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NYRB January 9,
2014 Issue The Daggers
of Jorge Luis Borges Michael
GreenbergProfessor Borges: A Course on English Literature by Jorge
Luis Borges, edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, and translated
from the
Spanish by Katherine Silver New
Directions, 306 pp., $24.95 Ferdinando
Scianna/Magnum Photos Jorge Luis
Borges, Palermo, Sicily, 1984 Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges
was
engaged in a dialogue with violence. Speaking to an interviewer about
his
childhood in what was then the outlying barrio of Palermo, in Buenos
Aires, he
said, “To call a man, or to think of him, as a coward—that was the last
thing…the kind of thing he couldn’t stand.” According to his
biographer, Edwin
Williamson,1 Borges’s father handed him a dagger when he was a boy,
with
instructions to overcome his poor eyesight and “generally defeated”
demeanor
and let the boys who were bullying him know that he was a man. Swords,
daggers—weapons with a blade—retained a mysterious, talismanic
significance for
Borges, imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honor. The short
dagger
had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death
close, in
a final embrace. As a young man, in the 1920s, Borges prowled the
obscure
barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife
fighters,
who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he
wished to
know and absorb. The criollos
were the early Spanish settlers of the pampa, and their gaucho
descendants. For
at least a century now, the word has signified an ideal cultural purity
that,
according to its champions, was corrupted by the privatization of the
pampa
and, later, by the flood of immigrants from Italy and elsewhere in
Europe that
took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Borges spent
much of his twenties attempting to write a full-length epic poem that
would
mythologize this “innumerable Buenos Aires of mine,” as he called it—a
work
that would, in Borges’s words again, “converse with the world and with
the
self, with God and with death.” He saw it as a way to reflect the
city’s
essence, as Joyce had done with Dublin, a way to establish a lasting
cultural
identity that Argentina did not yet possess in the world. His aim, in
part, was
to enshrine the urban descendent of the criollo, with his ubiquitous
dagger and
supposedly honorable outlaw ways. Eventually he would abandon the
project—Borges was never able to conquer the long form; and though his
cultural
vision, as it later developed, would be much broader, the romance of
the
criollo would continue to animate his imagination. Some of his finest
fiction—including the stories “The South,” “The Dead Man,” and “The
Intruder,”
to name just a few—was kindled by the dagger. The deeply Argentinian nature of Borges’s work is often camouflaged by his metaphysical preoccupations and far-flung literary references. But his involvement with Argentine history and politics, and his belief that the country’s fate was entwined with his own, persisted almost to the end of his life. Politics was an emotional matter. His family wasn’t wealthy but his bloodline was illustrious. Some of the most prominent streets of Buenos Aires are named after his ancestors, most notably Isidoro Suárez, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a hero of the Battle of Junín in 1824 that would turn the tide in South America’s war for independence from Spain. The battle was fought in the Peruvian Andes, with swords and lances. “No retumbó un solo tiro,” not a single gunshot resounded, Borges writes in a poem to commemorate Suárez. This “clash of the lances” was of high significance to Borges, as was his great-grandfather’s feat of running through a Spaniard “with his spear.” Borges’s paternal grandfather was a colonel in the Indian wars who died in battle. Another ancestor led the vanguard of José de San Martín’s army against Spain. “At last the blow/At last the hard blade ripping my chest,/the intimate dagger at my throat,” wrote Borges in “Conjectural Poem.” The narrator of the poem is yet another of Borges’s famous ancestors, Francisco Laprida, who was murdered in 1829 on the orders of a gaucho chieftain or caudillo. The poem is
not a celebration of violent death but an anguished response to the
coup of
1943 in Argentina that was sympathetic to the Nazis. Borges was
outspokenly
antifascist during those critical years. But his allegiances were
split.
Culturally he was a nationalist, politically a liberal. In 1934, a
rising
faction of right-wing nacionalistas attacked him for “slyly” concealing
his
Jewish ancestry. Borges answered the attack with an essay entitled “I a
Jew”
that mocked the nacionalistas’ anti-Semitism and general bigotry. “I
wish I had
some Jewish forefathers,” he would tell an interviewer later
on—probably
because it would have allowed him to take psychological possession of a
bookish
tradition he admired. By the early
1940s, nacionalistas were marching in the streets of Buenos Aires,
chanting
slogans in support of the Nazis. During World War II, Borges was
closely
aligned with socialist and liberal writers. And during the most
oppressive
years of Juan Domingo Perón’s government, in the early 1950s, he was
assigned a
detective to keep track of his moves and monitor his lectures, which
were often
caustically critical of Perón. Yet in the
conundrum of Argentine politics of those days, his liberalism was shot
through
with ambivalence. In principle, he favored a centralized,
European-style
democracy, but he worried that such “progressivism” amounted to
“submitting to
being almost–North Americans or almost-Europeans, always
almost-others”—a
threat to Argentina’s precarious cultural maturation. He also knew from
experience that, given free elections, Argentines would, more often
than not,
vote into power a tyrannical caudillo with no interest in cultivating
an
independent judicial system or other reliably democratic institutions.
