Lo fugitivo permanece y dura. Los materiales de trabajo de la revista Mito (1955-1962)

Abstract

In the Colombian cultural sphere, in the mid-twentieth century, the magazine Mito (1955-1962) is a fundamental discursive space to grasp and interpret tensions, contradictions and possible perspectives to face our National Crisis. The clues that reveal this crisis are found in those texts that Mito calls working materials and that appear throughout the forty-two issues of the magazine. The study of the meaning of religion, society and eroticism in such materials, while revealing the ethical foundation that sustains Mito's editorial project, points out the political sense of such particular type of texts. Thus, and through Gaitán Durán's nexus with the humanism of Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, and by discarding the prejudice that considers Mito as the simple copy or transposition of the objectives of the French magazine, the philanthropic objectives and commitments of Mito are studied, as well as its way of responding to the complex and conflictive context of the Colombia of those difficult times. The study of the working materials reveals the hermeneutic prejudice of understanding Mito as a pale reflection of our traditional bipartisanship and evidences that such materials make up a constellation of meaning: a system of cross-references, allusions, winks and permanent quotes that point to living processes of thought, to responsible pluralism, to the defense of freedom of expression and to the practice of political and ideological tolerance.