Word: paz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Paz, 58, is not an apolitical...
...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...
...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...
...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...