Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

I’m not sure whether Borges would agree with my explication of his work, but I do fear that I have attributed more to him than he deserves, and that he has not written his best work with so serious an intent (in its semantic depths, not its comical-paradoxical surface, of course). Which means that I suspect that Borges “privately” has not seen the final point of his fictional chain of proof. This guess is based on a knowledge of all of his stories. By talking about his other stories, I pass onto the other, more dubious aspects of his work. Seen as a whole, his work is a universe of literature whose secondary, repetitious aspects diminish and slight his best efforts by their very neighborhood, because these aspects structurally debunk his best work. In Borges’s best stories one can find flashes such an intellectual power that they do not lose impact even after many rereadings. If at all, they are lessened only when one reads all of his stories at a sitting.

Only then do we notice the mechanism of their creative process. It is always dangerous, even fatal for the creator, when we see the invariant (debunking) structure, the algorithm of his creative power. God is a total mystery to us above all because it is on principle impossible for us — and will remain impossible for us — to understand or imitate exactly the structure of God’s act of creation.

Considered from a formal point of view, the creative method of Borges is very simple. It might be called unitas oppositorum, the unity of mutually exclusive opposites. What allegedly must be kept separate for all time (that which is considered irreconcilable) is joined before our very eyes, and without distorting logic. The structural content of nearly all of Borges’s stories is built up by this elegant and precise unity. Borges calls the one and the same the conflicting notions of the orthodox and the heretic, Judas and Jesus. Christ, betrayer and betrayed, the troglodytes and the immortals, chaos and order, the individual and the cosmos, the nobleman and the monster, good and evil, the unique and the repeated, etc. His literary game with its borderline meanings always begins where opposites repel one another with their inherent force; and it ends as soon as they are joined together. But we can see a trivial weakness in Borges’s work in the fact that there is always the same mechanism of conversion (or a closely related inversion). God the Almighty was wise enough never to repeat Himself in such a manner. We authors, his successors, shadows and apprentices, also mustn’t do it. Occasionally — but very rarely — the skeletal, paradigmatic structure of the transformations used in Borges’s fiction results in truly extraordinary things, as I have tried to show. But we always find this structure, invariably in the same form, once we have properly recognized and assessed it. Such repetition, which inevitably is already accompanied by an element of the unintentionally comical, is the most familiar and most general weakness in all of Borges’s fiction. For as good old Le Bon has already said in his work on humor, we always look disdainfully down upon the mechanic, for a mechanical process always lets the strange and surprising get away. It is simple to predict the future of a purely mechanical phenomenon. In its utmost depths, the structural topology of Borges’s work acknowledges its relationship with all mechanistic-determinist kinds of literature, including the mystery novel. The mystery novel always incorporates unequivocally the formula of Laplacean determinism.

The cause of his work’s “mechanistic” sickness is this, I think: from the beginning of his literary career, Borges has suffered from a lack of a free and rich imagination. [16] This can be seen from the fact that several times he has rewritten material supplied by others. I have not discussed this aspect of his work, for I believe that nothing can be more erroneous in criticism than to descend to the shallow passages of the work of a writer merely in order to prove their worthlessness. Besides, it is an undisputed fact that world literature is full of prose that is similar, and the immense number of such exercises alone deprives of originality any piece that can defend its individuality only by stylistic means. You can see this in the stories comprising the last two parts of the Hanser volume [which Lem was reviewing in this essay —TRANS.], especially in regard to the stylistic means employed, whose baroque character is stressed by Borges in his introduction. The more nearly a work becomes “literature,” the greater its originality (as measured by the integral of its differences from all other literary works), the more this kind of fiction, which only increases the number of already existing texts by further similar elements, must be likened to the enlargement of an ocean by the pouring of water into it — it is, rather, a work of reproduction, more related to the crafts than to creative art. Of course, ninety-five percent of all writers are just craftsmen; but the historical movement of literature, and its historical changes, are caused by the inventors, heretics, visionaries, anticonformists — the revolutionaries of writing. And this gives us the right to measure any work claiming to belong to the top in literature first of all by its originality. Many writers can entertain; but only a few can amaze, educate, and move. But because such a point of view is open to attack, I have armed this review with a warning against its subjective character. Also I do not intend to evaluate the whole work of Borges, and especially not his poetry, which I would feel I would have to read in its original Spanish form. Whatever the matter may be with his poetry (which I value highly), it does not belong to fantastic literature for the simple reason that, in my opinion (and here I am in agreement with T. Todorov), on principle there can be no fantastic poetry. In the beginning he was a librarian, and he has remained one, although the most brilliant manifestation of one. He had to search in libraries for sources of inspiration, and he restricted himself wholly to cultural-mythical sources. They were deep, multifarious, rich sources — for they contain the total reservoir of the mythical thought of mankind.

But in our age they are on the decline, dying off as far as their power to interpret and explain a world undergoing further changes is concerned. In his paradigmatic structures, and even in his greatest achievements, Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago. Therefore he is forced to play with the sacral, the awe-inspiring, the sublime and the mysterious from our grandfathers. Only in rare cases does he succeed in continuing this game in a serious way. Only then does he break through the paradigmatically and culturally caused incarceration which is its limitation, and which is quite contrary to the freedom of artistic creation he strives for. He is one of the great men, but at the same time he is an epigone. Perhaps for the last time. He has lit up — given a paradoxical resurrection to — the treasures transmitted to us from the past. But he will not succeed in keeping them alive for any long period of time. Not because he has a second-rate mind, but because, I believe, such a resurrection of transitory things is in our time quite impossible. His work, admirable though it may be, is located in its entirety at an opposite pole from the direction of our fate. Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot “alloy” our world’s fate with his own work. He has explicated to us paradises and hells that remain forever closed to man. For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them.

Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner