POETRY, SOCIETY, STATE

There is no more pernicious and barbarous prejudice than that of attributing to the state powers in the sphere of artistic creation. Political power is sterile, because its essence is the domination of men, whatever the ideology that may mask it. Although there has never been absolute freedom of expression-freedom is always defined in relation to certain obstacles and within certain limits: we are free in relation to this or that-it would not be difficult to show that where power invades every human activity, art languishes or is transformed into a servile and mechanical activity. An artistic style is a living thing, a continuous invention within a certain direction. Never imposed from without, born of the profound tendencies of society that direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, as is the growth of the tree's branches. On the other hand, the official style is the negation of creative spontaneity: great empires tend to have a leveling effect on man's changing face and to transform it into a mask that is repeated indefinitely. Power immobilizes, stabilizes life's variety in a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, or theatrical and, in the end, simply monotonous. "I am the state" is a formula that signifies the alienation of human faces, supplanted by the stony features of an abstract self that is changed, until the end of time, into the model of a whole society. The style that, like a melody, advances and weaves new combinations, utilizing some of the same elements, is degraded into mere repetition.
There is nothing more urgent than the need to dispel the confusion that has been established between the so-called "communal" or "collective" art and the official art. One is art that is inspired by the beliefs and ideals of a society; the other, art subjected to the rules of a tyrannical power. Diverse ideas and spiritual tendencies-the cult of the polis, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and so on-have been incarnated in powerful states and empires. But it would be a mistake to regard Gothic or Romanesque art as creations of the papacy, or the sculpture of Mathura as the expression of the empire founded by Kanishka. Political power can channel, utilize, and-in certain cases-stimulate an artistic current. It can never create it. What is more: In the long run it generally has a sterilizing effect. Art is always nourished from the social language. That language is, likewise and above all, a vision of the world. Like the arts, states live by that language and sink their roots in that vision of the world. The papacy did not create Christianity, but the other way around; the liberal state is the offshoot of the bourgeoisie, not die latter of me former. The examples can be multiplied. And when a conqueror imposes his vision of the world on a people-for example: Islam in Spain-the foreign state and its whole culture remain as alien superimpositions until the people have truly made that religious or political conception their own. Only then, that is to say: when the new vision of the world becomes a shared belief and a common language, will there be an art or a poetry in which society recognizes itself. Thus, the state can impose one vision of the world, prevent others from emerging, and exterminate those that obscure it, but it lacks the fecundity to create such a vision. And the same thing happens with art: the state does not create it, it can hardly encourage it without corrupting it and, more frequently, as soon as it tries to utilize it, it deforms it, suffocates it, or converts it into a mask.
Egyptian and Aztec art, the art of the Spanish baroque and the Grand Century of France-to cite the best-known examples-seem to belie these ideas. They all coincide with the noonday of absolute power. Thus, it is not strange that many see in their light a reflection of the state's splendor. A brief examination of some of these cases will help to correct the error.
Like every art of the so-called "ritualistic civilizations," Aztec art is religious. Aztec society was submerged in the atmosphere, alternately somber and luminous, of the sacred. Every act was impregnated with religion. The state itself was an expression of it. Moctezuma was more than a chief: he was a priest. War was a rite: the representation of the solar myth in which Huitzilopochtli, the invincible Sun, armed with his xinhcoatl, defeated Coyolxauhqui and his column of stars, the Centzonhiznahua. The same quality characterized other human activities: politics and art, commerce and artisanship, foreign and family relations issued from the matrix of the sacred. Public and private life were two sides of the same vital current, not separate worlds. Dying or being born, going to war or to a festival were religious acts. Therefore, it is a grave error to classify Aztec art as a state or political art. The state and politics had not achieved their autonomy; power was still tinged with religion and magic. Aztec art does not in fact express the tendencies of the state but those of religion. One will say that this is a play on words, since the religious nature of the state does not limit but rather strengthens its power. The observation is unjust: a religion that is incarnated in a state, as occurs with the Aztec, is not the same as a state that is served by religion, as happens with the Romans. The difference is so important that without it one could not understand the Aztec policy toward Cortes. And one thing more: Aztec art is, literally, religion. Sculpture, poem, and painting are not "works of art"; neither are they representations, but rather incarnations, living manifestations of the sacred. And similarly: the absolute, total, and totalitarian character of the Mexican state is not political but religious. The state is religion: chiefs, warriors, and simple mecehuales are religious categories. The forms in which Aztec art is expressed, as well as the political expressions, constitute a sacred language shared by the whole society. (l)

