Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges Jaime Alazraki G. K: Hall & Co. • Boston, Massachusetts Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges Critical Essays on World Literature Robert Lecker, General Editor McGill University Copyright © 1987 by Jaime Alazraki All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Alazraki, Jaime. Critical essays on Jorge Luis Borges. (Critical essays on world literature) Bibliography: p. 193 Includes index. 1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899- - Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PQ7797.B635Z56 1987 868 86-14973 ISBN 0-8161-8829-7 This publication is printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Jaime Alazraki ARTICLES AND REVIEWS An Autobiographical Essay 21 Jorge Luis Borges A Modern Master 55 Paul de Man The Author as Librarian 62 John Updike Borges and the Fictive Narrative 77 Pierre Macherey The Literature of Exhaustion 83 John Barth A Game with Shifting Mirrors 93 John Ashbery The Politics of Self-Parody 96 Richard Poirier Imaginary Borges and His Books 108 William H. Gass Tigers in the Mirror 116 George Steiner [Review of The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969] 125 Geoffrey H. Hartman Meeting Borges 127 Alfred Kazin The Reality of Borges 130 Robert Scholes COMPARATIVE ESSAYS The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges 141 Patricia Merivale vi Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges Borges and Thomas De Quincey 153 Ronald Christ Borges and American Fiction 1950-70 165 Tony Tanner From Amhoretz to Exegete: The Swerve from Kafka by Borges 173 Margaret Boegeman SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS IN ENGLISH 193 INDEX 195 INTRODUCTION Strange destiny that oj Borges. This is a line from a 1963 poem, "Elegy;' in which the paradoxical nature of his life is pondered and ruminated over. Subsequent variations on the same paradox will be reformulated in forthcoming poems. The line also encapsulates the para doxical fate of Borges's writings in the fluctuating tide of criticism. Since its beginning, Borges's texts invited controversy when not outright quarrel, particularly in his native Argentina. As early as 1924 (Borges was barely twenty-five) a literary feud divided Argentine writers with social and political concerns from those who viewed literature solely as an aesthetic artifact. This chapter of local literary history is known as the "Boedo Florida Polemic." Each group adopted the name of the territory in Buenos Aires that represented its political affinities: Boedo was the quarter of the working class and the political left, and Florida, on the other hand, was the downtown heart of the elite. Although there were personal references to writers from both groups, the actual conflict was confined to the perception of literature defended or attacked by each group: Florida propagated and aped the experiments and prescriptions of avant-garde trends, and Boedo defended the need for social commitment in art. In spite of his early poems in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution, Borges sided with the first group. Ten years later, in 1933, the polemic continued, but now it focused on a single writer: Borges. The Buenos Aires journal Megajono devoted its eleventh issue to a poll in which fellow writers were asked to comment on the quality and value of his writings and on his place in the national literary scene. By then he had published three books of poetry and five collections of essays. He was considered the most prominent member of the so-called new generation and the most influential force among young writers. Reactions were mixed. Some praised his work as the most important ever produced in the country, others castigated him for his convoluted ptose. Most expressed their preference for the poet. A few were able to detect a change from his early inflated prose into a more exact tool. One referred to his essay books as being born dead, and another character ized his style as that of "a Spaniard in the 16th-century trying to imitate a 2 Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges Buenos Aires compadrito in 1900."1 As harsh as the last assertion may sound, it was confirmed by Borges himself: in a de facto manner by refusing republication of the first three collections of essays (Inquisitions, 1925, The Extent of My Hope, 1926, and The Language of Argentines, 1928), and in a more explicit form when thirty-five years later he commented on those distant volumes: I began writing in a very self-conscious, baroque style. It was probably due to youthful timidity. The young often suspect that their plots and poems aren't very interesting, so they try to conceal them or elaborate on them by other means. When I began to write I tried to adopt the style of classical Spanish seventeenth-century writers, such as Quevedo or Saavedra Fajardo. Then I reasoned that it was my duty as an Argentine to write like an Argentine. I bought a dictionary of Argentinisms, and managed to become so Argentine in my style and vocabulary that people couldn't understand me and I couldn't even remember very well myself what the words meant. Words passed directly from the dictionary to my manuscript without corresponding to any experience. 2 The Boedo-Florida polemic first, and the Megafono poll later, col ored from the outset the controversial quality of Borges criticism in Argentina. The line separating the two sides amounted to the following: his supporters and devotees hailed his sophistication and experimentalist audacity; his critics and detractors censured his cosmopolitism, his lack of commitment to Argentine realities, his contorted style. Borges's later acknowledgment of the mannerist quality of his early prose clearly indicates that some of the objections leveled by his critics were justified. Amado Alonso summarized the extent of this change in his prose when, commenting on the recent publication of the stories included in A Universal History of Infamy, he wrote back in 1935: "His youthful phraseology and vocabulary which lent to his prose a bumpy and squeaky course have almost completely disappeared.,,3 But by then critics were deeply polarized and the antagonisms remained the staple of Borges criticism in Argentina. In 1942, Victoria Ocampo found it necessary to devote an entire issue of her journal Sur to apologize to Borges for his having been denied the National Prize in Literature for The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). To offset the iniquity, twenty-one writers, intellectuals, critics, and friends wrote notes of protest to the jury and hymns of commendation to Borges. The Sur issue completely eclipsed the value of the prize and became a sort of apotheosis of Borges's work rendered by the Argentine literary establish ment. It emphasized his literary accomplishments and asserted his position as a leading figure in Argentine letters, but it was not a unified chorus. Between the superlatives, there were dissonant voices that managed to express their reservations. Enrique Anderson-Imbert, for example, wrote about the narrowness of Borges's interests and the self-confined nature of Jaime Alazraki 3 his fiction, to conclude: "Those of us who devotedly accompany him in his descents to buried temples suffer at times the suffocation of so much rarified air. I doubt if we could endure to live there for too long should Borges persist in inhabiting them forever. Perhaps we will kill ourselves or die. 