Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing

Rivka Galchen reviews Jorge Luis Borges' essay anthology On Writing.

Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.
And problematic as well. More than any other 20th-century figure, Borges is the one designated — and often dismissed as — the Platonic ideal of Writer. His outrageous intellect is cited as proof of either his genius or of his bloodless cerebralism.
But Borges did have some mortal qualities. He lived most of his life with his mother. He loved detective and adventure novels. (His first story in English was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.) Though he started to go blind in his 30s, he never learned to read Braille. And in his later years he made some unappealing political remarks about being happy that, following the military overthrow of the Perón government, “gentlemen” were again running the country. (Perón, to be fair, had “promoted” Borges from head of the National Library to head of poultry inspection.) Such remarks are perhaps why he never won the Nobel.

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Jorge Luis Borges: The Garden of Forking Paths

On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure.

This is the starting paragraph of Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Garden of Forking Paths, it's available online here, translated by Donald A. Yates.

Borges’s Lectures

Daniel Pritchard reviews Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights.

In Seven Nights, the recently re-released collection of lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, Borges does not discuss the phenomenon of déjà vu. He does, however, speak at great length about nightmares and dreams, which he describes as “a kind of modest personal eternity.” It is a beautiful phrase. With it, Borges could have just as well been describing déjà vu, because in suddenly recalling a scene or event that has not yet happened, the experience is as close to a waking sense of eternity—that discomforting vertigo against a centering prescience—that a person might ever achieve.

Reading the seven pieces collected in Seven Nights was, for me, an intense and prolonged sensation of déjà vu. At each turn, the phrases felt familiar yet new, as if they had been written for me by someone who knew all that I know about Borges.

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Perla Sassón-Henry: Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds

Noam Cohen reviews Perla Sassón-Henry's Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds.

THE Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might seem an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered the Internet. A fusty sort who from the 1930s through the 1950s spent much of his time as a chief librarian, Borges (1899-1986) valued printed books as artifacts and not just for the words they contained. He frequently set his stories in a pretechnological past and was easily enthralled by the authority of ancient texts.

Yet a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia — the so-called Internet 2.0 — and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.

Among the scores of Borges stories, a core group — including “Funes the Memorious,” “The Library of Babel” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — first appeared in the United States as “Labyrinths” in the early 1960s. With their infinite libraries and unforgetting men, collaborative encyclopedias and virtual worlds conjured up from the printed page and portals that watch over the entire planet, these stories (along with a few others like “The Aleph”) have become a canon for those at the intersection of new technology and literature.

New Directions, the publisher of “Labyrinths,” reissued the collection in May, for the first time in more than 40 years. In a sign of the changing times it includes an introduction from William Gibson, the cyberpunk author. (The original, by contrast, came with a preface from André Maurois of the Académie Française.)

By 1955 Borges had lost his sight yet was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina. Assessing his predicament (the digital age predicament) of having access to so much information and so few ways to process it, Borges wrote in “Poem of the Gifts,” “No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God, who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch.”

What follows are excerpts from prophetic Borges short stories — translated by Andrew Hurley in “Borges: Collected Fictions” (Penguin Books) — and examples of those prophesies fulfilled.

Infinite Encyclopedia

THEN “Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)

NOW Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia project that began in 2001, now has a total of more than nine million articles in more 250 languages. There are more than 75,000 “active contributors,” many of whom remain anonymous. As it grows and becomes ever more influential, its operating logic remains a mystery. A favored saying among Wikipedia’s contributors is: “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

Life Is Like A Blog

THEN “Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. ‘I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,’ he said to me. ... And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.” “Funes” (1942)

Now The path from diary to blog to the frequently updated “microblog” has now descended to “life-logging.” Not content merely to record their thoughts or even daily activities, life-loggers record and preserve everything they see, hear, say and read during the day. The world-recognized early adopter is Gordon Bell, a 73-year-old computer programmer who wears an audio recorder as well as a tiny camera that snaps a picture every 60 seconds. A 2006 profile in Fast Company described Mr. Bell as at one time being “worried about filling up his hard-drive space too quickly.” He adds a gigabyte of information a month and figures that an average 72-year-old person would require one to three terabytes, “a hefty amount of storage.”

