by Tim Parks
This challenging assertion looks forward to a key line in the Inferno where, when Dante shows pity for the diviners, Virgil protests: ‘Qui vive la pietà quand’ è ben morta.’ Literally: “Here pity - or piety (pietà can mean either or both) - lives when it is good and dead.’ The Hollanders, determined to spare us misunderstandings, translate, ‘Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.’ Sinclair more faithfully and enigmatically offers, ‘Here pity lives when it is quite dead.’
But let us not quibble over the translation, since the Hollanders’ version seems in fact the only contextually comprehensible reading of the line. Let us also leave aside the ungenerous reflection that Virgil, who himself shows pity elsewhere, has a particular axe to grind with the diviners since his Aeneid was frequently read, not as a poem, but as an instrument of divination. Pity for them was not justice for him! Let us even assume, as Hollander would wish us to, I think, that the comment refers to the whole of Hell and not just to this particular ditch. All the same, and however we phrase it, we cannot escape the fact that Dante is drawing our attention here to a scission within the very notion of what piety, or godliness, is.
The two qualities, pity/piety, stem from the same etymological root; we had hoped they were inseparable. Instinctively, we seek to keep them together. But a contemplation of Hell, where God’s terrible vendetta is visited on the damned for all eternity, obliges us to see that if we want an ordered cosmos with Paradise on top and Hell at the bottom, then pity will have to go. Hell, a pitiless place, is the price one pays for Paradise and more in general for the delirium of believing that human actions can reverberate for all eternity.
Looked at this way, Sayers’ translation of the thorny line is intriguing. ‘Here pity, or here piety, must die,’ she writes, acknowledging the interesting alternative that it might be pity that lives, as it certainly does in Dante’s poem, while orthodox piety and its grim fortifications collapse.
Another difficult and provocative remark makes it clear that Dante appreciates the revolutionary potential of the tensions that galvanise his tale. In Canto 12 the poet finds himself slithering down a landslide that ‘shifted under my feet’. In the now familiar tone of reassuring explanation, Virgil tells Dante that when Christ came briefly down to Hell after his crucifixion, carrying off a select few in the process, the infernal place was severely shaken. He goes on:
so that I thought the universe felt love,
by which, as some believe,
the world has many times been turned to chaos.
And at that moment this ancient rock,
Here and elsewhere, fell broken into pieces.
This is a very dangerous idea. The entrance to Hell bore the claim that the place was founded by ‘primal love, but here we have a suggestion that love is alien to order. Love leads to chaos because it tends to forgive, it isn’t interested in coiling tails and carefully divided ditches.
Whether he originally intended it or not, Dante has found that to bring pity into Hell makes for the most powerful poetry, as qualities that stir our souls are infinitely punished by a system we nevertheless feel we must accept as divine. Having happened upon that formula, he cannot resist pursuing it. What could be more seductive to an artist than the serendipitous discovery? But each time he does so he exposes an essential tension at the core of Christianity, a quarrel between rival visions of justice and of love that has kept Western society uneasily on the move for centuries, so much so that today it has become very hard for us to contemplate inflicting pain of any kind. To read the Inferno is to savour at its most elemental and intense one of the profound moral conflicts that has shaped the contemporary psyche. If twenty-first-century man went to Heaven he would soon be demonstrating to have Hell abolished.
Point the infernal brickwork as he will, even Robert Hollander is not immune from some chaotic sentiment. When Dante is moved at the sight of his old homosexual friends and wishes to greet them with an embrace, our commentator forgets to remind us that such affection for people God has eternally condemned is out of place. Rather than castigating the fraudulent intentions of a sinner who puts the blame for his sodomy on his ‘bestial wife, Hollander applauds the poet for a remarkable lack of the typical Christian heterosexual scorn for homosexuals’. It is a rare lapse, but telling.
Whenever a magical world crumbles and its demons are put to flight, you can be sure they will turn up again elsewhere, and without the reassuring distance old boundaries guaranteed. So, on reading Dante, one is powerfully struck by how present he is in our modern literature. Hell is gone, but, like New York’s mental patients, the damned have been let loose among us. They are there in Eliot, in Kafka, in Borges, and above all in Beckett, where they loom from the trash cans of Endgame, from the heap of sand in Happy Days. And if, having read the Hollanders’ excellent translation, you are yearning for a more sophisticated commentary on the Divina Commedia, you might do worse than to turn to Beckett’s novel Watt, where he recreates for the modern reader the Inferno’s strange force field of symmetry and suffering, of a language that evokes and anaesthetises. Here is Watt exploring a Hell in need of renovation:
This garden was surrounded by a high barbed wire fence, greatly in need of repair, of new wire, of fresh barbs. Through this fence, where it was not overgrown by briars and giant nettles, similar gardens, similarly enclosed, each with its pavilion, were on all sides distinctly to be seen. Now converging, now diverging, these fences presented a striking irregularity of contour. No fence was party, nor any part of any fence. But their adjacence was such, at certain places, that a broad-shouldered or broad-basined man, threading these narrow straits, would have done so with greater ease and with less jeopardy to his coat, and perhaps to his trousers, sideways than frontways. For a big-bottomed man, on the contrary, or a big-bellied man, frontal motion would be an absolute necessity, if he did not wish his stomach to be perforated, or his arse, or perhaps both, by a rusty barb, or by rusty barbs. A big-bottomed big-bosomed woman, an obese wet-nurse, for example, would be under a similar necessity. While persons at once broad-shouldered and big-bellied, or broad-basined and big-bottomed, or broad-basined and big-bellied, or broad-shouldered and big-bottomed, or big-bosomed and broad-shouldered, or big-bosomed and broad-basined, would on no account, if they were in their right senses, commit themselves to this treacherous channel …
Both the horror and the humour of such a passage owe everything to Dante, while the distance between the anguished tension of the Inferno and the despairing hilarity of Watt can in part be traced back to the corrosive powers that animate the earlier work.
