Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  The same occurs in ‘The Immortal’. A group of men gain immortality and as a result lose all interest in life, since over an infinite period of time everything must happen to them, good and bad. Any action becomes unimportant, no more than ‘the echo of others that preceded it with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem'. So there can be ‘no spiritual or intellectual merits’. Homer has forgotten his Greek. What is the point of remembering anything?

  Typically, Borges revels in the elimination of what are normally considered the inescapable conditions of our existence, but at the same time never fails to underline the ludicrous or terrifying consequences. As with any ghost story, ‘The Immortal’ gains its disturbing power from the unspoken message that it is better to be either alive and engaged or dead and gone rather than, as Cioran would put it, to ‘fall out of time’ altogether. Thus the narrator of ‘The Immortal’, who has sought and gained eternal life, now seeks to return to mortality, and is overjoyed when, some sixteen hundred years later, he succeeds. The pain that promises eventual death now becomes pleasure:

  Incredulous, speechless, and in joy, I contemplated the precious formation of a slow drop of blood. I am once more mortal, I told myself over and over, again I am like all other men. That night, I slept until daybreak.

  The pattern in ‘The Aleph’ is the same. Overwhelmed by the vision of a place in which all places simultaneously intersect, the narrator urgently needs to forget in order to return to normality. Again and again, the self seeks, or is granted, infinite extension, is terrified, returns to the ‘ordinary’ world.

  Ordinariness itself, on the other hand, is not a condition Borges wishes to write about, except by exploring the implications of its opposite. Perhaps this is because the ‘ordinary’ situation he finds himself in is so unattractive. An ugly fascism has conquered Europe. Officially neutral, Argentina is spiritually pro-Nazi. This is ugly. Peronism is rampant. Estela no longer goes out for walks with him. Mother continues to buy his clothes but Borges doesn’t care for the maid she has hired. The library job is unbearable, but, even more unbearable, in 1946 Borges finds himself fired for having expressed his anti-Peronist views. He has no income. The learnedly facetious detective stories he has written with close friend Adolfo Bioy are not a solution. They have generated more perplexity than royalties. Forced to take up lecturing to make ends meet, Borges must visit, of all people, a psychologist in an attempt to overcome his chronic shyness. He cannot speak in public. The psychologist, needless to say, has a useful smattering of Freud, a man Borges has charmingly dismissed in a single line of a story entitled. A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain’.

  Taken one by one each of the short stories, at least of Fictions and The Aleph, is striking, dazzling. Nevertheless, to read them all one after another is to grow a little weary. Where the self is not perilously extended by a brush with infinity, we have satires of people whose individuality is exposed as a vain boast. The first time we hear that two rivals die only to discover they are the same person, we are fascinated. There is great insight here. The second time something of the kind occurs, we admire again the brilliance, the extraordinary wit, the admirable range of philosophical reference with which this idea is worked out. The two are theologians of the early Christian world. Or they are Argentine painters, or they are gaucho knife fighters. Then they are gaucho knife fighters again. By the time, in the later stories, we reach the fifth or sixth presentation of two or more central ‘characters’ obliged to recognise a mysterious oneness, we have realised that Borges has effectively eliminated the idea of a diversified community (so useful when it comes to protracted storytelling). There are now only two conditions: the single self here and now, and all humanity throughout all time. Of course these two conditions are actually the same: any antagonism is cancelled out in the oneness of all human experience.

  Putting it another way, we might say that Borges reaches out to a transcendental oneness, the community of all men, but finds himself constantly returned to Borges. There is nothing, or nothing we would wish to contemplate, in the middle. Gradually, he begins to tire of establishing the elaborate and multiform disguises behind which oneness lurks. There are so many hats a rabbit can be pulled from. Or rather: we begin to see the rabbit before Borges pulls it out. We even begin to wish he would leave it in there. And in fact this is what he eventually starts doing in the supposedly ‘more realistic stories of the collection Brodie’s Report. But we see that rabbit all the same. It is time to turn to the essays.

