David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

The torments described by Borges in this story… are, of course, displaced confessions of the extremity of his plight. Estela [Canto, who’d just broken up with him] was to have been the “new Beatrice,” inspiring him to create a work that would be “the Rose without purpose, the Platonic, intemporal Rose,” but here he was again, sunk in the unreality of the labyrinthine self, with no prospect now of contemplating the mystic Rose of love.

Thin though this kind of explication is, it’s preferable to the reverse process by which Williamson sometimes presents Borges’s stories and poems as “evidence” that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson’s claim, for instance, that in 1934, “after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges… came to the brink of killing himself” is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason — was the Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary eo ipso suicidal? — but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges’s interior life: “ ‘The Cyclical Night,’ which he published in La Nación on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of an acute personal crisis”; “In the extracts from this unfinished poem… we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.” Bluck.

Again, it is primarily because of Borges’s short stories that anyone will care enough to read about his life. And while Edwin Williamson spends a lot of time detailing the explosive success that Borges enjoyed in middle age, after the 1961 International Publishers’ Prize, shared with Samuel Beckett, introduced his work to the United States and Europe, 6there is little in his book about just why Jorge Luis Borges is an important enough fiction writer to deserve such a microscopic bio. The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty — a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. 7His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.

And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots’ centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroës. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially — consciously — a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there’s finally no difference — that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges’s is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It’s also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. This is why, for instance, it is so irksome to see Williamson describe Borges’s “The Immortal” and “The Writing of the God”—two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O’Connor seem pallid and crude — as respective products of Borges’s “many-layered distress” and “indifference to his fate” after various idealized girlfriends dump him. Stuff like this misses the whole point. Even if Williamson’s claims are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.

— 2004

sopor—abnormally deep, lethargic sleep sordino—a mute for an instrument soricine—looking like a shrew sorrel—fancy greens for salad sortilege—sorcery, witchcraft, divination sough(n.) — a soft murmuring or rustling sound; (v.) to make such a sound… wind, surf, leaves souk—open-air Arab market spagyric—relating to or resembling alchemy spall—chip or flake of rock or ore spanakopita—Greek spinach pie spandrel—triangular space between arch’s exterior curves and the rectangular framework around it spathic—having good cleavage (used of minerals) spavined(adj.) — marked by destruction, ruin; junkyard full of spavined cars speleology—study of caves (“speleothems”) spirituel—having a refined mind or wit spoliation—plundering or despoiling Sprachgefühl—“feeling for language” sprat—small edible fish stanchion—upright pole, post, or support sternutation—sneezing, a sneeze sternutatory—causing sneezing stertor—a heavy snoring sound in respiration stob—short piece of wood-like stake; Southern stridulation—noise produced by moving body parts, like crickets and locusts succor—assistance in time of distress supernal—coming from or related to heavens, celestial; q.v. “supernally” as sarcastic adverb sural—of or relating to calf of leg surbase—baseboard suspire(v.) — to sigh susurration—soft whispering sound sutler—army camp follower who sold provisions to soldiers swage—tool used in bending or shaping cold metal swanskin—any of several flannel or cotton fabrics with a soft nap tailing—refuse after ore has been processed talus—sloping pile of loose stone at base of cliff; also “anklebone” tangram—intricate Chinese puzzle w/squares and diagonals tarantism—disorder where you have uncontrollable need to dance tardive(adj.) — having symptoms that develop slowly or appear long after inception; used of disease tarn—small mountain lake formed by glacier tatterdemalion—a ragamuffin, person wearing ragged clothing taxon—a taxonomic group like phylum, class, species tellurion—a device that shows how the movement of earth on its axis and around sun causes night & day & seasons tenebrosity—gloominess, darkness tenesmus—urgent but ineffectual attempt to pee or shit thallophyte—algaeish super-simple plants w/no differentiation between root, stem, leaf thrombus—clot in blood vessel or heart toby—a drinking mug in the shape of a stout man wearing a three-cornered hat toile—sheer fabric like linen or cotton trecentosent st — the 14th century, esp. w/r/t Italian art and lit treillage—decorative trellis for vines tremolo—like vibrato, a tremulous event produced by rapid repetition of a single tone trencherman—gour mand, hearty eater trepan—rock-boring tool used for sinking shafts in mining tribade(n.) — lesbian tribology—study of friction, lubrication, and wear of surfaces in relative motion trichoid—resembling hair