BURGIN: I’ve always felt that by working out the rational consequences of mystic ideas, you’ve written about the things people are most astonished at or afraid of, that you’ve selected things to write about that are really even more terrifying than death, like infinity.
BORGES: But I don’t think of death as being terrifying. I was going over a sonnet with di Giovanni and the subject of that sonnet; I began by saying to the reader that he was invulnerable, that nothing could happen to him, that God had given to him the certainty of dust, mortality, and that, after all, if one day he should die, he could always fall back on the fact that life was a mere dream. But I don’t think of death as being terrifying.
BURGIN: What about infinity?
BORGES: Infinity, yes, because infinity is an intellectual problem. Death means you stop being, you cease from thinking, or feeling, or wondering, and at least you’re lucky in that you don’t have to worry. You might as well worry, as the Latin poet said, about the ages, and ages that preceded you when you did not exist. You might as well worry about the endless past as the endless future uninhabited by you … Infinity, yes, that’s a problem, but death isn’t a problem in that sense. There’s no difficulty whatever in imagining that even as I go to sleep every night, I may have a long sleep at the end. I mean it’s not an intellectual problem. I don’t understand Unamuno, because Unamuno wrote that God, for him, was the provider of immortality, that he couldn’t believe in a God who didn’t believe in immortality. I don’t see that. There might be a God who might not want me to go on living, or who might think that the universe does not need me. After all, it did not need me until 1899, when I was born. I was left out until it did.
BURGIN: Perhaps a stronger argument against God might be the idea of random happenings. The fact that people can be born as freaks, physical freaks, or that, people can be born paralysed.
BORGES: Oh, yes, of course. In fact, there are many arguments against God, but there are only four arguments for His existence.
BURGIN: Four arguments? Which are they?
BORGES: Well, one is called the ontological argument; it seems to be a mere trick. It runs thus. Can you imagine a perfect being, all powerful, all wise, and so on, and then you say yes, no?
BURGIN: Yes.
BORGES: Now, does that being exist or not?
BURGIN: Well, then the answer is, if you imagine him, he exists.
BORGES: No, no. Then you would say no, I don’t know.
BURGIN: You have to say no?
BORGES: Or, I don’t know. Then here the argument is clinched, in a very unconvincing way as I see it. You said that you could imagine a perfect being, a being all wise, all knowing; well, if that being does not exist, then it isn’t perfect. Because how can a nonexistent being be perfect? So you have to add existence to it. It’s not a very convincing argument, no? And then it was made still worse. It went, does God exist? I don’t know. Does a man exist? Well, he seems to exist. Then you think that God, who is eternal, omnipotent, and so on, cannot achieve what a man has to start with? And God, who is so wise, cannot even attain to manhood? Well, of course, that’s not an argument. In fact, if you say that God cannot succeed in existing, you are really supposing there is existence, no? Because if you don’t exist you cannot succeed or fail at it.
BURGIN: Do you think that a lot of philosophy has been wasted arguing about the existence of God, or can you still derive enjoyment from it?
BORGES: I can derive great enjoyment from it, the enjoyment I get out of detective novels or science fiction. Enjoyment of the imagination. But I don’t think anybody could take it too seriously. Of course, you may believe in God, I daresay there is a God, but I don’t believe in Him because of those arguments. I should say that I believe in God in spite of theology. Theologians follow the rules of the games; you accept certain premises and you have to accept the conclusions.
BURGIN: You once said that if a man is happy, he doesn’t want to write or really do anything, he just wants to be.
BORGES: Yes, because happiness is an end in itself. That’s one of the advantages, or perhaps the only advantage, of unhappiness. That unhappiness has to be transmuted into something.
BURGIN: So then, your own writing proceeds out of a sense of sorrow.
BORGES: I think that all writing comes out of unhappiness. I suppose that when Mark Twain was writing about the Mississippi and about the rafts, I suppose he was simply looking at his own past, no? He had a kind of homesickness for the Mississippi … Of course, when you’re happy you don’t need anything, no? Now I can be happy, but not for a long time.
BURGIN: Walt Whitman tried to write some poems about happiness, but we see through them so that …
BORGES: But Whitman, I think, overdid it. Because in him everything is wonderful, you know? I don’t think that anybody could really believe that everything is wonderful, no? Except in a sense of it being a wonder. Of course, you can do without that particular kind of miracle. No, in the case of Whitman I think he thought it was his duty as an American to be happy. And that he had to cheer up his readers. Of course, he wanted to be unlike any other poet, but Whitman worked with a programme, I should say, he began with a theory and then he went on to his work. I don’t think of him as a spontaneous writer.
BURGIN: Although he tries to convey the impression of spontaneity.
BORGES: Well, he had to do it.
BURGIN: Do you think any poets are really spontaneous?
