Borges and I, and I, and I. ...
Seven years after the centennial of his birth, and on the twentieth anniversary of his death, the competing chorus of scholarship on Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) seems to be never ending: new editions of his work, worldwide academic conferences, and a Center for Studies and Documentation located, until moving recently to Iowa, in a very Borgesian-sounding place, the University of Århus in Denmark. In that chorus, the critical readings by John Updike, John Barth, Susan Sontag, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others, are testimonials to the Argentine writer's impact on reading and writing for many contemporary authors.
However, there is an echo in those voices that goes beyond what might be written about Borges's fictions or essays on literature. I am referring to writers "writing Borges." What happens when Borges is written? Two books published in 1999, Borges múltiple: Cuentos y ensayos de cuentistas and Escrito sobre Borges: Catorce autores le rinden homenaje, provide some answers. In the first section of Borges múltiple, short stories either play with Borgesian topics--labyrinths, apocryphal texts, doubles--or introduce him or one of his characters into the story. In the second volume, well-established Argentine writers--Mempo Giardinelli, Angélica Gorodischer, and Luisa Valenzuela, among others--rewrite a Borges story of their liking to their liking, thus the Escrito sobre Borges title, writing not about Borges but literally over Borges, in palimpsest-like fashion.
To begin approaching this intertextual phenomenon, which we might call the "literaturization" of writers, let us look at "La entrevista" (1979; The interview), by Argentine writer Mempo Giardinelli, and "Borges el comunista" (1977; Borges the communist), by Mexican writer René Avilés Fabila.1 Both stories engage Borges as a literary object: Giardinelli fictionalizes him to debate Borgesian poetics; Avilés Fabila subverts the political persona created by Borges's public comments. My main intent is thus to address the effects produced by texts that appropriate Borgesian poetics and politics.
Interview with the Vampire
At the beginning of "The Interview," the narrator, who is a writer and a journalist, summarizes his relationship with that "unusual old man whom I have admired, and, of course, I still hate" (Borges múltiple).2 He had seen Borges twice before: in a restaurant and near a bank. The interview, however, happens in a nightmare that ends with vertigo and a scream. The narrator-protagonist wakes up, figures it was a bad dream, and comes to a reassuring yet disappointing conclusion: "The simple fact is nobody is ever going to ask me to interview Borges." Some of the story's narrative elements are in clear dialogue with Borgesian poetics, especially the play with time, the story-within-a-story frame, and the foreshadowing technique.
The story takes place in 2028; the narrator is eighty-one years old, and Borges is one hundred and thirty. This allusion to Borges's "eternity" elicits a smile and underlines the writer's ubiquitous figure. The timeline has another curious effect, though, since the distant future (although not so distant at the time of our reading, it is forty-nine years from the time of the writing of the story) establishes a distance for readers, perhaps making it easier to accept this Borges as a pervasive character. On the other hand, the first "real" meeting between the protagonist and Borges occurs at the restaurant around 1970-71, and the second encounter, at the bank, can be dated to 1974-75. The 1970s, a period of extreme social and political upheaval in Argentina, are the most prominent time in the story. In the real world, the real Borges turned more conservative, the military junta took over the government in 1976, and Giardinelli's story was published. In the story, this second meeting takes place, the narrator explains, "before I had left Buenos Aires when the long night began in 1976." Besides bringing to the surface the collective political situation at the time, the date makes readers equate the narrator with the real Giardinelli, who left the country that year, lived in Mexico until 1986, and is now back in his country. The third meeting, meanwhile, happens in the dream and corresponds to the time of the interview and the story.
These juxtapositions of times hint at another recognizable Borgesian device, the mise-en-abîme structure, exemplified in "The Interview" with two stories told by the character of Borges. In one of them, he follows a writer and erases everything he writes without his victim knowing it; in the end, Borges discovers that the writer is himself.
Like the stories-within-stories frame, inlaid details figure prominently in "The Interview." In the dream, the blue suit that Borges wears when he goes out with Giardinelli is the same suit he had on when his interviewer "really" saw Borges in 1974-75; the 1970-71 tablecloth with red-and-white squares reappears in the dream when Borges and Giardinelli go into a restaurant; and, when both are at the bank, the impatient young man who is lined up behind them in the dream is the twenty-five-year-old Giardinelli. These repetitions foreshadow the inevitable yet surprising revelation: "Borges had entangled me in his spider's web, in a horrible paradox where reality was fantastic and fantasy real," the narrator realizes. Readers may wonder if it isn't the architecture of Borges's stories that causes Giardinelli's agitation at the end of the tale.
