Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  COFFA: In connection with your interest in idealism, you encountered solipsism, in fact you refered to solipsism last time in your talk about poetry.

  BORGES: The central idea of solipsism is that there’s only one individual. I am an individual, but also every single one of you is an individual. And all the rest has been dreamed by him. For example, let’s say, the sky, the stars, the round earth, and all history, all that is a dream. Of course if you are going to accept solipsism as absolute, then the world begins when I rap the table thus. No, it didn’t begin then, because that is already past. That already happened very, very long ago within a snap, the second I tapped on the table. You go on and on, and you never finish of course. I suppose if we were really solipsists, we would think of the present as existing, and not of the past and the future. But since the present glides on, we have to accept a tiny amount of past and a tiny amount of future. Those should be accepted. Then that leads us, alas, to universal history, to the whole past of the world, to the future, and so on.

  COFFA: When I was preparing for this conversation, I thought I had to explain to the audience what solipsism is before I asked my questions about it, but I found a very serious problem.

  BORGES: Now, solipsism, I think, was discovered by Descartes, who rejected it. Nobody seems to have accepted solipsism. At least I have read Bradley’s and Bertrand Russell’s refutation of solipsism. I have never read anything in proof of it, or accepting it. I have only read refutations.

  COFFA: Yes, and mostly by people who say that it is irrefutable.

  BORGES: Yes, irrefutable at the same time that they can hardly be convinced. That’s what Hume said about Berkeley, no? “His arguments are incapable of refutation and produce no conviction.” Those are David Hume’s words.

  COFFA: Which is true of most philosophical arguments.

  BORGES: I suppose, yes. But I remember that Emerson wrote: Arguments convince nobody. And Walt Whitman also felt that arguments were no good. But we might be convinced by the night air, by the wind, by looking at the stars, but not by arguments.

  COFFA: We will return to idealism in a moment, but I would like to ask you a question concerning a philosopher who did not influence you significantly, as far as I can tell, the Spanish philosopher Ortega. I don’t mean to ask a question about him but rather a discussion that you had—

  BORGES: Did I?

  COFFA: You did, yes. On a subject which he wrote about, which is not surprising since he wrote about every subject, I am told.

  BORGES: I haven’t read him.

  COFFA: The discussion had to do with Ortega’s theory of the novel. Roughly speaking, what he was saying is that—

  BORGES: That it is impossible to invent a new plot. People are inventing new plots all the time. For example, detective story writers are inventing new plots all the time.

  COFFA: That’s right, he was appealing to the distinction between substance and function, and he argued that whereas until 1900, not only science, but also literature had been based on the idea of function and no serious attention had been paid to the substance—

  BORGES: Substance and function, what do you mean exactly? I can hardly follow you.

  COFFA: I’m quoting him.

  BORGES: But he has to be paraphrased in order to be understood. What did he mean by function? Did he mean the plot?

  COFFA: I would suppose that he meant the structure of the novel quite independently of the psychology of the characters.

  BORGES: It depends. In the case of a short tale, the plot is all-important. But in the case of a novel, then the plot may be thought away. What is really important is the characters. Or maybe in a short story by Henry James, both are important. Or in a short story by Kipling, both are important—the plot and what is called very loosely the psychology of the characters. But to take a famous example, Don Quixote, even in the case of that famous novel, one thinks of the adventures as being little more than adjectives of the character. They are attributes of him. We need them in order to know him. All the adventures of Don Quixote are adjectives of Don Quixote. They are all meant to show us the kind of man he was. In a hidden sense of course. The adventures taken by themselves are irrelevant and rather poor. But they serve a function, because after reading Don Quixote we know who he was. We have been Don Quixote or Alonso Quijano all the time when we are reading the book. And that might be said of many novels, for example, the novels of George Meredith, The Egoist, and so on. Those are meant to show character. While in other novels, what is important is the action and the surprise you get at the end. In most novels of adventure, I should say in Stevenson’s Treasure Island and in the Arabian Nights, what is important is the adventures and not the characters. The characters could hardly exist without the adventures. The adventures are all-important.

  COFFA: It would seem that what Ortega was arguing for was—

  BORGES: I suppose that Ortega had read very few novels, no?

  COFFA: I wouldn’t know.

  BORGES: Well, he had no English, so he missed the best novels in the world.

  COFFA: I don’t know about that. But it seems to be that he was arguing that we have run out of plots…

  BORGES: I don’t think we have. I seem to be inventing new plots all the time. I don’t seem to have run dry of plots.

  COFFA: I think you are right. But in any case, he seemed to be saying—

  BORGES: I know. What he wanted was novels like Marius the Epicurean by Pater, no? Novels in which practically nothing happens, which are made for an old man. I suppose he was after that kind of novel, no?

  COFFA: Proust, although Proust was perhaps a bit too much even for him.

  BORGES: Yes, Henry James, Meredith, Pater.

  COFFA: What you call the psychological novel.

  BORGES: I personally can enjoy both kinds of novel. I enjoy plots and I enjoy characters.

  COFFA: Since he enjoyed it, being a philosopher, he thought he had to prove that that was the only admissible sort of thing.

