Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  At the beginning of this essay I mentioned the doctrine of the psychologist Jung, who compared literary inventions to oneiric inventions, or literature to dreams. That doctrine does not seem to be applicable to the literatures written in the Spanish language, which deal in dictionaries and rhetoric, not fantasy. On the other hand, it does pertain to the literature of North America, which (like the literatures of England or Germany) tends more toward invention than transcription, more toward creation than observation. Perhaps that is the reason for the curious veneration North Americans render to realistic works, which induces them to postulate, for example, that Maupassant is more important than Hugo. It is within the power of a North American writer to be Hugo, but not, without violence, Maupassant. In comparison with the literature of the United States, which has produced several men of genius and has had its influence felt in England and France, our Argentine literature may possibly seem somewhat provincial. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century we produced some admirable works of realism—by Echeverria, Ascasubi, Hernández, and the forgotten Eduardo Gutiérrez—the North Americans have not surpassed (perhaps have not equaled) them to this day. Someone will object that Faulkner is no less brutal than our Gaucho writers. True, but his brutality is of the hallucinatory sort—the infernal, not the terrestrial sort of brutality. It is the kind that issues from dreams, the kind inaugurated by Hawthorne.

  Hawthorne died on May 18, 1864, in the mountains of New Hampshire. His death was tranquil and it was mysterious, because it occurred in his sleep. Nothing keeps us from imagining that he died while dreaming and we can even invent the story that he dreamed—the last of an infinite series—and the manner in which death completed or erased it. Perhaps I shall write it some day; I shall try to redeem this deficient and too digressive essay with an acceptable story.

  Van Wyck Brooks in The Flowering of New England, D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, and Ludwig Lewisohn in Story of American Literature analyze and evaluate the work of Hawthorne. There are many biographies. I have used the one Henry James wrote in 1879 for the English Men of Letters Series.

  When Hawthorne died, the other writers inherited his task of dreaming. At some future time we shall study, if your indulgence permits, the glory and the torment of Poe, in whom the dream was exalted to a nightmare.

  Note on Walt Whitman

  “The whole of Whitman’s work is deliberate.”

  R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of

  Men and Books (1882)

  The practice of literature sometimes fosters the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes all the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtue is not lessened by the years. Those who cherished that ambition have chosen lofty subjects: Apollonius of Rhodes, the first ship that braved the dangers of the deep; Lucan, the struggle between Caesar and Pompey, when the eagles waged war against the eagles; Camoëns, the Portuguese armies in the Orient; Donne, the circle of a soul’s transmigrations according to Pythagorean dogma; Milton, the most ancient of sins and Paradise; Firdusi, the thrones of the Sassanidae. Góngora, I believe, was the first to say that an important book can exist without an important theme; the vague story told by the Soledades is deliberately trite, according to the observation and reproof of Cascales and Gracián (Cartas filologicas, VIII; El Criticón, II, 4). Trivial themes did not suffice for Mallarmé; he sought negative ones—the absence of a flower or a woman, the whiteness of the piece of paper before the poem. Like Pater, he felt that all the arts gravitate toward music, the art that has form as its substance; his decorous profession of faith Tout aboutit à un livre seems to summarize the Homeric axiom that the gods fabricate misfortunes so that future generations will have something to sing about (Odyssey, VIII). Around 1900 Yeats searched for the absolute in the manipulation of symbols that would awaken the generic memory, or Great Memory, which pulsates beneath individual minds; those symbols could be compared to the later archetypes of Jung. Barbusse, in L’Enfer, a book that has been unjustly neglected, avoided (tried to avoid) the limitations of time by means of the poetical account of man’s basic acts. In Finnegans Wake Joyce tried to achieve the same objective by the simultaneous presentation of the characteristics of different epochs. The deliberate manipulation of anachronisms to produce an appearance of eternity has also been practiced by Pound and T. S. Eliot.

  I have recalled some procedures; none is more curious than the one used by Whitman in 1855. Before considering it, I should like to quote some opinions that more or less prefigure what I am going to say. The first is from the English poet Lascelles Abercrombie, who wrote that Whitman extracted from his noble experience the vivid and personal figure who is one of the few great things in modern literature: the figure of himself. The second is from Sir Edmund Gosse, who said there was no real Walt Whitman, but that Whitman was literature in the protoplasmic state: an intellectual organism that was so simple it only reflected those who approached it. The third one is mine; it is found on page 70 of the book Discusión (1932):

  Almost everything that has been written about Whitman is falsified by two persistent errors. One is the summary identification of Whitman, the man of letters, with Whitman, the semidivine hero of Leaves of Grass, as Don Quixote is the hero of the Quixote. The other is the senseless adoption of the style and vocabulary of his poems by those who write about him, that is to say, the adoption of the same surprising phenomenon one wishes to explain.