Perón,
who was elected president in 1946 when Borges was forty-seven, was a
prime
example of this. “Our vernacular imitation of fascism,” he called
Peronism,
with its roving bands of pampered workers, modeled on Mussolini’s
Blackshirts,
who acted as street enforcers and unofficial thugs. The
conundrum led Borges to the misguided belief that what Argentina needed
was an
enlightened dictatorship that would train its citizens in the ways of
true
democracy, and then oversee free elections. His public support for the
violently repressive juntas of Generals Jorge Rafael Videla in
Argentina and
Augusto Pinochet in Chile, in the 1970s, has left a permanent stain on
his
reputation. Without excusing it, one can comprehend it as an act of
despair, as
Argentina tumbled toward bankruptcy and civil war, and a seemingly
endless
succession of inept governments collapsed. At the time, no political
faction
offered anything resembling a solution. While an
official guest of Pinochet, in 1976, Borges spoke of the “sword of
honor” that
would draw “the Argentine Republic out of the quagmire” just as it had
done in
Chile. Referring to the underground guerrilla groups that were battling
the
junta in Argentina, he said he preferred “the sword, the bright sword”
over the
“furtive dynamite” of the enemy. While in Spain, he called Videla’s
junta “a
government of soldiers, of gentlemen, of decent people.” Sheltered at
this point by fame, blindness, and the private mythology of honor that
he had
been cultivating for fifty years, he seemed not to understand the
extent of
Videla’s reign of terror. He made the mistake of lending the luster of
his name
to a more virulent version of the fascist state he had condemned in
Perón. In
place of the personality cult of Peronism, Videla’s junta offered an
impersonal
justification of patriotic murder. Later, when censorship of the press
was
eased and Borges learned about the atrocities of the Dirty War, he
regretted
his support, calling the members of the junta “gangsters” and “madmen”
who
should be prosecuted for their crimes. Professor
Borges is the literal transcription of a course in English literature
that
Borges taught at the University of Buenos Aires in 1966. The course
begins with
Beowulf and ends with Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, a total
of
twenty-five classes. It’s no surprise that Borges’s discussion of the
ancient
Anglo-Saxon epics make up this book’s most inspired chapters. With its
harsh
consonants and open vowels, and its unambiguous vocabulary of things
that
“correspond to fire, metals, man, trees,” Anglo-Saxon was perfectly
suited to
the poetry of battle. Borges had
been reading English translations of the epics throughout his life, but
when he
was fifty-nine, he set out to teach himself Anglo-Saxon, a process he
called
“the pure contemplation of a language at its dawn.” The epics provided
him with
a kind of literary ideal: concrete, precise, and suffused with the glow
of the
sword as a magical object. His reader’s eye was keen, and interestingly
unpredictable. He admires the “Finnsburh Fragment” over Beowulf, for
instance,
though it consists of a mere sixty lines, preserved from what surely
was a much
longer poem, and composed, perhaps, as early as the late seventh
century. What
moves Borges is the directness of the language that comes at the reader
with an
illuminated power, unobscured by kennings, a common literary mannerism
of the
Middle Ages. Kennings were a form of metaphor fashioned primarily from
composite words: “whale road” for sea, for example, and “sea stallion”
for
ship, and “sword-storm” for battle. At the heart of the “Finnsburh Fragment” is a Danish princess who has been married off to Finn, the king of Frisia, to avoid a war. The princess’s brother, king of the Danes, comes to visit her at Finn’s castle for the winter. They are attacked by the Frisians and the Danish king manages to hold them off, but kills his own nephew in the process, a tragedy (though the poet would never call it so) that suggests a future conflict with no obvious resolution. Borges
revels in the image of the hall of Finn aglow “with the shimmering of
the
swords, ‘as if Finnsburh were in flames.’” This glow is not from a
fire, as the
king’s guards originally suppose, but from the moon “‘shining through
the
clouds’ and onto the shields and spears of the Frisians who have come
to
attack.” He notes an analogous metaphor in the Iliad that likens a
battle to a
fire—the comparison referring “to the glow of the arms as well as its
moral
stature”—and also the Scandinavian myth of Valhalla, “illuminated not
with
candles but with swords that shine with their own supernatural glow.” Beowulf, the only surviving full-length Saxon epic, is, to Borges’s mind, “poorly wrought.” Unlike the “Finnsburh Fragment” with its implied familial tragedy, Beowulf simply introduces us to a hero—“a northern Hercules,” Borges calls him—and then goes on to show him doing heroic things before he dies. The author, we know, was most likely a monk who set out to write a Germanic Aeneid, and what irritates Borges is that he mimics the syntactic rules of Latin. At the time Beowulf was composed, probably during the eighth century, there were only about five hundred Latin words in Saxon, religious words for the most part, describing abstract and, to the Saxons, alien concepts. Borges is annoyed by Beowulf’s piousness and “pompous” tone. Borges, of course, wrote in a Latinate language; the hard Saxon words that represented “essential” things in English carried for him an exotic sonic power. Latin-derived words in Saxon seemed imitative and watered down. In his most metaphysical stories and poems, he searched, in Spanish, for primal, material words. In the alchemy of composition, their clarity of meaning had the effect of making the overall mystery of a story sharper. “I have felt epic poetry far more than lyric or elegy,” Borges told The Paris Review in 1966, “perhaps…because I come from military stock.” But in fact he is unexpectedly stirred by the Saxon elegies of the ninth and tenth centuries, when there occurs, in Borges’s words, “the most important thing that can take place in poetry: the discovery of a new inflection.” These are not poems of battle but personal poems of solitude and sadness. “The Seafarer,” for instance, has a startling opening that anticipates centuries of literature to come, including, most obviously, Walt Whitman: “I will sing a true song of me myself and tell of my travels.” Borges delights in the unselfconscious, colloquial way that, later in the poem, the poet describes a snowstorm from the north: “Hail fell on the earth, coldest of seeds.” This metaphorical pairing of opposites is new—hail summons death, seeds summon life—yet one doesn’t feel the poet straining for effect; it just seems to be the way he saw it. The most
remarkable of the elegies is the second part of “The Dream of the
Rood,” when
the tree from which the cross was made to crucify Christ speaks to us
directly.