BORGES: No, but I think that if you’re writing about unhappiness, feeling bleak or discouraged, it can be done more sincerely … Somebody wrote, I think it was William Henry Hudson, that he had tried to—I think he was quoting someone else—that he wanted to study philosophy and that he tried to read, well, I don’t know, Hume or Spinoza, but he couldn’t do it because happiness was always breaking in. He really was just bragging, no? In the case of most people, happiness isn’t always breaking in, but if it breaks in, you are thankful for it.
BURGIN: But don’t you think many people are ashamed to admit they’re happy? In fact, Bertrand Russell wrote a book called The Right to Be Happy.
BORGES: Well, because people felt that if other people were unhappy, their happiness would be resented. I don’t think we need be afraid of feeling too happy, no? For example, if suddenly, walking down the street or sitting here in my room, I feel happy, I think I’d better accept it and not pry into it. Because if I pry into it, I shall find that I have far too many reasons for being unhappy. But I think that one should accept happiness, and perhaps unexplained happiness is all to the better because I think that’s something right in your body, no? Or in your mind. But if you’re happy because of something that has happened, then you may be unhappy the next moment. I mean if you are just being spontaneously, innocently, happy, that’s all to the good. Of course, that doesn’t happen too often.
BURGIN: You once said to me that you could envision a world without novels, but not without tales or verses. How do you feel about philosophy? Could you envision a world without philosophy?
BORGES: No. I think that people who have no philosophy live a poor kind of life, no? People who are too sure about reality and about themselves. I think that philosophy helps you to live. For example, if you think of life as a dream, there may be something gruesome or uncanny about it, and you may sometimes feel that you are living in a nightmare, but if you think of reality as something hard and fast, that’s still worse, no? I think that philosophy may give the world a kind of haziness, but that haziness is all to the good. If you’re a materialist, if you believe in hard and fast things, then you’re tied down by reality, or by what you call reality. So that, in a sense, philosophy dissolves reality, but as reality is not always too pleasant, you will be helped by the dissolution. Well, those are very obvious thoughts, of course, though they are none the less true for being obvious.
“BORGES AND I”
INTERVIEW BY DANIEL BOURNE, STEPHEN CAPE, CHARLES SILVER
ARTFUL DODGE, 1980
Jorge Luis Borges is a man of many worlds and moods. A significant figure in modern Spanish literature, he has drawn much of his creative force from the Germanic world: English poetry, Franz Kafka, the warrior mythology of the Old English and Norse. Strongly anti-political and anti-moralistic, this Argentine’s work frequently revolves around the history of South America and the stirrings of the human heart. A storyteller who claims to perform his work in a simple manner, Borges may set his tales in exotic temples or in neighborhood bars; he may describe tigers and knives flashing in moonlight, or the patience of a scholar thumbing an ancient manuscript. Borges’s writings emerge from dreams and from experience. Nothing can be taken for certain; life is powerful, but poorly glimpsed before it overwhelms.
The result of Borges’s continual crossing of linguistic, mythological, and social boundaries is a body of work—essays, tales and poetry—which has earned recognition the world over. In 1960, he shared the World Publisher’s Prize with the French playwright Samuel Beckett, and he is often predicted to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although Borges began publishing in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, and his important collection of prose, Ficciones, came out in 1944, it was not until the appearance in 1961 of Labyrinths (New Directions), an anthology of his earlier stories, essays, and poetry, that his work spread to America and other English-speaking lands. A translation of Ficciones appeared in 1962, and subsequent translations have included A Personal Anthology (1967), The Aleph and Other Stories (1972), and In Praise of Darkness (1974), the latter four translated by or under the direction of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with whom Borges worked closely.
To talk closely to Jorge Luis Borges is to track him through a labyrinth of his past experiences and attitudes, and the walls that one encounters in the search might be painted in unexpected ways. These may furnish clues or merely diversions in the pursuit, but to understand Borges at least partially is to realize that these clues and diversions are the Borges. We must not expect to find Borges the same each time. There is not one Borges, but many.
This is the Jorge Luis Borges whom the Artful Dodge encountered on April 25, 1980.
JORGE LUIS BORGES: First let me say: straightforward questions. Not, for example, “What do you think of the future?” when there are so many futures and quite different from each other, I suppose.
DANIEL BOURNE: Let me ask you about your past, then, your influences and so on.
BORGES: Well, I can tell you about the influences I have received, but not about the influence I may have had upon others. That’s quite unknown to me and I don’t care about it. But I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that’s more or less irrelevant. I think I’m a good reader, I’m a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father’s love of Swinburne, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on—not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it. My father gave me the free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.
BOURNE: You are indeed a bookman. Can you give us a notion of how your librarianship and antiquarian tastes have helped your writings in terms of freshness?
