David Forster Wallace had a mathematical mind. I believe he wrote a dissertation on Montague grammars- i.e. the dream of reducing natural language to something purely logical. Perhaps such a thing could be achieved at 'the end of mathematical Time' but the book of that grammar would be larger than the Universe. I suppose, something similar could be said about the fate of the beloved disciple bid to out tarry the Apocalypse, or the Biblical teaching that a Chronicle of the Acts of the Risen Christ would be bigger than the world.
Just recently, I came across an article Forster Wallace wrote on a biography of Borges which, on his account, was simplistically Freudian. This passage caught my attention-
The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature.
Sadly, post-modernism was shit. There is no point in being a bridge to it unless you earn your living cleaning sewers. Borges's talent was for compaction. But, that compaction depended on a knowledge of the human heart.
My own theory is that Borges was distilling the essence of modernism from authors then in vogue and dispensing it in a form ordinary people might find enthralling even if they chanced upon it in the pages of a high brow literary magazine.
He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty
He is certain that some stories are good. True, they may grow shorter and better over the ages. But this is obviously true of what has come down to us as Scripture. As for ideology, if it isn't already tedious nonsense, it is the job of the ideologue to make it so.
-- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself.
Borges isn't Valery's Monsieur Teste. He told good stories. The fact that they were short and lifted a veil upon a mystery of the heart is what made them good.
His stories are inbent and hermetic,
No. They may feature narrators of that type. But what happens in the story is dramatic and, more often than not, touches the heart.
with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.
Nonsense! In 'Death & the Compass' the gangster plays a game with a detective by planting clues to do with the Kabbalah. The stakes are death. But Death isn't everything. It is nothing. It is enough to see the pattern of the labyrinth to fulminate its minotaur.
And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books.
Which is what permits their compaction. Borges doesn't have to re-invent the wheel. Even when we don't spot the allusion, we understand what it is likely to be.
This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader.
He is a master of 'smriti'- remembering- but only because love too is smriti. His method of allusion is that of 'dhvani' such that 'rasasvad' is also 'brahmasvad' except it isn't. The thing is counterfeit. But perhaps Brahma, the Creator, too can taste but ersatz haecceity which is why as Ibn Arabi says, there is no repetition in theophany.
The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic,
it is enjoyable because it is so euphonious as to seem innocent and unmeaning. The average reader doesn't feel that himself to be a stupid ignoramus. Rather he is encouraged to feel some, not unaffectionate, contempt for the book-worm telling the story.
or even really a style;
it looks like the style of a belle-lettrist writing for precious literary magazines. But the content is strong meat.
and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroës.
But these stories have strong characters. It is a hideous strength. As with the best penny dreadful, you can put down his slender volume of stories and go back to your boring life with the feeling of having witnessed horrors the more atrocious for being bracketed by bathos.
Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act.
No. Borges understands that ordinary peeps might want a glimpse of high literary culture, but only at the price of perusing a few hundred words. But, we would also be willing to read about the achievement of engineers or the aporias of actuaries at that tariff. Had he wanted to hold our attention longer he would have had to invent a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. His and Bioy Cesares' 'Isidro Parodi' verged on the unreadable because their aim was to satirize the bombastic denizens of Buenos Aires.
This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same.
We don't distinguish between boring people who are unknown and of no use to us. But this isn't true of those of whom good stories can be told. Emma Zunz isn't the man she kills after framing him for her own rape. But, if he truly had been an embezzler, she has stolen back from him something she alone can know is her family honor except, for her father, the reverse would be the case. I suppose you may say she has unsexed herself and has thus becomes like the Boss who hopes to get inside information from her to crush a potential strike of his workers. But, Borges creates literary capital from Zunz by making us complicit in a more hideous type of 'insider trading'. The good news is we can then go on to discover in Leopold Zunz's 'science of Judaism' a riposte to Bauer and Marx. I'm kidding. Borges has done the work for us. We don't need to do shit.
Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one.
The problem here is that Chesterton had already rung the changes on this theme in novellas like 'the Man who was Thursday' or 'Napoleon of Notting Hill'. The fanatic transforms the delusive trap sprung for him by a jester in such a manner as to turn that facetious demiurge into a yet more savage and demented Lord of Hosts. Borges, being of the post-War generation, was content to keep such horrors at a distance or at least ensure they were brief and bracketed by a disarming bookishness.
It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se.
Monism and monomania, solipsism and sociopathy- sure. But there is no reason why minds should not be kept prisoner by their own dreams of a world. Of such, indeed, are the mysteries of the heart.
And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality.
Nonsense! Loneliness is not self-obsession. The fussy little habits it breeds are a defense against utter effacement, like that of Hawthorne's Wakefield, from the Social world. Borges tells us about turgid texts in between lifting the veil on abysmal terrors in the same manner that a cat-lady might mention Mitzi's various mischiefs in between showing you the spot where she beat an intruder to death. The police were sympathetic. They even found her a tortoiseshell kitten to replace Mitzi whom the intruder had killed when he entered the house hoping to rape and murder the mother who had been forced to give him up at birth.
Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. This is why, for instance, it is so irksome to see Williamson describe "The Immortal" and "The Writing of the God" -- two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever,
are they though? The point about guys who compose poems or write books is that they are vainly defending against death. If this weren't the case, all authors would be the same author because there would be no literature. As for the 'writing of God', the fact is, the formula which annihilates the Universe can only be uttered if it is not known to be that formula. This is because, it is in the nature of something learnt that it ceases to be knowledge once it is performed. You have learned the science of killing people with a single blow. You have that knowledge and can transmit it. But, the moment you kill a man with a single blow- you are simply a killer. We say you have a skill or a conditioned reflex or something of that sort. As for knowledge, that is precisely the fruit you forfeited when you took the path of Cain. It is one thing to know there is an apple of knowledge. To eat it is merely to bring death into the world.
next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude
no. They are real as Emma Zunz is real.
-- as respective products of Borges's "many-layered distress" and "indifference to his fate" after various idealized girlfriends dump him.
this is a story about Borges which makes him mildly interesting. Saying that he was a smart guy who served the ordinary reading public exceptionally well, is true but otiose.
Stuff like this misses the whole point. Even if Williamson's claims are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.
Buenos Aires was a small place. It did no harm at all for there to be a roman a clef aspect more particularly when no lady's reputation was compromised thereby. But it is true that if he had married a 'managing' woman, she might have set him to creating his own Sherlock Holmes.
Of course, Borges's famous "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote' " makes sport of this very conviction, just as his later "Borges and I" anticipates and refutes the whole idea of a literary biography. The fact that his fiction is always several steps ahead of its interpreters is one of the things that make Borges so great, and so modern.
He did not aim at greatness. He served and was content to serve. No doubt, had he married a smart and ambitious woman, he could have been very modern indeed. Alternatively, we can imagine him a bachelor Don at Oxbridge discussing Beowulf with Tolkein and Leibniz with Radhakrishnan. No doubt, he'd have a seminal paper or two to his credit in arcane fields. This is because he rejected reductionism of the modern type though, being a gentleman, didn't object if the thing was ancient or oriental or lyrically mystical.
Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody's interested in a writer's life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it -- the personal lives of most people who spend 14 hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill rides to hear about.)
This is the question a biographer should answer. How did Borges come to understand the mass-market so well that he could take a recently published academic book- e.g. on modern mathematical logic, or the theory of barzakh in Ibn Arabi- and extract from it an enchanting tale which ordinary people could read while eating their lunch or rattling home on the tram?
This is part of what gives Borges's stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures' earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoetic),
perhaps Wallace read Borges as a kid and forgot all about it. I read Borges at 19. Being as thick as shit, I didn't find anything precognitive there. What I did find was that he, very helpfully, mentioned popular authors- Kipling, Chesterton, etc- and thus could communicate very economically with a low-brow thickie like me.
which quality in turn helps explain how they can be at once so abstract and so moving.
He was extracting the essence of what had moved him. Abstraction made for compaction. Ordinary people don't have the time to read big big books- unless they are by Stephen King or Robert Ludlum. I was never able to finish Forster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' though I had waded through John Irving & Thomas Pynchon obediently enough. Sometimes a 'strong author' destroys his own precursors rendering them equally unreadable. Borges was never strong. His labyrinths were modest but they were those of Stephen Daedalus.
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