'as did his Babel's librarians. Fortunately, in spite of his limitations, Borges remains sufficiently human so that his fiction could be nurtured by life.'>4 In this ambivalence, restated by Ernesto Sabato and others, lie the thrust of most objections he received in Argentina. His undeniable literary genius - it was felt - was couched in hyperintellectual assumptions and mythological perceptions of disappeared indigenous types: gauchos and compadres. Argentine reality was left out, A journal that defended the jury's decision put it bluntly: "Those who would venture through the pages of this book [The Garden oj Forking Paths] would find an explana tion to the jury's decision in the dehumanized nature of its pages, in its preciosity, in the obscure and arbitrary cerebral game which cannot even be compared to chessgame combinations since these respond to precise and rigorous relationships and not to a sheer whim often bordering on mystification."s The outcry was not against the lack of social or political involvement in his writings, but, as Sabato put it, against the geometric nature of his fiction holding the perfection of a mathematical theorem and lacking at the same time the adventure and passion of life and death.6 Borges knew and accepted his limitations. Almost echoing some of his critics, he wrote in the preface to Discusi6n of 1932: "My life has been devoid of life and death. From this poverty stems my laborious love for these minutiae.,,7 Many years later, in his "Autobiographical Essay" of 1970, he reiterated his loyalty to the world of books: "If I were asked to name the chief event of my life, I should say my father's library. In fact, I sometimes think I never strayed outside that library."s Like Asterion, the Minotaur of his fiction, who when confronted with the chaos of the world chooses the orderly space he has found in a human construction - Daedalus's Labyrinth - , Borges has made a similar choice: confronted with the chaos of the world, he chose the order of the library, the safety of a decipherable labyrinth. His books grew out of other books. He wrote fiction based on theologies and philosophies, literature founded in literature. He knew that the hard face of reality lingers on every corner of life, but he renounced reality because, he said, of its impenetrable nature. Instead, he anchored his writings in the order of the intellect, in the chartable waters of the library. What he wrote about Paul Valery is applicable to himself: "In a century that adores the chaotic idols of blood, earth, and passion, he always preferred the lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order."g For Borges, the intellect is the true adventure, the mind is the true passion, and life is but a dream (at least in literary terms). He has, consequently, avoided human experience in favor of intellectual knowl- 4 Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges edge. In his aloofness toward things too human, he has denounced "the tendency of modern literature to reveal men's weaknesses and to delight in their unhappiness and guilt."lo For a writer like him, who was born in a generation characterized as "the last one of happy men," the question of unhappiness was anathema. Should Borges's readers be surprised by his indictments against forms of literature and intellectual endeavours that deal with the miseries of human unhappiness? Any form of knowledge that challenged his skeptical understanding of the world met with his strong disapproval and even condemnation. In his paraphrasis of Valery, he attacked romanticism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and surrealism as manifestations of the savage and irrational in human life: "The meritori ous mission that Valery performed (and continues to perform) is that he proposed lucidity to men in a basely romantic age, in the melancholy age of dialectical materialism, the age of the augurs of Freud's sect and the traffickers in surrealism."l1 The derogatory tinge of these epithets is evident. Any human effort addressed at confronting life as a passionate, unjust, instinctive, or irrational force met with his stark resistance. Borges's answer was his fiction in which, like in the classical traditional of idealist philosophy that feeds much of his narrative outlook, "the world has been constructed by means of logic, with little or no appeal to concrete experience, and while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.,,12 This answer couldn't possibly please those who view literature as an effort to change life. The first two book-length studies published in Argentina and elsewhere in the mid-fifties reflected this early bifurcation in Borges criticism: Adolfo Prieto's Borges and the New Generation (1954) and Marcial Tamayo and Adolf Ruiz Diaz's Borges: Enigma and Clue (1955). The first book voiced the dissatisfaction of the young generation with Borges as a possible model for Argentine literature. It aired the complaints of the young against a writer they considered too individualis tic when not solipsistic: "Borges has sharpened the singularity of his work to such a degree that it appears alien to its time and place, as if the work and the environment in which it was conceived were totally divorced .... The young preoccupied by the social problems of their time cannot possibly identify with him. Borges was born in a world very different from ours.,,13 The excellence of his prose was acknowledged, but his lack of commitment toward the problems facing the people and the country was condemned. The book rejected Borges as a gratuitous and merely ludic writer. The second book was a more academic study of major themes and motifs in his fiction. The two prolonged and broadened the conflictive terms under which Borges criticism evolved since its inception in his native Argentina. The intellectual substratum of his work alienated some and fascinated others. Borges might have chosen to ignore and even deny reality in his fiction, but as he himself wrote so memorably reality is irreversible and