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In a
1963
interview in Montevideo,
Jorge Luis Borges confessed: «I’m rotten of literature,
I wouldn’t be able to give an account of the sun. I’m not used to think
about
the sun1, but rather about the images, texts and
chronicles
about the sun.» The sun as a concrete entity
was not
of his interest, only as a mean of poetical expression. A disciple of
Berkeley,
Borges beautifully stresses the immateriality of our
representations:
La lluvia es una cosa
Que sin duda sucede en el pasado
[Rain
is an event
That, doubtlessly, happens in the past]
Borges
assumes literature as
the supreme creation of humankind, far more elaborated and mysterious
than the
immediate universe. Hegel categorized the manifestations of thought,
placing
philosophy at the zenith, over art and religion. His reasons, we
suppose, were
mainly personal. Borges would alter this conception, writing in one of
his
pages than philosophy is but the most ambitious enterprise of
literature.
The
world, as a physical
entity was of his interest only as long as it corresponded to a
literary
tradition. James Irbi wrote in 1960 about
his first
meeting with Borges in the US:
«He is very
enthusiastic about San Francisco,
a city that he only
knew by the readings of Mark Twain, Bret Harte,
Norris, Stevenson. 'San Francisco
stands out in a remarkable way!' he says. In general, the US
raises his admiration. He cannot wait to see the east: New York, New England… ‘For everything came
from there, didn’t it?’ This is the
first time than Borges leaves Río de la Plata since 1924.
He is like discovering the world for the
first time2.» Borges, in
fact, would
no only discover, but also seduce the US,
praising the verses of Robert Frost and declaiming
passages previously memorized of Boewulf.
His
poems, his essays, his
reiterative conferences and interviews are but an
strenuous effort to encompass, or –I would say, to point out the
writings that
preceded his work. But contrary to what an erudite or a university
professor
would do, Borges does not limit his
work to
the description of his readings. Instead, he recreates them, reinvents
them or,
to use his own words, rewrites them. The places that he visits and the
writers
that he rereads are but coordinates of a vast and imperfect topography,
badly
recalled or forgotten. Borges’ work is an effort to remember it, to
improve it
or to accomplish it. Albeit the literary and stylistic value of his
work,
Borges guide us through a maze of quotes,
verses and opinions, as extense as the maps
of the Empire pointed out by his character Suárez
Miranda in his book Viajes de Varones Ilustres
[Expeditions of
Famous Gentlemen]: «…In that Empire, the art of Cartography
achieved such
Perfection that the map a single Province used to take over a complete
Province. As time went on, those Disproportionate Maps were
unsatisfactory, and
the Schools of Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire that was of the
dimensions of the Empire, and coincided punctually with it3.»
A dazzled Portuguese
journalist wrote upon the
publication of the complete works of Borges in Lisbon,
that only an erudite like Borges was able to quote twenty-six authors
per page.
Borges’ literary allusions are continuous, and necessarily evanescent.
Borges, for instance, dedicates three lines to Philipp Mainländer,
a forgotten
philosopher who committed
suicide after the publication of his „Philosophie der Erlösung“. E.
Cioran, an apologist of Mainländer’s
work, accuses Borges of eclecticism and tactlessness on that account:
«Everything is valid for him as long as he [Borges] be the center of everything4.»
One of the characters
of Ernesto Sábato’s novel Abbadon,
the exterminator, tells us that Nobokov
was first
fascinated by Borges, until he came to the conclusion that his works
were but
the façade of an empty house. The most fascinating or revolting
trait in
Borges is, in fact, his erudition. It is indeed puzzling in his first
poems, in
which the author struggles to communicate us his emotions as a reader.
Were we ignorant of the virtues of his favourite poets we would
deplore
verses such as:
Hugo me dio una hoz que
era de oro
[Hugo gave me a
sickle that was made of gold]
Critics associated
Borges’ work to a labyrinth, a
direct reference to his short stories, where the maze plays an ultimate
role,
but also to his craft. Borges announces an idea, just to replace it by
another
and so on. When Borges writes about Moll Flanders he assures us
that
that it is the first novel that makes use of the circumstantial traits.
Borges
propounds this hypothesis, but he does not develop it. This tantalizing
technique is identical when he merges the divergent philosophies of
Heidegger
and Jaspers in order to refute them in
five lines:
«The philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers makes of each of us the
interesting
speaker of a secrete and continuous dialogue with the nothingness or
the
divinity. These disciplines, which can be admirable in their form,
promote the
illusion of the I that the Veda rejects as a capital error. They play
with our
anguish and despair, but in reality they flatter our vanity. They are,
in that
sense, inmoral5.» Borges’ eclecticism is evident in
several
essays, where he quotes Heráclito besides Lulio and the lyrics of a tango song.
