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In the Details
Collection bears witness to writer's prodigious talent
By Michael Sims
DECEMBER 21, 1998:
A couple of months ago, I wandered the coasts of Maine and
Massachusetts with a paperback of Jorge Luis Borges' horrific but immensely
entertaining Universal History of Iniquity in my backpack. The
economical grandeur of Borges' style seemed more suited to the ocean than
to Middle Tennessee, and I found myself walking along lost in his world.
More than once, I bemoaned the lack of a complete Borges--although it would
have been too heavy for my backpack.
Lo and behold, my wish was granted. Upon my return, I found
Collected Fictions, a fat new 565-page volume from Viking. There are
several reasons to rejoice over this collection. First, finally we have all
of Borges' stories in one place and in the order he wrote them; second, we
have them all in a consistent voice and idiom, thanks to the splendid new
translation by Andrew Hurley; third, the book itself is handsome and
appealing and, well, even smells good.
John Updike once asked of Borges, "What are we to make of him?" That's
the question: Is the Argentine master a fabulist, a short story writer, an
essayist, a scholar, or a poet? The answer is yes.
A smorgasbord of Borges will make my point. Consider this perfect
detail: "He died like a Samurai; the more distant spectators saw no blood,
for the felt was red." Or ponder this opening for a story: "Out of this
city marched armies that seemed grand, and that in later days were
grand, thanks to the magnifying effects of glory."
Although Borges' stories take place all over the world and in plenty of
unnamed regions, the American West of the 19th century repeatedly captured
the writer's attention. His fascination gave birth to a number of fine
stories, from which I will quote a single Picasso mural of a sentence:
"Beyond the setting sun lay the cedar-felling ax, the buffalo's huge
Babylonian face, Brigham Young's top hat and populous marriage bed, the red
man's ceremonies and his wrath, the clear desert air, the wild prairie, the
elemental earth whose nearness made the heart beat faster, like the
nearness of the sea."
Born in 1899 in Argentina, Borges published his first volume in his
early 20s. During his lifetime, he rose to the level of undisputed master,
applauded by everyone from Mario Vargas Llosa to Harold Bloom. He died in
1986--blind, world-famous, and leaving behind poems, essays, and dozens of
inimitable stories, including such influential classics as "The Circular
Ruins" and "Shakespeare's Memory."
Borges' stories are rich in fantasy and allegory. He was a baroque
miniaturist. Again and again he painted, out of pure wit and inventive
enthusiasm, luminous microcosms that seemed to encapsulate far more than
anyone else could cram into such a tiny space. For example, in a
one-paragraph meditation, "Argumentum Ornithologicum," the narrator
describes closing his eyes and seeing a flock of birds. He is uncertain how
many birds he sees, but knows that it is more than one and fewer than 10.
In a Schrodinger's-cat sort of way, he makes of this indeterminacy an
internal dialogue about the existence of God.
One hallmark of Borges' style is his sheer narrative chutzpah. In "The
Improbable Impostor Tom Castro," a con man impersonates a lost son even
though he looks nothing at all like the man whose inheritance he is
seeking. His rationale: "He sensed that the vast ineptitude of his pretense
would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud, for no fraud would ever
have so flagrantly flaunted features that might so easily have convinced."
The hoax succeeds--for a time.
Borges was a conjuror who delighted in literary sleight-of-hand. His
stories are replete with spurious quotations and sly parodies of pedantry
that are also homages. Are these merely literary games, exploiting the
absurdity of the world à la Joyce and Beckett? Sometimes, yes. Absurdities
and eccentricity are Borges' shtick. But through them he comes close to the
very mystery of existence.
His stories can be dreamlike, haunting, as if Poe and Kafka were his
drinking buddies and each had sworn to try his hand at the same styles and
themes. Then there are moments when he sounds like Marcel Proust doing a
cocktail-party imitation of H.P. Lovecraft. In other words, Jorge Luis
Borges sounds only like himself. And to be oneself with such inimitable
style is to leave a legacy in the presence of which we can merely smile the
reader's goofy smile of complete, bookish satisfaction.

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