David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

THERE’S AN UNHAPPY PARADOX about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer’s bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, will be admirers of the writer’s work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy. Part of the appeal of the writer’s work for these fans will be the distinctive stamp of that writer’s personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions — the sense that these stories were written by this author and could have been done by no other. 1And yet it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire. And the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is. In the present case, the Jorge Luis Borges who emerges in Williamson’s book — a vain, timid, pompous mama’s boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions — is about as different as one can get from the limpid, witty, pansophical, profoundly adult writer we know from his stories. Rightly or no, anyone who reveres Borges as one of the best and most important fiction writers of the last century will resist this dissonance, and will look, as a way to explain and mitigate it, for obvious defects in Williamson’s life study. The book won’t disappoint them.

Edwin Williamson is an Oxford don and esteemed Hispanist whose Penguin History of Latin America is a small masterpiece of lucidity and triage. It is therefore unsurprising that his Borges starts strong, with a fascinating sketch of Argentine history and the Borges family’s place within it. For Williamson, the great conflict in the Argentine national character is that between the “sword” of civilizing European liberalism and the “dagger” of romantic gaucho individualism, and he argues that Borges’s life and work can be properly understood only in reference to this conflict, particularly as it plays out in his childhood. In the nineteenth century, grandfathers on both sides of his family had distinguished themselves in important battles for South American independence from Spain and the establishment of a centralized Argentine government, and Borges’s mother was obsessed with the family’s historical glory. Borges’s father, a man stunted by the heroic paternal shadow in which he lived, evidently did things like give his son an actual dagger to use on bullies at school and send him to a brothel for devirgination. The young Borges failed both these “tests,” the scars of which marked him forever and show up all over the place in his fiction, Williamson thinks.

It is in these claims about personal stuff encoded in the writer’s art that the book’s real defect lies. In fairness, it’s just a pronounced case of a syndrome that seems common to literary biographies, so common that it might point to a design flaw in the whole enterprise. Borges: A Life ’s big problem is that Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges’s work; his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism. You can see why this problem might be intrinsic to the genre. A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable. 2In order to ensure this, the bio has to make the writer’s personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can’t correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka — Borges’s only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he’s often compared — because Kafka’s fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka’s psyche. But Borges’s stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments 3; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness—“to be incorporated,” as Borges puts it, “like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.” One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neo-Platonist — human thought, behavior, and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense kabbalistic Book that includes its own decoding. Biography-wise, then, we have a strange situation in which Borges’s individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal.

Borges: A Life, which is strongest in its treatments of Argentine history and politics, 4is at its very worst when Williamson is discussing specific pieces in light of Borges’s personal life. Unfortunately, he discusses just about everything Borges ever wrote. Williamson’s critical thesis is clear: “Bereft of a key to their autobiographical context, no one could have grasped the vivid significance these pieces actually had for their author.” And in case after case, the resultant readings are shallow, forced, and distorted — as indeed they must be if the biographer’s project is to be justified. Random example: “The Wait,” a marvelous short-short that appears in 1949’s The Aleph, takes the form of a layered homage to Hemingway, gangster movies, and the Buenos Aires underworld. An Argentine mobster, in hiding from another mobster and living under the pursuer’s name, dreams so often of his killers’ appearance in his bedroom that, when the assassins finally come for him, he

gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep. Did he do that to awaken the pity of the men that killed him, or because it’s easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly — or (and this is perhaps the most likely possibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at that same hour?

The distant interrogative ending — a Borges trademark — becomes an inquisition into dreams, reality, guilt, augury, and mortal terror. For Williamson, though, the real key to the story’s significance appears to be that “Borges had failed to win the love of Estela Canto…. With Estela gone, there seemed nothing to live for,” and he represents the story’s ending all and only as a depressed whimper: “When his killers finally track him down, he just rolls over meekly to face the wall and resigns himself to the inevitable.”

It is not merely that Williamson reads every last thing in Borges’s oeuvre as a correlative of the author’s emotional state. It is that he tends to reduce all of Borges’s psychic conflicts and personal problems to the pursuit of women. Williamson’s theory here involves two big elements: Borges’s inability to stand up to his domineering mother, 5and his belief, codified in a starry-eyed reading of Dante, that “it was the love of a woman that alone could deliver him from the hellish unreality he shared with his father and inspire him to write a masterpiece that would justify his life.” Story after story is thus interpreted by Williamson as a coded dispatch on Borges’s amorous career, which career turns out to be sad, timorous, puerile, moony, and (like most people’s) extremely boring. The formula is applied equally to famous pieces, such as “ ‘The Aleph’ (1945), whose autobiographical subtext alludes to his thwarted love for Norah Lange,” and to lesser-known stories like “The Zahir”: