Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  Perhaps. But what if we experiment? What if we rewrite Frost’s lines thus: ‘Memories of having starred / Atone for later disregard / And keep the end from being hard’? At a purely metrical level the revision is not, to my ear, inferior to Frost’s original. However, its meaning is opposite. Would these lines, in Brodsky’s eyes, qualify to enter the bloodstream of the nation? The answer is: no – the lines are in a telling sense false. But to show how and why they are false requires a poetics with an historical dimension, capable of explaining why it is that Frost’s original, coming into being at the moment in history when it does, carves out for itself a place in time (‘restructures time’), whereas the alternative, the parody, cannot do so. What is required, therefore, is a means of treating prosody and semantics together in a unified yet also diachronic way. For a teacher (and Brodsky clearly thinks of himself as a teacher) to assert that the genuine poem restructures time means little until he can show why the fake does not.

  In sum, then, there are two sides to Brodsky’s critical poetics. On the one hand there is a metaphysical superstructure in which the language-Muse speaks through the medium of the poet and thereby accomplishes world-historical (evolutionary) goals of its own. On the other there is a body of insights into and intuitions about how certain poems in English, Russian and (to a lesser extent) German actually work. The poems Brodsky chooses are clearly poems he loves; his comments on them are always intelligent, often penetrating, sometimes dazzling. I doubt that Mandelstam (in Less than One) or Hardy (in On Grief) have ever had a more sympathetic, attentive, co-creative reader. Fortunately the metaphysical superstructure of Brodsky’s system can be detached and laid aside, leaving us with a set of critical readings which in their ambitiousness and their fineness of detail put contemporary academic criticism of poetry to shame.

  Can academic critics take a lesson from Brodsky? I fear not. To operate at his level, one has to live with and by the great poets of the past, and perhaps be visited by the Muse as well. Can Brodsky take a lesson from the academy? Yes: not to publish your lecture notes verbatim, unrevised and uncondensed, quips and asides included. The lectures on Frost, Hardy and Rilke could with advantage be cut by ten pages each.

  III

  Though On Grief and Reason intermittently alludes to, and sometimes directly addresses, Brodsky’s own exile/immigrant status, it does not, except in an odd and inconclusive exercise on the spy Kim Philby, address politics pure and simple. At the risk of oversimplifying, one can say that Brodsky despairs of politics and looks to literature for redemption.

  Thus, in an open letter to Vaclav Havel, Brodsky suggests that Havel drop the pretence that Communism in Central Europe was imposed from abroad and acknowledge that it was the result of ‘an extraordinary anthropological backslide’ whose basis was no more and no less than original sin. As President of the Czech state, Havel would be well advised to operate on the premise that man is inherently evil; the re-education of the Czech public might begin with doses of Proust, Kafka, Faulkner and Camus in the daily papers. (On Grief, pp. 218—22)

  (Elsewhere Brodsky criticises Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the same grounds: for refusing to accept what his senses plainly tell him, that humankind is ‘radically bad.’ Less than One, p. 299)

  In his Nobel Prize lecture, Brodsky sketches out an aesthetic credo on the basis of which an ethical public life might be built. Aesthetics, he says, is the mother of ethics, in the sense that making fine aesthetic discriminations teaches one to make fine ethical discriminations. Good art is thus on the side of the good. Evil, on the other hand, ‘especially political evil, is always a bad stylist’. (On Grief, p. 49) (At moments like this Brodsky finds himself closer to his illustrious Russo-American precursor, the patrician Vladimir Nabokov, than he might have wished to be.)