The contrast between Romans and Aztecs shows the difference between sacred and official art. The art of the Romans aspires to the sacred. But if the passage from the sacred to the profane, from the mythical to the political -as is seen in ancient Greece or at the end of the Middle Ages-is natural, the leap in the opposite direction is not. In reality, what we are dealing with here is not a religious state but rather a state religion. Augustus or Nero, Marcus Aurelius or Caligula, "delights of mankind" or "out-and-out monsters," are feared or beloved beings, but they are not gods. And the images with which they aim to make themselves eternal are not divine either. Imperial art is an official art. Although Virgil has his eye on Homer and Greek antiquity, he knows that the original unity has been broken forever. The urban desert of the metropolis follows the universe of federations, alliances, and rivalries of the classic polis; the state religion replaces the communal religion; the inner attitude of the philosophers supplants the old piety, which worships at the public altars, as in the age of Sophocles; the public rite becomes an official function, and the real religious attitude is expressed as solitary contemplation; philosophical and mystical sects proliferate. The splendor of the age of Augustus-and, later, of the Antonines must not cause us to forget that there are brief periods of rest and respite. But neither the learned benevolence of some men, nor the will of others-be they named Augustus or Trajan-can resuscitate the dead. An official art, at its best and highest moments Roman art is an art of the court, aimed at a select minority. The attitude of the poets of that time can be exemplified in these verses by Horace: 

Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.

Favete linguis: carmina non prius

audita Musarum sacerdos

Virginibus puerisque canto ...

As to the Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its relation to the house of Austria: almost all the artistic forms of that period are born at the moment when Spain opens up to Renaissance culture, feels the influence of Erasmus, and participates in the tendencies that prepare the way for the modem epoch (La Celestina, Nebrija, Garcilaso, Vives, the Valdes brothers, and so on). Even the artists who belong to what Valbuena Prat calls the "mystic reaction" and the "national period," whose common attribute is opposition to the Europeanism and "modernism" of the epoch of the emperor, merely develop the tendencies and forms that Spain appropriated some years earlier. Saint John imitates Garcilaso (possibly through the "Garcilaso a lo divino" of Sebastian de Cordoba); Fray Luis de Leon cultivates Renaissance poetic forms exclusively, and in his thought Plato and Christianity are allied; Cervantes-figure between two epochs and example of a secular writer in a society of clerics and theologians - absorbs the Erasmist ferments of the sixteenth century," (2) besides being directly influenced by the culture and free life of Italy. The state and the church channel, limit, prune, and utilize those tendencies, but do not create them. And if attention is focused on Spain's most purely national creation-the theater-the astonishing thing is, precisely, its freedom and spontaneity within the conventions of the time. In short, the Austrian monarchy did not create Spanish art and, on the other hand, it separated Spain from the incipient modernity.

Nor does the French example show convincing proof of the supposed relation of cause and effect between the centralization of political power and artistic greatness. As in the case of Spain, the "classicism" of the period of Louis XIV was brought about by the extraordinary philosophical, political, and vital unrest of the sixteenth century. The intellectual freedom of Rabelais and Montaigne, the individualism of the highest figures of the lyric-from Marot and Scève to Jean de Sponde, Desportes, and Chassignet, and including Ronsard and d' Aubigné-the eroticism of Louise Labe and the "Blasonneurs du corps féminin" bear witness to spontaneity, ease, and free creation. The same must be said of the other arts and even the very life of that individualistic and anarchical century. Nothing could be further from an official style, imposed by a state, than the art of the Valois period, which is invention, sensuality, whim, movement, passionate and lucid curiosity. This current penetrates the seventeenth century. But everything changes as soon as the monarchy is consolidated. After the founding of the Academy, poets not only have to contend with the vigilance of the Church, but also with that of a State grown grammatical. The sterilization process culminates, years later, with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the triumph of the Jesuit party. From this perspective alone the dispute over Le Cid and Corneille's difficulties, Moliere's troubles and bitterness, La Fontaine's solitude and, finally, Racine's silence-a silence that merits something more than a simple psychological explanation and seems to me like a symbol of France's spiritual situation in the "Grand Century"-acquire true meaning. These examples show that the arts must fear rather than be grateful for a protection that ends by suppressing them on the pretext of giving them guidance. The Sun King's "classicism" sterilized France. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the romanticism, realism, and symbolism of the nineteenth century are a profound negation of the spirit of the "Grand Century" and an attempt to resume the free tradition of the sixteenth.

Ancient Greece reveals that communal art is spontaneous and free. It is impossible to compare the Athenian polis with the Caesarean state, the papacy, the absolute monarchy, or modern totalitarian states. The supreme authority of Athens is the assembly of citizens, not a remote group of bureaucrats supported by the army and the police. The violence with which the tragedy and the Old Comedy treat of the affairs of the polis helps to explain the attitude of Plato, who desired "the intervention of the state in the freedom of poetic creation." One has only to read the tragedians--especially Euripides --or Aristophanes to note the incomparable freedom and grace of these artists. That freedom of expression was grounded on political liberty. And it may even be said that the root of the Greeks' conception of the world was the sovereignty and freedom of the polis. "The same year that Aristophanes staged his Clouds," says Burckhardt in his History of Greek Culture, "there appeared the earliest political memoir surviving anywhere on earth, On the Athenian State." Political reflection and artistic creation live in the same climate. Painters and sculptors enjoyed similar freedom, within the limitations of their calling, and the conditions under which they were employed. Unlike what occurs in our own time, the politicians of that period had the good sense to abstain from legislating on artistic styles.

