Few artists
have built grand structures on such uncertain foundations as Jorge Luis Borges.
Doubt was the sacred principle of his work, its animating force and,
frequently, its message. To read his stories is to experience the dissolution
of all certainty, all assumption about the reliability of your experience of
the world. Of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, Borges seems
to have been the least convinced by himself—by the imposing public illusion of
his own fame. The thing Borges was most skeptical about was the idea of a
writer, a man, named Borges.
In his
memorable prose piece “Borges and I,” he addresses a deeply felt distinction
between himself and “the other one, the one called Borges.” “I like hourglasses,”
he writes, “maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and the
prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns
them into the attributes of an actor.” He recognizes almost nothing of himself
in the eminent literary personage with whom he shares a name, a face, and
certain other superficial qualities. “I do not know which of us has written
this page,” he concludes.
This
haunting, teasing fragment is reproduced in its entirety in “Borges at Eighty:
Conversations,” a collection of interviews from his 1980 trip to the U.S.,
which has been published in a new edition by New Directions. It’s an
instructively ironic context for the piece to turn up in—a transcript of a
public event at Indiana University in which a number of Borges’s poems and
prose pieces were read aloud in English, followed by a short extemporaneous
commentary by the author. When he addresses the audience, he seems to be
speaking for the “I,” but it is surely “Borges” who is doing the talking:
Borges stands for all the things I hate. He stands for publicity, for
being photographed, for having interviews, for politics, for opinions—all
opinions are despicable I should say. He also stands for those two nonentities,
those two impostors failure and success […] He deals in those things. While I,
let us say, since the name of the paper is “Borges and I”, I stands not for the
public man but for the private self, for reality, since these other things are
unreal to me.
For someone
who hated being interviewed, Borges was a prolific and garrulous interviewee
(although it was perhaps “Borges” who handled that side of things). And yet, to
point this out is to risk missing the substance of what he is saying here,
which is not simply that he feels himself at odds with his own public persona
but that he feels himself profoundly at odds with how little he is at odds with
it. (Such paradoxes are an occupational hazard in any encounter with Borges.)
One of the collection’s most interesting aspects is the interaction of these
incompatible elements: the obvious pleasure Borges takes in the opportunity to
present himself for public consumption, and his reflexive skepticism about the
necessary fraudulence of the writer as personality.
There’s
something fascinatingly Borgesian about the way in which the self-awareness of
the performance is itself highly performative. This preoccupation with the
divided self veers close to a sort of ontological double act, a one-man
odd-couple routine. “Everyone sitting in this audience wants to know Jorge Luis
Borges,” begins the interviewer, in the first of this book’s conversations.
Borges replies, “I wish I did. I am sick and tired of him.” For a writer, he
was not greatly exercised by the topic of himself. He was interested in his interests
and not the contingent fact that it was he, Borges, who was interested in them.
Being himself was never much more than drudgery. “When I wake up,” he tells one
of his interviewees, “I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I
am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to
be exactly that somebody. I have certain commitments. One of the commitments is
to live through the whole day.”
Borges
never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages. “It is a laborious
madness and an impoverishing one,” he wrote in 1941, “the madness of composing
vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly
related orally in five minutes.” But I think, perhaps, that the real reason he
never wrote a novel was that the form is largely dependent on character, and
Borges had no real interest in, or facility for, the creation of
psychologically vivid people. (Try relating Leopold Bloom orally in five
minutes, or Mrs. Dalloway, or Anna Karenina. Their greatness as characters
arises out of their irreducibility to the facts about themselves.) He wasn’t
much for fleshing out, and he was not the kind of writer whose characters ever
had a chance of “taking over” from their creator. His most indelible creations—Funes
the Memorious, say, or Pierre Menard—are memorable not for the contents of
their invented souls but for the situations that he placed them in, the
ingenious conceits that worked their way into narrative through the idea of
their particular madness. His characters—including the one called Borges, the
recurring protagonist of so many of his fictions—tended to be ciphers. They
were fictions made from fiction, drawn from reading, not from life. And he
himself, the character who he happened to be in the framing narrative called
reality, was not much different. “Why on earth,” he asks in another of these
conversations, “should I worry what happens to Borges? After all, Borges is
nothing, a mere fiction.”
The man we
see in these eleven interviews is a person made of books, a librarian who often
remarked that his idea of paradise was an endless library—a sort of eternal
busman’s holiday. He speaks of himself as a reader first and a writer only
secondarily. That this self-conception emerges out of his scrupulous humility
and instinct for self-effacement doesn’t make it any less accurate or
revealing. Borges’s writing was always, to some degree, a creative form of
reading, and many of his best fictions were meditations on the condition of
fictionality: reviews of invented books, stories whose central presences were
not people but texts. He was a man of letters in the nineteenth-century mode,
possessed of a type of encyclopedic erudition that seems not to exist anymore.
And this brings us to one of the structural paradoxes at the heart of Borges’s
work. He was deeply invested in the past, in the idea of a living and evolving
literary tradition. “I think of myself as not being a modern writer,” he says
here. “I don’t think of myself as a contemporary of surrealism, or dadaism, or
imagism, or the other respected tomfooleries of literature, no? I think of
literature in terms of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
I am a lover of Bernard Shaw, Henry James.” And yet this strangely totalizing
conservatism was the basis of Borges’s radical legacy, a new way of thinking
about fiction and its relationship to the world.
