about borges and not about borges

7/28/2019 About Borges and Not About Borges

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About Borges and Not about Borges

Author(s): Keith BotsfordSource: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 723-737Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334494

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Keith Botsford

A B O U T BORGESA N D N O T A B O U T BORGE SThis text is based on a series of dialogues with the Argentinepoet, critic, and short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges. Dia-logues of every kind. Some between the two of us, recordedon tape; sonme ust noted; some that took place in my imagina-tion; and some that are beyonid both of us, whose relation toBorges is that they exist because Borges exists, and would notif he did not. A word aboout method: this essay is not a workof cr iticism on Bor ges but rather an image of him that isstrictly my own. The method is the only one that I felt I couldfollovw, for there are, to be honest, as many Jorge Luis Borgesas there are persons who have been led into his extraordinaryand magic art.-K.B.MEETINGBORGESCANBEAN UNUSUALEXPERIENCE.THE FIRSTtime, I believe, was with the poet Alberto Girri, in the loftyroom that serves as an office for Borges in his position as di-rector of the National Library in Buenos Aires. There is along table in the center of the room and a circular bookshelflike an English postbox: much waste space through which thealmost-blind Borges navigates with the certainty of a manwho knows landfalls in the midst of a sea.As we were leaving, that first time, Borges detained meand said, "How curious it is that people always pride them-selves on that blood of which they have the least: I of myEnglish grandmother, Argentinians in general of their Basqueblood-when the best that can be said of Basques is that theyare honest though crude."


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724 ABOUT BORGESOne's normal persona is dull; the exotic attracts. Borgeshimself grew from the quotidian Buenos Aires (many likehim best there, in his early poems) to Babylon, and from thedictionary of Argentinismos (without leaving the Argentine)to his present eminence as the most universal-in the senseof least limited to a time, a place, or a theme-of SouthAmerican writers.The next time I saw him, again at the library, my notessay:He gives the impression of a strange frailty, as though his near-blindness hobbled his walk; as though, unable to see his words, hecould only speak in short phrases, and the phrases themselves hadto touch the walls along which they walked, so that a spoken sen-tence is like an endless tapping with a stick.About Borges' written sentences, later notes say:They are composed in the ear and in the memory. They begin witha mnemonic process, which is why their rhythm is so peculiarly hisown, and so recognizable, timeless, like inscriptions. His narrativecomes from a different direction, but is also governed by his sight:it is a storyteller's narration, not an observer's. It selects ratherthan retails; it is richer in imagination than the narratives of thosewho have the world ever before them. His criticism springs fromqueer and surprising ideas, on the borderline between art and com-mentary on art: this, too, is a product of enforced solitude andof a vision ever turned back on itself.Why should the two most intelligent men I know in Buenos Aires-Borges and Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson-have bad eyes? But the im-pression is not of valetudinarianism. Ancien regime, perhaps, itbeing impolite to raise one's voice.I also noted that it was hard to imagine a youth for him.The entry ends:That overwhelming suspicion one has of persons whose youth isunexplained, whose childhood and adolescence are not to be readin their adult faces. True bureaucrats have, in the seams of theirskins, the opacity of their eyes, this quality of having devouredtheir childhoods. Of the authentic geniuses I have known, like thepoet Lowell, or the novelist Bellow, each retains his boyhood bi-


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KEITH BOTSFORD 725cycling and the slingshot in his back pants pocket: a childhood singsout from behind a consuming intelligence. Is one to ascribe thisto America, wearing its heart on its sleeve?One of our meetings took place just after the ArgentineIndependence Day. From the windows of the Hotel Con-tinental, I had watched the Household Cavalry, all gleamingcurried horses with tasseled tails, all blue with silver and goldepaulets, parading under my window. The broad avenue be-fore me, shut in by imposing buildings,' was dotted withpassers-by on a morning that had begun with fog and wasthen thinning out under a wan sun. In the distance there wasa sound of bands, a trifling musketry of speeches and ap-plause. The citizens of this city, muffled in their overcoatsof a thick and padded style like an expressionist Berlin, lookedboth tedious and shabby, and more particularly old. The pen-sioners were out en masse, but of course it was their sort of

