ROGER CUNNINGHAM: On the story “The Sect of the Phoenix,” right at the beginning you have somebody quote the doctrine of some obscure gnostic sect—it’s always good to have an obscure gnostic sect.
BORGES: Oh yes, of course. They’re very handy, eh? They’re available at any moment.
CUNNINGHAM: That somebody says that mirrors and copulation are both abominable because they increase the number of persons.
BORGES: I am those obscure gnostics!
CUNNINGHAM: To ask a dull question of fact, what have you read in gnosticism, firsthand, like the Poimandres or any of those nice things?
BORGES: I have read a book by a man called Hans Leisegang, called Die Gnosis. Then a book by an Englishman called Mead, which I read in a German translation, Fragmente Forschungen. Then I have read some translations from the Glaubens Pistis Sophia. So that I give you Leisegang, I give you Mead, I give you Deussen’s Geschichte der Philosophie. And then another book written by a German theologian. I read that in 1918, but then I lost the book. That’s all I know about it really. And that was sufficient for my own South American literary purposes.
AUDIENCE: Would you like to tell us about the use of violence in your short stories?
BORGES: I think the use of violence can be attributed to the fact that my grandfather fell in action, and my great-grandfather won a battle, in the cavalry charge in Peru in 1856. Those people always had a kind of hankering for what we might call an epic history. Of course I was denied that, since I don’t think I would have made a good soldier, especially by reason of my defective eyesight. So I have a tendency to think of things in that way. And then somehow my friends are hoodlums, who go in for knives. The gauchos also. And those things have stood me without myself fighting. After all, I don’t think you should worry about that fact, since every writer is free to choose his own symbols. If I have chosen, let us say, miller, masons, and knives, why not? Why should I not be allowed to do so?
AUDIENCE: Could you tell us about your story “El Sur,” “The South,” how you conceived it, how it came about?
BORGES: I had been reading Henry James. I was greatly struck, as you all have been, by that story “The Turn of the Screw,” which admits of several interpretations. You might think of the apparitions as being fiends masquerading as ghosts, and you might think of the children as being fools, or as being victims or perhaps accomplices. Henry James has written several stories rolled into one. Then I thought I would do the same thing myself. I would try the same trick by writing three stories at a time. Then I wrote “El Sur.” In “El Sur,” you will find three stories. You have firstly that of parody. There is a man being killed by the thing he loves. That is the reverse of what Oscar Wilde said: “For each man kills the thing he loves.” That would be one version. Another would be if you read the story as being realistic. Then you also might have the most interesting interpretation, which doesn’t exclude the others: you might think of the second half of the story as being what the man was dreaming when he died under the knife in the hospital. Because, really, that man was hungering after an epic death. He was inclined to die in the sharpness of the blades with a knife in his hand. He was actually dying under the surgeon’s knife. So all that was dreamt up by him. I have the feeling that that was the interpretation. Really I think that story is a good story technically, because I tell those three stories at once, at one time. And they don’t intrude on each other. That’s what makes it interesting. You might have at first a parable. A man is thirsting for the south and when he goes back to the south, the south kills him. There you have the parable. Then the realistic story of the man going insane and of being made to fight with a drunken murderer. Then the third, which is the best, I think, that the whole thing is a dream. So the story would be not the actual death of the man, but the one he dreamt of while he was dying.
AUDIENCE: Is poetry “a sweet vengeance against life”?
BORGES: I can hardly agree to that. I think of poetry as being an essential part of life. How could it be against life? Poetry is perhaps the essential part of life. I do not think of life, or of reality, as lying beyond me or outside of me. I am life, I am within life. And one of the many facts of life is language and words and poetry. Why should I pit them one against the other?
AUDIENCE: But the word life is not life.
BORGES: But life, I suppose, might be the sum total, if such a sum total be possible, of all things, and then, why not language also? I cannot think of life as being something outside me, of being something very different. Since I am living, what else can I do? But I am also living when I dream, when I sleep, when I write, when I read. I am living all the time. If I consider my past experiences, I suppose Swinburne is as much a part of my experience as the life I led in Geneva in 1917. All those things are part of my experience. I have no need to classify it, or to think of life as different from me. In the case of Alonso Quijano, I suppose the chief event in his life was the reading of the chivalric romance Amadis de gaula and he became a very real Don Quixote. I don’t think of life as being pitted against literature. I believe that art is a part of life.
AUDIENCE: Which writers of today interest you?
BORGES: The writers of today who interest me are chiefly dead writers. I’m an old man. I may be a dead man for all I know.
AUDIENCE: I would like to rephrase a question that was asked earlier about the relationship between the personality and the work. I came across a remark made by Flaubert: “The man is nothing, the work is everything.” I think of the story “The Three Versions of Judas” and the possibility that in taking on a great work of any kind the work can be in opposition to the man.
BORGES: I am hampered by the fact that I can’t remember that story. I wrote it and have utterly forgotten it. That I wrote three versions suggests three different examples of the same subject. I cannot even remember it. But I suppose there has to be a link between a writer and his work. Otherwise the work would be a combination of words, a mere game.
