Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952
Page 4
Unobtrusively, the reader comes to love Villari, to respect his dull humility and to share his animal fear. Each brush with the outer world is a touch of terror. The toothache—“an intimate discharge of pain in the back of his mouth”—has the force of a “horrible miracle.” Returning from the movies, he feels pushed, and, turning “with anger, with indignation, with secret relief,” he spits out “a coarse insult.” The passerby and the reader are alike startled by this glimpse into the savage criminal that Villari has been. Each night, at dawn, he dreams of Villari—Villari the hunter—and his accomplices overtaking him, and of shooting them with the revolver he keeps in the drawer of the bedside table. At last—whether betrayed by the trip to the dentist, the visits to the movie house, or the assumption of the other’s name we do not know—he is awakened one July dawn by his pursuers:
Tall in the shadows of the room, curiously simplified by those shadows (in the fearful dreams they had always been clearer), vigilant, motionless and patient, their eyes lowered as if weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had overtaken him at last. With a gesture, he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly await it, or—and this is perhaps most likely—so that the murderers would be a dream, as they had already been so many times, in the same place, at the same hour?
So the inner action of the narrative has been to turn the utterly unimaginative hero into a magician. In retrospect, this conversion has been scrupulously foreshadowed. The story, indeed, is a beautiful cinematic succession of shadows; the most beautiful are those above, which simplify the assassins—“(in the fearful dreams they had always been clearer).” The parenthesis of course makes a philosophic point: it opposes the ambiguity of reality to the relative clarity and simplicity of what our minds conceive. It functions as well in the realistic level of the story, bodying forth all at once the climate, the moment of dawn, the atmosphere of the room, the sleeper’s state of vision, the menace and matter-of-factness of the men, “their eyes lowered as if weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons.” Working from the artificial reality offilms and gangster novels, and imposing his hyper-subtle sensations of unreality on the underworld of his plot, Borges has created an episode of criminal brutality in some ways more convincing than those in Hemingway. One remembers that in “The Killers” Ole Andreson also turns his face to the wall. It is barely possible that Borges had in mind a kind of gloss of Hemingway’s classic. If that is so, with superior compassion and keener attention to peripheral phenomena he has enriched the theme. In his essay on Hawthorne, Borges speaks of the Argentine literary aptitude for realism; his own florid fantasy is grafted onto that native stock.
“The Library of Babel,” which appears in Ficciones, is wholly fantastic, yet refers to the librarian’s experience of books. Anyone who has been in the stacks of a great library will recognize the emotional aura, the wearying impression of an inexhaustible and mechanically ordered chaos, that suffuses Borges’ mythical universe, “composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings.” Each hexagon contains twenty shelves, each shelf thirty-two books, each book four hundred and ten pages, each page forty lines, each line eighty letters. The arrangement of these letters is almost uniformly chaotic and formless. The nameless narrator of “The Library of Babel” sets forward, pedantically, the history of philosophical speculation by the human beings who inhabit this inflexible and inscrutable cosmos, which is equipped, apparently for their convenience, with spiral stairs, mirrors, toilets, and lamps (“The light they emit is insufficient, incessant”).
This monstrous and comic model of the universe contains a full range of philosophical schools—idealism, mysticism, nihilism:
The idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space, or, at least, of our intuition of space. They contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable.
The mystics claim that to them ecstasy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a continuous back circling the walls of the room.… That cyclical book is God.
I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands.… They speak (I know) of “the febrile Library, whose hazardous volumes run the constant risk of being changed into others and in which everything is affirmed, denied, and confused as by a divinity in delirium.”
Though the Library appears to be eternal, the men within it are not, and they have a history punctuated by certain discoveries and certain deductions now considered axiomatic. Five hundred years ago, in an upper hexagon, two pages of homogeneous lines were discovered that within a century were identified as “a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with classical Arabic inflections” and translated. The contents of these two pages—“notions of combinational analysis”—led to the deduction that the Library is total; that is, its shelves contain all possible combinations of the orthographic symbols:
Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on this gospel, the commentary on the commentary on this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
Men greeted this revelation with joy; “the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimensions of hope.” They surged onto the stairs, searching for Vindications—books that would vindicate and explain his life to each man. Sects sprang up. One used dice and metal letters in an attempt to “mimic the divine disorder” and compose by chance the canonical volumes. Another, the Purifiers, destroyed millions of books, hurling them down the air shafts. They believed in “the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.” A third sect worshipped the Man of the Book—a hypothetical librarian who, in some remote hexagon, must have perused a book “which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest.” This librarian is a god. “Many pilgrimages have sought Him out.”
