In 1977, William F. Buckley Jr. went to Buenos Aires and interviewed Jorge Luis Borges for one hour. It’s a great interview, maybe the best literary interview I’ve ever seen. Borges was 77 at the time of the interview, and blind; he had become completely blind at age 55, due to a congenital problem that also affected his father and grandfather. Borges was an experienced public speaker, and did numerous interviews; one might call him a master of the art of literary conversation; during part of his life, he was an itinerant lecturer, like Emerson. Borges’ speech is somewhat indistinct, so I watched the interview with subtitles.
Borges wrote some non-fiction essays, but he’s chiefly known for his poetry and his short stories; he never wrote a novel. Speaking of his stories, Borges says, “I have no message whatever... I write to please myself.” He has an idea or urge, then he expresses it. Borges said, “I don’t think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.” Borges has a penchant for wild fantasy; his fiction doesn’t try to create the illusion of reality.
Quoting Carlyle, Borges says that working deserves respect, though the product of work generally doesn’t deserve respect. So Borges works, though he doesn’t like his own writings, never re-reads them, and thinks they’re vastly overrated. “I prefer the work of any other writer,” he says. Borges is a great man-of-letters, a great conversationalist, but I don’t think he’s a great fiction-writer.
Buckley begins the interview with a hardball question — one might call the question a high-and-tight fastball. He asks Borges if he supported (as his left-wing critics allege) the execution of the French leftist Regis Debray, who had been captured in Bolivia in 1967 while fighting with Che Guevara (Debray is still alive today at age 83). Borges ducks the question, but does so in such an interesting way that one is scarcely aware he’s ducking the question. Borges says that execution is more merciful than incarceration, and he says that he would like to be executed himself, since life has lost its savor for him, now that he’s old, blind, and lonely. In fact, Borges wasn’t executed, much to his disappointment; he lived another nine years, and died in 1986.1
Borges was conservative in his politics; Wikipedia says that this may explain why he never won the Nobel Prize, though he was often mentioned as a candidate. Borges accepted an award from Chile’s dictator, Pinochet. Borges approved of the military junta that took power in Argentina after the ouster of the populist Perón government; Borges tells Buckley, We were governed by the scum of the earth, but now gentlemen are in power. But Borges also approved when the military junta was replaced by a democratic government in 1983.
Like most conservatives, Borges thinks that imperialism/colonialism is good for the colonized. He says that the British Empire “made for good” but “maybe it did no good to England.”2
Borges doesn’t let his politics determine his literary opinions. Though he disagreed with Pablo Neruda’s communist views, he praised Neruda’s poetry, and he thought Neruda deserved a Nobel Prize. Borges takes a broad, cosmopolitan view, and rejects nationalism. He thinks that a writer’s political views are “superficial”; he says that his own political opinions don’t affect his literary work.
Since I enjoyed the interview with Buckley, I read Borges’ long autobiographical essay, which was published in the New Yorker in 1970. This essay is consistently interesting and very well-written; one can’t praise it too highly. I’m not a fan of Borges’ fiction, but when he finds his niche, he can write very well indeed.
Borges’ ancestors were mostly military men, who played a prominent role in the history of Argentina. His father was a lawyer, a psychology teacher, and a would-be writer. His father’s mother was English, so his father grew up speaking English, and his father’s library was filled with English books. Borges himself read mostly English books, and considered English literature the best in the world. “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life,” Borges said, “I should say my father’s library.”3
At first, Borges’ parents didn’t have much money, so they lived in a low-rent section of Buenos Aires, a section known as Palermo. Borges compares the Palermo of his youth to the Wild West.4 But while people in the West fought with guns, people in Palermo fought with knives. Borges filled his stories with knives, swords, and guns, partly because of the military exploits of his ancestors, partly because of the atmosphere in Palermo.
