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About Borges and Not about Borges Author(s): Keith Botsford Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol.

26, No. 4 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 723-737 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334494 Accessed: 31/03/2010 11:18
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Keith Botsford

ABOUT AND NOT

BORGES
ABOUT BORGES

This text is based on a series of dialogues with the Argentine poet, critic, and short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges. Dialogues of every kind. Some between the two of us, recorded on tape; sonmejust noted; some that took place in my imagination; and some that are beyonid both of us, whose relation to Borges is that they exist because Borges exists, and would not if he did not. A word aboout method: this essay is not a work of cr iticism on Bor ges but rather an image of him that is strictly my own. The method is the only one that I felt I could follovw, for there are, to be honest, as many Jorge Luis Borges as there are persons who have been led into his extraordinary and magic art.-K.B. THE FIRST MEETING BORGES CAN BE AN UNUSUALEXPERIENCE. time, I believe, was with the poet Alberto Girri, in the lofty room that serves as an office for Borges in his position as director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. There is a long table in the center of the room and a circular bookshelf like an English postbox: much waste space through which the almost-blind Borges navigates with the certainty of a man who knows landfalls in the midst of a sea. As we were leaving, that first time, Borges detained me and said, "How curious it is that people always pride themselves on that blood of which they have the least: I of my English grandmother, Argentinians in general of their Basque blood-when the best that can be said of Basques is that they are honest though crude."

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One's normal persona is dull; the exotic attracts. Borges himself grew from the quotidian Buenos Aires (many like him best there, in his early poems) to Babylon, and from the dictionary of Argentinismos (without leaving the Argentine) to his present eminence as the most universal-in the sense of least limited to a time, a place, or a theme-of South American writers. The next time I saw him, again at the library, my notes say:
He gives the impression of a strange frailty, as though his nearblindness hobbled his walk; as though, unable to see his words, he could only speak in short phrases, and the phrases themselves had to touch the walls along which they walked, so that a spoken sentence 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 with a mnemonic process, which is why their rhythm is so peculiarly his His narrative own, and so recognizable, timeless, like inscriptions. comes from a different direction, but is also governed by his sight: It selects rather it is a storyteller's narration, not an observer's. than retails; it is richer in imagination than the narratives of those who have the world ever before them. His criticism springs from queer and surprising ideas, on the borderline between art and commentary on art: this, too, is a product of enforced solitude and of a vision ever turned back on itself. Why should the two most intelligent men I know in Buenos Airesbad eyes? But the imBorges and Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson-have Ancien regime, perhaps, it pression is not of valetudinarianism. being 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 is whose childhood and adolescence are not to be read unexplained, True bureaucrats have, in the seams of their in their adult faces. skins, the opacity of their eyes, this quality of having devoured their childhoods. Of the authentic geniuses I have known, like the poet Lowell, or the novelist Bellow, each retains his boyhood bi-

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cycling and the slingshot in his back pants pocket: a childhood sings out from behind a consuming intelligence. Is one to ascribe this to America, wearing its heart on its sleeve?

One of our meetings took place just after the Argentine Independence Day. From the windows of the Hotel Continental, I had watched the Household Cavalry, all gleaming curried horses with tasseled tails, all blue with silver and gold epaulets, parading under my window. The broad avenue before me, shut in by imposing buildings,' was dotted with passers-by on a morning that had begun with fog and was then thinning out under a wan sun. In the distance there was a sound of bands, a trifling musketry of speeches and applause. The citizens of this city, muffled in their overcoats of a thick and padded style like an expressionist Berlin, looked both tedious and shabby, and more particularly old. The pensioners were out en masse, but of course it was their sort of day. Also, they had not been paid their pensions in several months. Everyone seemed poor, but their poverty was of a special kind: in the shabby-genteel tradition. The people were poor by reason of their expectations, by contrast with their appetites. I think it was on this occasion that Borges received a medal. It was exhibited to me-the Legion of Honor in Culture, or some other French toy of M. Malraux's-together with its rosette and, if I remember rightly, a spare. Unaccountably, the conversation that morning, in Borges' crowded apartment (over which his mother, infinitely regal, presides), took a genealogical turn: officers of singular bravery, ladies living in primitive conditions in the desolate spreads of the ci-devant Jesuit missions, garrison towns. Here must be inserted a conversation that occurred scant hours later. Beatriz Guido, the novelist, was discussing her sister, 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 says that the only monuments in Argentina are banks. Murena