For all the protagonist's animosity and angered tone throughout, "The Interview" cannot evade a few elements of the Borgesian universe. Some are a parody in its most elementary sense of mockery (e.g., the list of critics, a mix of real people and imaginary characters who, like parasites, live off Borges); others become a parody, given that they refer to a prior literary discourse: Borges's literature. In the end, the dream becomes a nightmare and the narrator encounters his own self, there are two possible endings, and the interviewer is "a capricious old man who suffers from gastritis and is determined to imagine the impossible."
El "Che" Borges
Between 1940 and 1960, the mature years of his writing, Borges made three important decisions as a citizen: he repudiated Juan Domingo Perón's rise to power; he praised the military-led "Revolución Libertadora" that overthrew Perón in 1955; and he aligned himself with the Allies during and after World War II. From the 1960s on, the time of his international acclaim, Borges was deemed a political reactionary, a reputation fueled by countless interviews wherein he seemingly lashed out at almost anything or anybody, even though nobody bothered to find out if he was kidding or, well, being Borges.
Perhaps no other Latin American writer has been more confronted for his political views than Borges. Is there any other writer who holds the dubious distinction of having two books, Contra Borges (1978) and Anti-Borges (1999), critical of his political views? This apparent animosity could be explained in part by the fact that he went against the grain and did not sympathize with socialism like many of his contemporaries (e.g., Pablo Neruda and Julio Cortázar). In this sense, Borges might have been a revolutionary of a different sort, a "Che" of letters, fighting for the autonomy of his craft in times that called for "committed" literature. However naïve this revolution may be, the books mentioned not only signal the body of criticism on Borges's political thought--although Borges himself would deny partaking of such a thing--but also make evident his importance for the relationship between politics and literature in Latin America.
Unlike the character created by Giardinelli, Borges was never a communist. That is the reason why "Borges the Communist," Avilés Fabila's story, creates such an oxymoronic effect. The genealogy of the tale reinforces an ironic context of reception. It first appeared in El Machete, a publication of the Mexican Communist Party, and was later included in Avilés Fabila's 1988 book, El diccionario de los homenajes (A dictionary of tributes). What might be considered a private joke in one context may be viewed as a curious yet careful selection of one aspect of Borges's larger-than-life legacy for Latin American writers in another. Written as a newspaper article, the story's objective style acts as a counterpoint to the amusing repercussions that a communist Borges would have had. Starting from an "as if" Borgesian framework, the results of such a contrary-to-fact situation produce the subversive outcome.
On the one hand, we find the reactions of those involved in this affair. The Argentine Communist Party supports Borges's conversion, which confirms that "historical reason" is on his side. However, he will have to follow the road that leads from the Communist Youth to the party: "The Argentine comrades are very severe on this: many years of experience and maturity are required to achieve change. For this reason, Borges, although eighty years old, shall remain in the Communist Youth ranks so as to obtain, through his study of Marxism, the necessary knowledge to be a member of the Party." The repercussions of Borges's imaginary membership in the Communist Party emphasizes the double-edged sword of irony, making the readers see through the veil of language and reinforcing the idea that politics is not the art of the possible but the art of the convenient. The Trotskyites, holders of "the Holy Grail of revolutionary purity," are still critical of Borges and accuse him of being a Stalinist, but the military junta believes that this conversion is a clear example of the freedom that reigns in Argentina, where only "extremists" are persecuted. Of course, the logical conclusion would be that "Borges will now receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, like other communist writers before him such as Neruda."
To characterize this political persona, Avilés Fabila mixes real data with imaginary actions or comments by this "born again" Borges. Throughout the story, we find references to the criticism Borges received because of his political positions, to his infamous handshake with Pinochet and equally infamous support for the Vietnam War, to his breakfast with the junta. But all this comes under a different light in the story since, in it, Borges understands that, to his customary themes (the self, time, mirrors), he will need to add dialectical materialism and class struggle. He will also need to read the classics: Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
On the surface, Avilés Fabila's story is a witty exercise about a most ironic writer. But the critical dimension of this narrative warns readers both about the dangers of blind praise and the idea of a Borges "for export" as well as the ineffectiveness of a critique that confines Borges to a ready-made ideological cast.
The Influence of Anxiety
In a time (1949) when Borges was barely beginning to be "Borges," or recognized as such, Augusto Monterroso, an early reader of his, said: "When we meet Borges, we become, in a way, ill. We are not prepared for this illness, and the restlessness that overtakes us is aggravated by not knowing if this illness will be over one day or if it will end up killing us. I suppose no greater compliment can be given to a writer. We all know similar diseases: they are called Proust, Joyce, Kafka."
