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"Borges and Paz: toward a dialogue of critical
texts"
En Books Abroad, v. 46, nº 4,
fall 1972,
p. 560-566."
... ese mundo de ideas que, al desplegarse,
crea un espacio intelectual: el ámbito de una obra, la resonancia
que la prolonga o la contradice. Ese espacio es el lugar de encuentro
con las otras obras, la posibilidad del diálogo entre ellas.
Octavio Paz, Corriente alterna (1967)
"Here are few more tantalizing names in contemporary culture
than Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. Both men have for a number
of years transcended the soinewhat parochial limits of their respective
regions and have directed their work toward America (Latin or non-Latin)
and Europe. To mention Paz or Borges in an international context
today is to speak of writers who can demonstrate the intuition with
which El laberinto de la soledad ends: today we Latin Americans
are "for the first time in our history the contemporaries of
all men."' The frequency with which the works of Paz or Borges
are quoted or alluded to in French or American, English or German
criticism is sufficient proof of that contemporaneity, achieved
with such difficulty by a culture which until very recently had
been considered marginal, peripheral and rnerely colonial. What
Borges has to say about Henry James or Kafka (and not merely what
he has to say about Lugones or Carriego) is now carefully discussed
in the West; what Paz has to say about Lévi-Strauss or Tantrism
finds an intelligent response among the specialists. The names of
Paz and Borges have become symbols for a mode of being and of reading
in contemporary culture. Interpreting them is the task of every
educated person regardless of origin. Borges and Paz have achieved
in our day what was impossible for Bello and Sarmiento, for Dario
and Rodo', Reyes and Maria'tegui: They have attracted the attention
of a truly international audience which gives their texts the saine
care it gives those of its European or North American contemporaries,
and interprets them unhurriedly and without condescension.
In the context of present-day Spanish-American culture the names
of Borges and Paz have even greater importance. In more than one
sense they embody certain traits that should be taken into account
before passing on to a more detailed analysis of them and their
work. They share a certain intellectuel attitude toward the esthetic
phenomenon: an attitude which of course does not offer identical
solutions to the saine problems. Neither Paz nor Borges are disdainful
of the day-to-day exercise of intelligence and erudition. They are
highly educated poets, even in their impulsive or anguished moments.
Lucid intelligence and intellectuel enlightenment pervade their
works and those works can sustain critical, profoundly personal
meditation. Neither
Paz nor Borges have renounced intellectualité they realize
that a poet cannot maintain an attitude of ignorance before the
problems of language, esthetic phenomena and rhetorical spéculation.
As critics, they have both analyzed foreign works as well as their
own; they have submitted the (ultimately unexplainable) phenomenon
of poetic creation to tireless scrutiny.
To say this is not to assert, as some pretend to believe, that
Paz and Borges are unaware of or hold in disdain the other faculties
without which poetic creation or criticism is impossible. Paz's
lyrical work begins with lucidity in order to reach the blinding
glare of ecstasy; that of Borges makes use of the intellect in order
to undermine and definitively destroy its own arrogance. Overwhelming
intuition, the electric spark that leaps between two distant poles,
the ability to seize by oblique methods the elusive core of reality
are also characteristic of Paz's and Borges's works. But if their
intelligence does not function in a vacuum, it is certainly the
conducting rnedium of that poetic or critical charge both of their
works contain.
They also share a deliberate, conscious and programmatic acceptance
of a cultural tradition that comes to us from the West and transforme
our literary task into the renewed;construction and destruction
of a dialogue begun many centuries ago on the shores of the Mediterranean.