day. Also, they had not been paid their pensions in severalmonths. Everyone seemed poor, but their poverty was of aspecial kind: in the shabby-genteel tradition. The people werepoor by reason of their expectations, by contrast with theirappetites.I think it was on this occasion that Borges received amedal. It was exhibited to me-the Legion of Honor in Cul-ture, or some other French toy of M. Malraux's-togetherwith its rosette and, if I remember rightly, a spare. Unac-countably, the conversation that morning, in Borges' crowdedapartment (over which his mother, infinitely regal, presides),took a genealogical turn: officers of singular bravery, ladiesliving in primitive conditions in the desolate spreads of theci-devant Jesuit missions, garrison towns.

Here must be inserted a conversation that occurred scanthours later. Beatriz Guido, the novelist, was discussing hersister, who apparently had the gift of speaking to animals."Yes," Beatriz said, "she really loved animals."1. That angry and quarrelsome and yet very fin critic Hector Murenasays that the only monuments in Argentina are banks.


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726 ABOUT BORGESTorre-Nilsson, her husband, leaned back from the driver'sseat: "She married an army officer," he argued.To which his wife answered, perfectly calmly, "Oh, yes,that's true!"God knows, there is unreality everywhere in Buenos Aires.Just before another meeting with Borges I recall a womanhanding out drinks to soldiers from the forward turret of a

tank: an awesome brute of a thing, filling up the street andbristling, like a mechanical ant, with antennae. The warmsunshine belied the revolution that had just taken place, andI wandered to all parts looking for it-even for the one soldiersupposedly wounded by the recoil of his own rifle (fired at ablackbird?). Apart from the fact that everyone remainedshuttered at home, nothing had changed.Borges' own reaction was typical. One's impression, heindicated, was that the wrong people had won."They lacked the epic touch," he said. He found the "wholerumpus rather personal." He added that he had been inter-ested in politics after the war, or in something wider anddeeper than politics. "During the dictatorship, one soughtcommon decency, and not fine shades of meaning. With thisrevolution, the actual actors may feel happy. The governmentcontributes to their happiness by not taking them seriously."I quoted to him Torre-Nilsson's observation: "The troublewith Argentina is that it has never had a civil war, but isalways on the verge of having one. It wastes its energies pre-paring indecisive struggles. The two parties are the, City andthe Country, the machine versus the Horse and the Cow."That poor hero of El cuchillo makes his journey from theone world to the other, in what terror! Had he written thepoem then, I could have quoted Borges a few stanzas fromLowell's "Buenos Aires":

A false fin de siecle decorumsnored over Buenos Aires,lost in the pampasand run by the barracks.Old strong men denied apotheosis,bankrupt, on horseback, welded to their horses, movedwhite marble rearing moon-shaped hooves,to strike the country down.


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KEITH BOTSFORD 727Romantic military sculpturewaved sabers over Dickensian architecture,laconic squads patrolled the blanksleft by the invisible poor.All day I read about newspaper couIp d'Otat'sof the leaden, internecine generals-lumps of dough on the chessboard-and never sawtheir countermarching tanks.

Borges, anyway, said that he would not have been braveenough to be a military man. But perhaps no one in Argentinaexcept Borges is brave enough to be anything else. EzequielMartinez Estrada wrote, "One thing is certain: we are ahappy people tormented by fear. Rosas created the complexof fear, and he himself was afraid."That indefinable fear carries over into Borges' work, ofcourse. About which there is something both very ancientand very modern, both primitive and totalitarian. We weretalking of his interest in the Sagas:

Borges: It began some time ago. I must have been nineor ten. My father gave me a copy of William Morris' trans-lation of the Volsunga Saga. I felt attracted toward theNorth. And then I also saw some engravings of Vikingslanding. I read Carlyle's book. I began studying German bymyself. What I was really looking for was not modern Ger-man but something older and . . . more Germanic?"Borges writes an Ur-literat ur." The note is scribbled on the backpage of my copy of El Hacedor. Later, I added to it a note to theeffect that: "Where there is a great deal of emptiness, things arereduced to their most primitive elenments. Buenos Aires is the oneurban area in the world that is totally empty, like the pampa,because it is undifferentiated." I then noted another remark ofMartinez Estrada's: "We live, we do not put down roots; we areguests not citizens."

