BOOKS
Do not attempt this at home
Philip Hensher
COLLECTED FICTIONS by Jorge Luis Borges Allen Lane, £20, pp. 565 Borges is a splendid oddity in litera- ture, like Quevedo or Peacock, whose idiosyncrasies and obsessions have some- how come to inspire an entire school of writers. His work is scrupulously modest in ambition and scope — the Collected Fic- tions, which runs to less than 600 pages and contains no individual piece over 15 pages, has pretty well all the Borges one needs bother with. But his influence has been huge, and echoes of his ideas and imagery may be heard in writers the world over, producing laborious, flowery epics about tigers in libraries and books made out of bananas. He is quickly becoming an exquisite period piece, a purveyor of deli- cious curiosities; and, although he appeared for a time to be founding a school, what was most remarkable and interesting about him was that he was never susceptible to imitation. The pecu- liarly resonant paradoxes of these fictions, their unique and immediately recognisable atmosphere, have not been reproduced, and, despite the sometimes embarrassing enthusiasm with which his inventions have been exploited by subsequent writers, Borges remains a one-off. Good as he is, I wonder whether his influence has been entirely healthy; he enabled a large number of mediocrities to pursue a particularly dreary line of post-modernist fantasy in the 1980s, and was seldom a wholly beneficial influence even on. good writers. Calvino, who was and remained a splendid writer, might have become something bigger if he had continued to pursue the grand and brilliant realism of his first books and had not been lured by Borges into writing exquisite and bookish miniatures.
His intellectual world is so immediately familiar now that it is hard to remember quite how original these stories were when they first started to appear in Spanish in the 1930s. Borges is an intensely literary writer, and his most memorable stories are narratives of individual volumes, of fantas- tic libraries. His motto is habent sua fata libelli, and it's those fates which really excite his imagination. Imagine a library in which the collection comprises volumes which contain every single possible permu- tation of the alphabet, volumes of gibber- ish, volumes with a single rational sentence halfway through, the works of Shakespeare and every book which has ever or will ever be written. Or, more concisely, the gift of a single book of infinite extent, of limitless pages. These fantasies of plurality are not limited to textual objects — in 'Blue Tigers' it is the gift of a collection of discs, appear- ing and disappearing to defy the rules of mathematics. But they are at their most elaborate and perceptive when Borges turns to the idea of the book. Most concise is the celebrated `Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', the story of how a minor liter- ary figure of the 19th century turned him- self into Cervantes, and rewrote sections of Don Quixote word for word. The Borgesian touch is that identical sentences, written at the beginning of the 17th century and the end of the 19th, carry quite different freights of meaning, and, although there is no textual difference whatever between Cervantes' Don Quixote and Menard's, the two works are quite dissimilar in signifi- cance. Even a single object like a book is infinite in possibilities, we see, as we start to speculate about other Quixotes, each of which comes into being every time the book is read.
His subject, in the end, is the infinite divisibility of single experiences. A man's memory, for instance, is usually thought of as a single thing; in two of his best stories, Borges imagines situations where this stops being the case. A man acquires the extraordinary gift of Shakespeare's memory — odd how many of Borges's stories start from an unrequested gift. He begins to recall, imperfectly, in half-lights, what Shakespeare has experienced, and ends by understanding less of Shakespeare than he did to start with. In another, classic tale, Tunes, His Memory', a boy's perception and memory has no power of omission, and the useful faculty of oblivion is lost to him: He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled bind- ing of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Que- bracho. Nor were these memories simple every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. 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.
He is a writer of curious and un- predictable contradictions. He is less of a modernist than an antiquarian, always going on about textual bibliography and siglas, palimpsests and incunabula. It's sad that Philip Larkin claimed never to have heard of Borges; if they had met, I imagine they would have found a good deal to talk about. He is fascinated by exoticism, but, with perverse consistency, his exoticism is to be found much more in libraries and individual books than in the Argentinian setting which surfaces from time to time. The oddest of his contradictions, however, is to do with all those infinite libraries. He is constantly producing images of the infinitely various book, the literary work with infinite meanings — the Book of Sand, the Library of Babel, the rewritten Quixote. We might expect his own writings to embody the virtue they constantly pro- claim, but they do not. They are not ambiguous stories in the least; they have, on the whole, one clear and simple mean- ing: that literature is infinitely various, and that is that. Even at their most intricate, as in 'non, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', these stories said what they meant on first publication, and have gone on saying very much the same thing ever since. Do as Borges says, in short, and not as he does.
One of the nicest and most surprising things about Borges is his obsessive fond- ness for England and English writers Chesterton, of all people, is referred to again and again. The compliment has been handsomely returned in this useful and well-translated collection, which brings together all the stories. He is a difficult writer to translate, since he has a Miltonic fondness for punning on the etymologies of individual words which will only occasional- ly go into English — when Borges makes `one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar' write, `Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind', we feel the Latin pressure of ab homine under the ordinary English word. But Andrew Hurley has done very well, rather daringly changing some very familiar English titles in the interest of correctness, and it is agreeable to have the whole lot in one volume; the late Shakespeare's memo- ry stories haven't been translated before, and are among Borges' best. Still, I do feel that it would be best all round if the book had 'Do Not Attempt This at Home' written in large letters on the cover.
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