Out of the Labynnth

...Writers & Writing OUT OF THE LABYRINTH BY PEARL K BELL It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to think of another writer in this century who seems so distant, so artfully removed from the contentious urgencies of contemporary life, as Jorge Luis Borges In part this is an accident of geography Until Borges' emergence on the international scene in 1961, when he shared the coveted Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, South American literature scarcely had footnote importance for the cultural arbiters of New York, London and Pans In greater measure, Borges' isolation is a result of the strange forms he has chosen for his prose writing, at least until recently They seem to come out of a shadowy no-man's-land between the story and the essay, the short pieces, whether he calls them ficciones or inquisiciones, are neither fiction nor fact, nor anything easily recognizable as a mingling of the two The points of reference that define his literary landscape are often arcane, buried like Pompeii beneath the inexorable accumulations of history, sometimes they are sly hoaxes, for Borges is fond of "the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution " In the past decade, of course, this exceedingly hermetic and difficult writer has acquired the stature and ubiquitous presence of a sacred totem in the Western world, an elusive legend, an object of adulation and tireless exegesis such as we have not had since the Kafka commentaries reached their peak some 20 years ago The stumbling blocks of his woik, however, remain formidable His stories, Borges tells us, are often "games with time and infinity," metaphysical puzzles whose solutions turn out to be only ciphers of an infinity of puzzles The ideas he capriciously gathers up in his net of idiosyncratic erudition, philosophical obliqueness and cabalistic circularity often have the taunting evasiveness of meta-phonc phantoms, rather than the dogmatic visibility of facts or declarations Unwary critics, struck by the superficially apposite logic of a story like "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," insist on reading absolute philosophical beliefs into that astounding piece of science fiction about an imaginary planet, Tlon, which was invented by "a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers"—the many faces of Borges The critics forget that ideas are esthetic materials to Borges, and they do not pay attention when he reminds us, with uncharacteristic sharpness "I have no message I am neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of literature " Above all, Borges' intricate mazes and labyrinths are reflections, reconstructions, witty rearrangements of his polylingual and omnivorous reading not only his adored English writers, De Quincey, Stevenson, Kipling, and Chesterton, whom he discovered as a boy through his English grandmother, but the Talmud, Averroes, Schopenhauer, Whitman, Ibn-Khaldun, Croce, Ariosto, Cervantes Though he has also been a professor of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature, any attempt to do justice to his erudition is doomed by the inherent impossibility of what Borges, in another context, calls "the setting down of a limited catalog of endless things " Like the illusory library dictated by Hermes Tnsmegistus, Borges' reading encompasses everything Books are a living presence to him "I think of reading a book as no less an experience than traveling or falling m love " No wonder, then, that he can feel so deeply personal a commitment to the archetypes described in Plato, Emerson, Carlyle, in the Jewish cabahst mysticism of the medieval Zohar To Borges the universe is a marvelously complex illustration of "the profound unity of the Word " All languages and all books, past, present and future, take their bemg from a cosmic universal alphabet, an immanent archetype of letters and metaphor older than Babel, all literature and physical history are only the visible renderings of an eternal cosmic dream of words As Borges remarks m "The Aleph," language "is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past shared by all the other interlocutors " In some ways, Borges' life has been a 50-year race against the irreversible eye disease he inherited from his father, and he speaks with stoic awe of "God's splendid irony" in making him, at one moment m 1953, director of the 800,000 books in the National Library of Buenos Aires, and totally blmd For the blind, whose physical world is legible only through memory, a belief in this miraculous "alphabet of symbols" is vital P M erhaps this inner vision of memory accounts for the radically unexpected Borges of his new book, Doctor Brodte's Repoit (Dutton, 128 pp , $5 95), a collection of the stories he has written since his blindness Some of the characters and locales have appeared in earlier stories—gauchos on the pampa, and the kmfe-fighting compadntos who hung out on the streetcorners of Palermo, the Buenos Aires suburb where Borges was born But these new stones are a far cry from the fabled Borges, the metaphysical magician tirelessly shuffling the books and shadows of an eternal dream The wily conjurer has closed his books, shut the library door, and turned away from the mythological songs of the Minotaur that once lured him down the labyrinthine paths "I have given up," he writes, "the surprises inherent in a baroque style as well as the surpnses that lead to an unforeseen ending For many years, I thought it might be given me to achieve a good page by means of variations and novelties, now, having passed seventy, I believe I have found my own voice ' In a few of the stones Borges returns to the Argentina of his youth, the scene of his lifelong interest in the nature of courage and "the dignity of danger " He asks us to believe that all but the title story, derived from Gulliver's Travels, are "realistic " By this he seems to mean that he has chosen details for their ability to give a single character or event its local habitation and name Each story is rigorously confined to its austere circumference of credible incident The infinitely widening circles of hypnotic suggestion that give such a dazzling multi-faceted texture to earlier Borges tales have not been allowed to form m this book, and one feels their absence strongly Since these are the stones of Borges that are being most widely read, in part because he is now published often in the New Yorker, it seems a pity that they offer so attenuated a glimpse of his elegance and ingenuity, of the perplexing power implicit in even his most bizarre inventions In "The Intruder," two inseparable brothers find that a woman threatens the bond between them By killing her, they forge a new link of fastness "the woman they had cruelly sacrificed and their common need to forget her' Both "Juan Murafia" and "The Meeting" revive an old Borges conceit that knives?not their tools, the men"—will continue to clash m anonymous duels long after their owners are dust Straightforward though he means these stories to be, not one of them forces the reader into the paradoxical attitude of complicity and skepticism that is among the special pleasures of reading Borges For all his fussing with names and dates and places, I found it hard to keep the significances of these tales distinctly in mind alarmingly soon after I had read them And the Swiftian Yahoos of Doctor Brodie's Report left me bewildered Is this a parody of Swift or of Borges9 Whatever he intends, there is little wit or substance in this mock-solemn report on their socialized vileness The weakest story in this book, "The Gospel According to Mark," is the one Borges unaccountably thinks the best A young medical student is marooned by floods on a friend's ranch Stuck with only the illiterate hired hands for company, he reads the Gospel aloud to them at mealtimes As the flood ebbs, they prepare to crucify him What are we to make of this flimsy little morality tale with its stale melodrama7 One looks in vain for irony or fear, but they are not there In any case, the emotional untidiness of fear has always been alien to Borges' vision, and this is what separates him crucially from Kafka, with whom he is often compared Though one can find clear traces of Kafka in "The Library of Babel," and its image of an endlessly replicated hierarchy in the universe, Borges' metaphysical fantasies and Kafka's dream narratives are strikingly different In Kafka, mystery is a form of humiliation that finally engulfs K in horror Though Kafka's courtrooms and castles are superficially as unreal as the intellectually devised planet Tlon, Kafka's settings become gradually charged with a mechanistic menace as weighted with physical jeopardy as a collapsing wall In contrast, the hieratic center of Borges' inquisitive intellect is unemphatically calm, absorbed sub specie aetei ni-tatis m the intricate order of the Book of the World Without Borges' own suffering his antiquarian aloofness might seem inhumanly cold But it has been his means of survival, and he makes it one of ours...