Borges: To my way of thinking, the Norsemen musthave been a sad, unjoyous people.K.B.: Except for the kind of joy that comes in artifi-cial exaltation, in drink, battle, and sacrifice. . ..Borges: They were hard, practical men; there wasn'tanything romantic about them.K.B.: Then why indulge in such romantic mythologies?Borges: The old mythology was a kind of homesick-


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728 ABOUT BORGESness. They thought of the gods as something lost. Theydidn't believe in anything. They hardly believed any morein the old gods, and very little in the new ones. What isstrange is their capacity for absorbing things, for notbeing sentimental about them. They are a very practicalpeople: they explored America and, when they found itdidn't pay, they forgot about it. If they had had anyonewith a political imagination, they could have conqueredthe world; but they were only after loot. In this sensethey are very like Americans. One of the things that mostdisturbed me in America was that empires have no mean-ing for them: that seems very strange to us.K.B.: Perhaps we're merely imperialists in a differ-ent way?Borges: I think Americans are realistic in the Norsemanner, which is a pity: people more easily forgive otherkinds of imperialism. There is a glamor about fighting,about armies, whereas commercial feelings are hard tounderstand. The Americans have beaten everybody andseem hardly interested in the fact. Perhaps the onlyAmerican war they remember is the War between theStates, and that is remembered because the South lost.People don't admire them for their hesitations. But per-haps you've got to be romantic; everyone sympathizes withthe Trojans, and no one with the Greeks. There's some-thing quite vulgar about victory, something dignified andpathetic about defeat. I think Kipling is a very greatwriter, and he's been run down simply because he bragged,in a very un-English way, about the empire. Or take theGermans. They can be wonderful soldiers, but they haveto be bolstered up by some theory. They have to think ofthemselves as Teutons, or as characters out of Tacitus,or as Norsemen.Just about there, the reel snaps off. Suddenly, there iscacophony: a salesman is pointing out the advantages of a cer-tain recorder (there are none) ; he then hums a tango, muytriste. Underneath, in a sepulchral hum, I hear a voice-myown-saying, "And what is death ?" The answer then wasthat Death is a City-and in Borges' work that city is BuenosAires. In the conversation that follows, something of hiscontext emerges. But first it should be emphasized that not

all, or even much, of Borges lies in his "queerness." There isthe matter of style, of the concision of metaphor, and more


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KEITH BOTSFORD 729particularly his theory of "allusion." As we had spoken aboutEnglish and German in Argentina, in London we spoke aboutSpanish. Did Borges consider that there was a special ver-sion of Spanish in Latin America?

