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Saturday, June 26th, 2010
| Esa obra era un escándolo, porque la confusión y la maravilla son operaciónes propias de Dios y no de los hombres. | | This work [the building of a labyrinth in Babylon] caused outrage; for chaos and miracles are acts proper to God, not to mortals. |
-- "The two kings and the two labyrinths",
which Borges attributes to an inauthentic edition of the 1001 Nights.
In the foreword to Brodie's Report, Borges claims to be attempting ("I don't know how successfully") the composition of direct narratives, stories which do not mislead -- the implicit counterpart being that his previous volumes of stories have been labyrinths, mazes for the reader to lose himself in. (He draws a parallel to Kipling's work which I don't fully understand, need to look into that a bit more.) This is an interesting claim and I think it bears some thinking about...One way of treating this foreword is as itself a clever bit of misdirection. I have only read Brodie's Report once, in the course of reading Collected Fictions this Spring, did not blog about it at all; my impression was that the stories in this volume would be, after I read them some more and got comfortable with them, my very favorite of Borges' stories, and that while there was a good deal of potential for the reader to get lost in the mazes of these stories, one would need to pull in the themes and storylines of his earlier fictions to make that happen -- that the stories appeared to be straightforward narrative but contained secondary levels in which the path of plot was not as obvious. I'm embarking on a second read now, to try and confirm some of this and to see how they hold up on rereading. Here is some beautiful prose from the foreword:
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He intentado, no sé con qué fortuna, la redacción de cuentos directos. No me atrevo a afirmar que son sencillos; no hay en la tierra una sola página, una sola palabra que lo sea, ya que todas postulan el universo, cuyo más notorio atributo es la complejidad. Sólo quiero aclarar que no soy, ni he sido jamas, lo que antes se llamaba un fabulista o un predicador de parábolas y ahora un escritor comprometido. No aspiro a ser Esopo.
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I have made an attempt, I don't know how successfully, at the composition of direct narratives. I am not claiming that they are simple; there is not a single page on earth -- a single word -- that is simple; for every word must assume the entire universe, whose most noteworthy attribute is complexity.* I would only like to clarify that I am not -- I have never been -- what was once called a fabulist, a preacher of parables, what is now called an "engaged" author. I have no desire to be Æsop.
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 *In this regard, see also "Scripture".
Reading further, he is talking about his political beliefs in a slightly combative way, or perhaps in a resigned tone with a bit of self-justification about it. He says, his writing does not contain his personal political views -- except for once, in the case of the Six Days War -- this almost sounds like a response to (or an anticipation of) people who think he was denied a Nobel prize which he deserved, on the basis of being considered too conservative. The Six Days War thing would be useful to read up on... not finding quickly what writing he's got in mind, though I see a reference to it in this MartÃn Zubieta piece at leedor.com.
posted morning of June 26th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, June 20th, 2010
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what no ears have heard? Listen to the sparrow's cry. Do you want to touch that which no hands have touched? Touch the soil. Truly I tell you, God has not yet created the earth.from the teachings of the Histrionic heretics
Thinking about "The Theologians" is a very fruitful activity -- it is a well that I can go back to repeatedly and never find it dry. I'm wondering what is the "discourse of 20 words" which Aurelianus uses obliquely to condemn Pannonia to the stake. Note here the deep irony of Pannonia's being condemned using words he wrote to denounce Euphorbius. But what is confusing me here is the repetition of "20 words" -- earlier Borges had noted that these 20 were the only words surviving from the work of John of Pannonia; he is attaching a lot of significance to the words -- but he never quotes them! It's a big missing piece in the center of the puzzle...The irony that I'm seeing here in Pannonia's situation is a reflection of the irony in the Church's treatment of dissent.* The first group of heretics, the Monotoni, propose that time is cyclical, that every present moment will be repeated without end; for that Euphorbius is burned. Now the Histrioni teach that time can never repeat itself, that each instant is of necessity unique -- based on this and other crimes, an inquisitorial court is formed to prosecute them. The church's problem is with any intellectual innovation (as Aurelianus himself notes with respect to the first persecution) rather than with the specific content of the teachings. This makes it difficult to sympathize with either of the main characters -- they are after all participating (cynically in Aurelianus' case and in John's case as a true believer, if I am reading correctly) in these inquisitions on the side of power -- I'm left to identify with the narrator as a voice of sarcasm and occasionally with a minor character like Euphorbius. Borges describes the main characters in his afterword as "a dream, a somewhat melancholy dream, of personal identity" -- which makes me wonder who he is trying to identify with.
