Picked-Up Pieces (27 page)

Americans also, perhaps in their zeal for practical instruction, tend to expect too much of Proust as a social critic. Satire of snobs and anatomizing of society occur, of course, and Proust was a climber in his day; but a personal obsession should not be confused with an artistic one. He writes about aristocrats, in their banality and glamour, their vanity and gallantry, because they are there:
were
there, in the life he has ceased to live, the life that lostness has bathed in paradisiacal colors. As soon call Proust an anti-snob as a gargoyle-carver anti-devil; hatred is swallowed in an art of homage. Proust would take the entire living population of France as a
trésor trouvé
, a paleontological imprint left by the past, a clue to the central mystery of France herself, with her cathedrals, her blossoms, her place names. As the hero, aging, discovers deceit everywhere and absurdity everywhere, only two things remain worth loving: Marcel and France, which are everything. The book is not a tract but a religious travail.

In those August and September Manhattan days, themselves now paradisiacal, when I first read Proust, I also began to read Kierkegaard. College had left them out of my education; now I embraced them. I was
not only a would-be writer but a would-be Christian. I was happy, but happiness, as Harold Brodkey observed in a short story from those same 1950’s, makes us afraid. And Proust and Kierkegaard seemed (though both had been petite men) two giant brothers, whose bullying and showing-off I forgave because between them I could walk safely down the street, the street of my life. The remorseless pessimism of Proust’s disquisitions on the heart, the abyss he makes of human motives, the finality of all our little deaths, did not appall me; morbid myself, I only trusted morbidity. In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness. Proust was one of those men—increasingly rare, as faith further ebbs—who lost the consolations of belief but retained the attitudes and ambitions of a worshipper. For all his biochemistry, Proust emphasizes the medieval duality of body/spirit: “the body imprisons the spirit in a fortress.” For all the disillusion and cruelty it depicts,
Remembrance of Things Past
is, like the Bible, a work of consolation. Einstein’s relativity developed its formulas from the recognition of an absolute, the speed of light. Marcel, having experienced—in the madeleine, in the uneven paving stones—“a sense of eternity,” vows to “leave this behind me to enrich others with my treasure.” The next sentence goes on to uncover in his momentary “sense of eternity” a strangely modest secret, a kind of Godless Golden Rule and the germinating principle of art:

BORGES

O
THER
I
NQUISITIONS
, 1937–1952, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. 205 pp. University of Texas Press, 1964.

D
REAMTIGERS
, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland. 95 pp. University of Texas Press, 1964.

B
ORGES THE
L
ABYRINTH
M
AKER
, by Ana María Barrenechea, edited and translated from the Spanish by Robert Lima. 175 pp. New York University Press, 1965.

The belated North American acknowledgment of the genius of Jorge Luis Borges proceeds apace. The University of Texas Press last year published two volumes by this Argentine fantasist, critic, poet, and librarian. These translations, together with Grove Press’s
Ficciones
, bring to three the number of complete books by Borges available in English. There is also New Directions’
Labyrinths
, a selection. And now the New York University Press has published a book
about
him.
^*

Four years ago, when Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the Prix International des Éditeurs, he was known here to few but Hispanic specialists. A handful of poems and short stories had appeared in scattered anthologies and magazines. I myself had read only “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” originally published in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
and subsequently a favorite of detective-story anthologies. Though vivid and intellectual beyond the requirements of its genre, the story can be read without awareness that its creator is a giant of world literature. I was prompted to read Borges seriously by a remark made—internationally enough—in Rumania, where, after a blanket disparagement of contemporary French and German fiction, Borges was praised by a young critic in a tone he had previously reserved for Kafka. An analogy with Kafka is inevitable, but I wonder if Borges’ abrupt projection, by the university and avant-garde presses, into the bookstores will prove as momentous as Kafka’s publication, by the commercial firm of Knopf, in the thirties. It is not a question of Borges’ excellence. His driest paragraph is somehow compelling. His fables are written from a height of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction. Furthermore, he is, at least for anyone whose taste runs to puzzles or pure speculation, delightfully entertaining. The question is, I think, whether or not Borges’ lifework, arriving in a lump now (he was born in 1899 and since his youth has been an active and honored figure in Argentine literature), can serve, in its gravely considered oddity, as any kind of clue to the way out of the dead-end narcissism and downright trashiness of present American fiction.

Borges’ narrative innovations spring from a clear sense of technical crisis. For all his modesty and reasonableness of tone, he proposes some sort of essential revision in literature itself. The concision of his style and the comprehensiveness of his career (in addition to writing poems, essays, and stories, he has collaborated on detective novels, translated from many tongues, edited, taught, and even executed film scripts) produce a strangely terminal impression: he seems to be the man for whom literature has no future. I am haunted by knowing that this insatiable reader is now virtually blind.