  BORGES: Let me think, in the case of Shakespeare, you believe in the characters, you don’t believe in the plots. We all believe in Hamlet. He is far more real than I am. But I don’t believe in his father’s ghost, in the mother of his father. I can’t bring myself to believe in the plot. In the case of Macbeth also. I believe in Macbeth, in Lady Macbeth. Even in the three witches who are also fates, but I can’t believe the plot.

  COFFA: So there is the psychological novel, on the one hand, where the all-important thing is the characters, and what happens to them is not so important—

  BORGES: In the case of Conrad, I suppose both are important. I think of Conrad as being a chief novelist. In the case of Conrad, what do you make of him? One thinks of him in terms of the story and of the characters. So really there is no opposition. We have now said both things.

  COFFA: But in your own writings, or at least in many of them, the plot is what attracts attention much more than the characters.

  BORGES: The fact is that I cannot create characters. I am always writing about myself in impossible situations. I have never created a single character, as far as I know. In my stories I suppose the only character is myself, and I disguise myself as a gaucho, as a compadrito,* and so on, but it is myself all the time, really. Myself in imaginary times or in imaginary situations. I haven’t created characters.

  COFFA: Except for yourself.

  BORGES: Yes. But if we think of Dickens, we are thinking in terms of multitudes. In the case of Shakespeare also. In the case of Balzac, I am told the same thing happens, but I haven’t actually read him.

  COFFA: Here comes my question.

  BORGES: At long last. Sorry.

  COFFA: They haven’t come to hear my questions.

  BORGES: I have come to hear your questions.

  COFFA: The psychological novel, Ortega says, is the only good thing to do, and there are lots of people doing it nowadays. Then there is this other kind of writing.

  BORGES: Contrivance.

 
COFFA: Which you claim is very much alive and well, which you practice, together with Adolpho Bioy Casares and several other people, and which seems to have been influential in South America. I won’t say Latin America because otherwise you’ll tell me that there is no such thing.

  BORGES: Yes. The whole thing’s a fiction, yes.

  COFFA: The question is: Have they had anything to do with your decision not to write psychological novels and to write these other sorts of things? And before you answer me, I’d like to read a passage from something you wrote.

  BORGES: Yes, but I would like to say that I don’t write what I want. Those things are given me by something or somebody. You can call it the muse or the Holy Ghost or the subconscious. I don’t choose my subjects or plots. They are given to me. I have to stand back and receive them in a passive moment.

  COFFA: Do we have a copy of Other Inquisitions?

  BORGES: If not, you can invent anything you like.

  COFFA: I would like you to comment on something that you say in “For Bernard Shaw,” from Other Inquisitions.

  BORGES: Oh, did I?

  COFFA: You did.

  BORGES: I wrote those things a long time ago and I’m an old gentleman now, over eighty. I cannot be expected to remember what I wrote. I never reread my own writing. I try to remember other and better authors.

  COFFA: “The character of man and his variations is the essential theme of the contemporary novel. Lyric poetry is the complacent magnification of happiness and unhappiness.”

  BORGES: Did I write that?

  COFFA: Yes, you did.

  BORGES: It’s quite good, eh?

  COFFA: “The philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers—”

  BORGES: Have I written that?

  COFFA: Yes. But let me finish the sentence.

  BORGES: I’ve never read them.

  COFFA: “—transform every one of us into an interesting interlocutor of a secret and continuous dialogue with nothingness or God.” So we have lyric poetry on the one hand, existentialist philosophies on the other.

  BORGES: I have only read Alexius Meinong’s existentialist philosophy.

  COFFA: “These disciplines that formally may be admirable encourage that illusion of the I or ego that the Vedanta disapproves of as a capital error.”

  BORGES: It is also condemned by the Buddha, I think, no? By Hume.

  COFFA: And by Schopenhauer.

  BORGES: By Schopenhauer and by my friend Macedonio Fernández.

  COFFA: “They play at desperation and anguish, but in the end they flatter our vanity. In that sense they are immoral.” So we have lyric poetry, Heidegger’s and Jasper’s works being in the end immoral, and then we have the work of Shaw, which you offer as a paradigm of the opposite approach and which “leaves an aftertaste of liberation.”

  BORGES: I suppose someone worked in the names of Heidegger and Jaspers.

  COFFA: Could you comment?

  BORGES: Yes. Of course I can. At least I’ll do my best. I think that the novel is really flattering the reader because the reader becomes an interesting character, while in the epic, for example, the reader is not made to analyze his unhappiness. And in that sense you might think of the novel as being immoral. But you might also think of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as being immoral. Or of Beider, since he encourages introspection, abounding, as Kipling had it, in loud self-pity, which is encountered by the novel, but which is not encouraged by the epic, or by writers with an epic strain to them, for example, Joseph Conrad or George Bernard Shaw.

  COFFA: The farfetched conjecture that I wanted you to refute was the following: that you are not very much interested in the psychological novel because you don’t find that there is anything to the ego, and at any rate that there is anything interesting in the ego.