 *Side thought here -- I have never thought of Borges as a particularly political or satirical author. Is he poking fun at the power relationships in the mediæval Church here, or primarily interested in painting Aurelianus as a tragic figure? It would be worth spending some time working out what I mean by a "political and satirical author"... There is a further irony, I think, in the juxtaposition of John of Pannonia's persecution with the vandalism of the library in the first paragraph of the story -- Volume XII of Civitas Dei was misinterpreted because the rest of the work had been destroyed; and Pannonia's 20 words were used against him because the context of his treatise had been (wilfully) forgotten.
posted evening of June 20th, 2010: 8 responses
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There is something special about Borges' stories which are set in Argentina and Uruguay, particularly I'm thinking of the stories like "The South", "The Dead Man", "Funes", and of the stories in Brodie's Report -- I get a similar feeling from reading these stories as from watching Westerns -- the same sort of longing for cultural identity, construction and description of a cultural identity. In "The Dead Man" we see Borges addressing the reader directly, it takes me by surprise every time I read it. BenjamÃn Otálora has fled a murder charge in Buenos Aires and is working as a gaucho in Tacuarembó:
Here began, for Otálora, a different life; a life of vast dawns, days smelling of horses. This life is new to him, sometimes harsh, but it is already in his blood; just as men of other nations worship and fear the sea, we (and also the man who is interweaving these symbols) long for the infinite pampas echoing with hoofbeats.
We! Also the man who is interweaving these symbols! I don't think Borges refers so clearly and unambiguously to himself in any of his other fictions (leaving aside those pieces like "Borges and I" and "The Other" which are specifically introspective) -- that parenthesis seems to me designed to clear away all the levels of confusion about who is saying "we".
posted morning of June 20th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, June 19th, 2010
To be immortal is banal -- except for man, every creature is immortal, not knowing of death. The divine, the terrible, the incomprehensible, is to know oneself to be immortal.
Bryan Nelson's post at Mother Nature Network on the 10 animals with the longest life spans has some beautiful photography, including this magnificently anthropomorphic* picture of turritopsis nutricula, believed to be the only animal with no natural limit to its lifespan. (Thanks for the link, John!)
 Related in only the very most tenuous and impressionistic manner, Katy Butler's piece in this mornings New York Times Magazine on dealing with her father's dementia and unnaturally prolonged death, and with a medical establishment devoted unreflectively to such prolongation, sent a chill down my spine. To be, like Ms. Butler's mother, "continent and lucid to [one's] end," seems to me a fine thing, a fate I will hope for for myself and those I love, a fate I will try to work for.
*(or "cyclopomorphic" I guess -- a grimacing Cyclops with a frizzy beard.)
posted morning of June 19th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I've gotten a little bogged down in the translation process for Réquiem -- I thought I would try writing out some summary data as a way of helping myself get a handle on the story: Slavko (to be precise, his narrator Felipe; having no information to the contrary I am identifying the author pretty closely with the narrator) discovers on June 14, 1986 (he is 16 years old, like I was that year) a strange power: by stealing a book from the shop of his family's friend Fernández and reading the book, he can cause the book's author to perish. The first to go is Borges (as you can see from the date) -- you have to be able to forgive this as an accident, after all he could not have known beforehand what his theft would entail -- and a few days later a local author, a young dentist whose name is never given named BenjamÃn Castro; Felipe stole his book of poetry seeking to confirm whether Borges' death had been his fault. Then in awe of his power, he does not exercise it for several years. But one thing leads to another...
Slavko kills Bioy Casares, by stealing a copy of Morel's Invention on March 8th, 1999. This precipitates the end of his relationship with Susana M (who he believes was already interested in the faculty dean anyways).
The next to go is José Ãngel Valente, on July 18th, 2000, after Felipe steals a collection of his poetry. Here we see Felipe going off the deep end -- he embarks on a career of murdering authors just before he publishes an essay about the author -- Juan José Arreola dies on December 3, 2001; Arturo Úslar Pietri (February 26, 2001), Camilo José Cela (January 17, 2002), "and the majority of the authors whom we've seen disappear in the last few years" (not clear on the precise date of the story -- it was published in Piedepágina in 2008 but may well have been written, and set, a few years before that) -- people begin to notice the sequence of coincidences, the head of his department eventually calls him out. The ending is a nice twist that I don't want to give away...
This story interests me a bit by the way it draws on and amplifies the theme of the recent Latin American issue of Zoetrope (which is where I found out about Zupcic), the passing of an older generation of Latin American authors and the coming into their own of new authors with new voices and styles.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2010: 2 responses
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Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
The anniversary of Borges' death just passed -- got me thinking of a couple of things, principally that I should get back to my translation of Réquiem by Slavko Zupcic (in which Zupcic "accidentally" kills Borges); and also about which Borges fictions would be the best ones to start out with for a new reader. (This thanks to a Facebook post of Matt Dickerson's, in which he suggested "The Library of Babel" as a starting point.)I was thinking there might be a good argument for starting off with any of:
- "Tlön, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius" -- Donald Taylor mentioned in that thread that he had not yet read the story of "The Library of Babel" but he appreciated the puzzle of it -- I think Tlön and Babel and the other stories in Garden of Forking Paths (part I of Ficciones) are a great starting point if you are primarily interested (or even "strongly interested") in the intellectual-puzzles aspect of Borges' work.
