The task of the writer in Latin America has never been an easy one. In some countries literacy hardly surmounts functional levels; in others, where it far exceeds them, there still is not much of a public for which one can write. There are few serious universities or, literary reviews, and the book trade is one of the most perilous occupations imaginable, subject to the anomalies of paper supplies, exchange controls, price controls, and a minuscule market. It is perhaps unflattering to say so, but Latin Americans are not great readers of books: instead, they consume huge quantities of newsprint, café gossip, and conspiracy theories. This is so notwithstanding the fact that the region has also produced some world-class writers, and shows every indication of continuing to do so.

In some ways, of course, the foregoing merely describes the situation of literature in any area of the Third World. But in one important regard, Latin America is quite different from, say, Africa, the Middle East, or South Asia: Latin Americans are more firmly situated within the Western literary tradition. Even so, one should not make too much of this: in some ways the region has more in common with other non-Western areas than we think. This leads to much confusion on the part of American and Western European readers, who are often taken in by false labels, and misunderstand the spirit underlying much of Latin American literary work. Nonetheless, Latin American literature has succeeded in gaining a foothold in mainstream Western culture, as a kind of exotic cousin whom we feel obliged to admit to our table. The relationship is sometimes based more on courtesy, guilt, and misunderstanding than on genuine affinity, but the writers themselves would be foolish indeed not to take advantage of it.

The subject of literature and politics in Latin America is, of course, extraordinarily broad.

The subject of literature and politics in Latin America is, of course, extraordinarily broad. Yet a few ruthless generalizations will serve as a point of departure. The image of the writer as an independent critic of society and power, or as a voice in the wilderness defending humanistic and liberal values against an established order of violence and greed, is greatly exaggerated. Indeed, most writers in Latin America have been unusually drawn to power, for reasons both of economic necessity and cultural predisposition. Further, at least since the turn of the century, they have been particularly attracted to non-liberal or anti-liberal ideologies. More recently, their anti-liberal bias has been positively encouraged by the literary establishments in Western Europe and the United States. And finally, a new generation of liberal voices has succeeded in making itself heard in Mexico, in Peru, in the Southern Cone republics. But the future of this generation remains extremely problematic. In this article I propose to comment at length on each of these propositions.

Popular tradition places the roots of censorship in Latin America deep in the colonial period, when the Spanish authorities forbade the importation of works of creative imagination. It is true that Latin Americans were expected from the very start to subsist on a steady diet of sermons, writings of the Church fathers, and lives of the saints (some of which, actually, were very nearly pornographic). There was also, however, from the very beginning an underground trade in other books; the first copies of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for example, were smuggled to the New World in crates supposedly containing bottles of wine. This serves as a useful illustration of the limits of censorship, which—like almost every other aspect of government in the region—has never worked the way it is supposed to.

To be sure, over the years there have been instances in which individual tides have been prohibited, or even physically destroyed, sometimes with considerable brio. These episodes have captured the momentary attention of the Western cultural public. For example, copies of Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), were publicly burned at the military academy in Peru where much of its action takes place. The incident was seized upon by its American publisher to promote the work of a (then) unknown writer. The junta in Chile staged a widely reported (and photographed) book-burning episode shortly after the coup in 1973, and has seized and destroyed several book shipments since then. Despite such incidents, however, censorship has been a less serious threat to literature in Peru, Chile, and elsewhere than other things, including indifference, popular taste, and economic constraints. Only in Cuba and (until yesterday) Nicaragua has literature been conscripted into rigorous service to the state.

