by John Updike
It’s the other one, it’s Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor.
Borges tempts one to quote him at too great length. These brief paragraphs composed in his head have an infrangible aptness. His ability to crystallize vague ideas and vaguer emotions into specific images has grown. The image of Layamon, the last Saxon poet, returns in the form of an anonymous old man, dying, unaware that he is the last man to have witnessed the worship of Woden. He lies in a stable: “Outside are the plowed fields and a deep ditch clogged with dead leaves and an occasional wolf track in the black earth at the edge of the forest.” This stark sentence, with its unexpectedly vivid ditch, has in it the whole of a primitive England, and pierces us with a confused sense of elapsed time. These sketches see a diminishing of those adjectives—“mysterious,” “secret,” “atrocious”—with which the younger Borges insisted on his sense of strangeness. Instead, there is a delicate manipulation of the concrete—lists and catalogues in which one or two of the series seem anomalous (“… islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses …”) and the application now and then of a surprising color adjective (the volumes’ “golden shadow” above, “red Adam in Paradise,” and, apropos of Homer, “black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle”). Immensity is reified in terms of color: “Every hundred paces a tower cleft the air; to the eye their color was identical, yet the first of all was yellow, and the last, scarlet, so delicate were the gradations and so long the series.” In this image the concept of the infinite—the concept that “corrupts and confuses the others”—is tamed into something lyrical and even pretty. One feels in Dreamtigers a calm, an intimation of truce, a tranquil fragility. Like so many last or near-last works—like The Tempest, The Millionairess, or “Investigations of a Dog”—Dreamtigers preserves the author’s life-long concerns, but drained of urgency; horror has yielded to a resigned humorousness. These sketches can be read for their grace and wit but scarcely for narrative excitement; the most exciting of them, “Ragnarök,” embodies Borges’ most terrible vision, of an imbecilic God or body of gods. But it occurs within a dream, and ends easily: “We drew our heavy revolvers—all at once there were revolvers in the dream—and joyously put the Gods to death.”
The second half of this slim volume consists of poems, late and early. Poetry was where Borges’ ramifying literary career originally took root. The translations, by Harold Morland, into roughly four-beat and intermittently rhymed lines, seem sturdy and clear, and occasional stanzas must approximate very closely the felicity of the original:
In their grave corner, the players
Deploy the slow pieces. And the chessboard
Detains them until dawn in its severe
Compass in which two colors hate each other.
As a poet, Borges has some of the qualities—a meditative circularity, a heavy-lidded elegance—of Wallace Stevens:
With slow love she looked at the scattered
Colors of afternoon. It pleased her
to lose herself in intricate melody
or in the curious life of verses.
And
We shall seek a third tiger. This
Will be like those others a shape
Of my dreaming, a system of words
A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger
That, beyond the mythologies,
Is treading the earth.
But in English the poems are chiefly interesting for their content; they are more autobiographical and emotionally direct than Borges’ prose. The first one, “Poem About Gifts,” movingly portrays himself in his blindness:
Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.
Thoughts anonymously cached in the maze of his fictions are enunciated in his own voice. In a fabricated encyclopedia article he describes the “philosophers of Uqbar” as believing that “Copulation and mirrors are abominable.… For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.” In a poem, “Mirrors,” the belief turns out to be Borges’ own:
I see them as infinite, elemental
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of begetting. Sleepless. Bringing doom.
The profound sense of timelessness that in the prose activates so much textual apparatus becomes in verse an elementary nostalgia:
Rain is something happening in the past.…
And the drenched afternoon brings back the sound
How longed for, of my father’s voice, not dead.
And his long poem about his childhood home at Adrogué culminates:
The ancient amazement of the elegy
Loads me down when I think of that house
And I do not understand how time goes by,
I, who am time and blood and agony.
