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do not favor unconditional support for the guerrillas, because
theirs is a very confused, ideologically heterogeneous alliance . I
think those involved ought to go beyond the murders and repres–
sion one side commits and the terrorism the other side indulges
in, to enter into negotiation and to seek a solution through elec–
tions . While I have no confidence in Latin American intellectuals,
I have complete confidence in the peoples of Latin America.
IS:
In some of your recent writings , above all the book you published
in Puerto Rico, we have learned about your growing attachment
to Camus and your drifting away from Sartre. This is related to
your ideas on ideology, so would you tell us about this process of
attachment and distancing?
MVL:
The book you mention is a collection of articles I published
over the course of some twenty years. It shows, I think, a pattern
that begins with my almost unconditional adherence to Sartre's
thesis about the writer's commitment, about literature as a weapon
capable of producing virtually immediate social and political ef–
fects. Camus's ideas seemed to me, to the contrary, lyrical and
even, at certain moments of my life, deceptive. Later on, after a
lot of stumbling around, after a lot of mistakes, I began to grow
disillusioned with Sartre's theses. Reality itself gave the lie to a
goodly number of his theories, and at the same time Camus's the–
ses suddenly took on new vigor and turned out to be very valid
answers to a series of concerns of a political and ethical nature. I
think Camus was very lucid with regard to two things: the first
was that history is not everything . That is, to try to explain hu–
man predicaments exclusively by means of history is insufficient :
man is not only history but something more. The purely historic
vision of reality and of human problems is incomplete and always
leads one to incomplete solutions to those problems. The second is
the danger of ideology. I think that in this matter Camus was ex–
traordinarily lucid. The danger of a purely intellectual, abstract
vision must cut reality down so it will fit into its patterns. But real–
ity is always more complex, richer. The only way in which you
can impose a pattern on a reality that rejects it is through violence.
I think that there we can find the history of authoritarianism and
totalitarianism in our time. That deformation of ideas turns ideas
into what Marx called fetishes, fetishes that eventually turn
against men and enslave them . In Camus the problem really takes
on its true dimension when he talks about ethics. The ends do not
justify the means: the means are the only justification of the ends.,
IS:
I'm going to change the subject radically to ask you if you think