Borges: Very decidedly, though all the values are differ-ent. So perhaps what is important in any tradition is whatis rejected or changed. Is that possibly the meaning of atradition ?-that things should be modified. I don't set outto write like a Spaniard; at the same time, it would be anawful mistake if I tried consciously and conscientiously towrite like an Argentinian. That wouldn't mean much! I oncetried to write like an Argentinian. There's a book of mine-I suppressed all the copies I could find-that was written outof a dictionary of Argentinismos. I worked in all the wordsI found there, and of course it was a kind of gibberish. Mostunnatural it was! I was very young then. Then I tried myhand at seventeenth-century Spanish. That was not such asilly idea at first: there were quite a few good ideas in thatbook.Most Argentinian writers are not too fond of the Spanishlanguage. There are too many words they dislike, and theiytry to avoid them. That rather hampers them, makes themrather self-conscious. The Spaniards, of course, have a likingfor the past, while we hardly have a past. In that sense, wemight do more with the language. We have done more. Thelast great revolution in the language, modernismo, began inSouth America. Actually, for the past 150 years we mayhave been Spaniards, but we've been trying our best not tobe. We look naturally toward France and other countries.In that sense, we are less provincial than the Spaniards them-selves. But because the difference is hard to define doesn'tmean it doesn't exist. It can be seen in the music, in poetry,in literature. The Spaniards are a rather boisterous people.Their poetry is full of interjections and exclamations; Argen-tinian poetry is mainly of statements-I should say evenof understatements.We Argentinians are timid. For example, in the sonnetsof Enrique Banchs, where he blames a woman for having lefthim, he speaks of nightingales-of course there are no night-ingales in Argentina-yet he is being very Argentinian, be-cause he is speaking of his heart's sorrow. He uses that kindof image-"Ruisen-iores que quieren decir que estan enramora-dos"-out of a kind of shyness, and that shyness is veryArgentinian.


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730 ABOUT BORGESI think you can see that in the city itself. For example,when I came back from the United States I realized what agray city Buenos Aires is. I'd been living four months inTexas. In Texas you have lemon-colored, brown, red build-ings. London is more or less a reddish city, brownish or red-dish, and cream also. At least, as far as I can see. In BuenosAires you get an impression of an enormous gray city: akind of labyrinth in which every street corner is like everyother. In Buenos Aires, the only thing you can tell is whetheryou are a long way from the center, whether you are in aslum or in the center of the city, but not much more than that.K.B.: It's like one of your libraries.Borges: There is something uncanny about it. Everybodytries to be like his neighbor.K.B.: Is that why some of your works seem deliberatelyanti-dramatic?Bor ges: Yes, they are. I don't think we're a dramaticpeople. If there was a dramatic history, it was not meant tobe dramatic; or perhaps it was so in the last century, butnow people are timid.We began speaking of style. I was fresh from a trip toSpain, and I told Borges (he was unbelieving: "That's thesort of thing one person says, and then everyone says it")how he was admired there for the purity of his prose. It hadoccurred to me that perhaps the religious tradition of Spainhad something to do with this "austere" tradition of writingin Spanish, of which there is relatively little in Latin America.

Borges: It could be. There is something very mysteriousabout Spain; I'm not sure they even understand themselves.Something happened to them. When a country starts notunderstanding anything, losing all its wars, something hashappened; and as Spaniards are very, very brave men, itisn't that or lack of will. It seems a kind of stupidity, afailure of nerve.K.B.: The state as State and authority as Authority re-produced themselves so many times that the form becameByzantine and failed to function.Borges: Everything was being written down.K.B.: You have both elements in your work, both kindsof Spaniards: the freebooters and the travelers who are lostin adventures they don't understand.


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KEITH BOTSFORD 731Borges: It's such a long time ago I wrote those stories.I know very little about them, really. I am traveling now.I have been in Spain, in Paris. I was in Geneva. I was inOxford, in Canterbury. All the time people, saying things.Their faces change at every moment; every one of them canbecome someone else at a moment's notice, no? I feel very,very unreal. Besides, I'm not sleeping too well.Still, one of the remarkable things about Borges is whatmight be called a "metaphysical" realism: the surface of anyBorges text is limpid; it is super-realistic detail like the greatsurrealist painters. The only difficulty in Borges is the waythe task of interpretation is passed on to the reader:first unsettled, then presented with an image, a metaphor, asymbol, the Borges reader is asked to answer a series ofdelicate ethical or metaphysical questions. None the less,Borges obviously can tolerate obscurity even less thanstupidity.K.B.: You do think writing is for understanding, fordirect communication, don't you?Borges: What else do you write for?K.B.: You realize you're often accused of being a difficultwriter.Borges: That's because I'm clumsy. I don't try to bedifficult. I began by being a clumsy writer. In this sense,I have committed every possible mistake. Perhaps, as theagnostics say, the only way of being purified of a sin is tocommit it. That would be Blake's idea, too. Until you have

