Enrique
Krauze

On Monday, Mexico celebrates the centennial of the birth of Octavio Paz. There have been public readings of his poetry and an international conference to discuss the ideas that stirred his imagination throughout his long life. Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, and for many Mexicans he is our country’s greatest writer.

The celebrations haven’t been unanimous, however, as the intellectual wars that he fought so vigorously in life continue to be waged in his memory —which appears destined to never rest in the “peace” that his name signifies.

Paz belonged to the group of writers born around the time of World War I and who were deeply marked by world events: the Russian Revolution, the collapse of Wall Street, the ascent of Fascism and Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Holocaust. In his youth he was an orthodox Marxist, and in 1937 he traveled to Spain in support of the Republic.

Although he would reject Socialist realism, later repudiate Stalinism and maintain his distance from the Cuban Revolution, Paz would long retain his faith in revolution as the true lever of social redemption, the only possible means for the positive transformation of history. As late as 1967, he would write that Marxism is “our point of view” and that the Revolution (with the capital letter ascribed to it in Mexican, and anarchist, tradition) was “anointed by the light of the idea, philosophy converted into action, lucid violence.”

But when Paz read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1974 (he was just turning 60) he had an epiphany. “Now we know,” he wrote, “that the splendor that seemed to us a new dawn was that of a blood-soaked pyre ... our errors in this respect have not been mere errors ... they were a sin in the ancient sense of the word, something that affects the entire being. ... This sin has stained us and fatally also stained our writings. ... I say this with sadness and humility.” He would dedicate the final 24 years of his life to washing away this “sin.”

Paz had almost been predestined for the cult of the Revolution. He was the grandson of a combative editor who, as a Liberal, had participated in the Liberal vs. Conservative wars of the 19th century and hung portraits of Georges Danton and Jean-Paul Marat, the French revolutionaries, in his library. His father was the personal emissary of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, to the United States.

Paz was faithful to his romantic heritage, trusting in the revolutionary power of poetry to reveal and transform the world. Unlike Pablo Neruda (another Walt Whitman devotee, like himself), Paz did not write the great poetic saga of America, but rather an impressive book of prose about his country: “El laberinto de la soledad” (“The Labyrinth of Solitude”). Published in 1950, it continues to be, for many, the mirror in which the Mexican contemplates the traits of his identity: the fascination with death and celebratory fiestas, his deep fears of being eternally defeated or conquered, the indigenous subsoil of Mexican culture and the hold of the old Spanish and Catholic tradition, his equivocal encounter with Western liberalism, and his nationalist and revolutionary commitment.

Although he was praised, beginning early in his youth, for his philosophical poetry, his reputation soared and his work expanded after “The Labyrinth.” He represented Mexico as a diplomat from 1945 to 1968: In Paris, he had a significant encounter with André Breton and surrealism; in India, where he was ambassador, he benefited from a confrontation with Indian culture.

Paz was also influenced by translations of works from farther east, from Japan and China. And he applied his creative energies not only to poetry but books of literary theory (“El arco y la lira” — “The Bow and the Lyre”) and ambitious treatises on the decline of the literary avant-garde (“Los hijos del limo” — “The Children of the Mire”). And he became a hero for Mexico’s rebellious youth when he bravely resigned as ambassador to India to protest the government’s massacre of students in Tlatelolco Plaza during the 1968 Olympic Games.

Paz believed that he saw, in the student rebellions in Mexico and across much of the world, the coming of the Revolution that he had long awaited. For a brief moment during those years, many young people, including myself, firmly shared his belief.

Then suddenly, to our surprise, the revolutionary poet of the left made a decisive ideological turn. He boldly criticized the ideological foundations of Russian communism (and by extension of the Communist parties of China and Cuba), listed its historical toll of lies, misery and crimes, and re-evaluated his views of democracy, moving to a social-democratic position.

In 1976 he founded the journal Vuelta, which became the voice of his struggle, publishing East European dissidents (like Andrei Sakharov, Adam Michnik and Solzhenitsyn himself) as well as many Latin American and European writers who shared his disenchantment with communism. Paz and his magazine also denounced Latin American military dictatorships, but not without criticizing the undemocratic tendencies of the Latin American guerrilla movements of the 1970s and 1980s.

It must be recalled that in those years (even more so than now), the Latin American left did not tolerate even minimal criticism of Cuba or what it called the “positive balance” afforded by East European communism. Thus Paz was denounced as a “reactionary” on campuses and in newspapers and academic journals; in 1984, an effigy of him was burned in front of the United States Embassy in Mexico City.

And yet his belligerence never wavered, perhaps because he saw it as a form of expiation. The first Nobel Prize in Literature to be awarded after the fall of the Berlin Wall went to him, the steadfast advocate of political freedom.

For 23 years, I stood alongside him at Vuelta in this interminable war, now being waged in the streets of Venezuela and in the struggles of those who believe in earthly and perfectible democracy, not in revolutionary redemption. Octavio Paz, for many, committed a heresy by choosing the wrong side; there are many who will not forgive him and would still burn him in effigy today.

The commemorations of his birth are certain to be polemical. But if his memory is never to be at peace, that was his destiny — and his badge of honor.