Two Books
A Comment On August 23, 1944
About William Beckford’s Vathek
About The Purple Land
From Someone To Nobody
Forms Of A Legend
From Allegories To Novels
The Innocence Of Layamon
For Bernard Shaw
The Modesty Of History
New Refutation Of Time
Bonus Tracks
The Simurgh and the Eagle
A History of the Echoes of a Name
Narrative Art and Magic
The Total Library
A Fragment on Joyce
The Nothingness of Personality
I, a Jew
A History of Eternity
A Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet
Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny
Book and Movie Criticism
William Faulkner
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Henry James
Thomas Carlyle
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Raymond Bradbury
Citizen Kane
Notes
Introduction
Under Perón, Borges collected his essays with the aggressive title Otras inquisiciones in 1952 (“Other Inquisitions,” a sequel to his suppressed 1926 book Inquisiciones). This exciting book, with the fictions of Ficciones and El Aleph, is the third in the trinity of his great works. These wide ranging, teasing essays are completely original. They are not conventional book reviews, nor literary essays in the Virginia Woolf or Cyril Connolly mould. They all arise from reading, but comment on apparently random details. All were published in magazines first. They jump around from Kafka to Wells, W. H. Hudson, Pascal, Keats, Beckford, Coleridge, Quevedo, Wilde, Américo Castro in unpredictable, quirky ways (who on earth would group those authors?). This is a new genre between his fictions (equally bookish and cheekily learned) and the hoax reviews, that “seudoerudition” (his noun) that Borges made his own. I repeat; he had no time for “bibliographies,” dates, histories; he was for hedonism, pleasure-reading. Robert Graves accused him of not being historical in his sources, so that you never knew if he invented a quotation or not (Borges would laugh at this, that was the point of his anti-bibliographic writing). In 1964 Sábato accused him of an “irriguroso conocimiento” (“lack of rigour in his knowledge”), displaying a dilettante’s “disparatada mezcla” (“crazy mixture”), missing the point that this is his freedom and strength. More recently, Juan José Sebreli contrasted Borges with Sartre and underlined the former’s avoidance of history, psychology, sociology and sexuality. He defined Borges’s erudition as “extravagant and unilateral,” based on caprice and random reading, many encylopaedias, much pastiche and plagiarism. That flicking-through-books that characterized his hedonistic reading method, what Borges himself called “pure aesthetic pleasure”; he was Barthian before Barthes. Sebreli quotes Borges’s close friend Néstor Ibarra: “Borges erudite? I would even worry about calling him learned. What a chaos of reading.” But that’s exactly the point. In the 1940s in Argentina, Borges’s strangeness was based on this apparently random learning. When the exiled English writer Christopher Isherwood visited Buenos Aires in 1948 he called on Borges, and characterized him as an “extraordinary scholar” (not poet or short story writer), who could quote entire passages from the “most unexpected authors, with very amusing and subtle comments.” Exactly. His essays had made Borges the talk of the town.
No doubt, then, about his local prestige. In 1947 the English poet and critic G. S. Fraser met Borges, already the most “original living Argentine writer” and the “last great master of the discursive English essay” (Fraser read him too literally). But he was perceptive about the man himself as “rather dry, sad and morose”; “his emotions are coiled and compressed” and noticed his “touch of malice” (that Imp in him). Borges avoided “obvious rhetoric” to reveal a “rare combination of density with ease” (that is, learning and humour). He looked like a great “teddy-bear” and had a “quite exceptional integrity of mind.”
—Jason Wilson
Jorge Luis Borges, 2006
The Author as Librarian
other inquisitions, 1937–1952, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. 205 pp. University of Texas Press, 1964.
dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland. 95 pp. University of Texas Press, 1964.
borges the labyrinth-maker, by Ana María Barrenechea, edited and translated from the Spanish by Robert Lima. 175 pp. New York University Press, 1965.
The belated North American acknowledgment of the genius of Jorge Luis Borges proceeds apace. The University of Texas Press last year published two volumes by this Argentine fantasist, critic, poet, and librarian. These translations, together with Grove Press’s Ficciones, bring to three the number of complete books by Borges available in English. There is also New Directions’ Labyrinths, a selection. And now the New York University Press has published a book about him.1
Four years ago, when Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the Prix International des Éditeurs, he was known here to few but Hispanic specialists. A handful of poems and short stories had appeared in scattered anthologies and magazines. I myself had read only “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and subsequently a favorite of detective-story anthologies. Though vivid and intellectual beyond the requirements of its genre, the story can be read without awareness that its creator is a giant of world literature. I was prompted to read Borges seriously by a remark made—internationally enough—in Rumania, where, after a blanket disparagement of contemporary French and German fiction, Borges was praised by a young critic in a tone he had previously reserved for Kafka. An analogy with Kafka is inevitable, but I wonder if Borges’ abrupt projection, by the university and avant-garde presses, into the bookstores will prove as momentous as Kafka’s publication, by the commercial firm of Knopf, in the thirties. It is not a question of Borges’ excellence. His driest paragraph is somehow compelling. His fables are written from a height of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction. Furthermore, he is, at least for anyone whose taste runs to puzzles or pure speculation, delightfully entertaining. The question is, I think, whether or not Borges’ lifework, arriving in a lump now (he was born in 1899 and since his youth has been an active and honored figure in Argentine literature), can serve, in its gravely considered oddity, as any kind of clue to the way out of the dead-end narcissism and downright trashiness of present American fiction.