Later his parents had more money, and his father sought treatment for his eyes in Switzerland. Borges moved to Switzerland with his family at age 14, and Borges remained in Europe for almost ten years. Near the end of this European period, Borges lived with his family in Madrid. “There the great event to me was my friendship with Rafael Cansinos-Asséns. I still like to think of myself as his disciple.... The most remarkable fact about Cansinos was that he lived completely for literature, without regard for money or fame. Every Saturday I would go to the Café Colonial, where we met at midnight, and the conversation lasted until daybreak. Sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty of us.
“Cansinos would propose a subject — the Metaphor, Free Verse, the Traditional Forms of Poetry, Narrative Poetry, the Adjective, the Verb. In his own quiet way, he was a dictator, allowing no unfriendly allusions to contemporary writers and trying to keep the talk on a high plane.
“[Cansinos] had a perversity that made him fail to get on with his leading contemporaries. It lay in writing books that lavishly praised second- or third-rate writers. At the time, Ortega y Gasset was at the height of his fame, but Cansinos thought of him as a bad philosopher and a bad writer. What I got from him, chiefly, was the pleasure of literary conversation. Also, I was stimulated by him to far-flung reading.”
In 1967, when Borges delivered the Norton Lectures at Harvard, Borges “mentioned [Cansinos] as one of his masters, and expressed wonder at the fact that he has been forgotten.”
In his early 20s, Borges left Europe, returned to Argentina, and began mingling in literary circles. “At this time, I... met Alfonso Reyes. He was the Mexican Ambassador to Argentina, and used to invite me to dinner every Sunday at the Embassy. I think of Reyes as the finest Spanish prose stylist of this century, and in my writing I learned a great deal about simplicity and directness from him.
“Summing up this span of my life, I find myself completely out of sympathy with the priggish and rather dogmatic young man I then was. Those friends, however, are still very living and very close to me. In fact, they form a precious part of me. Friendship is, I think, the one redeeming Argentine passion.”
Alfonso Reyes isn’t the only Spanish-language writer who was also a diplomat. Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Carrera Andrade — all were writer-diplomats.
Borges continues: “One of the chief events of these years — and of my life — was the beginning of my friendship with Adolfo Bioy-Casares. We met in 1930 or 1931, when he was about seventeen and I was just past thirty. It is always taken for granted in these cases that the older man is the master and the younger his disciple. This may have been true at the outset, but several years later, when we began to work together, Bioy was really and secretly the master.
“He and I attempted many different literary ventures. We compiled anthologies of Argentine poetry, tales of the fantastic, and detective stories; we wrote articles and forewords; we annotated Sir Thomas Browne and Gracián.... Every night I dine at his house and then after dinner we sit down and write.5
“I had invented what we thought was a quite good plot for a detective story. One rainy morning, he told me we ought to give it a try. I reluctantly agreed, and a little later that same morning the thing happened. A third man, Honorio Bustos Domecq, emerged and took over. In the long run, he ruled us with a rod of iron and to our amusement, and later to our dismay, he became utterly unlike ourselves, with his own whims, his own puns, and his own very elaborate style of writing....
“The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq [are] better than anything I have published under my own name and nearly as good as anything Bioy has written on his own.”
In the mid-1960s, Borges became friendly with a young priest, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who’s now Pope Francis.6
Borges had a knack for literary conversation. When he was in his early 30s, he met Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, in Argentina. When La Rochelle returned to France, he told his friends, “Borges vaut le voyage [Borges is worth the trip].”7
The young Borges wrote about elevated feelings in an elevated style, it took time for him to develop a simple, restrained style. His first published poem was a Hymn to the Sea, modelled after Whitman’s poetry. In his Hymn, Borges spoke of himself and the sea “hungering for stars.” “Years after, when I came across Arnold Bennett’s phrase ‘the third-rate grandiose,’ I understood at once what he meant.”