The analogies with Christianity are pursued inventively and without the tedium of satire. The narrator himself confides, “To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book. I pray the unknown gods that some man—even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it.” But in his own person he has only the “elegant hope” that the Library, if traversed far enough, would repeat itself in the same disorder, which then would constitute an order. At hand, in the illegible chaos, are only tiny rays of momentary sense, conglomerations of letters spelling O Time your pyramids, Combed Clap of Thunder, or The Plaster Cramp.
This kind of comedy and desperation, these themes of vindication and unattainability, suggest Kafka. But The Castle is a more human work, more personal and neurotic; the fantastic realities of Kafka’s fiction are projections of the narrator-hero’s anxieties, and have no communion, no interlocking structure, without him. The Library of Babel instead has an adamant solidity. Built of mathematics and science, it will certainly survive the weary voice describing it, and outlast all its librarians, already decimated, we learn in a footnote, by “suicide and pulmonary diseases.” We move, with Borges, beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront, in his work, the world atomized and vacant. Perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space.
What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thou
ght are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvellous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place. Yet discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision. Though the population of the Library somehow replenishes itself, and “fecal necessities” are provided for, neither food nor fornication is mentioned—and in truth they are not generally seen in libraries. I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum. Literature—that European empire augmented with translations from remote kingdoms—is now the only world capable of housing and sustaining new literature. Is this too curious? Did not Eliot recommend forty years ago, in reviewing Ulysses, that new novels be retellings of old myths? Is not the greatest of modern novels, Remembrance of Things Past, about its own inspiration? Have not many books already been written from within Homer and the Bible? Did not Cervantes write from within Ariosto and Shakespeare from within Holinshed? Borges, by predilection and by program, carries these inklings toward a logical extreme: the view of books as, in sum, an alternate creation, vast, accessible, highly colored, rich in arcana, possibly sacred. Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life. Certainly the traditional novel as a transparent imitation of human circumstance has “a distracted or tired air.” Ironic and blasphemous as Borges’ hidden message may seem, the texture and method of his creations, though strictly inimitable, answer to a deep need in contemporary fiction—the need to confess the fact of artifice.
Three Translations
(with Norman Thomas di Giovanni)
THE SEA
Before our human dream (or terror) wove
Mythologies, cosmogonies, and love,
Before time coined its substance into days,
The sea, the always sea, existed: was.
Who is the sea? Who is that violent being,
Violent and ancient, who gnaws the foundations
Of earth? He is both one and many oceans;
He is abyss and splendor, chance and wind.
Who looks on the sea sees it the first time,
Every time, with the wonder distilled
From elementary things—from beautiful
Evenings, the moon, the leap of a bonfire.
Who is the sea, and who am I? The day
That follows my last agony shall say.
THE ENIGMAS
I who am singing these lines today
Will be tomorrow the enigmatic corpse
Who dwells in a realm, magical and barren,
Without a before or a when.
So say the mystics. I say I believe
Myself undeserving of Heaven or Hell,
But make no predictions. Each man’s tale
Shifts like the forms of Proteus.
What errant labyrinth, what blinding flash
Of splendor and glory shall become my fate
When the end of this adventure presents me with
The curious experience of death?
I want to drink its crystal-pure oblivion,
To be forever; but never to have been.
THE LABYRINTH
Zeus himself could not undo these nets
Of stone encircling me. My mind forgets
The persons I have been along the way,
The hated way of monotonous walls
That is my fate. The galleries seem straight
But curve furtively, forming secret circles
At the terminus of years; and the parapets
Have been worn smooth by the passage of the days.
In the tepid alabaster dust I discern
Tracks that frighten me. The hollow air
Of evening sometimes brings a bellowing,
Or the echo, desolate, of bellowing.