Together, the prose and poetry of Dreamtigers afford some glimpses into Borges’ major obscurities—his religious concerns and his affective life. Physical love, when it appears at all in his work, figures as something remote, like an ancient religion. “[Shakespeare] thought that in the exercise of an elemental human rite he might well find what he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon.” And Homer remembers when “a woman, the first the gods set aside for him, had waited for him in the shadow of a hypogeum, and he had searched for her through corridors that were like stone nets, along slopes that sank into the shadow.” Though Dreamtigers contains two fine poems addressed to women—Susana Soca and Elvira de Alvear—they are eulogies couched in a tone of heroic affection not different from the affection with which he writes elsewhere of male friends like Alfonso Reyes and Macedonio Fernández. This is at the opposite pole from homosexuality; femaleness, far from being identified with, is felt as a local estrangement that blends with man’s cosmic estrangement. There are two prose sketches that, by another writer, might have shown some erotic warmth, some surrender to femininity. In one, he writes of Julia, a “sombre girl” with “an unbending body,” in whom he sensed “an intensity that was altogether foreign to the erotic.” In their walks together, he must have talked about mirrors, for now (in 1931) he has learned that she is insane and has draped her mirrors because she imagines that his reflection has replaced her own. In the other, he writes of Delia Elena San Marco, from whom he parted one day beside “a river of vehicles and people.” They did not meet again, and in a year she was dead. From the casualness of their unwitting farewell, he concludes, tentatively, that we are immortal. “For if souls do not die, it is right that we should not make much of saying goodbye.”
It would be wrong to think that Borges dogmatically writes as an atheist. God is often invoked by him, not always in an ironical or pantheistic way.
God has created nighttime, which he arms
With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear
To man he is a reflection and a mere
Vanity.
He hopes seriously for immortality. Death is “the mirror/In which I shall see no-one or I shall see another.” One of the many riddles that interest him is Christ’s aspect, and he is moved by the possibility that “the profile of a Jew in the subway is perhaps the profile of Christ; perhaps the hands that give us our change at a ticket window duplicate the ones some soldiers nailed one day to the cross.” But we feel that he entertains these possibilities, almost blasphemously; they are isolated, for him, from the corpus of ethics and
argument which is historical Christianity. He dismisses the orthodox afterlife: “We distrust his intelligence, as we would distrust the intelligence of a God who maintained heavens and hells.” He ransacks Christian apologetics for oddities of forced reasoning. He writes, “Those who automatically reject the supernatural (I try, always, to belong to this group).…” While Christianity is not dead in Borges, it sleeps in him, and its dreams are fitful. His ethical allegiance is to pre-Christian heroism, to Stoicism, to “the doctrines of Zeno’s Porch and … the sagas,” to the harsh gaucho ethos celebrated in the Argentine folk poem of Martín Fierro. Borges is a pre-Christian whom the memory of Christianity suffuses with premonitions and dread. He is European in everything except the detachment with which he views European civilization, as something intrinsically strange—a heap of relics, a universe of books without a central clue. This detachment must be, in part, geographical; by many devious routes he returns to the home in space and time that he finds
in the tumbledown
Decadence of the widespread suburbs,
And in the thistledown that the pampas wind
Blows into the entrance hall …
And in a flag sort of blue and white
Over a barracks, and in unappetizing stories
Of street-corner knifings, and in the sameness
Of afternoons that are wiped out and leave us …
Perhaps Latin America, which has already given us the absolute skepticism of Machado de Assis, is destined to reënact the intellectual patterns of ancient Greece. Borges’ voracious and vaguely idle learning, his ecumenic and problematical and unconsoling theology, his willingness to reconsider the most primitive philosophical questions, his tolerance of superstition in both himself and others, his gingerly and regretful acknowledgment of women and his disinterest in the psychological and social worlds that women dominate, his almost Oriental modesty, his final solitude, his serene pride—this constellation of Stoic attributes, mirrored in the southern hemisphere, appears inverted and frightful.
Borges the Labyrinth Maker, by Ana María Barrenechea, has for its jacket design a labyrinth from which there is no exit. I do not know whether this is intentional or a mistake in drawing. The book is a methodical and efficient arrangement of quotations from Borges in abstract categories—The Infinite, Chaos and the Cosmos, Pantheism and Personality, Time and Eternity, Idealism and Other Forms of Unreality. In a foreword, Borges says that the book “has unearthed many secret links and affinities in my own literary output of which I had been quite unaware. I thank her for those revelations of an unconscious process.” Professor Barrenechea’s collations, however—including many sentences and paragraphs of Borges not elsewhere translated—seem to me an admirable explication of his conscious philosophical concerns as they shape, adjective by adjective, his fiction. What is truly unconscious—the sense of life that drives him from unequivocal philosophical and critical assertion to the essential ambiguity of fiction—she scarcely touches. The labyrinth of his thought-forms is drawn without an indication of how his concrete and vigorous art has emerged. She admits this: “Only one aspect of the writer’s work—the expression of irreality—has been treated; but Borges’ creativity is characterized by the richness and complexity of his art.”
The great achievement of his art is his short stories. To round off this review of accessory volumes, I will describe two of my favorites.