  Entering into dialogue with great literature, Brodsky continues, fosters in the reading subject ‘a sense of uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I”’. (On Grief, p. 46) Earlier, in Less than One Brodsky had commended Russian poetry for ‘set[ting] an example of moral purity and firmness’ in the Soviet era, not least by preserving classical literary forms. (p. 142) Now he rejects the nihilism of postmodernism, ‘the poetics of ruin and debris, of minimalism, of choked breath’, holding up instead the example of those poets of his generation who, in the wake of the Holocaust and the Gulag, took it as their task to reconstruct world culture and hence to rebuild human dignity. (On Grief, p. 56)

  It is not Brodsky’s manner to attack, discuss, or even mention the names of his philosophical opponents. Thus one can only guess at his response to arguments that artworks (or ‘texts’) construct communities of readers as much as they construct individuals, that an emphasis such as his on a highly individualistic relation between reader and text is historically and culturally bounded, and that what he (following Mandelstam) calls ‘world culture’ is merely the high culture of Western Europe in a particular phase of its history. There can be no doubt, however, that he would have rejected them.

  IV

  The prestige of the poet figure in Russia since Pushkin, the example of the great poets in keeping the flame of individual integrity alive during Stalin’s dark night, as well as deeply embedded traditions of reading and memorising poetry, cheap editions of the classics and the near-sacred status of forbidden texts in the samizdat phase – these and other factors contributed to the persistence in Russia, before the great opening up of the 1990s, of a large, committed, and informed public for poetry. The linguistically oriented bias of literary studies there – in part a continuation of the Formalist advances of the 1920s, in part a self-protective reaction to the ban, after 1934, on literary criticism not in line with Socialist-realist dogma – further nurtured an analytic discourse hard to match in the West in its level of technical sophistication.

  Comments on Brodsky by his Russian contemporaries – fellow poets, disciples, rivals – as collected by Valentina Polukhina four years before Brodsky’s death in 1996, prove that even after a quarter of a century abroad he was still read and judged in Russia as a Russian poet.4

  Brodsky’s greatest achievement, says the poet Olga Sedakova, was to have ‘placed a full stop at the end of [the Soviet] literary epoch’. (p. 247) He did so by bringing back to Russian letters a quality crushed, in the name of optimism, by the Soviet culture industry: a tragic perception of life. Furthermore, he fertilised Russian poetry by importing new forms from England and America. For this he deserves to stand beside Pushkin. Elena Shvarts, Brodsky’s younger contemporary and perhaps his main rival, concurs: he brought ‘a completely new musicality and even a new form of thought’ to Russian poetry. (Shvarts is not so kind to Brodsky the essayist, whom she calls ‘a brilliant sophist’.) (pp. 222, 221)

  Brodsky’s fellow Russians are particularly illuminating on technical features of his verse. Brodsky, claims Yevgeny Rein, found metrical means to embody ‘the way time flows past and away from you’. This ‘merging of [the] poetry with the movement of time’ is ‘metaphysically’ Brodsky’s greatest achievement. (p. 63) To the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, Brodsky’s ‘giant linguistic and cultural reach, his syntax, his thoughts that transcend the limits of the stanza’, make of his poetry ‘a spiritual exercise [which] extends the reach of [the reader’s] soul’. (p. 278)

  There is thus no doubt that Brodsky in exile remained a powerful presence on the Russian stage. Receptive as his fellow writers are to his innovations, however, all except Rein seem sceptical about the full metaphysical baggage behind them, a metaphysics that makes the poet the voice of an hypostatised Language. Lev Loseff dismisses this ‘idolisation’ of language out of hand, attributing it to Brodsky’s lack of formal education in linguistics. (p. 123)

  In Russia Brodsky has not managed to make himself a well-loved poet, as (say) Pasternak was well loved. Russians look in vain to him, says Venclova, for ‘warmth . . . all-forgivingness, tearfulness, tender-heartedness, or cheeriness’.
‘He does not believe in man’s inherent goodness; nor does he see nature as . . . made in the image of God.’ (p. 283) The poet Viktor Krivulin expresses doubts about the very un-Russian irony that became habitual in Brodsky’s later poetry. Brodsky cultivates irony, suggests Krivulin, to protect himself from ideas or situations he finds uncomfortable. ‘A fear of openness, possibly a desire not to be open . . . has grown deeper so that every poetic statement already exists inherently as an object for analysis and the following statement springs from that analysis.’ (p. 187)

  Roy Fisher, one of Brodsky’s best English commentators, points to something analogous in the texture of Brodsky’s self-translations from Russian, which he criticises as ‘busy’ in a musical sense, with ‘lots of little notes and pauses’. ‘Something is running about in the way of the poetry.’ (p. 300)

  This ‘busyness’, together with a continual ironic backtracking, became a feature of Brodsky’s prose as much as of his verse. His logic acquired a jagged, spiky quality: trains of thought have no time to develop before being halted, questioned, cast in doubt, in qualifications that are in turn, with mannered irony, interrogated and qualified. There is a continual shuttling back and forth between colloquial and formal diction; and when a bon mot is in the offing, Brodsky can be trusted to scamper after it. In his fascination with the echo chamber of the English language, he is again not unlike Nabokov, though Nabokov’s linguistic imagination was more disciplined (also, perhaps, more trammelled). The problem of consistency of tone becomes particularly marked in essays that have their origin in public addresses, where, as if in an effort to suppress the habitual sideways movement of his thought, Brodsky goes in for large generalisations and hollow lecture-hall prose.

  Brodsky’s difficulties here may in part be temperamental – public occasions clearly did not fire his imagination – but they are also linguistic. Brodsky, David Bethea has observed, never quite succeeded in commanding the ‘quasi-civic’ level of American discourse, as he never entirely commanded the nuances of ironic humour, perhaps the last level of English to be mastered by foreigners.5

  An alternative approach to Brodsky’s problem with tone is to ask whether his imagined interlocutors are always adequate to him. In his lectures and addresses there seems to be an element of speaking down that leads him not only to simplify his matter but also to wisecrack and generally to flatten his emotional and intellectual range; whereas, once he is alone with a subject equal to him, this uneasiness of tone vanishes.

  We see Brodsky truly rising to his subject in the two Roman essays in On Grief and Reason. In emotional reach, the essay on Marcus Aurelius is one of Brodsky’s most ambitious, as though the nobility of his interlocutor frees him to explore a certain melancholy grandeur. Like the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, with whose stance of stoic pessimism in public affairs he has more than a little in common, Brodsky looks to Marcus as the one Roman ruler with whom some kind of communion across the ages is possible. ‘You were one of the best men that ever lived, and you were obsessed with your duty because you were obsessed with virtue,’ he writes movingly. Wistfully he adds that we ought always to have rulers who, like Marcus, have ‘a detectable melancholic streak’. (On Grief, pp. 291, 294)

  The finest essay in the collection is similarly elegiac. It takes the form of a letter from Brodsky the Russian or, in Roman terms, the Hyperborean, to Horace in the Underworld. To Brodsky, Horace is, if not his favourite Roman poet (Ovid holds that place), then at least the great poet of ‘melancholic equipoise’. (On Grief, p. 235). Brodsky plays with the conceit that Quintus Horatius Flaccus has just completed a spell on earth in the guise of Wystan Hugh Auden, and that Horace, Auden, and Joseph Brodsky himself are thus the same poetic temperament, if not the same person, reborn in successive Pythagorean metamorphoses. His prose attains new and complex, bitter-sweet tones as he meditates on the death of the poet, on the extinction of the man and his survival in the echo of the poetic metres he has served.

  13 J. L. Borges, Collected Fictions

  I

  IN 1961 the directors of six leading Western publishing houses (Gallimard, Einaudi, Rowohlt, Seix Barral, Grove, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson) met at a resort in the Balearic Islands to plan a literary prize that would single out writers who were actively transforming the world literary landscape, and eventually rival the Nobel Prize in prestige. The first International Publishers’ Prize (also known as the Prix Formentor) was split between Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. That same year the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Yugoslav Ivo Andrić, a substantial novelist but no innovator. (Beckett won the Nobel in 1969. Borges never won it – his advocates claimed that his politics scuppered him.)

  The publicity surrounding the Prix Formentor catapulted Borges on to the world stage. In the United States, Grove Press brought out seventeen stories under the title Ficciones. New Directions followed with Labyrinths, twenty-three stories – some overlapping the Ficciones, but in alternative translations – as well as essays and parables. Translation into other languages proceeded apace.