That extent
to which he was steeped in tradition can also be seen in another new book
published by New Directions, “Professor Borges: A Course on English
Literature.” The book collects the transcripts of a lecture course on the
history of English literature that Borges gave at the University of Buenos
Aires in 1966. It’s both shamelessly comprehensive and entirely idiosyncratic,
launching with the Anglo-Saxons and coming to rest, twenty-five lectures later,
on Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer especially beloved of Borges.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t make for particularly gripping reading. His approach
to most of the works that he’s lecturing on is largely descriptive, so that we
get a fairly exhaustive rundown of what happens in “Beowulf,” say, or some of
the more interesting aspects of Boswell’s Johnson, but not nearly the insight
into either you’d expect from a great literary mind.
The “Borges”
who is revealed, or perhaps performed, in these two books seems like the
Platonic ideal of the man of letters: a man who taught himself German because
he wanted to read Schopenhauer in the original, and learned it, moreover, by
reading the poetry of Heine; a man who taught himself Icelandic in order to
pursue his interest in Norse sagas. His loss of sight seems strangely
appropriate; in the interviews, he speaks of the “luminous mist” of his
blindness as though it were a kind of blessing, a removal of all distraction
from what was most important, most real—the life of the mind. (And there was
never any shortage of people willing to read to the great writer in his old
age.)
But there
were things that Borges didn’t see whose invisibility had nothing to do with
his physical blindness—things he didn’t see because he wasn’t interested in
looking at them. The lecture course in “Professor Borges” doesn’t feature
anything written by a woman. It’s a history of English literature that includes
no Austen, no Shelley, no Charlotte or Emily Brontë, no Eliot, and no Woolf. He
was a great admirer of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but even that admiration is
not without its strain of condescension: in an interview with the collection’s
editor, Willis Barnstone, he describes her as “the most passionate of all women
who have attempted writing.” I laughed out loud when I read this, and then
decided to extend Borges the benefit of the doubt, given the context of an
unscripted conversation in a language that—despite his Anglophilic protestations—was
not his first. But then I came to this moment, sixteen pages further on, in a
conversation with Alastair Reid and John Coleman at the New York PEN Club:
COLEMAN: Borges, you have spoken of
literary men you admire, what about literary women? Could you identify the
women in literature whose contribution you consider most significant?
BORGES: I think I would limit myself to
one, to Emily Dickinson.
COLEMAN: Is that it?
BORGES: That’s that. Short and sweet.
REID: I think it should be pointed out,
however, that there are more.
BORGES: Yes, of course. There is Silvina
Ocampo, for example, who is translating Emily Dickinson at this moment in
Buenos Aires.
Borges’s
fictional universe is relentlessly, oppressively male. He wrote very few female
characters, and there is a vision of masculinity—violent, fearless,
austere—that exists in his work as a counterpoint to its obsessive bookishness,
and neither ideal has much room for the presence of women, writers or otherwise.
His abstraction meant, among other things, a removal from the heat and chaos of
human relationships. There is very little love in his work, very little
emotional intensity; its richness and complexity is that of philosophical
problems, of theology and ontology, not of human relationships.
And it is
certainly not that of the wider human complexity of politics. An aloofness from
mere politics seems like a strength in his fiction, but it’s hard to come away
from reading these interviews seeing it as anything other than a serious
weakness in his life. Understandably, he is often asked to speak about
Argentina’s recent history of tyranny and brutality; repeatedly, he finds ways
of evading these questions. And the ways in which he says nothing often end up
being more revealing than he intends. On “The Dick Cavett Show,” Cavett asked
him if he could account for the level of sympathy for the Nazis in Argentina.
“Look here,” said Borges. “I don’t profess to understand my country. I am not
politically minded, either. I do my best to avoid politics. I belong to no
party. I am an individualist.” Pressed on the topic of Hitler, Borges said that
“of course I hate and loathe him. His anti-Semitism was very foolish.” This is
hard to read because, although we should know better, it’s difficult to stop
ourselves expecting wisdom from a person who happens to be a genius. Hitler’s
anti-Semitism might well have been foolish, but that was pretty far from being
its most remarkable aspect.
Borges’s
refusal to engage with politics wouldn’t have been nearly so remarkable had he
not lived through two World Wars and, in his own country, six coups d’états and
three dictatorships. In an interview revealingly titled “But I Prefer
Dreaming,” an audience member asks him what he thinks the role of the artist
should be in a threatened society. Rather than saying that the role of the
artist should be to make art, he gives an answer that seems itself oddly
threatened and elusive. “I have no use for politics,” he says. “I am not
politically minded. I am aesthetically minded, philosophically perhaps. I don’t
belong to any party. In fact, I disbelieve in politics and in nations. I
disbelieve also in richness, in poverty. Those things are illusions. But I
believe in my own destiny as a good or bad or indifferent writer.” Borges’s
skepticism was deeply felt, but here it does look like a tactical withdrawal
from the very real terror and anarchy and injustice of the world, a retreat
into the luminous mist of his own blindness. His fiction was no less great for
its abstraction, but there is something ultimately sad about this great
architect of labyrinths who would not enter into the ramifying complexity of
his own century.
Fuente : New Yorker
July 30,
2013
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