  Imagine that a biography of Ulysses (based on the testimonies of Agamemnon, Laertes, Polyphemus, Calypso, Penelope, Telemachus, the swineherd, Scylla, and Charybdis) indicated that he never left Ithaca. Such a book is fortunately hypothetical, but its particular brand of deception would be the same as the deception in all the biographies of Whitman. To progress from the paradisiacal sphere of his verses to the insipid chronicle of his days is a melancholy transition. Paradoxically, that inevitable melancholy is aggravated when the biographer chooses to overlook the fact that there are two Whitmans: the “friendly and eloquent savage” of Leaves of Grass and the poor writer who invented him.14 The latter was never in California or in Platte Canyon; the former improvises an apostrophe in Platte Canyon (“Spirit that Formed this Scene”) and was a miner in California (“Starting from Paumanok,” 1). In 1859 the latter was in New York; on December second of that year the former was present at the execution of the old abolitionist, John Brown, in Virginia (“Year of Meteors”). The latter was born on Long Island; so was the former (“Starting from Paumanok,” 1), but he was also born in one of the southern states (“Longings for Home”). The latter was chaste, reserved, and somewhat taciturn; the former, effusive and orgiastic. It is easy to multiply such contradictions; but it is more important to understand that the mere happy vagabond proposed by the verses of Leaves of Grass would have been incapable of writing them.

  Byron and Baudelaire dramatized their unhappiness in famous volumes; Whitman, his joy. (Thirty years later, in Sils-Maria, Nietzsche would discover Zarathustra; that pedagogue is happy or, at any rate, he recommends happiness, but his principal defect is that he does not exist.) Other romantic heroes—Vathek is the first of the series, Edmond Teste is not the last—tediously emphasize their differences; Whitman, with impetuous humility, yearns to be like all men. He says that Leaves of Grass “is the song of a great collective, popular individual, man or woman” (Complete Writings, V, 192). Or in these immortal words (“Song of Myself,” 17):

  These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

  If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

  If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

  If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

  This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

  This is the common air that bathes the globe.

  Pantheism has disseminated a variet
y of phrases which declare that God is several contradictory or (even better) miscellaneous things The prototype of such phrases is this: “I am the rite, I am the offering, I am the oblation to the parents, I am the grass, I am the prayer I am the libation of butter, I am the fire” (Bhagavad-Gita, IX, 16) Earlier, but ambiguous, is Fragment 67 of Heraclitus: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger.’ Plotinus describes for his pupils an inconceivable sky, in which “everything is everywhere, anything is all things, the sun is all the stars and each star is all the stars and the sun” (Enneads, V, 8, 4). Attar a twelfth-century Persian, sings of the arduous pilgrimage of the birds in search of their king, the Simurg; many of them perish in the seas, but the survivors discover that they are the Simurg and that the Simurg is each one of them and all of them. Extension of the principle of identity seems to have infinite rhetorical possibilities. Emerson, a reader of the Hindus and of Attar, leaves us the poem “Brahma”; perhaps the most memorable of its sixteen verses is this one: “When me they fly, I am the wings.” Similar but more fundamental is “Ich bin der Eine und bin Beide,” by Stefan George (Der Stern des Bundes). Walt Whitman renovated that procedure. He did not use it, as others had, to define the divinity or to play with the “sympathies and differences” of words; he wanted to identify himself, in a sort of ferocious tenderness, with all men. He said (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 6):

  [I] Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

  And also, (“Song of Myself,” 33):

  I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

  The disdain and calmness of martyrs,

  The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,

  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,

  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,

  All these I feel or am.

  Whitman felt and was all of them, but fundamentally he was—not in mere history, in myth—what these two lines denote (“Song of Myself,” 24):

  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,

  He was also the one he would be in the future, in our future nostalgia, which is created by these prophecies that announced it (“Full of Life Now”):

  Full of life now, compact, visible,

  I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,

  To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,

  To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

  When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,

  Now it is you, compact, visible, realising my poems, seeking me,

  Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;

  Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

  Or (“Songs of Parting,” 4, 5):

  Camerado, this is no book,

  Who touches this touches a man,

  (Is it night? are we here together alone?)

  I love you, I depart from materials,

  I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.15

  Walt Whitman, the man, was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and read his basic ideas in the pages of Emerson, Hegel, and Volney; Walt Whitman, the poetic personage, evolved his ideas from contact with America through imaginary experiences in the bedrooms of New Orleans and on the battlefields of Georgia. That does not necessarily imply falsity. A false fact may be essentially true. It is said that Henry I of England never smiled after the death of his son; the fact, perhaps false, can be true as a symbol of the King’s grief. In 1914 it was reported that the Germans had tortured and mutilated a number of Belgian hostages; the statement may have been false, but it effectively summarized the infinite and confused horrors of the invasion. Even more pardonable is the case of those who attribute a doctrine to vital experiences and not to a certain library or a certain epitome. In 1874 Nietzsche ridiculed the Pythagorean thesis that history repeats itself cyclically ( Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie, 2); in 1881 he suddenly conceived that thesis on a path in the woods of Silvaplana (Ecce homo, 9). One could descend to the level of a detective and speak of plagiarism; if he were asked about it, Nietzsche would reply that the important consideration is the change an idea can cause in us, not the mere formulation of it.16 The abstract proposition of divine unity is one thing; the flash of light that drove some Arab shepherds out of the desert and forced them into a battle that has not ended and which extended from Aquitaine to the Ganges is another. Whitman’s plan was to display an ideal democrat, not to devise a theory.