Borges continues: “Fine writing is a mistake, and a mistake born out of vanity. Good writing, I firmly believe, should be done in an unobtrusive way.” As Somerset Maugham said, “Good prose should be like the clothes of a well-dressed man, appropriate but unobtrusive.”
“When I was a young man,” Borges says, “I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature, because they correspond to something essential.... That’s better than the idea of shocking people, than finding connections between things that have never been connected before.... If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever.”
Borges said, “A writer always begins by being too complicated.... The first thing a young writer... sets out to do is to show his readers that he possesses a dictionary, that he knows all the synonyms; so we get, for example, in one line, red, then we get scarlet, then we get other different words, more or less, for the same color: purple.
“Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word [in my writings], that is to say, a word that may be used by the Spanish classics or a word used in the slums of Buenos Aires, I mean a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word. One should be able to read smoothly... even if you’re writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.”
As I said in my book of aphorisms, “We should remember Caesar’s advice: “Avoid, like a rock, the strange and unusual word” (tamquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens verbum). In an earlier issue, I defended the use of common metaphors, common expressions, against Orwell’s criticisms: “If the purpose of language is to communicate, to convey a thought or experience or fact, a common metaphor might be appropriate because most readers understand it. An original metaphor, on the other hand, might be more obscure, and might draw the reader’s attention away from the thought that the writer is trying to communicate. The purpose of language is to disappear, to make the reader forget the language and focus on the content.”
Borges realizes that advice about style is unnecessary, because if a writer is deeply moved, style will come by itself. “I remember what Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and not more. Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless. He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.8
“In this country, though, there is a tendency to regard any kind of writing — especially the writing of poetry — as a game of style. I have known many poets here who have written well — very fine stuff — with delicate moods and so on — but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be kind of sideshow.
“They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets or writers at all. It was a trick they had learned and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them — except four or five I should say — seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it. They take things for granted. They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic.”9
Borges says that some of these “false writers” grow tired of the charade, and ask someone else to write their works for them. Discussing a Madrid magazine called Grecia, Borges says, “the editor, Isaac del Vando Villar, had the whole corpus of his poetry written for him by one or another of his assistants. I remember one of them telling me one day, ‘I’m very busy — Isaac is writing a poem.’”10
In recent months, numerous cases of plagiarism by professional scholars have emerged. Perhaps plagiarism happens when writers aren’t sincere, aren’t passionate about their subject; they’re just “going through the motions,” producing written work as a formality, a charade.
When Borges was in his early 20s, he self-published a poetry-collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires. “In those days, publishing a book was something of a private venture. I never thought of sending copies to the booksellers or out for review. Most of them I just gave away.” He asked a magazine-editor to put copies of his book into the pockets of the coats hanging in his office. “When I came back after a year’s absence, I found that some of the inhabitants of the overcoats had read my poems, and a few had even written about them. As a matter of fact, in this way I got myself a small reputation as a poet.”11 When Borges was in his early 30s, he published a book called The History of Eternity. It sold 37 copies. He wanted to locate each of the 37 buyers, thank them, and apologize for the book’s shortcomings.12
Borges was fond of reading encyclopedias. He particularly liked old encyclopedias, which he said were meant for reading, not just for research. “In the eleventh or twelfth editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica you had long articles by Macaulay... De Quincey, [etc.] Those articles were really monographs, really books or short books. The same goes for the German encyclopedias — Brockhaus or Meyers.” Borges complains that more modern encyclopedias have been condensed so as to fit into today’s smaller homes.
Poets, novelists, philosophers — all have recurring themes, recurring ideas. Borges said, “Once it happened to me to write a poem... and then to re-write it many years afterwards.... Some of my friends told me: ‘Well, that’s the same poem you published some five years ago.’ And I said: ‘Well, so it is!’ But I hadn’t the faintest notion that it was. After all, I think that a poet has maybe five or six poems to write and not more than that. He’s trying his hand at re-writing them from different angles and perhaps with different plots and in different ages and different characters, but the poems are essentially and innerly the same.”13
Borges was fond of English literature, including Old English literature. His grave in Geneva is decorated with Anglo-Saxon images. When he was at the University of Texas in 1961, he taught Argentine literature, and took a class in Old English. When Buckley asks Borges, “What are you working on now?” Borges says he’s writing a book about an Icelandic historian.
Borges was influenced by the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink, who’s known for a supernatural novel called The Golem (1915). In 1892, when Meyrink was living in Prague, he decided to commit suicide. As he was standing at his table with a gun to his head, he heard a scratching sound, and noticed that someone had put a booklet under his door, a booklet with the title “Afterlife.” Amazed by the coincidence, wondering if it was more than chance, Meyrink began a study of occult literature.
Buckley and Borges discuss great Russian novelists — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, etc. Buckley says that the burst of literary creativity in Russia was followed by “nothing.” Buckley asks, “What was it that all of a sudden brought that whole movement [to an end]? Or is genius too rare to make it possible to formulate any rules about the incidence of it?” This is the question I attempt to solve with my theory of renaissance and decadence.
Borges was a fan of the 19th-century Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz, who wrote realistic fiction. Borges was also a fan of the long poem Martín Fierro (1872), by the Argentine writer José Hernández; Borges devoted a volume to Martín Fierro, and called it “the one clearly great work in Argentine literature.” Borges was a fan of the 20th-century Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, who delivered the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1957, ten years before Borges delivered them. Borges was fond of the American poet Carl Sandburg; he said that Sandburg was influenced by Whitman. Borges was also fond of Emerson’s poetry; he called Emerson “a very fine intellectual poet.”
Borges says he’s not a Christian, but he’s a fan of The Divine Comedy nonetheless; he read it a dozen times; he calls it, “perhaps the greatest poem ever written.” He reads the original Italian though he never studied Italian, and can’t converse in Italian or watch an Italian movie; since Italian is close to Spanish, he can make his way through Dante’s Italian. He particularly likes the footnotes, and reads the footnotes first; he says that some Italian editions of The Divine Comedy have a footnote on almost every line.
Borges likes the Arabian Nights, which he reads in English. He also likes A Literary History of Persia, by Edward Granville Browne; he says it can be used as a reference book, or read through. Amazon says, “A Literary History of Persia is still the standard work in the English language on Persia and her literature. It spans four volumes (2,256 pages) and took about twenty-five years to write. Although it concentrates on Persian literature, it also surveys all aspects of Persian culture from Iranian pre-history to the twentieth century.” Wikipedia says that Browne’s A Year Amongst the Persians (1893) is “a classic of English travel literature.”
Borges wrote an essay on Edward Fitzgerald, who’s known for his translation of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám. In 1859, Fitzgerald “arranged for [his translation] to be published at his own expense, by Bernard Quaritch, a bookseller and printer who sold the copies in his store [in London]. At first it was completely ignored, and in 1861 it was put on the remainder tables at the price of a penny, where it was discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti showed it to Charles Swinburne and William Morris, and [it] became popular.... In 1868, a second, expanded edition was printed that was a wild success in America. Quaritch’s is still in business in London as a rare book store.”
Both as reader and writer, Borges had a marked preference for the short story over the novel. “In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page. At the same time, I have always been a reader and re-reader of short stories. Stevenson, Kipling, James, Conrad, Poe, Chesterton, the tales of Lane’s Arabian Nights, and certain stories by Hawthorne have been habits of mine since I can remember. The feeling that great novels like Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn are virtually shapeless served to reinforce my taste for the short-story form, whose indispensable elements are economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle, and end.... The stories of Henry James are far above his novels.”14
Before there were books, there was oral literature, which was often memorized. Poetry is easier to memorize than prose, because of its rhyme and meter; one might say that poetry is a mnemonic device. So as Borges became increasingly blind, he turned to poetry, which enabled him to compose in his head. “One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics. In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and metre have mnemonic virtues.”
Borges’ friends arranged a job for him at a library. “I was given a very minor position as First Assistant in... the Municipal Library.... While there were Second and Third Assistants below me, there were also a Director and First, Second, and Third Officials above me. [He was a municipal employee, a government employee.]
“At the library, we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could easily have done. My particular job, shared with fifteen or twenty colleagues, was classifying and cataloguing the library’s holdings, which until that time were uncatalogued. The collection, however, was so small that we knew where to find the books without the system, so the system, though laboriously carried out, was never needed or used.
“The first day, I worked honestly. On the next, some of my fellows took me aside to say that I couldn’t do this sort of thing because it showed them up. ‘Besides,’ they argued, ‘as this cataloguing has been planned to give us some semblance of work, you’ll put us out of our jobs.’ I told them I had classified four hundred titles instead of their one hundred. ‘Well, if you keep that up,’ they said, ‘the boss will be angry and won’t know what to do with us.’ For the sake of realism, I was told that from then on I should do eighty-three books one day, ninety another, and one hundred and four the third.
“I stuck out the library for about nine years. They were nine years of solid unhappiness. At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories.... Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.15
“A couple of hours each day, riding back and forth on the tram, I made my way through The Divine Comedy.... I would do all my library work in the first hour and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing.
“My Kafkian story ‘The Library of Babel’ was meant as a nightmare version or magnification of that municipal library.”
When Perón came to power in 1946, Borges lost his library job. “Several months before, an old English lady had read my tea leaves and had foretold that I was soon to travel, to lecture, and to make vast sums of money thereby. When I told my mother about it, we both laughed, for public speaking was far beyond me.”
But the tea leaves proved accurate. “At forty-seven, I found a new and exciting life opening up for me. I travelled up and down Argentina and Uruguay, lecturing on Swedenborg, Blake, the Persian and Chinese mystics, Buddhism, gauchesco poetry, Martin Buber, the Kabbalah, the Arabian Nights, T. E. Lawrence, medieval Germanic poetry, the Icelandic sagas, Heine, Dante, Expressionism, and Cervantes. I went from town to town, staying overnight in hotels I’d never see again. Sometimes my mother or a friend accompanied me. Not only did I end up making far more money than at the library but I enjoyed the work and felt that it justified me.”
Borges also enjoyed college teaching: “[I] spent ten or twelve happy years at the university.” Teaching gave him further practice at public speaking.
In addition to lecturing in Argentina and Uruguay, Borges lectured in the U.S., and developed a positive view of Americans: “I was invited as Visiting Professor to the University of Texas [in 1961]. It was my first physical encounter with America.... During those six months in the States, we travelled widely, and I lectured at universities from coast to coast. I saw New Mexico, San Francisco, New York, New England, Washington. I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all.”
Borges had a high opinion of the Puritan writer Jonathan Edwards, and placed him among his “literary heroes.” In an earlier issue, I quoted Perry Miller: “The theology of Edwards is generally taken as the supreme achievement of the New England mind, and so it is, considered philosophically and artistically.”
Borges is somewhat dismissive of SouthAmerican literature. He says that South America has produced some good writers for local readers, but “nobody worthwhile,” its writers “mean nothing whatever to the world.”
In 1946, when Juan Perón came to power, Borges was informed that he “had been ‘promoted’ out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets. I went to the City Hall to find out what it was all about. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘It’s rather strange that among so many others at the library I should be singled out as worthy of this new position.’ ‘Well,’ the clerk answered, ‘you were on the side of the Allies — what do you expect?’”
Some Argentines had supported the Axis powers during World War II, perhaps because they had German or Italian ancestors, perhaps because German and Italian businessmen came to Argentina and made friends in the country. Several Nazis — Eichmann and Mengele, for example — found safe haven in Argentina after the war.
