Jorge Luis Borges (7 page)

BURGIN:
Is it a very short story?

BORGES:
Yes, five pages. I think it’s the best thing I’ve done.
Because, for example, in “Hombre de la esquina rosada,” I rather overdid the local colour and I spoiled it. But here I think you find, well, I won’t say local colour, but you feel that the whole thing happened in the slums around Buenos Aires, and that the whole thing happened some fifty or sixty years ago. And yet, there’s nothing picturesque about it. There are, of course, a few Argentine words, but they are not used because they are picturesque but because they are the exact words, no? I mean, if I used any other, I would make the whole thing phony.

BURGIN:
What about “Death and the Compass”? Do you like the way you treat the local colour in that story?

BORGES:
Yes, but in “Death and the Compass,” the story is a kind of nightmare, no? It’s not a real story. While in “La intrusa” things are awful, but I think that they are somehow real, and very sad also.

BURGIN:
You’ve quoted Conrad as saying that the real world is so fantastic that it, in a sense,
is
fantastic, there’s no difference.

BORGES:
Ah, that’s wonderful, eh? Yes, it’s almost an insult to the mysteries of the world to think that we could invent anything or that we needed to invent anything. And the fact that a writer who wrote fantastic stories had no feeling for the complexity of the world. Perhaps in the foreword to a story called “The Shadow Line,” a very fine story in Everyman’s
Library—I think he wrote a foreword to that story—there you’ll find the quote. Because, you see, people asked him whether “The Shadow Line” was a fantastic story or a realistic story, and he answered that he did not know the difference. And that he would never try to write a “fantastic” story because that would mean he was insensitive, no?

BURGIN:
I’m curious also about the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

BORGES:
One of the best stories I ever wrote, eh?

BURGIN:
You didn’t include it in your
Personal Anthology
.

BORGES:
No, because a friend of mine told me that many people thought of me as writing cramped and involved tales and she thought that since the real aim of the book was to bring readers nearer to me, it might on the whole be wiser if that story was left out. Because though she liked the story, she thought that it conveyed the wrong idea about me. That it would scare people away from reading the other stories. She said, “For this
Personal Anthology
, you want to make things easier for the reader. While if you give him, well, such a mouthful, you may scare him away and he won’t read any of the others.” Perhaps the only way to make people read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is to make them read other stories first. In Buenos Aires, I mean there are many people who write well, but most of them are trying their hand at realistic stories, no? So this kind of story, of course, falls outside the
common expected. That’s why I left it out, but it’s one of my best stories, perhaps.

BURGIN:
You work in your friend Casares again.

BORGES:
Yes, well, yes, that’s a kind of stock joke we have of working in imaginary and real people in the same story. For example, if I quote an apocryphal book, then the next book to be quoted is a real one, or perhaps an imaginary one, by a real writer, no? When a man writes he feels rather lonely, and then he has to keep his spirits up, no?

BURGIN:
Of course, it must be much more difficult for you to write now because of your blindness.

BORGES:
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible. I have to limit myself to short pieces. Yes, because I like to go over what I write; I’m very shaky about what I write. So before I used to write any amount of rough drafts, but now, as I can’t do them, I have to imagine drafts. So then, walking up and down the streets or walking up and down the National Library, I think what I want to write, but, of course, they have to be short pieces because otherwise, if I want to see them all at once—that can’t be done with long texts. I try to shorten them as much as I can, so I write sonnets, stories maybe one or two pages long. The last thing I wrote, rather a long short story, well, it was six pages.

BURGIN:
“La intrusa.”

BORGES:
“La intrusa,” yes. I don’t think I’ll ever go any farther than that. No, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it. I want to see at one glance what I’ve done … that’s why I don’t believe in the novel because I believe a novel is as hazy to the writer as to the reader. I mean a writer writes maybe a chapter, then another, then another one, and in the end he has a kind of bird’s eye view of the whole thing, but he may not be very accurate.

BURGIN:
Have you written anything since you’ve been in America?

BORGES:
I wrote some quite short pieces; I’ve written two sonnets, not too good ones, and then a poem about a friend who had promised us a picture. He died. He’s a well-known Argentine painter, Larco, and then I thought of the picture he had promised us, promised my wife and me—I met him in the street—and then I thought that in a sense he had given us a picture because he had intended to do so, and so the picture was in some mystic way or other with us, except that the picture was perhaps a richer picture because it was a picture that kept growing and changing with time and we could imagine it in many different ways, and then in the end I thanked him for that unceasing, shifting picture, saying that, of course, he wouldn’t find any place on the four walls of a room, but still he’d be there with us. That was more or less the plot of the poem. I wrote that in a kind of prose poem.

BURGIN:
That’s very nice.

BORGES:
Well, I wander. Now, when I was in New York, I began writing a poem and then I realized it was the same poem I had written to my friend all over again, yes, because it was snowing and we were on the, I don’t know, sixteenth floor of one of those New York towers, and then I lay there, it was snowing very hard, we were practically snowed in, snowbound, because we couldn’t walk, and then I felt that somehow the mere fact of being in the heart of New York and of knowing that all those complex and beautiful buildings were around us, that mere fact made us see them and possess them better than if we had been gaping at shop windows or other sights, no? It’s the same idea, of course. And suddenly I realized that I’d been going over the same ground, the idea of having something because you don’t have it or because you have it in a more abstract way.

BURGIN:
This seems to be the type of feeling one gets from a story like “The Circular Ruins.” Can you tell me what the pattern was behind the story?

BORGES:
No. I can’t say much about the conception, but I can tell you that when I wrote that story the writing took me a week. I went to my regular business. I went to—I was working at a very small and rather shabby public library in Buenos Aires, in a very grey and featureless street. I had to go there every day and work six hours, and then sometimes I would meet my friends, we would go and see a film, or I would have dinner with somebody, but all the time I felt that life was
unreal. What was really near to me was that story I was writing. That’s the only time in my life I’ve had that feeling, so that story must have meant something—to me.