  ‘That crowded day,’ Borges writes in a piece entitled ‘A Comment on August 23, 1944’ ‘gave me three distinct surprises: the physical degree of joy I felt when they told me that Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the puzzling and flagrant enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler.’

  This is Borges writing inside history. He has not chosen the subject matter, it is forced upon him; he is obliged to recognise surprises. In particular, finding himself at one with public enthusiasm must have come as a big surprise indeed, for Borges. Immediately, his brilliant mind sets to work to understand, to place this experience, and particularly the inexplicable happiness of these Nazi sympathisers, within the reference points of his considerable erudition. Needless to say, he has no intention of talking to those sympathisers. They are incoherent, they enjoy only a low level of consciousness, any ‘uncertainty was preferable to the uncertainty of a dialogue with these siblings of chaos’. For Borges, the moral, intellectual and aesthetic are always inseparable.

  After some reflection, the first conclusion he reaches is that these people are merely succumbing to the reality of what has happened, somewhat dazzled in the meanwhile by the power of the symbols ‘Paris’ and ‘liberation’. But such a banal explanation could not long satisfy a man like Borges, for whom it was always important that an explanation be both profound and beautiful. Happily, some nights later, he recalls that in Shaw’s Man and Superman a character has a dream ‘where he affirms that the horror of hell is its unreality’. Borges then has no difficulty relating this idea to the doctrine, a thousand and more years before, of ‘John Scotus Erigena, who denied the substantive existence of sin and evil.

  The writer then compares these textual references to his memory of the day Paris was occupied. A Germanophile had come to give Borges the news, announcing in stentorian tones the imminent fall of London and the pointlessness of any opposition. Behind the apparent enthusiasm, Borges had sensed, with great psychological acumen, that the Nazi sympathiser was himself terrified by the completeness of Hitler’s victory. Nazism, he concludes, like Erigena’s hell, (or indeed, if it comes to that, the worlds of ‘The Immortal’ and of ‘The Lottery of Babylon’) ‘suffers from unreality’. One can die for it and lie for it, but in the end it is ‘uninhabitable’, one cannot actually want it. ‘Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.’

  In just a page and a half, then, Borges has brought a historical experience, private and public, into line with his reading and with his tendency to see antagonists as obeying a larger and ahistorical design beyond their immediate intentions. Most of all, he has redeemed reality, however unpromising his own personal situation may have been at the time. Whether we agree with what he says or not (something largely irrelevant when reading Borges), we find ourselves with a feast of ideas to consider and, above all, the example of how a remarkable mind comes to grips with the world in a constant back and forth between personal experience and the ideas of others.

  Borges is a great orchestrator. There is his name on the front cover of the book and then, in the index at the back, the three hundred or so names of his close collaborators, the authors he constantly quotes and examines and uses to examine others: sixteen entries for Walt Whitman, thirty-eight for Schopenhauer, twen
ty-eight for De Quincey. This is the community Borges moves in, the orchestra he conducts and seeks at once to lose himself in and to make his own. Twenty entries for Plato and Platonism, twenty-four for Chesterton, thirteen for Benedetto Croce. The History of literature’ - this remark from Paul Valéry appears on more than one occasion - ‘should not be the history of authors and the course of their careers or of the career of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature. Borges’s essays attempt to invoke that spirit by bringing the most disparate voices together. And what better way to start than by showing that every quotation can be corroborated by another? He follows Valéry with this remark from Emerson:

  I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books … there is such equality and identity both of judgement and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing all-hearing gentleman.

  How wonderful the word ‘gentleman’ is there. Perhaps this ‘one person’ is the ‘someone else’ Borges claimed he wanted to be.

