Octavio Paz and Intellectual Independence in Defense of Freedom and Democracy
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a writer with two facets (poet and essayist) who lived simultaneously in two 20th centuries – “the Mexican and the world’s, which did not always coincide” – and on three continents, according to historian Francisco Javier Garciadiego Dantán, president of Colegio de Mexico.
Paz – an advocate, when young, of the Mexican and Soviet revolutions – became disillusioned with both of them in the mid-20th century, and “always an attentive witness of the various periods, as well as a visionary due to his poetic perspective, he realized in the late 1960s that the world was about to face numerous revolts of every kind, the student rebellion being just the first one.”
According to Dantán, it is certain that “the Cuban revolution and, shortly after, the Sandinista revolution made him suspicious of this type of process, because he did not consider it a solution to man’s problems the last third of the 20th century: forsaking his old, primal rebellion, Paz began to commit himself to democratic demands.”
The course of the political involvement and positioning of the Mexican poet, essayist and diplomat was the subject of the conference Octavio Paz and Politics, given by Dantán on July 31, an event organized by IEA-USP and the Colegio de Mexico in celebration of the writer’s birth centenary.
The commentators of the conference were historian Carlos Guilherme Mota –director of the Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin Library, professor emeritus at USP’s School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (fflch) and the first director of the IEA-USP – and Celso Lafer – president of fapesp, professor at USP’s Law School and a former student of Octavio Paz at Cornell University in 1966, in a course on the theory and practice of poetry since Symbolism. The event was mediated by Jorge Schwartz, director of the Lasar Segall Museum and a professor at FFLCH-USP.
THE MEXICAN SCENE
Dantán began his exposition reminding the audience that Paz was born when Mexico’s historical 20th century, which started with the 1910 revolution, was four years old – practically the same moment that Europe’s historical 20th century was beginning, with the outbreak of the First World War.
According to Dantán, Paz’ childhood and youth took place in Mexican environments and only in 1937 did he become interested in what was happening abroad. “He lived his strictly Mexicans years within a family with close ties to the country’s politics and history.”
Ireneo Paz, the grandfather, was a military man born in 1836 who became directly involved in the political struggles of the 19th century, fighting the French intervention and becoming a follower of Porfírio Diaz (1830-1915), the military and political leader who controlled Mexico from 1876 to 1911, even during the period when he was not president. According to Dantán, Ireneo Paz was “more Porfirist than liberal and more militaristic than democratic.”
In turn, Octavio Ireneo, Paz’ father, “was a man devoured by his constant political defeats and his irrepressible taste for alcohol.” “Paz’ closeness to his grandfather surely sought to compensate the absence of the father.”
Even as a young man, the father “laid bare his political interests and soon also showed that they were different from Ireneo’s, the poet’s grandfather.” He ended up joining the forces of Emiliano Zapata, whose camps were a bit more south from Mixcoac, the village where the family lived.
Dantán outlined the political and cultural context of Octavio Paz’ adolescence and youth: “If his childhood was concurrent with the Revolution, his teen years coincided with years of extraordinary national and global instability.” This was the period of the Cristero War (a popular uprising against the anticlerical provisions of the Mexican Constitution) and of electoral violence. Internationally, it was the onset of the crisis of 1929, which “had enormous impacts on Mexico and on Paz’ family.”
While still in high school, Paz joined the presidential campaign of José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), a writer, educator and philosopher. Indeed, Vasconcelos “had shared some revolutionary experiences with Octavio Paz’ father,” explained Dantán.
He also explained that the defeat of Vasconcelism disillusioned the country’s youth and the severity of the 1929 crisis led many to foresee the demise of capitalism and democracy. It was in this climate and context, he said, that Paz and others of his generation began to sympathize with communist organizations and ideology. According to the historian, one of Paz’ first jobs was as a journalist at El Popular, the official newspaper of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, a pro-Soviet association of labor unions founded in 1936.
BEGINNINGS
According to Dantán, the onset of Paz’ political life coincided, chronologically and ideologically, with his poetic inception: “His magazine, Barandal, was openly pro-Soviet, as was his next publishing venture, the Notebooks of the Valley of Mexico.”
In 1933, he published his first book of poetry, Luna Silvestre, with seven poems on the subject of love. His next publication, in 1936, “was an overtly political poem called ¡No Pasarán!, on the recent breakout of the Spanish Civil War.”
The year 1937 was decisive in the poet’s life. He abandoned a career in law, married Elena Garro and published his second book of poetry, Raíz del Hombre, “in which he showed his two facets: a man committed to his time and an artist fully dedicated to his literature.”
“Motivated by the social policies of president Lázaro Cárdenas, Paz moved to the countryside of the state of Yucatán, to collaborate with a new literacy campaign.” According to Dantán, Paz was struck by the poverty of the 20th century Mayans and by the architectural and artistic sumptuousness of their historical counterparts. “Even then he showed his dual perception, the dichotomy that he would retain throughout life, between art and politics, between past and present.”