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Torre-Nilsson, her husband, leaned back from the driver's seat: "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 woman handing out drinks to soldiers from the forward turret of a tank: an awesome brute of a thing, filling up the street and bristling, like a mechanical ant, with antennae. The warm sunshine belied the revolution that had just taken place, and I wandered to all parts looking for it-even for the one soldier supposedly wounded by the recoil of his own rifle (fired at a blackbird?). Apart from the fact that everyone remained shuttered at home, nothing had changed. Borges' own reaction was typical. One's impression, he indicated, was that the wrong people had won. "They lacked the epic touch," he said. He found the "whole rumpus rather personal." He added that he had been interested in politics after the war, or in something wider and deeper than politics. "During the dictatorship, one sought common decency, and not fine shades of meaning. With this revolution, the actual actors may feel happy. The government contributes to their happiness by not taking them seriously." I quoted to him Torre-Nilsson's observation: "The trouble with Argentina is that it has never had a civil war, but is always on the verge of having one. It wastes its energies preparing indecisive struggles. The two parties are the, City and the Country, the machine versus the Horse and the Cow." That poor hero of El cuchillo makes his journey from the one world to the other, in what terror! Had he written the poem then, I could have quoted Borges a few stanzas from Lowell's "Buenos Aires":
A false fin de siecle decorum snored over Buenos Aires, lost in the pampas and run by the barracks. Old strong men denied apotheosis, bankrupt, on horseback, welded to their horses, moved white marble rearing moon-shaped hooves, to strike the country down.

KEITH BOTSFORD
Romantic military sculpture waved sabers over Dickensian architecture, laconic squads patrolled the blanks left by the invisible poor. All day I read about newspaper couIp d'Otat's of the leaden, internecine generalsnever lumps of dough on the chessboard-and tanks. their countermarching

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saw

Borges, anyway, said that he would not have been brave enough to be a military man. But perhaps no one in Argentina except Borges is brave enough to be anything else. Ezequiel Martinez Estrada wrote, "One thing is certain: we are a happy people tormented by fear. Rosas created the complex of fear, and he himself was afraid." That indefinable fear carries over into Borges' work, of course. About which there is something both very ancient and very modern, both primitive and totalitarian. We were talking of his interest in the Sagas: Borges: It began some time ago. I must have been nine or ten. My father gave me a copy of William Morris' translation of the Volsunga Saga. I felt attracted toward the North. And then I also saw some engravings of Vikings landing. I read Carlyle's book. I began studying German by myself. What I was really looking for was not modern German but something older and . . . more Germanic?
"Borges writes an Ur-literat ur." The note is scribbled on the back page of my copy of El Hacedor. Later, I added to it a note to the effect that: "Where there is a great deal of emptiness, things are reduced to their most primitive elenments. Buenos Aires is the one urban area in the world that is totally empty, like the pampa, because it is undifferentiated." I then noted another remark of Martinez Estrada's: "We live, we do not put down roots; we are guests not citizens."

Borges: To my way of thinking, the Norsemen must have been a sad, unjoyous people. K.B.: Except for the kind of joy that comes in artificial exaltation, in drink, battle, and sacrifice. . .. Borges: They were hard, practical men; there wasn't anything 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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ABOUT BORGES ness. They thought of the gods as something lost. They didn't believe in anything. They hardly believed any more in the old gods, and very little in the new ones. What is strange is their capacity for absorbing things, for not being sentimental about them. They are a very practical people: they explored America and, when they found it didn't pay, they forgot about it. If they had had anyone with a political imagination, they could have conquered the world; but they were only after loot. In this sense they are very like Americans. One of the things that most disturbed me in America was that empires have no meaning for them: that seems very strange to us. K.B.: Perhaps we're merely imperialists in a different way? Borges: I think Americans are realistic in the Norse manner, which is a pity: people more easily forgive other kinds of imperialism. There is a glamor about fighting, about armies, whereas commercial feelings are hard to understand. The Americans have beaten everybody and seem hardly interested in the fact. Perhaps the only American war they remember is the War between the States, and that is remembered because the South lost. People don't admire them for their hesitations. But perhaps you've got to be romantic; everyone sympathizes with the Trojans, and no one with the Greeks. There's something quite vulgar about victory, something dignified and pathetic about defeat. I think Kipling is a very great writer, and he's been run down simply because he bragged, in a very un-English way, about the empire. Or take the Germans. They can be wonderful soldiers, but they have to be bolstered up by some theory. They have to think of themselves as Teutons, or as characters out of Tacitus, or as Norsemen.

Just about there, the reel snaps off. Suddenly, there is cacophony: a salesman is pointing out the advantages of a certain recorder (there are none) ; he then hums a tango, muy triste. Underneath, in a sepulchral hum, I hear a voice-my own-saying, "And what is death ?" The answer then was that Death is a City-and in Borges' work that city is Buenos Aires. In the conversation that follows, something of his context emerges. But first it should be emphasized that not all, or even much, of Borges lies in his "queerness." There is the matter of style, of the concision of metaphor, and more

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particularly his theory of "allusion." As we had spoken about English and German in Argentina, in London we spoke about Spanish. Did Borges consider that there was a special version of Spanish in Latin America? Borges: Very decidedly, though all the values are different. So perhaps what is important in any tradition is what is rejected or changed. Is that possibly the meaning of a tradition ?-that things should be modified. I don't set out to write like a Spaniard; at the same time, it would be an awful mistake if I tried consciously and conscientiously to write like an Argentinian. That wouldn't mean much! I once tried to write like an Argentinian. There's a book of mineI suppressed all the copies I could find-that was written out of a dictionary of Argentinismos. I worked in all the words I found there, and of course it was a kind of gibberish. Most unnatural it was! I was very young then. Then I tried my hand at seventeenth-century Spanish. That was not such a silly idea at first: there were quite a few good ideas in that book. Most Argentinian writers are not too fond of the Spanish language. There are too many words they dislike, and theiy try to avoid them. That rather hampers them, makes them rather self-conscious. The Spaniards, of course, have a liking for the past, while we hardly have a past. In that sense, we might do more with the language. We have done more. The last great revolution in the language, modernismo, began in South America. Actually, for the past 150 years we may have been Spaniards, but we've been trying our best not to be. We look naturally toward France and other countries. In that sense, we are less provincial than the Spaniards themselves. But because the difference is hard to define doesn't mean 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; Argentinian poetry is mainly of statements-I should say even of understatements. We Argentinians are timid. For example, in the sonnets of Enrique Banchs, where he blames a woman for having left him, he speaks of nightingales-of course there are no nightingales in Argentina-yet he is being very Argentinian, because he is speaking of his heart's sorrow. He uses that kind of image-"Ruisen-iores que quieren decir que estan enramorados"-out of a kind of shyness, and that shyness is very Argentinian.

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I think you can see that in the city itself. For example, when I came back from the United States I realized what a gray city Buenos Aires is. I'd been living four months in Texas. In Texas you have lemon-colored, brown, red buildings. London is more or less a reddish city, brownish or reddish, and cream also. At least, as far as I can see. In Buenos Aires you get an impression of an enormous gray city: a kind of labyrinth in which every street corner is like every other. In Buenos Aires, the only thing you can tell is whether you are a long way from the center, whether you are in a slum 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. Everybody tries to be like his neighbor. K.B.: Is that why some of your works seem deliberately anti-dramatic? Bor ges: Yes, they are. I don't think we're a dramatic people. If there was a dramatic history, it was not meant to be dramatic; or perhaps it was so in the last century, but now people are timid. We began speaking of style. I was fresh from a trip to Spain, and I told Borges (he was unbelieving: "That's the sort of thing one person says, and then everyone says it") how he was admired there for the purity of his prose. It had occurred to me that perhaps the religious tradition of Spain had something to do with this "austere" tradition of writing in Spanish, of which there is relatively little in Latin America.
Borges: It could be. There is something very mysterious about Spain; I'm not sure they even understand themselves. Something happened to them. When a country starts not understanding anything, losing all its wars, something has happened; and as Spaniards are very, very brave men, it isn't that or lack of will. It seems a kind of stupidity, a failure of nerve. K.B.: The state as State and authority as Authority reproduced themselves so many times that the form became Byzantine and failed to function. Borges: Everything was being written down. K.B.: You have both elements in your work, both kinds of Spaniards: the freebooters and the travelers who are lost in adventures they don't understand.

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Borges: 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 in Oxford, in Canterbury. All the time people, saying things. Their faces change at every moment; every one of them can become 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 what might be called a "metaphysical" realism: the surface of any Borges text is limpid; it is super-realistic detail like the great surrealist painters. The only difficulty in Borges is the way the task of interpretation is passed on to the reader: first unsettled, then presented with an image, a metaphor, a symbol, the Borges reader is asked to answer a series of delicate ethical or metaphysical questions. None the less, Borges obviously can tolerate obscurity even less than stupidity. K.B.: You do think writing is for understanding, for direct communication, don't you? Borges: What else do you write for? K.B.: You realize you're often accused of being a difficult writer. Borges: That's because I'm clumsy. I don't try to be difficult. I began by being a clumsy writer. In this sense, I have committed every possible mistake. Perhaps, as the agnostics say, the only way of being purified of a sin is to commit 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 do it 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 of imaginative literature which are meant to prevent, or forestall, certain events, or combinations of circumstances. The writer's imagination 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: that which can be written cannot happen. The coincidence would