  Over the sixty-four years of the production covered in Selected Non-Fictions Borges comes at a huge range of subjects - the tango, suicide, the apocryphal Gospels, Argentinian literature, translation, the paradoxes of Zeno, German literature in the Age of Bach - plus dozens of biographical sketches of the most disparate figures, and he never tires, never sinks into mannerism. Again and again he takes on a new subject, marshals his reading, his faithful friends of old, gives us fresh ways of seeing things, suggests lucid, often conflicting, frequently bizarre ways of understanding the world. It is astonishing. And though the yearnings are ever the same - the desire to annihilate time, to approach a transcendental perception of life, to grasp an ungraspable truth - Borges never stoops to wishful thinking. Here he is speaking of Emerson’s monism and assuming a position which seems an implicit criticism of much of his own endeavour:

  Our destiny is tragic because we are, irreparably, individuals, restricted by time and by space; there is nothing, consequently, more favourable than a faith that eliminates circumstances and declares that every man is all men and that there is no one who is not the universe. Those who profess such a doctrine are generally unfortunate or mediocre, avid to annul themselves in the cosmos …

  Is this an ironic triumph of self-effacement? Or is it that Borges feels he comes closest to that ‘all-seeing all-hearing gentleman’ when able to hold two conflicting views, if not simultaneously, then almost? Here he is only two years on from the Emerson piece leaning quite the other way over the question of Argentine provincialism, its tendency to believe the country is cut off from European tradition and must thus establish its own separate world:

  This opinion strikes me as unfounded. I understand why many people accept it: such a declaration of our solitude, our perdition, and our primitive character has, like existentialism, the charms of poignancy. Many people may accept this opinion because, having done so, they will feel themselves to be alone, disconsolate and, in some way, interesting.

  I am trying to suggest that while much of the work in the five hundred-plus pages of Viking’s Collected Fictions actually detracts from the marvellous achievement of the best stories, the opposite is true of the essays. Here, accretion is of the essence as we watch Borges twisting and turning to deal with new contingencies, to write for different kinds of publications, to accommodate contradictory intuitions, to strike an impossible balance, to align a film he has seen, a book he has read, a historical figure, a political event, to an essential core of reading and its related force field of ideas. Taken as a whole, Selected Non-Fictions is the more interesting, more seductive book. Joyce is the twentieth century’s great genius, but both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in so far as they express the exasperation of a highly personal style, are ‘unreadable’ and parts of the latter actually ‘incompetent’. 'Psychologism’ is anathema, but we have an entirely convincing psychological reading of the Divina Commedia that prompts Borges to field the provocation that the whole work was undertaken to allow Dante to stage an imagined encounter with the dead woman who had rejected him. All literature is the work of the same spirit, but on rereading Shakespeare and his contemporaries Borges has no difficulty in resolving that most celebrated of authorship arguments: only Shakespeare could have written Shakespeare. Pierre Menard take heed.

  It is this process of Borges’s coming to terms with things, his seeking, for example, to be outside Argentinian politics but then finding himself involved in a visceral antagonism with Peron, that makes the essays so engaging. As if, at last, and precisely because they were not written to be collected, we had the sustained, chronologically fascinating narrative that Borges never wrote, the tale of his own self constantly seeking to shake off that self. In fact, it occurs to me now that perhaps I was wrong at the beginning of this essay to imagine that Borges achieved his intended goal; perhaps he is right to go on claiming (in his sixties) that ‘the true essence of a writer’s work is usually unknown by that writer’. For as piece after piece in the collection brings together dozens of quotations from all ages to suggest the oneness of human experience, so we grow ever more aware of a deep divide that separates him, and indeed us, from most of those he cites.

  The phenomenon is most evident in a strand that runs throughout the book and is, one suspects, the author’s favourite. It involves the rapid consideration of this or that metaphysical view of the world. So we have A Defence of Basilides the False, who, in the second century believed human beings to be the deficient improvisation of a lesser God. Borges justifies the idea thus: What better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?’

