“The Library of Babel,” which appears in Ficciones, is wholly fantastic, yet refers to the librarian’s experience of books. Anyone who has been in the stacks of a great library will recognize the emotional aura, the wearying impression of an inexhaustible and mechanically ordered chaos, that suffuses Borges’ mythical universe, “composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings.” Each hexagon contains twenty shelves, each shelf thirty-two books, each book four hundred and ten pages, each page forty lines, each line eighty letters. The arrangement of these letters is almost uniformly chaotic and formless. The nameless narrator of “The Library of Babel” sets forward, pedantically, the history of philosophical speculation by the human beings who inhabit this inflexible and inscrutable cosmos, which is equipped, apparently for their convenience, with spiral stairs, mirrors, toilets, and lamps (“The light they emit is insufficient, incessant”).
This monstrous and comic model of the universe contains a full range of philosophical schools—idealism, mysticism, nihilism:
The idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space, or, at least, of our intuition of space. They contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable.
The mystics claim that to them ecstasy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a continuous back circling the walls of the room.… That cyclical book is God.
I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands.… They speak (I know) of “the febrile Library, whose hazardous volumes run the constant risk of being changed into others and in which everything is affirmed, denied, and confused as by a divinity in delirium.”
Though the Library appears to be eternal, the men within it are not, and they have a history punctuated by certain discoveries and certain deductions now considered axiomatic. Five hundred years ago, in an upper hexagon, two pages of homogeneous lines were discovered that within a century were identified as “a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with classical Arabic inflections” and translated. The contents of these two pages—“notions of combinational analysis”—led to the deduction that the Library is total; that is, its shelves contain all possible combinations of the orthographic symbols:
Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on this gospel, the commentary on the commentary on this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
Men greeted this revelation with joy; “the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimensions of hope.” They surged onto the stairs, searching for Vindications—books that would vindicate and explain his life to each man. Sects sprang up. One used dice and metal letters in an attempt to “mimic the divine disorder” and compose by chance the canonical volumes. Another, the Purifiers, destroyed millions of books, hurling them down the air shafts. They believed in “the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.” A third sect worshipped the Man of the Book—a hypothetical librarian who, in some remote hexagon, must have perused a book “which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest.” This librarian is a god. “Many pilgrimages have sought Him out.”
The analogies with Christianity are pursued inventively and without the tedium of satire. The narrator himself confides, “To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book. I pray the unknown gods that some man—even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it.” But in his own person he has only the “elegant hope” that the Library, if traversed far enough, would repeat itself in the same disorder, which then would constitute an order. At hand, in the illegible chaos, are only tiny rays of momentary sense, conglomerations of letters spelling O Time your pyramids, Combed Clap of Thunder, or The Plaster Cramp.
This kind of comedy and desperation, these themes of vindication and unattainability, suggest Kafka. But The Castle is a more human work, more personal and neurotic; the fantastic realities of Kafka’s fiction are projections of the narrator-hero’s anxieties, and have no communion, no interlocking structure, without him. The Library of Babel instead has an adamant solidity. Built of mathematics and science, it will certainly survive the weary voice describing it, and outlast all its librarians, already decimated, we learn in a footnote, by “suicide and pulmonary diseases.” We move, with Borges, beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront, in his work, the world atomized and vacant. Perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space.
What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvellous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place. Yet discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision. Though the population of the Library somehow replenishes itself, and “fecal necessities” are provided for, neither food nor fornication is mentioned—and in truth they are not generally seen in libraries. I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum. Literature—that European empire augmented with translations from remote kingdoms—is now the only world capable of housing and sustaining new literature. Is this too curious? Did not Eliot recommend forty years ago, in reviewing Ulysses, that new novels be retellings of old myths? Is not the greatest of modern novels, Remembrance of Things Past, about its own inspiration? Have not many books already been written from within Homer and the Bible? Did not Cervantes write from within Ariosto and Shakespeare from within Holinshed? Borges, by predilection and by program, carries these inklings toward a logical extreme: the view of books as, in sum, an alternate creation, vast, accessible, highly colored, rich in arcana, possibly sacred. Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life. Certainly the traditional novel as a transparent imitation of human circumstance has “a distracted or tired air.” Ironic and blasphemous as Borges’ hidden message may seem, the texture and method of his creations, though strictly inimitable, answer to a deep need in contemporary fiction—the need to confess the fact of artifice.
Three Translations
(with Norman Thomas di Giovanni)
THE SEA
Before our human dream (or terror) wove
Mythologies, cosmogonies, and love,
Before time coined its substance into days,
The sea, the always sea, existed: was.
