31 May 2013 14:27:50
Professor Borges, then, is a translation of a transcription of a series of apparently extemporised lectures, and this, unfortunately, is how it reads. "Now, in the same way that we have seen the way Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that in the same way that Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, so we see Boswell in relation to Dr Johnson." The sentence is representative of the book's verbal profligacy. Granted, when you do finally figure out what is being said (that Boswell is to Johnson as Sancho Panza is to Don Quixote; that heroes need foils), the point seems sound enough. But shouldn't the professor be the one doing the explication?
Fine prose isn't everything, of course. In "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader," a characteristically heterodox essay from the 1930s, Borges mounted a case against the cult of Flaubert and the notion ("this vanity about style") that the "perfect page" was the one "in which no word can be altered without harm". Borges argued that, on the contrary, "the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process".
Professor Borges would certainly suggest a broad continuity of his thinking on the matter. In these pages, plot and character, the "soul" of the books under discussion, take clear precedence over textual nuance. The first seven "classes" are devoted to Anglo-Saxon literature, and while we do get a useful primer on kennings and alliterative verse, Borges spends most of the time simply telling us what happens in Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, the "Finnsburg Fragment", and so on. Shying away from linguistic appraisal, the teacher's analysis rarely rises above the level of enthusiastic interjection. "But this poem was written with so much intensity that it is one of the great poems of English poetry." "And this is, undoubtedly, astonishing." Whatever effect such straightforwardness had in person (and we should remember Borges was speaking to a class of undergraduates whose first language was not English), in print it is about as exciting as flat seltzer.
And so we trundle through the centuries. The Augustan age aspired to "clarity, eloquence, and expressions of logical justification". The Romantics were distinguished by their "keen and pathetic sense of time". The Victorians lived in an era "of debates and discussions". To be clear, Borges was no doubt an inspiring presence, and such literary-historical boilerplate has its function in the kind of survey course he was teaching. The question is whether this course really needed to be turned into a book.
In "The Library of Babel", Borges imagines the universe as a vast network of interconnected reading rooms whose shelves contain all possible books. Every volume, we are told, "is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma". The text of Professor Borges that has come down to us often reads like an imperfect facsimile – or indeed, like the first draft of a superior book. In a way, this is what it is. Much of the material it covers was reworked in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures that Borges gave at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, and that were later collected in This Craft of Verse. There is also significant overlap with many of the essays that comprise The Total Library. Anyone interested in Borges's critical writing (which is to say, anyone interested in literature) should start with those lucid and passionate volumes.
"I think of myself as being essentially a reader," Borges says in This Craft of Verse. "As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think that what I have read is far more important than what I have written." Coming from a writer of such world-historical reputation, that is rather beautiful, and, even if it doesn't quite redeem the muddle of Professor Borges, the author's unflagging responsiveness at least sends you back to the canon with a fresh appetite. "The thread that unites all these classes," the editors write, a little wishfully perhaps, "is literary pleasure, the affection with which Borges treats all of these works, and his clear intention to spread his enthusiasm for every author and period studied."
That seems true enough; and yet to see Borges as a mascot for the bookish life is to see him neither straight nor whole. Borges was nothing if not dialectical, and it bears pointing out that his work, especially the fiction, often manifests an outright horror of books. In "The Library of Babel", many of the involuntary patrons, sentenced to a lifetime of reading, choose suicide: "The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." Another famous story, "The God's Script", inverts the scenario. Instead of a total library filled with mostly meaningless books, there is a single "magical sentence", written by God on the first day of creation. To read it is to receive divine power and understanding, but as the narrator of the story (a Mayan priest held captive by the Spanish conquistadors) learns, such knowledge also entails an obliteration of selfhood: "Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortune's or misfortunes, though he be that very man."
Or again, there is the menacing late story "The Gospel According to Mark", in which a flash flood forces a young medical student to spend several days with a benighted and illiterate peasant family. To pass the time, the student reads to his hosts from one of the few books in the house, the Bible. The family is descended from Scottish immigrants but, after generations of intermarriage with the Indians, they have lost the Calvinist faith of their ancestors. Nevertheless, the story of Christ's sacrifice transfixes them. They quiz the student on points of theology. "And those that drove the nails will also be saved?" the father asks, and the student, himself an atheist but feeling it his duty to defend what he has read them, says yes. Only on the last page do we realise where it is all headed. One evening, just as it seems the waters are about to recede, the family surrounds the guest, and lead him outside to where they have built a cross. Borges, the panegyrist of reading, knew that it was possible to ask, or to make, too much of books.
As for Professor Borges, the only people likely to make too much of it are a few professors. Let them have their fun. Borges was fond of the idea that an inability to forget would make life unbearable and meaningless. There are so many things we can do without. Professor Borges is one of them.