  Since Horace predicted his celestial metamorphosis with a Platonic or Pythagorean image, the theme of the poet’s immortality has been classic in literature. Those who utilized it did so from motives of vainglory (“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”), if not from a kind of bribery or even revenge. From his manipulation of the theme, Whitman derives a personal relationship with each future reader. He identifies himself with the reader, and converses with Whitman (“Salut au Monde!,”3):

  What do you hear, Walt Whitman ?

  And it was thus that he became the eternal Whitman, the friend who is an old American poet of the eighteen hundreds and also his legend and also each one of us and also happiness. Vast and almost inhuman was the task, but no less important was the victory.

  Valéry as Symbol

  Bringing together the names of Whitman and Paul Valéry is, at first glance, an arbitrary and (what is worse) inept operation. Valéry is a symbol of infinite dexterities but, at the same time, of infinite scruples; Whitman, of an almost incoherent but titanic vocation of felicity; Valéry illustriously personifies the labyrinths of the mind; Whitman, the interjections of the body. Valéry is a symbol of Europe and of its delicate twilight; Whitman, of the morning in America. The whole realm of literature would not seem to admit two more antagonistic applications of the word “poet.” One fact, however, links them: the work of both is less valuable as poetry than it is as the sign of an exemplary poet created by that work. Thus, the English poet Lascelles Abercrombie could praise Whitman for having created “from the richness of his noble experience that vivid and personal figure which is one of the few really great things of the poetry of our time: the figure of himself.” The dictum is vague and superlative, but it has the singular virtue of not identifying Whitman, the man of letters and devoté of Tennyson, with Whitman, the semidivine hero of Leaves of Grass. The distinction is valid; Whitman wrote his rhapsodies in terms of an imaginary identity, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers. Hence the discrepancies that have exasperated the critics; hence the custom of dating his poems in places where he had never been; hence the fact that, on one page of his work, he was born in the Southern states, and on another (and also in reality) on Long Island.

  One of the purposes of Whitman’s compositions is to define a possible man ― Walt Whitman ― of unlimited and negligent felicity; no less hyperbolic, no less illusory, is the man defined by Valéry’s compositions. The latter does not magnify, as does the former, the human faculties of philanthropy, fervor and joy; he magnifies the virtues of the mind. Valéry created Edmond Teste; this character would be one of the myths of our time if intimately we did not all judge him to be a mere Doppelgänger of Valéry. For us, Valéry is Edmond Teste. In other words, Valéry is a derivation of Poe’s Chevalier Dupin and the inconceivable God of the theologians. Which fact, plausibly enough, is not true.

  Yeats, Rilke and Eliot have written verses more memorable than those of Valéry; Joyce and Stefan George have effected more profound modifications in their instrument (perhaps French is less modifiable than English and German); but behind the work of these eminent artificers there is no personality comparable to Valéry’s. The circumstance that that persona
lity is, in some way, a projection of the work does not diminish this fact. To propose lucidity to men in a lowly romantic era, in the melancholy era of Nazism and dialectical materialism, of the augurs of Freudianism and the merchants of surréalisms, such is the noble mission Valéry fulfilled (and continues to fulfill).

  Paul Valéry leaves us at his death the symbol of a man infinitely sensitive to every phenomenon and for whom every phenomenon is a stimulus capable of provoking an infinite series of thoughts. Of a man who transcends the differential traits of the self and of whom we can say, as William Hazlitt did of Shakespeare, “he is nothing in himself.” Of a man whose admirable texts do not exhaust, do not even define, their all-embracing possibilities. Of a man who, in an age that worships the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion, preferred always the lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order.

  Translated by James E. Irby

  Coleridge’s Flower

  Around 1938, Paul Valéry wrote: “The history of literature should not be the history of authors and the course of their careers or of the career of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature; such a history could be written without mentioning a single writer.” It was not the first time the Spirit had made this observation; in 1844, one of its amanuenses in Concord had noted: “I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books . . . there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman” (Emerson, Essays: Second Series, “Nominalist and Realist;’ 1844). Twenty years earlier, Shelley expressed the opinion that all the poems of the past, present, and future were episodes or fragments of a single infinite poem, written by all the poets on earth.