Borges in Wonderland

I read a short story entitled The Zahir, and I was hooked. Is it just me? I think this story gives us the whole Borges (1899-1986) in a nutshell. What are those objects which dispense such mysterious power from the moment one catches a glimpse of it? Is it only one object that through the centuries manifests itself in numerous reincarnations of Yahweh’s burning bush, or is it a figment of paranoia, a chimera in a mad archivist's mind who is feeding his habit by ransacking the libraries for supporting evidence?

Whatever it is, the story is speaking of the Zahir as a tangible object from the everyday world, and in this instance it is a copper coin, a piece of small change, that has become the object of a neurotic obsession.

Borges' art has been criticized for being "all porch and no house behind" (Nabokov). The critic has a point. Instead of churning out a so-so novel Borges writes the mouth-watering review on The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim.

I can be dense at times and I searched the central catalog at the British Library back and forth before I realized that I had fallen for a hoax. But what had started as a literary joke among snobbish and slightly Daliesque literati in the cafes of Buenos Aires became a new kind of fiction. In a sense every of Borges's short stories is a mere synopsis of fictional events and yet he manages to tell it all.

The trick is to leave character and psychology to the reader's intuition and instead flick in the carefully selected circumstantial detail while keeping the delivery declarative and dead pan. Only recently it occurred to me how much Borges's craft actually owes to the old Norse storytellers, a fact Borges himself had never denied. The Norse sagas appear to be all surface: as an advance on his inheritance, the protagonist steals a few implements from his father's cottage, moves away and starts an enterprise of his own. He succeeds beyond expectation, branches out, takes in an apprentice, promotes him to be his steward, but disappoints the fellow because he doesn't offer him a full partnership. Tensions develop, the steward decides to ... we get the idea.

After turning away from his fascination with Carlyle, Borges had looked to Kafka for inspiration. However Kafka's magic has its dry spells. This author has a tendency to lose himself running circles in rants and reflections and this was against the inner nature of the precise Borges. His marvelous familiarity with bygone philosophies doesn’t make any allowances for loose reasoning, and at the same time philosophy is never more than a toy for Borges. Like a boy sitting at the pond and chewing on a stalk of grass. From time to time he tosses a pebble into the water and watches the ripples extending in ever more widening rings. He makes it look deceptively easy.

I guess, Borges is the opposite extreme to Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and the difference between the two temperaments is representing a fundamental polarity in the narrative universe. A polarity which had always been with us.

We can follow it back to the masculine Norse sagas in contrast to the opulent needlepoint work of Lady Murasaki's Prince Genji (973/8-1014 AD.), or further back, to Apuleius' ribald tale with a metaphysical twist (123-180 AD.) if set against the sometimes tantalizing glimpses on the plenitude of omniscient realism in the fragments of Petron's Satyricon (22-65 AD.). It is not so much a difference in subtlety than temperament.

You either tell it all and offer life to be swallowed whole, or you prefer to be selective with your effects and to create a mirror cabinet of perspectives as the actual object of your narrative. Both is a legitimate way of storytelling, the latter allowing for more deliberation.

The difference lies in the narrator's concept of truth. Now, truth of course is a big fancy cooking word. But no matter how we look at it, it is rooted in our way of deciding what is meaningful or not. In his essays, especially in his early years, Borges had given it a lot of thought in An Investigation of the Word, in The superstitious Ethics of the Reader, in Narrative Art and Magic, in The Postulation of Reality, in On literary Description, and many more. I think Borges hit the nail on the head when he defined language as a system of quotations, and in The Postulation of Reality Borges establishes as the telltale sign for classicism the classicist’s trust in semantic conventions.

The classicist is confident in the invariable meaning of his terms; to him the edges of his cookie cutter seem always sharp, although to the reader it may come across as rather vague and generic.

The romantic writer tries to reinvent the wheel in every turn of phrase and to restore the freshness of first impressions; he is vain enough to present himself as someone who has escaped the cliche. Both attitudes still continue to characterize an author. Our understanding has moved on, yet the approach remains either general or highly personal. But we are more self-conscious.

The modern classicist now claims to be objective and condemns the use of metaphor as a sign of unjustifiable idiosyncrasy and in his roman nouveau stays noncommittal with an abundance of visual detail and the cinematic minimum of characterization and dialogue. Paradoxically this has led to a position of semantic nihilism, which in and by itself is a romantic’s attitude. For this type of author “the true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way how he says it” (Alain Robbe-Grillet). It is the point where the parallels intersect in infinity for an act of smoke and mirror artistry.

What became clear to Borges, thanks to his troubled eyesight, is, that even the most unbiased of perceptions is ultimately as subjective and personal as the most outrageous of metaphors.

What really makes the difference is what has always made the difference: delivery and style and what it is reflecting of the artistic temperament. The narrator may present a rich meal of events and sensations and put the accent on omniscient totality, or if he is of a more opaque, more skeptical and more nervous mentality he considers his choices and infuses the reader's imagination with innuendo and alternative specters in a slimmer but more suggestive package. Storytelling of Tolstoyan grandeur appeals to the reader's whole spectrum of sensuality and emotions, whereas Borges prefers to cast little spotlights on carefully chosen events and moments.

It is a bit like lovemaking. Many people are already breathing heavier when they feel the partner's skin and smell her perfume; others need to get their fantasy going. For them sex is primarily an event in their imagination, even during the act. Apparently you can't have it both ways and it is affecting the artist's entire personality; the choice of how to tell a tale is more than a mere caprice. It is one of the crossroads in life and no possibility to retract your steps. So Tolstoy (1828-1910) is as omniscient as God himself and counting every hair, while Borges is the awakening sleeper, reporting to us from the exclusive world of his dream.