Dramatic individual instances of censorship mask a more important fact about the literary estate in Latin America—namely, that in most cases the relationship between writers and power has been symbiotic. During the first century of independence, literary skills of any kind were a monopoly of urban elites who dominated national affairs. Many writers were also presidents, generals, ministers, ambassadors, or prefects. While individual writers were persecuted and sometimes driven into exile, this was due to their affiliation with the party out of power, not to the allegedly subversive content of their work. Moreover, in the absence of a broad economic base to support an independent or semi-independent intellectual class, writers had no choice but to recur to the State for economic subsistence. This point is particularly well established in Doris Meyer’s recent anthology, Lives on the Line: The Testimony of Contemporary Latin American Authors.¹ Starting in the nineteenth century, but continuing well into the twentieth, many Latin American governments maintained writers on the national budget, often as consuls or even ministers at overseas legations; for example, Rubén Darío, the greatest voice of Spanish-American poetry, was happy to edit the official daily of the oligarchical regime in neighboring El Salvador, and, later, to represent the dictator of his own country, Jose Santos Zelaya, at the Court of Madrid. “He lived side by side with idiotic and reactionary politicians,” Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier later observed, “whoring generals whom he found agreeable and even interesting.” (The comment loses none of its impact by the fact that Carpentier himself later did exactly the same thing for Fidel Castro, for whom he served as ambassador to France.)

The Colombian poet José Santos Chocano served as a diplomatic agent for the Mexican bandit-cum-revolutionary Pancho Villa, and, even more deplorably, for Manuel Estrada Cabrera, ruthless dictator of Guatemala from 1905 to 1920. Successive Chilean governments maintained another great poet, Pablo Neruda, by offering him minor diplomatic postings in the Netherlands Indies and in Spain, and they did the same for his colleague, also a Nobel laureate, Gabriela Mistral. Jorge Luis Borges for years worked at the Buenos Aires Public Library, and subsequently became the director of Argentina’s National Library.

The phenomenon is by no means limited to “conservative” Latin American governments or to the military dictatorships of the Right.

The phenomenon is by no means limited to “conservative” Latin American governments or to the military dictatorships of the Right. Indeed the first Latin American government to recruit writers and artists systematically for specifically political purposes was a government of the Left–revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s. The Mexican phenomenon deserves more than passing reference because it embodies the finished model to which so many other Latin American governments and political parties secretly aspire: a one-party state that dominates both its military institutions and its labor movement; that elevates corruption to a system; that deftly conjugates a left-wing foreign policy with a right-wing domestic policy; and that preemptively  eliminates criticism from abroad by accusing skeptical foreigners (particularly Americans), of racism, imperialism, or “lack of mutual respect.” In some respects what historians call the Mexican revolution (1910-40) was not notably different from other struggles for power in that country save for its duration, geographical extent, and the degree of physical and human damage inflicted upon a helpless population. But the new Mexian authorities understood (as their predecessors did not) that in order to create enduring institutions, it was necessary to conscript cultural workers, particularly writers and artists. These in turn could be used to create a facade of broad philosophical meaning or what in many ways was nothing but a pillaging expedition which culminated in the creation of a new class of “revolutionary” millionaires.

By nationalizing large sectors of the nation’s economy, the new government evidently acquired vast control over culture; no newspaper could survive without advertising from state enterprises, or even go to press without newsprint from paper companies that were also now “socially owned.”

But the revolutionary political class in Mexico went well beyond negative sanctions–it created new opportunities for writers on state-subsidized literary magazines and periodicals, or for government agencies. It also created a state book publishing house (Fondo de Cultura Economica), the first such in the history of Latin America.

Most important of all, the Mexican government mastered the use of house intellectuals in order to counteract unfavorable news stories abroad. The efficacy of the new system was first demonstrated in 1929, when Jose Vasconcelos, one-time minister of the education (who was, in fact, responsible for creating many of the revolution’s new cultural institutions), was defeated for the presidency of Mexico. Himself an honest man who abhorred violence and corruption, Vasconcelos was labeled by the regime as a “reactionary”—a damning accusation which had immediate resonance on both sides of the border. After a fraudulent election, his followers all over Mexico were set upon; many were murdered, and several dozen were buried in a mass grave. The candidate himself was lucky to escape to the United States with his life.

The intellectual class, however, kept silence or repeated the allegations of the government, while the American liberal community (The Nation and The New Republic) saved its disapproval for Vasconcelos, whom it saw as a backslider who had abandoned his revolutionary faith. Since then Mexico has enjoyed a unique immunity from criticism by American liberals otherwise so interested in the conduct of other repressive Latin American governments. This undoubtedly reflects, at least in part, the lengthy quiescence of Mexico’s own literary and intellectual community—the crowning achievement of the triumphant revolutionary state.

