I
The Chilean historian Claudio Véliz says that, when the Spanish arrived, the Mapuche Indians had a system of beliefs that ignored the concepts of aging and natural death. For them, man was young and immortal. Physical decline and death could only be the work of magic, black arts, or an adversary’s weapons. This conviction, simple and comfortable, without a doubt helped the Mapuches to be the ferocious warriors they were. It helped us, in contrast, to forge an original civilization.
The attitude of the Mapuches is far from being an extravagant case. In reality, we’re dealing with an extensive phenomenon. To attribute the cause of our misfortunes or defects to others—to “the other”—is a recourse that has allowed countless societies and individuals, if not to free themselves of evil, then at least to bear it and to live with a clean conscience. Masked behind subtle logic, hidden behind abundant reasoning, this attitude is the root, the secret basis, of a remote aberration that the twentieth century made respectable: nationalism. Two world wars and the prospect of a third and last, which would do away with humanity, have not freed us from it; rather, these appear to have made it more robust.
Let’s briefly summarize what nationalism consists of in the realm of culture. Basically, it asks one to consider what is one’s own absolute and unquestionable value and to devalue all that is foreign as something that threatens, undermines, impoverishes, or degenerates the spiritual personality of a country. Although such a thesis withstands the most shallow analysis with difficulty and it is easy to demonstrate how prejudiced and naïve its reasoning is, as well as how unrealistic its aims—cultural autocracy—are, history shows us that it takes root with ease and that even countries with an ancient and solid civilization are not immune to it. Without going too far afield, Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Franco’s Spain, Mao’s China all practiced cultural nationalism, trying to create a culture that was pure, cut off from and protected from the hated corrupting agents—foreignism, cosmopolitanism—through dogma and censorship. But in our days, it is in the third world especially, in underdeveloped countries, where cultural nationalism is preached more stridently and has more followers. Its defenders start from a false assumption: that a country’s culture is, like natural resources and the raw materials held by its soil, something that must be defended against the voracious greed of imperialism, and kept stable, intact, and unpolluted, since its contamination with anything from the outside would adulterate it and make it vile. To fight for “cultural independence” and to become emancipated from “foreign cultural dependence” with the goal of “developing our own culture” are habitual formulas in the mouths of so-called progressives in the third world. That such catchphrases are as hollow as they are cacophonous, true conceptual gibberish, is not an obstacle to the many people finding them seductive, due to the air of patriotism enveloping them. (And in the realm of patriotism, Borges has written, the people only tolerate affirmations.) They allow themselves to be persuaded by them, even the media who believe themselves to be invulnerable to the authoritarian ideologies promoting them. People who say they believe in political pluralism and in economic freedom and that they are hostile to the idea of only one truth and omnipotent, omniscient states subscribe nonetheless to the theses of cultural nationalism without examining what they mean. The reason is very simple: nationalism is the culture of the uneducated, and of these, there are legions.
We must resolutely combat these theses, ignorance on the one hand and demagoguery on the other, which have received their citizenship papers, since they are a major stumbling block for the cultural development of countries like ours. If they prosper, we will never have a rich, creative, modern spiritual life that speaks for us in all of our diversity and reveals to us what we are before ourselves and before the earth’s other peoples. If the proponents of cultural nationalism win the game and their theories become the official policy of the “philanthropic ogre”—as Octavio Paz has called the state in our day—the result is foreseeable: our intellectual and scientific standstill and our artistic suffocation, to immortalize ourselves in a minority of cultural age and represent, within the concert of cultures of our time, the picturesque anachronism, the folkloric exception, which the civilized approach with contemptuous benevolence only out of thirst for exoticism or nostalgia for the barbaric age.
