Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  II

  Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 into a prosperous middle-class family, in a Buenos Aires where Spanish – to say nothing of Italian – descent was not deemed a social asset. One of his grandmothers was from England; the family chose to stress their English affiliations and to bring up the children speaking English as well as Spanish. Borges remained a lifelong anglophile. Curiously for a writer with an avant-garde reputation, his own reading seemed to stop around 1920. His taste in English-language fiction was for Stevenson, Chesterton, Kipling, Wells; he often referred to himself as ‘un ser victoriano’, a Victorian. (Woodall, p. xxix)

  Englishness was one part of Borges’s self-fashioning, Jewishness another. He invoked a rather hypothetical Sephardic strain on his mother’s side to explain his interest in the Kabbalah and, more interestingly, to present himself as an outsider to Western culture, with an outsider’s freedom to criticise and innovate. (Indeed, one might add, to pillage whole libraries for citations.)

  In 1914 the Borges family travelled to Switzerland to seek a cure for Borges senior’s eye condition (detached retinas, a condition inherited by his son). Trapped in Europe by the war, the children received a French-language education. The young Borges also taught himself German and read Schopenhauer, who came to exert a lasting influence on his thought. German led him to the new Expressionist poets, painters, and film-makers, and thus to forays into mysticism, thought transmission, double personalities, the fourth dimension, and so forth.

  After a spell in Spain, Borges returned to Argentina in 1921 an enthusiast for Ultraismo, the Spanish cousin of Imagism. Yet even in his rather conventional youthful radicalism there are flashes of originality – for instance, when he dreams up a language in which one word will stand simultaneously for sunset and the sound of cattle bells.

  In 1931 the wealthy patroness of the arts Victoria Ocampo launched the magazine Sur and threw open its pages to Borges. Ocampo’s inclinations were European and internationalist; in his years as chief contributor to Sur Borges worked his way beyond the rather tired issues of Argentine literary debate (naturalism versus modernism, Europeanism versus nativism). The stories that make up The Garden of Forking Paths – stories that mark the beginning of his major period – appeared in Sur in a burst between 1939 and 1941.

  ‘Pierre Menard’, the earliest of the group, is, as fiction, the least satisfactory: a cross between spoof scholarly essay and conte philosophique. Borges excluded the piece from his Personal Anthology of 1968. Nevertheless, its intellectual daring is remarkable. Pierre Menard, minor contemporary of Paul Valéry, absorbs himself totally in the world of Cervantes so as to be able to write (not rewrite) Don Quixote word for word.

  The ideas on which ‘Pierre Menard’ is built can be found in David Hume (the past, including the age of Cervantes, has no existence except as a succession of present mental states). What Borges achieves is to invent a vehicle (imperfect in this case, but rapidly perfected in the stories that follow) in which the paradoxes of philosophical scepticism can be elegantly staged and followed to their vertiginous conclusions.

  The finest of the stories of The Garden of Forking Paths are ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and ‘The Library of Babel’ – finest in the sense that the philosophical argument folds discreetly into the narrative, and the fiction takes its course with the certainty of a game of chess in which the reader is always a move behind the author. The technical innovation on which these fictions rest, and which allows them their swift pace – the reader is outflanked and overwhelmed by his opponent before he knows where he is – is that they use as model the anatomy or critical essay, rather than the tale: with narrative exposition reduced to a bare minimum, the action can be condensed to an exploration of the implications of a hypothetical situation (an infinite library, for instance).

  In interviews given in the 1960s Borges suggested that, besides exploring the intellectual possibilities of inventing a world by writing a total description of it, ‘Tlön’ explores the ‘dismay’ of a narrator ‘who feels that his everyday world . . . his past . . . [and] the past of his forefathers . . . [are] slipping away from him’. Thus the hidden subject of the story is ‘a man who is being drowned in a new and overwhelming world that he cannot make out’.5 Like all authors’ readings of their own work, this one has its own interest. But as an account of ‘Tlön’ it misses something important: the excitement, even creative triumph, however sombre its shading, with which the narrator records the stages by which an ideal universe takes over a real one, the takeover being capped, in a turn of the screw of paradox characteristic of Borges, by the realisation that the universe of which we are part is more than likely already a simulacrum, perhaps a simulacrum of simulacra going on to infinity. Revisiting his 1940 story a quarter of a century later, Borges finds in it an emotional colouring that belongs to his older, more pessimistic self.