  Besides his native Argentina, there was one country in which the name Borges was already well known. The French critic and editor Roger Caillois had spent the years 1939–45 in exile in Buenos Aires. After the war he promoted Borges in France, bringing out Ficciones in 1951 and Labyrinthes in 1953 (the latter collection substantially different from the New Directions Labyrinths – the Borges bibliography constitutes a labyrinth in its own right). In the 1950s Borges was more highly regarded, and perhaps more widely read, in France than in Argentina. In this respect his career curiously parallels that of his forerunner in speculative fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, championed by Baudelaire and enthusiastically taken up by the French public.

  The Borges of 1961 was already in his sixties. The stories that had made him famous had been written in the 1930s and 1940s. He had lost his creative drive and had furthermore become suspicious of these earlier, ‘baroque’ pieces. Though he lived until 1986, he would only fitfully reproduce their intellectual daring and intensity.

  In Argentina Borges had by 1960 been recognised, along with Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar, as a leading light of his literary generation. During the first regime of Juan Perón (1946—55) he had become somewhat of a whipping boy of the press, denounced as extranjerizante (foreign-loving), a lackey of the landowning elite and of international capital. Soon after Perón’s inauguration he was ostentatiously dismissed from his job in the city library and ‘promoted’ to be inspector of poultry and rabbits at the municipal market. After the fall of Perón it became fashionable again to read him; but his support for unpopular causes (the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, for instance) made him vulnerable to denunciation from the Left as well as by nationalists and populists.

  His influence on Latin American letters – where writers have traditionally turned to Europe for their models – has been extensive. He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso and Mario Vargas Llosa have all acknowledged a debt to him. ‘The only thing I bought [in Buenos Aires] was Borges’s Complete Works,’ said Garcia Márquez. ‘I carry them in my suitcase; I am going to read them every day, and he is [for political reasons] a writer I detest.’1

  For a decade after Borges’s death in 1986, his literary estate remained in a state of confusion as various parties contested the terms of his will. Happily that confusion has now been resolved, and the first fruits in English are a Collected Fictions, newly translated by Andrew Hurley.2 This volume brings together Borges’s early stories A Universal History of Iniquity (1935), the Fictions of 1944 (which include the stories of The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941), The Aleph (1949), the prose pieces of The Maker (El hacedor, previously translated as Dreamtigers) (1960), five short prose pieces from In Praise of Darkness (1969), Brodie’s Report (1970), The Book of Sand (1975) and four late stories, collected here under the title ‘Shakespear
e’s Memory’ (1983).

  Of the hundred-odd pieces in the volume, ranging in length from a single paragraph to a dozen pages, only the last four have not hitherto been available in English. The notes appended by Hurley, while valuable in themselves, are limited in scope, ‘intended only to supply information that a Latin American (and especially Argentine or Uruguayan) reader would have and that would color or determine his or her reading of the stories’. (CF, p. 520) For the rest, the reader who has difficulty with this learned and allusive writer is directed to A Dictionary of Borges by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes (London: Duckworth, 1990), a commendable work of reference which, however, fails to rise to the challenge of providing an entry for J.L. Borges, a character – fictional? real? – who appears in the story ‘Borges and I’ and numerous other pieces.

  The Collected Fictions – the first of three Borges volumes published by Viking in 1999 – is based on the Spanish Obras completas of 1989.3 As an edition without scholarly apparatus, it does not aspire to rival the French Oeuvres complètes, scrupulously edited in two volumes for Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade by Jean-Pierre Bernès, which not only attempts to collect the totality of Borges’s writings (including journalism, reviews and other ephemera), but, more importantly, goes a long way in tracking the revisions which Borges – himself a fussy editor – carried out on successive printings of his own texts (‘[Borges’s] habit of changing texts from edition to edition, of suppressing, or excising, sometimes reintroducing in modified form, words, phrases, lines . . . has landed any potential bibliographer with a lifetime’s toil,’ remarks Borges’s biographer James Woodall).4