I know that hidden in the shadows lurks
Another, whose task it is to exhaust
The loneliness that weaves this unravelling Hell,
To crave my blood, to fatten on my death.
We seek each other. O if only this
Were the last day of our antithesis!
—“The Author as Librarian”
John Updike, Picked-Up Pieces, 1976
A Note on This Edition
Jorge Luis Borges never wrote anything long, and so it is often assumed that he never wrote much. In fact, he was a man sworn to the virtue of concision who couldn’t stop writing. There are a thousand pages of Borges’ stories (including the ones he wrote with Adolfo Bioy Casares), five or six hundred pages of poetry, two dozen books of translations, and—to the matter at hand—thousands of pages of non-fiction: some twelve hundred essays, prologues, book reviews, film reviews, transcribed lectures, capsule biographies, encyclopedia entries, historical surveys, and short notes on politics and culture. The accumulation of so many compact writings makes their totality seem even more immense than the collected works of a prolific author of thick books.
From this mountain—I avoid the word labyrinth—of non-fiction texts, much of it still uncollected in book form in Spanish, I have chosen 161: a fraction of the work. Two-thirds of these pieces have never appeared in English before, and the rest have been newly translated for this edition. (The initials of the translator follow each entry.) English-language readers who associate Borges only with certain subjects (time, dreams, The Thousand and One Nights, gauchos, nineteenth-century English and American literature . . .) may be amazed at the extent of his interests. Like the Aleph in his famous story—the point in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world—Borges’ unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition becomes, in the non-fiction, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe. Where else would one find Lana Turner, David Hume, and the heresiarchs of Alexandria in a single sentence?
Those for whom Borges is the archetype of the detached and cerebral metaphysician may be surprised to find his scandalous polemics on Argentina and machismo, his principled stand against the Fascism and antiSemitism of the Argentine bourgeoisie in the 1930s and 1940s, and his courageous attacks on the Peron dictatorship. Borges, the blind old man of the popular image, was for years a movie critic. Borges, the recondite scholar, was a regular contributor to the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal. He was equally at home with Schopenhauer or Ellery Queen, King Kong or the Kabbalists, Lady Murasaki or Erik the Red, Jack London, Plotinus, Orson Welles, Flaubert, the Buddha, or the Dionne Quints. More exactly, they were at home with him. Borges is both a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that is a guide to Borges.
In contrast to how much he wrote, Borges published very few collections of his essays, and the publishing history and present state of these writings is indeed a labyrinth. In the 1920s, he released three books that he later dis owned and refused to allow to be reprinted in his lifetime. There were an other three between 1930 and 1936: two miscellanies and a thematic book on the Argentine past, Evaristo Carriego. His next book of essays, Other Inquisitions, came sixteen years later, in 1952, and includes less than forty of the hundreds of non-fiction pieces he wrote during this particularly prolific period. There were no more new books of non-fiction for another twenty-odd years. Quite late in his life, and continuing after his death in 1986, a few retrospective collections of his prologues, lectures, and reviews were gathered. (For a bibliography, see the notes.)
Borges was essentially unknown outside of Argentina, even among Spanish-language readers, until the 1950s. As his fame grew, the four unsuppressed books of essays began to go through various editions, and it was Borges’ custom to include a few recent w
orks in the reprints, while excluding or reinstating others. Thus some of the essays in a reprint of a book from 1930 could be written as much as twenty-five years later, and in a greatly changed style.
The Spanish and French standard editions take, as the basis for their texts, the contents of the last reprint of each of these books. While this may make sense in the case of an individual work revised over the years by its writer, for Borges it creates an anachronistic jumble of styles and content. Worse, no one knows what to do with the uncollected work. The five thick volumes and over three thousand pages of the Spanish Complete Works are arranged according to book publication, including the late or posthumous collections (such as Prologues, which spans over fifty years) and ignore everything that was never published in book form. (This is now being corrected by a series of volumes called Recovered Texts. The first to appear, recovering only the years 1919 to 1929, is over four hundred pages long.) The French Pleiade edition is based on the Spanish Complete Works, but adds some uncollected pieces, oddly organized according to the magazines in which they were published. Almost a third of the texts here cannot be found in the Complete Works.