“The Waiting” is from his second major collection, El Aleph, and is found, translated by James E. Irby, in Labyrinths. It is a rarity in Borges’ oeuvre—a story in which nothing incredible occurs. A gangster fleeing from the vengeance of another gangster seeks anonymity in a northwest part of Buenos Aires. After some weeks of solitary existence, he is discovered and killed. These events are assigned a detailed and mundane setting. The very number of the boarding house where he lives is given (4004: a Borgian formula for immensity), and the neighborhood is flatly described: “The man noted with approval the spotted plane trees, the square plot of earth at the foot of each, the respectable houses with their little balconies, the pharmacy alongside, the dull lozenges of the paint and hardware store. A long windowless hospital wall backed the sidewalk on the other side of the street; the sun reverberated, farther down, from some greenhouses.” Yet much information is withheld. “The man” mistakenly gives a cabdriver a Uruguayan coin, which “had been in his pocket since that night in the hotel at Melo.” What had happened that night in Melo and the nature of his offense against his enemy are not disclosed. And when the landlady—herself unnamed, and specified as having “a distracted or tired air”—asks the man his name he gives the name, Villari, of the man hunting him! He does this, Borges explains, “not as a secret challenge, not to mitigate the humiliation which actually he did not feel, but because that name troubled him, because it was impossible for him to think of any other. Certainly he was not seduced by the literary error of thinking that assumption of the enemy’s name might be an astute maneuver.”
Villari—Villari the hunted—is consistently prosaic, even stupid. He ventures out to the movies and, though he sees stories of the underworld that contain images of his old life, takes no notice of them, “because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him.” Reading of another underworld in Dante, “he did not judge the punishments of hell to be unbelievable or excessive.” He has a toothache and is compelled to have the tooth pulled. “In this ordeal he was neither more cowardly nor more tranquil than other people.” His very will to live is couched negatively: “It only wanted to endure, not to come to an end.” The next sentence, grounding the abhorrence of death upon the simplest and mildest things, recalls Unamuno. “The taste of the maté, the taste of black tobacco, the growing line of shadows gradually covering the patio—these were sufficient incentives.”
Unobtrusively, the reader comes to love Villari, to respect his dull humility and to share his animal fear. Each brush with the outer world is a touch of terror. The toothache—“an intimate discharge of pain in the back of his mouth”—has the force of a “horrible miracle.” Returning from the movies, he feels pushed, and, turning “with anger, with indignation, with secret relief,” he spits out “a coarse insult.” The passerby and the reader are alike startled by this glimpse into the savage criminal that Villari has been. Each night, at dawn, he dreams of Villari—Villari the hunter—and his accomplices overtaking him, and of shooting them with the revolver he keeps in the drawer of the bedside table. At last—whether betrayed by the trip to the dentist, the visits to the movie house, or the assumption of the other’s name we do not know—he is awakened one July dawn by his pursuers:
Tall in the shadows of the room, curiously simplified by those shadows (in the fearful dreams they had always been clearer), vigilant, motionless and patient, their eyes lowered as if weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had overtaken him at last. With a gesture, he asked them to wait and turned his face to the wall, as if to resume his sleep. Did he do it to arouse the pity of those who killed him, or because it is less difficult to endure a frightful happening than to imagine it and endlessly await it, or—and this is perhaps most likely—so that the murderers would be a dream, as they had already been so many times, in the same place, at the same hour?
So the inner action of the narrative has been to turn the utterly unimaginative hero into a magician. In retrospect, this conversion has been scrupulously foreshadowed. The story, indeed, is a beautiful cinematic succession of shadows; the most beautiful are those above, which simplify the assassins—“(in the fearful dreams they had always been clearer).” The parenthesis of course makes a philosophic point: it opposes the ambiguity of reality to the relative clarity and simplicity of what our minds conceive. It functions as well in the realistic level of the story, bodying forth all at once the climate, the moment of dawn, the atmosphere of the room, the sleeper’s state of vision, the menace and matter-of-factness of the men, “their eyes lowered as if weig
hted down by the heaviness of their weapons.” Working from the artificial reality of films and gangster novels, and imposing his hyper-subtle sensations of unreality on the underworld of his plot, Borges has created an episode of criminal brutality in some ways more convincing than those in Hemingway. One remembers that in “The Killers” Ole Andreson also turns his face to the wall. It is barely possible that Borges had in mind a kind of gloss of Hemingway’s classic. If that is so, with superior compassion and keener attention to peripheral phenomena he has enriched the theme. In his essay on Hawthorne, Borges speaks of the Argentine literary aptitude for realism; his own florid fantasy is grafted onto that native stock.