  Yet to conclude that Borges misreads his story is to miss the Borgesian (or Menardian) point. There is no Tlön, just as there is no 1940, outside the conceptions of Tlön and 1940 that humankind collectively holds in the present. Just as the all-comprehending encyclopedia of Orbis Tertius takes over the universe, our fictions of the fictions of the past take over these fictions. (Gnostic cosmology, in which Borges was deeply read, proposes that the universe in which we believe we live is the work of a minor creator nested within a universe which is the handiwork of a slightly less minor creator who is nested within another universe, and so on 365 times.)

  Of the Fictions of 1944, ‘Funes, His Memory’ is the most astonishing. Ireneo Funes, an untutored country boy, is possessed of an infinite memory. Nothing escapes him; all of his sensory experience, past and present, persists in his mind; drowned in particulars, unable to forget even the changing formations of all the clouds he has seen, he cannot form general ideas, and therefore – paradoxically, for a creature who is almost pure mind – cannot think.

  ‘Funes’ follows the by now familiar Borgesian pattern of pushing a donnée to its dizzying conclusions. What is new in the story is a confidence with which Borges embeds his Funes in a recognisable Argentine social reality, as well as a touch of human pity for the afflicted boy, ‘the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world’. (CF, p. 137)

  It is not hard to see why daringly idealistic fictions about worlds created by language or characters enclosed in texts should have found resonance in a generation of French intellectuals who had just discovered the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, to whom language is a self-regulating field within which the human subject functions without power, more spoken by language than speaking it, and the past (‘diachrony’) is reducible to a series of superposed present (‘synchronic’) states. What Borges’s French readers found startling – or perhaps just piquant – was that he had found a way to textualité along routes of his own devising. (In fact there is reason to believe that Borges found his way there via Schopenhauer and, particularly, Fritz Mauthner [1849—1923]. Mauthner is little read nowadays; there is no entry for him in Fishburn and Hughes’s Dictionary of Borges, despite the fact that Borges alludes to him several times.)

  The three collections that comprise Borges’s middle and major period – The Garden of Forking Paths, Fictions, and The Aleph – were followed in 1952 by Other Inquisitions, a mosaic of pieces culled from his critical writing. The fact that many of these pieces, with their vast erudition in a range of languages, first appeared in newspapers says much for the upper reaches of the Buenos Aires press. Many of the ideas explored in the fiction can be found half-grown here, not yet ready to show their teeth.

  Reading the essays side by side with the fictions prompts what is perhaps the central question about Borges: what do the operations of fiction offer this scholar-writer that enable him to take ideas into reaches where the discursive essay, as a mode of writing, fails him? Borges’s own answer, following Coleridge, is that the poetic imagination enables the writer to join himself to the uni
versal creative principle; following Schopenhauer, he would add that this principle has the nature of Will rather than (as Plato would say) of Reason. ‘In the course of a lifetime dedicated less to living than to reading, I have been able to verify repeatedly that aims and literary theories are nothing but stimuli; the finished work frequently ignores and even contradicts them.’6

  Yet it would be obtuse not to hear, in pronouncements like this one, tones of parody and self-parody. The voices that speak the Other Inquisitions are much like the voices of the narrators of the fictions; behind the essays is a persona whom Borges had already begun to call ‘Borges’. Which Borges is real, which is the other in the mirror, remains dark. The essays allow the one Borges to dramatise the other. In practical terms, this puts in question the distinction between fiction and non-fiction used by Borges’s American publishers (see note 3).

