Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  BORGES: I will tell you of what Adolfo Bioy Casares told me. He said: “I love Buenos Aires” (that’s his hometown and my hometown), “I love London, I love Rome, I love Paris, but when I came to New York, I thought I’d spent all my life in the provinces. Here’s the capital city.” He felt very happy about it and so do I. Here we are in the capital.

  AUDIENCE: We’re in a library now. What about your story “The Library”?

  BORGES: Yes, I wrote that story when I was playing the sedulous ape to Kafka. I wrote it forty years ago and I don’t remember it, really.

  AUDIENCE: You once said that a writer starts out to describe a kingdom of castles and horses, but ends by tracing the lines of his own face.

  BORGES: Did I say that? I wish I had said that! Ah, but of course, I remember that page. It is about a man who has an endless world before him and then he begins drawing of ships, of anchors, of towers, of horses, of birds, and so on. In the end he finds out that what he has designed is a picture of his own face. That, of course, is a metaphor of the writer: what the writer leaves behind him is not what he has written, but his image. So that is added to the written word. In the case of many writers, every page may be poor, but the sum total is the image the writer leaves of himself. The image, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe is far superior, I should say, to any one of the pages Poe wrote (even that very wonderful Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, his best work). So that may be the destiny of a writer.

  AUDIENCE: Would you talk about your interest in Judaism?

  BORGES: I suppose there are many reasons. Firstly, my grandmother was English, from a stock of preachers. So I was brought up, let’s say, hearing the English Bible over and over again. And then, I have done my best to be a Jew. I may have failed. And there are some names in my family which are Jewish: Acevedo and Pinedo. And what is more important, if we belong to Western civilization then all of us, despite the many adventures of the blood, all of us are Greeks and Jews. And if we are Christians, then of course we also belong to the Bible and to the Jews.

  I owe so many things to the Jews. I taught myself German way back in 1917, and I found the very best method of doing so: I got a copy of Heinrich Heine’s poetry and a German-English dictionary. For people who are learning English, I always tell them to begin by reading Oscar Wilde, though Wilde was a minor poet, and Heine, of course, was a man of genius, as we all know. I have also dabbled in the Kabbalah, I wrote a poem on the Golem, and I have written many poems on Israel. But I wonder if those reasons are sufficient. I suppose they are. Many a time I think of myself as a Jew, but I wonder whether I have the right to think so. It may be wishful thinking.

  AUDIENCE: Do you have any plans to write part three of Don Quixote?

  BORGES: No. Nothing is to be expected or feared from me.

  AUDIENCE: In your writing, you concern yourself with the uncanny, the supernatural, the fantastic. Why is this?

  BORGES: You might as well ask “Why am I interested in love or in the moon?” I don’t see anything strange about it. Of course the word uncanny exists only in the Germanic languages. In Romance languages, people did not feel the need for that word. But I do, partly because of my English blood, perhaps. I have a feeling for the uncanny. Many people don’t, since there is no such word in Spanish. There is a fine Scottish word, eerie, that also stands for something not felt by Latin people.

  AUDIENCE: What is the difference between your impulse in writing poetry and in writing prose?

  BORGES: Poetry and prose are essentially the same thing. There is only formal difference. But there is also a difference in the reader. For example, if you look at a printed page in prose, then you expect or fear information or advice or arguments, while if you see something printed as verse, then you feel that what you will take in is emotion, passion, sadness, felicity, or whatever it may be. But essentially I suppose they are the same.

  AUDIENCE: In “Pierre Menard” [Ficciones], you discuss the literary technique of creative anachronism. What literary anachronisms do you see today?

  BORGES: I wonder if anachronism is possible. Since we’re all living in the same century, we are all writing the same book and thinking the same things. For example, Flaubert sat down to write a novel about Carthage, but if I had to name a typical nineteenth-century French novel I would choose Salambô. It could not have been otherwise. And even such a fine piece as Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw, you can see that it was not written in Rome or in Israel. It was written in the twentieth century by an Irishman. You can detect those things. I don’t think anachronism is possible. Unhappily for us, we belong to a certain time, we belong to certain habits. We are using contemporary language, and that’s that.

