A Reader on Reading

Characters too can be, like places and objects in Borges’s work, all-encompassing. Sir Thomas Browne, whom Borges loved, had said it for all time: “Every man is not only himself; there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are liv’d over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.” Borges rejoiced in the paragraph and asked me to read it to him several times. He approved of Browne’s seemingly naive “though but few of that name,” which “makes him dear to us, eh?” and chuckled without really expecting an answer. One of the earliest of these “revived selves” is Tom Castro, the unlikely impostor from A Universal History of Infamy, who, though a semi-idiot, tries to pass himself off as the aristocratic Tichborne heir, following the dictum that one man is in fact all men. Other versions of this protean character are the unforgetting and unforgettable Funes (in ‘‘Funes the Memorious”), whose memory is a rubbish heap of everything seen throughout his short life; the Arab philosopher Averroës (in “The Search of Averroës”), who tries, across the centuries, to understand Aristotle, much like Borges himself in search of Averroës and the reader in search of Borges; the man who has been Homer (in “The Immortal”) and who has also been a sampling of all men throughout our history and who created a man called Ulysses who calls himself Nobody: Pierre Menard who becomes Cervantes in order to write, once again but in our time, Don Quixote. In “Everything and Nothing” Shakespeare begs God to let him, who has been so many men, be one and himself. God confesses to Shakespeare that He too is nothing: “I dreamed the world [says God] as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms of my dream are you who like Myself is many and no one.” In “The Lottery of Babylon” every man has been a proconsul, every man has been a slave: that is to say, every man has been every man. My list also includes this note, with which Borges ends his review of Victor Fleming’s film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “Beyond Stevenson’s dualist parable and close to the Assembly of the Birds composed in the twelfth century of our era by Farid ud-din Attar, we can imagine a pantheistic film whose many characters, in the end, resolve themselves into One, which is everlasting.” The idea became a script written with Bioy (The Others) and then a film directed by Hugo Santiago. Even in Borges’s everyday talk, the theme of all-in-one was constantly present. When I saw him, briefly, after the Malvinas War had been declared, we talked, as usual, about literature and touched on the theme of the double. Borges said to me sadly, “Why do you think no one’s noticed that General Galtieri and Mrs. Thatcher are one and the same person?”

But this multiplicity of beings and places, this invention of an eternal being and an eternal place, is not enough for happiness, which Borges considered a moral imperative. Four years before his death Borges published one more book, Nine Essays on Dante, composed of pieces written in the forties and fifties and revised much later. In the first paragraph of his introduction, Borges imagines an old engraving found in a fictional oriental library, in which everything in the world is arduously depicted. Borges suggests that Dante’s poem is like that all-encompassing engraving, the Commedia as the Aleph.

The essays are written in Borges’s slow, precise, asthmatic voice; as I turn the pages, I can hear his deliberate hesitations, the ironic questioning tone with which he liked to end his most original remarks, the solemn recitativo in which he would quote long passages from memory. His ninth essay on Dante, “Beatrice’s Last Smile,” begins with a statement that he would have made in conversation with disarming simplicity: “My purpose is to comment on the most moving verses ever achieved in literature. They are included in the thirty-first canto of Paradiso and, although they are famous, no one appears to have noticed the sorrow hidden in them, no one has heard them fully. It is true that the tragic substance they hold belongs less to the book than to the author of the book, less to Dante the protagonist than to Dante the writer or inventor.”