  BORGES: I think that the psychological novel makes for any amount of make-believe and lying. You can say anything in a psychological novel. So and so was so happy that he committed suicide. That may be in a novel, but not in a tale, I should say. In the novel, anything is possible. The idea of loving and hating people at the same time. Well, psychoanalysis is a kind of novel. Or gossip.

  COFFA: So would you say, or is this thoroughly wrongheaded, that the psychological novel is based on a wrong philosophy, on a philosophy that like Heidegger’s and Jasper’s philosophy and lyrical poetry has even something ethically wrong about it.

  BORGES: Yes, I would venture to say so, at least today, and now. I wonder how I will feel about it tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But today, yes, I thoroughly agree. There is something wrong about the psychological novel. And about the romantic movement, sentimentalism. Those kinds of things should be subdued rather than encouraged.

  COFFA: Would it be fair to relate the psychological novel to a realist attitude?

  BORGES: I suppose it would.

  COFFA: And your magical and fantastic literature to an idealistic way of looking at things—idealism at least concerning the conception of the ego?

  BORGES: I tend to think of things as being illusory. The idea of the world as a dream is not alien to me. On the contrary. But I know that when I write I have to enrich the dream, I have to add something to the dream. Let’s say, I have to add patterns to the dream. As to realism, I always thought it was essentially false. I have no use, let’s say, for local color, for being true to history. Those things are alien to me. What I like—there is a fine word in English—is to dream away, to let myself go dreaming. That’s what I really enjoy. But afterwards, of course I have to go to the task of writing it down, of correcting the proofs, of emending the sentences. But really, I think of a writer as a man who is continually dreaming. I am continually dreaming, and I may be dreaming you at the present moment for all I know. Solipsism again.

  COFFA: You have said that universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

  BORGES: I suppose I was making a fine sentence when I wrote that. I wonder if it is really true, eh? It might be said, and it has a fine ring to it. That should be enough, no? “Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.” Yes. I was taken in when I wrote that. I’m taken in now. Maybe you’re taken in. I am not at the present moment. Universal history is far more. History is what James Joyce called it: a nightmare, from which we are all trying to awaken.

  COFFA: A closely related claim that you make and that you are perhaps more committed to than the one I just read is that literature is the exploration of the finite and a rather small number of metaphors.

  BORGES: It is true. I think that there are but few metaphors. I think that the idea of inventing new metaphors may be wrong. We have, for example, time and the river, living and dreaming, sleeping and dying, the eyes and the stars. Those should be sufficient. And yet, some ten days ago I read a metaphor that greatly surprised me. It came from an Indian poet: “And therein I found the Himalayas are the laughter of Shiva.” That is to say, a terrible god for a terrible mountain. Now that metaphor is new, at least it is new to me; I can’t link it to stock metaphors I have used. The idea of the mountains as being the laughter of Shiva. I thought I had found new metaphors in Chesterton, and then I found that they were not really new. For example, when a Danish Viking is made to say, in The Ballad of the White Horse: “And Marble like solid moonlight,/ And gold like a frozen fire.”* Those metaphors are of course impossible. And yet the idea of comparing white marble and a white moon, or fire and gold, is not new. But they are expressed in a new way. When Chesterton writes

  But I shall not grow too old to see

  Enormous night arise,

  A cloud that is larger than the world

  And a monster made of eyes†

  we might think of this as being new. But of course the idea of eyes and stars have always gone together. So what Chesterton has done is to give a new shape to those very ancient and, I should say, essential metaphors.

  COFFA: You yourself use a small number of metaphors.

  BORGES: I remember what Emerson said: language is fossil poetry. He
said every word is a metaphor. You can verify that by looking a word up in the dictionary. All words are metaphors—or fossil poetry, a fine metaphor itself.

  COFFA: You have the mirrors image, you have the dreams, you have a bag of tricks as some people have called it.

  BORGES: Yes, I have a few stock subjects. A bag of tricks, yes. But those things are given to me. I cannot elude them. I cannot write without those tricks.

  COFFA: I am not blaming you for using them.

  BORGES: Those tricks are essential to me. They are not arbitrary. I have not chosen them, they have chosen me.

  COFFA: They have good taste. Mirrors, for example?

  BORGES: I always stood in fear of mirrors. When I was a little boy, there was something awful at my house. In my room we had three full-length mirrors. Then also the furniture was of mahogany, and that made a kind of dark mirror, like the mirror to be found in Saint Paul’s epistle. I stood in fear of them, but being a child I did not dare say anything. So every night I was confronted by three or four images of myself. I felt that to be really awful. I never said anything, since childhood is shy.

  COFFA: It seems to me that most of these metaphors that I have seen in your writings are in some sense used to support some version of idealism, if I may use that argument.

  BORGES: I suppose they do. My idea of the “fetch,” the Doppelgänger in German, the double in Jekyll and Hyde.

  COFFA: Which we find in “Tlön” where you have the heresiarch say that mirrors and copulation are hateful because they multiply the images of man.

  BORGES: I think the images of mankind and the images in the mirror are equally unreal and equally real. Mirrors and copulation are the same thing. They stand for creating images, not realities.