  AUDIENCE: Please discuss the character of “Funes the Memorious.”

  BORGES: I wrote that story as a metaphor, or allegory, of insomnia. Because I had been sleepless many nights over, and then I thought that a man bordering on infinite memory would go mad. I was suffering under insomnia at the time, and oddly enough, after writing that story I began to sleep quite well. I hope the story hasn’t sent you to sleep.

  BARNSTONE: Of all the characters you’ve created—if you’ve created any—

  BORGES: No, I haven’t. It was always the same old Borges, only slightly disguised.

  BARNSTONE: —who is the one you feel closest to?

  BORGES: I wonder if I have created any characters. I don’t think so. I am always writing about myself, using different myths.

  BARNSTONE: Does Funes have a priority among those characters whom you’ve not created?

  BORGES: Yes. I think of that story as being quite a good story though I wrote it.

  AUDIENCE: Why, among your stories, are there characters who appear to be intellectually pretentious?

  BORGES: I suppose because I am pretentious. I am a bit of a prig.

  BARNSTONE: You’re asked to say something about “Death and the Compass.”

  BORGES: I hardly remember that story. It was meant to be a detective story. It won a second prize in an Ellery Queen mystery magazine—I’m very proud of it.

  AUDIENCE: Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

  BORGES: What is that?

  BARNSTONE: When you can’t write because your mind runs dry.

  BORGES: It runs dry all the time but I pretend it doesn’t.

  AUDIENCE: What do you think about Julio Cortázar?

  BORGES: I remember Cortázar. Some thirty years ago I was editing a small and almost secret magazine* and he came to me with a story and wanted to have my opinion on it. I said: “Come back within ten days.” He came back before the week was out. And I told him the story was being printed and my sister was doing illustrations for it. That story was a very fine story, and the only thing I’ve read by him, called “La casa tomada,” “The House Taken Over.” I saw him no more. We met once in Paris and he reminded me of the episode—and that’s that. You see, I am old, blind, I do not read my contemporaries. But I do remember that very fine story and the illustrations made by my sister. And that was the first time he got something printed in Buenos Aires. I was his first publisher.

  AUDIENCE: What memories do you have about Macedonio Fernández?

  BORGES: I am remembering him all the time. Macedonio Fernández was a man of genius—not always in his writings but always in his almost silent conversation. You could not speak to Macedonio without being intelligent. I remember a cousin of mine, who is dead now. Macedonio once asked him were there many people at a concert, and he answered that there were so few that people were left out in droves. Macedonio liked that joke and my cousin gave it to him. I asked my cousin why on earth he gave that joke to Macedonio. And he said because if it were not for Macedonio he would not have made that joke. Macedonio obliged all of us, even me, to be intelligent, and that by his silence. He spoke in a very low voice, but he was thinking all the time. He never thought of publishing. We published his works in spite of him. He wrote only as a means of thinking. I have known many famous men,
but no one has impressed me as Macedonio Fernández.

  AUDIENCE: Someone characterized our age as a time when humanism is of diminished importance in our arts and culture. Do you consider yourself to be a humanist and would you comment on this hypothesis?

  BORGES: I think we should do our best to save humanism. It is the one thing we have. I do what I can. I think of myself as a humanist, of course. I take no interest whatsoever in, say, politics, in money making, in fame—all those things are alien to me. But of course I worship Virgil, I worship all literatures. I worship the past—we need it in order to create the future. Yes, I think in terms of the decline of the West, as Spengler had it, but we may be saved, for all I know, by the Far East, by Japan, for example. We should try to do our own saving of ourselves. That would be better.

  AUDIENCE: What do you think of the future of literature?

  BORGES: I think that literature is quite safe. Literature is a necessity of the human mind.

  *The Annals of Buenos Aires.

