BURGIN: Do you think a book like Ulysses, for example, was, among other things, an attempt to show the full spectrum of thought?
BORGES: Yes, but I think that Ulysses is a failure, really. Well, by the time it’s read through, you know thousands and thousands of circumstances about the characters, but you don’t know them. And if you think of the characters in Joyce, you don’t think of them as you think of the characters in Stevenson or in Dickens, because in the case of a character, let’s say in a book by Stevenson, a man may appear, may last a page, but you feel that you know him or that there’s more in him to be known, but in the case of Ulysses you are told thousands of circumstances about the characters. You know, for example, well, you know that they went twice to the men’s room, you know all the books they read, you know their exact positions when they are sitting down or standing up, but you don’t really know them. It’s as if Joyce had gone over them with a microscope or a magnifying glass.
BURGIN: I imagine you’ve revealed a lot about English literature to your students.
BORGES: Nobody knows a lot about English literature, it’s so rich … But I believe, for example, that I have revealed Robert Browning to many young men in Buenos Aires who knew nothing whatsoever about him. Now I’m wondering if Browning, instead of writing poetry—of course he should have written poetry—but I think that many of Browning’s pieces would have fared better, at least as far as the reader goes, had they been written as short stories. For example, I think that he wrote some very fine verses in The Ring and the Book. We find it burdensome because I suppose we’ve grown out of the habit of reading long poems in blank verse. But had he written it in prose, had The Ring and the Book been written as a novel, and the same story told over and over again by different characters, he might have been more amusing, no? Though he would have lost many fine passages of verse. Then I should think of Robert Browning as the forerunner of all modern literature. But nowadays we don’t, because we’re put off by the …
BURGIN: … poetic technicalities.
BORGES: Yes, the poetic technicalities, by the blank verse, by the rather artificial style. But had he been, let’s say, well, yes, had he been a good prose writer, then I think that we should think of Browning as being the forerunner of what is called modern literature.
BURGIN: Why do you say that?
BORGES: Because when I told the plots of his poems to my students, they were wild about them. And then, when they read them, they found them, well, a task. But if you tell somebody the framework of The Ring and the Book, it’s very interesting. The idea of having the same story told by different characters from different angles, that seems to be, well, more or less, what Henry James would have liked to do—a long time before Henry James. I mean that you should think of Browning as having been the forerunner, quite as good as the forerunner, of Henry James or of Kafka. While today we don’t think of him in that way, and nobody seems to be reading him, except out of duty, but I think people should enjoy reading him.
BURGIN: You’ve linked Henry James and Kafka before—you seem to associate them in your mind for some reason.
BORGES: I think that there is a likeness between them. I think that the sense of things being ambiguous, of things being meaningless, of living in a meaningless universe, of things being many-sided and finally unexplained; well, Henry James wrote to his brother that he thought of the world as being a diamond museum, a museum of monsters. I think that he must have felt life in much the same way.
BURGIN: And yet the characters in James or in Kafka are always striving for something definite. They always have definite goals.
BORGES: They have definite goals, but they never attain them. I mean, when you’ve read the first page of The Trial you know that he’ll never know why he’s being judged, why he’s being tried, I mean; in the case of Henry James, the same thing happens. The moment you know that the man is after the Aspern papers, you know, well, either that he’ll never find the papers, or that if he does find them, they’ll be worthless. You may feel that.
BURGIN: But then it’s more a sense of impotence than it is an ambiguity.
BORGES: Of course, but it’s also an ambiguity. For example, “The Turn of the Screw.” That’s a stock example. One might find others. “The Abasement of the Northmores”—the whole story is told as a tale of revenge. And, in the end, you don’t know whether the revenge will work out or not. Because, after all, the letters of the widow’s husband, they may be published and nothing may come of them. So that in the end, the whole story is about revenge, and when you reach the last page, you do not know whether the woman will accomplish her purpose or not. A very strange story … I suppose that you prefer Kafka to Henry James?
BURGIN: No, they stand for different things for me.
BORGES: But do they?
BURGIN: You don’t seem to think so. But I think that Henry James believed in society; he never really questioned the social order.
BORGES: I don’t think so.
BURGIN: I think he accepted society. I think that he couldn’t conceive of a world without society and he believed in man and, moreover, in certain conventions. He was a student of man’s behaviour.
BORGES: Yes, I know, but he believed in them in a desperate way, because it was the only thing he could grasp.
BURGIN: It was an order, a sense of order.
BORGES: But I don’t think he felt happy.
BURGIN: But Kafka’s imagination is far more metaphorical.
BORGES: Yes, but I think that you get many things in James that you don’t get in Kafka. For example, in Henry James you are made to feel that there is a meaning behind experience, perhaps too many meanings. While in Kafka, you know that he knew no more about the castle or about the judges and the trial than you do. Because the castle and the judges are symbols of the universe, and nobody is expected to know anything about the universe. But in the case of Henry James, you think that he might have had his personal theories or you feel that he knows more of what he’s talking about. I mean that though his stories may be parables of the subject, still they’re not written by him to be parables. I think he was really very interested in the solution, maybe he had two or three solutions and so in a sense I think of Henry James as being far more complex than Kafka, but that may be a weakness. Perhaps the strength of Kafka may be in his lack of complexity.
BURGIN: I think of James as being able to create characters, whereas Kafka has no characters. Kafka is closer to poetry really. He works with metaphors and types as opposed to characters.
BORGES: No, there are no characters.
BURGIN: But James could create characters.
BORGES: Are you sure of that?
BURGIN: You don’t seem to think so.
BORGES: No, I think that what is interesting in James are the situations more than the characters. Let’s take a very obvious example. If I think of Dickens, I’m thinking of Sir Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield. I think of people, well, I might go on and on. While if I think of James, I’m thinking about a situation and a plot. I’m not thinking about people. I’m thinking about what happened to them. If I think about What Maisie Knew, I think of the framework of a hideous story of adultery being told by a child who cannot understand. I think of that and not of Maisie herself and not of her parents or of her mother’s lover and so on.
BURGIN: You also said that you don’t think Ulysses has any real characters either.
BORGES: No.
BURGIN: What do you think of when you think of that book? The language perhaps?
BORGES: Yes, I think of it as being verbal. I think I said that we know thousands of things about Daedalus or about Bloom, but I don’t think we know them. At least I don’t. But I think I know quite a lot about the characters in Shakespeare or in Dickens. Now—I’ll qualify this, I suppose you can help me out—in the case of Moby-Dick, I think that I believe in the story rather than in the characters, because the whole story is a symbol, the white whale stands for evil, and Captain Ahab stands, I
suppose, for the wrong way of doing battle against evil, but I cannot believe in him personally. Can you?
BURGIN: To think only in terms of an allegory or a symbol seems reductive of the text; it reduces the story of one of its elements.
BORGES: Yes, of course it does. That’s why Melville said that the book was not an allegory, no?
BURGIN: But I don’t think it’s so specific that you can say the whale stands for evil; maybe the whale stands for many things—you feel many things, but you can’t perhaps verbalize the exact thing that the whale stands for. I mean, I don’t like to think of it in terms of algebra, where one thing equals another.
BORGES: No, no, of course the idea of the whale is richer than the idea of evil.
BURGIN: Yes.
BORGES: Of course, I’m not allowed to see the work in Melville’s mind, but you think of Captain Ahab as being more complex than any abstract statement.
BURGIN: Yes. Ahab has presence, he has real presence on the page, but I don’t really think of him as a real man.
BORGES: I think of Billy Budd as being a real man.
BURGIN: Yes.
BORGES: And Benito Cereno—but in the case of Moby-Dick, the whole thing is so overloaded with gorgeous language, no?
BURGIN: Shakespearean, almost.
