The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  So Tropic of Cancer, says I, isn’t a great book. So? There is a consolation prize, however, think of what pleasure it is to disagree with Karl Shapiro. And what pleasure it is to disagree with that long and laudatory list of eminent names that appears on the dust jacket like a list of vitamins and minerals: Eliot, Pound, Durrell, Anaïs Nin, Orwell, etc. And what pleasure to disagree also with the whole of the beat generation and their sycophants who have learned from Miller…to posture at revolutions that even Time Magazine approves of.

  This passage, despite its strange, uncertain irony, calls into being the argument-from-the-stature-of-the-people-with-whom-one-disagrees.

  “The sum effect is that The Glass Bees puzzles,” writes Theodore Solotaroff, “by its technique of steadily delimiting and generalizing its particulars, to the point of turning them into abstractions that could mean this or could mean that, and producing eventually a type of moral sensationalism and sentimentalism.” “Delimiting…particulars to the point of…abstractions…producing…moral sensationalism”—the sum effect is that this argument puzzles by its technique of steadily ensnarling and obfuscating its terms that could mean this and could mean that, and producing eventually a kind of logical surrealism and vertigo.

  And, finally, Mr. Podhoretz himself has argued in Show that if two authors “had really wanted to give us a profile of the art of acting, rather than a profile of the practitioners themselves, they would have tried to induce these people to talk candidly about each other’s work instead of about their own lives and careers.” The argument that a book is improved when its subjects “talk candidly about each other’s work” is—“for reasons,” as Miss Weisberg would say, “all too transparent”—a characteristically New Reviewing prescription. “Hamlet,” Mr. Podhoretz says in the same piece, “would exist without John Gielgud to play him, but would the heroine of Sweet Bird of Youth have existed without Geraldine Page? For me, the fact that I can’t remember her name is answer enough.” Answer enough, perhaps, for Mr. Podhoretz. The reader may detect the birth of the argument-from-personal-amnesia.

  It is hardly necessary to go on citing instances of the inexhaustible variety of argument along the reviewing circuit. There are signs, in any case, that the cloud (catastrophe-droppers might say “the mushroom cloud”) is passing. Or, in purely mechanical terms, there are beginning to be some short circuits in the New Reviewing system. Steven Marcus, in The New York Review, crosses three wires (anti-Everyman cliché, reviewer centrality, and catastrophe-dropping), with this result:

  It is almost as if for three hundred years the literature of Western culture had not, so to speak, conducted a campaign to demonstrate that the middle class family is about as close as we have come to achieving hell on earth.

  “The literature of Western culture,” as represented by Henry James, Thomas Mann, and Jane Austen—to name authors of but three nationalities—has conducted no such “campaign.” Mr. Marcus has confused “the literature of Western culture” with the expository writing of Norman Podhoretz, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Abel, and the rest of the New Reviewing school.

  · · ·

  One can view Mr. Podhoretz as an exponent of a group program only because, in his polemic, or “Undoings,” he insistently invites one to do so, and because (aside from an ill-informed and poorly reasoned piece on Hannah Arendt and his well-intentioned but poorly reasoned essay on the Negro problem, both of which have a kind of negative fascination) the “Undoings” have no interest except as examples of a school of critical writing. And the principles that unite the New Reviewing school are—if it is possible to call them “principles” at all—an elaborate system of cross-references that amounts to mutual coattail-hanging; a stale liberalism gone reactionary in anti-Everyman snobbery and defeatist cliché; a false intellectualism that is astonishingly shabby in its arguments; a hostile imperiousness toward fiction that results in near megalomania on the part of expository writers; and a withering condescension toward authors and readers that finds expression in a strident tendency to shout the opposition down. The New Reviewing is, more generally, a pastiche of attitudes and techniques vying to divert the attention of the reader from the book ostensibly under review to the personality of the reviewer, striving intrusively and valiantly to hold the line against the arts. And the “Undoings” in this collection are, for the most part, models of New Reviewing principle.

  In the essays, however, in which Mr. Podhoretz is least interesting as a member of, or spokesman for, something—in his “Doings,” in short—Mr. Podhoretz does manage to assert himself as a genuine critic. Most of these “Doings” are included in a section called “Traditions”—non-topical, non-polemical, even non-controversial essays—and they are the considered, sympathetic works of a young man more interested in interpreting books than in pitting himself against them. There are not enough of them to constitute a volume of three hundred and seventy-one pages, but they are evidence that the critical writings of Norman Podhoretz may yet result in a worthwhile collection.

  JOHN UPDIKE

  OCTOBER 30, 1965 (J. L. BORGES)

  THE BELATED NORTH American acknowledgment of the genius of Jorge Luis Borges proceeds apace. In 1964, the University of Texas Press published two volumes by this Argentine fantasist, critic, poet, and librarian: Dreamtigers (translated from the Spanish by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland) and Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952 (translated by Ruth L. C. Simms). These translations, together with Grove Press’s Ficciones, bring to three the number of complete books by Borges available in English. There is also New Directions’ Labyrinths, an excellent selection, translated by various hands. And in 1965 the New York University Press published a book about Borges: Borges the Labyrinth Maker, by Ana Maria Barrenechea (translated from the Spanish by Robert Lima).