While no other Latin American country has fully replicated the Mexican model, elements of it have appeared and reappeared periodically across the continent. Peron in Argentina (1946-55) and Allende in Chile (1970-73) used control of the economy to bankrupt potential advertisers in the opposition press (the latter failing to extinguish the independent El Mercurio only because of a covert subsidy from the CIA). Another recent example is the self-styled “left-wing” military government of Peru (1968-79) which in 1974 “transferred to the national majorities” all of the daily newspapers of Lima, throwing five hundred journalists and press workers into the streets for having allegedly worked for the “oligarchy” and “imperialism.” For novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, this was the moment of a great epiphany; up to that time he thought of the intellectual as a kind of moral reserve of the nation. Instead,

To a man (and a woman) they accepted “the lie of the ‘transfer to the social sectors’ and went to work in the dailies to fulfill a function about which, from the very first, there could be no doubt whatsoever.” No doubt some were driven by sheer economic necessity, Vargas Llosa continues, but given the wretched salaries they were paid, this can hardly have been the principal motivation. At issue was an appetite for power, “a fascination even greater in a country like ours, where, given the cultural poverty of the environment, intellectual life tends to be replete with frustrations.”

These developments in Peru are characteristic of the explosion of urban centers in Latin America since World War II, an explosion that expanded the number of writers (or potential writers) well beyond the capacity of any state to absorb or co-opt fully. Even with greatly enlarged government payrolls, the safety valve of emigration to Western Europe or (particularly) the United States, the ubiquitous grants from foreign foundations and United Nations agencies, the supply still far exceeds the demand. Vargas Llosa’s point remains valid, however: the difference between “ins” and “outs” “haves” and “have-nots,” divides the literary community far more than any devotion (or lack of it) to democratic principle, commitment to freedom, tolerance for other people’s ideas, or preference for an open political and social order. This does not prevent individual writers from producing very good work, often of no particular political import; but in their public role as repositories of the national culture, they are not, as a group, democratic exemplars.

The most notable case was Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, an early supporter of Franco who switched sides in the Fifties.

If further proof were needed, there is the evident attraction that anti-democratic and anti-liberal ideologies have long held for the Latin American literary class. In the nineteenth century the reigning notion was positivism, which in its Latin American version justified rule by the enlightened few —the cientificos, as they were known in Mexico; in the twentieth, it has been fascism, Communism, or both. Some have moved from one extreme to the other without difficulty; the most notable case was Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, an early supporter of Franco who switched sides in the Fifties, participated in the Russell Tribunal on “American War Crimes” in Stockholm, and subsequently supported leftist police states in Cuba and Nicaragua; another example is Nicaragua’s José Coronel Urtecho, a former admirer of Mussolini who until recently was the chief literary apologist for Comandante Darnel Ortega.

The number of Latin American writers who have been attracted to Marxism at one time or another, or have actually joined Communist parties, is legion, including Neruda, Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias (another Nobel laureate), Brazil’s Jorge Amado, Argentina’s Ernesto Sabato, Cuba’s Nicolas Guillén. As in Western Europe and the United States, most of these men made their commitment in the Thirties and Forties, under the double impact of the Depression and the Spanish Civil War; some abandoned Communism later on, out of disillusionment with either the Hider-Stalin Pact or the Khrushchev revelations of the crimes of the Stalin era. But unlike Marxists in Western Europe and the United States, they did not necessarily gravitate toward a liberal democratic vocation; more often, their Marxism became a bit like other people’s Catholicism—a religion one continued to profess but no longer practiced. Paradoxically, with the exception of Neruda (and not always him), their work reflects little familiarity with the canons of Socialist Realism; rather, they tended to borrow their aesthetics from Zola and the French naturalists.