DISAPPOINTMENT
In 1937, Paz was invited to the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which would take place in Valencia, as Madrid was already being besieged by Franco’s troops. The League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (lear) was responsible for organizing the Mexican delegation. “Paz was not a member of the lear, but there was no doubt that the mere publication of ¡No Pasarán! justified his inclusion in the delegation.”
In Paz’ opinion, according Dantán, “his first contact with communist world politics [during the Congress] was enough to put him on the alert for its authoritarianism and intolerance. And the cruel censorship of André Gide was a harsh disappointment, although it still did not lead him to leave.”
“Paz returned from Spain intimately committed to the Republican group and to the policies of Lázaro Cardenas, especially the expropriation of oil companies in early 1938.” Since that time, Paz became a constant author in various literary magazines and in some journals linked to Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a pro‑Soviet Mexican communist.
However, the assassination of Trotsky, in August 1940, “led to the beginning of his disenchantment, which most certainly increased after his breakup with Pablo Neruda [in 1942],” who was then living in Mexico. “Paz stopped publishing in ‘leftist’ newspapers and began writing for the daily Novedades, owned by a renowned businessman with links to the post-revolutionary government.”
DIPLOMACY
At that time, Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship and settled in the United States until 1943. Soon after, he began his diplomatic career, “a situation that forced him to accelerate his withdrawal from communism.” He also began writing about international politics.
Commissioned in France from 1946 to 1951, he had contact with the Surrealists, some of whom, such as Breton and Artaud, he had met in Mexico. “The impact of Surrealism in his work is unquestionable and led him to move away from Mexican nationalist and revolutionary art.”
His years as a diplomat forced him to bury his ideological radicalism. Politics – and diplomacy in particular – started to become a professional responsibility, explained Dantán. It was then that Paz “began to distinguish reality from ideology, possibility from hope.”
This first stable job enabled him to “forget the agonies of day-to-day survival and write more regularly, but without haste.” The result was two of his greatest works: in 1946, Libertad Bajo Palabra, his first collection of poems; and, in 1947, the essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, a bold socio-psychological analysis of the nature of the Mexican man.”
THE EAST
1959 was a watershed year for Paz, when he published the definitive version of Libertad Bajo Palabra and once again left the country on a diplomatic mission, with a brief stay in Paris, and then on to Japan and India. “In the East, everything was discovery and experimentation. Undoubtedly, Paz acquired a second cultural perspective in India; more than that, he developed a new sensibility.”
“Overall, we may perhaps say that Paz was the first authentically universal Mexican intellectual, because Alfonso Reyes [1889-1959] was never interested in Oriental culture and Vasconcelos had a harsh relationship with Western culture.”
Paz’ diplomatic career ended abruptly in October 1968. When he learned of the cruel repression to the students who had gathered in the Plaza de Tlatelolco, he submitted his resignation to the post of ambassador in India. “Clearly, this was the greatest conflict in his entire political and intellectual biography. His resignation should be seen as a decisive element, one that redefined the relationship between the intellectuals and the Mexican government.”
This break allowed him “to devote more time to his poetry, to unfetter his essayistic work, and to have more freedom and independence in his political analyses.” He returned to Mexico two years later, after spending some time in American and European universities, “where his act of rebellion against the government earned him huge visibility and prestige.”
THE RETURN
Back in Mexico, Paz dedicated the rest of his life to writing and to having “a very active public life, with strong views on major national and international issues.”
He was one of those who defended deep and peaceful political and social changes. In 1971, he founded Plural magazine, dedicated to culture and politics and sponsored by the biggest Mexican newspaper, Excélsior.
In the early 1970s, Mexico “went through a serious moment of uncertainty: the political class did not know which way to go in the immediate future, while the opposition wavered between violence and independent and peaceful political organization.” Paz opted for the latter and, contradicting his nonpartisan profile, supported the creation of the Mexican Workers’ Party, which he soon left, “in view of differences of opinion since the beginning of the movement and of his lifelong aversion to partisan militancy.”
Dantán recalled that Paz’ definitive breakoff with the administration of president Luis Echeverría Álvarez occurred when, in mid-1976, the government used a labor dispute as a pretext to support a change of management in the Excélsior newspaper, which affected Plural magazine.
However, if Echeverría wanted to silence his critics, the effect was just the opposite: “Part of the newspaper staff founded the magazine Proceso, whose outlook was radically critical and personalist; in turn, Paz and his colleagues from Plural founded Vuelta. The two groups eventually diverged, as Proceso exacerbated its positions and Paz and Vuelta devoted themselves to criticizing not only authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in Latin America, starting with Mexico’s, but also the regimes and opposition movements of the left.”
In fact, the fundamental point of contention was whether to support or criticize Cuba: “The Mexican intellectual milieu virtually split in two, and would remain so until Paz’ death; actually, the division has even transcended his death and remains to this day.”