BORGES: Shakespearean and Carlylean also, no? Because you feel that Carlyle is in Melville.
BURGIN: What about “Bartleby the Scrivener”—did you like that story?
BORGES: Yes, I remember an anthology that came out in Buenos Aires, well, about six months ago. Six Argentine writers could choose the best story they knew. And one of those writers took that story, “Bartleby.”
BURGIN: The best story of Melville or the best story by anybody?
BORGES: I mean by anybody.
BURGIN: One story from all of world literature, that’s very difficult.
BORGES: Yes, but I don’t think the aim was really to find out the best stories in the world by any means. I think what they wanted was to get an anthology that people might want to buy, no? That people might be interested in. Then one took “Bartleby,” and one took, I don’t know why, a very disagreeable and rather bogus story by Lovecraft. Have you read Lovecraft?
BURGIN: No, I haven’t.
BORGES: Well, no reason why you should. And somebody had a story about a mermaid by Hans Andersen, I suppose you know it. Well, it’s not a very good story.
BURGIN: Strange choices.
BORGES: Then somebody had a short Chinese story, quite a good story—three pages long. And then, I wonder what you will make of my choice? I took Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” about the man who stays away from home all those years. Well, strangely enough, there were six stories and three by American authors: Melville, Lovecraft and Hawthorne.
BURGIN: Did you have a hard time picking Hawthorne from the others or did you know it right away?
BORGES: No. Well, of course, I really wasn’t thinking of all the stories I know. And it had to be a story already translated into Spanish. That limited my choice. Besides, as I didn’t want to astonish people, because I think that to take a story by Lovecraft and to say it’s the best story in the world, that’s done in order to amaze people. Because I don’t think that anybody would think that Lovecraft wrote the finest story in the world, if the phrase the finest story in the world can have any meaning. I hesitated between the story and some story by Kipling. And then I thought that that story was a very fine story to be written ever so long ago. The book came out and now there is going to be a second series, by different writers, of course. It was a book that sold very well.
BURGIN: Have you had occasion to go to Salem since you’ve been here?
BORGES: Yes, I went several times to Salem and then I went to Walden also. And I should say that the whole American adventure began here, no? That the history of America began here. In fact, I should say that the West was invented by New Englanders, no?
Tales and meanings; favourite poems; the gifts of unhappiness; a girl from Buenos Aires; Homer; parables …
BORGES: You know, I want to tell you that some people have no literary sense. Consequently they think that if anything literary pleases them, they have to look for far-fetched reasons. I mean, for example, instead of saying, “Well, I like this because this is fine poetry, or because this is a story that I follow with interest; I’m really forgetting about myself and I’m thinking of the character,” they’re trying to think that the whole thing is full of half truths, reasons and symbols. They’ll say, “Yes, we enjoyed that tale of yours, but what did you mean by it?” The answer is, “I meant nothing whatever, I meant the tale itself. If I could have said it in plainer words, I would have written it otherwise.” But the tale itself should be its own reality, no? People never accept that. They like to think that writers are aiming at something. In fact, I think that most people think—of course they won’t say so to themselves or to anybody else—they think of literature as being a kind of Aesop’s Fables, no? Everything is written to prove something—not for the sheer pleasure of writing it, or for the sheer interest a writer may have in the characters or in the situation or in whatever it may be, no? I think that people are always looking for some kind of lesson, no?
BURGIN: Maybe they hope that books will give them what the world doesn’t. They want some meaning. They want truths. They want to be told how to live, from books.
BORGES: Perhaps. But if they thought of poetry as they think of music, that might make things easier for them, don’t you think so? When you’re hearing music, well, of course, I know nothing whatever about music, I suppose you’d just be pleased or displeased or bored. But if you’re reading a book, you’re hunting for a book behind the book, no? Consequently you have to invent all kinds of reasons … Well, maybe you wanted to ask me something far more concrete; I’m just rambling on. But I think that’s the only way for a real conversation to begin—by rambling on, no? I’m not looking too closely at what I’m saying.
BURGIN: No, I think what you say is very true. In the colleges, at least in the schools I’ve gone to, the method is always to explicate things, explain very literally what everything means.
BORGES: I’m thinking, for example, that you might have a very crude character in a skit, a comedy or whatever it might be, talking Shakespeare, “Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.” Now that’s very beautiful, very lovely. And yet you might have a very clumsy and very illiterate character, saying, “If you make music, why do you feel sad? And why does it make you sad?” And it would boil down to the same idea, no? But when Shakespeare says it, it’s lovely and in the other case, I mean if the thought were plainly expressed, it would give you the idea of a very clumsy kind of person, no? Don’t you think so?
BURGIN: Yes, I do.
BORGES: I dislike that kind of thing. And another thing I dislike is if people ask me, for example, “Do you admire Shaw?” “Yes.” “Do you admire Chesterton?” “Yes.” “And if you had to choose between them?” “But I don’t.” They stand for different moods, don’t you think so? I mean, you might say that Chesterton as a weaver of tales was cleverer than Shaw, but that on the whole I think of Shaw as a wiser man than Chesterton. But I’m not thinking of a kind of duel between them. Why not have both?
BURGIN: Things get back to a duel again. Everyone seems to have to prove he’s the best.
BORGES: Well, that’s a kind of football mind, no? Or they live a boxing match.
BURGIN: I don’t like boxing. Do you?
BORGES: Yes. At least, when I had sight, I enjoyed seeing a boxing match … but as to football, I know so little about it that I could never tell who was who or who was winning or who was losing. The whole thing seemed meaningless to me, and besides, it’s so ugly, the spectacle. While a cockfight—you’ve seen cockfights, no?
BURGIN: No, I haven’t. They’re banned in America.
BORGES: Well, they’re banned also in my country, but you see them.
Besides, a cockfight is a fair fight because both cocks are thoroughly enjoying it, enjoying it, of course, in their own hellish way. I’ve seen bullfights, also. But to an Argentine, there’s something very unfair about a bullfight.
The Spaniards told me that no one thought of danger in a bullfight, because no bullfighters ever run any dangers. They thought of it as sheer technique, and things had to be done in a very elegant way, and that a bullfighter had to be very skillful about it. But that nobody ever thought of a man risking his life, or of a bull being killed, or of the horses being murdered, that those things were not seen. That it was really a game of skill. I said, “Yes, but it’s not very skillful to have a bull and some ten or twelve people killing him.” “Yes,” they said, “because you’re thinking of the idea of a fair fight, but the idea of a fight isn’t there at all. What is really important is that things should be done in a very deft way; it’s a kind of dance.” And they said, “I see you don’t understand anything about bullfighting if you are thinking of it as a dangerous sport or if you’re thinking of a man risking his life.”
BURGIN: I think we’re constantly trying to block out our distant animal past, and a bullfight is one of the many forms of that idea.
BORGES: It might be that, but not a very fair form. When my father was a boy, he knew a man, or rather, he knew several men whose job it was to kill jaguars. They were called tigreros because a jaguar is called a tiger, no? Even though it’s smaller. The same thing might be found in Venezuela or in Colombia or in southern Brazil. This was in Buenos Aires, I think.
Well, the man’s job was to kill jaguars. He had a pack of dogs with him, he had a poncho (a cloak with a hole in it) and a long knife. The dogs would make the jaguar come from his den. Then the man would hold up the poncho in his left hand, moving it up and down. The jaguar would spring, because the jaguar was a kind of machine; it always did the same thing. The jaguar was the same jaguar over and over again, an everlasting jaguar, no? Then he would jump, and as the poncho could hardly defend the man’s hands, his hands were scratched by the claws of the jaguar, but at that moment the jaguar laid himself bare to the man’s knife and the man killed him with an upward thrust.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations Page 6