Picked-Up Pieces (28 page)
Authors: John Updike
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. Whereas, 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.
Turning from Borges’ criticism to his fiction, one senses the liberation he must have felt upon entering “the paradise of the tale.” For there is something disturbing as well as fascinating, something distorted and strained about his literary essays. His ideas border on delusions; the dark hints—of a cult of books, of a cabalistic unity hidden in history—that he so studiously develops are special to the corrupt light of libraries and might vanish outdoors. It is uncertain how seriously he intends his textual diagrams, which seem ciphers for concealed emotions. Borges crowds into the margins of others’ books passion enough to fill blank pages; his essays all tend to open inward, disclosing an obsessed imagination and a proud, Stoic, almost cruelly masculine personality.
Dreamtigers
, a collection of paragraphs, sketches, poems, and apocryphal quotations titled in Spanish
El Hacedor
(
The Maker
), succeeds in time the creative period of narrative fiction his essays foreshadow. It is frankly the miscellany of an aging man, fondly dedicated to a dead enemy—the Modernist poet Leopoldo Lugones, like Borges the director of a national library.
Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically desiccated and preserved.… These reflections bring me to the door of your office. I go in; we exchange a few words, conventional and cordial, and I give you this book.… My vanity and nostalgia have set up an impossible scene. Perhaps so (I tell myself), but tomorrow I too will have died, and our times will intermingle and chronology will be lost in a sphere of symbols. And then in some way it will be right to claim that I have brought you this book, and that you have accepted it.
The epilogue repeats this prediction of his own death:
Few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering than Schopenhauer’s thought or the music of England’s words.
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.
The book is in two parts. The first, translated by Mildred Boyer, consists of those short prose sketches, musical and firm, that Borges, unable to see to write, composes in his head. The first of these describes Homer: “Gradually now the beautiful universe was slipping away from him. A stubborn mist erased the outline of his hand, the night was no longer peopled by stars, the earth beneath his feet was unsure.” In a critical essay, Borges had traced the evolution of God and Shakespeare, as reputations, from something to nothing; now this nothingness is discovered
in Shakespeare himself, intimately: “There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone.” Dante is imagined dying in Ravenna, “as unjustified and as alone as any other man.” God in a dream declares to him the secret purpose of his life and his work, which is like that of the leopard who endured a caged existence so that Dante might see him and place him in the first canto of the
Inferno
. “You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem,” God told the leopard, “but when he awoke, there was only a dark resignation in him; a valiant ignorance.…” And the illustrious Italian Giambattista Marino—“proclaimed as the new Homer and the new Dante”—dying, perceives that “the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not—as his vanity had dreamed—a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.” It is as if, in his blindness and age, the oneness of all men that Borges had so often entertained as a theory and premonition has become a fact; he
is
Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and tastes fully the bitter emptiness of creative splendor. The usurpation of a writer’s private identity by his literary one has not been more sadly, or wittily, expressed than in “Borges and I”:
It’s the other one, it’s Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor.
Borges tempts one to quote him at too great length. These brief paragraphs composed in his head have an infrangible aptness. His ability to crystallize vague ideas and vaguer emotions into specific images has grown. The image of Layamon, the last Saxon poet, returns in the form of an anonymous old man, dying, unaware that he is the last man to have witnessed the worship of Woden. He lies in a stable: “Outside are the plowed fields and a deep ditch clogged with dead leaves and an occasional wolf track in the black earth at the edge of the forest.” This stark
sentence, with its unexpectedly vivid ditch, has in it the whole of a primitive England, and pierces us with a confused sense of elapsed time. These sketches see a diminishing of those adjectives—“mysterious,” “secret,” “atrocious”—with which the younger Borges insisted on his sense of strangeness. Instead, there is a delicate manipulation of the concrete—lists and catalogues in which one or two of the series seem anomalous (“… islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses …”) and the application now and then of a surprising color adjective (the volumes’ “golden shadow” above, “red Adam in Paradise,” and, apropos of Homer, “black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle”). Immensity is reified in terms of color: “Every hundred paces a tower cleft the air; to the eye their color was identical, yet the first of all was yellow, and the last, scarlet, so delicate were the gradations and so long the series.” In this image the concept of the infinite—the concept that “corrupts and confuses the others”—is tamed into something lyrical and even pretty. One feels in
Dreamtigers
a calm, an intimation of truce, a tranquil fragility. Like so many last or near-last works—like
The Tempest, The Millionairess
, or “Investigations of a Dog”—
Dreamtigers
preserves the author’s life-long concerns, but drained of urgency; horror has yielded to a resigned humorousness. These sketches can be read for their grace and wit but scarcely for narrative excitement; the most exciting of them, “Ragnarök,” embodies Borges’ most terrible vision, of an imbecilic God or body of gods. But it occurs within a dream, and ends easily: “We drew our heavy revolvers—all at once there were revolvers in the dream—and joyously put the Gods to death.”
The second half of this slim volume consists of poems, late and early. Poetry was where Borges’ ramifying literary career originally took root. The translations, by Harold Morland, into roughly four-beat and intermittently rhymed lines, seem sturdy and clear, and occasional stanzas must approximate very closely the felicity of the original:
In their grave corner, the players
Deploy the slow pieces. And the chessboard
Detains them until dawn in its severe
Compass in which two colors hate each other.
As a poet, Borges has some of the qualities—a meditative circularity, a heavy-lidded elegance—of Wallace Stevens:
With slow love she looked at the scattered
Colors of afternoon. It pleased her
to lose herself in intricate melody
or in the curious life of verses.
And
We shall seek a third tiger. This
Will be like those others a shape
Of my dreaming, a system of words
A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger
That, beyond the mythologies,
Is treading the earth.
But in English the poems are chiefly interesting for their content; they are more autobiographical and emotionally direct than Borges’ prose. The first one, “Poem About Gifts,” movingly portrays himself in his blindness:
Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.
Thoughts anonymously cached in the maze of his fictions are enunciated in his own voice. In a fabricated encyclopedia article he describes the “philosophers of Uqbar” as believing that “Copulation and mirrors are abominable.… For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.” In a poem, “Mirrors,” the belief turns out to be Borges’ own:
I see them as infinite, elemental
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of begetting. Sleepless. Bringing doom.
The profound sense of timelessness that in the prose activates so much textual apparatus becomes in verse an elementary nostalgia:
