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"Borges and I" By Jorge Luis Borges From Borges’ Labyrinths:
Selected Stories and Other Writings pp.246-47. Notes and commentary by Martin
Irvine. The
other one, the one called Borges[1],
is the one things happen to[2].
I walk[3]
through the streets of Spinoza[11]
knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally
wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in
myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his
books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years
ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the
suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges
now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I
lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I
do not know which of us has written this page. |
[1] The writer, using a voice or persona
in the first-person--"I"--, names and refers to "Borges" the
public figure, the famous "author," who gets cited in the press, in
book reviews, in biographical essays. The voice in the first-person creates a
distance between the "I" and the proper name "Borges," and
we are led to believe that this "I" is closer to a "real
person," Jorge Luis Borges, who lived in Buenos Aires and had a personal
life only distantly related to the "fictive" "Borges" known
only in the media and through books and other writings. But read on: is this "I"
a voice representing a "real self," or is it another layer of
fiction, a convention, the biographical "I," which Borges knows is a
traditional and literary creation?
[2] "Things happen" to the
public figure, "Borges," whom people know from the media: you can
read about him, his books, his accomplishments, his work. The narrator, close
to an authorial "I"--or is it?--says ironically that nothing like
this happens to the "real life" "I" speaking now.
[3] Using the "I" of
first-person narration, which is also used in autobiographical writing in our
literary tradition, the writer plays with several layers of discourse and
literary convention: persona, narrator, author, the self behind the writer, the
real-life person behind the "author" as a social identity, the ego,
even the parts of the psyche unknown to the self or ego. Borges knows that we
refer to all of these social, linguistic, and psychological qualities by the
simple pronoun "I".
The
first-person narrator describes activities of a private self, and not the
official and public details of the life of "Borges," who is named in
lists and biographical dictionaries. The "author function" takes
over, and the name "Borges" has a role in public discourse outside
the control of the writer or self behind the writings.
[4] The narrator, standing in for the
person behind the author, further differentiates himself from
"Borges," the author known in his social identity. The author in his
public and literary role inevitably turns all the personal likes and tastes of
the real-life person into an act, a role, or a piece of literary fiction. The
biography of "Borges" known from publicly documented sources, the
narrator suggests, is also contrived, fictive, and conventional since it must
conform to our notions of "a writer's biography" or "the life of
the author."
[5] The narrator now playfully refers to
"Borges," the publicly known "author," as a separate
personality, an objective identity, that the real person must carry on some
kind of relationship with. The real person goes on so that the persona can
exist.
[6] The "me" or "I"
behind the writing and the writer finds no ultimate security or self-identity
in the writings of author "Borges," not even in the renaissance sense
of continuing one's fame and identity in writings that endure beyond one's
lifetime. The writing and the life are thus separate things.
[7] The writer invokes an impersonal
theory of literature, much like that of T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the
Individual Talent." The narrator states that what he has written is not
validated by anything in the person, in the self behind the writing, but by its
participation in literary tradition and in the resources of the Spanish
language. Borges was multi-lingual but wrote in his native language, Spanish.
But by "tradition" here, he means the whole tradition of Western
literature in all the literary languages. It's a short step to the notion of
intertextuality: any text is a subset of a larger universe of discourse, a
whole cultural library, and what we see and understand in texts is based on a
life-time of accumulated reading experience. Meaning and value in literature
thus always emerge from writing and reading within a larger cultural system of
language and prior writings. Thus if "Borges" has written anything of
value, this value will only be understood, will only be possible, in the
context of a tradition and a language, contexts that are social and cultural,
not personal or individual.
[8] Again, the speaker denies the
humanist idea of perpetuating existence through the fame in great books. The
real person behind the writer and the writing will die a real death, and only
some small part of this person can be said to "survive" in the
writings of "Borges."
[9] The speaker suggests that the person
and the persona seem to blend together: at times the real person identifies
almost fully with "Borges" the author. But since the "I"
can refer itself and name "Borges" in the same context, the
identities remain distinct. The "I" feels the powerful pull of the
public identity, "Borges," and may often feel this is an adequate
self-definition too.
[10] With continued humor and
self-parody, the narrator suggests that "Borges" the author, known as
an inventive creator of fiction, has a tendency to "falsify" and
"magnify" things. But the writer also knows that these are features
of all writing and forms of representation, including the seemingly
autobiographical story-essay that contains these statements.
[11] Baruch (Benedictus) de Spinoza
(1632-77), Jewish rationalist philosopher. Born in