A constant bookishness gives Borges’ varied production an unusual consistency. His stories have the close texture of argument; his critical articles have the suspense and tension of fiction. The criticism collected
in
Other Inquisitions
,
1937–1952
almost all takes the form of detection, of uncovering what was secret. He looks for, and locates, the hidden pivots of history: the moment (in Iceland in 1225) when a chronicler first pays tribute to an enemy, the very line (in Chaucer in 1382) when allegory yields to naturalism. His interest gravitates toward the obscure, the forgotten: John Wilkins, the 17th-century inventor
ab nihilo
of an analytical language; J. W. Dunne, the 20th-century proponent of a grotesque theory of time; Layamon, the 13th-century poet isolated between the death of Saxon culture and the birth of the English language. Where an arcane quality does not already exist, Borges injects it. His appreciation of the classic Spanish satirist and stylist Francisco de Quevedo begins, “Like the history of the world, the history of literature abounds in enigmas. I found, and continue to find, none so disconcerting as the strange partial glory that has been accorded to Quevedo.” His essay on Layamon concludes, “ ‘
No one knows who he is
,’ said Léon Bloy. Of that intimate ignorance no symbol is better than this forgotten man, who abhorred his Saxon heritage with Saxon vigor, and who was the last Saxon poet and never knew it.”

Implacably, Borges reduces everything to a condition of mystery. His gnomic style and encyclopedic supply of allusions generate a kind of inverse illumination, a Gothic atmosphere in which the most lucid and famous authors loom somewhat menacingly. His essay on Bernard Shaw begins, “At the end of the thirteenth century Raymond Lully (Ramón Lull) attempted to solve all the mysteries by means of a frame with unequal, revolving, concentric disks, subdivided into sectors with Latin words.” It ends on an equally ominous and surprising note: “[Existentialists] may play at desperation and anguish, but at bottom they flatter the vanity; in that sense, they are immoral. Shaw’s work, on the other hand, leaves an aftertaste of liberation. The taste of the doctrines of Zeno’s Porch and the taste of the sagas.”

Borges’ harsh conjunctions and plausible paradoxes are not confined to literary matters. In “A Comment on August 23, 1944,” Borges meditates on the ambivalent reaction of his Fascist friends to the Allied occupation of Paris and ends with this daring paragraph:

The tracing of hidden resemblances, of philosophical genealogies, is Borges’ favorite mental exercise. Out of his vast reading he distills a few related images, whose parallelism, tersely presented, has the force of a fresh thought. “Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors. I should like to sketch one chapter of that history,” he writes in “Pascal’s Sphere,” and goes on to compile, in less than four pages, twenty-odd instances of the image of a sphere “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.” These references are arranged like a plot, beginning with Xenophanes, who joyously substituted for the anthropomorphic gods of Greece a divine and eternal Sphere, and ending with Pascal, who, in describing nature as “an infinite sphere” had first written and then rejected the word “
effroyable
”—“a frightful sphere.” Many of Borges’ genealogies trace a degeneration: he detects a similar “magnification to nothingness” in the evolutions of theology and of Shakespeare’s reputation; he watches an Indian legend succumb, through its successive versions, to the bloating of unreality. He follows in the works of Léon Bloy the increasingly desperate interpretations of a single phrase in St. Paul—“
per speculum in aenigmate
” (“through a glass darkly”). Borges himself recurrently considers Zeno’s second paradox—the never-completed race between Achilles and the tortoise, the formal argument of
regressus in infinitum
—and comes to a conclusion that is, to use his favorite adjective, monstrous: “One concept corrupts and confuses the others.… I am speaking of the infinite.… We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have
dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know that it is false.”

Borges is not an antiseptic pathologist of the irrational; he is himself susceptible to infection. His connoisseurship has in it a touch of madness. In his “Kafka and His Precursors,” he discovers, in certain parables and anecdotes by Zeno, Han Yü, Kierkegaard, Browning, Bloy, and Lord Dunsany, a prefiguration of Kafka’s tone. He concludes that each writer creates his own precursors: “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” This is sensible enough, and, indeed, has been pointed out by T. S. Eliot, whom Borges cites in a footnote. But Borges goes on: “In this correlation the identity or plurality of men matters not at all.” This sentence, I believe, expresses not a thought but a
sensation
that Borges has; he describes it—a mixture of deathlike detachment and ecstatic timelessness—in his most ambitious essay, “New Refutation of Time.” It is this sensation that encourages his peculiar view of human thought as the product of a single mind, and of human history as a vast magic book that can be read cabalistically. His highest praise, bestowed upon the fantastic narratives of the early H. G. Wells, is to claim that “they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus of Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.”