Nevertheless, Borges is far from being a herald of truth. In another
interview, he claimed to have read the
complete
works of Schopenhahuer, a philosopher that
wrote with
admiration and scorn: «Where there are contradictions and lies, there
is
thought6.
» Borges does not attempt to persuade us; he wants to provoke us, to
oblige us
to consult his references. Only then we will be able to corroborate
them, to
refute them or to discover their inexistence. Borges himself became
aware of
the chaotic impression of his inventiveness some years before his
death: «I
believe that they have abused of the sentence “caothic
enumeration”, invented, I believe, by a German critic… I think that the
making
of many chaotic enumerations would be irresponsible; the reader would
not be
able to follow them… Obviously the enumeration has to be apparently
chaotic,
but the fact is that some secrete affinities should remain7.»
Borges’ work invites us
to a constant reading or
rereading. The storylines of his short stories are admirable indeed.
Would we
remove their literary references from them, we will see them as a mere
pastime:
detective, horror or science-fiction short stories. His story
lines would
also appear to be reiterative. It would be enough to mention that the
plots of Sur, Las Ruinas Circulares,
Los Teólogos y Abenjacán
el Bojarí muerto
en su laberinto
—amongst many other less-known short stories and poems, are alike.
They
recount the story of a character that discovers that his life was not
his own;
that his fate was someone other’s fate:
«…comprendió que el tesoro no
era lo esencial para
él [Zadid].
Lo esencial era que
Abenjacán pereciera. Simuló
ser Abenjacán, mató
a Abenjacán y finalmente
fué Abenjacán8.»
[«…He
understood that the treasure
was not essential to him [Zadid]. What was
essential
was the death of Abenjacán. He pretended
to be Abenjacán, he killed Abenjacán
and finally he was Abenjacán.»[
«Aureliano supo
que para
la insondable divinidad,
él y Juan de Panonia
… formaban una
sola persona9.»
[«Aureliano learnt
that for the unfathomable divinity, he and Juan de Panonia
… were members of the same person.» ]
Borges’s
main innovation was, I believe, the academic metaphor, which blends the
real
and the literary world. When he writes «aquel
rey de Tebas que vió dos soles10» «That
King of Thebes
that saw two suns», we think on Oedipus, the most famous of the
Theban
Kings. We conjecture that the pair of suns are a reference to the man
who took
his eyes from his sockets or to the man who threw himself into a crater
as
scorching as the sun. His ambiguity is, in any event, intentional.
Borges
emulates the pages he has read and invites us to emulate him in a
similar way. Gérard Genette
confessed that to
write about Borges was a laborious and annoying task, for Borges’ work
incites
parodies, a mere imitation of his own discourse. But
to talk about a Borgesian discourse would
be a
contradiction of terms. The young Borges may have also believed that
his essays
were but scholarship. In 1959 he still believed «that his little book
about
Ancient Germanic Literatures was nothing more than the work of an
ill-informed
dilettante, and that just now he starts to have some clear knowledge on
the
subject11.» Time persuaded
him that
the errors of his classicist style were far more interesting than his
certainties. His pages remain as a topography
of
literature, without precedent in a universal history literature. It is
not a
referential work, as any encyclopaedia can be. It would be unfair,
likewise, to
stress his didactic dimension, for Borges lived with passion all the
pages he read or wrote, an attitude in open contrast with that of most
of our educational policies, which remain associated
to the
rigor of the academy. In an essay of Otras
Inquisiciones, Borges
introduces Quevedo as «el literato de los literatos» [«the man of
letters of the men of letters».] Such appreciation –if ever existed, would be better applied to the literary
genius of
Borges. His pages point out forsaken encyclopaedias, languages and
manuscripts.
His erudition might confuse us as readers, but in such a case
our confusion would be the fruit of our naivety or ignorance, of our
impossibility to follow Borges on his readings or inventions. A cartography eminently aesthetic, inhabited by
imaginary
writers or inconceivable pamphlets.
It would be banal, in
the same vein, to associate
Borges to the Argentinean society of his age. His time and his space
dismayed
him. «I believe that reading Berkeley, Shaw or Emerson is an
experience
as real as seeing London13,» used to say. But
that London
was extemporal. In a TV program recorded in 1980 in New York, Borges said: «I think on New York
according to the words of Walt Whitman, of O. Henry, and, in the same
way, as
sheer beauty. A city of skyscrapers
that spring
out as fountains. It’s a very poetic city14.»
His praise, though graciously done, was coldly
received by
his interviewer. Thirty years back Borges had already made fun
of the
Argentinean character, always eager to please foreigners: «We were
quite surprised
to see in the first edition of a journal published in Buenos Aires [Sur] a photography of the Iguazú
Falls, another of the Tierra del Fuego,
another of
the Andes and another of the Buenos Aires province. I remember that it
was a ‘view
of the pampas’… in plural! A
true handbook of geography. Victoria [Ocampo]
did it to show our Argentina
to her European friends, but it was a little bit ridiculous to see it
in Buenos
Aires15.»