murdered somebody, you are really a murderer at any moment.When you have murdered someone, you feel you wouldn't doit again: you are safe from murder. The murderee, of course,is less happy about it.La cdrcel p revcntiva / la ficciont pr eventiva. There are kinds ofimaginative literature which are meant to prevent, or forestall, cer-tain events, or combinations of circumstances. The writer's imagina-tion is imprisoned by a possibility that must be avoided at all costs.Rereading this note of mine two years later, I find it much

clearer. It refers to the oldest function of literature: thatwhich can be written cannot happen. The coincidence would


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732 ABOUT BORGESbe too great. All sorts of rules would be broken-especiallythat one rule which has most terrorized man from the begin-ning of time: prediction. The man who writes, "I died on the18th of April of 1978," knows that he cannot die on that day.Above all, then, this means that literature is not reality. Themore real a writer can make it, however, the more he acts onthat world which is real by itself, without any efforts on hispart.Borges: I was doing my best, at one time, to build up akind of mythology. Of course I failed. I was trying to workwith certain elements, quite simple elements. I was alwaysworking them in. The idea, for instance, in El Almacen Rosadoor El Compadrito: fighting with knives-that sort of thing. Itried to evolve a very simple system out of it. It makes all theearly things I wrote seem very flat. I was self-conscious aboutit; in fact, far too self-conscious for any creative meaning toget through. Now, I have found that the only way you cangive an idea about something is to allude to it. I find allusionfar more important than expression. At the worst, things canbe expressed; but by allusion we bring out a memory in thereader, and thus a great many things can be done. That iswhy Mar-tin Fierro is superior to other works of its kind. Itslandscape is never described. The sadness, the loneliness ofevening: there are no descriptions. He doesn't tell you there'sa gray cloud on the left and a purple cloud turning red on theright: these things are false. No one looks at a landscape thatway. He writes: "en esa hora de la tarde, en que el mundoparece vivir en pura calma," and so on. The whole thing is anallusion. While in Don Segundo Sombra Guiraldes makeseverything slightly theatrical, slightly tawdry; he has to stopevery now and then to give a word picture of the landscape.I don't think narrative should have to stop to give scenery;everything goes dead. Except in the case of Chesterton. Butthat's because he's trying to give you not reality but a sort ofstage-picture. Everything in Chesterton happens on a paintedscene; the characters are not real, but people who have beendressed up. In the case of Guiraldes, I think he was trying tobe as real as he could.When one says that something is not "real," one is actuallysaying that the author doesn't believe in it. It's not a case ofabsolute reality. If an author is telling you a dream, or astory, as in Alice in Wonderland, the story or the dream istrue because the author dreamed those things in that par-ticular way. He didn't put them in to impress you. If you


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KEITH BOTSFORD 733get the impression that things have been worked in, outsidethe natural scene or the dreaming of things, then you can saythe book is "unreal." A book with fairies and goblins may bereal: the author was dreaming unconsciously about thosethings. That is what is meant by reality: not objective reality.K.B.: The author's reality, then, if he is true to his own?Borges: That's the only reality you can get in literature.K.B.: Supposing his reality drifts into something quitealienated from the rest of our "realities"?-supposing it be-comes so personal or idiosyncratic that we lose sight andtouch of it?Borges: No, if the author is true to himself, you are madeto feel it. You are made to feel he was built that way; thatwas the way his mind functioned.K.B.: What if he cares to work on the so-called "objec-tive" reality?-like Conrad.Borges: I call him a very great writer.K.B.: Though full of sunsets and river noises?Borges: They all have a meaning to them. They have todo with the passion of the characters.K.B.: How about the tendency to "abstraction"-sayamong the recent French writers? I suppose you could becalled an "abstract" writer, despite your interest in com-munication.Borges: The best example of realist literature is the Sagas.The Sagas make you feel that everything is true. The most"unreal," I suppose, are the novels of Sir Walter Scott. WhenI was a boy, I tried to read those Waverley novels and Ialways felt something wrong about them.K.B.: You're not disturbed by the alienation involved inthe use of abstract language?Bor ges: I had a friend who was very angry becausepeople didn't remember her. She said, "Horrors! Lost in aconglomeration of faces." A kind of nightmarish statement,no? The word was monstrous enough for what she was think-ing. Of course, she was vain.K.B.: And poetry?Borges: Poetry is very different. In poetry, the centralcharacter is the reader. Lyric poetry is written so that thereader should think of himself as being the character. Or thepoet may think of himself as the character, but the characteris already there, no? Those are states of emotion.K.B.: There are writers today who want to eliminatepeople from fiction, work in movements and objects or lan-guage alone.Borges: Robbe-Grillet, and Butor? I met them in Buenos