  El hacedor (1960) is a compendium of prose and verse, from which the Viking Collected Fictions drops the verse. The title alludes – rather cryptically, for a Spanish-speaking audience – to the archaic English ‘maker’, or poet, which is the word that Hurley takes over; Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, in their 1964 translation, retitle the book Dreamtigers. Borges called it ‘my most personal work, and to my taste, maybe the best’. (Woodall, p. 188) There is a touch of defiance in this pronouncement, since nothing in the collection measures up to the best of the fictions of the period 1939—49. But by 1960 Borges had already begun to put a distance between himself and what he would later, disparagingly, call ‘labyrinths and mirrors and tigers and all that’.7

  The truth was that the Prix Formentor of 1961 caught Borges in the middle of a long creative slump. His newfound fame brought invitations to lecture, which he was happy to accept. Accompanied by his mother, he travelled widely. From the North American lecture circuit he began to enjoy a steady income. Rarely did he refuse interviews; he became, in fact, garrulous. He searched actively for a wife, found one, and for three years, in his late sixties, suffered an unhappy marriage.

  In 1967 Borges met the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni. An association developed: not only did di Giovanni translate, or collaborate with Borges to translate, a number of works, and help with his business affairs, but he also coaxed Borges back into writing fiction. The fruits can be seen in the eleven stories of Brodie’s Report (1970). The mirrors and labyrinths are gone. The settings are the Argentine pampas or the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the language is simpler, the plots are more conventional (in his foreword Borges points to Kipling as a model). Borges was proudest of ‘The Interloper’, but ‘The Gospel according to St Mark’, in which a student, having introduced the Christian gospel to a backlands gaucho family, is accepted as their saviour and solemnly crucified, is as good. With its concentration on jealousy, physical bravery, and laconically treated violence, Brodie’s Report is the most defiantly masculine of Borges’s collections.

  The Book of Sand (1975) and ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ (1983) recycle old themes (the Doppelgänger, possession, the interpenetration of universes) as well as exploring Germanic mythology, a new interest of Borges’s. There is much tired writing in them; they add nothing to his stature.

  III

  Borges’s gnosticism – his sense that the ultimate God is beyond good and evil, and infinitely remote from creation – is deeply felt. But the sense of dread that informs his work is metaphysical rather than religious in nature: at its base are vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of meaning, including language itself, flashing intimations that the very self that speaks has no real existence.

  In the fiction that responds to this dread, the ethical and the aesthetic are tightly wound together: the light but remorseless tread of the logic of his parables, the lapidary concision of his language, the gradual tightening of paradox, are stylistic traces of a stoical self-control that stares back into the abysses of thought without the Gothic hysteria of a Poe.

  Borges has been criticised for falling back on the aesthetic for salvation. Harold Bloom, for instance, suggests that Borges would have been a greater writer if he had exercised a less iron control over his creative impulse – a control whose purpose Bloom sees as self-protective. ‘What Borges lacks, despite the illusive cunning of his labyrinths, is precisely the extravagance of the romancer . . . [He] has never been reckless enough to lose himself in a story, to our loss, if not to his.’8

  I am not sure that these strictures take adequately into account those stories of Borges’s that focus on the confrontation with death. ‘The South’ – which ends with the hero accepting the challenge to a knife duel he is sure to lose – is the most haunting of these; but there are several other more realistic tales of gaucho or hoodlum life in which characters, following an unarticulated stoic ethic, choose death rather than loss of honour, recovering themselves from disgrace and discovering their truth in the same moment. These stories, laconic in expression and sometimes brutal in content, reveal the attractions of a life of action for their bookish and rather timid author. They also show Borges trying to situate himself more forthrightly in an Argentine literary tradition and contribute to Argentine national myth-making.