  6

  But I Prefer Dreaming

  Massachusetts Institute of

  Technology, April 1980 I think I am concerned with images rather than with ideas. I am not capable of abstract thinking. Even of what the Greeks did and what the Hebrews did, I tend to think not in terms of reason but of fables and metaphors. That’s my stock in trade. Of course I have to reason now and then. I do it in a very clumsy way. But I prefer dreaming.

  JAIME ALAZRAKI: Could you clarify your own debt to the English language?

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: I think the chief event in my life has been my father’s library. Therein I did most of my reading. The library was composed of English books. My father knew by heart ever so many stanzas by Keats, by Shelley, by Swinburne. He knew by heart Fitzgerald’s Rubiyat. And I also remember him intoning verses of Poe. And some of them have stuck to me since that time. Poetry came to me through the English language. Afterwards it came to me through the Spanish language, especially in the verses I did not understand—after all, understanding is not important.

  As I say, I felt poetry without understanding it when I was a boy. And it came to me through my father. And my mother, who died five years ago, used to say that when I intoned British verses, especially when I intoned stanzas of Swinburne, of Keats, I was going over them with my dead father’s voice.

  BARNSTONE: At the very beginning of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Dante speaks of copying a dictation given to him from his own memory. He writes: “In my book of memory, in the early part, where there is little to read, there comes a chapter with the rubric Incipit vita nova. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading, if not all of them at least the essence of their meaning.” Could you comment on what is given to you from your book of memory or from wherever you hear that voice?

  BORGES: I think of writing as a dictation. Let us say, I am suddenly aware that something is about to happen. Then I sit back and try to be as passive as I can, try not to meddle with it. And then I see something. There is always an initial inspiration, a partial one. I may be given a line, I may be given a plot, or in a dream I may be given a word or certain words. For example, when I was in America in East Lansing several years ago, I had a dream. When I awoke the whole thing had been forgotten. But I retained this sentence: “I am about to sell you Shakespeare’s memory.” Then I woke. I told that to María Kodama, my friend, and she said to me: “There might be a story lurking there.” I let it wait. I try not to meddle with what the Holy Ghost or inspiration or the muse or, as they say today, the subconscious gave me. And I then wrote the story. It’s being published now in Buenos Aires. And the story’s called “The Memory of Shakespeare.” But in my story the personal memory of Shakespeare is not sold. It is merely given. It is felt in the beginning as a gift. But in the end there is something unbearable about it. And the man is disappearing under the weight of Shakespeare’s personal memory.

  KENNETH BRECHER: In physics we are constantly trying to reduce the world of complex phenomena to simple principles, to a few principles. But in all your writings you seem to be proving the immense complexity of the universe, which confounds our attempt to unravel it, and yet you seem to have the point of view that the universe is essentially complex, irreducible, and that man’s attempts will ultimately fail. Is this a correct representation of your view of the world? What is your world view?

  BORGES: If any. I think of the world as a riddle. And the one beautiful thing about it is that it can’t be solved. But of course I think the world needs a riddle. I feel amazement all the time. For example, I was born way back in Buenos Aires in 1899 and here I am in America, ringed in by friends. All this is unbelievable, and yet it’s true. At least I suppose it is true. Or maybe I’m not here, for all I know.

  ALAZRAKI: You have given several lectures in Argentina on the subject of—

  BORGES: Far too many.

  ALAZRAKI: Well, not really. On a particular subject which I know interests you, on the subject of the Kabbalah. You have also published on this subject, early in 1926 when you included that essay “A Study of Angels” in El tamaño de mi esperanza, The Size of My Hope. Now your fiction—

  BORGES: I am thoroughly ashamed of that book, but go ahead, yes. I try to forget it. A very poor book.

  ALAZRAKI: I know you don’t like it.

  BORGES: No. Let’s avoid unpleasant subjects.

  ALAZRAKI: I know you even went to the extreme of going around Buenos Aires, gathering copies of that book.

  BORGES: And burning them. That was an act of justice.

  ALAZRAKI: Still, there are several essays in that book which I’m sure you consider redeemable.

