After the success of Fictions, my first exposure to the world of Jorge Luis Borges, I was always going to try more from the Argentine master of the short story. Luckily, my ever-wonderful library came up with the goods, in the form of a Penguin Classics edition with two collections included. Time to dive back into the world of the meta-fictional and meta-physical...
*****
The Aleph, including the prose fictions from The Maker (translated by Andrew Hurley) has another two sets of early works from Borges. The first is a series of short stories, reminiscent of the collection The Garden of Forking Paths, while the second is much shorter, full of pieces which are almost examples of flash fiction at times. The Aleph, though, is the collection most similar in form to what I read a while back, and this similarity applies to the themes too.
The lead-off story, 'The Immortal', is a perfect example of this. It's an intriguing tale, starting with that old Borgesian staple, an arcane document, one whose authenticity can be doubted, and it ends up as an improbable tale. A soldier searches for immortality in a story which turns the idea of eternal life on its head:
"Among the corollaries to the doctrine that there is no thing that is not counterbalanced by another, there is one that has little theoretical importance but that caused us, at the beginning or end of the tenth century, to scatter over the face of the earth. It may be summarized in these words: There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away."
p.15, 'The Immortal' (Penguin Classics, 2000)
In a lovely twist, the characters here are searching for water which will take away the curse of immortality. Of course, we are once again faced with the dilemma of how much (and who) to believe in Borges' elaborate stories within stories. Perhaps the document is just a hoax...
Many of the stories in The Aleph take place in the writer's native Argentina, and there are many tales of macho men in the wild west (or south!). 'The Dead Man' is a neat little piece where a cocky gaucho thinks he can take down the big boss, little knowing that he is just a pawn in a bigger game. However 'A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz' is a much subtler story, one which ends up being entangled in real-life Argentine history. While the significance of the ending of this story (and many others) would sail right over the head of the average Anglophone reader, Hurley's excellent notes help to explain exactly what is going on.
Borges is great at writing short stories with twists, and there are some very tricky endings here. In 'The Dead Man', the narrator discovers that a friend he remembers seems to have lived parallel, simultaneous lives, with different people remembering him in very different ways. In 'Emma Zunz', we have a well-constructed story of a woman taking revenge for her father's demise. Her actions leading up to the end of the story seem incomprehensible, but on the final page we understand why she has done what she did.
Of course, it wouldn't be Borges without a labyrinth or two, and there are plenty to be found in this collection. 'Ibn Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in his Labyrinth' is a story which doesn't keep the reader waiting for the content of the piece; however, titles (and labyrinths) can be most deceiving. Another story with a maze is 'The House of Asterion', a brief, three-page tale of a 'deity' - one which seems a little bland until the final, fascinating twist ;)
*****
The Maker is very different to The Aleph. It's a lot shorter and consists of several brief pieces; a nice addition, but not really a book in its own right. The stories in this section, may not be quite as short as haikus, but they have a similar, thought-provoking effect.
Having also read Professor Borges recently (a translation of a series of lectures Borges gave on English literature), there were many familiar names and themes mentioned in The Maker. The writer appears to have an obsession with the promise King Harold gave to Harald Hardrada in 1066 of 'six feet of English soil', and he's equally preoccupied with Don Quixote, Shakespeare and Anglo-Saxon poetry. One piece from The Maker combines a couple of his interests nicely - 'Ragnarök' is a story of the end of the gods (and mentions Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another of Borges' literary obsessions...).
I enjoyed this collection a lot, and I only wish I'd had more time to peruse it at my leisure (unfortunately, I managed my time badly and had to hurry through my library copy). It's a book to dip into and return to when you have an unhurried moment to devote to it - another time, perhaps ;)
After my recent experience with Fictions, I was keen to try more of Jorge Luis Borges' work (and I actually had a library copy of The Aleph sitting on my shelves). However, while browsing the New Directions web-site recently, I saw a new book by the Argentinian legend, an intriguing piece of non-fiction - and thought it might be interesting to see what the maestro thinks about our literary history...
*****
Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature (edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, translated by Katherine Silver - review PDF courtesy of the publisher) does exactly what it says on the cover. Borges spent many years as a lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires, and this book brings together a series of lectures he held from one semester back in 1966. The twenty-five chapters (or lessons!) provide the reader with a trip through time and English literature - Borges style.
We start with Anglo-Saxon poetry, looking at the differences in style between Beowulf and other historic texts, before jumping to the middle ages. There's a (very) brief look at the Victorian novelists, especially Dickens, before ending with the romantic poets. There is a lot on poetry... Strangely, Shakespeare is mentioned only in passing (if frequently), and while George Eliot, Austen and the Brontës are absent, there's a whole lesson on Robert Louis Stevenson.