The wood of the felled tree is sentient and alive. It tells us its
story, it
asks for forgiveness, and we feel the extraordinary imaginative newness
of the
poet becoming the voice of a tree. There is nothing pious or dutifully
Christian about this part of the poem. It is the voice of the earth
itself,
expressing a torn sorrow. “The cross trembles when it feels Christ’s
embrace,”
remarks Borges. “It is as if the cross were Christ’s woman, his wife;
the cross
shares the pain of the crucified God.” What
captivates Borges is the apparent purity of feeling in these verses,
the sense
that the writers are unaware of the originality of their poems. “They
were
forcing an iron language, an epic language, to say something for which
that
language had not been forged—to express sadness and personal
loneliness. But
they managed to do it.” He is speaking of Coleridge, whose posthumous fame is equal, say, to that of Wordsworth, though “Coleridge’s work, which fills many volumes, actually consists of only a few poems…and a few pages of prose.” He says this is because when one thinks of Coleridge “one thinks of a character from a novel.” In a way, we think of Borges too as someone who has been conjured: a blind, oracular man who imagined a world of doppelgängers and endless cosmic repetitions, and who wrote a handful of “essay-fictions” that have made him one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Contributing
to this image of Borges as an invented figure is his own preoccupation
with the
idea of an alternate self. He sometimes spoke of a second Borges who
was born
the same day as the first Borges, bore his name, but was a different
person.
This second Borges was an observer or spectator of the “real”
Borges—the
profounder Borges—whom the second Borges has come to identify with, as
one
identifies with a character in a movie or a play, because his actions
are
always before his eyes. He borrowed this idea from a Hindu school of
thought, a
theological attempt to reconcile our self-conscious way of being with
our
inner, immutable selves. In 1973, I
attended a lecture Borges gave in an elegant room at some historical
society in
Buenos Aires. I arrived an hour early because the year before, in New
York, I
had been unable to get into one of his talks—the crowd, at Columbia
University,
had been so large that it had spilled out onto Broadway. In Buenos
Aires there
were four people in the audience; one of them was Borges’s assistant,
another
his close friend. The joke in Buenos Aires at the time was that if
Borges had
been Czech or French, Argentines would be reading him in translation in
droves. The lecture
I attended was on José Hernández’s 1872 epic poem The Gaucho Martin
Fierro. In
the poem, Martin Fierro is pressed into military service during the
Indian
wars; he deserts, lives with the Indians for a time, kills a man in a
barroom
knife fight, and becomes an outlaw, hunted by the authorities. Fierro
is left
with two choices: to become a tamed ranch hand for one of the large
beef
growers who were in the process of cordoning off the pampa, or
surrender to the
police—both a form of imprisonment. Borges admired the poem for its rich, colloquial authenticity. A sign of this authenticity, he said, was that the protagonist never described the sky—so ubiquitous on the pampa that it goes without remark. The vastness of the landscape is implied in the way the characters move through their lives. The rhythm
of Martin Fierro was drawn from the payada, a kind of gaucho field song
with a
driving eight-syllable line. The payada would provide the basis for the
guitar-sung ballads known as milongas, which in turn would give way to
the
tango, Argentina’s most recognized artistic form. Criollo,
gaucho life, like that of the characters in the Saxon epics, was marked
by an
unassailable code of violence. Death was never far away; nor did the
gaucho—who, ideally at least, lived in a cult of courage that Borges
championed
and admired—want it to be. This presence of death, as in the Saxon
epics,
provoked an elemental expression that he wished to emulate. He strived
for a
warrior-like stature, or some equivalent of it, in his work, believing
that it
could lift us out of what he called the “nothingness of personality”
with its
picayune neuroses and personal complaints. When he was
in his late seventies, he still lived in the modest Buenos Aires
apartment he
had shared with his mother until she died. His biographer, Edwin
Williamson,
describes his bedroom as resembling “a monk’s cell with its narrow iron
bed,
single chair, and two small bookcases where he kept his collection of
Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian books.” Those ancient books were an
integral part
of the ethos that sustained this most modern of writers.
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