Greek art participated in the debates of the city because the very constitution of the polis required citizens' free opinion on public affairs. A "political" art can only spring up where there is the possibility of expressing political opinions, that is, where freedom of speech and thought prevails. In this sense, Athenian art was "political," but not in the base contemporary acceptance of the word. Read The Persians to learn what it is to view one's adversary with eyes undefiled by the distortions of propaganda. And Aristophanes' ferocity was always unleashed against his fellow citizens; the extremes he resorted to in order to ridicule his enemies were part of the nature of Old Comedy. This political belligerence of art was born of freedom. No one thought of persecuting Sappho because she sang about love instead of the struggles of the city. It was necessary to wait until the sectarian and shabby twentieth century to know this kind of a disgrace.

Gothic art was not the work of popes or emperors, but of the cities and religious orders. The same may be said of the typical intellectual institution of the Middle Ages, the university. Like the latter, the cathedral was the creation of the urban communes. It has often been said that in their vertical thrust those churches express the Christian aspiration toward the hereafter. It must be added that if the direction of the building, tense and seemingly thrown to heaven, incarnates the meaning of medieval society, its structure reveals the composition of that same society. Indeed, everything is thrown upward, toward heaven; but, at the same time, each part of the edifice has a life of its own, individuality and character, but that plurality does not break the unity of the whole. The arrangement of the cathedral seems like a living materialization of that society in which, against the backdrop of monarchical and feudal power, communities and guilds form a complicated solar system of federations, leagues, pacts, and contracts. The free spontaneity of the communes, not the authority of popes and emperors, gives Gothic art its double movement: on the one hand, thrown upward like an arrow; on the other, spread out horizontally, sheltering and covering but not oppressing every genus and species and individual in creation. The great art of the papacy is truly that of the baroque period and its typical representative is Bernini.

The relations between the state and artistic creation depend, in each case, on the nature of the society to which they belong. But in general-insofar as it is possible to reach conclusions in a sphere so vast and contradictory historical examination corroborates the fact that not only has the state never been the creator of an art of real value, but that each time it tries to transform art into a tool for its own purposes, it ends by denaturalizing and degrading that art. Thus, "art for the few" is almost always the bold answer of a group of artists who, openly or with caution, oppose an official art or the decomposition of the social language. Gongora in Spain, Seneca and Lucan in Rome, Mallarme before the Philistines of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, are examples of artists who, affirming their solitude and repudiating the public of their time, achieve a communication that is the highest to which a creator can aspire: the communication with posterity. Thanks to their efforts, language is not dispersed as a jargon or petrified in a formula but concentrated, acquiring consciousness of itself and its powers of liberation.

Their hermetism-never completely impenetrable, but always open to the one who will venture to cross the undulant and spiny wall of words-is like that of the seed. Immured within it sleeps the life to come. Centuries after their death, the obscurity of these poets becomes light. And their influence is so profound that, more than poets of poems, they can be called poets or creators of poets. The phoenix, the pomegranate, and the Eleusinian corn always figure on their escutcheon.

Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre

Appendix I

(1) This is not the place to make a closer examination of the nature of Aztec society and to ferret out the true significance of its art. Let it suffice to note that the dual organization of the society corresponds to the dualism of the religion (the agrarian cults of the ancient towns of the valley and the typically Aztec warrior gods). Moreover, we know that the Aztecs almost always used foreign vassals as artisans and builders. AII this causes us to suspect that we are in the presence of an art and a religion that, by the accumulation and superimposition of their own and alien elements, conceal an inner schism. There is nothing similar in Mayan art at its height, in "Olmec" art or that of Teotihuacan, where the unity of the forms is free and spontaneous, not conceptual and external, as in the divinity Coatlicue. The living and natural line of the reliefs of Palenque-or the severe geometry of Teotihuacan permit us to envisage an undivided religious consciousness, a vision of the world that has evolved naturally and not by the accumulation, superimposition, and reo arrangement of disparate elements. Or rather: Aztec art tends toward a syncretism, not fully realized, of opposite conceptions of the world, while that of the more ancient cultures is merely the natural development of a single and unique vision. And this is another of the barbarous traits of Aztec society in comparison with the ancient civilizations of Middle America.

2 Angel Valbuena Prat, Historia de la literatura espanola (1946).