Naipaul on Borges

Borges dedicated himself to producing, by purely literary means, a 'new' refutation of Time. This appears an oxymoron.  If there is no Time, how could anything be new? A Hindu would say- Borges sought an 'apoorva' (novel) खण्डन, (rebuttal) of Kala. This is not paradoxical because what is denied is that there exists a well defined, id est not epistemic, extension for 'Time'. Apoorvata may be a property of all that is cognised precisely because, following Sri Harsha, knowledge is unreal. Harsha is also the author of the Naishadyacharitra based on the Mahabharata's Nalophkyanam (story of Nala), This episode is of special interest to us because it shows that the proper utilization of statistical game theory is necessary to dispel the vishada (abulia or akrasia) of the principal. Moreover, the Nalophkyanam is coupled with the Vyadha (butcher's) Gita which is itself the 'dual' of the Bhagavad Gita.

 Sri Harsha, apart from his refutation of Nyaya (Logicism) is also associated with an Aesthetic theory that what is beautiful is always fresh and strange while yet remaining what it was before or to other people. This suggests a notion of canonicity or categoricity such that intensions are constructive of, rather than simply having a mapping to, unique extensions. 

Thus, when the Hindu of average education- a guy like me with a degree in Econ or IT- reads Borges, not only are we reminded of foundational issues in mathematics but also great philosophic and poetic works by Hindu saints.

V.S Naipaul was not a Hindu. Having 'read' English at Oxford, he was incapable of reading or writing save in the manner of a mimic man from a bogus Time-line. 

This is what he had to say about the greatest Indian author, after Kipling. 

Borges is a great writer,

writing poetry enables one to perfect one's prose. But what made Borges profound was that he was eternally refuting Time which alone heals the heart's deepest, darkest, wounds. Yet he did it with a truly English humour and reticence- at least in translation. 

It may be- for Latin Americans of my darker complexion or ever declining class,-that, by some 'brusque', Gongoresque, 'theological magic', the marmoreal El Escorial of Borges's baroque prose yet is his vast continent's bleeding heart or ever renewed, ever more intimate, thrust of Longinus' spear.

a sweet and melancholy poet;

 Sri Harsha's khandana-khanda-khadya literally means 'sweetness of refutation'. As for the Saint's biography of Nala- we recall that Prince would have been the Indian Job but for the knowledge-that-is-love of his pativrata wife. Otherwise, he would be a byword for undeserved misfortune. 

As for melancholy- which is 'saudade' or the Arabic/Urdu 'sauda'- its English anatomy is actually rather cozy or gemutlich. 

and people who know Spanish well revere him as a writer of a direct, unrhetorical prose.

He had mastered many different styles of rhetoric. What he rejected was heartless, unmeaning, bombast.  

But his Anglo-American reputation as a

lapidary prose stylist who understood the beloved English authors of our boyhood- Kipling, Chesterton, Hawthorne (he translated the latter two)- better than we did ourselves 

blind and elderly Argentine,

Ved Mehta was blind. He also wrote a book about analytical philosophy. He did well, though he was Indian, because he was a better journalist than Naipaul. Borges wasn't a journalist, he was a poet- i.e. qualitatively different from darkies who cud spell gud. Perhaps because of his early education in Einstein's Geneva, he entered the Republic of Letters as a post-Euclidean. But he entered it already endowed with that which, in European literature, if not Paideia, most spectacularly foreshadowed Time's dethronement as an 'ineluctable modality'.

the writer of a very few, very short, and very mysterious stories, is so inflated and bogus that it obscures his greatness.

Naipaul did not know Mathematics. Borges's intuitions regarding its foundations appear more, not less, interesting now than they did 50 years ago.  

It has possibly cost him the Nobel Prize; and it may well happen that when the bogus reputation declines, as it must, the good work may also disappear.

This was written a couple of years after Mick Jagger was seen reading Borges's Labyrinths in the cult film 'Performance'. But the cult of Borges was no mere fad like that of McLuhan or 'Bucky' Fuller.

he other stories—the ones which have driven the critics crazy—are in the nature of intellectual jokes.