In reality, “dependent” and “emancipated” cultures do not exist, nor anything of the sort. There are rich and poor cultures, archaic and modern ones, weak and powerful ones. Inevitably, all are dependent. They always were, but are more so now, when the extraordinary advance in communications has made volatile the barriers between nations and made all peoples immediately and simultaneously coparticipants of current events. No culture has managed itself, developed and reached its full expression without feeding off of others and, in turn, nourishing others, in a continuous process of give-and-take, reciprocal influences and mixtures, in which it would be very difficult to ascertain what belongs to whom. Notions of what constitutes “one’s own” and “the other’s” are doubtful, without going as far as to say absurd, in the realm of culture. In the only area in which they have a foothold—that of language—they are undermined if we try to identify them with a country’s geographic and political borders and turn them into something that sustains cultural nationalism. For example, for Peruvians, is the Spanish that we speak along with 300 million other people in the world “our own” or “the other’s”? And, among the Quechua speakers of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, who are the legitimate owners of the language and the Quechua tradition and who are the “colonized” and the “dependent” ones who should be emancipated from them? We would arrive at the very same perplexity if we wished to inquire which country can patent as native the interior monologue, that key resource of modern fiction. Is it France, because of Édouard Dujardin, the mediocre novelist who appears to have been the first to usurp it? Ireland, with Molly Bloom’s famous monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses, which cemented his status in the literary world? Or the United States, where, thanks to Faulkner’s sorcery, it acquired unsuspected flexibility and sumptuousness? Via this path—that of nationalism—when it comes to the realm of culture, one arrives, sooner or later, at confusion and absurdity.
What is certain is that in this realm, although it appears strange, what is one’s own and what is the other’s get mixed up and originality is not at odds with influences or even with imitation and plagiarism, and the only way in which a culture can flourish is in close interdependence with others. Whoever tries to impede it does not save “national culture,” but kills it.
I’d like to give two examples of what I am talking about, taken from the work that is most dear to me: the literary one. It is not difficult to demonstrate that the Latin American writers who have made a more personal mark on our letters were, in all cases, those who showed fewer inferiority complexes in the face of foreign cultural values and relied on them at their will and without the least scruples when it came time to create. If modern Spanish-American poetry has a birth mother and father, these are modernism and its founder: Rubén Darío. Is it possible to conceive of a poet who is more “dependent” and more “colonized” by foreign models than this universal Nicaraguan? His excessive and nearly pathetic love for the French Symbolists and Parnassians, his vital cosmopolitanism, that endearing religiosity with which he read, admired, and devoted himself to acclimating his own poetry to the literary fashions of the time, did not make him a mere epigone, a creator of “underdeveloped and dependent poetry.” Quite the contrary. Making use of magnificent freedom within the cultural arsenal of his time, everything seducing his imagination, his feelings, and his instinct, Rubén Darío combined with formidable irreverence those disparate sources in which the Greece of philosophers and tragedy is mixed with the France of licentiousness and eighteenth-century courtesans, with Golden Age Spain, and with his American experience, thereby carrying out the deepest revolution experienced by Spanish poetry since the time of Góngora and Quevedo, rescuing it from the traditional academicism in which it was languishing and placing it once again, like in the time of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poets, in the vanguard of modernity.
Darío’s case is that of almost all great artists and writers; it is that of Machado de Assis, in Brazil, who never would have written his beautiful human comedy without having first read Balzac; that of Vallejo in Peru, whose poetry took advantage of all the isms shaking up literary life in Latin America and Europe between the two world wars and is, in our time, the case of an Octavio Paz in Mexico and a Borges in Argentina. Let’s pause for a moment regarding the latter. His stories, essays, and poems are, surely, the ones that have had the greatest impact on other languages of any contemporary author of our language, and his influence is noticeable in writers from a range of countries. No one like him has contributed as much to our literature as a respected creator of original ideas and forms. So: would Borges’s work have been possible through the varied and fantastic cultural geography by way of continents, languages, and historical periods? Borges is a clear example of the best way to enrich with original work the culture of the nation where he has been born and the language in which he writes by being, culturally, a citizen of the world.
