José Revueltas (1914-1976): a Political Biography

Abstract

Jose Revueltas, author and independent militant of Mexico's left, whose political and literary militancy extend over forty years of Mexican history, died in April 1976 in Mexico City at age of sixty-two. Revueltas had committed most of his life to important struggle within Mexican left for formation of ideological arm of proletarian socialism. This struggle often found its way into Revueltas' fiction, where his contributions to modern Mexican novel are significant. Octavio Paz called him the purest man in Pablo Neruda called him synthesis of Mexican soul. And for those of us who called him compafiero, his death brings to an end a life of leadership, love, and sacrifice within oftentimes brilliant struggle he waged for development of a rational and legitimate rev-olutionary consciousness among working class and oppressed peoples of Mexico. It is difficult to separate Revueltas author and Revueltas active militant. I remember having attempted to do just that while preparing my doctoral dissertation back in 1971. The thesis suffered from self-conscious pedantry and sophistry of fulfilling an academic requirement, and I remember straining and manipulating my literary criticism so as not to offend Harvard's New Critics. In so doing, I committed a great disservice not only to intellectual integrity or to Revueltas himself but, ironically enough, to those works I had chosen to examine on their own terms. I remember that I argued in my dissertation that Revueltas' fiction approached a rigid Stalinist socialist realism during his years of militancy within Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM) and that his two expulsions from PCM (1943 and 1960) produced an embracing of a kind of decadent existentialist humanism. And I suppose that even now an innocent reading of his works would lead one to sustain this argument. Nevertheless, Revueltas was never a rigid Stalinist nor a tragic Sartrean. In order to understand fully dramatic impact and ideological tension of Revueltas' fiction, one must see that Revueltas' literary works are quite simply part of his political arsenal in an ongoing and ever-intense participation in intra-leftist dialogue in Mexico. The essential informing motives of Revueltas' political life, and therefore also of his literary works, are: denunciation of bourgeois class conscious-

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