Jorge Luis Borges (11 page)

BURGIN:
But now, I’m curious, you have this parable of Cervantes, and you have written other parables about Dante and Homer and Shakespeare; I was wondering how you got the idea, because I don’t know of any other writer who has ever done this. I mean, to have written parables in which you tried to imagine or re-imagine the history of particular compositions or of their authors’ lives or destinies?

BORGES:
I think the explanation is fairly simple. The explanation is that I am interested in literature, not only for its own sake, but also as one of the many destinies of man. I mean, as I am interested in soldiers and in adventures and in mystics—well, I come from a military family and so on—I am also interested in literary men. I mean, in the fact of a man dedicating himself to his dreams, then trying to work them out. And doing his best to make other people share them. I’m interested in literary life. Of course, I’m not the first writer to do that because there are many Henry James stories about literary subjects, about literary men.

BURGIN:
You’ve really based your whole literature on literature itself in a way.

BORGES:
Yes. That may be an argument against my literature, and yet why? In many of my stories and poems the central character is a literary man. Well, this means to say that I think that literature has not only enriched the world by giving it books but also by evolving a new type of man, the man of letters. For example, you might not care for the works of Coleridge; you might think that outside of three or four poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” maybe “Time, River, and Imagining,” what he wrote is not very interesting, it’s very wordy, and very perplexed and perplexing stuff, confused and confusing stuff, and yet I’m sure that you think of Coleridge as you might think of somebody you had known, no? I mean, that though his writing is sometimes rather unreal, yet you think of him as being a real man—perhaps because of his unreality also, and because he lived in a kind of haze world or dream world, no? So that I think literature has enriched the world not only through books, but through a new type of man, the man of letters.

BURGIN:
Have you ever tried writing in a more realistic way, basing your stories not on literature but on developed characters and …

BORGES:
Yes. I have done that.

BURGIN:
You did try that first?

BORGES:
No, no. I’m going back to that. I wonder if you’ve seen the last edition of
El Aleph
?

BURGIN:
“La intrusa,” yes, that’s a very atypical story of yours in some ways. But in some ways it isn’t.

BORGES:
No, but I find that “La intrusa” is a different story from the others. Well, I have several plots of the same kind and when I’m back in Buenos Aires, I’ll go on with them.

BURGIN:
Why do you suppose you’ve changed your direction?

BORGES:
Well, there might be many reasons. I suppose the real reason is that when I thought of “La intrusa” I was very interested in it and I wrote it down in quite a short time. That might be a reason. And the other reason might be that I feel that the kind of stories you get in
El Aleph
and in
Ficciones
are becoming rather mechanical, and that people expect that kind of thing from me. So that I feel as if I were a kind of high fidelity, a kind of gadget, no? A kind of factory producing stories about mistaken identity, about mazes, about tigers, about mirrors, about people being somebody else, or about all men being the same man or one man being his own mortal foe. And another reason, which may be a rather malicious one, is that there are quite a few people all over the world who are writing that kind of story and there’s no reason why I should go on doing it. Especially as some of them do it far better than I do, no?

BURGIN:
Well, they followed you, and no, I don’t think they do it better or as well. Though, of course, some of your stories, like “The Form of the Sword,” are more “realistic.”

BORGES:
That’s one of the stories I like least, because it’s a trick story after all. Now a friend of mine told me that he saw through the trick, and I thought that is as it should be because I did think of the story as a trick story. I thought that if the reader felt that the man was talking about himself, it would make the whole thing more “pathetic,” but if he were merely telling a story about somebody who betrayed him, then that’s a mere episode. But if a traitor in a bashful way found that the only way of telling the story was to think of himself as outside the story, or rather, joining together with the central character, the story might be better and besides it might be said for the story that, well, let’s suppose—let’s suppose you made me some confession about yourself, no? You told me something that nobody knew or that nobody was supposed to know, or that you wanted hidden and suppose that in the moment you were telling it to me, you felt outside the whole thing because the mere fact of telling it made you the teller and not the told.

BURGIN:
I think you underrate that story because, though, as you say, it ends in a trick, an O. Henry kind of reversal, I think that …

BORGES:
But of course, when I wrote that story I was quite young and then I believed in cleverness, and now I think that
cleverness is a hindrance. I don’t think a writer should be clever, or clever in a mechanical way, no?

BURGIN:
I think it’s deeper than the plot. I think it’s thematically very interesting and I think it’s somewhat akin to that story “The Theologians” because …

BORGES:
No. “The Theologians” is a better story.

BURGIN:
“The Theologians”
is
a better story.

BORGES:
But, perhaps, perhaps “The Form of the Sword” makes for easier reading?

BURGIN:
Yes, but what I’m saying is that essentially the person who was telling the story could have been either one of the men. Just like in “The Theologians,” the two men were the same to God.

BORGES:
Yes, that’s true. I never thought of that.

BURGIN:
He could have been either one of the men, and in a sense he was.

BORGES:
I never thought of that. Well, you have enriched the story. Thank you.

BURGIN:
You noticed something very interesting about Don
Quixote. That he never does kill a man in all his adventures, although he often engages in fights.

BORGES:
Ah, yes! I wonder about that.

BURGIN:
And then you wrote that parable.

BORGES:
Well, I suppose the real reason or the obvious reason would be that Cervantes wanted to keep within the limits of farce and had he killed a man, then the book, then that would have been too real, no? Don’t you think so? I mean if Quixote kills a man, then he somehow is a real, bad man, whether he feels himself justified or not. I don’t think Cervantes wanted to go as far as all that, no? He wanted to keep his book within certain bounds, and had Don Quixote killed a man that would have done Cervantes no good.

