Redeemers (31 page)

Headed by the older Monsiváis, these young men (David Huerta, Héctor Manjarrez, Héctor Aguilar Camín, Carlos Pereyra, and myself) applied the word “liberal” to Paz's new political positions as, to them, an obvious stigma and they spoke pejoratively of formal liberties, rule of law, freedom of expression, and democracy. They were convinced that, in the revolutionary Mexico of the 1970s, these anachronistic emphases had no place. It was a matter of almost literally “expelling liberals from the discussion.”

In an unsigned article in
Plural
, “The Criticism of the Parrots,” Paz responded with a pair of strong “counterpunches.” He reminded his critics that even the great theoreticians of Marxism (from Marx and Engels themselves to Kolakowski and Kosik and including Rosa Luxemburg) never insulted the ideas of freedom of expression and democracy. And he reminded them that their ability to freely publish opinions contradicted their denigration of “freedom of expression.” Their anger against the system led them into careless assertions. Their “point of view was Marxism”—as had been Paz's in the 1960s, and they wanted radical change. Paz, on the other hand, had turned away from many of his illusions. This duel on the printed page was the first clear indication of a rupture between Octavio Paz and the Generation of '68.

 

IT WAS
true that Paz had become “reformist” but he was not really a “liberal.” He would never lose a measure of respect for the political system he had served. To deny that history was to deny the Mexican Revolution. He was, in both a cultural and biological sense, a son of the Mexican Revolution. The “system,” he affirmed, had produced economic achievements, educational progress, and “very important” cultural and social advances. And in the political sphere, given the chronic oscillation between anarchy and authoritarian militarism in Latin America, it was no small thing to have reached “a compromise between dictatorship and
caudillismo
.” Such a compromise was the essence of the PRI, which, with all its defects, was “not an appendix of imperialism and the bourgeoisies.” Nevertheless, if the objective was to construct “a democratic socialism based on our history,” it had to be sought outside the PRI. His motto was “a popular movement along with democratization.”

The word
democratización
but not “democracy” frequently appears in his writings of that time. What did he mean by it? Most of all he meant full freedom for public demonstrations, uncensored expression, political participation and criticism, liberties that the PRI had violated (or corrupted with payoffs) for decades and crushed in the repression of 1968. “Democratization” for Paz meant, above all, creating a space for words. Significantly, he never used the term “vote,” he never referred to elections, nor did he criticize the control of the PRI over their so-called elections. He did not believe in Western democracy.

But he did believe that, for any debate on ideas to be honest and fruitful, writers had to maintain “their distance from the prince,” by which he meant the government. Paz understood (as did Cosío Villegas) that his personal dependence on governmental philanthropy had inhibited his ability to criticize. Power had to be criticized in Mexico, in Latin America. It was the theme of our time. In May 1971, denouncing the false “confessions” attributed to the poet Heberto Padilla by the Cuban government, he had written:

 

Our time is marked by a plague of authoritarianism. If Marx criticized capitalism, we have to criticize the state and the great contemporary bureaucracies, those of the East as well as those of the West. A criticism that we Latin Americans should complete with another of an historical and political nature: the criticism of an exceptional government by an exceptional man, that is to say, criticism of the
caudillo
, that Hispano-Arab inheritance.

 

Paz saw the task as immense. It was not enough for the writer to resist the seduction of power. (Paz preferred the term “writer” [
escritor
] to the word “intellectual” [
intelectual
]. There was another, more incisive power: “the fascination of orthodoxy.” And, starting from this assertion, Paz, for the first time (in the October 1972 issue of
Plural
) hints at a direct criticism of the central myth of his century and his life, the Revolution:

 

The history of modern literature, from the German and English romantics till our own day, is the story of a long unfortunate passion for politics. From Coleridge to Mayakowski, the Revolution has been the great Goddess, the eternal Beloved and the great Whore of poets and novelists.

 

The criticism poured into the poetry of
El cántaro roto
has become movement and action. Paz had criticized power as personified, each avatar filling the role in turn of the “fat chieftain”: the Tlatoani, the Spanish priest, the viceroy, the
caudillo
, the president, the banker, the corrupt political leader. Now he would begin to exercise a dissident form of criticism, of ideologies and orthodoxy, of the Revolution itself.