Borges’ narrative innovations spring from a clear sense of technical crisis. For all his modesty and reasonableness of tone, he proposes some sort of essential revision in literature itself. The concision of his style and the comprehensiveness of his career (in addition to writing poems, essays, and stories, he has collaborated on detective novels, translated from many tongues, edited, taught, and even executed film scripts) produce a strangely terminal impression: he seems to be the man for whom literature has no future. I am haunted by knowing that this insatiable reader is now virtually blind.
A constant bookishness gives Borges’ varied production an unusual consistency. His stories have the close texture of argument; his critical articles have the suspense and tension of fiction. The criticism collected in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952 almost all takes the form of detection, of uncovering what was secret. He looks for, and locates, the hidden pivots of history: the moment (in Iceland in 1225) when a chronicler first pays tribute to an enemy, the very line (in Chaucer in 1382) when allegory yields to naturalism. His interest gravitates toward the obscure, the forgotten: John Wilkins, the 17th-century inventor ab nihilo of an analytical language; J. W. Dunne, the 20th-century proponent of a grotesque theory of time; Layamon, the 13th-century poet isolated between the death of Saxon culture and the birth of the English language. Where an arcane quality does n
ot already exist, Borges injects it. His appreciation of the classic Spanish satirist and stylist Francisco de Quevedo begins, “Like the history of the world, the history of literature abounds in enigmas. I found, and continue to find, none so disconcerting as the strange partial glory that has been accorded to Quevedo.” His essay on Layamon concludes, “ ‘No one knows who he is,’ said Léon Bloy. Of that intimate ignorance no symbol is better than this forgotten man, who abhorred his Saxon heritage with Saxon vigor, and who was the last Saxon poet and never knew it.”
Implacably, Borges reduces everything to a condition of mystery. His gnomic style and encyclopedic supply of allusions generate a kind of inverse illumination, a Gothic atmosphere in which the most lucid and famous authors loom somewhat menacingly. His essay on Bernard Shaw begins, “At the end of the thirteenth century Raymond Lully (Ramón Lull) attempted to solve all the mysteries by means of a frame with unequal, revolving, concentric disks, subdivided into sectors with Latin words.” It ends on an equally ominous and surprising note: “[Existentialists] may play at desperation and anguish, but at bottom they flatter the vanity; in that sense, they are immoral. Shaw’s work, on the other hand, leaves an aftertaste of liberation. The taste of the doctrines of Zeno’s Porch and the taste of the sagas.”
Borges’ harsh conjunctions and plausible paradoxes are not confined to literary matters. In “A Comment on August 23, 1944,” Borges meditates on the ambivalent reaction of his Fascist friends to the Allied occupation of Paris and ends with this daring paragraph:
I do not know whether the facts I have related require elucidation. I believe I can interpret them like this: for Europeans and Americans, one order—and only one—is possible: it used to be called Rome and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the game of energetic barbarism, to play at being a Viking, a Tartar, a sixteenth-century conquistador, a Gaucho, a redskin) is, after all, a mental and moral impossibility. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hells. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall hazard this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is collaborating blindly with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must not have been unaware that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.
The tracing of hidden resemblances, of philosophical genealogies, is Borges’ favorite mental exercise. Out of his vast reading he distills a few related images, whose parallelism, tersely presented, has the force of a fresh thought. “Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors. I should like to sketch one chapter of that history,” he writes in “Pascal’s Sphere,” and goes on to compile, in less than four pages, twenty-odd instances of the image of a sphere “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.” These references are arranged like a plot, beginning with Xenophanes, who joyously substituted for the anthropomorphic gods of Greece a divine and eternal Sphere, and ending with Pascal, who, in describing nature as “an infinite sphere” had first written and then rejected the word “effroyable”—”a frightful sphere.” Many of Borges’ genealogies trace a degeneration: he detects a similar “magnification to nothingness” in the evolutions of theology and of Shakespeare’s reputation; he watches an Indian legend succumb, through its successive versions, to the bloating of unreality. He follows in the works of Léon Bloy the increasingly desperate interpretations of a single phrase in St. Paul—“per speculum in aenigmate” (“through a glass darkly”). Borges himself recurrently considers Zeno’s second paradox—the never-completed race between Achilles and the tortoise, the formal argument of regressus in infinitum—and comes to a conclusion that is, to use his favorite adjective, monstrous: “One concept corrupts and confuses the others.… I am speaking of the infinite. . . .We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know that it is false.”
