Why Read the Classics?

  Language (and work) as the person’s secretions is a metaphor which recurs several times in the texts on snails and seashells. But what counts even more (in Notes for a Seashell) is his eulogy of the proportion between the shell and its mollusc inhabitant, as opposed to the disproportion of man’s monuments and palaces. This is the example the snail sets us by producing its own shell: ‘What their work consists of does not involve anything that is extraneous to them, to their necessities or their needs. Nothing that is disproportionate to their physical being. Nothing that is not necessary and essential for them.’

  That is why Ponge calls snails saintly. ‘But saintly in what? In their precise obedience to their own nature. Know yourself, then, first of all. And accept yourself as you are. Along with your flaws. In proportion with your own measure.’

  Last month I ended an article on another—very different—sage’s testament (Carlo Levi’s) with a quotation: Levi’s eulogy of the snail. Here I am now ending this essay with Ponge’s eulogy of the snail. Could the snail be the ultimate image of contentment?

  [1979]

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Jorge Luis Borges’ critical acclaim in Italy goes back some thirty years now: it began in 1955, the date of the first Italian translation of Ficciones (Fictions), which appeared under the title of La biblioteca di Babele (The Library of Babel), published by Einaudi, and culminates today with the publication of the collected works in Mondadori’s Meridiani series. If I remember correctly, it was Sergio Solmi who, after reading Borges’ stories in French, spoke enthusiastically about them to Elio Vittorini, who immediately suggested doing an Italian edition and found an enthusiastic and congenial translator in Franco Lucentini. Since then Italian publishers have been competing with each other to publish the Argentine writer’s works in translations which now Mondadori has gathered together along with several other texts which have never been translated before. This will be the most comprehensive edition of his Opera omnia to date: the first volume, edited by Borges’ faithful friend Domenico Porzio, is published this very week.

  This popularity with publishers has been accompanied by a literary-critical acclaim which is both the cause and the effect of the former. I am thinking of the admiration for Borges expressed by even those Italian writers who are furthest from him in terms of their poetics; of the in-depth analyses that have been carried out in order to reach a critical definition of his world; and also, especially, of the influence he has had on creative literature in Italian, on literary taste and even on the very idea of literature: we can say that many of those who have been writing in the last twenty years, starting with those who belong to my own generation, have been profoundly shaped by him.

  How can we explain this close encounter between our culture and an oeuvre which embraces a wide range of literary and philosophical legacies, some familiar to us, others very unfamiliar, and which modulates them into a key which is definitely as remote as could be from our own cultural inheritance? (Remote, at least in those days, from the paths trodden by Italian culture in the 1950s.)

  I can only reply by relying on my memory, trying to reconstruct what the Borges experience has meant for me from the beginning down to today. The starting point, indeed the fulcrum, of this experience was a pair of books, Fictions and The Aleph, in other words that particular genre which is the Borgesian short story, before I moved on to Borges the essayist, who is not easily distinguishable from the narrator, and then Borges the poet, who often contains the nucleus of narrative, or at least a nucleus of thought, a pattern of ideas.

  I will start with the major reason for my affinity with him, that is to say my recognising in Borges of an idea of literature as a world constructed and governed by the intellect. This is an idea that goes against the grain of the main run of world literature in this century, which leans instead in the opposite direction, aiming in other words to provide us with the equivalent of the chaotic flow of existence, in language, in the texture of the events narrated, in the exploration of the subconscious. But there is also a tendency in twentieth-century literature, a minority tendency admittedly, which had its greatest supporter in Paul Valéry—and I am thinking in particular of Valéry the prose writer and thinker — and which champions the victory of mental order over the chaos of the world. I could try to trace the outlines of an Italian vocation in this direction, from the thirteenth century through the Renaissance and seventeenth century down to the twentieth century, in order to explain that the discovery of Borges was for me like seeing a potentiality that had always only been toyed with now being realised: seeing a world being formed in the image and shape of the spaces of the intellect, and inhabited by a constellation of signs that obey a rigorous geometry.

  But perhaps to explain the consensus that an author arouses in each of us, we should start, rather than from grand classifications by category, from motives more precisely connected with the art of writing. Amongst these I would put in first place his economy of expression: Borges is a master of concision. He manages to condense into texts which are always just a few pages long an extraordinary richness of ideas and poetic attraction: events which are narrated or hinted at, dizzying glimpses of the infinite, and ideas, ideas, ideas. How this density is conveyed without any sense of congestion, in his limpidly clear, unadorned and open sentences; how this style of brief, tangential narration leads to the precision and concreteness of his language, whose originality is reflected in the variety of rhythm, of syntactic movement, of always unexpected and surprising adjectives; all this is a stylistic miracle, which is without equal in the Spanish language, and for which only Borges knows the secret recipe.

  Reading Borges, I have often been tempted to draw up a poetics of concise writing, proclaiming its superiority over prolixity, and contrasting the two mentalities that are reflected in the favouring of one tendency over the other, in terms of temperament, idea of form and tangibility of content. For the moment I will simply say that the true vocation of Italian literature, just like any literature that values the poetic line in which each word is irreplaceable, is more recognisable in brevity than in prolixity.