 

WHILE A
sector of Mexican and Latin American intellectuals dreamed of resorting to (or would actually conduct) the “criticism of arms” or else entrust “the weapons of criticism” to the comandante of the Cuban Revolution, Gabriel Zaid—who had published a poem against Díaz Ordaz—was a solitary dissident. After the “mini-Tlatelolco” of June 10, 1971, however, even the director of
Siempre!
did not dare to publish Zaid's assertion that “the only historic criminal is Luis Echeverría.” Zaid resigned in protest and some months later became a member of the editorial board of
Plural.
Octavio Paz had called for criticism of the Mexican political pyramid and the need for finding an alternative model of development. A poet and essayist of considerable and original talent, Zaid (in his monthly column, “Moebius Strip”) addressed both issues. His articles, elegant as theorems—later collected in his book
El progreso improductivo
(Improductive Progress)
—
asserted that the continued existence of poverty in Mexico demonstrated the failure of the statist model of modernization.

A new project had to be designed (as Paz had insisted) and Zaid offered various possibilities meant to affect Mexico's huge population of rural and urban poor. Among them were ideas like support for microbusinesses, the establishment of a bank for the impoverished (a direct foreshadowing of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, which would earn its founder, Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006), and the direct payment of cash to members of the poorest part of the population, with most of it going directly to women (an idea accepted in the 1990s by the government, to become a social program acclaimed both nationally and abroad). Once adopted, these ideas of Zaid seemed totally natural measures.

 

ANOTHER SORT
of political criticism demanded by Paz was the criticism of dogma. Aggrieved by the twofold assault of 1968 and 1971, attracted by the images and the ideas of Che Guevara, a portion of Mexican youth was growing more and more impatient and moving toward armed insurrection. Paz saw in these young people the very image of his high school comrades in the 1930s—“boys of the middle class who transform their obsessions and personal fantasies into ideological fantasies in which ‘the end of the world' assumes the paradoxical form of a proletarian revolution . . . without the proletariat.”

Paz used Marxist categories to criticize the Latin American guerrilla movements. He considered them an anachronistic version of the “Blanquism” repudiated by Marx and Engels. (Louis Blanqui was a nineteenth-century French revolutionary who championed—and devoted his life to—violent uprisings against established power.)

 

Perhaps it is not completely correct to call these Latin-American extremists “blanquistas.” Luis Blanqui was a romantic revolutionary who belongs to the prehistory of revolution (though some of his theses show a disturbing resemblance to Leninism). In any case, the ideology of the Latin-Americans is a “blanquism” that does not recognize itself. Perhaps more precisely it is a terrorist reading of Marxism.

 

The new Mexican left, unlike in the 1930s, was not made up of union members, the Communist Party, progressive groups within the regime (of whom there were many under President Lázaro Cárdenas), and, in lesser number, by artists and intellectuals, The new Mexican left was formed, above all, of middle-class, university-trained young people (and this was its great novelty). Paz would characterize them (and in some sense address them) with these words written in 1973:

 

The left is the natural heir of the movement of 1968 but, in recent years, it has not been committed to democratic organization but to the representation—drama and farce—of the revolution, using the universities as their theaters. Perverted by many years of Stalinism, influenced by Castroist
caudillismo
and Guevarist blanquism, the Mexican left has not been able to recover its original democratic vocation. Moreover, in recent years, it has not been distinguished for its political imagination: what is its concrete program and what does it propose now—not in some improbable future—to Mexicans? . . . Incapable of elaborating a program of viable reforms, they struggle between nihilism and millenarianism, activism and utopianism. The spasmodic and the contemplative modes: two ways to escape from reality. The road to reality passes through democratic organization. The public plaza—not the cloister or the catacombs—is the site for politics.