  And Borges considers J.W. Dunne’s bizarre book Nothing Dies, published in 1940, which claims that we already possess eternity since the future is pre-existent. Our dreams are proof of this. ‘In death we shall recover all the moments of our lives and combine them as we please. God and our friends and Shakespeare will collaborate with us.’ In a complex discussion Borges dismisses Dunne’s reasoning, but concludes: ‘So splendid a thesis makes any fallacy committed by the author insignificant.’

  In short, and this occurs again and again, we are offered an aesthetic appreciation of a metaphysical position, or a whole philosophy, regardless, but never unaware of its probable truth. So angels are attractive (T always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot … with their backs to the sunset’) while the Trinity is “an intellectual horror, a strangled specious infinity, like facing mirrors’.

  Borges is prodigiously generous with these savourings. The doctrine, from Pythagoras to Nietzsche, of repeating cycles of existence is shown to be ugly, but Phillip Henry Gosse’s theory that at the moment of creation God created not only an infinite future but an infinite past too, which explains why although the world begins with Adam nevertheless that first man could have come across the fossils of animals that had never been, is very beautiful. What separates Borges from Gosse of course, and indeed almost all the others he quotes, is that for Gosse what mattered was whether his theory was true or not. These people were fundamentalists, or at least believers, and always earnest scholars. Borges is not only incapable of fundamentalism and traditional religious belief, but even incapable of attacking it per se. He is as far removed from scholasticism as it is possible to be. In this he declares his modernity. Butterfly-like, he sucks nectar here and there, and finds it to be largely the same nectar. It is difficult to imagine such an attitude being struck pre-Nietzsche.

  The same underlying irony, though this is not unwitting, emerges from Borges’s constant assault on history. Frequently a date, the fifth century for example, is introduced with the qualification ‘of our era (‘the fifth century of our era’) to remind us of all the other fifth centuries. Frequently, a writer generally celebrated for epitomising the avant-garde of his time is presented by Borges as, on the contrary, akin to some quite different period. Apollinaire
is close to the twelfth-century author of Chanson de Roland: ‘He was so unmodern that modernity seemed picturesque, and perhaps even moving, to him.’ Oscar Wilde, far from being fin-de-siècle man par excellence, is actually a creature of the eighteenth century, akin to Gibbon, Johnson and Voltaire. But such claims, which pitch the beauty of imaginative parallel against the ugly sloth of received ideas, largely serve to illuminate the target they cannot destroy. Borges is kicking against the pricks. His secret task, perhaps, was to remind us of the limits of even the most powerful imagination.

  Meanwhile, many beautiful and ugly things were happening in the writer’s life. Having survived the first period of Peronism, he was, to his astonishment, made Director of the Argentine National Library by the generals who had ousted the dictator. It was 1955. Borges had often thought of paradise as a library. But exactly as the Pearly Gates were opened to him, his declining sight, a consequence of a congenital condition, finally gave out. ‘No one,’ he wrote in ‘Poem of Gifts’, ‘should read self-pity or reproach/into this statement of the majesty/of God, who with such splendid irony/granted me books and blindness at one touch.’

  Blindness and its attendant dependency, writes Borges’s bland biographer, James Woodall, “was not a problem for Leonor’. Mother accompanied the writer on his now frequent lecture tours. Mother walked the streets with him, to hear his rehearsal of performances that shyness still made a torture. But oddly, now that he couldn’t see them, being with women was rather easier. Often very young women. They were invited to intimate seminars in pleasant cafés to learn Old English with him. Evidently the writer’s imagination hadn’t deserted him. They collaborated on anthologies and textbooks. Did Borges consider them his intellectual equals? Was the all-seeing gentleman also a gende-woman? With its scores of literary biographies and book reviews only a page and a half of Selected Non-Fictions is dedicated to a woman: Virginia Woolf, a writer whose transcendental yearnings are very close to Borges’s own. He had translated Orlando.