Borges and History

Jorge Luis Borges. A Personal Anthology. Edited and with a foreword by Anthony Kerrigan. Grove Press, 1967. 0-8021-3077-1

Robert Browning. Poetical Works, Volume 1. The World’s Classics (London: Grant Richards), nd, c.1905.

Peter Gay. Style in History. W.W. Norton, 1988.0-393-30558-9

Denys Hay. The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background. Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Readers always come up against the question of how important it is to read an author’s work the way the author meant to present it. Borges is a significant example. His style permits a message to be conveyed in the arrangement of individual texts as well as within the texts themselves. These days Borges exists mostly in edited editions, and in single volume editions of one or more individual books. His short fictions, critical writing, and poetry usually come separately, as they do in the three volumes of the Viking centennial edition of his work in English – I discuss this edition elsewhere on this site in a ‘from my collection’ review essay. This week I have been revisiting quite a different way to read Borges: a work that appeared in Spanish in 1961 under the title Antología Personal and which I read in English as A Personal Anthology.

The advantage to this selection and arrangement is that it was made by Borges himself; it covers thirty or more years of his work, from the late 1920s and early 1930s to the beginning of the 1960s. These were good years for Borges, and saw the publication of his most significant books. In English we tend to concentrate on the first two collections of fictions: A Universal History of Iniquity (1935) and Fictions (1944). In his preface to A Personal Anthology Borges cautions us against this essentially chronological approach, to which he preferred a selection based on ‘sympathies and differences’. Borges was a reflective writer, who chose to concentrate on three or four inter-related themes. He wrote about them all in the context of a single imagined inner world: that of a writer he named ‘Borges’ – a writer who thought of himself as a reader and compiler more than as an inventor or maker of things. Borges thus began his body of work from a complicated philosophical position, one which he elaborated and developed in almost all his writing. An idea – for example, about the proposition that time is circular – will appear in different forms in different contexts: in a story about a person who experiences a repetition in time; in a poem that meditates on the idea of repetition; in an essay on the implications of the idea for our individual lives. A Personal Anthology collects examples of these different ways of thinking through the same theme, and by placing them next to each other invites us to consider how the theme develops in each different style. This is certainly the best way to read Borges’ poetry, and the most satisfying way to move along the contours of his thinking in prose.

In his essay In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki Junichirô said of the traditional Japanese aesthetic sense that ‘we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates’. Tanizaki had a specific scene in mind, but the gist of his point – a way of thinking about the world that involves looking at relationships between things rather than the details of the things themselves – is useful in thinking about the full range of human experience. Historians – literary historians, in the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides – are always engaged in this process: looking at what emerges when source is held up against source, and a pattern emerges that was not visible before. Peter Gay’s Style in History talks about this point with reference to how historians develop a personal style, and how we can use this style to puzzle out their way of making history. Historiographers often follow this process as a way to expose or caution against bias in historical writing, but Gay has bigger things on his mind.

Gay’s key point is to say that while ordinarily ‘the historian of history proceeds from apparent objectivity to concealed subjectivity’, he wants to ‘reverse this procedure and move from subjectivity to understanding’. In effect, he advocates a reasoned and tolerant attentive reading as an antidote to both extreme positivism and extreme relativism – in other words, he makes a lot of noise about being sensible. His book draws attention to two important but recently neglected facts about history. One is that historians are obliged to write well, because their work is most valuable as a kind of literature. The other is that every historian uses the particularities of their preferred style of arrangement and presentation to arrive at different insights about the past.

Denys Hay’s The Italian Renaissance has a story to tell, intended in part as a corrective to the story told by Jacob Burckhardt – one of Gay’s master stylists – about the origins and background of the Renaissance. Hay, too, selects and arranges to great effect; he seems to be aware that his thinking about Italy in historical time has a direct bearing on how we choose to move through the world today. His work stands at a difficult point in contemporary writing about history. Gay was convinced that the movement of history from the private library into the university – the professionalization of the writing of history – was a very good thing. The two books by ‘professionals’ in my reading this week date back to a time when footnotes were starting their campaign against narrative in history writing. In more recent titles – let us say, more or less at random, something like Daniel C. Snell’s Life in the Ancient Near East (Yale, 1997) – we often find that at least half the value of the book lies hidden away in the notes and bibliography. This is marvellous as an aid to other researchers, but it makes for rather arid thinking. Tanizaki’s essay drew its insight about light and shadow in the context of shadows disappearing from everyday life in Japan. Natural light shines clearly enough in all my reading this week, but I worry that we now spend too much time in rooms lit by ranks of fluorescent lights.

With Browning we are squarely in a room lit by candles: there are plenty of shadows, and smoke, and obscurity in general, particularly in Sordello. The poem talks about the sort of figure Borges would have liked: a poet living out the consequences of being thoroughly engaged with the world. Sordello – a troubadour poet of the thirteenth century – appears in the sixth canto of the Purgatorio, allowing Dante to complain about the state of Italy in his own time. Browning’s Sordello also appears to be about Italy, but I suspect that all of Browning’s Italians are only instrumentally Italian: that he finds something more general about human nature in the business of living in Italy. Borges does much the same thing with Buenos Aires: of course it matters very much that his ‘Borges’ is an Argentine, but to be Argentinean is also to be a candle throwing shadows. History wants to be true about history; fiction wants to be true about humanity – imagining the inner life of people in the world. It seems to me that these are not different kinds of truth: they are different things to be true about.

2002/05/25

Date posted: 2003-09-01