Books: Saving Soul

ALTERNATING CURRENT

by OCTAVIO PAZ 215 pages. Viking. $7.95.

The more flamboyant political leaders of Latin America-the Fidel Castros, the Che Guevaras-are familiar to the point of cartoonist’s cliches. But what does the ordinary North American citizen and/or reader know of Latin American cultural leaders? For instance: Octavio Paz, Mexico’s foremost poet and essayist-hardly a North American household name.

Paz, 58, is not an apolitical man.

Like other modern poets (the Frenchman St.-John Perse, the Greek George Seferis), he has made a career as a professional diplomat. He was Mexico’s Ambassador to India when he resigned from the diplomatic service for, in fact, the most political of reasons-to protest the killing of Mexican university students by soldiers and police in October 1968.

Yet Paz states flatly: “The Third World needs not so much political leaders, a common species, as something far more rare and precious: critics.” The essays he has collected here may constitute their own persuasive evidence in behalf of Octavio Paz’s priorities. The author once wrote a literary want ad describing the need for “an Indonesian Swift or an Arab Voltaire.” He pretty well fills that job himself.

To Paz, the Third World is not simply a political or economic concept but a psychological state, consisting of “madmen,” “lovers” and, of course, poets as well as “colored peoples” and ex-colonials. Essayist Paz regards “revolt” as “the form of our age,” above all for the Third World. But his notion of revolt, being cultural rather than political, broadly defines itself as the impulse “to give otherness a place in historical life.”

Paz’s Third World comes close to being a metaphysical entity: that element in humanity which has not yet been machined down by technology and bureaucracy, though it may very well want to be. The Third World, he writes, “wavers between Buddha and Marx, Siva and Darwin, Allah and cybernetics.” It is “a reflection of a past that antedates Christ and machines; it is also a determination to be modern.” Paz concedes the course of events. “The Third World is condemned to modernity and the task confronting us is not so much to escape this fate as to discover a less inhuman form of conversion.”

“Imagination” and “soul” are words that occur again and again in these essays. They are still alive, if not always well, in the Third World, Paz believes, and his primary concern is to save them. In his quest for allies he ranges far and wide. He examines fellow Latin American artists like Pablo Neruda (whom he calls “a poetic continent”) and the film maker Luis Bunuel (whom he compares to Goya). He looks to Marshall McLuhan, then looks away from him -as a “prophet,” alas, only of Madison Avenue.

He even considers a little help from drugs: “Is pharmacy a substitute for grace?” Paz’s answer is no. But it is also no for Hindu philosophy and avantgarde art-and perhaps in all three cases for the same reason. Paz is finally ill at ease with any state in which “nothing ever meets our eye but our own gaze.” He needs nature, as a poet and as a man, and he believes that the Third World, including Latin America (“an eccentric, backward part of the West”), is peculiarly close to nature.

At times, Paz’s suggestions become a bit fanciful. He proposes “the incarnation of poetry in collective life: the fiesta,” and grows mystical about woman-as-savior, pronouncing her “a place where the natural world and the human are reconciled.” But as a man of the Third World, Paz is by vocation a believer in alternatives, in new ways in which tradition and change can nourish each other. In his special detachment, he can afford to regard the past with love, the future without panic. More than just Third Worlders should be heartened by his message of renewal. Borrowing the words of the French poet Gerard de Nerval, Paz promises: “Those Gods whose deaths you still mourn will return.” — Melvin Maddocks