The stories discussed here are examples of that "illness" that keeps leaving its mark on readers and writers. Both Giardinelli and Avilés Fabila dialogue with a canonical literary figure, but they also try to create their own space within the Latin American literary horizon. They could be experiencing Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence." In this case, however, we might be better off speaking about the "influence of anxiety." Why? Because Latin American writers are eager to move out from the shadows of the masters. "Post-Boom" writers such as Giardinelli and Avilés Fabila did not define an agenda to achieve this distancing, but the younger generations, admirers of Borges, are confronting another major legacy of Latin America's fiction in the twentieth century: exporting magical realism. Speaking of writers, the interviewer in Giardinelli's story says: "The little fish is the one who fears the big fish; the shark never worries about the sardine."
In the case of Borges, one of the ways this process takes place is through the objectification of his figure as a writer. The modus operandi appears to be "if we cannot beat him, let's make him literature." What are the effects of this process? Giardinelli, for all his attempts at humor, attacks both what Borges represents and his veneration of the critics. Result? The narrator ends up a pawn in Borges's plot, and Giardinelli has written--what else?--a Borgesian story. Thus, we could speak of a contamination effect, derived from the strong pull of Borgesian poetics. As for Avilés Fabila's story, the invention of a contrary-to-Borges real political persona generates complexity in meaning, and we could thus refer to an ironic distancing. The sharpness of this ironic distancing seems to fade when applied to Borges, due to the open-ended quality of his works and words. But when applied to some of his supporters as well as some of his critics, that distancing makes evident the ridiculousness and rigidity of certain political and cultural institutions. There is an old joke that one of Borges's first biographers (presumably Emir Rodríguez Monegal) believed that when Borges wrote his classic "Borges and I," the "I" referred to the late Uruguayan critic.
The option exercised by Giardinelli and Avilés Fabila, to make Borges a literary fetish, makes manifest, among other things, the tension between tradition and rupture, the effects of a writer's life and works on other writers, and the shortcomings and hopes of sardines.
In the 1954 preface to the second edition of his Universal History of Iniquity, Borges declares: "I would define the Baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature" (1998). Perhaps this is the Borgesian phase we are in. Borges is being used. It should come as no surprise that he anticipated this in "Borges and I," "The Other," "August 25th, 1983," and other texts. As usual, he was the first, before Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Giardinelli, and Avilés Fabila, to call for the death of the author, to understand the author-function, to become a character in his own stories, and to be irreverent with him. He began to "dis-authorize" himself and became, in the process, a literary object.
Legend has it that when Witold Gombrowicz left Argentina, he shouted from the rail of the ship: "Boys, you better kill Borges." Obeying that order looks more and more unlikely, since the stories discussed here are only a sample of the ever-increasing phenomenon of Borges's literaturization. I wonder if this points to one of the directions post (but not past) Borgesian fiction might take: a writing that proposes both dialogue and play, not of characters in search of an author, but of writers in a struggle with the legacy of their precursors. Borges once defined the essential condition for the survival of a book or a page: it had to be "everything for everyone" (1996). Little did he know--or, perhaps, he did suspect?--that he would continue to be "everything to everyone," and I imagine he might accept happily the idea that one of his destinies is, still, the literary page.
Notes
1. Mempo Giardinelli (b. 1947) is an author of short stories, novels, and essays. After his exile in Mexico and other countries, he returned in 1990 to Argentina. His works include Vidas ejemplares (1982); Luna caliente (1983; Eng. Sultry Moon, 1998); Santo oficio de la memoria (1993; Rómulo Gallegos Prize); and El décimo infierno (1999; Eng. The Tenth Circle, 2001). René Avilés Fabila (b. 1940) is a journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and active intellectual figure in Mexico. He is currently editing his complete works, which include Hacia el fin del mundo (1969); Tantandel (1975); La canción de Odette (1982); Borges y yo (1991); and Bestiario de seres prodigiosos (2001).
2. Citations for "The Interview" and "Borges the Communist" are from Borges múltiple, 51-54 and 109-22, respectively. All translations are mine except where noted.
Works Cited
Anti-Borges. Ed. Martín Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Javier Vergara, 1999.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Tr. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998.
------. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1996.
Borges múltiple: Cuentos y ensayos de cuentistas. Ed. Pablo Brescia & Lauro Zavala. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999.
Contra Borges. Ed. Juan Fló. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1978.
Escrito sobre Borges: Catorce autores le rinden homenaje. Ed. Josefina Delgado. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1999.
Monterroso, Augusto. "In Illo Tempore." In La palabra mágica. Mexico City: Era, 1983. 106-11.
Source Citation: Brescia, Pablo. "Post or Past Borges?: The Writer as Literary Object." World Literature Today. 80.5 (September-October 2006): 48-51. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 210. Detroit: Gale, 48-51. Literature Resource Center. Gale. New York Public Library. 2 Jan. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=nypl>.
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420085325
