Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations

3. The Task of the Intellectual

The Task of the Intellectual n. s. What is an intellectual? i. s. An enabler of ideas. n. s. What role does the intellectual play in public life here in the United States? I ask you because the lion-mane-coifed, FrenchJewish media darling, philosopher-activist, Bernard-Henri Lévy, once edited a book where he posed a simple question to intellectuals worldwide: What Good Are Intellectuals? i. s. I tend to see the role of intellectual as that of a traveler to a distant land whose mandate is to offer a comprehensive report on what his eyes see. Except that the journey taken is not miles away but around my desk—not a physical journey per se but a journey of the mind. n. s. I recall that in your book Octavio Paz: A Meditation you penned “[I]n Latin American literati are seen as a voice for the oppressed and silenced.” Why has this understanding of intellectuals predominated in Latin America? i. s. Yes. South of the border, the tradition is to approach the intellectual as an opponent to the status quo. South of the Rio Grande there has always been a large segment of the population that has been voiceless. By “voiceless” I mean dispossessed of any power. It has fallen on the intellectual to become their speaker. I feel a note of caution 55 3 The Task of the Intellectual is needed, though. Although the intelligentsia in Latin America gravitate typically to the left, there have always been intellectuals seated comfortably across the ideological spectrum. n. s. Do public intellectuals in Latin American have a limited audience? i. s. Literature is an elitist endeavor south of the Rio Grande. n. s. In the volume on Paz you explain that Fidel Castro’s defiant rise to power was a “veritable rite of passage” for an entire generation of Latin American thinkers and artists. In what way? i. s. Intellectuals, at least those with even a slight interest in history, are often messianic: their dream is to make ideas influential, to change the course of events. But do ideas have edge? On the one hand, Auden said, rightly so, that “poetry makes nothing happen.” On the other hand, Heinrich Heine, the German poet, once warned the French— as Isaiah Berlin indicated—never to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization. The Cuban Revolution of 1958 to 59 was a template onto which the intelligentsia in Latin America projected its own messianic dreams. It was also the rite of passage to evidence , in the eyes of many, that politicians are, by definition, corrupt. n. s. Many of that Castro-era generation came to the United States. Eventually, they became prominent in various disciplines, including academia. Your essay “Against the Ostrich Syndrome” [The Essential Ilan Stavans] critiques the intellectual warfare waged within Spanishlanguage departments of American universities. One of the points you made was that “the exiled intellectuals barricaded in Spanish departments ” were living in a universe still ruled by “the anachronistic radicalism of the Cuban Revolution.” How well did these intellectuals fare here? What was the reaction to your essay by your Spanishlanguage department colleagues? i. s. For the first generation of Cuban exiles, the United States was a temporary stage. Sooner or later, Castro would fall and their return to the island would take place. With that attitude they built a culture of nostalgia. Their children and grandchildren were educated in that culture. Some broke away from it. They realized that their status as Cuban-Americans was an invitation to reflect on another set of questions that only tangentially dealt with Castro and the island. But some sort of nostalgia prevails in them too. 56 The Task of the Intellectual All in all, exiled Cuban intellectuals, such as Heberto Padilla and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, fared quite well in the United States. Padilla benefited tremendously from the welcoming hand of people like Susan Sontag and Robert Silver. He devoted the rest of his life to poetry and journalism. Of course, one could argue that, as soon as he left the island, his élan disappeared: he became a shadow of himself. This might be the reason why, in spite of the success he accomplished —his books were published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; he was often invited to speak...