Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Thirty thousand irregular verses then recount the battles of the Britons, particularly Arthur, against the Picts, the Norse, and the Saxons.

  The first impression, and perhaps the last, given by Layamon’s preamble is of an infinite, almost incredible, ingenuousness. Adding to this impression is the poet’s childlike trait of saying “Layamon” for “I,” but behind the innocent words the emotion is complex. Layamon is moved not only by the subject matter of the songs, but also by the almost magical circumstance of seeing himself singing them; this reciprocity corresponds to the “Illo Virgilium me tempore” [In that time, Virgil] of the Georgics or to the beautiful “Ego ille qui quondam” [I, who one day] that someone wrote to preface the Aeneid.

  A legend recounted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and famously adopted by Virgil states that Rome was founded by men descended from Aeneas, the Trojan who battles Achilles in the pages of the Iliad; similarly a Historia Regum Britanniae from the beginning of the twelfth century attributes the founding of London (“Citie that some tyme cleped was New Troy”) to Aeneas’ great-grandson Brutus, whose name would be perpetuated in Britannia. Brutus is the first king in Layamon’s secular chronicle; he is followed by others who have known rather varied fortunes in later literature: Hudibras, Lear, Gorboduc, Ferrex and Porrex, Lud, Cymbeline, Vortigern, Uther Pendragon (Uther Dragon’s Head), and Arthur of the Round Table, “the king who was and shall be;’ according to his mysterious epitaph. Arthur is mortally wounded in his last battle, but Merlin—who in the Brut is not the son of the Devil but of a silent golden phantom loved by his mother in dreams—prophesies that he will return (like Barbarossa) when his people need him. Fruitlessly waging war against him are those rebellious hordes, the “pagan dogs” of Hengest, the Saxons who were scattered over the face of England, beginning in the fifth century.

  It has been said that Layamon was the first English poet; it is more ac curate and more poignant to think of him as the last of the Saxon poets. The latter, converted to the faith of Jesus, applied the harsh accents and the military images of the Germanic epics to the new mythology (the Twelve Apostles, in one of Cynewulf’s poems, are skilled in the use of shields and fend off a sudden attack by swordsmen; in the Exodus, the Israelites who cross the Red Sea are Vikings); Layamon applied the same rigor to the courtly and magical fictions of the Matière de Bretagne. Because of his subject matter, or a large part of it, he is one of the many poets of the Breton Cycle, a distant colleague of that anonymous writer who revealed to Francesca da Rimini and Paolo the love they felt for each other without knowing it. In spirit, he is a lineal descendant of those Saxon rhapsodists who reserved their joyful words for the description of battles and who, in four centuries, did not produce a single amatory stanza. Layamon has forgotten the metaphors of his ancestors—in the Brut, the sea is not the “whale’s path,” nor are arrows “vipers of war”—but the vision of the world is the same. Like Stevenson, like Flaubert, like so many men of letters, the sedentary cleric takes pleasure in verbal violence; where Wace wrote, “On that day the Britons killed Passent and the Irish King;’ Layamon expands:

  And Uther the Good said these words: “Passent, here you will remain, for here comes Uther on his horse!” He hit him on his head and knocked him down and plunged his sword down his throat (giving him a food that was new to him) and the point of the sword disappeared into the ground. Then Uther said: “Now it is well with you, Irishman; all England is yours. I deliver it into your hands so that you may stay here and live with us. Look, here it is; now you will have it forever.”

  In every line of Anglo-Saxon verse there are certain words, two in the first half and one in the second, that begin with the same consonant or vowel. Layamon tries to observe that old metrical law, but the octosyllabic couplets of Wace’s Geste des Bretons—one of the three “noble books”—continually distract him with the new temptation to rhyme, and so we have brother after other and night after light.. . . The Norman Conquest took place around the middle of the eleventh century; the Brut comes from the beginning of the thirteenth, but the vocabulary of the poem is almost entirely Germanic; in its thirty thousand lines there are not even fifty words of French origin. Here is a passage that scarcely prefigures the English language but has evident affinities with the German:

  And seothe ich cumen wulle

  to mine kineriche

  and wumien mid Brutten

  mid muchelere wunne.

  Those were Arthur’s last words. Their meaning is: “And then I shall go to my kingdom, and I shall dwell among Britons with great delight.”

  Layamon ardently sang of the ancient battles of the Britons against the Saxon invaders as if he himself were not a Saxon, and as if the Britons and the Saxons had not been, since that day in Hastings, conquered by the Normans. This fact is extraordinary and leads to various speculations. Layamon, son of Leovenath (Liefnoth), lived not far from Wales, the bulwark of the Celts and the source (according to Gaston Paris) of the complex myth of Arthur; his mother might well have been a Briton. This theory is possible, unverifiable, and impoverished; one could also suppose that the poet was the son and grandson of Saxons, but that, at heart, the jus soli was stronger than the jus sanguinis. This is not very different from the Argentine with no Querandi blood who identifies with the Indian defenders of his land rather than with the Spaniards of Cabrera or Juan de Garay. Another possibility is that Layamon, whether knowingly or not, gave the Britons of the Brut the value of Saxons, and the Saxons the value of Normans. The riddles, the Bestiary, and Cynewulf’s curious runes prove that such cryptographic or allegorical exercises were not alien to that ancient literature; something, however, tells me that this speculation is fantastic. If Layamon had thought that yesterday’s conquerors were the conquered of today, and today’s conquerors could be the conquered of tomorrow, he would, I think, have used the simile of the Wheel of Fortune, which is in the De Consolatione, or had recourse to the prophetic books of the Bible, not to the intricate romance of Arthur.

  The subjects of the earlier epics were the exploits of a hero or the loyalty that warriors owe to their captain; the true subject of the Brut is England. Layamon could not foresee that two centuries after his death his alliteration would be ridiculous (“I can not geste—rum, ram, ruf—by letter,” says a character in Chaucer) and his language, a rustic jargon. He could not have suspected that his insults to the Hengests’ Saxons would be the last words in the Saxon language, destined to die and be born again in the English language. According to the Germanic scholar Ker, he barely knew the literature whose tradition he inherited; he knew nothing of the wanderings of Widsith among the Persians and Hebrews or of Beowulf’s battle at the bottom of the red marsh. He knew nothing of the great verses from which his own were to spring; perhaps he would not have understood them. His curious isolation, his solitude, make him, now, touching. “No one knows who he himself is,” said Léon Bloy; of that personal ignorance there is no symbol better than this forgotten man, who abhorred his Saxon heritage with Saxon vigor, and who was the last Saxon poet and never knew it.

  [1951] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  For Bernard Shaw

  At the end of the thirteenth century Raymond Lully (Ramon Lull) attempted to solve all the mysteries by means of a frame with unequal, revolving, concentric disks, subdivided into sectors with Latin words. At the beginning of the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill expressed the fear that the number of musical combinations would some day be exhausted and that the future would hold no place for new Webers and Mozarts. At the end of the nineteenth century Kurd Lasswitz played with the overwhelming fantasy of a universal library that would record all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols, or rather everything that can be expressed, in all the languages of the world. Lull’s machine, Mill’s fear, and Lasswitz’s chaotic library may make us laugh, but they merely exaggerate a common propensity to consider metaphysics and the arts as a sort of combinatory game. Those who play that game forget
that a book is more than a verbal structure, or a series of verbal structures; a book is the dialogue with the reader, and the peculiar accent he gives to its voice, and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. That dialogue is infinite. Now the words arnica silentia lunae mean “the intimate, silent, and shining moon,” and in the Aeneid they meant the interlunar period, the darkness that permitted the Greeks to enter the citadel of Troy.51 Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. If I were able to read any contemporary page— this one, for example—as it would be read in the year 2000,1 would know what literature would be like in the year 2000. The concept of literature as a formal game leads, in the best of cases, to the good work of the period and the strophe, to a proper craftsman (Johnson, Renan, Flaubert), and in the worst of cases, to the vexations of a work formed of surprises dictated by vanity and chance (Gracian, Herrera Reissig).

  If literature were nothing but verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book simply by practicing variations. The lapidary formula Everything flows abbreviates the philosophy of Heraclitus in two words. Raymond Lully would tell us that, after saying the first word, one needs only to substitute intransitive verbs in order to discover the second word and to obtain, by a methodical chance, that philosophy and many, many more. But we would reply that the formula obtained by elimination would lack value and even meaning. If it is to have any virtue we must conceive it as Heraclitus did, as an experience of Heraclitus, although “Heraclitus” is only the presumable subject of that experience. I said that a book is a dialogue, a form of narration. In the dialogue an interlocutor is not the sum total or the intermediate value of what he says: it is possible for him not to speak and yet to reveal intelligence, or to emit intelligent observations and still reveal stupidity. The same occurs with literature. D’Artagnan performs innumerable feats and Don Quixote is beaten and derided, but Don Quixote’s worth is felt more deeply. This leads us to an aesthetic problem not posed heretofore: Can an author create characters that are superior to himself? I would reply that he cannot, and my negation would apply to the intellectual as well as the moral levels. I believe that creatures who are more lucid or more noble than our best moments will not issue from us. On that opinion I base my conviction of the preeminence of Shaw. The problems about labor unions and municipalities of his early works will cease to be interesting, or else have already done so; the jokes of the Pleasant Plays bid fair to being, some day, no less awkward than Shakespeare’s (humor, I suspect, is an oral genre, a sudden spark in conversation, not a written thing); the ideas expressed by the prologues and the eloquent tirades will be sought in Schopenhauer and in Samuel Butler;52 but Lavinia, Blanco Posnet, Keegan, Shotover, Richard Dudgeon, and, above all, Julius Caesar, surpass any character imagined by the art of our time. To think of Monsieur Teste or the histrionic Zarathustra of Nietzsche alongside them is to apprehend, with surprise or even astonishment, the primacy of Shaw. In 1911 Albert Soergel was able to write, repeating a commonplace of the time, “Bernard Shaw is an annihilator of the heroic concept, a killer of heroes” (Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit, 214); he did not understand that the heroic was completely independent from the romantic and was embodied in Captain Bluntschli of Arms and the Man, not in Sergius Saranoff.

  The biography of Bernard Shaw by Frank Harris contains an admirable letter written by Shaw, in which he says: “I understand everything and everyone, and am nobody and nothing” (p. 228). From that nothingness (so comparable to the nothingness of God before He created the world, so comparable to the primordial divinity that another Irishman, Johannes Scotus Erigena, called Nihil), Bernard Shaw educed almost innumerable persons, or dramatis personae: the most ephemeral, I suspect, is G. B. S., who represented him to the public and who supplied such a wealth of easy witticisms for newspaper columns.

  Shaw’s basic subjects are philosophy and ethics: it is natural and inevitable that he is not esteemed in Argentina, or that he is remembered in that country only for a few epigrams. The Argentine feels that the universe is nothing but a manifestation of chance, the fortuitous combination of atoms conceived by Democritus; philosophy does not interest him. Nor does ethics: for him, social problems are nothing but a conflict of individuals or classes or nations, in which everything is licit—except ridicule or defeat.

  Man’s character and its variations constitute the essential theme of the novel of our time; the lyric is the complacent magnification of amorous fortunes or misfortunes; the philosophies of Heidegger or Jaspers transform each one of us into the interesting interlocutor of a secret and continuous dialogue with nothingness or with divinity; these disciplines, which may be formally admirable, foster the illusion of the self that Vedanta condemns as a capital error. They may play at desperation and anguish, but at bottom they flatter the vanity; in that sense, they are immoral. Shaw’s work, on the other hand, leaves an aftertaste of liberation. The taste of the doctrines of Zeno’s Porch and the taste of the sagas.

  Buenos Aires, 1951

  A Note on (toward)

  Bernard Shaw

  At the end of the thirteenth century, Raymond Lully (Raimundo Lulio) was prepared to solve all arcana by means of an apparatus of concentric, revolving discs of different sizes, subdivided into sectors with Latin words; John Stuart Mill, at the beginning of the nineteenth, feared that some day the number of musical combinations would be exhausted and there would be no place in the future for indefinite Webers and Mozarts; Kurd Lasswitz, at the end of the nineteenth, toyed with the staggering fantasy of a universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols, in other words, all that it is given to express in all languages. Lully’s machine, Mill’s fear and Lasswitz’s chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propension which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations. Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. This dialogue is infinite; the words amica silentia lunae now mean the intimate, silent and shining moon, and in the Aeneid they meant the interlunar period, the darkness which allowed the Greeks to enter the stronghold of Troy . . .53 Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page―this one, for example―as it will be read in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like. The conception of literature as a formalistic game leads, in the best of cases, to the fine chiseling of a period or a stanza, to an artful decorum (Johnson, Renan, Flaubert), and in the worst, to the discomforts of a work made of surprises dictated by vanity and chance (Gracián, Herrera y Reissig).

  If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula “Everything flows” abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond Lully would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to methodical chance, that philosophy and many others. Here it is fitting to reply that the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive it in terms of Heraclitus, in terms of an experience of Heraclitus, even though “Heraclitus” is nothing more than the presumed subject of that experience. I have said that a book is a dialogue, a form of r
elationship; in a dialogue, an interlocutor is not the sum or average of what he says: he may not speak and still reveal that he is intelligent, he may omit intelligent observations and reveal his stupidity. The same happens with literature; d’Artagnan executes innumerable feats and Don Quixote is beaten and ridiculed, but one feels the valor of Don Quixote more. The foregoing leads us to an aesthetic problem never before posed: Can an author create characters superior to himself? I would say no and in that negation include both the intellectual and the moral. I believe that from us cannot emerge creatures more lucid or more noble than our best moments. It is on this opinion that I base my conviction of Shaw’s pre-eminence. The collective and civic problems of his early works will lose their interest, or have lost it already; the jokes in the Pleasant Plays run the risk of becoming, some day, no less uncomfortable than those of Shakespeare (humor, I suspect, is an oral genre, a sudden favor of conversation, not something written); the ideas declared in his prologues and his eloquent tirades will be found in Schopenhauer and Samuel Butler;54 but Lavinia, Blanco Posnet, Keegan, Shotover, Richard Dudgeon and, above all, Julius Caesar, surpass any character imagined by the art of our time. If we think of Monsieur Teste alongside them or Nietzsche’s histrionic Zarathustra, we can perceive with astonishment and even outrage the primacy of Shaw. In 1911, Albert Soergel could write, repeating a commonplace of the time, “Bernard Shaw is an annihilator of the heroic concept, a killer of heroes” (Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit, 214); he did not understand that the heroic might dispense with the romantic and be incarnated in Captain Bluntschli of Arms and the Man, not in Sergius Saranoff.