The informative style
of the Buenos
Aires
newspapers used to dismay him. He preferred instead the orthodox prose
and the
la pompous and archaic judgements of Gibbon and Herodotus. The
countries where
he went to, in other words, were less real than the texts he had
preserved in
his memory about them: «I hope to travel to China
and India.
I have been already there, while reading Kipling and the Tao Te Ching… My memory is
shaped by books
mainly. In fact, I can hardly remember my own life. I cannot recall
dates. I
know that I have travel to 17 or 18 countries, but I cannot tell you
the
sequence of my trips… Everything is a mass of divisions and images… I
always
quote books, once and again. I remember that Emerson, one of my heroes,
used to
prevent us against cites. He said: 'Let’s
be careful.
Life can become a long cite'16.» He was scarcely concern about the economy of
the peoples
and nations of the 20th century. He stated that he used to
write for
himself, or for his most intimate erudite friends. He prescribed that a
lasting
literary work should lack political and comical elements, for the laws,
as the
sense of humour, change from one generation to another. Blind and weary
of
living, he used to postulate and refute solipsism, an illusion that
hunted him
since the writing of Las Ruinas Circulares. Umberto Eco owes to La Biblioteca
de Babel the writing of Il Nome della
Rosa.
His fascination for Borges’ work contrasts with the sinister
personality of his
character Jorge Burgos, a blind librarian with a prodigious memory that
bitterly hated the good humour of his contemporaries. In Montevideo,
again, when asked what was his opinion about hunger,
Borges replied: «I never had a relationship with hunger, exception made
of the
first year of the war. Thus, I don’t have a great knowledge of it17.» An attitude that exacerbated many
Latin-American
intellectuals of his generation and that was going eventually to deter
the Swedish Academy
from granting him the Nobel Prize of Literature. His apology of the
work of
Kipling is an apology of himself: «It’s is quite unfair to judge a
writer by
his ideas18.»
His tortuous life,
however, explains the vitality
of his work. Cioran saw Borges as a
by-product of the
Latin-American emptiness, of the cultural asphyxia of Argentina.
Borges had already anticipated such judgement, quoting once and again
Paul Groussac, who wrote that to be famous
in South America
it to be famous nowhere. He
used to compare the South American writer to the Jewish intellectual,
for their
roots take in a culture as imprecise as the universe. Let’s remember that
his master
and alter-ego was Rafael Cansinos-Asséns,
a Spanish Jew
who spoke fourteen languages, and who translated to Spanish The
Arabian
Nights, as well as the divergent works of Dostoyevsky and Goethe.
His verses to Alfonso
Reyes are, as each of his
poems, a meditation about his own experience:
Supo bien aquel arte que ninguno
Supo del
todo, ni Simbad ni Ulises,
Que es
pasar
de un país a otros
países
Y estar íntegramente
en cada uno
[He
knew well the
art that no one else
Learnt so well, not Simbad nor Ulises,
Which is to move from one country to other countries
Being entirely in each of them]
His literary
cartography started with Fervor
de Buenos Aires (1923). His
neighbourhood, Palermo, is meticulously described
in Evaristo Carriego
(1930). This
book evinces his aesthetic
intention: Borges wants to engage us in Carriego’s
work. Persuaded by Plinio, that there is
not a bad
book without a good page, Borges struggles to point out the virtues of
a
forgotten author and an awful poetry. Years later Borges affirmed that
the
verses of Evaristo
Carriego were so
unfortunate that he ended up losing
interest in praising them. From then on, he would praise passages of
writers
more undeservedly forgotten. In Inquisiciones (1925), Borges had already
manifested
his lack of interest in famed authors, a position that he was going to
sustain
all his life, in remote countries and diverse languages: «I do not
believe in
schools, nor in chronologies. I never date my writings. I think that
poetry
should be anonymous… We are always rewriting what the ancient writers
wrote: an
indisputable proof19.»
Cioran
regarded Borges’
curiosity as vicious and monstrous. Borges preferred, indeed, worn-out
books
and obsolete encyclopaedias. In another interview he stated that
he was
only interested on writing about forgotten places. Accordingly,
he talked about Lugones
and Quevedo to the North-Americans, and
about Emerson and
Jonathan Edwards to the Argentineans: «For in my country writing about
Emerson
and Jonathan Edwards is like writing about a forgotten corner20.»
