A Reader on Reading

Life, which so many times provides us with fake representations, provided Borges himself with a perfect simulacrum of a Borgesian fictional device in which the reader imbues a certain text with the required perfection of an all-encompassing answer.

In April 1976, the second world convention of Shakespearean scholars met in Washington, D.C. The high point of the congress was to be a lecture on Shakespeare by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Riddle of Shakespeare,” and thousands of scholars fought like rock-band groupies for the privilege of occupying one of the seats in the largest hall available at the Hilton Hotel. Among the attendants was the theater director Jan Kott, who, like the others, struggled to get a seat from which to hear the master reveal the answer to the riddle. Two men helped Borges to the podium and positioned him in front of the microphone. Kott describes the scene in The Essence of Theatre:

Everyone in the hall stood up, the ovation lasted many minutes. Borges did not move. Finally the clapping stopped. Borges started moving his lips. Only a vague humming noise was heard from the speakers. From this monotonous humming one could distinguish only with the greatest pains a single word which kept returning like a repeated cry from a faraway ship, drowned out by the sea: “Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare …” The microphone was placed too high. But no one in the room had the courage to walk up and lower the microphone in front of the old blind writer. Borges spoke for an hour, and for an hour only this one repeated word — Shakespeare—would reach the listeners. During this hour no one got up or left the room. After Borges finished, everyone got up and it seemed that this final ovation would never end.

No doubt Kott, like the other listeners, lent the inaudible text his own reading and heard in the repeated word—“Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shake-speare”—the answer to the riddle. Perhaps there was nothing else to say. With a little help from ailing technology, the master faker had achieved his purpose. He had turned his own text into a resonant fake composed by an audience full of Pierre Menards.

PART THREE

Memoranda

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1

The Death of Che Guevara

“Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.

“Then it would die, of course.”

“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

“It always happens,” said the Gnat.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 3

CAN WE READ POLITICS AS literature? Perhaps, sometimes, in certain cases. For example: on 8 October 1967, a small battalion of Bolivian army rangers trapped a group of guerrilleros in a scrubby gully in the wilderness east of Sucre, near the village of La Higuera. Two were captured alive: a Bolivian fighter, known simply as Willy, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, leader of what Bolivia’s president, General René Barrientos, called “the foreign invasion of agents of Castro-Communism.” Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich, hearing the news, scrambled into a helicopter and flew to La Higuera. In the ramshackle schoolhouse, Selich held a forty-five-minute dialogue with his captive. Until the late 1990s, little was known of Che’s last hours; after a silence of twenty-nine years, Selich’s widow finally allowed the American journalist Jon Lee Anderson to consult Selich’s notes of that extraordinary conversation. Beyond their importance as a historical document, there is something poignant about the fact that a man’s last words were respectfully recorded by his enemy.

“Comandante, I find you somewhat depressed,” Selich said. “Can you explain the reasons why I get this impression?”

“I’ve failed,” Che replied. “It’s all over, and that’s the reason why you see me in this state.”

“Are you Cuban or Argentinean?” asked Selich.

“I am Cuban, Argentinean, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc…. You understand.”

“What made you decide to operate in our country?”

“Can’t you see the state in which the peasants live?” asked Che. “They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals …”

“But the same thing happens in Cuba,” retorted Selich.

“No, that’s not true” Che fired back. “I don’t deny that in Cuba poverty exists, but [at least] the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the Bolivian lives without hope. Just as he is born, he dies, without ever seeing improvements in his human condition.”