Borges suggests that writers rewrite previous writers without truly realising it. In his narrative ‘The Circular Ruins’, a man dreams about a son until the son becomes real; the man then discovers he, too, is someone’s dream. This story is essentially a fable on creativity; we come to understand that we owe a debt of influence to those who went before us and that we are not in control of things in the ways we might think or wish. Borges, who was very familiar with Stevenson’s essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, said this story came to him as a dream, and that furthermore he considered reading to be a form of dreaming in that it is a private, internal experience only somewhat tied to the external world. The relationship between dream and reality, between creativity and actuality, is key. Discussing ‘The Circular Ruins’, Borges said, ‘The whole story is about a dream, and, while writing it down, my everyday affairs – my job at the municipal library, going to the movies, dining with friends – were like a dream. For the space of that week, the one thing real to me was the story.’
Furthermore, referencing Schopenhauer, Borges highlights the idea that life and dreams are pages of the same book: reading them consecutively is living, flicking through them is dreaming. Fiction can seem to have a life of its own, and both Stevenson and Borges are intrigued by the ways in which life and literature interrelate. Stevenson seems to prefigure Pablo Picasso’s dictum that ‘Art is a lie that makes us realise truth’ (which seems nowhere more true than in fiction, for the best and most lasting of fictions surely reveal bigger truths). These truths can seem unpredictable or unsettling in Stevenson’s fables and Borges’s stories alike. This is partly because both authors allow room for the reader to engage with the mysterious, with contingencies that seem acausal or impossible in life – coincidences, contradictions and the otherworldly. Borges often takes existential arguments to dizzying conclusions. Stevenson and Borges, in Balderston’s words, ‘find the highest achievements of the art of fiction to be those in which a story is suggested by a text but left to be completed by the imaginative reader’. This approach allows a reader to feel involved in the story in an insightful and pleasurable manner; we feel absorbed by and into the text, actively subsumed by the narrative process.
The art of reading allows us to cast off our selves and assume a different persona – perhaps even to become the author. In some ways, when we read Stevenson we become Stevenson. Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and essayist who was a friend to and translator of Borges, paraphrased Borges’s thoughts:
We are physical beings, rooted in the physical cycle of life-and-death. Yet we are also users of language, fiction-makers, and language and fictions are not, like us, subject to natural laws. Through them, we are able to cross over into a timeless dimension, to bring into being alternate worlds, to enjoy the full freedom of the imaginable.
Good readers, Borges believed, are rarer than good writers. Borges and Stevenson allow the reader’s imagination to participate in the creation of the narrative. As Reid put it:
We are all ficcioneros – inveterate fiction-makers – it is through our fictions, private and public, that we make sense of our world, and find some equilibrium in it, it is through our fictions that we create ourselves.
Borges, like Stevenson, was a reader of Carlyle, who posited the notion that history was a story we read and write and which writes us. To Borges, we are in fact the authors, readers and protagonists of an infinite narrative – trying to negotiate our own meanings and those of others, while underneath all our superficial differences we are one person: nobody. This kind of radical thinking – seeded in Stevenson and others and brought to fruition in Borges – is lively, creative and provocative.
Stevenson and Borges were both enamoured with succinctness. ‘There is but one art – to omit’, wrote Stevenson. Borges famously didn’t write novels because, in a sense, he had too much to say; it was more productive to write brief, dense stories and short, fertile essays. Borges condensed novels into ideas contained within a sentence, often contemplating instead the non-existent book. ‘Why,’ he reasoned, ‘take five hundred pages to develop an idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes?’ Some have ascribed Borges’s lack of superfluous detail to his myopia, but I think it is also attributable to stylistic choice, by way of Stevenson’s essays and artistic practices.
Another thing they have in common is that the quantity of material they wrote is much greater than is generally supposed. Stevenson scholar Roger G. Swearingen identifies more than 350 projects the author embarked on in his short life, incorporating essays, novels, short stories and plays, and not counting his many letters. Borges wrote 1,000 pages of stories, more than 500 pages of poetry, a couple of dozen works of (often idiosyncratic) translation, 1,200 essays, hundreds of prologues as well as film and book reviews, capsule biographies, and more. In Borges’s published works alone there are more than one hundred references to Stevenson.