- "Funes, His Memory" -- this was the first thing I thought of, because I had read it quite recently and been really taken with the quality of Borges' voice and of his narrative. This is the first story in Artifices, which is part II of Ficciones and postdates part I by three years. Drawing of character is much stronger here than in any of his earlier stories.
- "The Immortal" -- This is the first story in The Aleph, published 5 years after Ficciones. A wonderful, wonderful story and a good introduction to the role of time and of infinity in Borges' fictions.
In the end I would probably go with "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" just because having it be one's first taste of Borges seems like a sort of canonical experience among people I know who like his work. But probably would suggest that my interlocutor skip ahead to some later work next instead of reading straight through The Garden of Forking Paths. Certainly I would recommend either starting with the translations in Collected Fictions or with those in Labyrinths.
 (Of course I am hoping the person I am recommending these stories to will feel moved to read much more of his work -- these three stories seem sort of like good vehicles for figuring out if you are interested in reading more, I don't by any means think that these three stories in isolation would be particularly enlightening.)
posted evening of June 15th, 2010: 4 responses
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Saturday, June 12th, 2010
My and Mariana's exchange of Spanish books continues -- yesterday I gave her El informe de Brodie (she says she and every other Argentinian student read Borges' stories in her High School classes but has not gone back to them since then) and she gave me Galeano's Bocas del tiempo and El palacio japonés by José Mauro de Vasconcelos (translated from the Portuguese, and with a foreword, by Haydée M. Jofro Barroso).
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
The piece of Pliny's Natural History which Funes is reciting the third time Borges sees him is from the beginning of Book VII*, chapter 26; in Philemon Holland's translation: AS TOUCHING MEMORIE, the greateſt gift of Nature, and moſt neceſſarie of all others for this life; hard it is to judge and ſay who of all others deſerved the cheefe honour therein: conſidering how many men have excelled, and woon much glorie in that behalfe. King Cyrus was able to call every ſouldior that he had through his whole armie, by his owne name. L. Scipio could doe the like by all the citizens of Rome. Semblably, Cineas, Embaſſador of king Pyrrhus, the very next day that he came to Rome, both knew and alſo ſaluted by name all the Senate, and the whole degrees of Gentlemen and Cavallerie in the cittie. Mithridates the king, reigned over two and twentie nations of diverſe languages, and in ſo many tongues gave lawes and miniſtred juſtice unto them, without truchman: and when hee was to make ſpeech unto them in publicke aſſemblie reſpectively to every nation, he did performe it in their owne tongue, without interpretor. One Charmidas or Carmadas, a Grecian,†††was of ſo ſingular a memorie, that he was able to deliver by heart the contents word for word of all the bookes that a man would call for out of any librarie, as if he read the ſame preſently within a booke. At length the practiſe hereof was reduced into an art of Memorie: deviſed and invented firſt by Simonides Melicus, and afterwards brought to perfection and conſummate by Metrodorus Scepſius: by which a man might learne to rehearſe againe the ſame words of any diſcourſe whatſoever, after once hearing.
†††Carneades, according to Cicero and Quintilian.
* (The same volume to which John of Pannonia will refer in "The Theologians".)
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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My sorry condition of being an Argentine prevents me from engaging in the genre -- obligatory in Uruguay -- of dithyramb; my subject is after all a Uruguayan.
Line from "Funes, the memorious" has me looking around to see if there are any examples of old Uruguayan dithyramb chanting... and I do not find that, not exactly*. But check out this more recent Chilean group, Ditirambo.
 * And I have a sneaking hunch that Borges is not saying quite what I at first took him to be saying, either -- that the usage is exaggeration or mis-naming, that "dithyramb" is here just a manner of speaking.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
The caprice, the fantasy, the utopia of a Total Library has certain characteristics which are easily mistaken for virtues. Incredible, in the first place, how long it took mankind to arrive at this idea. Certain passages which Aristotle attributes to Democritus and to Leucippus clearly prefigure it; but its tardy inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner; its first expositor, Kurd Lasswitz.
The note in Sur #59 to which Borges referred in the foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths, is his essay "The Total Library" -- I thank Daniel Balderston of the Borges Center at U. Pittsburgh for pointing this out to me. "The Total Library" (which has appeared many times in translation, most recently in Selected Non-Fictions) is a lovely read and excellent companion material for "The Library of Babel" -- it lacks the haunting, overpowering sense of futility which is that story's strongest characteristic, but it lays out clearly and concisely the premises underlying the story and its sources of inspiration.
See also Theodor Pavlapoulos' essay, Lasswitz and Borges: Indexing the Library of Everything; and Lasswitz' story Die Universalbibliothek.
posted evening of June 8th, 2010: Respond
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