Who is the sea? Who is that violent being,
Violent and ancient, who gnaws the foundations
Of earth? He is both one and many oceans;
He is abyss and splendor, chance and wind.
Who looks on the sea sees it the first time,
Every time, with the wonder distilled
From elementary things—from beautiful
Evenings, the moon, the leap of a bonfire.
Who is the sea, and who am I? The day
That follows my last agony shall say.
THE ENIGMAS
I who am singing these lines today
Will be tomorrow the enigmatic corpse
Who dwells in a realm,
magical and barren,
Without a before or a when.
So say the mystics. I say I believe
Myself undeserving of Heaven or Hell,
But make no predictions. Each man’s tale
Shifts like the forms of Proteus.
What errant labyrinth, what blinding flash
Of splendor and glory shall become my fate
When the end of this adventure presents me with
The curious experience of death?
I want to drink its crystal-pure oblivion,
To be forever; but never to have been.
THE LABYRINTH
Zeus himself could not undo these nets
Of stone encircling me. My mind forgets
The persons I have been along the way,
The hated way of monotonous walls
That is my fate. The galleries seem straight
But curve furtively, forming secret circles
At the terminus of years; and the parapets
Have been worn smooth by the passage of the days.
In the tepid alabaster dust I discern
Tracks that frighten me. The hollow air
Of evening sometimes brings a bellowing,
Or the echo, desolate, of bellowing.
I know that hidden in the shadows lurks
Another, whose task it is to exhaust
The loneliness that weaves this unravelling Hell,
To crave my blood, to fatten on my death.
We seek each other. O if only this
Were the last day of our antithesis!
* In the decade since this rather pioneering piece of homage was framed, the Borges bibliography in English, with the forceful midwifery of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, has added an offspring a year, including a Personal Anthology and, that ultimate elegance, some Conversations With.
NABOKOV
Mnemosyne Chastened
SPEAK, MEMORY: An Autobiography Revisited, by Vladimir Nabokov. 316 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966.
Alas, Nabokov doesn’t want to be an American writer after all. He has moved to Switzerland and, instead of composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to Pale Fire, fusses with backward-looking projects such as ushering his minor Russian works (Despair, The Eye, The Waltz Invention) into English, defending in Encounter his sumptuous but ungratefully received version of Eugene Onegin, and translating Lolita into Russian, a virtually posthumous maneuver not likely to win much gratitude either.
The pity is, his greatness waits here. To my taste his American novels are his best, with a fiercer frivolity and a cruelty more humane than in the fiction of his European decades. In America his almost impossible style encountered, after twenty years of hermetic exile, a subject as impossible as itself, ungainly with the same affluence. He rediscovered our monstrosity. His fascinatingly astigmatic stereopticon projected not only the landscape—the eerie arboreal suburbs, the grand emptinesses, the exotic and touchingly temporary junk of roadside America—but the wistful citizens of a violent society desperately oversold, in the absence of other connectives, on love. If the perceiver of John Shade and Charlotte Haze and Clare Quilty and the Waindell College that impinged on poor Pnin devotes the rest of his days to fond rummaging in the Russian attic of his mind, the loss is national, and sadder than Sputnik.
The latest memento confided to the care of Nabokov’s American public is a revision of Speak, Memory, whose chapters were published one by one in (mostly) The New Yorker from 1948 to 1950 and assembled as Conclusive Evidence in 1951. As readers then already know, twelve of the fifteen chapters portray an aspect of the writer’s happy boyhood as the eldest son of a St. Petersburg aristocrat, and the last three, more briefly but as enchantingly, sketch his rootless years in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris. Nabokov has never written English better than in these reminiscences; never since has he written so sweetly. With tender precision and copious wit, exploiting a vocabulary and a sensibility enriched by the methodical pursuit of lepidoptera, inspired by an atheist’s faith in the magic of simile and the sacredness of lost time, Nabokov makes of his past a brilliant icon—bejewelled, perspectiveless, untouchable. While there are frequent passages of Joycean trickiness, Proust presides in the metaphorical arabesques, the floral rhythms, and the immobilized surrender to memory. Proust, however, by fictionalizing Illiers into Combray, threw his childhood open to everyone; whereas the Nabokov memoir is narrowed by its implication that only an expatriate Russian, a well-born and intellectual Russian at that, can know nostalgia so exquisite.
