Poetry and the Free Market
To the Editors:
Bruce Bawer (“Columbia’s Assault on the American Novel,”December 1991) might be less hysterical if he would reflect upon Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s comments in “Poetry and the Free Market” (The New York Times Book Review, December 8, 1991). Bawer apparently cannot distinguish between Stalinist political terrorism and the benign and ancient socialist efforts to ameliorate the inevitable inequities of unregulated market forces.
As Paz writes, “Recently I have been recalling, not without sadness, the struggles that certain of us poets, writers and artists have waged for many years and in different countries. In my youth, the struggle against ‘socialist realism’, a doctrine that subjected literature to the dictates of a state and a party that, in the name of the liberation of mankind, was erecting monuments to the whip and the boot. . . . Today literature and the arts are exposed to a different danger: they are threatened not by a doctrine or a political party but by a faceless, soulless and directionless economic process. The market is circular, impersonal, impartial, inflexible. Some will tell me that this is as it should be. Perhaps. But the market, blind and deaf, is not fond of literature or of risk, and it does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological: it has no ideas. It knows all about prices and nothing about values.”
Bawer might grasp these fundamental and crucial distinctions if he were to study