by Aashish Kaul
Let us now go and eat and drink, resumes his companion. There I will bore you with an idea of a story I just this minute discovered, about a rose that is made immortal by the name ‘rose’, and in return you may tell me how the moon is tonight. That we are here, without anyone knowing it, is nothing short of a miracle, which I produced simply by walking up the street and pressing the bell to your apartment, while all around us they break their heads and spines over our work, suffocating it under oceans of words and mountains of paper.
Academic dementia, he breathes in the ear of his companion, tightening his hold on the other’s arm, and the two men break into laughter and song together, the bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the – fens …
*
He lies sprawled on the wet grass thinking of Macedonio, a cold compress on his head, slowly forgetting the world, himself, and his quest, divining the truth in the middle of the pampa. What does he care that to his left at some distance, clouds are biting away and spitting ice on Mont Blanc? What does he care that he is back in the beloved city of his youth where he first found Schopenhauer and Whitman? For he can now see the tiger clearer than ever before, flying through the heat-shimmering jungles of Bengal, gathering speed, salivating, as it rushes to tear him to pieces.
A Word on Two Travellers
Fiction, once remarked André Gide, was history which could have happened. The evidence that Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett met in real life is scant and unreliable. This conclusion is supported by their respective conversations, interviews, and correspondences published to date, where one is conspicuous by his absence in the other. And yet their international renown owes so much to the First Prix Formentor the two writers shared in 1961. The prize opened up for their works new commercial possibilities, led to translations into several languages, and won for them innumerable admirers around the world. Proceeding with the assumption that the singular event of a meeting between the two writers never transpired is in some way liberating for a storyteller, for it grants him the occasion to weave fantasies into the texture of that which we call real.
Growing up in completely different and yet not so different worlds of Buenos Aires and Dublin in the early part of the last century, both Borges and Beckett were exceptional readers and dreamers from early age. Borges loved English as much if not more than Spanish and once remarked that English should have been his by birth right. Fueled by his father’s love and passion for English writers and philosophers, he had by the age of nine already translated Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince into Spanish, which the publisher unknowingly but not unreasonably ascribed to the father instead of the son. Troubled by poor vision from the beginning, his father’s library became for Borges the entire world, and it seemed to him later that he never did step out of it. Books, yes, but two other ‘heterogeneous’ (the word is a favourite of Borges or at least his translators) interests would divide and occupy him, remaining lifelong obsessions: chess and the tiger.
It is told that the child, taken to visit the zoo once, went up close to the cage due to his near-sightedness (hence, he once retorted that he preferred reading Milton in a hotel room in Paris to touring the city, and that he didn’t ever regret it) and watched with wonder the toing and froing yellow-striped beast, which would mark thenceforth nearly all his hours of dream and waking, and which he would make eternal through his work, like Keats’s nightingale. As he grew older, Borges would chase that one image through the works not only of Kipling and Blake, Dante and Whitman, but also through the writings of the Gnostics and the Chinese Mystics, giving to the tiger’s stripes the ‘secret language of God,’ and ultimately employing it as a metaphor for that ‘greatest of perplexities’ – time – in the now famous words ‘time is the tiger that destroys me, but I am that tiger.’
Then again, the chequered board became, like the wild cat, something mysterious, inexplicable, and necessary. Borges tells of his father using a chessboard to explain to him in his childhood why the arrow in Zeno can never leave the bow and how the nimble-footed Achilles will always lose the race to the crawling tortoise. As he grew to love Homer and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes, his love of the epic and beauty in literature coalesced with the enigmas of numbers and time into the black-and-white board, and gradually chess began to percolate into his stories, essays, and poems as an essential metaphor for that which is at once beautiful and elusive.