Borges has an idiosyncratic style, and his choices certainly reflect that. In addition to the heavy focus on poetry, he also spends a long time looking at Anglo-Saxon literature, an era you'd expect to fill one or two sessions, not seven. His lectures are not your usual meticulously planned talks, more a kind of informal, digression-filled ramble through literary history. His goal seems to be less to deconstruct texts but to kindle interest in his students by discussing the history of the pieces and the lives of the writers.
Of course, it's all done with a slight Spanish slant. Barely a session goes by without a mention of Cervantes or Don Quixote (or both), and even in the sessions on Beowulf, Borges is able to find an Hispanic connection through the involvement of the Geats (Spanish relatives of the Goths). When he says...
"Hence all descendants of the Spaniards would be relatives of Beowulf"
p.10 (New Directions, 2013)
...you might think he's exaggerating a little though ;)
Above all, Borges has an interest in the characters of the writers he discusses, the people, not the author. He spends a lot of time talking about Samuel Johnson, using Boswell's biography of the great man to paint a humorous warts-and-all picture (he even describes the Johnson-Boswell pairing as comparable to that of Quixote and his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza...). Another figure to receive this treatment is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Borges brings across as a somewhat lazy genius...
It's true that the book is just a transcript of off-the-cuff lectures, but it is amazing how he expounds and digresses, but manages to stay (mostly) on topic. Borges is erudite, with an incredibly wide historical and literary knowledge - and, let us not forget, it's all from memory. At this point of his life he was virtually blind:
"And now let us read some of Rossetti's work. We are going to begin with this sonnet I spoke to you about, "Nuptial Sleep." I do not remember all the details, but I do remember the plot." (p.187)
As a piece of writing, you won't find it particularly impressive - and that's because it's not writing...
It is inspiring though. I frequently zipped off to the computer to look up the writers and works name-checked (Rossetti, Blake, Morris), often reading the poems mentioned before returning to the book. One interesting find was Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, a long poem dealing with ten views of the same crime, a work Borges mentioned in the same breath as Kurusawa's film Rashomon (adapted from two stories by Akutagawa). Yep, erudite ;)
While I enjoyed this book greatly, not everyone agrees. A Guardian review I saw really didn't like it, and had several reasons for criticising it. The first was that this is not something Borges would ever have wanted published himself, and that's a hard point to argue with. Then again, this is merely a translation of the Spanish-language original, so I think we can probably side-step that objection.
The second point was that this is just a standard series of university lectures and that there's nothing here a university student wouldn't have come across before. That may be true to an extent, but for readers like myself, without a university background in literature, it does throw up new writers and works - plus there is the unique Borgesian slant...
The final point is that the lectures are dull and lacking in humour, and that's one I'd have to disagree with. It's not obvious, but a subtle, dry humour pervades Professor Borges (perhaps easily missed if you don't read the book carefully enough...), and what appears to be dry conjecture could also be read as sly mockery:
"Johnson had a peculiar temperament. For a time he was extremely interested in the subject of ghosts. He was so interested in it that he spent several nights in an abandoned house to see if he could meet one. Apparently, he didn't." (p.84)
All in all then, Professor Borges is a book worth having a look at, especially for those obsessed with all things Borgesian. In fact, even the introduction explaining how the book came about is a fascinating one. You see, we owe these pages to the unnamed students who recorded the lectures (on cassettes!) for lazy friends, and later transcribed them. All good and well, except for the fact that these were university undergraduates working in a foreign language - which means that the transcripts were full of errors and, at times, illegible.
With the original tapes long reused, scholars had to reconstruct the original lectures from the half-baked second-hand copies the students had produced, leaving us with a sparkling, possibly imaginary, series of lectures which may or may not have happened this way (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius...). So did these lectures really exist? Just as was the case (as Borges tells us) with Samuel Johnson, whose witty conversations were remembered and written down after the fact, we'll never really know the truth...
Today's post features another stop on my Spanish-language literature self-education journey (courtesy of my wonderful library), and it's one I've been looking forward to for a while. You see, if you're going to start reading works translated from the Spanish, there's a name you'll come across sooner or later - a certain Jorge Luis Borges...
*****
Fictions (translated - mostly - by Anthony Kerrigan: with some stories translated by Alastair Reid, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd) brings together two of the writer's first collections of short stories, The Garden of Forking Paths and Artifices. Despite this, Fictions is a short work, clocking in at just over 150 pages - mainly because Borges' creations don't tend to outstay their welcome. For the Argentinian maestro, ten pages is a fairly long tale.
The first eight-part collection is a dazzling display of meta-fiction, and any reader wondering where writers like Enrique Vila-Matas inherited their style should look no further. The stories are written in a dry, detached, academic tone, and Borges relates his analyses of invented works and writers (complete with footnotes...) in a manner which is both confusing and intriguing. Beneath the surface though, you suspect that there is some serious leg-pulling going on, with the writer taking aim at out-dated philosophies and academic approaches.
A good example of this style is the story 'Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote'. In this short piece, the narrator discusses the major unpublished work of Monsieur Menard, namely an attempt to rewrite Don Quixote - not to change it, or to transcribe it, but to rewrite it exactly as it is. 'Borges', our narrator, advances the opinion that Menard's work is superior to that of Cervantes (despite the fact that it is identical, word for word) as the modern writer can impart more meaning to the words after centuries of progress in the fields of philosophy and literary analysis. If you say so...
Another highlight from the first collection is 'The Library of Babel', where the writer restructures the universe as a gigantic, geometrically-designed library. It contains all the books you could ever wish for - you'll never be able to find the one you need though. 'The Babylon Lottery' is another great story, one where a former citizen of Babylon recounts how a simple game we all recognise turned into an all-encompassing way of life. In his country, life literally is a lottery (which is certainly an interesting way of looking at things...).
The second collection, Artifices, is markedly different in style. The focus is less on the academic (imaginary) literary analysis, and more on conventional twisty-turny types of stories. In 'The Form of the Sword', Borges tells us the tale of a traitor, a story with a startling, unexpected ending. 'Funes, the Memorious', on the other hand, is about a man whose life is altered by an accident. With a memory far surpassing normal human standards, he is able to remember every single thing he has ever seen or heard - and is unable to believe the polite conventions (or lies) of time and language:
"It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term 'dog' embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
p.104 (John Calder, 1985)
A word which continually crops up throughout Artifices is 'labyrinth', and Borges seems obsessed by the idea of mazes, both tangible and mental. In 'The Death and the Compass', a detective story with a difference, an investigator is concerned with fascinating possibilities of crime. When his superior attempts to explain away a murder with a conventional explanation, the sleuth begs to differ:
"It's possible, but not interesting," Lönnrot answered. "You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not." (p.118)
However, we've all heard what curiosity did to the cat, and Lönnrot eventually runs the risk of being trapped in a labyrinth partially of his own making...
*****
Sharp-eyed Borges lovers may have noticed a rather notable omission, a deliberate one as I'm leaving the best to last. The opening story of The Garden of the Forking Paths, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' (translated by Alastair Reid) is the stand-out of the two collections and, perhaps, a landmark in short-story writing. Eighteen-pages long, it's easily the longest of the tales in this selection, and it's a fascinating example of Borges' mastery of meta-fiction.
The story begins with the discovery of a book which doesn't exist, containing an article on a fictional country. After a feverish search for more information, the writer comes across a book that was never written, one which has detailed information on the customs and philosophy of an imaginary world. It all adds up to a shadowy conspiracy, a meticulously-planned hoax - which then begins to bleed over into the 'real' world when alien artefacts are found...
In a coda to the story, set seven years after the original events (and in the future from the point of view of the actual writing of the story), the narrator reveals the effect the teachings of Tlön have had upon the world:
"Almost immediately, reality gave ground on more than one point. The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet?" (p.33)
The story was written in 1940, and Borges shows superb foresight of the tragedies about to unfold in Europe. It's easy to fall under the spell of a regime which promises the world...
Fictions is a short collection, but fairly dense, and it's a book I'd recommend to most people. While not all of the stories in Artifices grabbed me, I enjoyed The Garden of Forking Paths immensely, and I'm keen to try some more. A warning to the casual reader though: Labyrinths, the other commonly-cited collection of Borges' early writings, is an American publication which contains many of the same stories (it omits a few from the two collections from Fictions and adds some from a later collection, The Aleph). It seems remarkably apt that even deciding which Borges book to try is steeped in confusion ;)
*****
You'd think that I would have exhausted my ideas on a 150-page book by now, but there's something else I need to tell you. You see (and I am not making this up), my battered old library copy, sent from somewhere in country Victoria, had one last surprise for me. Sellotaped inside the back cover, I found a small, cut-out piece of paper, smaller than the other pages, on which was a Borges poem, 'The End Game'. It describes a game of chess, and moves from the perspective of the pieces to that of the players, to God... and to another god. The last three lines read:
"God moves the player, and he, the pieces
What god from behind God begins to weave the plot
of dust and time and dreams and agonies?"
It's a great poem - but where on earth did it come from? Is it a part of the book that fell out, or is it just a random inclusion from a generous soul? Whatever the answer, it's all very Borgesian :)