Another generation emerged in 1968, inspired by the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam war, and the example of Ché Guevara. These writers could be regarded more as “New Left” than Marxist or Marxist-Leninist; while their work is more explicitly political in content, it is demagogic or melodramatic rather than doctrinal in tone, utilizing set-piece techniques of social protest, nationalism, and anti-Americanism, often writing with an eye to the European and American book-buying public than to national audiences. By and large it has produced fewer writers of genuine quality—the best-known being the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano (just now being discovered in translation by New York’s radical-chic literary community) and his compatriot Mario Benedetti, Chile’s Ariel Dorfrnan, and Nicaragua’s Omar Cabezas and Sergio Ramírez. Of course, the most famous member of this group is Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Unlike the others, however, Garcia Marquez’s novels have no political content whatsoever; in spite of this (or perhaps because of it), his political pronouncements (on behalf of Castro and, later, the Sandinistas) are unusually shrill.

The generation of 1968 also reflects a more cosmopolitan trend in Latin American letters—the internationalization, as it were, of certain formerly local themes, which in this case are protest, revolution, repression, solidarity, and also the supposed “authenticity” of native cultures threatened by North American consumerism. The “dirty war” against urban guerrilla subversion in Argentina (1976-83), but even more, the coup which deposed Allende in Chile, followed later by the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the struggle of the FMLN guerrillas in EI Salvador, led an emerging generation of Western Europeans to discover a special affinity with what they imagined Latin America to be. The point of convergence was a common hatred of the United States and the conviction that the real enemy of humanity was not Communism but a renascent fascism and American economic interests and mass culture (seen as one and the same thing). Of course, not all Latin American writers responded to this situation by plunging into political themes; but the more ambitious (or unscrupulous) among them could not help noting that revolutionary posturing was the most expeditious route to success in the North Atiantic publishing and literary worlds.

Again, Vargas Llosa gives us the best picture of this new kind of Latin American writer:

The proliferation of such “progressive intellectuals” says even more about developments in the United States over the last twenty years—and particularly, developments in American culture and higher education—than about Latin America. It is obviously unfair to require a minimal coherence between thought and action by intellectual visitors to the United States, when native practitioners of philosophy and letters see no reason for it themselves. It is also unrealistic to expect writers in countries with limited economic resources to be insensitive to demands of the international market. It is perhaps worth noting, however, the degree to which the “long march through institutions” has created an alternative American culture, with its own requirements which at least conceivably shape the composition and design of its imports.

Another generation emerged in 1968, inspired by the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam war, and the example of Ché Guevara.

In any event, certain expectations on American university campuses (derived mainly, it seems, from such often-exhibited movies as State of Siege, The Battle of Chile, Missing, and Salvador) must be met. For example, one Chilean novelist (himself a former supporter of the Allende regime) experienced some difficulties on an American lecture tour in 1980; the discovery that he had accepted an airplane ticket and per diem expenses from the United States Information Agency profoundly troubled several students and faculty at one university in the San Francisco Bay Area at which he spoke; but the fact that he resided in his own country—to which he had finally been permitted to return from Spain the previous year—rather than in exile was what finally convinced some in the audience that his anti-Pinochet bona fides were not in order. It may be a coincidence, but so far his novels, though well known and highly regarded in Spain, France, and West Germany, have yet to appear in the United States.

Not only are many Latin American writers not political at all; others have become intensely anti-political as the result of their own experiences, particularly with “revolutionary” governments in Cuba and Nicaragua; still others—a small but distinguished company—have made the journey back from the authoritarian left to the democratic center. The late Argentine novelist Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman) is perhaps the best example of the first. As a student of film-writing in Rome in the 1950s, he was astounded to discover that intellectual circles in Italy were pervaded by a kind of left-wing McCarthyism. “Emotionally, I was split. On the one hand, a popular cinema of protest appealed to me; but on the other, I also liked cinema with a story, and this apparently classified me as a die-hard reactionary.” Puig persisted, though, and eventually developed his own style and themes, which have to do with the confusion of sex roles and cultural models that afflict contemporary Argentine society—a subject so daring as to prevent his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968), from being published in Argentina until after it had already succeeded in a French translation.