II
The way in which a country strengthens and develops its culture is by opening its doors and windows, widely, to all intellectual, scientific, and artistic currents, stimulating the free circulation of ideas wherever they come from, in such a way that its own tradition and experience is constantly put to the test, and corrected, completed, and enriched by those who, in other territories and with other languages and in different circumstances, share with us the misery and greatness of the human adventure. Only thus, subject to this continuous challenge and encouragement, will our authentic, contemporary, and creative culture be the best tool of our own economic and social progress.
To condemn “cultural nationalism” as atrophy for the spiritual life of a country does not, of course, signify disdain in the least for national or regional traditions and behaviors, nor an objection to their serving, even in a primordial way, the thinkers, artists, technicians, and researchers in a country for their own work. It only signifies reclaiming, in the realm of culture, the same freedom and the same pluralism that should reign in politics and economics in a democratic society. Cultural life is richer the more diverse it is and the more free and intense the exchange and rivalry is of ideas in its bosom.
We Peruvians are in a privileged situation to know this since our country is a cultural mosaic in which “all bloods,” as Arguedas wrote, coexist or mix; pre-Hispanic cultures and Spain and all of the West that came to us with the Spanish language and history; the African presence, so alive in our music; Asian immigration and that collection of communities in the Amazon with their languages, legends, and traditions. That multitude of voices equally express Peru, a plural country, and neither has more of a right than any other to be more representative. In our literature, we notice this abundance. Martín Adán, whose poetry does not seem to have any other home or ambition than language, is as Peruvian as José María Eguren, who believed in fairies and revived, in his little house in Barranco, characters from Norse mythology, or as José María Arguedas, who transfigured the world of the Andes in his novels, or as César Moro, who wrote his most beautiful poems in French. Foreignizing at times and at times folkloric, traditional for some and in the vanguard for others, from the coast, the mountains, or the jungle, realistic or fantastic, Spanish-influenced or French-influenced, indigenous or North Americanized, in its contradictory personality, it expresses that complex and varied truth that we are. And it expresses it because our literature has been fortunate to develop with a freedom that we real, live Peruvians have not always enjoyed. Our dictators were so uncultured that they deprived men of freedom, but rarely books. This belongs to the past. Dictatorships today are ideological and also want to control ideas and spirits. That is why they rely on pretexts, such as that national culture should be protected against foreign infiltration. This is not acceptable. It is not acceptable that, for the purpose of defending culture against the danger of “denationalization,” governments establish systems to control thoughts and words that, in reality, have no other objective than to impede criticism. It is not acceptable that, for the goal of preserving the purity of or ideological health of culture, the state assigns itself as the governing body or warden of a country’s intellectual and artistic work. When this happens, cultural life becomes trapped in a straitjacket of bureaucracy and atrophies, plunging society into spiritual lethargy.
To ensure freedom and cultural pluralism, we must clearly define the state’s role in this area. This role can only be that of creating the most propitious conditions for cultural life and meddling as little as possible in it. The state should guarantee freedom of expression and the free flow of ideas, foment research and the arts, guarantee access to education and to information for all, and rather than impose or favor doctrines, theories, or ideologies, to allow these to flourish and freely compete. I know that it is difficult and nearly utopian to achieve this neutrality in the face of the state’s cultural life in our time, that big, unwieldy elephant whose very movement causes damage. But if we don’t manage to control its trajectory, it will step all over and devour us.