BORGES: I wonder if my writing has any freshness. I think of myself as belonging essentially to the nineteenth century. I was born in the last but one year of the century, 1899, and also my reading has been confined—well, I also read contemporary writers—but I was brought up on Dickens and the Bible, or Mark Twain. Of course I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past.
I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past, after all, is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me. I think that I owe much to many writers, perhaps to the writers I have read or who were really part of their language, a part of tradition. A language in itself is a tradition.
STEPHEN CAPE: If we could, let’s turn to your poetry.
BORGES: My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don’t really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I’m no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don’t know what to do, I’m in a quandary.
CAPE: One modern poet, Gary Snyder, describes his poetic theory in a short poem called “Riprap.”2 His ideas seem to have some things in common with your poetry, and I’d like to quote a short section of it which describes his attitudes towards words in poems.
BORGES: Yes but why a short section, a large section would be better, no? I want to enjoy this morning.
CAPE: The title “Riprap” refers to making a path of stones on slippery rock, to get pack horses up a mountain, a small inter-connected path.
BORGES: Of course, he writes with varied metaphors, and I don’t, I write in a simple way. But he has the English language to play with, and I haven’t.
CAPE: His idea seems to be comparing placing words in a poem with building the inter-connected trail where each piece is dependent on the piece on either side. Do you agree with that type of approach towards the structure of a poem, or is it just one of many?
BORGES: Well, I think as Kipling said, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / and-every-single-one-of-them-is-right”—and that may be one of the right ways. But mine is not at all like that. I get—it’s some kind of relation, a rather dim one. I’m given an idea; well, that idea may become a tale or a poem. But I’m only given the starting point and the goal. And then I have to invent or concoct somehow what happens in between, and then I do my best. But generally, when I get that kind of inspiration, I do all I can to resist it, but if it keeps bothering me, then I have to somehow write it down. But I never look for subjects. They come to me in a cage, they may come when I’m trying to sleep, or when I wake up. They come to me on the streets of Buenos Aires, or anywhere at anytime. For example, a week ago I had a dream. When I awoke—it was a nightmare—I said, well, this nightmare isn’t worth telling, but I think there’s a story lurking here. I want to find it. Now when I think I found it, I write it within five or six months. I take my time over it. So I have, let’s say, a different method. Every craftsman has his own method, of course, and I should respect it.
CAPE: Snyder’s trying to achieve a direct transfer of his state of mind to the reader with as little interference as possible from reasoning. He’s going for the direct transfer of sensation. Does this seem a little extreme for you?
BORGES: No, but he seems to be a very cautious poet. Where I’m really old and innocent. I just ramble on, try to find my way. People tell me, for example, what message I have. I’m afraid I haven’t any. Well, here’s fable, what’s the moral? I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I’m a reader.
CAPE: Do you think of words as having effects that are inherent in the word or in the images they carry?
BORGES: Well, yes, for example, if you attempt a sonnet, then, at least in Spanish, you have to use certain words. There’s only a few rhymes. And those of course may be used as metaphors, peculiar metaphors, since you have to stick to them. I would even venture to say—this of course is a sweeping statement—but perhaps the word moon in English stems from something different than the word luna in Latin or Spanish. The moon, the word moon, is a lingering sound. Moon is a beautiful word. The French word is also beautiful: lune. But in Old English the word was mona. The word isn’t beautiful at all, two syllables. And then the Greek is worse. We have celena, three syllables. But the word moon is a beautiful word. That sound is not found, let’s say in Spanish. The moon. I can linger in words. Words inspire you. Words have a life of their own.
CAPE: The word’s life of its own, does that seem more important than the meaning that it gives in a particular context?
BORGES: I think that
the meanings are more or less irrelevant. What is important, or the two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don’t think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don’t like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.
CAPE: Could one set of myths be replaced by another when moving from one poet to another and still get the same poetic effect?
BORGES: I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he’s unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I’m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of a poet. When I think of America, I always tend to think in terms of Walt Whitman. The word Manhattan was invented for him, no?
CAPE: An image of a healthy America?
BORGES: Well, yes. At the same time, Walt Whitman himself was a myth, a myth of a man who wrote, a very unfortunate man, very lonely, and yet he made of himself a rather splendid vagabond. I have pointed out that Whitman is perhaps the only writer on earth who has managed to create a mythological person of himself and one of the three persons of the Trinity is the reader, because when you read Walt Whitman, you are Walt Whitman. Very strange that he did that, the only person on earth. Of course, America has produced writers important all over the world. Especially New England. You have given the world men that cannot be thought away. For example, all contemporary literature could not be what it is had it not been for Poe, for Whitman, and perhaps Melville and Henry James. But South America, we have many things important to us and Spain, but not to the rest of the world. I do think that Spanish literature began by being very fine. And then somewhere, and already with such writers as Quevado and Gongora, you feel something has stiffened; the language doesn’t flow as it did.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations Page 9