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be too great. All sorts of rules would be broken-especially that one rule which has most terrorized man from the beginning of time: prediction. The man who writes, "I died on the 18th of April of 1978," knows that he cannot die on that day. Above all, then, this means that literature is not reality. The more real a writer can make it, however, the more he acts on that world which is real by itself, without any efforts on his part. Borges: I was doing my best, at one time, to build up a kind of mythology. Of course I failed. I was trying to work with certain elements, quite simple elements. I was always working them in. The idea, for instance, in El Almacen Rosado sort of thing. I or El Compadrito: fighting with knives-that tried to evolve a very simple system out of it. It makes all the early things I wrote seem very flat. I was self-conscious about it; in fact, far too self-conscious for any creative meaning to get through. Now, I have found that the only way you can give an idea about something is to allude to it. I find allusion far more important than expression. At the worst, things can be expressed; but by allusion we bring out a memory in the reader, and thus a great many things can be done. That is why Mar-tin Fierro is superior to other works of its kind. Its landscape is never described. The sadness, the loneliness of evening: there are no descriptions. He doesn't tell you there's a gray cloud on the left and a purple cloud turning red on the right: these things are false. No one looks at a landscape that way. He writes: "en esa hora de la tarde, en que el mundo parece vivir en pura calma," and so on. The whole thing is an allusion. While in Don Segundo Sombra Guiraldes makes everything slightly theatrical, slightly tawdry; he has to stop every 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. But that's because he's trying to give you not reality but a sort of stage-picture. Everything in Chesterton happens on a painted scene; the characters are not real, but people who have been dressed up. In the case of Guiraldes, I think he was trying to be as real as he could. When one says that something is not "real," one is actually saying that the author doesn't believe in it. It's not a case of absolute reality. If an author is telling you a dream, or a story, as in Alice in Wonderland, the story or the dream is true because the author dreamed those things in that particular way. He didn't put them in to impress you. If you

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get the impression that things have been worked in, outside the natural scene or the dreaming of things, then you can say the book is "unreal." A book with fairies and goblins may be real: the author was dreaming unconsciously about those things. 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 quite alienated from the rest of our "realities"?-supposing it becomes so personal or idiosyncratic that we lose sight and touch of it? Borges: No, if the author is true to himself, you are made to feel it. You are made to feel he was built that way; that was the way his mind functioned. K.B.: What if he cares to work on the so-called "objective" 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 to do with the passion of the characters. K.B.: How about the tendency to "abstraction"-say among the recent French writers? I suppose you could be called an "abstract" writer, despite your interest in communication. 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. When I was a boy, I tried to read those Waverley novels and I always felt something wrong about them. K.B.: You're not disturbed by the alienation involved in the use of abstract language? Bor ges: I had a friend who was very angry because people didn't remember her. She said, "Horrors! Lost in a conglomeration of faces." A kind of nightmarish statement, no? The word was monstrous enough for what she was thinking. Of course, she was vain. K.B.: And poetry? Borges: Poetry is very different. In poetry, the central character is the reader. Lyric poetry is written so that the reader should think of himself as being the character. Or the poet may think of himself as the character, but the character is already there, no? Those are states of emotion. K.B.: There are writers today who want to eliminate people from fiction, work in movements and objects or language alone. Borges: Robbe-Grillet, and Butor? I met them in Buenos

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Aires. I thought they were a pair of fools. They claimed that the Marienbad film had been taken from a book by Bioy Casares. "If I had known that, I wouldn't have written a single line," Bioy said. Naturally, he was rather indignant. He said, "What can you expect from Frenchmen?" He's halfFrench himself. I suppose that makes him feel he should not praise the French. He goes about saying things like, "French is not quite so ugly a language as people think. However, as nothing's been written in it, as there is no literature, we cannot tell. Perhaps if someone tried his hand at writing French, something could be done. We should not be too quick in supposing that nothing would come out of that attempt." K.B.: You don't much like French writing yourself, do

you ?
Borges: I admire Flaubert, I admire Montaigne. Once upon a time I doted on Leon Bloy. Not his novels or his short stories but his journals. For their extraordinary language, the violence of his language. I thought he did splendidly what Carlyle tried to do: to be very violently and theatrically angry with everyone. I admire Verlaine. You see, if I am a poet at all, I am an intellectual poet and consequently I can hardly admire intellectual poetry because I feel I can play that kind of trick myself. While poetry like Verlaine's, the mere music of words-that's the kind of thing I cannot do. I don't even try 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 Lugones; but I admire these things because I couldn't do them to save my life. Conrad again. I could never do that sort of thing. 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 dream and a text lay all composed on the surface of my dream, which I wrote out and reproduce below without changing a word. 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 someone else's works by getting very close insid e-which is imitation. Both are aspects of the common fact that it is perfectly possible to lose oneself, or one's sense of oneself. Mr. Cohen in Encounter noted to a nicety that the Argentine landscape makes man unimportant; it conveys an "impression of per-