  In order to write briefly, Borges’ crucial invention, which was also what allowed him to invent himself as a writer, was something that in retrospect was rather simple. What helped him overcome the block that had prevented him, almost until he was forty, from moving from essays to narrative prose was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written, written by someone else, by an unknown invented author, an author from another language, another culture, and then to describe, summarise or review that hypothetical book. Part of the legend that surrounds Borges is the anecdote that the first, extraordinary, story that he wrote using this formula, The Approach to Almotasim’ when it first appeared in the journal Sur, convinced readers that it was a genuine review of a book by an Indian author. Similarly, all Borges’ critics regularly point out that each text of his doubles or multiplies its own space through other books cited from an imaginary or real library, works that are either classical or erudite or simply invented. What I am most interested in stressing here is that with Borges we see the birth of literature raised to the second degree, as it were, and at the same time literature as derived from the square root of itself: a potential literature’, to borrow a term that would later be fashionable in France, but whose forerunners can all be found in Fictions in the ideas and formulae for those works which could have been written by Borges’ own hypothetical Herbert Quain.

  It has been said many times that for Borges only the written word has a full ontological reality and that the things of this world exist for him only inasmuch as they refer back to things which have been written. What I want to underline here is the circuit of values that characterises this relationship between the world of literature and that of experience. Lived experience is only valued for what it can inspire in literature or for what it in turn repeats from literary archetypes: for instance, there is a reciprocity between a heroic or daring enterpr
ise in an epic poem and a similar deed actually happening in ancient or contemporary history which makes one want to identify or compare episodes and values from the written event with those from the real event. This is the context in which the moral problem resides, which is always present in Borges like a solid nucleus in the fluidity and interchangeability of his metaphysical scenarios. For this sceptic, who seems to sample philosophies and theologies impartially, only for their value in terms of spectacle or aesthetics, the moral problem is constantly restated in exactly the same terms from one universe to the next, in its elementary alternatives of courage or cowardice, violence caused or suffered, and the search for truth. In Borges’ perspective, which excludes any psychological depths, the moral problem surfaces reduced almost to the terms of a theorem from geometry, in which individual destinies form an overall pattern which everyone has to recognise first before choosing. Yet it is in the rapid instant of real life, not in the fluctuating time of dreams, nor in the cyclical or eternal time of myths, that one’s fate is decided.

  At this point we should remember that Borges’ epic is made up not only of what he read in the classics, but also of Argentine history, which in some episodes overlaps with his family history, with the daring deeds of military ancestors in the wars of the emerging nation. In ‘Poema conjectural’ (‘Conjectural Poem’), Borges imagines in Dantesque style the thoughts of one of his ancestors on his mother’s side, Francisco Laprida, as he lies in a marsh, wounded after a battle, hunted down by the tyrant Rosas’ gauchos: Laprida recognises his own fate in that of Buonconte da Montefeltro, as Dante portrays him in Purgatorio canto 5. Roberto Paoli has pointed out, in a detailed analysis of this poem, that more than Buonconte’s death, which is explicitly cited, it is the preceding episode in the same canto that Borges draws on, the demise of Jacopo del Cassero. There could be no better exemplification than this, of the osmosis between what happens in literature and what happens in real life: the ideal source is not some mythical event that took place before the verbal expression, but a text which is a tissue of words and images and meanings, a harmonisation of motifs which find echoes in each other, a musical space in which a theme develops its own variations.

  There is another poem which is even more significant for defining this Borgesian continuity between historical events, literary epics, poetic transformation of events, the power of literary motifs, and their influence on the collective imagination. And this too is a poem which concerns us closely, because it mentions the other Italian epic which Borges knows in detail, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The poem is entided ‘Ariosto and the Arabs’. In it Borges runs through the Carolingian and Arthurian epics which merge in Ariosto’s poem, which skims over these elements of the tradition as though on the hippogriff. In other words it transforms them into a fantasy which is both ironic and yet full of pathos. The popularity of the Orlando Furioso ensured that the dreams of medieval heroic legends were transmitted to European culture (Borges cites Milton as a reader of Ariosto), right down to the moment when what had been the dreams of Charlemagne’s enemies, that is to say the dreams of the Arab world, supersede them. The Arabian Nights conquer the imagination of European readers, taking the place that had once been held by the Orlando Furioso in the collective imagination. There is thus a war between the fantasy worlds of the West and the East which prolongs the historic war between Charlemagne and the Saracens, and it is in this later war that the Orient gains its revenge.

  The power of the written word is, then, linked to lived experience both as the source and the end of that experience. As a source, because it becomes the equivalent of an event which otherwise would not have taken place, as it were; as an end, because for Borges the written word that counts is the one that makes a strong impact on the collective imagination, as an emblematic or conceptual figure, made to be remembered and recognised whenever it appears, whether in the past or in the future.