The revisions, which a laborious collation with the 1951 edition has bared to my scrutiny, tend to narrow the memoir further. The author, back in Europe, has consulted with his sisters and cousins, who have chastened his imperfect recollections. Much new information about the Nabokov tribe, bristling with parenthetic dates and hyphenated alliances with the Prussian nobility, has been foisted off on Chapter Three; a tidy dry biography of his father now inaugurates Chapter Nine. (Compare, invidiously, the fabulous epic of filial admiration worked into his novel The Gift.) Elsewhere gardeners and dachshunds have been named, tutors sorted out, and apologies delivered to his previously suppressed brother Sergey. Some of the interpolations are welcome (the family tennis game in Chapter Two, the wooing of Tamara in Chapter Twelve, the differentiated drawing masters in Chapter Four); but sentences at times limp under their new load of accuracy and the ending of one vignette, “Mademoiselle O” (Chapter Five), is quite dulled by the gratuitous postscript of some recent personal history. The additions, and the addition of pleasant but imagination-cramping photographs, make the book more of a family album and slightly less of a miracle of impressionistic recall.
Very few changes are stylistic. The grand evocations of the Nord-Express and the blending parks and gardens of exile are not improved—how could they be? On page 19, “sensitive youth” becomes “young chronophobiac,” and on page 284, “Dostoevskian emotion” becomes the more scornful “Dostoevskian drisk.” On page 100, a rather conventional image of “that great heavenly O shining above the Russian wilderness” has very wonderfully become “the moon, fancy’s rear-vision mirror.” And on page 48, a burned bridge has been unkindled; Nabokov has smoothly stricken an irreverent reference to a dachshund descended from a dog of Anton Chekhov’s as being “one of my few connections with the main current of Russian literature.” Alas, that now seems his hope—to rejoin, by some sparkling future rivulet beyond the grim hydroelectric dam of Sovietism, that remote Zemblan current.
Mary Unrevamped
MARY, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author. 114 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1970.
His first novel, written in 1925. Faithful Nabokovians have met Mary before; she sat for her portrait as Tamara in Speak, Memory, lurks near the heart of Lolita, and was deified in Ada. Here, artistically as well as chronologically young, she is the first love of the autobiographical hero, Ganin, for whom her wanton yet delicate Tartar beauty condenses into pure perfume the idyll of rural Russia and the enchantment of privileged youth. But Ganin remembers her from afar, when he is in a Berlin boarding house surrounded by other émigrés, comic and pathetic types of exile from reality—a race as of film extras, “flickering, shadowy doppelgangers, the casual Russian film extras, sold for ten marks apiece and still flitting, God knows where, across the white gleam of a screen.” Ganin wakes from the shadows, from dreaming of Mary, at the end, and slopes off to his future as, it may be, an internationally renowned poet/scholar/novelist. Mary not only adumbrates the future of a master, it shines by its own light. From the start, Nabokov had his sharp peripheral vision, an intent deftness at netting the gaudy phrase, and the knack (crucial to novelists and chess players) of setting up combinations. Though his materials are tender, his treatment shows the good-natured toughness that gives an artist long life. Wisely, and nicely, he has spared this venerable text the—he admits—“high-handed revampments” to which his elder self is prone, and
has supervised an exact, deferential translation.
The Crunch of Happiness
GLORY, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 205 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1971.
Here is a book that deserves not a review but a party. Let us all rejoice with Vladimir Nabokov. Before he was twenty, revolution deprived him of his Mother Russia and of an estate worth millions. When he was forty, Hitler deprived him of his second home, Europe, and of another fortune—the accumulated treasure of fiction and poetry that his pseudonym V. Sirin had composed in the Russian language, a precious oeuvre unpublishable in the Soviet Union and destined, it seemed, to fade into oblivion as the subnation of Russian émigrés was scattered and absorbed by the passage of time. When Nabokov landed here, in 1940, his genius had neither a visible past nor an imaginable future. However, he had known English since his boyhood, and in this second language he recast his aloofly original inspirations, reignited his singular verbal fire, and bestowed upon America a literary master it had done nothing to raise. This second career, crowned by the notorious and remunerative and splendid Lolita, has in its strength reached down and redeemed from limbo the substance of the first career—the novels composed by “Sirin” in Berlin between 1925 and 1937. Now, with Nabokov sailing nicely into his eighth decade, the last of these Russian novels to reach the safe haven of definitive English translation, Glory, has been published. The rainbow of romances (nine Russian, six American) now arches complete, from Mary to Ada, and though, along with some short stories and poems and feuilletons, a few fine vibrations have no doubt been left behind in the Russian—a fuzz of nuance and euphony as untransferable as the dust on a butterfly’s wing—Nabokov’s diligence and self-respect have essentially defied a cruel century’s blind attempt to silence his sensibility and disarray his shelf of work.