He often challenge
firmly established
coordinates. He ranked the work of Henry James over Kafka’s; he
regarded Proust and Virginia Woolf as
«authors for women»; he said that Joyce’s Ulysses
was
a work «of laborious and useless symmetries»; he tarnished
Goethe’s name
by affirming that it was delicate and less interesting than Joyce’s work21;
he called García Lorca
a
charlatan «who had the stoke of luck of being executed22»;
he
discredited, finally, the aesthetics judgements of Ortega y Gasset:
«he didn’t learn English, which means that he was unable to read the
best
novels in the world23.»
In face of the
intellectual accomplishments of
Borges, our only solution appears to be our further readings. He was
proud of
having lived amongst books all his life. His popularity at the
universities is
mainly due, I believe, to his enthusiasm about learning. One of my
first
discoveries of his work was a commentary of an essay about Swift: «A
modest
proposal», an irony that, coincidently, I had already read. In it Swift expounded a solution to the hunger of
the United Kingdom,
cooking Irish children. I understood Swift’s
writing
as a political sarcasm, or, on a more contemporary vein, as a chronicle
of
black humour. Borges, on the contrary, presented it as a nightmare. It
would
not be daring to affirm, following the Borguesian
plot, that Pierre Menard, a scribe, and Funes,
a erudite, were the
characters that created Jorge Luis
Borges and incarnated him.
Borges’ fate, quite
contrary to that of so many
of his contemporary writers, was not as much that of innovating
literature as
of recovering it. His blindness prevented him, according to his own
words, from
studying contemporary writers. He also confessed certain weariness:
«because I
think on Menard, coming after a long literary period to the conclusion
that he
does not want to overwhelm the world with more books24.»
He
longed to be known as an English writer from the 19th-century,
colleague of De Quincey, Kipling,
Chesterton, Stevenson and Bernard Shaw.
It is difficult to
reread Borges without becoming
infected of his passion or his vice for reading. His prologues, that
veneration
of so many nations and languages, advocate the study of ancient and
remote
literatures. Borges was a master, and remains as such. His pages are,
one way
or another, a creative compilation without precedent, a map that
inspires other
writers from dissimilar nations—so that literature will never endure
the
indolence of the inhabitants of the Empire: «Less Addicted to the study
of
Cartography, the Incoming Generations understood that such an extensive
Map was
Useless, and not without Impiety they delivered it to the
inclemency of
the Sun and the Winter. The torn-apart ruins of the Map still stand
over the
West Deserts, populated by Animals and Beggars. In the entire country
there is
no other relic of the Geographical Arts25.»
Notas:
1.
Carlos
Peralta, “La electricidad de las palabras,” in
James E. Irby. Encuentro
con Borges (Buenos Aires: Galerna,
1968) p. 107
2.
Ibid., p. 9
3.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Del
rigor de la ciencia,” in El Hacedor (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960) p. 103
4.
Cfr. E. Cioran, Oeuvres
(Manchecourt: Gallimard)
1995. p. 1607
5.
Jorge Luis
Borges, “Nota sobre
(hacia)
Bernard Shaw,” in Otras Inquisiciones
(Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960) p. 221
6.
Arthur Schopenhahuer, Sämtliche
Werke (Stuttgart: Suhrkamp.
1986) Volume V, p. 20
7.
Stelio Cro, Jorge
Luis Borges, Poeta, Saggista
e Narratore (Milán: Murcia, 1971) p.
258-259
8.
Jorge Luis Borges, 'Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su
laberinto,' in El Aleph
(Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1957) p. 134
9.
Jorge Luis
Borges,
'Los Teólogos,' in El Aleph
(Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1957) p. 45
10.
Ibíd., p. 37
11.
James E Irby, Op.
Cit., p. 12
12. Jorge Luis
Borges, 'Quevedo,' in Otras
Inquisiciones (Buenos
Aires: Emecé,
1957) p. 56
13. Richard
Burgin, Conversaciones con Jorge
Luis Borges (Madrid: Tauros, 1968) p.
43
14. Willis
Barnstone, Borges at
Eighty, conversations with
Jorge Luis Borges (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) p.
34. Temporally, I quote my own translation from my 2000 Spanish
translation from the original text at the University
of Manchester.
15. Napoleón Murat.
'Conversación con Napoleón Murat,' in James E
Irby. Op. Cit., p. 72-73
16. Willis
Barnstone, Op. Cit., p. 6-7
17.
Carlos Peralta, Op.
Cit., p. 109
18. James E Irby, Op. Cit.,
p. 47
19. Willis Barnstone,
Op. Cit.,
p. 9
20. Richard Burgin, Op. Cit., p.
112-114
21. Cfr. Michel Berveiller, Le cosmopolitisme de
Jorge Luis Borges (París: Chastrusse, 1973)
22. Richard Burgin, Op. Cit.,
p. 45
23. Willis Barnstone,
Op. Cit.,
p. 160
24. Richard
Burgin. Op. Cit. p. 45
25. Jorge Luis Borges, “Del
rigor de la ciencia,” Op. Cit.
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