Conversing with Borges
Reflections on Borges's late interviews
1.
This is my second go at writing an essay about the conversations between Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari. The first went nowhere. This one might also go nowhere, but I’m committed to finishing it. Somewhere in the three volumes of these transcribed radio conversations, Borges says that he published all of his books so that he could stop thinking about them. I’m trying to write this essay to stop thinking about it. He also says that “the act of writing has to be gratifying” and that “if there is difficulty, it implies a certain awkwardness” and that “writing should be as spontaneous as reading.”[1] That’s awkward for me, although I did find reading these conversations to be a spontaneous joy. The conversations reminded me of being an undergraduate student, listening to my older friends talk about things I only vaguely knew about, learning more than contributing, and listening to my teachers talk about things I only barely understood.
There’s a genre of academician that sees professing as a mission that goes far beyond the academy. They see it as a vocation, to which they were called by the heavens. When I was taking my first steps in the university, my grandmother told me about how her colleagues who taught during the period of martial law in Poland in the early 1980s would simply move their classes to their homes, sneaking students past various military checkpoints. The most important thing was that the students’ learning was uninterrupted. I like to think the story is true.[2] Borges doubtlessly would have been a teacher like this. Throughout these interviews, Ferrari steps aside and gives his friend a wide license to talk about whatever is on his mind. Borges steps into the role of teacher, professing on the topics on which he spent his life ruminating.
Multiple times throughout the conversations, Borges describes his goal as a teacher to be not inculcating the love of whole literatures, since that would be impossible, but the love of particular writers, the love of particular books and writers. He comes back to his personal cannon frequently as a point of reference: Quixote, Tennyson, Poe, Martín Fierro, Kafka, Stevenson, Joyce, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Melville, Plato, Aristotle. In his reading, lines are blurred between literature, philosophy, and science. The way he speaks of writers and ideas shows his goal as a teacher to be a reflection of himself and his writing. He loved books and ideas, and he loved teaching them. He hides behind modesty, “I haven’t read many novels” he likes to say, though he’s read everything he could, it seems.
Borges often tried to see things in their absolute context. Reading the claim in the context of his ‘Library of Babel’ gives a different view. He opens that story with an epigram from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…” The story itself describes an infinitely large library with infinitely many volumes. In the real world, there may as well be infinitely many books, since one can only ever read a small fraction of what is published and even the most prolific reader hasn’t actually read that much, relatively speaking. It would be dishonest to claim one has read a lot, since at best it’d be a infinitesimal fraction. [3]
2.
Borges was obsessed with language and with the infinite size of the universe. Much like we can contemplate the variation of the letters, we can contemplate how few simple particles make up everything there is. In his stories these themes come up again and again – in ‘the Aleph’ we encounter a single point that unites all others in itself, in ‘the Library of Babel’ we encounter the infinite possibility of literature, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ we encounter the possibility of language creating entire worlds. In the interviews, there is a story Borges retells of an artist setting out to draw everything on an infinite wall. He draws all sorts of things – birds, ships, houses, people, trees, and so on. At the end of his life, he steps back from the wall and finds that all of the drawings add up to a self-portrait. The artist’s entire work was merely an expression of himself. Borges tells us that this is how we can understand Poe’s work, in his works we see the portrait of a troubled genius, but undoubtedly a genius.[4] We can apply the same analogy to Borges. The themes he discussed throughout his life in his stories, essays, and poems appear again and again. Reading his self-descriptions and his stories side by side, what emerges most clearly is a portrait of the author himself.
In one of the first conversations Borges tells us his life is “casual enough but [he tries] to ensure that [his] writing is not” and that he tries “to express something from the cosmos, even if it is essentially chaotic.”[5] His entire ouvre could be considered an attempt at organizing his many obsessions and interests into some semblance of order. The Library of Babel is organized into hexagonal units of which there are infinitely many, and there is an order of monks dedicated to exploring it and bringing knowledge back to the others to catalogue. In his reading, the writers in his personal cannon all grasp at the same universal truth, because all writing really is an expression of the same universal truth. On the one hand, “every book is unique and its classification is up to the critics or for their convenience”[6] but on the other “when a poet gets it right, it’s right for ever.”[7] The beauty in art, in language, though emerging from tradition, is timeless. It has to be, for Borges, precisely because it aims for that universal.
Milan Kundera once said that all of his books could have the same title, because he’s just trying to grasp at the same set of concerns throughout them all.[8] Borges should agree with this statement regarding himself.
3.