BURGIN:
Have you ever read any poetry by Wallace Stevens?

BORGES:
I seem to recall the name in some anthology. Why? Is there something akin to it?

BURGIN:
I think he believes a lot in the integrity of the dreamer, in the integrity of the life of the imagination as opposed to the physical universe.

BORGES:
Yes, well, but I don’t think that feeling got into the story, it was merely a kind of intensity I had. That story came from the sentence “And I let off dreaming about you”—in
Alice in Wonderland
.

BURGIN:
You like
Alice in Wonderland
, don’t you?

BORGES:
Oh, it’s a wonderful book! But when I read it, I don’t think I was quite as conscious of its being a nightmare book and I wonder if Lewis Carroll was. Maybe the nightmare touch is stronger because he wasn’t aware of it, no? And it came to him from something inner.

I remember as a child I, of course, I gently enjoyed the book, but I felt that there was—of course, I never put this feeling into words—but I felt something eerie, something uncanny about it. But now when I reread it, I think
the nightmare touches are pretty clear. And perhaps, perhaps Lewis Carroll disliked Sir John Tenniel’s pictures, well, they’re pen-and-ink drawings in the Victorian manner, very solid, and perhaps he thought, or he felt rather, that Sir John Tenniel had missed the nightmare touch and that he would have preferred something simpler.

BURGIN:
I don’t know if I believe in pictures with a book. Do you?

BORGES:
Henry James didn’t. Henry James didn’t because he said that pictures were taken in at a glance and so, of course, as the visual element is stronger, well, a picture makes an impact on you, that is, if you see, for example, a picture of a man, you see him all at once, while if you read an account of him or a description of him, then the description is successive, The illustration is entire, it is, in a certain sense, in eternity, or rather in the present. Then he said what was the use of his describing a person in forty or fifty lines when that description was blotted by the illustration. I think some editor or other proposed to Henry James an illustrated edition and first he wouldn’t accept the idea, and then he accepted it on condition that there would be no pictures of scenes, or of characters. For the pictures should be, let’s say, around the text, no?—they should never overlap the text. So he felt much the same way as you do, no?

BURGIN:
Would you dislike an edition of your works with illustrations?

BORGES:
No, I wouldn’t, because in my books I don’t think the visual element is very important. I would like it because I don’t think it would do the text any harm, and it might enrich the text. But perhaps Henry James
had
a definite idea of what his characters were like, though one doesn’t get that idea. When one reads his books, one doesn’t feel that he, that he could have known the people if he met them in the street. Perhaps I think of Henry James as being a finer storyteller than he was a novelist. I think his novels are very burdensome to read, no? Don’t you think so? I think his novels are very … James was a great master of situations, in a sense, of his
plot
, but his characters hardly exist outside the story. I think of his characters as being unreal. I think that the characters are made—well, perhaps, in a detective story, for example, the characters are made for the plot, for the sake of the plot, and that all his long analysis is perhaps a kind of fake, or maybe he was deceiving himself.

BURGIN:
What novelists do you think could create characters?

BORGES:
Conrad, and Dickens, Conrad certainly, because in Conrad you feel that everything is real and at the same time very poetical, no? I should put Conrad as a novelist far above Henry James. When I was a young man I thought Dostoevsky was the greatest novelist. And then after ten years or so, when I reread him, I felt greatly disappointed. I felt that the characters were unreal and that also the characters were part of a plot. Because in real life, even in a difficult situation, even when you are worrying very much about something, even when you feel anguish or when you feel hatred—well, I’ve
never felt hatred—or love or fury maybe, you also live along other lines, no? I mean, a man is in love, but at the same time he is interested in the cinema, or he is thinking about mathematics or poetry or politics, while in novels, in most novels, the characters are simply living through what’s happening to them. No, that might be the case with very simple people, but I don’t see, I don’t think that happens.

BURGIN:
Do you think a book like
Ulysses
, for example, was, among other things, an attempt to show the full spectrum of thought?

BORGES:
Yes, but I think that
Ulysses
is a failure, really. Well, by the time it’s read through, you know thousands and thousands of circumstances about the characters, but you don’t know them. And if you think of the characters in Joyce, you don’t think of them as you think of the characters in Stevenson or in Dickens, because in the case of a character, let’s say in a book by Stevenson, a man may appear, may last a page, but you feel that you know him or that there’s more in him to be known, but in the case of
Ulysses
you are told thousands of circumstances about the characters. You know, for example, well, you know that they went twice to the men’s room, you know all the books they read, you know their exact positions when they are sitting down or standing up, but you don’t really know them. It’s as if Joyce had gone over them with a microscope or a magnifying glass.

BURGIN:
I imagine you’ve revealed a lot about English literature to your students.

BORGES:
Nobody knows a lot about English literature, it’s so rich … But I believe, for example, that I have revealed Robert Browning to many young men in Buenos Aires who knew nothing whatsoever about him. Now I’m wondering if Browning, instead of writing poetry—of course he should have written poetry—but I think that many of Browning’s pieces would have fared better, at least as far as the reader goes, had they been written as short stories. For example, I think that he wrote some very fine verses in
The Ring and the Book
. We find it burdensome because I suppose we’ve grown out of the habit of reading long poems in blank verse. But had he written it in prose, had
The Ring and the Book
been written as a novel, and the same story told over and over again by different characters, he might have been more amusing, no? Though he would have lost many fine passages of verse. Then I should think of Robert Browning as the forerunner of all modern literature. But nowadays we don’t, because we’re put off by the …