Other novelists had their fling with revolution, and lost their taste for it. The best example is Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a rising star of Cuban literature, who worked on Lunes de Revolución, the cultural supplement of Castro’s official daily, until he ran into problems with the censor. He eventually defected from his post as cultural attache in the United Kingdom, and continues his work in England today. His novelistic work reconstructs Havana in the late Forties and early Fifties—the last moment of the old regime—and maps the parameters of cultural dislocation, in this case, the enormous influence of American culture in Cuban life, against the impossibility of fully replicating the foreign model. Though Cabrera Infante has done much to puncture the balloons of the English literary Left in their love affair with Castro—his remarks, when interviewed, are extremely astringent—he could hardly be said to have any strong political views of his own.

Chilean novelist José Donoso introduces a special variant, which might be called “post-political.” His newest work, La desesperanza (1985; English version, Curfew, 1988), recounts the experiences of a left-wing folk singer who returns to Chile in the early 1980s after spending nearly a decade in Western Europe cashing in on European guilt and solidarity; he discovers that many of the people on the Left who stayed behind and faced the dictatorship in its most ferocious period are resentful of his success. For his part, he discovers a Chile entirely different from the one he left, exhausted spiritually from the ideological wars of the 1960s. Donoso’s narrative style is droll and ironic, reflecting a cynical world view evocative of Cabrera Infante. A somewhat similar spirit pervades the magnificent novel of his compatriot Jorge Edwards, Los convidadosde piedra (1978), which provides a long and somewhat skeptical perspective on Chilean political life, moving back and forth between the prewar period and the Allende years.

The most important development in recent Latin American letters has been the emergence of a new group of writers who have made a decisive liberal and democratic commitment, explicitly denouncing totalitarian regimes and Utopian ideologies. The most important, and certainly the best known, is Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, anthropologist, diplomat—and now Nobel laureate—whose magazine Vuelta has become the vehicle whereby a new generation of Latin American writers dare to experiment with dangerous ideas—dangerous, that is, to the Latin American literary-cultural establishment and its numerous and well-placed foreign allies. Paz himself has been a dominant figure in Mexican letters for two generations. His own left-wing credentials leave little to be desired. His father was the Washington representative of the famous revolutionary General Emiliano Zapata; he himself rushed to Spain in the 1930s to demonstrate his solidarity with the beleaguered Second Republic; and in the later part of the decade he was close to the Trotskyite movement in Mexico. In 1968, he resigned his post as ambassador to India to protest the shooting of protesting students at the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico.

Chilean novelist José Donoso introduces a special variant, which might be called “post-political.”

For some years now, however, Paz has been moving away from his earlier militance. As early as 1950, he wrote an article condemning the concentration camps in Stalinist Russia—a daring act for an intellectual in Mexico, where the enemy of one’s enemy is automatically one’s friend. As it was, the piece had to be published in Victoria Ocampo’s literary quarterly Sur, in faraway Argentina.² He was almost alone among Mexican intellectuals in expressing reservations about the Cuban revolution during the Sixties and Seventies. And he publicly objected to his country’s support of a 1976 United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism; since his view happened to coincide with that of the United States, he was widely accused of treason to the Mexican nationality.

Neither then nor now, however, could Paz be regarded as a man of the Right. He has denied ever being an “anti-Communist,” and in fact Vuelta conspicuously opposed U.S. policy in Vietnam, publishing pieces by Noam Chomsky and I. F. Stone. At a forum at Harvard University in 1972, he declared that given Mexico’s dependence on the United States, its “transformation into a more just, freer, and more human society—a democratic socialism founded on our history—is inevitably linked to the United States.” As such, he told his audience, “your struggle is our struggle. Our friends are your friends because your enemies are ours. . . . We must join together—Mexican and American dissidents, to change our two countries!”