In both writers Americanism does not exclude but embodies that Mediterranean
tradition. Too brilliant to ignore the fact that they are using
a European verbal instrument, both look at reality from their respective
Americas with the discipline they have acquired in vast multilingual
libraries. Their Americanism is open. Open to the multiple linguistic
reality of that Mediterranean tradition which is also embodied in
the Anglo-Saxon world, and more recently, in the Slavic. But also
open to the shifting and circumstantial realities of Argentina and
Mexico. For this reason both Paz and Borges have been able to give
us a vivid image of Latin American machismo in "Hombre de la
esquina rosada" or El laberinto de la soledad, and they have
been able to explore in their more poetic works (Fervor de Buenos
Aires, Piedra de Sol) the primary and most occult symbols of their
respective realities. Their Americanism is also open to other non-Mediterranean
traditions. For both Paz and Borges the East is part of that inclusive
cultural tradition that is centered in the Mediterranean. It should
not be overlooked that both interpret oriental culture with the
aid of European books. Borges discovered the East in a sinological
library which, once in Geneva, is now in Montevideo. Paz began to
read the East in books obtained in France. Of course he later visited
the East and even came to live in India for six years as his country's
ambassador. Likewise, Borges's East is (even today) that of the
Thousand and One Nights read in his father's library, the East of
Kipling and Captain Burton, of apocryphal Chinese encyclopedias,
of the no less apocryphal histories of widows dedicated to piracy
in the vast Yellow Sea. But that Paz bas established roots in Indian
soil and can write with authority about his direct experieüce
there does not alter the fondamental fact that his interprétation
of the East is also rooted in the Mediterranean tradition. And it
could not be otherwise. For him the East bas been above all an innër
expérience: the trial by fire, the rebirth of a poet more
authentic than ever from the ashes of other avatars. But this is
another story.
One does not have to overemphasize the similarities in Paz and
Borges. Many things separate them, and in a profound way.
A gap of fifteen years (Borges was born in 1899, Paz in 1914),
with what that implies about generational distance' separates them
considerably. One exarnple: the Russian révolution of 1917
finds Borges with his 18-year-old fervor intact; he dedicates an
expressionist poem to the red dawn of Moscow; but his enthusiasm
soon gives way to disenchantment and an anticommunisrn with a Manichean
bias, which is alrnost inconceivable in a inan so subtle in other
ways. For Paz the Russian révolution is a historical fact
(he was three years old when it happened) and it is the later struggle
between Stalin and Trotsky that awakens his political conscience
and from then on marks his cornmitment to the world. just as disillusionrnent
with Soviet totalitarianisin drove Borges to anticornmunism, Trotskyite
criticism serves Paz as a stirnulus for an exploration of the nature
of the political universe.
Nor is the historical distance of Mexican and Argentine cultures
negligible. Whereas Mexico bas its deeper roots in the pre-Columbian
past, Argentina founded its culture on a barely native soil, almost
unpopulated, but generously fertilized by waves of Mediterranean
immigrants. Borges can only be a European American; Paz is also
an Arnerican Indian. On the other hand, geopolitics, which has emphasized
Mexico's proxirnity to the United States, bas contributed to the
development of a powerful nationalisin in that nation, a nationalisrn
which Paz bas criticized so rnasterfully in El laberinio de la soledad
and Posdata. For Borges, however, nationalism is only an anachronistic
rornantic concept, or a private inheritance from ancestors who helped
tnake the country. In his friendly attitude toward the United States,
Borges reflects the geographical distance between Argentina and
the powerful and rernote nation to the north; but he also reflects
an inability to understand a continental destiny that reaches beyond
the battles of junin or Ayacucho to the present-day struggle for
freedom.
Nevertheless, these différences are not purely individuel.
To a greater or lesser degree they are différences other
Argentines and Mexicans from the sarne generation would also reflect.
The most important différences and distances, 1 think, are
those created by the individuel destinies of the two writers. In
Borges one finds the image (pluperfect, as he wrote of Valéry's
Monsieur Teste) of a writer whose life is nurtured only with books.
He himself has said it a thousand times. Once in the epilogue to
El hacedor (1960) he remarked:
Few things have happened to me, but 1 have read about tnany. Rather,
few things have happened to me that are more worthy of rernembering
than Schopenhauer's thoughiôr England's verbal MUSiC.2
Paz, however, is a writer in whom intellectuel activity is always
situated within a wider and more varied social contexte Like Borges,
no passion is foreign to him, but whereas the Argentine writer lives
out his passions within his breast and rarely expresses them in
naked reality (as he would say), Paz is a rnan who lives what he
dreams; or, rather, he lives twice. in the dream of reality and
in the dream of writing. Because of this, Paz has never shied away
froin political and hurnan cornmitrnent (nor does he today). Frorn
his participation in the Spanish, civil war to his recent intervention
in the Mexican political debate (a debatc which the daring paç,res
of his Posdata have given a deeper rneaning), Octavio Paz bas known
how to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action,"
as Harnlet said in another contexte In
Borges, protest or Political participation (which isn't lacking,
though at times it is regrettable) is always verbal. His eyesight
was very weak from adolescence on and in the course of his life
he underwent no fewer than six opérations, until, on the
threshold of old age he is practically blind. Borges lives a reality
in which everything is shadows or reflections of shadows on the
walls of a cavern of words.
