The Paris Review Subscribe A Note on Jorge Luis Borges
A Note on Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style. Argentine by birth and temperament, but nurtured on universal literature, Borges has no spiritual homeland. He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds. It is a sign of his importance that, in placing him, only strange and perfect works can be called to mind. He is akin to Kafka, Poe, sometimes to Henry James and Wells, always to Valéry by the abrupt projection of his paradoxes in what has been called “his private metaphysics.”
His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read every thing, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound—he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas—but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: “Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds in Giordano Bruno (1584): “We can assert with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Such researches, carried out among the Chinese as among the Arabs or the Egyptians, delight Borges, and lead him to the subjects of his stories.
Many of his masters are English. He has an infinite admiration for Wells and is indignant that Oscar Wilde could define him as “a scientific Jules Verne.” Borges makes the observation that the fiction of Jules Verne speculates on future probability (the submarine, the trip to the moon), that of Wells on pure possibility (an invisible man, a flower that devours a man, a machine to explore time), or even on impossibility (a man returning from the hereafter with a future flower). Beyond that, a Wells novel symbolically represents features inherent in all human destinies. Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader’s features known, but the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work—which is an excellent description of Borges’s own art. “God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”
He admires Poe and Chesterton as much as he does Wells. Poe wrote perfect tales of fantastic horror and invented the detective story, but he never combined the two types of writing. Chesterton did attempt and felicitously brought off this tour de force. Each of Father Brown’s adventures proposes to explain, in reason’s name, unexplainable fact. “Though Chesterton disclaimed being a Poe or Kafka, there was, in the material out of which his ego was molded, something that tended to nightmare.” Kafka was a direct precursor of Borges. The Castle might be by Borges, but he would have made it into a ten-page-story, both out of lofty laziness and out of concern for perfection. As for Kafka’s precursors, Borges’s erudition takes pleasure in finding them in Zeno of Elea, Kierkegaard and Robert Browning. In each of these authors there is some Kafka, but if Kafka had not written, nobody would have been able to notice it—whence this very Borgesian paradox: “Every writer creates his own precursors.”
Another man who inspires him is the English writer John William Dunne, author of such curious books about time, in which he claims that the past, present and future exist simultaneously, as is proved by our dreams. (Schopenhauer, Borges remarks, had already written that life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them in order is living; skimming through them is dreaming.) In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams. “God, our friends, and Shakespeare will collaborate with us.” Nothing pleases Borges better than to play in this way with mind, dreams, space and time. The more complicated the game becomes, the happier he is. The dreamer can be dreamed in his turn. “The Mind was dreaming; the world was its dream.” In all philosophers, from Democritus to Spinoza, from Schopenhauer to Kierkegaard, he is on the watch for paradoxical intellectual possibilities.
Comments
Post a Comment