Why Read the Classics? (35 page)

There is another poem which is even more significant for defining this Borgesian continuity between historical events, literary epics, poetic transformation of events, the power of literary motifs, and their influence on the collective imagination. And this too is a poem which concerns us closely, because it mentions the other Italian epic which Borges knows in detail, Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
. The poem is entided ‘Ariosto and the Arabs’. In it Borges runs through the Carolingian and Arthurian epics which merge in Ariosto’s poem, which skims over these elements of the tradition as though on the hippogriff. In other words it transforms them into a fantasy which is both ironic and yet full of pathos. The popularity of the
Orlando Furioso
ensured that the dreams of medieval heroic legends were transmitted to European culture (Borges cites Milton as a reader of Ariosto), right down to the moment when what had been the dreams of Charlemagne’s enemies, that is to say the dreams of the Arab world, supersede them.
The Arabian Nights
conquer the imagination of European readers, taking the place that had once been held by the
Orlando Furioso
in the collective imagination. There is thus a war between the fantasy worlds of the West and the East which prolongs the historic war between Charlemagne and the Saracens, and it is in this later war that the Orient gains its revenge.

The power of the written word is, then, linked to lived experience both as the source and the end of that experience. As a source, because it becomes the equivalent of an event which otherwise would not have taken place, as it were; as an end, because for Borges the written word that counts is the one that makes a strong impact on the collective imagination, as an emblematic or conceptual figure, made to be remembered and recognised whenever it appears, whether in the past or in the future.

These mythical or archetypal motifs, which are probably finite in number, stand out against the infinite backdrop of metaphysical themes of which Borges is so fond. In every text he writes, in any way he can, Borges manages to talk about the infinite, the uncountable, time, eternity or rather the eternal presence or cyclical nature of time. And here I go back to what was said previously about his maximum concentration of meanings in the brevity of his texts. Take a classic example of Borges’ art: his most famous story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. The surface plot is a conventional spy thriller, a tale of intrigue condensed into a dozen pages, which is then
manipulated somewhat in order to reach the surprise conclusion. (The epics exploited by Borges can also take the form of popular fiction.) This spy-story also includes another tale, whose suspense is more to do with logic and metaphysics, and which has a Chinese setting: it is the quest for a labyrinth. Inside this second story in turn there is the description of an endless Chinese novel. But what counts most in this complex narrative tangle is the philosophical reflection on time it contains, or rather the definitions of the conceptions of time which are articulated one after another. At the end we realise that, underneath the appearance of a thriller, what we have read is a philosophical tale, or rather an essay on the idea of time.

The hypotheses about time which are put forward in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ are each contained (and almost hidden) in just a few lines. First there is an idea of constant time, a kind of subjective, absolute present (‘I reflected that everything happens to a man in this very moment of now. Centuries and centuries, but events happen only in the present; countless men in the air, on land and sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me …’). Then an idea of time determined by will, the time of an action decided on once and for all, in which the future would present itself as irrevocable as the past. Lastly the story’s central idea: a multiple, ramified time in which every present instant splits into two futures, so as to form ‘an expanding, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times.’ This idea of an infinity of contemporary universes, in which all possibilities are realised in all possible combinations, is not a digression from the story, but the very condition which is required so that the protagonist can feel authorised to commit the absurd and abominable crime which his spying mission imposes on him, certain that this will happen only in one of the universes but not in the others, or rather by committing the crime here and now, he and his victim can recognise each other as friends and brothers in other universes.

Such a conception of ramified time is dear to Borges because it is the one which dominates in literature: in fact, it is the condition which makes literature possible. The example I am about to quote takes us back again to Dante, and it is an essay by Borges on Ugolino della Gherardesca, to be precise on the line ‘Poscia, piú che il dolor poté il digmno’ (Then what grief could not manage hunger did), and on what was described as a ‘pointless controversy’ on the possibility that Conte Ugolino committed cannibalism. Having examined the views of many critics, Borges agrees with the
majority of them, who say the line must mean that Ugolino died through starvation. However, he adds that Dante without wanting us to believe it was true, certainly wanted us to suspect ‘albeit with uncertainty and hesitation’ that Ugolino could have eaten his own children. And Borges then lists all the hints of cannibalism in
Inferno
canto 33, starting with the opening image of Ugolino gnawing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri.

This essay is significant for the general considerations on which it closes. In particular the idea (which is one of Borges’ statements that comes closest to coinciding with structuralist methods) that a literary text consists solely of the succession of words of which it is composed, so ‘on Ugolino we have to say that he is a textual construct, comprising about thirty
terzine’
. Then there is the idea that links with the notions maintained by Borges on many occasions, about the impersonality of literature, concluding that ‘Dante did not know much more about Ugolino than what his
terzine
tell us’. And lastly the idea I really wanted to stress, the idea of ramified time: ‘In real time, in history, whenever a man finds himself facing different alternatives, he opts for one, eliminating the others for ever; not so in the ambiguous time of art, which resembles that of hope and oblivion. Hamlet, in this literary time, is both sane and mad. In the darkness of the Tower of Hunger Ugolino devours and does not devour the bodies of his beloved children, and this wavering imprecision, this uncertainty is the strange matter of which he is made up. This was how Dante imagined him, in two possible death scenes, and how future generations imagine him.’

This essay is contained in a volume published in Madrid two years ago, and not yet translated into Italian, which collects Borges’ essays and lectures on Dante:
Nueve ensayos dantescos (Further Essays on Dante)
. His constant and passionate study of the founding text of Italian literature, his congenial appreciation of the poem, which has allowed him to make what he has inherited from Dante bear fruit both in his critical reflections and in his creative works, is one of the reasons, certainly not the least, why we celebrate Borges here and express once more with emotion and affection our gratitude for the intellectual nourishment he continues to give us.