 

IN OCTOBER
1973, Paz published a protest against the CIA-sponsored military coup in Chile. His rejection of Latin American militarism is explicit, continuous, and total. He includes a sentence on the “bloody hands of Nixon and Kissinger” and fully supports the (demolished) democratic regime in Chile but he also gives more space to a criticism of leftist extremism, which he accuses of contributing to the fall of Allende by alienating the middle class and small businessmen. The panorama of politics in Latin America he sees as growing darker and more radical. On the one hand are the “reactionary military dictatorship” in Chile, populist militarism in Peru, techno-military dictatorship in Brazil, and, at the other extreme, the growth of the Guevarist guerrilla movements. “Latin America is a continent of rhetorical and violent men.” Despite the tragedy of Chile—or due to it—he is convinced that “socialism without democracy is not socialism.”

In the winter of 1973, in the home of Harvard professor Harry Levin, Paz met the Russian poet in exile Joseph Brodsky (who had been expelled from Russia a year earlier for his dissident opinions). It was an encounter that catalyzed Paz's own political reorientation. His disenchantment with the Soviet Union—which perhaps began in 1937—had been gradual but steadily growing stronger. Now he met with the reality of a writer who had been persecuted in the Soviet Union. Their conversation turned to a discussion of Marxist authoritarianism. Paz brought up Hegel, and Brodsky said that he thought the problem dated back to Descartes, “who divided man in two and substituted the soul for the ego.” To the Americans, Paz remembered, the use of the word “soul” seemed odd. Paz commented to Brodsky, “All that you've said reminds me of Chestov, the Christian philosopher of the absurd, Berdyaev's maestro.” Brodsky was very moved: “What a pleasure to meet someone
here
who remembers Chestov! Here, at the heart of scientism, empiricism and logical positivism . . . This could only happen with a Latin-American poet!”

Brodsky's living testimony on the fate of writers in Russia greatly disturbed Paz. Soon after he would read Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago
. The reading closed the cycle of change for him and began a complementary cycle of contrition. On March 31 he would be sixty years old. During four nights in February he wrote a series of short poems titled
Aunque es de noche
(Although It Is Night), an anti-Stalinist suite. “Stalin had no soul: he had history / An uninhabited Marshal with no face, servant of the void.” The reading of Solzhenitsyn had freed him: “Solzhenitsyn writes. Our dawn is moral: writing in flames, flower of conflagration, flower of truth.” But he, Paz, blames himself: “Coward, I never saw evil right in front of me.”

The poems appeared in the March issue of
Plural
, accompanied by an essay central to his later work: “Powder of That Mud” (both words are plural in the Spanish:
Polvos de aquellos lodos
). More than an essay, it is a trial and a judgment on Bolshevism and Marxism, on his former “point of view,” and a severe judgment on himself. “That mud” is his, his youthful reading, his fixed beliefs, the truths not seen, the truths never spoken. The text begins with an epigram from Montaigne: “J'ai souvent ouy dire que la couardise est mere de cruauté.” (“I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty.”). With obsessive exactitude, he remembers—as if to redeem himself before himself and the tribunal of history—that he had denounced Stalin's camps in 1951 and that he had been subjected to accusations by orthodox Stalinists since the 1940s (when he had criticized the socialist aesthetic and quarreled with Neruda). They had dubbed him a cosmopolite, a formalist, a Trotskyist, and then there had been the more recent accusations: CIA agent, “liberal intellectual,” “structuralist at the service of the bourgeoisie.” But the recounting alone did not console him. As a result of his intense conversation with Brodsky, and in order to situate Solzhenitsyn intellectually in a tradition of dissidence (as well as, more modestly, himself), Paz reviews the tradition of “Russian spirituality” relating Solzhenitsyn (and Brodsky) to Chestov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Dostoyevsky, and Soloviev, all Christian critics of the modern era. He is moved by the moral force of that tradition but also stresses his own “tradition” (Blake, Thoreau, Nietzsche) and especially “those who were irreducible and incorruptible—Breton, Russell, and Camus and some few others, some dead and some living who did not yield nor have they yielded to the totalitarian seduction of communism and fascism or the comfort of the consumer society.” Did Paz consider himself to be among “those few others”? He will, by the end of the essay.