The major turning-point in his thinking seems to have been reached a little over ten years ago. As he told a Mexican journalist,

Even more to the point, while still embracing socialism as “the only rational solution for the West,” this could only be the case if it were “inseparable from individual liberties, democratic pluralism, and respect for the rights of minorities and dissidents.” In any event, he continued,

From here it was but a small step to openly condemning the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua as an effort to establish “a bureaucratic-military regime inspired by the Cuban model” in a now-famous speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. That speech—which had repercussions throughout Western Europe and Latin America—did nothing more than state the obvious; nonetheless, since then, Paz has found himself accused of being a right-winger. His political and economic views are still somewhat to the left of center, but his liberal democratic convictions are no more in doubt than they ever were. Most revealingly, when asked to enumerate the obligation of Mexican writers to their country, he replied, “I do not believe that writers have specific obligations to their country. Their obligations are to the language—and to their consciences.” Contrast that with the statement of Nicaraguan writer Claribel Alegria in Lives on the Line: “if there is no place [in Central America] for ‘pure art’ and ‘pure literature’ today, then I say so much the worse for pure art and literature.”

Mario Vargas Llosa is some twenty years younger than Paz. He belongs more properly to the generation of 1968, but has, evidently, separated himself from it. Unlike Paz, he was unreservedly enthusiastic about the Cuban revolution in its earlier days; conversely, he has moved further away from his original ideas. In the first volume of political essays published under the evocative title Against Wind and Tide (Contra viento y mareay 1986), he reproduces at the very beginning an article on Cuba which originally appeared in the early Sixties in French, as a way of charting the ideological distance he has since traveled.

The articles in Against Wind and Tide suggest a very gradual process of movement. The great watershed seems to have been his appointment by President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to a national commission to investigate the conduct of the Peruvian army after an encounter between it and the Shining Path guerrillas in the high Andes. The commission eventually absolved the army of charges of wanton abuse of human rights, and Vargas Llosa defended its findings in an article in The New York Times Magazine. Since then he has customarily been referred to as a “right-winger,” a label which no longer bothers him.

Like Paz, Vargas Llosa claims to have been influenced by the conduct of Marxist regimes in practice.

Like Paz, Vargas Llosa claims to have been influenced by the conduct of Marxist regimes in practice; as he has said, “policies designed to correct injustices are significantly less effective than [those inspired by] liberal and democratic doctrines and ideas—that is to say, those who do not sacrifice freedom in the name of justice.” Unlike Paz, however, he has actively embraced liberal economics, and recently ran for the presidency of Peru as an advocate of drastic reform along free-market lines.

Pablo Antonio Cuadra is the grand old man of Nicaraguan letters—one of the most highly regarded poets in Latin America. For some years he has also been the editor-in-chief of La Prensa, the voice of the Nicaraguan opposition under both the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista regime. A self-confessed Nicaraguan nationalist, Cuadra is also an outspoken defender of liberal values. As he told a radio interviewer recently, “I think a nation has a basic human right: the right to the truth.“ When asked “what do you think the news media law should be?”, he replied, “I have been asked that question for 50 years. . . . The answer is very simple: The best news media law is the one that does not exist.” As for the “situation of contemporary literature in Nicaragua,” he replied,

Nicaragua, of course, is one country in which literature has recendy been understood to have a concrete political purpose. As Cuadra’s compatriot Claribel Alegría—one of the Sandinistas’ favorite literary figures—puts it, “I do not know a single Central American writer who is so careful of his literary image that he sidesteps political commitment at this crucial moment in our history, and were I to meet one, I would refuse to shake his hand.” Though the Sandinistas were often praised in the foreign press for such cultural innovations as poetry workshops for the army and police (!), during their decade of rule political or anti-political writers had considerable difficulty getting published. As Cuadra told an Associated Press reporter two years ago, “Some of our best young poets are in exile—in Texas, in Venezuela.” In Lives on the Line he adds an ironic observation: “several of my friends who flaunted their independence in front of the right-wing dictatorships have happily bent over backwards to all of the demands of the [Nicaraguan] revolutionary leaders.”

All of that may change in Nicaragua now, as it has in Mexico, where a new generation of writers now has at least the opportunity to be heard. Significantiy, there is now a South American edition of Vuelta, edited in Buenos Aires by the Uruguayan writer Danubio Torres Fierro, who spent a number of years as a political exile in Mexico, where he came under the influence of Paz and his circle.