Among the most condensed of Stevenson’s writings are the fables. Stevenson was entranced by fables and a comment in a letter suggests he may have started writing his own as early as 1874. But this is by no means certain, and if true, would mean he worked on the fables on and off for two decades. Edmund Gosse, by contrast, claims he began them in Bournemouth in 1887, after completing the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson planned to publish a collection of his fables with Longman, but died before he could honour the contract. It is known that Fanny, Stevenson’s wife, did not like the fables – she considered them ‘aberrations’ – and her influence may have stalled their publication. In fact, though they are overlooked and undervalued, the fables are a rich and vital element of Stevenson’s literary legacy. Stevenson believed that just as tastes evolved, so must fables. And indeed there is something very modern about their unwillingness to yield to simplistic moralising. Serious, lyrical, nuanced, the fables ask deep questions about purpose and meaning. Some critics have described the fables as being like early examples of existentialist or Kafka-esque writing and it is no surprise that they appealed to Borges and Bioy. The aforementioned Borges story ‘The Circular Ruins’ may have been partly inspired by ‘The Song of the Morrow’, concerned as they both are with time, recurrence, doubling and multiplying, and circularity. Many of Borges’s stories read like fables – pared back, resonant, transcendent. Perhaps because of their combination of narrative momentum, engagement with greater meaning and lean and graceful writing, they are simply a joy to read.
One of the Stevenson fables that intrigued Borges was ‘Faith, Half-Faith and No Faith at All’. The eminent scholar R.H. Blyth (once tutor to Crown Prince, later Emperor, Akihito of Japan) offers an unusual interpretation. He equates Faith, the priest, with the man who believes (or professes to believe) in revealed religion. Half-Faith is the virtuous, perhaps sanctimonious, person who talks of qualities like beauty, goodness and truth. No Faith, says Blyth, ‘is the man who lives by Zen’. It is not accurate to describe either Stevenson or Borges as Buddhists, but here emerges another fascinating connection. Blyth and others have noted unwitting aspects of Buddhism in Stevenson’s writing – in these fables and in his works that reveal human nature as being more contradictory and more malleable than one might wish to believe. The connection between Borges and Buddhism is fascinating. ‘Time passing,’ wrote Borges, ’is a severing of selves, each one trapped in a past monad.’ He wrote a book on Buddhism and lectured on the subject.
Borges said, ‘There are two men whom I love personally, as if I had known them. If I had to draw up a list of friends, I would include not only my personal friends, my physical friends, but I would also include Stevenson and [fellow Scottish author] Andrew Lang. Although they might not approve of my stuff, I think they would like the idea of being liked for their work by a mere South American, divided from them in time and space.’ He often spoke of Stevenson as a ‘major writer’, no matter what his interlocutor thought.
An unenviable element all three authors share is that they have been, at times, somewhat misunderstood.
Stevenson has been dismissed as a ‘mere’ children’s author or perceived as no more than a minor author. Borges and Bioy are sometimes considered to be the drily intellectual, detached or narrowly in-joking authors of works that are more interested in metaphysical complexities than in human beings. This, too, is an erroneous view.
Stevenson’s reputation has fluctuated (as Borges’s has, to a lesser extent). Richard Dury notes four distinct periods: lifetime reception; height of esteem (1894–1914); revision; reinstatement. The death notice in the Illustrated London News of 22 December 1894 shows how highly regarded Stevenson was: ‘He is gone, our Prince of storytellers – such a Prince . . . with the insatiable taste for weird adventure, for diablerie, for a strange mixture of metaphysics and romance.’ Ever since the sensational success of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson had been in demand. He commanded considerable fees from magazines such as Scribner’s for some of the essays in this volume. Following his death, serious critics elevated his work and dreamy readers romanticised the noble Bohemian invalid who died young. Jack London, who visited Stevenson’s grave in 1908, wrote to a friend: ‘I do join you, heartily, in admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson. What an example he was of application and self-development! As a storyteller there isn’t his equal; the same thing might almost be said of his essays.’
During the revisionist period, Stevenson was often treated with disdain, and was as good as expelled from the literary canon. In 1924 Leonard Woolf published an essay entitled ‘The Fall of Stevenson’, in which he wrote: ‘there never has been a more headlong fall in a writer’s reputation . . . A false style tells most fatally against a writer when, as with Stevenson, he has nothing original to say.’ This is hardly justified. And yet an aversion towards Stevenson’s writings became strangely commonplace for a while. Edwin Muir, Stevenson’s compatriot, wrote in 1931: ‘Stevenson has simply fallen out of the procession. He is still read by the vulgar, but he has joined the band of writers on whom, by tacit consent, the serious critics have nothing to say.’