If we leave the biographies in order to examine the specific cultural
circumstances of their destinies, the distance between Borges and
Paz grows even greater. The influence of an English grandmother
who taught him to read in the language of Dickens before that of
Galdo's; the tutorial model of a father who was a professer of psychology
in an English high school in Buenos Aires marks Borges (or Georgie,
as he was called at home) with the stamp of Anglo-Saxon culture,
which repeats at a distance the patterns of impérial culture.
The Argentina of the upper classes is oriented more toward England
than toward France. Borges was educated in Europe and obtained his
M. A. (bachillerato) in Geneva, not Paris, and there he learned
not only French, but German, thus deepening and diversifying his
contacts with the roots of that Anglo-Saxon culture that is his
blood héritage. Much later, as a professer of English and
American literature in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at
the University of Buenos Aires, Borges became immersed in the magic
territories of early Anglo-Saxon poetry to émerge later (it
was inévitable) in the even more remote and splendid monuments
of Scandinavian culture. Today Iceland attracts him with the fascination
of a remote, secret and inaccessible land. All that is Spanish,
and thus ob. vious, in the River Plate culture; everything Italian
that bas so enriched the letters and music of his native country
is foreign to Borges, or is hostile to him. He read the Quijote
for the first time in English, and although he bas dedicated many
subtle pages to Cervantes, his authors continue to be De Quincey
or Stevenson, Browning or Chesterton, Swinburne or Kipling, Poe
or James, Emerson or Whitman, Mark Twain or Faulkner, Schopenhauer
or Kafka. He, who bas written so much and so well on The Divine
Comedy, Ariosto and Croce, assures us that he does not understand
a word of the Italian films and deplores thé influence of
Italian immigrants as reflected in the sentimentalism of Argentine
letters.
Octavio Paz, on the contrary, begins by consciously assuming hispanic
roots, which in Mexico is a sign of indépendance. Not only
did he hurry to Spain in its bout of agony in 1937, but all his
early poetry and critical work dérive from a very personal
reading of the great voices of contemporary Spain. The works of
Unamuno and Machado guided the young Paz and the traces of both
are very apparent in all his early writings, at least up to El arco
y la lira. Another Spaniard, José Bergamin, also influenced
Paz as a young man: Bergamin's présence in Mexico during
those years just after the Spanish civil war served as a catalytic
agent. He stimulated Paz to a more imaginative reading of Spanish
literature, of the German romantics, of Lautréamont and the
surréaliste and Heidegger. The other great European source
for his work is French literature, to which his critical thought
returns incessantly as a point of référence. In this
is one of the great différences between him and Borges. For
although the Argentine writer was nourished in his youth on Mallarmé
and Valéry, Flaubert and Apollinaire, Maupassant and Henri
Barbusse, Marcel Schwob and Léon Bloy, his interprétation
of French culture is too hétérodoxe too personal and
arbitrary to be compared with the ordered, systematic and avid reading
which Paz practiced from at least as early as the forties. It is
not only a matter of keeping up to date and reading Sartre and Camus
in 1945, and Robbe-Grillet and Lévi-Strauss in 1965. Nor
is it a matter of the live and vivid expérience of André
Breton deeply marking Paz's critical thinking since those years
when lie visited the master of surrealism in Mexico, or at his own
abode in Paris. (Only the hétérodoxe lazy Socrates,
Macedonio Ferna'ndez bas had a similar influence on Borges; but
Macedonio was the opposite of Breton; he was a master without disciples
or a cult, without a visible work, without any kind of literary
strategy.)