Though not a novel, Jorge Edwards’s book Persona non grata (1977) deserves mention in this context. Though primarily a writer, Edwards was for many years a career diplomat in the Chilean foreign service. Because of his socialist convictions, he was selected to be Allende’s chargé d’affaires in Havana in the first months of 1971. A longtime sympathizer with the Cuban revolution, he had made short trips to the island in the past, and even served on prize committees for Castro’s state publishing house, Casa de las Américas. Nonetheless, the experience of living there and witnessing the regime’s treatment of individual Cubans, particularly his writer friends, was a shattering experience. Persona non grata is a compelling memoir of his months in Cuba, and, with Milovan Djilas’s Conversations with Stalin, ranks as a classic contribution to the literature of disillusionment. Significantly, Ariel Dorfman, who understandably did not like Persona non grata, could think of no greater insult to Edwards than to accuse him of treason to—of all places—Chile. Edwards remains a social democrat—closer in his views to Octavio Paz than to his friend Vargas Llosa—hugely admired by the democratic forces in Chile, whose man-of-letters laureate he has, perforce, become.

Old habits die hard; so does the notion of the writer-as-militant.

How successful will this tendency be? In large part, it depends upon two developments, one proceeding from abroad, the other at home. The death of socialism (or, rather, the death of the idea of socialism), particularly in Europe, has so far not made much impact upon Latin American intellectual life. Old habits die hard; so does the notion of the writer-as-militant. As Paz recently wrote, “Their grandfathers swore by St. Thomas and they swear by Marx, yet both have seen in reason a weapon in the service of Truth with a capital ‘T,’ which is the mission of intellectuals to defend . . . . Thus there has been perpetuated in our lands an intellectual tradition that has little respect for the opinion of others, that prefers ideas to reality, and intellectual systems to the critique of systems.” It remains to be seen how long such a concept of intellectual citizenship can endure an ideological vacuum or a crisis of faith. Insofar as Marxism is concerned, one or the other (or both) are coming, whether or not the Latin American intellectuals are prepared for it.

It remains to be seen, also, what trends prevail in American intellectual life, particularly as they are reflected in the New York publishing world. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the titles offered to American readers reflect to a disproportionate degree the ideological preferences of editors in the major book publishing houses, as opposed to either judgments of literary quality or the interest of readers. As a result, there now exists something of an artificial market for Latin American literature, one that encourages writers to produce work mainly with an eye to a public that will read them in translation. As the Mexican critic Enrique Krauze has shown in a controversial study of Carlos Fuentes, this threatens the authenticity of their work. It is easy to imagine a situation in which Latin American literature could exist in a kind of ideological cocoon for some years to come—or, perhaps, artificially maintained on a life-support system made up of, say, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s magazine, and Pantheon Books. It would constitute the literary equivalent of the current situation of higher education in the United States—a series of cultures scattered across a society which actually have little or nothing to do with it. In short, if revolutionaries wielding machetes and spouting the cliches of liberation theology is what the American book-buying public is thought to want, it is hard to imagine they will not get it. At any rate, they may not be able to buy any other kind of Latin American literature at their local bookstore.

In the end, everything depends upon events within Latin America itself. If, for example, there is a new round of right-wing military governments, a new generation of leftist writers will certainly emerge in response, with or without the quasi-incentive of foreign translations. At the same time, if the region succeeds in joining the liberal economic revolution spreading in Eastern Europe, that will change the local environment in many important ways, including literacy, patterns of consumption, and, inevitably, the role of the writer in society.

If, however, the republics simply continue on their present course, avoiding either reform or revolution, but failing to hold their ground as viable economic entities, then Latin American writers may find themselves in the position of their counterparts in the Arab world, where themes of suicide, frustration, and death repeat themselves in endless (and monotonous) variation. In that event they would not constitute a serious threat to liberal society, but then, there would be little for them to threaten. One can only hope that the future, both for Latin America and for its republic of letters, holds out a more hopeful prospect.

1.   Lives on the Line: The Testimony of Contemporary Latin American Authors, edited and with an introduction by Doris Meyer, was published by the University of California Press in 1988. Go back to the text.
2.   See my article “Victoria Ocampo’s ‘Sur’” in the October 1988 New Criterion. Go back to the text.