CLASHES
Dantán mentioned some episodes that exemplify the degree of confrontation between the two groups. For instance, when Paz turned 70, the Televisa network made a series of programs about him and the government organized a warm-hearted celebration. On that occasion, “left-wing intellectuals and politicians criticized the affinity between Paz and Televisa, as well as his sympathy for president De la Madrid.”
During the 1980s, according to Dantán, Paz and his group stressed that the ideology of revolutionary nationalism, characterized by attempts to redefine Mexico’s social structure through State-driven economic policies, was becoming increasingly anachronistic vis-à-vis the changes the world was undergoing: “They sought to delimit the Mexican State, an essential step for the country’s democratization.”
Criticism of Paz increased shortly after, when he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair and, in his speech, criticized the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. “The response from the Mexican left was astonishingly violent.”
In 1988, he was criticized by the left for having celebrated the emergence of an electoral opposition in Mexico and for denouncing Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ (candidate of the situation) refusal to recognize the official results of the elections, which indicated his defeat and were considered a fraud by the left. At the time, according to Dantán, Paz pointed out that the democratization of Mexico would not happen if the left was victorious, because “its government project seemed more like a threat.”
The 1990s were the years of Paz’ world acclaim and in 1990 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This period was also marked by more controversies and by Paz’ physical decline. In 1989, his criticism of Fidel Castro, for “his 30 years of absolute rule over the regime,” spurred additional conflicts.
The early 1990s also saw Paz’ last public debate, regarding government support for the “Winter Colloquium,” which saw a polarization between those who held liberal positions and favored a limited State, and those who oscillated between leftist policies and State intervention. “For Paz, it was a matter of calling into question the permanence of the ‘philanthropic ogre’.” The consequences of the debate ended up involving Paz, who resigned from the honorary position he held in the National Council for Culture and the Arts, “an agency created by president Carlos Salinas de Gortari to draw intellectuals and artists closer to the government.”
However, in this final stage of life, “hope in rebellion resurfaced in him for a moment; understandably, the son of a Zapatista welcomed the outbreak of the Neozapatista rebellion in southeastern Mexico in early 1994.”
INDEPENDENCE
In his comments after the conference, Carlos Guilherme Mota said that Dantán presented “a new view of Octavio Paz, revealing how he transitioned between two centuries, enlightening our cultures with intense activity and the spirit of independence.”
“Besides the ever-present social issue, Paz’ work impresses us with its concern for history, sociology, poetry, language and the sophisticated insertion of social life and daily life in the larger structures of his time, which is still is our time,” said Mota. He stressed that “in addition to the legacies of the revolution in Mexico, Paz, better than anyone, not only knew how to establish a dialectic between major world events and their refractions in Latin America, but also to converse with the leading scholars and writers of his time.”
“He expanded – as few ever did – the very concepts of culture, criticism and history by redeeming, studying, criticizing, combating or approving the positions of great reviewers, writers and cultural producers.” At the same time, Paz’ criticism of “dogmatic Marxism, populism and authoritarianism in general were the reason for much misunderstanding and harsh criticism,” said Mota, for whom Paz’ main lesson is a commitment to intellectual independence.
Celso Lafer, in his comments, said that Dantán, by discussing the times and places in which Paz lived and worked, “provided a key to understanding the relationship between the poet and politics.”
Lafer said Paz dealt not only with all the dimensions of the Mexican circumstance, as his father and grandfather had done, but, unlike his forebears, he also dealt with the world, and “with a comprehensiveness, as our lecturer noted, that was lacking in two great Mexican intellectuals from an earlier generation, José Vasconcelos and Alfonso Reyes.”
REBELLIOUSNESS
Lafer emphasized Dantán’s qualification of Paz as “a rebellious man and an independent writer.” This suggests the writer “was a rebel, because he was never a conformist, yet underlying his political analysis is a game of revolt, rebellion, revolution and reformism, a framework that helps to explain his course of action.”
According to Lafer, “Paz’ political analysis is linked to his status as a poet. This stems from his awareness that the verbal contract precedes the social contract; that is why political analysis implies restoration of meanings and a critique of the masks of power and politics, much like a hall of mirrors.”
To illustrate with words from Paz himself, Lafer read an excerpt from the writer’s lecture about democracy in Seville, in November 1991: “I'm not a historian or a sociologist or a political scientist: I am a poet. My writings in prose are closely associated with my literary vocation and my artistic preferences. I prefer to speak of Marcel Duchamp or Juan Ramon Jimenes than of Locke and Montesquieu. Political philosophy has always interested me, but I never tried nor would try to write a book about justice, freedom or the art of government. Nevertheless, I published many essays and articles on the state of democracy in our time: the external and internal dangers that threatened and continue to threaten it, the doubts and ordeals it faces.”
According to Lafer, Paz was passionate about freedom, “because, as he stated in his acceptance speech of the Tocqueville Award in 1989, he early on understood that the defense of poetry is inseparable from the defense of freedom and that the latter, in a dialectic of complementariness, requires democracy: “Without freedom democracy is despotism; without democracy freedom is a chimera.”
English revision by Carlos Malferrari