  These mythical or archetypal motifs, which are probably finite in number, stand out against the infinite backdrop of metaphysical themes of which Borges is so fond. In every text he writes, in any way he can, Borges manages to talk about the infinite, the uncountable, time, eternity or rather the eternal presence or cyclical nature of time. And here I go back to what was said previously about his maximum concentration of meanings in the brevity of his texts. Take a classic example of Borges’ art: his most famous story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. The surface plot is a conventional spy thriller, a tale of intrigue condensed into a dozen pages, which is then manipulated somewhat in order to reach the surprise conclusion. (The epics exploited by Borges can also take the form of popular fiction.) This spy-story also includes another tale, whose suspense is more to do with logic and metaphysics, and which has a Chinese setting: it is the quest for a labyrinth. Inside this second story in turn there is the description of an endless Chinese novel. But what counts most in this complex narrative tangle is the philosophical reflection on time it contains, or rather the definitions of the conceptions of time which are articulated one after another. At the end we realise that, underneath the appearance of a thriller, what we have read is a philosophical tale, or rather an essay on the idea of time.

  The hypotheses about time which are put forward in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ are each contained (and almost hidden) in just a few lines. First there is an idea of constant time, a kind of subjective, absolute present (‘I reflected that everything happens to a man in this very moment of now. Centuries and centuries, but events happen only in the present; countless men in the air, on land and sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me …’). Then an idea of time determined by will, the time of an action decided on once and for all, in which the future would present itself as irrevocable as the past. Lastly the story’s central idea: a multiple, ramified time in which every present instant splits into two futures, so as to form ‘an expanding, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times.’ This idea of an infinity of contemporary universes, in which all possibilities are realised in all possible combinations, is not a digression from the story, but the very condition which is required so that the protagonist can feel authorised to commit the absurd and abominable crime which his spying mission imposes on him, certain that this will happen only in one of the universes but not in the others, or rather by committing the crime here and now, he and his victim can recognise each other as friends and brothers in other universes.

  Such a conception of ramified time is dear to Borges because it is the one which dominates in literature: in fact, it is the condition which makes literature possible. The example I am about to quote takes us back again to Dante, and it is an essay by Borges on Ugolino della Gherardesca, to be precise on the line ‘Poscia, piú che il dolor poté il digmno’ (Then what grief could not manage hunger did), and on what was described as a ‘pointless controversy’ on the possibility that Conte Ugolino committed cannibalism. Having examined the views of many critics, Borges agrees with the majority of them, who say the line must mean that Ugolino died through starvation. However, he adds that Dante without wanting us to believe it was true, certainly wanted us to suspect ‘albeit with uncertainty and hesitation’ that Ugolino could have eaten his own children. And Borges then lists all the hints of cannibalism in Inferno canto 33, starting with the opening image of Ugolino gnawing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri.

  This essay is significant for the general considerations on which it closes. In particular the idea (which is one of Borges’ statements that comes closest to coinciding with structuralist methods) that a literary text consists solely of the succession of words of which it is composed, so ‘on Ugolino we have to say that he is a textual construct, comprising about thirty terzine’. Then there is the idea that links with the notions maintained by Borges on many occasions, about the impersonality of literature, concluding that ‘Dante did not know much more about Ugolino than what his terzine tell us’. And lastly the idea I really wanted to stress, the idea of ramified time: ‘In real
time, in history, whenever a man finds himself facing different alternatives, he opts for one, eliminating the others for ever; not so in the ambiguous time of art, which resembles that of hope and oblivion. Hamlet, in this literary time, is both sane and mad. In the darkness of the Tower of Hunger Ugolino devours and does not devour the bodies of his beloved children, and this wavering imprecision, this uncertainty is the strange matter of which he is made up. This was how Dante imagined him, in two possible death scenes, and how future generations imagine him.’

  This essay is contained in a volume published in Madrid two years ago, and not yet translated into Italian, which collects Borges’ essays and lectures on Dante: Nueve ensayos dantescos (Further Essays on Dante). His constant and passionate study of the founding text of Italian literature, his congenial appreciation of the poem, which has allowed him to make what he has inherited from Dante bear fruit both in his critical reflections and in his creative works, is one of the reasons, certainly not the least, why we celebrate Borges here and express once more with emotion and affection our gratitude for the intellectual nourishment he continues to give us.

  [1984]

  The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau

  Who is Raymond Queneau? At first glance this might seem a strange question, since the image of this writer is well known to anyone with any knowledge of twentieth-century literature, and of French literature in particular. But if each one of us tries to put together the things we know about Queneau, this image immediately takes on intricate and complex outlines, embraces elements which are difficult to hold together; and the more defining traits we manage to highlight, the more we feel that we are missing others which are necessary to round out into a unitary figure the various planes of this multi-faceted polyhedron. This writer who seems always to welcome us with an invitation to put ourselves at our ease, to find the most comfortable and relaxed position, to feel on the same level as he is, as though we were about to play a round of cards with friends, is in reality someone with a cultural background that can never be fully explored, a background whose implications and presuppositions, explicit or implicit, one can never exhaust.