FAREWELL TO OCTAVIO PAZ

Although his wide-ranging poetry, criticism and essays are being reread across the globe, it seems to me that many analysts are missing the central passion of the writings of Octavio Paz, who lived to 84, and was being called this week “one of the greatest poets that the Spanish-language world has produced.” To me, that passion was quite simply to understand and to define the very nature of power in Latin society, which of course brought us face-to-face with the nature of the “caudillo” and the “macho.”

When Paz looked at these two quintessential male types in Latin America–the strongman and the supremely male aggressor–he saw things that others saw. “The `macho’ represents the masculine pole of life,” he wrote in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” his classic book on the loneliness and apartness of the Mexican character. “One word sums up the aggressiveness, insensitivity, invulnerability and other attributes of the macho: power. It is force without the discipline of any notion of order: arbitrary power, the will without reins and without a set course. . . . This is the model–more mythical than real–that determines the images the Mexican people form of men in power.”

This would have been bad enough in 1961 when the book was published, a time when the caudillos and the machos were still supremely in style–but Paz went on to compare them to men of power in the United States.

“North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate,” he wrote. “They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions. . . . It seems to me that North Americans consider the world to be something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed.”

Paz became somewhat of an outcast, for he soon made it clear that he was also against all of the political icons of the Latin intelligentsia. Although in earlier years he had worked with Republican Spain against fascism, by the 1960s and ’70s he was passionately against socialism and communism. His friends rejected him, and the intellectuals sneered, but he continued to go his own way, telling a New York Times interviewer that, because Latin intellectuals had a “semi-religious attitude toward socialism,” in part because it was considered anti-American, “they hate me as they would a heretic. If they could, they’d send me to the stake.”

What many missed at the time was the fact that, far from urging Mexicans or Latin Americans to mimic the United States, Paz was urging them to free themselves as Mexicans and Latin Americans. They had been living too long on the “margins of history”; they had been living others’ history. “For us Spanish-Americans, the present was not in our own countries; it was the time lived by others–by the English, the French, the Germans,” he said in his speech in 1990, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the end, what Paz so vividly saw was what more and more of Latin America is seeing today: that the very intensity of the macho’s craving for power, and the selfishness of it, is what finally keeps him from realizing real power in the world. And so, in the end, he wrote that “our nationalism, to be more than a mental illness or self-adulation, must search the whole world. We must recognize that our alienation is not unique, that it is shared by a majority of the world’s peoples.”

That is why upon Paz’s death, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo called the great writer a “universal Mexican.”