Nothing Is Forgotten

THEN “I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures.” “Funes” (1942)

Now There once was a time when a poet could assert that “the revolution will not be televised.” But today, of course, even a politician’s informal meet-and-greet will be recorded for posterity. Senator George Allen of Virginia learned this in 2006 when a tape of him calling his opponent’s videographer a “macaca,” a racially tinged epithet, spread like a virus across the state and, soon, the world. He lost his re-election bid.

Universal Library

THEN “From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is ‘total’ ... that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. ... When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist.” “The Library of Babel” (1941)

Now In announcing that an ambitious international project to digitize universities’ book collections had passed the 1.5 million mark, one of its organizers, Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, proclaimed in November: “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language.” To others, the Internet itself is the Universal Library, where readers can search for recipes, medical treatments, barroom trivia or perhaps even Google themselves.

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Latin American Literature

Susan Wyndham reviews The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 which includes the Jorge Luis Borges 1967 interview.

Jorge Luis Borges, on the other hand, enjoyed the interview so much that he ignored his secretary's frequent reminders that a Senor Campbell was waiting for him. "The Campbells are coming!" he cheers as he ploughs on in his demolition of English-language writers from Shakespeare onwards. The text is footnoted with minor factual corrections, suggesting the blind Borges either didn't check the text or didn't care.

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Latin American Literature

Buenos Aires doesn't live only on Tango. Borges' presence is a constant in the city.

When Jorge Luis Borges died, a distinguished Buenos Aires art collector, Jorge Helft, began a scholarly project, the assembling of little-known or unknown Borges material. That was in 1986, and so far he's gathered more than 15,000 items --private letters, unpublished manuscripts, long-forgotten pamphlets, obscure literary magazines carrying Borges poems that probably even Borges had forgotten. In recent years, scholars from around the world have quarried this mountain of words to produce 10 books.

No doubt many more will appear. The Borges reputation seems to grow even faster now than when he was alive. Helft's loving attention to every detail of the work typifies the attitude of intellectuals in Buenos Aires. As Helft says, "He has influenced every part of our culture."

In Argentina he's as much an emblem of national excellence as an author. Even those who haven't read his work find uses for him. Three years ago the maid who served his family for decades (without reading his books or any other books) put her name on a ghosted memoir, El Senor Borges. Among other revelations, she reported that (contrary to what he told the world at the time) Borges gravely regretted that he was never chosen as the Nobel laureate. She says that every year the announcement of someone else's triumph inaugurated a period of sadness for him, not at all lightened by journalists calling to ask for his comments. He joked about it, but the jokes were painful for him.

Today in Buenos Aires he's inescapable. Since the city now raises money by giving donors the right to put their logos on street signs, it's possible to turn a corner and find yourself looking up at "Telecom Jorge Luis Borges," a clever advertiser having simultaneously identified the corporation with both the street and the author for whom the street has been renamed.

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Argentine Literature

Book Review: With Borges by Alberto Manguel

Like the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Manguel's With Borges is almost perfect in its brevity (almost only because of the annoying typos and spelling mistakes). But, as with Borges, brevity in this case doesn't mean simplicity. In fewer than 100 narrow pages, many of them with Sara Facio's evocative photographs, Manguel manages to echo the complexity of his fellow Argentinean's labyrinthine tales, with their blending of fact and fiction, mysticism and mathematics. With Borges does not include fiction (although the conversations are based on memories of a time long past), but it does combine memoir, biography, and reflections on the works of Borges and of the writers he admired to create an intimate portrait of this enigmatic writer.

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Argentine Literature

Jorge Luis Borges' Rare manuscripts lost, then found

A three-week scramble to find two handwritten manuscripts by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges worth nearly $1 million ended on Monday when they were discovered in the bookstore that had reported them missing.
Lame Duck Books, a seller of rare books, art and manuscripts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had reported the short story manuscripts missing and presumed stolen after they were last seen on November 12 at an antiquarian book fair in Germany.
"By strange chance we've located the manuscripts today. They had been tucked behind the backing of a photograph that was inside a little plastic sheath that was in one of our manuscript files when we were at the book fair," John Wronoski, Lame Duck's owner, told Reuters.
The global police network Interpol, which fights international crime, had been notified along with police in Harvard Square in Cambridge, where the bookstore had previously held them locked in a safe.

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Latin American Literature