  Four years ago, when Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the Prix International des Éditeurs, he was known here to few but Hispanic specialists. A handful of poems and short stories had appeared in scattered anthologies and magazines. I myself had read only “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and subsequently a favorite of detective-story anthologies. Though vivid and intellectual beyond the requirements of its genre, the story can be read without awareness that its creator is a giant of world literature. I was prompted to read Borges seriously by a remark made—internationally enough—in Rumania, where, after a blanket disparagement of contemporary French and German fiction, Borges was praised by a young critic in a tone he had previously reserved for Kafka. An analogy with Kafka is inevitable, but I wonder if Borges’ abrupt projection, by the university and avant-garde presses, into the bookstores will prove as momentous as Kafka’s publication, by the commercial firm of Knopf, in the thirties. It is not a question of Borges’ excellence. His driest paragraph is somehow compelling. His fables are written from a height of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction. Furthermore, he is, at least for anyone whose taste runs to puzzles or pure speculation, delightfully entertaining. The question is, I think, whether or not Borges’ lifework, arriving in a lump now (he was born in 1899 and since his youth has been an active and honored figure in Argentine literature), can serve, in its gravely considered oddity, as any kind of clue to the way out of the dead-end narcissism and downright trashiness of present American fiction.

  Borges’ narrative innovations spring from a clear sense of technical crisis. For all his modesty and reasonableness of tone, he proposes some sort of essential revision in literature itself. The absolute conciseness of his style and the eerie comprehensiveness of his career (in addition to writing poems, essays, and stories, he has collaborated on detective novels, translated from many tongues, edited, taught, and even executed film scripts) produce a strangely terminal impression: he seems to be the man for whom literature has no future. I am haunted by knowing that this insatiable reader is now virtually blind….

  · · ·

  The great achievement of his art is his short
stories. In an attempt 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’ œuvre—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 weighted down by the heaviness of their weapons.” Working from the artificial reality of films and gangster novels, and weaving his hypersubtle sensations of unreality into the furniture 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.

  “The Library of Babel,” which appears in Ficciones, is wholly fantastic, yet refers to the librarian’s experience of books. Anyone who has been in the stacks of a great library will recognize the emotional aura, the wearying impression of an inexhaustible and mechanically ordered chaos, that suffuses Borges’ mythical universe, “composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings.” Each hexagon contains twenty shelves, each shelf thirty-two books, each book four hundred and ten pages, each page forty lines, each line eighty letters. The arrangement of these letters is almost uniformly chaotic and formless. The nameless narrator of “The Library of Babel” sets forward, pedantically, the history of philosophical speculation by the human beings who inhabit this inflexible and inscrutable cosmos, which is equipped, apparently for their convenience, with spiral stairs, mirrors, toilets, and lamps (“The light they emit is insufficient, incessant”).

  This monstrous and comic model of the universe contains a full range of philosophical schools—idealism, mysticism, nihilism:

  The idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable.

  The mystics claim that to them ecstasy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a continuous back circling the walls of the room….That cyclical book is God.

  I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands….They speak (I know) of “the febrile Library, whose hazardous volumes run the constant risk of being changed into others and in which everything is affirmed, denied, and confused as by a divinity in delirium.”

  Though the Library appears to be eternal, the men within it are not, and they have a history punctuated by certain discoveries and certain directions now considered axiomatic. Five hundred years ago, in an upper hexagon, two pages of homogeneous lines were discovered that within a century were identified as “a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with classical Arabic inflections” and translated. The contents of these two pages—“notions of combinational analysis”—led to the deduction that the Library is total; that is, its shelves contain all possible combinations of the orthographic symbols:

  Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a demonstration of
the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on this gospel, the commentary on the commentary on this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

  Men greeted this revelation with joy; “the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimensions of hope.” They surged onto the stairs, searching for Vindications—books that would vindicate and explain his life to each man. Sects sprang up. One used dice and metal letters in an attempt to “mimic the divine disorder” and compose by chance the canonical volumes. Another, the Purifiers, destroyed millions of books, hurling them down the air shafts. They believed in “the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.” A third sect worshipped the Man of the Book—a hypothetical librarian who, in some remote hexagon, must have perused a book “which is a cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest.” This librarian is a god. “Many pilgrimages have sought Him out.”

  The analogies with Christianity are pursued inventively and without the tedium of satire. The narrator himself confides, “To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book. I pray the unknown gods that some man—even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it.” But in his own person he has only the “elegant hope” that the Library, if traversed far enough, would repeat itself in the same disorder, which then would constitute an order. At hand, in this illegible chaos, are only the tiny rays of momentary sense, conglomerations of letters spelling O Time your pyramids, Combed Clap of Thunder, or The Plaster Cramp.

  This kind of comedy and desperation, these themes of vindication and unattainability, suggest Kafka. But The Castle is a more human work, more personal and neurotic; the fantastic realities of Kafka’s fiction are projections of the narrator-hero’s anxieties, and have no communion, no interlocking structure, without him. The Library of Babel instead has an adamant solidity. Built of mathematics and science, it will certainly survive the weary voice describing it, and outlast all its librarians, already decimated, we learn in a footnote, by “suicide and pulmonary disease.” We move, with Borges, beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront, in his work, the world atomized and vacant. Perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space.