness, whether of individu- lowing us only flashes of what lies be-
als or works of art.31“The end of Commu- neath, as in these lines from one of Paz’s
nism,” he suggests, finest poems, ”Sunstone”(“Piedra de sol”):
forces us t o look at the moral situation of The rotten masks that divide one man
our society with greater critical rigor. Its from another, one man fromhimself,
ills are not exclusively economic, but, as they crumble
always, also political, in the positive sense forone enormous moment and weglimpse
of the word-that is, moral. They have to the unity that welost, the desolation
do with freedom, justice, fraternity, and, of being man, and all its glories,
finally, with what we ordinarily call val- sharing breadandsun and death,
ues. At the center of these ideals is the the forgottenastonishment ofbeingalive.33
notion of the person. The person is the
1. Elmer Sprague, What is Philosophy? (New York, Ibid.,87.17. Ibid., 80.18. Ibid., 9.19. Ibid., 9.20. Ibid.,
196l), 104;Reginald E. Allen, Introd., CreekPhiloso- lO.%l.lbid.,13-14.22.Ibid., 170.23.“Mexicoand the
phy: Thales toAristotle (New York, 1966), 18-19.2. United States,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude and
TheSurvivor.An AnatomyofLife in theDeath Camps Other Writings, tr. Rachel Phillips Belash, 376.24.
(Oxford, 1976),vii,209.3.InSearchofthePresent, tr. TheLabyrinth ofSolitode, 24.25. For examples, see
Anthony Stanton (New York, 1991), 12-13, 14-15.4. Enrique Gonz6lez Rojo, El rey va desnudo. Los
Paz, “Suma y sigue (Conversaci6n con Julio ensayospoliticos de OctavioPaz(MexicoCity, 1989),
Scherer)” (1977), in Obras completas (Complete 302; Xavier Rodriguez Ledesma, El pensamiento
Works), Vol. 8 (Mexico City, 1996),371 (my trans.). politico de Octavio Paz.Las trampas dela ideologia
5. InSearchofthePresent, 18.6. Ibid., 131-32.7. The (Mexico City, 1996), 271, 432; and the especially
Double Flame. Love and Eroticism, tr. Helen Lane virulent anti-Pazattack of William Anthony Nericcio,
(NewYork, 1995). 175.8.In Search of the Present, 33- “iNobel Paz?: A Pre- and Post-Nobel Survey of a
34. 9. See Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith, tr. Mexican Writer’s Evolving Views of Mexico, the
Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, 1988). 10. An- United States and Other Na[rra]tions,” Siglo Xu/
thonyStanton,rev. of SorJuana, LiteraturaMexicana, 20th Century,Vol. 10,Nos. 1-2(1992),165-94.26. The
Vol. 1,No.1 (1990), 247; GeorginaSabat-Rivers, rev. Labyrinth of Solitude, 197. 27. Ibid., 202. 28. The
of SorJuana, SigIoXX,,ZOth Century, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2 Double Flame, 114. 29. Ibid., 157. 30. Ibid., 191-92.
(1990-91), 161.11. SorJuana or, The Traps ofFaith, 31. Corriente alterna (1967) (Mexico City, 1990),
469.12. TheLabyrinthofSolitudeand Other Writings, 201.32. TheDoubleFlame,201-02.33. TheCollected
tr. Lysander Kemp (New York, 1985),25.13. Bartra, Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987,ed. and tr. Eliot
La dernocraciaausente(Mexico City, 1986), 153.14. Weinberger (New York, 1991). 21.
The Labyrinth of Solitude, 27. 15. Ibid., 71-72. 16.
Modern Age 57
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