Borges is not an antiseptic pathologist of the irrational; he is himself susceptible to infection. His connoisseurship has in it a touch of madness. In his “Kafka and His Precursors,” he discovers, in certain parables and anecdotes by Zeno, Han Yü, Kierkegaard, Browning, Bloy, and Lord Dunsany, a prefiguration of Kafka’s tone. He concludes that each writer creates his own precursors: “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” This is sensible enough, and, indeed, has been pointed out by T. S. Eliot, whom Borges cites in a footnote. But Borges goes on: “In this correlation the identity or plurality of men matters not at all.” This sentence, I believe, expresses not a thought but a sensation that Borges has; he describes it—a mixture of deathlike detachment and ecstatic timelessness—in his most ambitious essay, “New Refutation of Time.” It is this sensation that encourages his peculiar view of human thought as the product of a single mind, and of human history as a vast magic book that can be read cabalistically. His highest praise, bestowed upon the fantastic narratives of the early H. G. Wells, is to claim that “they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus of Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.”
As a literary critic, Borges demonstrates much sensitivity and sense. The American reader of these essays will be gratified by the generous amount of space devoted to writers of the English language. Borges, from within the Spanish literary tradition of “dictionaries and rhetoric,” is attracted by the oneiric and hallucinatory quality he finds in North American, German, and English writing. He values Hawthorne and Whitman for their intense unreality, and bestows special fondness upon the English writers he read in his boyhood. The fin-de-siècle and Edwardian giants, whose reputations are generally etiolated, excite Borges afresh each time he rereads them:
Reading and rereading Wilde through the years, I notice something that his panegyrists do not seem to have even suspected: the provable and elementary fact that Wilde is almost always right.… he was a man of the eighteenth century who sometimes condescended to play the game of symbolism. Like Gibbon, like Johnson, like Voltaire, he was an ingenious man who was also right.
Borges’ tributes to Shaw and Wells have been quoted above. In connection with Wells and Henry James, it is a salutary shock to find the terms of the usual invidious comparison reversed: “the sad and labyrinthine Henry James … a much more complex writer than Wells, although he was less gifted with those pleasant virtues that are usually called classical.” But of this generation none is dearer to Borges than Chesterton, in whom he finds, beneath the surface of dogmatic optimism, a disposition like Kafka’s: “Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind, and central … the powerful work of Chesterton, the prototype of physical and moral sanity, is always on the verge of becoming a nightmare . . . he tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations.” Much in Borges’ fiction that suggests Kafka in fact derives from Chesterton. As critic and artist both, Borges mediates between the post-modern present and the colorful, prolific, and neglected pre-moderns.
Of the moderns themselves, of Yeats, Eliot, and Rilke, of Proust and Joyce, he has, at least in Other Inquisitions, little to say. Pound and Eliot, he asserts in passing, practice “the deliberate manipulation of anachronisms to produce an appearance of eternity” (which seems, if true at all, rather incidentally so), and he admires Valéry less for his work than for his personality, “the symbol of a man who is infinitely sensitive to every fact.” The essays abound in insights delivered parenthetically—”God must not theologize”; “to fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god”—but their texts as a whole do not open outward into enlightenment. Wherea
s, say, Eliot’s relatively tentative considerations offer to renew a continuing tradition of literary criticism, Borges’ tight arrangements seem a bizarre specialization of the tradition. His essays have a quality I can only call sealed. They are structured like mazes and, like mirrors, they reflect back and forth on one another. There is frequent repetition of the adjectives and phrases that denote Borges’ favorite notions of mystery, of secrecy, of “intimate ignorance.” From his immense reading he has distilled a fervent narrowness. The same parables, the same quotations recur; one lengthy passage from Chesterton is reproduced three times.
Here and there appear sentences (“One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read”) that elsewhere have been developed into “fictions”; in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” a modern writer as his masterwork reconstructs passages from Don Quixote that, though verbally identical, are read very differently. This story, in fact, was, according to an interview given in Buenos Aires in 1960, the first Borges ever wrote. Long a respected poet and critic, he turned to fiction with a grim diffidence. In his words:
I know that the least perishable part of my literary production is the narrative, yet for many years I did not dare to write stories. I thought that the paradise of the tale was forbidden to me. One day, I suffered an accident. I was in a sanitarium where I was operated upon.… a time I cannot recall without horror, a period of fever, insomnia, and extreme insecurity.… If after the operation and the extremely long convalescence I tried to write a poem or an essay and failed, I would know that I had lost . . . intellectual integrity. Thus, I decided upon another approach. I said to myself: “I am going to write a story and if I cannot do so it does not matter because I have not written one before. In any case, it will be a first attempt.” Then, I began to write a story … which turned out rather well; this was followed by others … and I discovered that I had not lost my intellectual integrity and that I could now write stories. I have written many since.