AUDIENCE: Could you compare Buenos Aires today with the past?
BORGES: Today Buenos Aires hardly exists, I am sorry to say. My country is breaking down. I feel very sad about things. When I think of my childhood I feel very happy. I think of people as being happier than they are today. Today I know nothing of Buenos Aires. I don’t understand it. I can only feel puzzled and saddened by what is happening or what is going on in my country. But I love it because, after all, my country right or wrong. I know that I am homesick for that anarchy, since that anarchy stands for so many things in my life. And I also think of my country not in terms of politics or the economy, but in terms of a few fine friendships, and habits. The habit of friendship is profoundly important to me.
MIGUEL ENGUÍDANOS: Borges, as you will remember, a few years ago we had a conversation in which you told me something very puzzling. You said: “I am going to abandon literature.”
BORGES: Did I?
ENGUÍDANOS: Yes, you said that.
BORGES: Now that puzzles me.
ENGUÍDANOS: Let me explain the circumstances. We were in Oklahoma. Supposedly you had in mind prospecting for oil or something.
BORGES: Yes, that’s my habit! I’m always doing it.
ENGUÍDANOS: And then you told me that you were going to devote the rest of your life to the study of Spinoza and the Old Norse sagas. The truth of the matter is that since then you have been not only as productive as ever but you have produced some of your most remarkable poetry and short stories. Now the main question is this: Will you be kind enough to tell us what Borges is doing now?
BORGES: I am sorry to say I am writing poems and tales. I also intend to write a book on Swedenborg, not on Spinoza. They both begin with S, however.
ENGUÍDANOS: Yes, but will you explain to me what it means, your nostalgia for that key, or that door in Buenos Aires?
BORGES: It means that after all I am an Argentine, a mere Argentine, so I feel homesick, though I feel very happy in America.
ENGUÍDANOS
: No, no, excuse me, you are evading the question. I am not trying to trick you. Do you have any statement about your present aesthetics or your present poetics, if you want to tell us?
BORGES: No, I am sorry to say I have no aesthetics. I can only write poetry and tales. I have no theory. I don’t think theories are any good, really.
BARNSTONE: You could devastate half a university with that last comment.
AUDIENCE: How does dictating poems and stories now affect your creative problems?
BORGES: I think it’s a great help. I don’t have to be going over my handwriting. Now I just dictate, and go on. I don’t have to hurry. Dictating lines may be difficult, for all I know. But at least now I feel at home in it. Besides I have friends who are very kind and very patient. I can do my work as I like. But I don’t feel that being blind and having to dictate as being necessarily an evil.
BARNSTONE: Would you say something about friendship? You speak about it so much.
BORGES: I think friendship is perhaps the essential fact of life. Friendship, as Adolpho Bioy Casares said to me, has this advantage over love, in that it needs no proofs whatever. In the case of love, you are always worrying about being loved or not, and you are always in a sad state of mind, in a state of anxiety, whereas in friendship you may not have seen a friend for a year or so. He may have slighted you. He may have tried to avoid you. But if you are his friend, and you know that he is your friend, then you don’t have to worry about that. Friendship, once it is established, needs nothing. It just goes on. There is something magical, there is a kind of spell about friendship. And I’d say that perhaps the one virtue that may be allowed my most unhappy country is the virtue of friendship. And I think that Barnstone here should know something about it. I think that he knows that friendship means much to us. In fact, when the poet Eduardo Mallea wrote a fine book called Historia de una Pasión Argentina, History of an Argentine Passion, I said to myself, this must be friendship, for it is the only passion that we really have. And then I went on and found it was a mere love story and I was quite disappointed.
AUDIENCE: Señor Borges, do you believe that poetry exists only in books?
BORGES: No. I think poetry, as I said, is existing all the time, except that we are not sensitive to it. Poetry of course grows in memory. My memory is full of verses. But there are also situations that are poetic. But why should it exist only in books? After all, books only exist when they are being read and when they are being remembered. Is not a book a thing among things? Why should we take it seriously? Why should we stand in awe of a bound volume? There is no reason whatever. I suppose poetry exists beyond the words, since the words are mere chance symbols. Poetry exists in the music of words.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned Don Quixote before in passing and I wanted to ask you if you would care to comment on Don Quixote?
BORGES: Don Quixote is perhaps one of the finest books ever written. Not because of the plot—the plot is flimsy, the episodes go nowhere—but the man, Alonso Quijano, who dreamt himself into Don Quixote is perhaps one of our best friends. At least he is my best friend. Creating a friend for the many generations to come is a feat which could hardly be equaled. And Cervantes has done that.
8
Time Is the Essential Mystery
University of Chicago,
March 1980 I think that time is the one essential mystery. Other things may be mysterious. Space is unimportant. You can think of a spaceless universe, for example, a universe made of music…. The problem of time involves the problem of ego, for, after all, what is the ego? The ego is the past, the present, and also the anticipation of time to come, of the future.
