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an extraordinary creative impulse, a wind of renewal. The activity
thus released, as we might say at its own risk, - through the misfor–
tune, prejudice, or negligence of those who exercise power and who
could, but fail to, regulate such activity- develops at an accelerated
pace, and begins to infect its surroundings.
Does this mean that it is enough to remove the religious, politi–
cal, and moral hindrances of censorship, for genius to spring forth?
That once freedom reigns throughout their dominions, literature and
art immediately begin to produce masterpieces? Naturally it does not.
It simply means that when freedom does not exist, or is enfeebled,
human creativity is diminished or worn to the point of disappearance,
and literary and artistic works are mediocre and short-lived.
Let us cite one example . Why was the colonial literature of
Latin America so insistently poor that today we must seek, like a
needle in a haystack, one author from all those three-hundred years
whose still-living word we can read with some pleasure? For one Sor
Juana Ines de la Cruz! or one Concolorcorvo,2 how many hundreds
of indifferent poets and writers, obscure historians, garrulous play–
wrights lacking so much as one original idea? The literary poverty of
three centuries' duration was no accident, nor was it due to a defect
shared by our colonial versifiers and prose writers . The steamroller
of ecclesiastic censorship, which banned the novel as a genre on the
grounds that it was ungodly - the sole case in history of the absolute
prohibition of an entire literary form - and subjected all printed mat–
ter to police inspection in the search for signs of heterodoxy, turned
literary enterprise into a depersonalized and antiseptic ritual carried
out within fixed and rigid molds . From the start, spontaneity was
suppressed. Such servitude left the creator no choice but to orient his
imagination toward formal ostentation. As thinking for oneself was
highly risky and nearly impossible, the colonial writer had to be con–
tent, in the sphere of ideas, with respecting the established cliches
and commonplaces which dogma required, and with developing his
truly creative work in what was purely decorative and external: this
1.
(1648-1695): Mexican nun, poet, dramatist, and intellectual, she is considered
the last great author of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, and the greatest lyric
poet of the colonial period.
2. The pen name of the mid-18th century Peruvian satirist, Calixto Bustamante,
about whom little is known . He is thought to be the author of a satirical travel narra–
tive reflecting contemporary manners, considered a classical example of its genre.
