Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Quevedo’s Política de Dios y gobierno de Cristo nuestro Señor should be considered, Aureliano Fernandez Guerra says, “as a complete system of government, the most perfect, noble, and appropriate one of all.” To evaluate that opinion more effectively, let us remember that the forty-seven chapters of the book are based on the curious hypothesis that the actions and words of Christ (who was, it is known, Rex Judaeorum) are secret symbols that provide politicians with a key for solving their problems. Faithful to this cabala, Quevedo’s interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that tributes demanded by kings must be small; he says that the parable of the loaves and fishes means kings must supply needs; and that the repetition of the formula sequebantur implies “the king must lead his ministers, not vice versa.” Our surprise wavers between the arbitrariness of the method and the triviality of the conclusions. Quevedo, by the dignity of his expression, atones for everything, or almost.9 1 Some readers may even find the work edifying. A similar dichotomy is observed in the Marco Bruto, where the thought is not memorable although the sentences are. The most imposing of Quevedo’s styles attains perfection in that work. The Spanish of those lapidary pages seems to return to the arduous Latin of Seneca, Tacitus, and Lucan—the tortured and crabbed Latin of the silver age. The ostentatious laconism, the hyperbaton, the almost algebraic austerity, the juxtaposition of opposites, the dryness, the repetition of words, give this text an illusory precision. Many lines deserve, or demand, to be called perfect. This, for example:

  A lineage was honored with laurel leaves; great and sovereign victories were acclaimed with shouts of triumph; lives that were almost divine were rewarded with a statue; and so that the wreaths and the shouting and the marble should not lose their connotation of glory, they were reserved only for merit, not pretension.

  Quevedo frequented other styles with equal success: the apparently oral style of the Buscón, the outrageous and orgiastic (but not illogical ) style of La hora de todos.

  Chesterton has asserted that language is not a scientific achievement, but an artistic one; it was invented by warriors and hunters and is much earlier than science. Quevedo never believed that; for him language was, essentially, a logical instrument. The commonplaces or iterations of poetry—water compared to crystal, hands compared to snow, eyes that shine like stars, and stars that gaze down like eyes—annoyed him because they were facile, but much more because they were false. When he criticized them, he forgot that the metaphor is the momentary contact of two images, not the methodical likening of two things. . . . He also lashed out against certain ridiculous idioms. With the aim of “putting them to shame,” he used the idioms to weave the rhapsody entitled Cuento de cuentos. Many generations, spellbound, have chosen to see in that reductio ad absurdum a veritable museum of beauty, divinely destined to save from oblivion such expressions as zurriburri, abarrisco, cochite hervite, quítame allá esas pajas, and a trochi-moche.

  Quevedo has been compared to Lucian of Samosata on more than one occasion. One basic difference separates them: when Lucian attacked the Olympian divinities in the second century, he did so as a religious polemist; when Quevedo repeated that attack in the seventeenth century, he was merely observing a literary tradition.

  Quevedo’s poetry is as many-faceted as his prose. Considered as documents of passion, his erotic poems are unsatisfactory; but as exercises in hyperbole, as deliberate Petrarchan experiments, they are usually quite admirable. A man of vehement appetites, Quevedo continually aspired to attain a kind of stoic asceticism. He scoffed at

  those who became dependent on women (“wise is the man who uses his caresses for a purpose, and nothing more”). That explains the deliberate artificiality of Muse IV of his Parnassus, which “sings of exploits of love and beauty.” Quevedo’s personal accent is found in other poems, those that permit him to give vent to his melancholy, his anger, or his disenchantment. An example is this sonnet written in his Torre de Juan Abad, which he sent to Don José Gonzalez de Salas (Musa II, 109):

  Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos,

  Con pocos, pero doctos, libros juntos,

  Vivo en conversation con los difuntos

  Y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.

  Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,

  O enmiendan o secundan mis asuntos,

  Y en musicos callados contrapuntos

  Al sueno de la vida hablan despiertos.

  Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta,

  De injurias de los aiios vengadora,

  Libra, oh gran don Joseph, docta la Imprenta.

  En fuga irrevocable huye la hora;

  Pero aquella el mejor calculo cuenta.

  Que en la lection y estudio nos mejora.