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734 ABOUT BORGESAires. I thought they were a pair of fools. They claimed thatthe Marienbad film had been taken from a book by BioyCasares. "If I had known that, I wouldn't have written asingle line," Bioy said. Naturally, he was rather indignant.He said, "What can you expect from Frenchmen?" He's half-French himself. I suppose that makes him feel he should notpraise the French. He goes about saying things like, "Frenchis not quite so ugly a language as people think. However, asnothing's been written in it, as there is no literature, we can-not tell. Perhaps if someone tried his hand at writing French,something could be done. We should not be too quick in sup-posing that nothing would come out of that attempt."K.B.: You don't much like French writing yourself, doyou ?Borges: I admire Flaubert, I admire Montaigne. Onceupon a time I doted on Leon Bloy. Not his novels or his shortstories but his journals. For their extraordinary language,the violence of his language. I thought he did splendidly whatCarlyle tried to do: to be very violently and theatrically angrywith everyone. I admire Verlaine. You see, if I am a poet atall, I am an intellectual poet and consequently I can hardlyadmire intellectual poetry because I feel I can play that kindof trick myself. While poetry like Verlaine's, the mere musicof words-that's the kind of thing I cannot do. I don't eventry to do it. You may think it silly that I admire verses like"la princesa estd palida en su silla de oio" of Ruben Dario,or "la noche como nn profundo pavo real dormido" of Lu-gones; but I admire these things because I couldn't do themto save my life. Conrad again. I could never do that sort ofthing. Writing rather clever little stories: yes, I can do that,but it's not very important.

One morning I woke from a drugged sleep and a dreamand a text lay all composed on the surface of my dream,which I wrote out and reproduce below without changing aword. It is perfectly possible to write someone else's works:that someone else (in this case Borges) can become oneself.One could call this assimilation. One can also write someoneelse's works by getting very close insid e-which is imitation.Both are aspects of the common fact that it is perfectly pos-sible to lose oneself, or one's sense of oneself. Mr. Cohen inEncounter noted to a nicety that the Argentine landscapemakes man unimportant; it conveys an "impression of per-


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KEITH BOTSFORD 735sonal non-existence." And the poet Robert Lowell, cominglate to a reading of his own work in Buenos Aires becausehe'd been "reading Borges," said of Borges' work that it"combinedT.S. Eliot's essays with Wittgenstein's philosophy."It was only a few months later that I came to realize thatthe text of this dream was probably an elaborate metaphorof Borges' art:

