"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