On the other hand, some Argentines, like Borges, sympathized with the Allies, and took a dim view of the Fascist nations. Borges said, “Nazism suffers from unreality.... It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated.”16
Perhaps Hitler wasn’t focused on reality, perhaps he was inspired by dramatists like Ibsen, Johst, and Wagner; perhaps the Nazi regime was an act, a drama. Maybe Borges is right, maybe Hitler wanted to be defeated, because that’s how the play ends, that’s how the script was written. When Hitler met Johst, Hitler said that he himself would someday die as Johst’s protagonist did. The Dutch writer Harry Mulisch said, “Perhaps Hitler, the man of the theater... had only played theatrically with toy soldiers, albeit of flesh and blood.” Borges’ comments on Nazism are profound, as many of his comments are.
Wikipedia says, “In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with the essay ‘Yo, Judío’ (‘I, a Jew’), a reference to the old phrase ‘Yo, Argentino’ (‘I, an Argentine’) uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews, to signify one was not Jewish. In the essay, Borges declares he would be proud to be a Jew, and remarks that any pure Castilian is likely to come from ancient Jewish descent, from a millennium ago.
“Both before and during the Second World War, Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state and its racist ideology.” Borges said he was “greatly elated” by Israel’s victory in the Six Day War.
In 1952, Borges was in charge of the Argentine Writers’ Association. Two policemen came to the Association, and told Borges to hang portraits of Perón and his wife. Borges refused. He was put under surveillance, and soon the Writers’ Association was shut down.
In an earlier issue, I discussed Borges’ story, “The Meeting.” In another issue, I quoted a love poem by Borges, a poem that was written in English. It was probably written for a younger woman; Borges says, “I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.”
One of the women Borges was in love with was Estela Canto. It was probably a Platonic relationship.
Borges with Estela Canto in 1945
Borges usually lived with his mother, until she died at age 99. He married at about age 67, while his mother was still alive, but the marriage didn’t last long. Shortly before he died, he married again, to his assistant María Kodama, who now controls his writings. Borges had no children.
Wikipedia says that Borges’ story “The Sect of the Phoenix” is “interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans — a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to.... Women are almost entirely absent from Borges’ fiction.”
As a youngster, Borges was somewhat timid. His younger sister, Norah, was bolder. “In all of our games she was always el caudillo, I the slow, timid, submissive one. She climbed to the top of the roof, traipsed through the trees, and I followed along with more fear than enthusiasm.” Norah later became a respected artist, and illustrated some of her brother’s books.
One of Borges’ essays is called “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Wilkins was a 17th-century English writer who proposed a language that would describe plants, animals, and other things in a logical way. Language often has an arbitrary, illogical character; for example, if a foreigner heard the word “rabbit” for the first time, he wouldn’t know that it was an animal, a land animal, etc. But Wilkins would use a term whose first syllable meant “animal,” whose second syllable meant “land animal,” and whose third syllable meant “rabbit,” so there would be a logical connection between the word and the thing.
Borges’ essay on Wilkins raises the question, How does man categorize things? It’s a profound question, and it has practical implications. The Nazis categorized some people as “master race,” others as “sub-men.” Putin puts Ukraine in the category “Russian World,” while Zelensky puts Ukraine in the category “Europe.” Wikipedia sets up a category for “science” and a category for “pseudo-science.” The New York Times might divide theories into “fringe theories,” “conspiracy theories,” and real theories. These are subjective divisions, meant to smear what we don’t like, yet we can’t say that they’re completely unfounded. In an earlier issue, I quoted the historian Robert Darnton:
| Pigeon-holing [is] an exercise in power. A subject relegated to the trivium rather than the quadrivium, or to the “soft” rather than the “hard” sciences, may wither on the vine. A mis-shelved book may disappear forever. An enemy defined as less than human may be annihilated. |
In his essay on Wilkins, Borges puts forward a humorous set of animal categories:
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in the present classification, (i) those that tremble as if they are mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that look like flies from a long way off
Borges says, “There is no description of the universe that isn’t arbitrary and conjectural for a simple reason: we don’t know what the universe is.” Yet we need categories to make sense of the world and to communicate. Categories are often imperfect and biassed, but they often have some truth. Borges’ essay on Wilkins has a certain philosophical weight; many of Borges’ writings interest philosophers.