The damned, then, show no signs of making themselves scarce. Like the poor, they are ever with us. But can the same be said of Beatrice and the blessed? Alas, no. Clinging to the wreckage, Ulysses and his sinful crew survive for a thousand reincarnations, but the good ship Paradise, it seems, was lost with all hands. Fortunately Dante was not aboard. Having threaded the world’s most treacherous passage and dreamed up, for the other side, a Purgatorio and Paradiso of great beauty and complexity but little excitement, he then awoke to find himself once again under the stars, where he remains with us to this day. It is a poor and shadowy sort of immortality for a man who no doubt believed he would be in the blazing light of Paradise with the saints and the angels; but at least the commedia of literary fame, unlike that of Heaven and Hell, is not one that need be underwritten by the sufferings of the damned.
The Universal Gentleman
[Jorge Luis Borges]
‘Romantic ego worship and loudmouthed individualism are … wreaking a havoc on the arts,’ announces a twenty-three-year-old Borges in the first essay of Selected Non-Fictions. The date is 1922. The piece is entitled ‘The Nothingness of the Personality’. In bold, polemical spirit, he declares: ‘The self does not exist.’
Fifty-six years later, old, adored and blind, Borges finds himself lecturing on the subject of immortality. He remarks: T don’t want to continue being Jorge Luis Borges; I want to be someone else
. I hope that my death will be total; I hope to die in body and soul.’
In the first statement the self doesn’t exist; in the second it is sufficiently real to be a burden, indeed the burden. It will not be difficult to read all of Borges’s work as driven by the tension generated between these two positions: self the merest invention, easily dissolved and denied; self the most disturbing imposition, frightening in its implications, appalling in its tenacity and limitations. All the same, the curious thing in the later statement is the confession: 'I want to be someone else.’ Is that an option? It is something we shall have to come back to.
Born a shy boy in 1899 in the macho town of Buenos Aires, the young Borges must soon have had occasion to feel different from others. His parents contrived to exacerbate his self-awareness in all kinds of ways. Half-English, his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, had his children brought up bilingual. Here was distinction. There was an English grandmother, an English nanny, above all a well-stocked English library where Jorge Luis and his younger sister Norah did their first reading. Coddled at home till the age of nine, Jorge Luis was then plunged, as if in some perverse behavioural experiment, into a tough local school. A bespectacled stammerer, eccentrically dressed in Eton blazer and tie, he had five years here to learn about bullying before the family was obliged to move to Switzerland to find a cure for Jorge Guillermo’s incipient blindness.
Now Borges was the boy who didn’t know French and German. He learned them. Living in Geneva, he spent his teens reading voraciously in four languages, so that by the age of twenty he had already discovered most of the writers who would be important to him throughout his long career. The impressive list that all accounts of his life must necessarily repeat (for Borges always kept his sources to the fore) includes, among many others, Berkeley, Hume, William James, Cervantes, Chesterton, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Wells, Nietzsche, Stevenson, Poe, Whitman (in German) and the author of The Thousand and One Nights.
The Thousand and One Nights was his declared favourite. But having read and reread this Arab exotica in Burton’s lavishly lubricious version, it must have been clear to the young Borges that there was now another thing he didn’t know about, another thing that threatened to set him apart: sex. Certainly his timidity and innocence were evident to the other members of the family. Jorge Guillermo, a compulsive philanderer, ever dependent on and ever betraying his domineering wife, decided that the boy’s education was not complete. Before returning to Argentina, Jorge Luis must visit a European brothel. The matter was arranged, but alas, this lesson was not so easily mastered. Wide and adventurous reading would not be matched by wild adventures and women. Unsettled, Jorge Luis settled at home and, unlike Father, remained ever faithful to Leonor, his remarkable mother.
*
‘Intention’, begins the first essay. The word is given a paragraph all to itself. It is a flourish, a cannon shot. We are about to read a manifesto. The author wants ‘to tear down the exceptional preeminence now generally awarded to the self and in its place to ‘erect … an aesthetic hostile to the psychologism inherited from the last century’.