[1984]

Who is Raymond Queneau? At first glance this might seem a strange question, since the image of this writer is well known to anyone with any knowledge of twentieth-century literature, and of French literature in particular. But if each one of us tries to put together the things we know about Queneau, this image immediately takes on intricate and complex outlines, embraces elements which are difficult to hold together; and the more defining traits we manage to highlight, the more we feel that we are missing others which are necessary to round out into a unitary figure the various planes of this multi-faceted polyhedron. This writer who seems always to welcome us with an invitation to put ourselves at our ease, to find the most comfortable and relaxed position, to feel on the same level as he is, as though we were about to play a round of cards with friends, is in reality someone with a cultural background that can never be fully explored, a background whose implications and presuppositions, explicit or implicit, one can never exhaust.

Of course Queneau’s fame is based primarily on his novels about the rather uncouth and shady world of the Parisian
banlieue
or of provincial French towns, on his word-games involving the spelling of everyday, spoken, French. His is a narrative oeuvre which is extremely consistent and compact, reaching its apogee of comic elegance in
Zazie dans le métro (Zazie in the Metro)
. Whoever remembers Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the early postwar period will include in this more popular image some of the songs sung by Juliette Gréco like ‘Fillette, fillette’ …

Other layers are added to this picture by those who have read his most ‘youthful’ and autobiographical novel,
Odile:
there we find his past links
with the group of Surrealists surrounding André Breton in the 1920s (this account tells of his first, tentative approach towards them, his rather rapid distancing from them, their basic incompatibility, all in a series of merciless caricatures) against the backdrop of a rather unusual intellectual passion in a writer and poet: mathematics.

But someone might object that, leaving aside the novels and the collections of poetry, Queneau’s most typical books are works which are unique in their own genre, such as
Exercises de style (Exercises in Style)
, or
Petite Cosmogonie portative (The Portable Small Cosmogony)
or
Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Million Million Poems)
. In the first, an episode narrated in a few sentences is repeated 99 times in 99 different styles; the second is a poem in Alexandrines on the origin of the earth, chemistry, the origin of life, animal evolution and the development of technology; the third is a machine for composing sonnets, consisting of ten sonnets using the same rhymes printed on pages cut into horizontal strips, one line on each strip, so that every first line can be followed by a choice of ten second lines, and so on until the total of 10
¹⁴
combinations is reached.

There is another fact which should not be overlooked, namely that Queneau’s official profession for the last twenty-five years of his life was that of encyclopedia consultant (he was the editor of Gallimard’s
Encyclopédie de la Pléiade)
. The map we have been outlining is now quite jagged, and every piece of bio-bibliographical information which can be added to it only makes it even more complicated.

Queneau published three volumes of essays and occasional writings in his lifetime:
Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (Signs, Figures and Letters)
(1950 and 1965),
Bords (Borders)
(1963), and
Le Voyage en Grèce (The Journey to Greece)
(1973). These works, along with a certain number of uncollected pieces, can give us an intellectual outline of Queneau, which is the starting-point for his creative work. From the range of his interests and choices, all of them very precise and only at first sight rather divergent, emerges the framework of an implicit philosophy, or let us say a mental attitude and organisation which never settles for the easy route.

In our century Queneau is a unique example of a wise and intelligent writer, who always goes against the grain of the dominant tendencies of his age and of French culture in particular. (But he never—and he is a rare, or rather, unique example of this—allows himself through intellectual self-indulgence to be dragged into saying things which are later shown to be disastrous or stupid mistakes.) He combines this with an endless need to
invent and to test possibilities (both in the practice of literary creation and in theoretical speculation) only in areas where the fun of the game—that distinctive hallmark of the human—guarantees that he will not go far wrong.

These are all qualities which make him still, both in France and in the world at large, an eccentric figure, but which perhaps in the not too distant future may reveal him to be a master, one of the few who will stay the course in a century in which there have been so many flawed maestros, or ones that have been only partially successful or inadequate or too well-intentioned. As far as I am concerned, without going farther afield, Queneau has assumed this magisterial role for some time now, even though—perhaps because of my excessive adherence to his ideas—I have always found it difficult to explain fully why. I am afraid that I will not succeed in explaining it in this essay either. Instead I would like him to explain it, in his own words.

The first literary battles in which we find Queneau’s name embroiled were those which he fought in order to establish ‘le néo-français’, in other words to bridge the gap between written French (with its rigid rules of spelling and syntax, its monumental immobility, its lack of flexibility and agility) and the spoken language (with its inventiveness, mobility and economy of expression). On a journey to Greece in 1932, Queneau had convinced himself that that country’s linguistic situation, characterised even in its written form by the split between the classicising
(kathareuousa)
and the spoken
(demotikê)
language, was no different from the French situation. Starting from this conviction (and from his studies of the peculiar syntax of American Indian languages such as Chinook), Queneau speculated on the advent of a demotic written French which would be initiated by himself and Céline.

Queneau did not opt for this choice for reasons of populist realism or vitality (‘In any case I have no respect nor consideration for what is popular, the future, “life” etc.’, he wrote in 1937). What inspired him was an iconoclastic approach to literary French (which, however, he did not want to abolish, but rather to conserve as a language in its own right, in all its purity, like Latin), and the conviction that all the great inventions in the field of language and literature emerged through transitions from the spoken to the written language. But there was more to it than this: the stylistic revolution he promoted derived from a context which was philosophical right from the start.