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Borges was the
astonishing writer of
the Twentieth Century in that he believed readers of books were the true
writers. As Jason Wilson puts it, 'By 1935, then, Borges had inverted the
Romantic relationship that we still believe in: the mystique of the author as
the embodiment of originality and inspiration, who Borges simply calls a
reader. His reversal takes on even greater effect today as more and more
people want to be writers and do not read.' There is at the heart of Borges
as writer and human being something uncommonly mysterious that leaked out in
various ways. Imagination and intellect were abnormally sharply in conflict
in him. He believed the ego was the enemy: a view that brought him close to
Buddhism. Also, he was a pre-Barthes, Barthes, implicitly denying the author
a place in the text. His whole upbringing was bookish, confessing, 'If I were
asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.
In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library.' Yet
another peculiarity is that the literature he loved most of all was English
literature: writers he loved best were Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis
Stephenson, closely followed by the likes of Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton,
Charles Dickens, S.T. Coleridge ('of whom he would talk endlessly'); and he
took the trouble to learn Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic so that he could
penetrate Norse-based literatures. Yet his reputation as a writer really
became international by virtue of his appeal to French literary intellectuals
- especially during the post-Second World War
structuralist era - an appeal based on his seeming abolition
of the author and his creation of a highly-focused, economical texte for his amazing short stories. A refined
bourgeois taste, an acute irony, and a fascination with Argentinian low life
characterized his writings and resonated particularly among French
intellectuals. Yet despite his being an omnivorous reader, he never read the
great French writers of the modern era like Flaubert or Proust: indeed,
though an obvious europhile, as well as anglophile, he never read Europe's
most famous 20th Century poet, Rilke. This latter despite always
regarding himself primarily as a poet.
Physically, Borges was a large, placid-looking man, not unattractive, who
dressed to match the very correct gentleman that he was. It seems that women
were attracted to him all his life, and it was an attraction that he
frequently reciprocated. However, it seems a strong possibility that he never
had sexual relations with any woman; and all the women in his life were muses
rather than mistresses. He may have been impotent, he may simply had a
revulsion about sexual intercourse that he could never overcome. Though
dealing faithfully with his various 'lady loves', this book never quite
resolves the matter. Here is what the book says about Borges' most famous
love affair:
During the
war, and under Peronism, Borges suffered what has
become his most publicized love
affair, with the writer and communist
Estela Canto.
In 1989 Canto wrote her version of the affair
with a timid
man eighteen years her senior. He proposed marriage to
her on a
cement benach on the river coast between AdroguŽ and
M‡rmol. She
was willing to become his mistress, even marry him
if they went
to bed together, but he insisted it had to be marriage. As
mentioned
earlier, he was not impotent, but was panicked and
shameful
about sex...
Interestingly, though asseverating that Borges was 'not impotent', he goes on
to describe the affair with Estela Canto as 'Their bookish and lustful
relationship'; and nowhere in the book is there offered real proof that
Borges ever had sexual intercourse. Obviously, too, the fact that Borges
lived all his life, until she died in extreme old age, with his mother
compounded his difficulties with the opposite sex. This was not only because
his parents' marriage was a painful failure, of which their son and daughter
were only too well aware, but Borges' mother - who long outlived the father - was a
highly literate, bookish person herself. With the result that not only did
Borges adore his mother for natural reasons, but they shared an enormous
literary interest: one to such a degree that his mother was an important
critic of everything he wrote. Love and shared
interest make the most powerful of combinations. In this case, not only did
it give the mother power over her son's work but, also, she exercised strong
and affecting approval or disapproval of his many women friends - and it was
mostly disapproval.
Over many years Borges became gradually blind. According to Wilson's view,
and that of most critics, his best work was produced while he was sighted - unlike with
Milton. But his blindness merely matched with outer darkness the inner
darkness were he always dwelled: a darkness lit only by the light of ideal
love and by innumerable lanterns of books. Throughout this study Jason Wilson
makes important observations that provide insights which cast light also on
that darkness. He tells how Borges said of the Bengali poet Tagore and all
Easterners, 'eternity interested them and not time'; and how he wrote
elsewhere, 'Descreo en la historia' or 'I do not believe in history'. 'I
remember', Borges wrote, 'is a sacred verb'. Borges was given to aimless
wandering of the streets of Buenos Aires; and one day, 'Suddenly, in his
lowly, ignored Palermo...it is here that Borges first experienced Òeternity.Ó
Borges set off ...through back streets...and found himself by the Maldonado
stream (that is, in Palermo), a place that he had possessed in words but not
in reality; he was in the wrong side of familiar Buenos Aires with low, poor
houses, pink walls, fig trees and mud, American mud, he wrote, and a state
of bizarre, utter happiness. Nothing had changed in twenty years: a bird sings,
a cricket scratches, silence is vertiginous. 'Me sent’ muerto' ('I felt
dead') he wrote, outside time, in one of those impersonal states like pleasure,
or falling asleep, with successive time a delusion. This crucial experience
lies at the source of his work and being.' In other words the heart of his
work, the core of his thinking was based on a mystical experience.
Borges was a joker and an ironist, a subverter of received opinion, even the
sheer conformism of his outer life was a kind of resistance to political and
social pressures, such as were put upon him during the Peron era. He was,
however, if anything anti-political, but his resistance to the prevailing
left-wing intellectual ethos of both Peron's time and of the whole
intellectual world, both in Argentina and in Europe - even though his support was always for
democracy over autocracy - led him to be considered a right-winger.
And once this view of him had taken firm hold it meant, for example, he would
not, and did not, receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Finally, here are two last quotes from the end of the book, where Borges dies
'reciting Verlaine'. In the prologue to his poems El otro, el mismo, Borges summarized his own life: 'Curious
fate that of a writer. At first he's baroque, vainly baroque, and after years
he manages to attain, if the stars are favourable, not simplicity, which is
nothing, but a secret and modest complexity.' Says Wilson, 'That secret lies
buried in the poems, not in some biographic fiction, and only reading them
as a kind of magic will reveal anything.' Lastly, 'Jean-Pierre Bernes was at
his
death bed and called Borges 'before all else a poet, always rebelling against
everything, but peaceful'. A fitting comment with which to end this
wonderful, information-and-insight-packed critical life of a great
writer.
©
William Oxley 2008
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