Borges' Funicular2There is a wire on which we see a man walking. It is dark allabout him, and we note in him an intensity of concentration: onascent, on the very loop of the wire on which he walks, so superiorto the world, so disdainful of both the terrors of his climb and thepoint of his origin.When he arrives at where he thinks the poles must be, on whichhis wire is suspended, he realizes that there are no poles, no tower,no intricate design of steel from which his wire depends. We wouldexpect him to fall from this knowledge, out of fear, or surprise.But there is no faltering even, no hesitation: simply a realizationthat he can go no farther. The end of the wire is one step beyond,and then darkness.At this point, there are two questions that must be asked, unless,of course, we opt out of the risks involved, unless we prefer thatnatural torpor of our minds.First, why does he not fall? Picturing his situation to oneself(it appears as an engraving, in that steely gray that dominatedthe illustrated sections of newspapers at the turn of the century),one senses a vast emptiness and the man's solitude. The wire isnaked and unprotected. There is the gathering darkness ahead,and behind, almost like an indication of time ("I have come fromhere and am going there"). There is also the mystery of theascent itself: the man would surely not have undertaken his jour-ney without some end in mind?The answer to this question, which deals with motives, is clearenough. He has been expecting that when he reaches the end ofthe wire he will find it unsupported, with nothing to connect it tothe earth beneath him or to the world from which he has come,and that he has now left behind. It is no surprise at all. Every-thing about him indicates this: his sureness, his deftness, his stylelike a Harlequin's in his pantomime who walks with such elegance

2. The word "funicular" must derive from Funes the Memorious, whichI had been reading, and from other ingredientes that I leave to theimagination of the reader.


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736 ABOUT BORGESthat the places where he sets his feet become whatever he wishesthem to be. Also, the fearlessness with which he has come so far:to the very end, in fact. We note, for instance, that far from hasten-ing at the end-as though the goal were the kind of safety most ofus aspire to-he is even more deliberate; he puts himself to thetest.The second question follows on the first: if he knows, how doeshe know? Given the darkness, the silence, the absence of anyonewho might inform him-he is not, after all, a traveler on a commonhighway, with signposts, hotels, and rest stations-there is onlyone possible answer: he must himself be the author of the wireon which he walks. It is all in his imagination; and he has imposedthis vision on us. Meanwhile, he has never started, never arrived.This raises a problem, for we find it difficult to acknowledge thatthe wire should not exist. All that is far too tangible. We haveseen it too clearly ourselves to be taken in by the petty mystifica-tions of the man or by his denials. Whether he authored it or notis truly of minor importance, if we have come this far, and havehad such doubts raised in our minds.A single question, then, remains: whether the man himselfexists, or only the wire and the man we see on the wire. That is amuch more difficult question. We are bound to remain with at leasta residual doubt: a doubt of the kind that he is the last person inthe world to dissipate.Or, to quote Borges himself: "The world, unfortunately, isreal; I, unfortunately, am Borges."I sent the text to him:Dear Borges,Please tell me if this text is yours. Possibly it is one you havenever published, or that you lost, or forgot. I have become PierreMenard.Some days later, Borges' translator, Alastair Reid, amade-of-games Scotsman, was in Mexico, and, quickly likingeach other, I gave him the text to read. He said: "But Borgeswould have made it more real. It would be still more frighten-ing." He meant, I think, that there would have been street-lamps and trolley cars, for a while. True, and Borges wouldalso have flicked it with irony. I quote the text to reveal a pre-occupation with the metaphysical: on his part, not mine. I

claim the dream to have been his. Even if it is mine, theresponsibility is his.


16/16

KEITH BOTSFORD 737By now, the reader will have seen the elementary schizo-phrenia of this essay: a part of the Borges context that liesin the conversations and reflects calm, measure, and intelli-gence; another, in the ambiente, reflects the phantasmagoric,the arcane, perhaps the obscure. This is, of course, the prob-lem posed by Borges himself, and the one that this essaymirrors: whether the physical can coexist with the meta-

physical, the surreal with the real. It is a problem posed bythe entire lineage to which Borges belongs, from the gnomicfragments of the Greek Anthology through the commentatorsof the Midrash to those writers-essentially of fragments ofexperience-like Kafka or Nathanael West, like Kleist, Walser,Nietzsche, like Corbiere or Valery, who state infinitely lessthan they mean, who add up to so much more than the sumof their parts. What they achieve-it is what I have tried todo, too, in this essay-depends on what each reader can con-tribute from his own memory and experience. Their worksonly allude to a common reality; they do not express it-thething which, as Borges says in one of the conversationsquoted, is always possible, if the worst comes to the worst.

about borges and not about borges

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