The tone is understandable. The 1920s were, after all, the decade of manifestos. Borges had been in Spain, he considered himself an Ultraist, a committed man. But it is marvellously ironic and an indication of some wit on the editor’s part that this new collection of his non-fiction should begin thus. For very soon Borges would appreciate that a successful attack on the cults of selfhood and personality would necessarily have to play down the role of intention, since intention is one of the most obvious and powerful manifestations of the self: ‘in art nothing is more secondary than an author’s intentions’, he will be telling us in a later essay. When speaking of achievements, literary or otherwise, he loves to introduce such formulas as, ‘almost unwittingly’, or ‘without wanting to or suspecting he had done so’. ‘A great book like the Divina Commedia he typically concludes one piece ‘is not the isolated or random caprice of an individual; many men and many generations built towards it.’
Yet, ironically, the intention so succinctly stated on the opening page of Selected Non-Fictions remains a fair description of Borges’s own remarkable achievement in the years to come, an achievement which is anything but unwitting. Intentionally, he played down intention. He accomplished what he set out to do. Even the man’s exemplary modesty, everywhere evident in these essays and unfailingly celebrated by those who knew him, was, if we can use the expression, an ‘engaged’ modesty, a pondered modesty, and very much part of this determined and lifelong project of ‘self-effacement. Whether or not we choose to see that project as linked to Borges’s feelings of social and sexual inadequacy, or the fact that he remained emotionally and economically dependent on his mother right into middle age is irrelevant.
Borges’s career begins when he returns to Argentina in 1921 after seven formative years in Europe. His parents tell him it’s OK to stay home and write. He doesn’t need to go to university, he doesn’t need to find a job. So he reads and writes, makes literary friendships, and courts well-to-do young women who have no intention of marrying him or making love to him. The more they have no intention of loving him, the more he reads and writes. When his father falls ill and eventually dies, Borges is obliged, in his late thirties, to find work. He writes as a columnist for a women’s magazine, appropriately entitled El Hogar, Home. Eventually he is forced to accept a minor clerical job in an overstaffed suburban library. Most of his nine years there will be spent in the basement reading and writing and trying to avoid his colleagues. Finally, in his early forties, he believes he has met the woman of his life. He walks Estela Canto through the warm Buenos Aires evenings, phoning Mother from call boxes at regular intervals to reassure her he will be home soon. When Estela rejects his offer of marriage, Borges steps up his reading and writing.
So the output is considerable. Each of Viking’s recent compendiums of the three major strands of Borges’s work -poetry, short stories and essays - runs out at just above or just below five hundred pages, and of the essays we are told that this new collection contains only 161 out of a possible twelve hundred. At the same time it’s worth noting that only a very few of the pieces in any of the books exceed six or seven pages. The long work was as alien to Borges as work in general was compulsive. A rehearsal of one or two plots from the most celebrated story collections, Fictions and The Aleph, may help us to understand why this was so and what was that ‘aesthetic hostile to psychologism’ that Borges eventually hit upon.
A certain Pierre Menard, author of a miscellany of minor philosophical, critical and poetical works (his Visible oeuvre), dedicates the greater part of his life to reproducing Cervantes’ Don Quixote word for word. This he does not by copying, nor by immersing himself in Cervantes’ world, but by coming to the story ‘through the experience of Pierre Menard’. ‘If I could just be immortal, I could do it,’ he says. As it is, we are given but one fragmentary example of his success in reproducing the original (though how he himself can know this, if he won’t reread Don Quixote for fear of copying, remains a mystery), as follows:
… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor.
Our admiring narrator comments that while the words are banal period rhetoric in the mouth of Cervantes, coming from Menard, they are remarkable. ‘History, the mother of truth! - the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality, but as the very fount of reality.’
The implications of the story are as evident as its unravelling is hilarious. If Menard can reproduce Cervantes then individuality is quite superficial. ‘Every man should be capable of all ideas and I believe in the future he shall be.’ History, far from being ‘the mother of truth’ is mere clutter. We could all write everything that has been written. And how fascinating if I can now see a snippet of Don Quixote in praise of the military life as bei
ng influenced by Pierre Menard’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche! Too intelligent to waste time arguing a position, Borges dazzles by conflation. The most improbable writers are wondrously superimposed. Humanity is one. Or maybe not. Pierre Menard is a typical example of Borges’s tendency to be ironic about a position he finds congenial.
It is standard orthodoxy to praise Borges for bringing all kinds of innovations to fiction, but in a way it may be easier to think of him as working out the consequences of removing from it all the innovations of the previous six or seven hundred years. Along with our modern nominalism and our ingenuous belief in history and individual character, the perplexing notion of personal responsibility will likewise have to go. In ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, we discover that everything that happens to people, good or bad, is not the result of their psychology or relationships, but rather the immensely complex working out of a state lottery into which each citizen is automatically and periodically entered and which, rather than dealing in money, dispenses happiness, unhappiness and tedium in every imaginable form. The random nature of their lives allows the Babylonians to enjoy all aspects of experience and become, as it were, everybody. ‘Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment.’ Again the accident of individuality is eliminated, there are no decisions, no responsibility, no success, no failure, no self.