  There are traces of conceptismo (the use of oxymoron) in this selection (listening with the eyes, posing wakeful questions to the dream-life), but the sonnet is effective in spite of them, not because of them. I shall not say that it is a transcription of reality, for reality is not verbal, but I can say that the words are less important than the scene they evoke or the virile accent that seems to inform them. But it is not always thus; in the most noteworthy sonnet of the volume— “Memoria immortal de don Pedro Giron, duque de Osuna, muerto en la prision”—the splendid effect of the couplet

  Su Tumba son de Flandes las Campanas

  y su Epitaphio la sangrienta Luna

  is felt before the interpretation and does not depend on it. I can say the same thing of the expression that follows: “the military weeping,” the meaning of which is not enigmatic, but indeed trite: “the weeping of the military men.” And as for “the bloody Moon,” it is perhaps better not to know that it is the symbol of the Turks, eclipsed by certain of Don Pedro Tellez Giron’s piracies.

  Not infrequently Quevedo’s point of departure is a classical text. For example, the memorable line (Musa IV, 31):

  Polvo seran, mas polvo enamorado

  is a recreation, or exaltation, of a line by Propertius (Elegies, I, 19):

  Ut meus oblito pulvis amore vacet.

  The scope of Quevedo’s poetical work is vast. It includes pensive sonnets, which reveal a prefiguring of Wordsworth; opaque and rasping severities;10 brusque theological magic (“With the twelve I supped; I was the supper”); Gongorisms inserted to show that he could play that game too; pleasant Italianate urbanities (“solitude humble, sonorous, and green”); variations of Persius, Seneca, Juvenal, the Scriptures, and Joachim du Bellay; Latinate concisions; coarse jokes;11 curious jest?;12 lugubrious commentaries on annihilation and chaos.

  Quevedo’s best work transcends the motives that engendered it and the common ideas that inform it. It is not obscure. Unlike some writings by Mallarme, Yeats, and George, it does not perturb or bewilder the reader with enigmas. Quevedo’s works are (to find some way to express it) verbal objects, pure and independent like a sword or a silver ring. This one, for example:

  Harta la Toga del veneno tirio,

  O ya en el oro palido y rigente

  Cubre con los thesoros del Oriente,

  Mas no descansa, oh Licas!, tu martirio.

  Padeces un magnifico delirio,

  Cuando felicidad tan delincuente

  Tu horror oscuro en esplendor te miente,

  Vibora en rosicler, aspid en lirio.

  Competir su Palacio a Jove quieres,

  Pues miente el oro Estrellas a su modo,

  En el que vives, sin saber que mueres.

  Y en tantas glorias tu, senor de todo,

  Para quien sabe examinarte, eres

  Lo solamente vil, el asco, el lodo.

  Three hundred years have passed since the corporal death of Quevedo, but he still continues to be the leading artisan of Hispanic letters. Like Joyce, like Goethe, like Shakespeare, like Dante—like no other writer—Francisco de Quevedo is less a man than a vast and complex literature.

  Partial Magic in the Quixote

  It is plausible that these obser
vations may have been set forth at some time and, perhaps, many times; a discussion of their novelty interests me less than one of their possible truth.

  Compared with other classic books (the Iliad, the Aenied, the Pharsalia, Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies), the Quixote is a realistic work; its realism, however, differs essentially from that practiced by the nineteenth century. Joseph Conrad could write that he excluded the supernatural from his work because to include it would seem a denial that the everyday was marvelous; I do not know if Miguel de Cervantes shared that intuition, but I do know that the form of the Quixote made him counterpose a real prosaic world to an imaginary poetic world. Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of reality because they judged reality to be poetic; for Cervantes the real and the poetic were antinomies. To the vast and vague geographies of the Amadis, he opposes the dusty roads and sordid wayside inns of Castille; imagine a novelist of our time centering attention for purposes of parody on some filling stations. Cervantes has created for us the poetry of seventeenth-century Spain, but neither that century nor that Spain were poetic for him; men like Unamuno or Azorín or Antonio Machado, who were deeply moved by any evocation of La Mancha, would have been incomprehensible to him. The plan of his book precluded the marvelous; the latter, however, had to figure in the novel, at least indirectly, just as crimes and a mystery in a parody of a detective story. Cervantes could not resort to talismans or enchantments, but he insinuated the supernatural in a subtle ― and therefore more effective ― manner. In his intimate being, Cervantes loved the supernatural. Paul Groussac observed in 1924: “With a deleble coloring of Latin and Italian, Cervantes’ literary production derived mostly from the pastoral novel and the novel of chivalry, soothing fables of captivity.” The Quixote is less an antidote for those fictions than it is a secret, nostalgic farewell.

  Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality; Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book. In those chapters which argue whether the barber’s basin is a helmet and the donkey’s packsaddle a steed’s fancy regalia, the problem is dealt with explicitly; other passages, as I have noted, insinuate this. In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the barber inspect Don Quixote’s library; astoundingly, one of the books examined is Cervantes’ own Galatea and it turns out that the barber is a friend of the author and does not admire him very much, and says that he is more versed in misfortunes than in verses and that the book possesses some inventiveness, proposes a few ideas and concludes nothing. The barber, a dream or the form of a dream of Cervantes, passes judgment on Cervantes. . . It is also surprising to learn, at the beginning of the ninth chapter, that the entire novel has been translated from the Arabic and that Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the marketplace of Toledo and had it translated by a morisco whom he lodged in his house for more than a month and a half while the job was being finished. We think of Carlyle, who pretended that the Sartor Resartus was the fragmentary version of a work published in Germany by Doctor Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh; we think of the Spanish rabbi Moses of Leon, who composed the Zohar or Book of Splendor and divulged it as the work of a Palestinian rabbi of the second century.

  This play of strange ambiguities culminates in the second part; the protagonists have read the first part, the protagonists of the Quixote are, at the same time, readers of the Quixote. Here it is inevitable to recall the case of Shakespeare, who includes on the stage of Hamlet another stage where a tragedy more or less like that of Hamlet is presented; the imperfect correspondence of the principal and secondary works lessens the efficacy of this inclusion. An artifice analogous to Cervantes’, and even more astounding, figures in the Ramayana, the poem of Valmiki, which narrates the deeds of Rama and his war with the demons. In the last book, the sons of Rama, who do not know who their father is, seek shelter in a forest, where an ascetic teaches them to read. This teacher is, strangely enough, Valmiki; the book they study, the Ramayana. Rama orders a sacrifice of horses; Valmiki and his pupils attend this feast. The latter, accompanied by their lute, sing the Ramayana. Rama hears his own story, recognizes his own sons and then rewards the poet. . . Something similar is created by accident in the Thousand and One Nights. This collection of fantastic tales duplicates and reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities, and the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian carpet. The opening story of the series is well known: the terrible pledge of the king who every night marries a virgin who is then decapitated at dawn, and the resolution of Scheherazade, who distracts the king with her fables until a thousand and one nights have gone by and she shows him their son. The necessity of completing a thousand and one sections obliged the copyists of the work to make all manner of interpolations. None is more perturbing than that of the six hundred and second night, magical among all the nights. On that night, the king hears from the queen his own story. He hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also ― monstrously ― itself. Does the reader clearly grasp the vast possibility of this interpolation, the curious danger? That the queen may persist and the motionless king hear forever the truncated story of the Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular. . . The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: “Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.”

  Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.

  Translated by J. E. I

  Nathaniel Hawthorne13

  I shall begin the history of American literature with the history of a metaphor; or rather, with some examples of that metaphor. I don’t know who invented it; perhaps it is a mistake to suppose that metaphors can be invented. The real ones, those that formulate intimate connections between one image and another, have always existed; those we can still invent are the false ones, which are not worth inventing. The metaphor I am speaking of is the one that compares dreams to a theatrical performance. Quevedo used it in the seventeenth century at the beginning of the Sueño de la muerte; Luis de Góngora made it a part of the sonnet “Varia imaginación,” where we read:

  A dream is a playwright

  Clothed in beautiful shadows

  In a theatre fashioned on the wind.

  In the eighteenth century Addison will say it more precisely. When the soul dreams (he writes) it is the theatre, the actors, and the audience. Long before, the Persian Omar Khayyam had written that the history of the world is a play that God—the multiform God of the pantheists—contrives, enacts, and beholds to entertain his eternity; long afterward, Jung the Swiss in charming and doubtless accurate volumes compares literary inventions to oneiric inventions, literature to dreams.

  If literature is a dream (a controlled and deliberate dream, but fundamentally a dream) then Góngora’s verses would be an appropriate epigraph to this story about American literature, and a look at Hawthorne, the dreamer, would be a good beginning. There are other Amer
ican writers before him—Fenimore Cooper, a sort of Eduardo Gutiérrez infinitely inferior to Eduardo Gutiérrez; Washington Irving, a contriver of pleasant Spanish fantasies—but we can skip over them without any consequence.