BURGIN:
Also, there’s the idea you’ve mentioned that the author at some time in the book becomes the main character. So perhaps Cervantes couldn’t bear to kill a man
himself
, if he
became
Don Quixote.

BORGES:
Yes, yet I suppose he must have killed many in his life, as a soldier. But that’s different, no? Because if a soldier kills a man, he kills him impersonally, no? Don’t you think so? I mean if you kill a man as a soldier you don’t really kill him. You’re merely a tool. Or somebody else kills him through you or, well, you don’t have to accept any responsibility. I don’t
think a soldier feels guilty about the people he’s killed, no? Except the men who threw the bomb on Hiroshima.

BURGIN:
Well, some of them have gone insane, some of those people who were involved with the bomb.

BORGES:
Yes, but somehow, now I suppose you are—I shouldn’t say this to you, I’ll be blurting it out.

BURGIN:
Well, say it.

BORGES:
I can’t think of Hiroshima as being worse than any battle.

BURGIN:
What do you mean?

BORGES:
It ended the war in a day. And the fact that many people are killed is the same fact that one man is killed. Because every man dies his own death and he would have died it anyhow. Then, well, of course, one hardly knows all the people who were killed in Hiroshima. After all, Japan was in favour of violence, of empire, of fighting, of being very cruel; they were not early Christians or anything of the kind. In fact, had they had the bomb, they would have done the same thing to America.

Hold it, I know that I shouldn’t be saying these things because they make me seem very callous. But somehow I have never been able to feel that way about Hiroshima. Perhaps something new is happening to mankind, but I think that
if you accept war, well, I should say this, if you accept war, you have to accept cruelty. And you have to accept slaughter and bloodshed and that kind of thing. And after all, to be killed by a rifle, or to be killed by a stone thrown at you, or by somebody thrusting a knife into you, is essentially the same. Hiroshima stands out, because many innocent people were involved and because the whole thing was packed into a single moment. But you know, after all, I don’t see the difference between being in Hiroshima and a battle or—maybe I’m saying this for the sake of argument—or between Hiroshima and human life. I mean in Hiroshima the whole tragedy, the whole horror, is packed very close and you can see it very vividly. But the mere fact of man growing, and falling sick, and dying is Hiroshima spread out.

You understand what I mean? For example, there’s a part in Cervantes and in Quevedo where they speak against firearms, no? Because they say that, after all, a man may be a good marksman and another may not be. No, but what I think is this: I think that really all arms are horrible, no? Are awful. We’ve grown more or less accustomed, our sensibilities have been blunted, by ages and ages and so we accept a sword. Or we accept a bayonet or a spear, and we accept firearms, but whenever a new arm is about, it seems peculiarly atrocious, though after all, if you are going to be killed, it hardly matters to you whether you are killed by a bomb, or by being knocked on the head, or by being knifed.

Of course, it might be said that war is essentially awful or rather that killing is essentially awful or perhaps that dying is essentially awful. But we have our sensibilities blunted, and
when a new weapon appears, we think of it as being especially devilish—you remember that Milton makes the Devil invent gunpowder and artillery, no? Because in those days artillery was sufficiently new to be specially awful. And perhaps a day will come when people will accept the atomic bomb when we shrink from some keener invention.

BURGIN:
Then it’s a certain idea that you find awful. The idea of a man being killed.

BORGES:
Yes, but if you accept that, and war accepts that, or else there would be no war … the idea of a man fighting a duel is the same idea, essentially.

BURGIN:
Well, the soldier may accept it while he’s fighting under orders, but I, as an individual, don’t have to accept it. And the soldier may not be a person who thinks in terms of accepting something or not; he may just do something because he’s told to by his government. He doesn’t necessarily question it. Do you think that each soldier debates with himself whether a given war is right or not, or examines the reasons and debates whether it’s worth taking another human life?

BORGES:
I don’t think he has to. I don’t think he could do it, no? Yet I remember my great-grandfather, Colonel Suárez, who had fought the War of Independence, the War of Brazil and the Civil War. When he was about to marry, his wife asked him about the men he had killed. And then he told her
that he had only killed one man, and that was a Spaniard he had to run through with a lance in order to save a friend of his who had been taken prisoner. He said that was the one man he killed in the War of Independence, the War of Brazil and the Civil War. Now I suspect that he was lying, but that he knew at the same time that she must have felt a kind of horror at the idea that she was going to give herself to a bloodstained man, no? So I suppose he invented that in order to calm her.

You remember, the battle of Junín lasted three quarters of an hour—not a shot was fired, the whole thing was done with spears and swords. It stands to reason that someone was going to get killed, and that he would have known it. And besides, I knew he had many executed. But I suppose that in a sense he felt that what he had done was awful, or rather, perhaps he felt that those things were awful to a woman but not to a man, no? I don’t think he was a clear thinker or anything of the kind, but he must have felt what all soldiers feel, well, these things have to be done and I’ve done them, and I’m not ashamed of it, but why speak of those things to a woman who cannot be expected to understand? I suppose he was lying, because battles, well, they were very primitive in those days and quite small affairs, but the fact that they were primitive and small affairs may, I suppose—if a man killed anybody he had to be quite sure about it, no? Because if you are hacking away with a sword at somebody, you know whether you’ve killed him or not.

BURGIN:
I’ve always felt that by working out the rational consequences of mystic ideas, you’ve written about the things
people are most astonished at or afraid of, that you’ve selected things to write about that are really even more terrifying than death, like infinity.

BORGES:
But I don’t think of death as being terrifying. I was going over a sonnet with di Giovanni and the subject of that sonnet; I began by saying to the reader that he was invulnerable, that nothing could happen to him, that God had given to him the certainty of dust, mortality, and that, after all, if one day he should die, he could always fall back on the fact that life was a mere dream. But I don’t think of death as being terrifying.