  The word ‘camel’, observes Borges in a lecture entitled ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ (1953), does not occur in the Koran. The lesson? That ‘we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local colour’.9 But his own later stories – particularly those collected in Brodie’s Report – do in fact abound in local colour. They represent a tenacious return to the task that Borges, on his return to Buenos Aires in the 1920s, saw before him: to hold on to the density of culture that was part of his generations-old criollo heritage, yet to get beyond mere regionalism and localism. ‘There are no legends in this land,’ he wrote in 1926. ‘That is our disgrace. Our lived reality is grandiose yet the life of our imagination is paltry . . . We must find the poetry, the music, the painting, the religion and the metaphysics appropriate to [the] greatness [of Buenos Aires].’10

  Set in the seedier Buenos Aires suburbs of the turn of the century, or even further back in time on the Argentine pampas, the later stories can hardly be claimed to confront the reality of modern Argentina. They embrace a romantic, nativistic streak in Argentine nationalism, turning their back both on the enlightened liberalism of the class into which Borges was born and on the new mass culture and mass politics – represented in his lifetime by Perónism – which he held in abhorrence.

  IV

  Borges’s prose is controlled, precise and economical to a degree uncommon in Spanish America. It avoids (as Borges notes with some pride) ‘Hispanicisms, Argentinisms, archaisms, and neologisms; [it uses] everyday words rather than shocking ones’.11 In his work up to and including The Aleph, the clear surface of his prose is ruffled now and again by unusual, even disturbing verbal collocations. In his late phase such moments are rare.

  Although any translator will be challenged to match the simultaneous concision and force of Borges’s Spanish and to find renderings for his sometimes riddling metaphors, his language presents no irresolvable problems, except on those occasions when it is coloured – deliberately, one is sure – by English verbal patterns. (Such patterns, as soon as they are reproduced in English translation, of course sink into invisibility.)

  There is a set of difficulties of a more practical nature, however, created by the fact that Borges, late in life, acted as his own (co)translator (of The Aleph and Brodie’s Report, as well as of much poetry), and in the process of translating availed himself of the opportunity to do some revising. These revisions can be quite sweeping in scale: half a page of rather dated satire is cut from ‘The Aleph’, for instance. Borges also felt free to work into his English texts information that the protocols of the craft would constrain any other translator to relegate to footnotes: a cryptic mention of la revolución de Aparício, for instance, is expanded to ‘a civil war . . . between the Colorados, or Reds, who were in power, and Aparicio’s Blancos, or
Whites’.12

  But Borges’s revisions have a subsidiary purpose as well: to tone down his own Spanish. Resounding trademark adjectives of the middle phase, like abominable, enigmático, implacable, interminable, notorio, perverso, pérfido, vertiginoso, violento – are softened: the ‘violent [violento] flank of the mountain’ becomes its ‘steep slope’, a woman’s ‘violent [violenta] hair’ becomes her ‘tangled hair’ (CF, pp. 96, 285).

  The justification offered by Borges and di Giovanni for this toning down, and for the general smoothness of their English versions, is that Spanish and English embody ‘two quite different ways of looking at the world’. They have tried less to transpose the original Spanish into English, they say, than ‘to rethink every sentence in English words’, aiming for prose that ‘[reads] as though . . . written in English’.13

  Hurley – correctly, to my mind – ignores the example Borges sets. Unfortunately, that cannot be the end of the story. The changes that Borges (as the creative partner in the collaboration) introduces in the process of translating himself can be regarded as authorial revisions capable, at least in theory, of being reintroduced into the Spanish text, and in any event as revisions authorially approved for the stories in their English guise.

  Hurley does not, in his brief ‘Note on the Translation’, address this problem. What he might have said – if one may be allowed to put words in his mouth – is that there are times when editors and translators have a duty to protect Borges from himself. Pace the author, the versions of Borges that we want to read are not necessarily those that sound as if English were their native tongue: if there is indeed a proportion of grandiloquence in the originals, the reader may prefer to hear that grandiloquence and discriminate for himself what is authentically Borgesian in it, what native to the Spanish, rather than have the language uniformly muted on his behalf.