Let’s not repeat, in this day, the mistake of the Mapuche Indians, combating supposed foreign enemies without noticing that the main obstacles we have to conquer are within ourselves. The challenges we should face in the area of culture are too real and large to invent additional imaginary difficulties like those of foreign powers insistent on culturally attacking us and debasing our culture. Let’s not succumb to the delirium of persecution nor to the demagoguery of uncultured carpetbaggers, convinced that everything goes in their fight for power and that, if they came to occupy that seat, they wouldn’t hesitate to surround culture with censorship and suffocate it with dogmas so that, like Albert Camus’s Caligula, they would do away with contradicters and contradictions. Those who propose these theses call themselves, through one of those dizzying magical substitutions of semantics of our time, progressives. In reality, they are modern retrogrades and obscurantists, the successors of that somber dynasty of jailers of the spirit, as Nietzsche called them, whose origin is lost in the night of human intolerance, and in which they stand out, identical and disastrous throughout the ages, the medieval inquisitors, the bearers of religious orthodoxy, the political censors, and the fascist and Stalinist cultural commissaries.
Besides dogmatism and the lack of freedom, the bureaucratic intrusions and ideological prejudices, another danger threatens the development of culture in any modern society: the substitution of the genuine cultural product by a pseudo-cultural product that is imposed on the market en masse by communications media. This is a certain and very serious threat and it would be foolish to downplay its importance. The truth is that these pseudo-cultural products are avidly consumed and offer an enormous swath of men and women the simulation of intellectual life, weakening their sensitivity, removing their sense of artistic values, and nullifying them to true culture. It is impossible for a reader whose literary tastes have been established reading Corín Tellado to appreciate Cervantes or Cortázar, or for another, who has learned everything he knows from Reader’s Digest, to make the necessary effort to deepen his knowledge in whatever area, and for minds conditioned by publicity to think for themselves. The vulgarity and conformism, the intellectual drabness and artistic poverty, the formal and moral misery of these pseudo-cultural products profoundly affect the spiritual life of a country. But it is false that this is a problem inflicted upon underdeveloped countries by the developed countries. It is a problem that we all share, that results from the technological advance in communications and from the development of the cultural industry, and to which no country in the world, rich or poor, has yet to provide a solution. In cultured England, the most widely read author is not Anthony Burgess or Graham Greene but Barbara Cartland, and the soap operas that are the delight of the French public are as awful as the Mexican or North American ones. The solution to this problem does not consist, naturally, in establishing censorship that prohibits pseudo-cultural products and gives the green light to cultural ones. Censorship is never a solution, or, in other words, it is the worst solution, the one that always leads to worse ills than what it seeks to resolve. “Protected” cultures dressed up as officialism adopt more caricature-like and degraded forms than those that arise, along with the authentic cultural products, in free societies.
It happens that freedom, which in this area is also always the best option, has a price one has to be resigned to pay. The extraordinary development of the means of communication have meant that, in our era, the culture that was in the past, at least in its richest and most elevated forms, the patrimony of a minority has been democratized and is in a position to reach, for the first time in history, the immense majority. This is a possibility that should excite us. For the first time, the technical conditions exist for culture to be truly popular. It is, paradoxically, this marvelous possibility that has favored the appearance and success of the massive industry of semicultural products. But let’s not confuse the effect with the cause. The means of mass communication are not to blame for the mediocre or mistaken use that is made of them. Our obligation is to conquer them for true culture, elevating, via education and information, the public, making them more and more rigorous, more restless, and more critical, and ceaselessly demanding of those who control the media—the state and private companies—greater responsibility and more ethical criteria in their use. But it is, above all, the intellectuals, technicians, artists, and scientists, the cultural producers of all kinds, to whom falls the audacious and formidable task of taking charge of our age, understanding that cultural life cannot today be, as it was yesterday, an activity for catacombs, for clerics locked away in convents or academies, but rather something to which the greatest number should recur and have access. This demands a reconversion of the entire cultural system, spanning from a change in psychology in the individual maker, and in his work mode, to a radical reform of the channels of distribution and means of promotion of cultural products; a revolution, in sum, of consequences that are difficult to foresee. The battle will be long and difficult, without a doubt, but the prospect of what victory would signify should give us moral strength and courage to undertake it. In other words, the possibility of a world in which, as Lautréamont wanted for poetry, culture will be at last for all, made by all and for all.
Lima, November 1981