A few years spent in Europe, chiefly Switzerland, Spain, and Germany, from when he was only fifteen, exposed the young Borges to the flavour of other tongues and literatures, and which flamed his precocious talent for words, languages, and etymologies, acquiring and assimilating them with an uncommon delight. Thus, by the time he was all but twenty he had taught himself to read Heine in German, Dante in Italian, Baudelaire in French, and Virgil in Latin. At the same time his love for the English language and the literatures of England, Ireland, and America, reached a high point. He travelled widely in Spain and Germany where he perfected his strokes in fast-flowing rivers, fell under the spell of German Expressionist Art, met artists and poets and, uncharacteristically, even joined a literary group (which he later dismissed as a hoax) before returning to South America where he remained for nearly all his life, and composed the works on which his reputation most solidly rests. In his fifties, he succeeded the blind French historian, Paul Groussac, as the Director of the National Library of Argentina, by which time he was himself blind, a fact he attributed in a poem to the terrible irony of God who had given him ‘books and the night.’
Beckett, on the other hand, grew up equally at home among books, music, and the outdoors. Sports came naturally to him and from a young age, he played cricket, tennis, and later golf, exceedingly well. While still a child, he accompanied his father on long walks into the Irish country and learned to dive and swim in the sea. The elemental in nature and the sounds and scenes of his childhood would have a lasting impression on him and remain a lifelong obsession entering and transforming his work everywhere. He received music lessons at a relatively young age and played the piano almost professionally as he grew older. Like Borges, he seems to have had a great talent for languages and by the time he had passed school he could already read books in French and Italian without help of a dictionary. In due course, he would teach himself to read German and Spanish too, becoming proficient enough at least in German to later oversee the translation into the language of some of his own work, and to travel to Germany to direct his own plays. Then again, like Borges, he succumbed early to the lure of the chessboard, not only becoming in later years proficient enough to play and hold his own against the likes of Marcel Duchamp, but to make it the very genesis of more than one of his important works. At Trinity College Dublin, he excelled in both sports and literature, often touring with the college teams for rugby and cricket tournaments and yet receiving a scholarship to become a lector in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris for two years.
Once in Paris, he quickly came into his own. Having been introduced to James Joyce, Beckett soon became a member of Joyce’s inner circle which included leading writers and artists of the time. Much taken in by the senior writer, he often read and scribbled notes for Joyce’s Work in Progress as his sight declined severely over the next few years, and later accompanying him for evening walks along the Seine. Encouraged by Joyce, Beckett collaborated with a friend to produce the first translation into French of Anna Livia Plurabelle.
By the time he came to Paris, Beckett already possessed a thorough knowledge of French literature and drama, and had carefully read the philosophical writings of Descartes, Geulincx, and Malebranche. During his stay there, he reread Dante’s Comedy and began a systematic study of Marcel Proust’s novel. Over the next decade, he would work with the Surrealist camp in Paris, contribute important essays on Joyce and Proust, publish his early poems and stories in avant-garde magazines, and translate into one another from French or English several crucial works
. Following the natural course from Kant to Hegel, he one day came to Schopenhauer in whom he found ‘an intellectual justification of unhappiness,’ a support for his deepening view that suffering is inseparable from human life, that ‘will’ is an unwelcome intrusion, and that real consciousness lies beyond human cognition. Together with his previous readings of the Bible, the Greeks, and the Hermetic texts, he had acquired at least a working knowledge of Eastern philosophical systems. Newer discoveries in physics and mathematics drove him to the understanding that reason beyond a point breeds paradoxes for itself, and that it is impossible to know reality through language, a view then becoming popular through the writings of Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Side by side, he consolidated his knowledge and love of European Art, from old masters to the new, travelling from one gallery to another, in England, France, Italy, and Germany, even as the clouds of fascism were gathering ominously over Europe. Pilgrimages taken in tough times, with little money and through bitter cold, amid ever-growing swamps of destitution and desperation, and in a body already giving signs of suppuration would confirm his view that the ‘experience of modern man is of a non-knower’ and would push him away from those certainties of language and order, that desire of ‘defrocking the object’ to which Joyce and Proust had given their lives – push him to beget his grandest works in what he often called ‘the great siege in the room.’