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sonal non-existence." And the poet Robert Lowell, coming late to a reading of his own work in Buenos Aires because he'd been "reading Borges," said of Borges' work that it "combined T.S. Eliot's essays with Wittgenstein's philosophy." It was only a few months later that I came to realize that the text of this dream was probably an elaborate metaphor of Borges' art:
Borges' Funicular2

There is a wire on which we see a man walking. It is dark all about him, and we note in him an intensity of concentration: on ascent, on the very loop of the wire on which he walks, so superior to the world, so disdainful of both the terrors of his climb and the point of his origin. When he arrives at where he thinks the poles must be, on which his wire is suspended, he realizes that there are no poles, no tower, no intricate design of steel from which his wire depends. We would expect him to fall from this knowledge, out of fear, or surprise. But there is no faltering even, no hesitation: simply a realization that 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 that natural 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 dominated the illustrated sections of newspapers at the turn of the century), one senses a vast emptiness and the man's solitude. The wire is naked and unprotected. There is the gathering darkness ahead, and behind, almost like an indication of time ("I have come from here and am going there"). There is also the mystery of the ascent itself: the man would surely not have undertaken his journey without some end in mind? The answer to this question, which deals with motives, is clear enough. He has been expecting that when he reaches the end of the wire he will find it unsupported, with nothing to connect it to the 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. Everything about him indicates this: his sureness, his deftness, his style like a Harlequin's in his pantomime who walks with such elegance 2. The word "funicular" must derive from Funes the Memorious, which I had been reading, and from other ingredientes that I leave to the imagination of the reader.

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that the places where he sets his feet become whatever he wishes them 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 hastening at the end-as though the goal were the kind of safety most of us aspire to-he is even more deliberate; he puts himself to the test. The second question follows on the first: if he knows, how does he know? Given the darkness, the silence, the absence of anyone who might inform him-he is not, after all, a traveler on a common highway, with signposts, hotels, and rest stations-there is only one possible answer: he must himself be the author of the wire on which he walks. It is all in his imagination; and he has imposed this vision on us. Meanwhile, he has never started, never arrived. This raises a problem, for we find it difficult to acknowledge that the wire should not exist. All that is far too tangible. We have seen it too clearly ourselves to be taken in by the petty mystifications of the man or by his denials. Whether he authored it or not is truly of minor importance, if we have come this far, and have had such doubts raised in our minds. A single question, then, remains: whether the man himself exists, or only the wire and the man we see on the wire. That is a much more difficult question. We are bound to remain with at least a residual doubt: a doubt of the kind that he is the last person in the world to dissipate.

Or, to quote Borges himself: "The world, unfortunately, real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

is

I sent the text to him:


Dear Borges, Please tell me if this text is yours. Possibly it is one you have never published, or that you lost, or forgot. I have become Pierre Menard.

Some days later, Borges' translator, Alastair Reid, a made-of-games Scotsman, was in Mexico, and, quickly liking each other, I gave him the text to read. He said: "But Borges would have made it more real. It would be still more frightening." He meant, I think, that there would have been streetlamps and trolley cars, for a while. True, and Borges would also have flicked it with irony. I quote the text to reveal a preoccupation with the metaphysical: on his part, not mine. I claim the dream to have been his. Even if it is mine, the responsibility is his.

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By now, the reader will have seen the elementary schizophrenia of this essay: a part of the Borges context that lies in the conversations and reflects calm, measure, and intelligence; another, in the ambiente, reflects the phantasmagoric, the arcane, perhaps the obscure. This is, of course, the problem posed by Borges himself, and the one that this essay mirrors: whether the physical can coexist with the metaphysical, the surreal with the real. It is a problem posed by the entire lineage to which Borges belongs, from the gnomic fragments of the Greek Anthology through the commentators of the Midrash to those writers-essentially of fragments of experience-like Kafka or Nathanael West, like Kleist, Walser, Nietzsche, like Corbiere or Valery, who state infinitely less than they mean, who add up to so much more than the sum of their parts. What they achieve-it is what I have tried to do, too, in this essay-depends on what each reader can contribute from his own memory and experience. Their works only allude to a common reality; they do not express it-the thing which, as Borges says in one of the conversations quoted, is always possible, if the worst comes to the worst.

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