OCTAVIO PAZ, along with his friend, our own Seamus Heaney, belongs to a small group of poets who be said to constitute the jet set of contemporary poetry. They have won prestigious prizes, have been honoured by prestigious universities, and they participate in the most prestigious international poetry gatherings. They are the "film stars" of the international poetry world. People who have never read a single line of poetry feel obliged at least to have heard of them. And their speeches, lectures and interviews are often given an importance and authority that is scarcely derivable from the solitary practice of the art of poetry. I intend this preamble as no more than a caution to the overly serious reader.
Paz is pre-eminently such a poet. In their subject matter, his essays range from anthropology to Zen, and in this new collection of his essays, The Double Flame, although his subject matter is ex-with Borges and Alfonso Reyes, unquestionably one of the great masters of Spanish prose of the present century and he is well served in this book by his translator, Helen Lane.
Like Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa is another literary high flier. While Paz was content to earn his living for many years in the Mexican Diplomatic Corp, Llosa actually had the temerity (courage?) to try (unsuccessfully) to become President of his native Peru.
Llosa is an assiduous and prolific writer who especially admires those writers like Flaubert and Joyce who ruthlessly dedicated themselves to the activity of writing. Indeed, this is a recurring theme throughout the collection of mainly journalistic pieces gathered together in Making Waves. Unlike Flaubert and Joyce, however, Llosa seems to me to have an unsatisfactorily low literary threshold, and all too frequently he writes, unnecessarily, for the sake of writing.
This collection of essays, like most of Llosa's fiction, suffers, in this reviewer's opinion, from excessive verbosity, a kind of artistic obesity, like Botero's typically inflated portrait of Llosa on the book's dust jacket. The best thing Llosa ever wrote was the relatively trim Aunt Julia & The Scriptwriter but when all's said and done, that novel is little more than second rate Flann O'Brien.
There is a good deal of politics in Making Waves. Llosa was (is?) a fervent Thatcherite, and like many liberal South Americans he subscribed to the idea that South American economies should copy the tiger economies of South East Asia by so doing, these countries would stride forward economically and, consequently, politically, socially and culturally. Alas, the slave labour based economies of South East Asia don't seem to work in South American countries, with their tradition of anarchistic individualism and their capacity for ideological partisanship.
The best thing in Making Waves is the essay on Joyce's Dubliners, which irrefutably demonstrates how that book is an accomplished masterpiece and not, as some would have it, prentice work for the later masterpieces. After that, I found Llosa's report on the massacre of the Peravian journalists by the peasants of Ucharaccay in 1983 fascinating, as much for the events related as for the revelation of Llosa's attitudes towards them. In the context of Senderista guerrilla activities, the peasants killed the eight journalists because they thought they were strangers coming to kill them. Llosa concludes his report as follows:
The achievements of democracy freedom of the press, elections, representative institutions are things that cannot be defended with conviction by people who are not in a position to understand them, much less to benefit from them. Democracy will not be strong in our countries while it remains the privilege of one sector and an incomprehensible abstraction for everyone else. The double threat the Pinochet model or the Fidel Castro model will continue to haunt democratic regimes for as long as there are people in our countries who kill for the reasons that the peasants of Uchuraccay killed.
And this brings us finally to the bugbear of all liberals wherever they may be how to change inclusively "love", the range of references is characteristically encyclopaedic. He explains the title of the book as follows "The original, primordial fire, sexuality, raises the red flame of eroticism, and this in turn, raises and feeds another flame, tremulous and blue the flame of love. Eroticism and love the double flame of life."
Paz sees love, taken in this context, as an important ingredient of culture, even going so far as to suggest that it expresses an aspiration towards transcendence. In it he finds that common human longing for a lost paradise of permanent bliss and beauty, echoing Keats's "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". For Paz, it is love, more than selfish fear, that forces us to face the reality of death. From that follows philosophy, among other things. Of course, I am grossing oversimplifying Paz.
The Double Flame is intriguing reading, rich in insights and stimulating in its multifarious allusions. It is not, however, a scholarly book, and its historical and sociological pages are highly and dubiously speculative in the way that those of Robert Graves are. But it is worth indulging Paz for the exciting skill and elegance of his discourse. After all, he is just and even atrocious socio political situations created and maintained by institutional violence without having to resort to violence to do so? The posited ideal is a lovely one. But history is against it, as Mario Vargas Llosa found out for himself when idealistically he entered the political forum of his country.