In the twenty-first century, however, critics are once again taking a more enlightened and understanding approach to Stevenson. He has been included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (after being omitted from the first seven editions of that influential anthology) and is hailed by some critics as anticipating elements of modernism and postmodernism. It is tempting to wonder how Stevenson’s reputation might have been rehabilitated, at least in the Spanish-speaking world, had the present anthology appeared as and when Borges and Bioy had first (or indeed subsequently) tried to publish it. Perhaps it is enough that writers as diverse as Isak Dinesen, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood have voiced their admiration for Stevenson.
To some extent, Borges’s reputation has also been contradictory. Never easy to categorise at the best of times, Borges described himself as ‘a Conservative’, but his opinions were, as befitted his sense of self, changeable. He was anti-Fascist, anti-Communist, anti-Marxist, anti-Peronist. When he worked at the Miguel Cané municipal library (for which he procured many great works of literature in the English language, books by Stevenson among them), he was unceremoniously relieved of his duties because of political remarks he made and was instead appointed poultry inspector (!); he resigned immediately. Borges’s reputation within Argentina received a major boost when, in 1961, he was jointly awarded the Prix International with Samuel Beckett. This prize also lead to greater recognition internationally and Borges came to be treated with reverence on the world stage. In some places Borges was perceived to be something of a counter-cultural figure; his image (on a book) appears in the infamous Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film Performance, which Cammell claims was influenced by the Argentine. Borges was later to stir up controversy by making strong statements against Marxist and Communist writers, and it is reasonable to acknowledge that Borges’s divisive political viewpoints had a bearing on his standing as a writer. When, in July 1985, Borges attended a trial and discovered that ‘gentlemen’ with whom he had lunched were responsible for the kidnapping, the torture and the ‘disappearing’ of many thousands of innocent citizens, he had to leave the courtroom, feeling physically sick.
Many people know and are bemused by his assessment of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict (‘Two bald men fighting over a comb’) but less well known and less well understood is his declaration that General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher were one and the same person.
Writers who evidence such a profound eccentricity of thought often make for compelling reading. Borges, like Stevenson, combines tenacity and magic to create narratives that alter the way we read the world, each other, and literature itself. One of Borges’s wittiest, strangest and most unshakeable stories is ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’. Melding fantasy, humour and erudition, the short essayistic tale concerns Menard’s ambition to rewrite Don Quixote, word for word, from scratch. It’s not about plagiarism, though, for the narrator considers Menard’s version to be richer and more successful than the Cervantes ‘original’, because it can be contextualised in the light of everything that has happened in the world since 1605, and because the style of writing, while natural to Cervantes, is archaic and challenging to Menard. The meaning of a text, then, is dependent upon the reader and on the context of the work.
The Borges essay ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ considers a logical paradox with profound implications. (It is in relation to this essay that the term ‘Borgesian conundrum’ has arisen.) Borges analyses six elements, from Zeno’s paradox to Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fears and Scruples’, that apply to his developing theory around the question of whether the writer writes the story or the story writes him/her. Borges indicates that the six narratives – which all pre-date Kafka – have, in fact, been proleptically influenced by him. Borges declares:
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist . . . In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
We can take a similarly innovative approach to the works of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Borges himself . . . or Stevenson.
In this way, Borges and Bioy Casares inform, reorientate and revitalise our reading of Robert Louis Stevenson. Perhaps, thanks to them, we can encounter a richer Stevenson, one whose contribution to world literature is not easily dismissed but is, rather, more lastingly assured.
Kevin MacNeil
Stirling and Buenos Aires
June 2017
ESSAYS
Lay Morals
The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were drafted at Edinburgh in the spring of 1879. They are unrevised, and must not be taken as representing, either as to matter or form, their author’s final thoughts; but they contain much that is essentially characteristic of his mind.
* * * * *
We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn.
I
THE PROBLEM of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two experience
s, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.
A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young, must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already retailed to them in their own youth. Every generation has to educate another which it has brought upon the stage. People who readily accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls due. What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions? Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words to say in his own defence. Where does he find them? and what are they when found?
Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology Page 2