They are gedanken. I suppose Naipaul would have said that Einstein was a fucking clown. 

Borges takes a word like “immortal” and plays with it.

Naipaul is referring to Borges's 'The Immortal' which is about Memory & Literature not Human Mortality. The key is the Homeric quotation the Roman soldier utters after drinking 'aab-e-hayaat'- from the river of immortality. "They who lived in Zeleia below the foot of Mount Ida, who drank the dark water of Aisepos (Aesepus), Trojans." 

This reminds us that Troy was utterly erased by changing the course of rivers like the Aesepus. Yet, Homer restored Troy and made it indestructible- at least while Human Literature, or Memory, lasts. But that is a river no man steps in twice. 

Suppose, he says, men were really immortal.

No. He describes a city of immortals who have regressed to a primitive state. But any city can degenerate. If the Immortal- be he the wandering Jew or the flying Dutchman- keeps on the move he will maintain his mental acuity.  

The atrocious city of the immortals which pollutes the very stars is nothing less than the mind- but a mind that has lost its, not telos, but Darwinian ethos- or fitness landscape.

Not just men who had grown old and wouldn’t die, but indestructible vigorous men,

the immortal troglodytes aren't vigorous. They are pathetic.  

surviving for eternity. What would be the result? His answer

is that they would degenerate. In Biology there is a term- 'Speigelman monster'- for an RNA chain which discards all genetic information aside from the replicase recognition signal. Essentially, the removal of selection pressure- i.e. the possibility of death- might lead to the violation of the law of increasing functional information. Borges's story predated Speigelman's discovery by about 15 years. 

—which is his story—is that every conceivable experience would at some time befall every man,

this is the Irish doctrine of tuirgen or investigative birth seeking. Borges was well up on stuff of that sort. This is because he hadn't been to University. He could read books for himself. Naipaul went to Oxford to 'read' English- i.e. was a fucking retard.  

that every man would at some time assume every conceivable character, and that Homer (the disguised hero of this particular story) might in the eighteenth century even forget he had written the Odyssey.

That is not the conclusion Borges reaches. He says that the document attributed to the supposed immortal who comes to suspect that he himself was Homer was merely a matter of 'Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men—those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.'

 Borges, by mentioning Ross's Virgilii Evangelisantis Christiados Libri, suggests that the Gospel too pre-existed Christ- a wholly orthodox doctrine. 

Naipaul was a writer of a good enough journalistic type. He was not a poet. He had no profound knowledge of literature or religion or philosophy and was wholly ignorant of STEM subjects. Still, he had filial piety. His father's Arya Samaji writing was his own Satyarth Prakash lamp in Tolkein's, or Thor's, dark world. 

Or take the word “unforgettable.”

Which means 'remarkable'. Borges's Funes the Memorious can't distinguish between what is remarkable and what is mundane. He remembers everything. But it is only for evolutionary reasons that we find some things remarkable or 'unforgettable'. Reality isn't like that. It may be that the only thing that is conserved is information. If so the Universe is holographic simply.

Suppose something was truly unforgettable, and couldn’t be forgotten for a single second;

Naipaul is conflating 'the Zahir' with Funes. Studying Literature at Uni makes you incapable of understanding what you read. 

suppose this thing came, like a coin, into your possession. Extend that idea. Suppose there was a man—but no, he has to be a boy—who could forget nothing, whose memory therefore ballooned and ballooned with all the unforgettable details of every minute of his life.

To be fair to Naipaul. Gerard t'Hooft's 'holographic principle' was only made known some two decades after this article came out. Borges is like Kipling- a great writer who 'shows more than he knows'. Kipling was the poet of work. Borges was the poet of poetry itself- which, after all, is merely work. Other writers may have good works or bad works. But they can show only what they know- or believe they know. 

Naipaul failed because he never really 'read' English. It read him- but did so badly and in an ignorant or condescending manner. This was cold. This was uncharitable. We can read him differently- provided we didn't study stupid shite at Uni.