Jorge Luis Borges Read online

  BORGES: “The Aleph,” yes, and “The Zahir.” “The Zahir” is about an unforgettable twenty-cent coin. I wonder if you remember it.

  BURGIN: Of course. I remember.

  BORGES: And I wrote that out of the word “unforgettable,” inolvidable, because I read somewhere, “You should hear so-and-so act or sing, he or she’s unforgettable.” And I thought, well what if there were really something unforgettable. Because I’m interested in words, as you may have noticed. I said, well, let’s suppose something really unforgettable, something that you couldn’t forget even for a split second. And then, after that, I invented the whole story. But it all came out of the word “unforgettable,” inolvidable.

  BURGIN: In a sense that’s a kind of variation on “Funes the Memorious” and even “The Immortal.”

  BORGES: Yes, but in this case it had to be one thing. And then, of course, that thing had to be something very plain, because if I speak of an unforgettable sphinx or an unforgettable sunset, that’s too easy. So I thought, well, I’ll take a coin because, I suppose, from the mint you get millions and millions of coins all alike, but let’s suppose that one of them is, in some hidden way, unforgettable, and the man sees that coin. He’s unable to forget it and then he goes mad. That will give the impression that the man was mad and that was why he thought the coin was unforgettable, no? So the story could be read in two slightly different ways. And then I said, “Well, we have to make the reader believe the story, or at least suspend his disbelief, as Coleridge said.” So if something had happened to him before he saw the coin, for example, if a woman he loved had died, that might make it easier for the reader and for myself. Because I can’t have the teller of the story buying a package of cigarettes and getting an unforgettable coin. I have to give him some circumstance, to justify what happened to him.

  BURGIN: And so you did.

  BORGES: Yes. But those stories go together. “Zahir” is one of the names of God, I think. I got it out of Lang’s Modern Egyptians, I think, or perhaps out of Burton.

  BURGIN: The story “Funes the Memorious” is, among other things, about insomnia.

  BORGES: About insomnia, yes. A kind of metaphor.

  BURGIN: I take it, then, you’ve had insomnia.

  BORGES: Oh, yes.

  BURGIN: I have also.

  BORGES: Do you?

  BURGIN: I don’t any more, but I have had it. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it?

  BORGES: Yes. I think there’s something awful about sleeplessness.

  BURGIN: Because you think it will never end.

  BORGES: Yes, but one also thinks, or rather one feels, that it’s not merely a case of being sleepless, but that somebody’s doing that to you.

  BURGIN: A kind of cosmic paranoia.

  BORGES: Cosmic paranoia, or some fiendish foe, no? You don’t feel it’s an accident. You feel that somebody is trying to kill you in a sense, or to hurt you, no?

  BURGIN: How long did you have it?

  BORGES: Oh, about a year. In Buenos Aires, of course, it’s worse than having it here. Because it goes with the long summer nights, with the mosquitoes, with the fact of tossing about in your bed, having to turn your pillow over and over again. In the cold country I think it’s easier, no?

  BURGIN: No sleeping pills there?

  BORGES: Oh yes, I had sleeping pills also, but after a time they did me no good. And then there was a clock. It worried me very much. Because without a clock you may doze off, and then you may try to humbug yourself into thinking that you’ve slept a long time. If you have a clock, then it will give you the time in the face every quarter of the hour, and then you say, “Well, now it’s two o’clock, now it’s a quarter past, now half past two, now quarter to three, now the three strokes,” and then you go on and on … it’s awful. Because you know you haven’t missed any of the strokes.

  BURGIN: What finally got you over the insomnia?

  BORGES: I can hardly remember it, because I had sleeping pills and I also went to another house where there were no clocks, and then I could humbug myself into the belief that I had slept. And finally, I did sleep. But then I saw a doctor; he was very intelligent about it. He told me, “You don’t have to worry about sleeplessness because even if you are not sleeping you are resting, because the mere fact of resting, of being in bed, of the darkness, all those things are good for you. So that even if you can’t sleep, you don’t have to worry.” I wonder if it’s a true argument, but, of course, that’s hardly the point; the fact is that I did my best to believe in it, and then, once I got over that, that after all a sleepless night meant nothing, I went to sleep quite easily. After a time, of course, as one tends to forget one’s painful experiences, I can’t tell you what the details were of that period. Is there another tale or poem you want to talk about?

  BURGIN: What about the story “The South”? Now you’ve said that story is your personal favourite. Do you still feel that way?

  BORGES: But I think I’ve written a better story called “La intrusa” (“The Intruder”) and you’ll find that story in the last edition of El Aleph or of A Personal Anthology. I think that’s better than the other. I think that’s the best story I ever wrote. There’s nothing personal about it; it’s the story of two hoodlums. The intruder is the woman who comes into the lives of two brothers who are hoodlums. It isn’t a trick story. Because if you read it as a trick story, then, of course, you’ll find that you know what’s going to happen at the end of the page or so, but it isn’t meant to be a trick story. On the contrary. What I was trying to do was to tell an inevitable story so that the end shouldn’t come as a surprise.

  BURGIN: That’s sort of like “The South,” though. The sense of inevitability in the story.

  BORGES: Yes, yes. But, I think that “La intrusa” is better, because it’s simpler.

  BURGIN: When did you write it?

  BORGES: I wrote it about a year or so ago, and I dedicated it to my mother. She thought that the story was a very unpleasant one. She thought it awful. But when it came to the end there was a moment when one of the characters had to say something, then my mother found the words. And if you read the story, there’s a fact I would like you to notice. There are three characters and there is only one character who speaks. The others, well, the others say things and we’re told about them. But only one of the characters speaks directly, and he’s the one who’s the leader of the story. I mean, he’s behind all the facts of the story. He makes the final decision, he works out the whole thing, and in order to make that plainer, he’s the only character whose voice we hear, throughout the story.

  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 wou
ldn’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?