Sometimes Borges strikes me as overly skeptical. For example, he described himself as an agnostic, and said, “Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen.” I agree that the world is mysterious and strange, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that anything is possible, and I wouldn’t abandon all hope of clarifying the issue of God.
Borges was a great man-of-letters, one of the best that the Spanish-speaking world has produced in recent years. He has a deep understanding of style, of the learning process, of literary history, of the play-element in literature. As a conversationalist, as an interview-subject, he has few peers.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | When Buckley reached an advanced age, life lost its savor for him, too, as we see in the documentary “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” back |
| 2. | Buckley interview. Borges’ mother and sister were imprisoned for one month for heckling Perón. Perón was a populist leader, he appealed to the masses, the working-class. Populism can be left-wing or right-wing. Perón’s movement was eventually divided into left and right factions.
Ortega and Tocqueville felt that colonialism benefited both colonizer and colonized. Ortega said, “If the European grows accustomed not to rule, a generation and a half will be sufficient to bring the old continent, and the whole world along with it, into moral inertia, intellectual sterility, universal barbarism.”(The Revolt of the Masses, 14, iv) Tocqueville advocated the conquest of Algeria in order to challenge the French people, to rouse the French middle classes from their comfortable lethargy. back |
| 3. | New Yorker back |
| 4. | See Borges’ interview in The Paris Review back |
| 5. | This sentence is from Paris Review, the rest of this section is from New Yorker back |
| 6. | Wikipedia back |
| 7. | Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, “A Note on the Translation” back |
| 8. | Orwell criticized the language used by totalitarian regimes. “The great enemy of clear language,” Orwell wrote, “is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
In a recent issue, I discussed Coleridge’s view that poetry is about strong feelings, language follows feeling; anything well-written must have sincere feeling behind it. Coleridge believed that “wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is some good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere.... It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him... become musical by the greatness, depth, and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet.”
Borges says, “The Gnostics claimed that the only way to avoid a sin was to commit it and be rid of it. In my [early] books, I seem to have committed most of the major literary sins.... These sins were fine writing, local color, a quest for the unexpected, and a seventeenth-century style.” back |
| 9. | Another way to interpret the gap between a writer and his work is to say that a writer’s real personality is in his book; the personality you encounter at a café isn’t the real personality. This was Proust’s view. Proust wrote, “The admirers of his work are disappointed in its author, upon whose face that internal beauty is imperfectly reflected.”
Proust was a fan of Anatole France’s writings, but France didn’t live up to those writings. Proust depicted Anatole France as “Bergotte.” Proust wrote, “One could hear, alternating with the speech of the true Bergotte, that of the other Bergotte, ambitious, utterly selfish, who thought it not worth his while to speak of any but his powerful, rich or noble friends, so as to enhance his own position, he who in his books, when he was really himself, had so well portrayed the charm, pure as a mountain spring, of poverty.”
Proust asks, “Was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?” A person we’re close to seems ordinary, human, flawed; “we can never believe in the genius of a person with whom we went to the Opera last night.” As one critic put it, Proust believed that “Man as a social being and man as an immortal soul capable of divine aesthetic creation are incommensurable concepts.”(These quotes can be found in my Selections from Proust) back |
| 10. | New Yorker back |
| 11. | New Yorker back |
| 12. | Paris Review back |
| 13. | Paris Review back |
| 14. | Most of this quote is from New Yorker, but the last sentence is from Paris Review. back |
| 15. | I’m reminded of Vonnegut’s tears. back |
| 16. | Wikipedia back |