  BORGES: I have never reread that book. Or any of my books, for that matter. I write but I don’t reread.

  ALAZRAKI: But what that book shows, at least, is your very early interest in the Kabbalah, and your fiction and poetry are crisscrossed with references to it. What does the Kabbalah mean to you?

  BORGES: I suppose the Kabbalah means much to me since I think I come of Jewish stock. My mother’s name was Acevedo, another in her family was Pinedo. Those are Sephardic Jews. But also I find a very interesting idea in the Kabbalah, the idea that Carlysle and Leon Bloch had also. It is that the whole world is merely a system of symbols, that the whole world, including the stars, stood for God’s secret writing. That idea is to be found in the Kabbalah and I think that that may be the chief attraction to it. I’ve read many books on the Kabbalah. I should advise you to read—but who am I to advise anybody—Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism. It’s quite the best introduction to the subject. I knew Scholem in Jerusalem. He sent me another book on the golem. The first book I ever read in German was Meyerig’s novel Der Golem. I read it through and therein I found that idea which always attracted me, the idea of the double. As they say in Scotland, the “fetch,” because the fetch is your own image that comes to fetch you and lead you to death. While in German the word Doppelgänger is used. It means the man, the invisible man, who walks by your side and who is like yourself. The idea of course of Jekyll and Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Alex Arner, and so on. But really, since I don’t know Hebrew I wonder if I have any right to study the Kabbalah. Yet I go on studying it, for my pleasure. I use the word pleasure, and happiness, after all, should not be sneezed at.

  BARNSTONE: Borges, I wanted to ask a similar question on the gnostics and your notion of otherness.

  BORGES: Otherness is a good word. You made it up of course.

  BARNSTONE: In the gnostic texts there are certain notions which you may wish to comment on.

  BORGES: Well, altruism is the same word.

  BARNSTONE: Specifically, the author Marcion speaks of the other, alien God, the unknown, the nameless Father or Mother. This alien or other life is the true life as the alien God is the true God. And the goal of the gnostic is the release of the inner person from the bonds of this world, from the mistake of this world, so that he or she can ret
urn to the real life.

  BORGES: To find the pleroma, I think is the word.

  BARNSTONE: Pleroma, right, the divine realm with its thirty divine characteristics. Would you elaborate those gnostic ideas of otherness, of mistaken worlds, salvation through escape from this world into light, into the other world?

  BORGES: I suppose life, I suppose the world, is a nightmare, but I can’t escape from it and am still dreaming it. And I cannot reach salvation. It’s shielded from us. Yet I do my best and I find my salvation to be the act of writing, of going in for writing in a rather hopeless way. What can I do? I’m over eighty. I am blind. I am very often lonely. What else can I do but go on dreaming, then writing, then, in spite of what my father told me, rushing into print. That’s my fate. My fate is to think of all things, of all experiences, as having been given me for the purpose of making beauty out of them. I know that I have failed, I’ll keep on failing, but still that is the only justification of my life. To go on experiencing things, to go on being happy, being sad, being perplexed, being puzzled—I am always puzzled by things and then I try to make poetry out of those experiences. And of the many experiences, the happiest is reading. Ah, there is something far better than reading, and that is rereading, going deeper into it because you have read it, enriching it. I should advise people to read little but to reread much.

  BRECHER: Would you say that in your philosophical stories and essays you are creating images or describing the metaphysical ideas themselves? Is the language the dominant feature or the philosophical notions?

  BORGES: I think I am concerned with images rather than with ideas. I am not capable of abstract thinking. Even of what the Greeks did and what the Hebrews did, I tend to think not in terms of reason but of fables and metaphors. That’s my stock in trade. Of course I have to reason now and then. I do it in a very clumsy way. But I prefer dreaming. I prefer images. Or as Kipling had it, a writer may be allowed to write down a fable, but, as to the moral of the fable, that may be unknown to him and may be different. So that I try to go on dreaming, try to use metaphor or fables rather than arguments. I always think the other man is in the right.