There is a fundamental tension in Borges’ thought that runs through these interviews and through the other writing of his that I’ve read. On the one hand, when art is good it is good forever, on the other, our use of language is determined by the constraints of the language we use and by the tradition from which we emerge. There is no such thing as an artist outside of time and history, we are always within them, they are always happening to us. But at the same time, Borges claims that this is untrue, that “[art] escapes, in some way, from the organized causality of history. Whether art happens or doesn’t neither depend on the artist.”[9]
Maybe I just find this an unconvincing view of art. One could refer to Heidegger who thought that the work in artwork is always about what it tells us about the world of those who created the work. Insofar as art does something, it reveals to us a truth, but it is a particular truth. The most famous of the examples Heidegger gives of this is of a painting of a pair of peasant’s shoes by Vincent van Gogh:
“From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman.”[10]
The point is that the painting gives us an insight into the peasant woman’s life. In the painting we see her daily toil and worry, we can be transported into her place, as it were. Now, looking at that painting (though, as I recall there are several possible paintings Heidegger could be referring to), we don’t get that same entry into a life-world, it simply doesn’t exist. The painting is no longer performing the work of art, but rather that of a historical document. The work is, after time passes, “ripped out of [its] own native sphere.”[11] Heidegger continues to argue that when artworks are preserved, “however high their quality and power of impression, however good their state of preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world.”[12] Even if we attempted to place them back into their context, their life-world is gone, and so the art cannot work in the same way.
Borges may well be right that if a poet gets it right, it’s right forever. There are very good reasons why we still read George Elliot, Dante, and Kafka, go to famous galleries to look at renaissance art, visit ancient sites, or listen to Bach. But it is an overstatement to say that these works open up their life world to us the same way they did for their creators in the world-historical moment from which they emerged. In the present moment we are already enculturated to the present. Listening to Bach may well stir the heart but it does not transport us into the composers life world the way it would in its original context, even if the performer does all in their power to make the performance authentic. Authenticity, in this context, is always merely historical authenticity – without the possibility of the original context existing, we cannot have the same impression of the artwork. And it can be dangerous to mistake the timelessness and beauty of certain artworks with their function as art, as shown by the recent surge in popularity of the various Western chauvinist aesthetic mongers across all the social media platforms.
I don’t think Borges is wrong that when poets get things right, they’re right forever. But the way in which we receive those texts changes wildly over time. If Heidegger is wrong and artworks can have that world-opening function even if their original context is wrong, then we must admit that the world that they open changes too. When Emily Wilson became the first woman translator to English The Odyssey, among other things she was praised for the way her edition made bare the gendered power imbalances present in the text that have been hitherto buried (or just unseen) by male translators. It’s a whole separate question of whether a translation is still the same work or a new one, but the example does show that changing the context of the artwork gives it the power to say something new. It still arts, just differently.
Borges wasn’t infallible and the Conversations show he had some plainly wrong opinions. There are other examples to pick throughout, such as his rejection of socialism because of his equivocation between it and fascism as the state overtaking the rights of the individual. But he was a great enough thinker to at least open the space for debate, to lay out his commitments plainly for the reader. I take the Conversations to be equally about the audience having a starting point for a conversation with Borges. Here, at the end of his life, he does more than anywhere else I’m aware of to guide his audience through the way he thought. In that, they form a wonderful companion to his other books, and beyond the historical interest they give to obsessives like me, they provide a glimpse of what a writer’s intellectual life might look like.
[1] Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari (2016), Conversations (3 vols.), trans. Jason Wilson, Tom Boll and Anthony Edkins, Seagull Books. Vol 1, 214
[2] Though it’s a nice romantic idea of life in academy, and in exceptional circumstances like martial law in Poland there is a certain subversiveness to teaching at all costs, generally, treating academia as vocation leads to giving universities a license to exploit their workers.
[3] When I was in primary school one of my teachers bragged about having read about one fourth of all world literature. I reflect on how sad the man must have been to try to impress children with a lie like that. An anti-Borges, perhaps.
[4] Conversations, Vol 2, p.322
[5] Conversations, Vol 1 p.15
[6] Conversations, Vol 1 p.31
[7] Conversations, Vol 1 p.187
[8] I read this in an interview with Kundera once, but can’t find a reference. Perhaps I imagined it.
[9] Conversations, Vol 1. 75
[10] Martin Heidegger (1956/2011), “Origin of the Work of Art” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Albert Hofstader. p.101
[11] Origin of the Work of Art, p. 105
[12] Origin of the Work of Art, p. 105-6