The Viking Borges

Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Viking, 1998.

Jorge Luis Borges. Selected Poems. Edited by Alexander Coleman. Viking, 1999.

Jorge Luis Borges. Selected Non-fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Viking, 1999.

Taken together, these three volumes constitute Viking’s ‘centennial edition’ of Borges, published to coincide with the centenary of his birth. The first of the three, the Collected Fictions, is destined to be the most popular, and will probably remain in print longer. Anyone at all concerned with English literature should own the complete set, almost in the same spirit as one would buy an encyclopaedia or a dictionary: not as a dry necessity, but as a living reference, a compilation of knowledge and dreams, and as a path to clarity through relentless questioning. I keep my Borges on the same shelf as my reference books: these are texts to be returned to again and again, as an inspiration and as an aid to memory. It is also hard to find a place for him anywhere else. By degrees, he could go with poetry, philosophy, fiction, essays, or even books about books: every part of literature is represented in his work. To see these volumes together illustrates the power of belles-lettres as a literary form.

Perhaps I value Borges so much because of my own limitations as a reader. I favour short texts: I am more a reader of poems, stories, and essays than I am of monographs, tracts, and novels. I prefer writers who can communicate big ideas in small spaces. Borges once said that big books are often exercises in madness: ‘setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes’. Economy and humility are probably the most important things we can learn from Borges on a stylistic level. Both of these are connected to his respect for language and for ideas.

Reading Borges always involves the feeling of being on the edge of understanding something profound. We come away from his books believing that we know Borges, but we are really involved with understanding ourselves; this is part of his ‘trick’ – what makes his work a genuinely creative art. His meditations on time, tradition, philosophy, and history – his reflections of life – reveal a quality of truth that seems obvious once we have read him, but which was not at all obvious before. The presence of this quality suggests that we can be confident about Borges in a way we can be about few other figures in twentieth century letters. It is already impossible to imagine literature in the European languages without him. One reason for this is that he shows us the best way to move on from the literary developments of the late century: by carrying the insights of the Modernists with us into our uncertain future. His is also the defining voice of American culture – to use the broad, continental sense of the term – as a European culture on horseback, alone on the plains, or living a life of violence and snobbery in the city. Borges demonstrates that a life begun in such circumstances can be used to make something worth keeping.

In very broad terms, there have been two categories of reactions to the twentieth century: one light-hearted; the other serious. Light-hearted writers want the world to be simpler than it was for previous generations, and they are often rather stern in their weightlessness. Borges is a very serious writer, but he is never grim: he continues to think seriously about aspects of human life other writers have given up for dead. His comprehensive intellect and wide understanding of tragedy and compassion extend his vision: this can help us, his readers, understand that what begins as a contribution to European culture can also become a facet of universal civilization. We can think of him as a librarian; or rather: as Teiresias exploring a library. There is a guarded optimism in his work that he sometimes conceals, but it is an important point about Borges: he is hopeful, even as he does not completely believe that he has earned the right to hope.

2002/05/25

Date posted: 2003-09-15