Thus, when one thinks of Borges one thinks of a writer who is partly
unexplainable unless the Anglo-Saxon cultural context within which
his work is written is taken into account. With Paz it is the context
of French culture, or France, that is essentiel. For even that which
is not French comes to Paz by way of France: it was through Albert
Béguin that Paz discovered the German romantics, as it was
by wày of French structuralism that lie came to know the
work of the Russo-North American linguist, Roman Jakobson. The fact
that Paz and Borges appear to be the bearers of two of the richest
currents of présent day culture stresses even more their
individuel différences. For the rivalry between the French
and Anglo-Saxon worlds (a rivalry that can only be understood in
the parochial context of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, but
which lacks any meaning today) bas prevented the incredible contributions
of both cultures from becoming harmoniously integrated within Europe
itself. This is one of the roots of mutual misunderstanding, which
a dialogue between Borges and Paz texts can reveal.
Before I go any further, let it be known that while I assert that
Borges and Paz are bearers of those parallel cultural currents,
1 do not intend to diminish in any way their originalité,
nor (which would even be less tolérable) their relationship
with the national cultures to which their works belong. Only someone
little versed in literary or cultural matters would lead us to believe
that foreign influences are unfortunate, or that they should be
eradicated. Those who support this theory today (and unfortunately
they are numerous in Latin America) seem not to know that it had
already been formulated in impérial Rome and that it was
in opposition to this theory that Horace wrote his "Epistle
to the Pisans." But the xénophobie of some of our compatriots
on the continent prevents them from recognizing the foreign origin
of the very nationalise doctrines which they profess with so much
ardor and ignorance.
Borges and Paz have both been attacked for taking up foreign matters
in thcir books, or for trying to reformulate foreign théories.
Generally, the level on which these attacks are carried out is almost
ridiculous. In 1954, an Argentine professer who today enjoys a considérable
réputation in his country, wrote a pamphlet that denounced
Borges's Byzantinism, supporting his argument with a very literal
reading of some concepts of literary sociology popularized by Lucien
Goldmann (a Romanian) and Jean-Paul Sartre.' In a récent
review of Configurations, the most récent book by Paz translated
into English, a Northamerican poet, whose name I prefer not to recall,
diseusses the poct's credentials for writing about the East because
lie considers Paz "a tourist"-this in spite of the fact
that lie bas lived in India for six years.' Would it have occurred
to the distinguished reviewer to ask Ezra Pound how many years lie
lived in Paz after read Boges has been frustrating and challening
experience, one of discipline and confusion, a rare Tantalic torture.
Paz cam into xistnce for me in th pages of El hijo pródigo,
one of the basic literary reviews of new hispanic literature. Reading
El laberinto de la soledad at the beginning of th 1950s confirmed
whta I had found in th texts of that review. Then came Lbertad bajo
palabra and El arco y la lira. And what was to follow? All of Paz
was impcit on the first texts.
But I inist that to read Paz after having interpreted Boges, or
to return to Borges after having examned Paz is a singularly tantalizin
experience. How many times have I lamented, for example, the fact
that Paz had not developed a litte furthr in El arco y la lira his
ideas on the modern novel in the light of those hyptoheses Borges
had written fifteen years earlier in the prologue to La invención
the Morel? But at that time Paz did not seem to have paid attention
to Borge's prologue or th the extraodinary novel of Bioy Casares
handled with so mucha familiarity and erudite peevishness? But also
how many times, returning to Borges after an exhausting excursion
through the pages of Paz, have I lamented the fact that the disconnected
and capricious erudition of the Agentine master had so many times
prevented him from rounding his argument wiht the MExican's precision?
How eoften, after followin Paz in his readings of Heidegger or Lévi-Strauss,
have I felt that Borges had remained (as if magically petrified)
in the books of his youth, or in those of the maturity of his father,
tthat Don Jorge Luis Borges who has extended such a long intellectual
shadow over the work of his child, his alter ego, his creation,
his Golem?
To read Borges and then Paz; to read Paz and return to Borges,
has been for me an exercise of uiet desperation but also an exercise
of nfinite learning. Some day I will have to attempt (with the space
that is lacking here) a parallel examination of the critical works
of both; an examination that will include, naturally, thir poetic
works, since in both writers poetry and criticism are not mutual
opposite, but are aspects of that dialogue between critical texts:
a dialogue that has never taken place in naked reality but which,
bevertheless, continues to go on in my imagination."
Yale University
Translated from the Spanish by
Tom J. Lewis
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