Since words alone were insufficient, Beckett took help from music and painting. Whether riding a bicycle, or leaning on crutches, or worst come worst, slithering on the ground like Molloy to find his mother (what in a Jungian analysis would be a move towards the anima, to the feminine in man’s psyche in touch with the unconscious), Beckett continued to move on and on from one text to the next in his search for the ‘real’ which is at once revealed and curtailed by words. To pierce the curtain was to risk losing the ‘real’ itself, and so he did what was only reasonable: to employ words, like music and painting, in an abstract and essentially different, non-representational sense, to fish out, what Northrop Frye called, ‘a truth of implication, a truth emerging from inner coherence rather than external reference.’ What he had written before the war in his essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, became the first premise of his own writing ‘…form is content, content is form…’
The everyday reality which Beckett questioned in his work, had been from the very beginning suspect for Borges due to his poor vision, and which obliged him to see things a little differently from others. In addition to this, nearly all his earliest readings, from Mark Twain to Poe, from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to Carroll’s Alice Books, from Treasure Island to H. G. Wells to the Arabian Nights opened up for him a different and richer world. With the passage of years, he read countless books, many that none had read for centuries, saw and heard terrible things, and divined that each seemingly ordinary day is also the carrier of untold silent cruelties, that which others give the name of ‘reality’ is a mere Schopenhauerian objectivation of will and thus in itself a fiction, far apart from the ‘real’ which is ‘obedient to vast and secret laws’ and, by its very nature, unknowable. But if the life we led, he asked himself, was essentially a fiction, could he not then bend it around his own designs to create, like Tlön, a minutely detailed orderly planet, ‘a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.’ And yet to do so, it was essential to write in a fashion that would declare its own artifice, behind which there was nothing but an ever-widening black hole – that words were what remained to conceal the terror of the universe. But he took his task only ironically and never vainly so that later he could give, in one of his parables, the following epiphany to Giambattista Marino who understood on his deathbed that ‘the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamt them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.’ As Paul de Man observed early, ‘his main characters are prototypes for the writer, and his worlds, are prototypes for a highly stylized kind of poetry or fiction…[constituting] Borges’s distinctive style, as well as his comment upon this style. His stories are about the style in which they are written.’ So, just as Beckett, form became content, and content form.
If one looks past their seemingly different works and styles, Borges and Beckett share an affinity in philosophy and vision that is uncannily close. Physically separated by vast spaces, their imaginary worlds as also their likes and dislikes in literature and elsewhere superimposed and dissolved into each other: from the love of Dr Johnson and Robert Burton, Joyce and Stevenson, Heine and Schopenhauer, to the regard for Kandinsky’s oils and Stravinsky’s scores; from the sublime, abstract pleasures of chess and mathematics, the cosmologies of Milton and Dante, to the distaste for the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre. What Beckett admired in Proust, Borges had long since found in the opium-induced dreams of De Quincey. That which had moved Beckett to write in his Proust: ‘habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit,’ made Borges repair to the library and, circling in its dim sanctuary, produce a literature of order and splendour, unbelievable yet essential. And did not Beckett truly come to stand in for Borges – the dreamer who believed he had dreamt the world and forgotten about it – in Comment c’est, when he wrote, ‘… but all this business of voices yes quaqua yes of other worlds yes of someone in another world yes whose kind of dream I am yes said to be yes that he dreams all the time yes tells all the time yes his only dream yes his only story yes…’?
But what these two great writers shared above all, what one rarely finds in literature these days, was man’s foredoomed quest to know his place in this gouache of space and time that he can’t rid himself of, that which is both his prison and the window out of the prison, that which makes for both love and defeat, that which, for want of something better, he calls the universe.
Acknowledgements
Some of the stories collected in this volume first appeared in Variaciones Borges, Arts & Opinion, Evergreen Review, Southerly, and Carpe Articulum Literary Review.
The words in italics on pp. 89-90 and 95 are from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, p. 185 (The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume II: Novels. 2006. Grove Press, New York), and Murphy, p. 272 (1957. Grove Press, New York), respectively. The Heine fragment in German on p.101 is from the poem ‘Wiedersehen’ and can be found, among other places, in the bilingual collection, Heinrich Heine, The Lazarus Poems. Trans. Alistair Elliot (1979. MidNAG–Carcanet, Manchester).
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