WILLIS BARNSTONE: Borges, although you are almost blind, you always remark on the qualities of the rooms and buildings you are in. How do you see with your limited eyes, and how do you feel here today in this hall?
JORGE LUIS BORGES: I feel friendship. I feel a very real welcome. Liked by people, loved by people, I feel all that. I don’t feel the circumstances but the essential, way down. I don’t know how I do it, but I’m sure that I am right.
BARNSTONE: You often compare friendship with love. Would you be willing to make a comparison between friendship and love?
BORGES: Love is a very strange thing, full of misgivings, full of hope, and those things may make for happiness. But in friendship there is no misleading, no hope, the thing goes on and on. There’s no need of frequency, we do not need tokens. But we know that if we are friends, and the other person is a friend, perhaps in the long run friendship is more important than love. Or perhaps the true function, the duty of love, is to become friendship. If not, it stops us halfway. But both should be greatly loved.
BARNSTONE: Would you speak of experience and poetry?
BORGES: I think that to a poet (and sometimes I think of myself in that way), all things are given for the purpose of being turned into poetry. So that unhappiness is not really unhappiness. Unhappiness is a tool that is given us, even as a knife may be a tool. All experience should become poetry, and if we were really poets (and I’m not really a poet. I pretend to be a poet), but if I were really a poet, I would think of every moment in life as being beautiful, even though at the moment it may not seem so. But in the end, memory turns all things into beauty. Our task, our duty, is to turn emotions, recollections, even memories of sad things into beauty. That is our task. And the great advantage of that task is that we never attain it. We are always on the point of doing it.
BARNSTONE: In “The Parable of the Prince” from Dreamtigers—
BORGES: I wish I could remember it.
BARNSTONE: Memories are to be forgotten.
BORGES: It’s utterly forgotten.
BARNSTONE: The parable ends with the poet’s descendants still looking for the one word which contains the universe. Are you seeking one word, a state of mind, a feeling, an understanding? What is it that you seek—if anything—before you die?
BORGES: I suppose the only way of finding the right word is not to look for it. One should live in the present moment. Then afterwards the words may be given us or they may not. We have to go on, by trial and error. We have to make our mistakes, we have to unmake them. And that of course is a lifelong job.
BARNSTONE: You do not believe in a personal god, yet lacking other symbols or analogies you often use the word god in your poems. Do you believe in anything or look for anything that eludes causality, in anything that is transcendental?
BORGES: Of course I do. I believe in the mystery of the world. When people use the word god, I think of what George Bernard Shaw said. He said, if I remember rightly: “God is in the making.” And we are the makers. We are begetting God. We are creating God every time that we attain beauty. As for rewards and punishments, those things are mere threats and bribes. I have no use for them. I don’t believe in a personal god. But why should a personal god be more important than a god that is—I am in a pantheistic mood today—all of us? We are all in a sense God. And I think I am an ethical man, or I have done my best to be an ethical man. I think that I have acted rightly and that should be enough also. I cannot believe in a personal god. I’ve done my best to believe in a personal god, but I can’t. And yet my forefathers were Methodist preachers, I’m sorry to say. My grandmother knew her Bible by heart; she knew chapter and verse. But she also knew Dickens by heart. That’s quite as good.
BARNSTONE: You’ve guessed my next question. What do you want to tell us about Dickens?
BORGES: When one thinks of Dickens, one thinks really of a crowd. I say “Dickens” but I think of Mr. Pickwick, of the Artful Dodger, of Nicholas Nickolby, of Martin Chuzzlewit and the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit. I think of Dickens, and then I’m really thinking of a crowd of men. As to Dickens himself, he is not as interesting as his dreams. That, of course, is meant to be in praise of Dickens. In the same way, when I say “Shakespeare,” I’m not thinking of the man William Shakespeare. I am thinking of Macbeth, of the Weird Sisters, of Hamlet, and the mysterious man behind th
e sonnets. So in the case of Dickens, I think of many men. And those many men, who were merely the dreams of Dickens, have given me much happiness. I go on reading and rereading them.
BARNSTONE: Returning to the question of a personal god, are you a gnostic?
BORGES: I am an agnostic.
BARNSTONE: No, a gnostic.
BORGES: Ah yes, I may be. Why not be gnostics today and agnostics tomorrow? It’s all the same thing.
BARNSTONE: And the basis of your ethics?
BORGES: I suppose at every moment of our lives we have to choose. We have to act one way or another. As Dr. Johnson had it, we are moralists all the time, not astronomers or botanists.
BARNSTONE: How, among all people, did you happen to become Borges? Are you not surprised that existence chose you? How do you account for individual consciousness?
BORGES: I am surprised and ashamed of being Borges. I’ve done my best to be somebody else but I haven’t been able to up till now. I don’t like being Borges at all. I wish I were any single one of you.
Borges at Eighty: Conversations Page 11
