Edwin Williamson on chronicling the life of Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges is one of Argentina's greatest and most beloved literary heroes. Born in 1899, Borges spent several years in Europe as a child and was educated in English as well as Spanish. As an adult he returned to Argentina to write and work as a professor of English. Artistically rebellious, Borges wrote poems and stories which are imaginative and often puzzling, many of them vehicles for complex philosophical themes. His 1944 collection of short stories, Ficciones, is widely regarded as his masterwork.

Prolific and smart as all get-out, Borges also wrote allegories, fantasies and even detective stories, and Penguin publishes a wide variety of his works, including comprehensive collections of his non-fiction and poetry. Award-winning writer Edwin Williamson, author of Borges: A Life talks about the great man and the daunting task of committing his life to biography.

 
For the greater part of his life, Jorge Luis Borges worked in obscurity, or at least the relative obscurity that living in Buenos Aires imposed on a writer so far removed from the established centers of literary culture. Fame was thrust upon him in his early sixties, when he was awarded the International Publishers' Prize in 1961, and even then a split jury required that he share it with Samuel Beckett. Still, grudging as fate had been toward Borges, it now lavished favors beyond imagining—recognition swiftly blossomed into an extraordinary renown, and within a few years he was being acclaimed as one of the great writers of the twentieth century and acknowledged as the most influential writer in the Spanish language of modern times.

Borges had a seminal influence on twentieth-century Latin American literature, whose richness and vitality were being celebrated worldwide at around the time he came to prominence. Subsequently, he was to have a remarkable impact on a rising generation of writers in Britain, the United States, Italy, and France, for his work extended the range of serious fiction in surprising ways, encouraging writers to depart from the character-based psychological or social realism of the postwar novel and embrace fiction as a self-conscious, rhetorical artifact, susceptible to unashamed fantasy and to overtly intellectual, and even philosophical, concerns. Additionally, his stories and essays were perceived to have anticipated some of the principal topics of modern critical theory. His subtle reflections on time and the self, or on the dynamics of writing and reading, had generated texts that embodied ideas such as the arbitrariness of personal identity, the de-centered subject, the "death of the author," the limitations of language and rationality, intertextuality, or the historically relative and "constructed" nature of human knowledge (viz. Borges's elliptical "histories" of abstract concepts, such as infamy, eternity, or angels).

Borges rejected what he saw as the intrinsic fraudulence of realism—the novelist pretending to hold up a mirror to "reality" when in fact he knew as little as his readers about the way the world actually worked. There was no point in disguising the artifice of fiction, he believed—a story was an orbe autónomo, a self-contained realm of the imagination that the author was free to shape at will so long as he could persuade the reader to lend it an appropriate degree of "poetic faith." Not only did Borges throw off the constraints of realism, he called into question the preeminence of the novel in the hierarchy of modern literature. He was drawn to modes of storytelling that had long preceded the novel—fable, epic, parable, and folktale. Favored also were contemporary modes that had been relegated to the category of subgenres by the towering prestige of the novel—Gothic fantasy, tales of adventure, science fiction and, best of all, detective stories, which he admired for their highly wrought, "teleological" plots. Not that he felt bound by categories of any sort. Nothing was proof against the spell of fiction—a book review, an obituary, a scholarly essay or a footnote could just as soon be touched by the magic of the storyteller. Even metaphysics and theology, as he famously observed, could be regarded as branches of the literature of fantasy.

Borges's writing was rooted in his childhood reading of adventure stories by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexandre Dumas or the Argentine Eduardo Gutiérrez, but his imagination was equally stirred by the philosophy of Berkeley and Hume, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. From Berkeley and Hume he took his basic premise—the subjective nature of all knowledge and experience; from thinkers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche he derived a sense of the fragility of personal identity, as likely to be the product of self-assertion as a mere conceit of some cosmic intelligence. Lacking objective truth, man was condemned to play in a game of no fixed rules and no specific end, for if the existence of beings other than oneself was uncertain, the presence of God or a hidden demiurge could not be ruled out. The act of writing was a paradigm of existence: the author might invent characters and plots, but was he the true source of his inventions, or did they simply reflect patterns repeated endlessly throughout universal literature? In the face of such radical uncertainties, the reader was invited to question personality, meaning, and, ultimately, objective reality itself.

Other than poetry, Borges's favorite medium was the ficción—a short story or prose text whose brevity allowed him to condense mental play into reverberating images and situations. The early ficciones were metaphysical fantasies in which, for instance, the universe was compared to a well-ordered but limitless library that refused to disclose its overall design, or the play of chance and necessity likened to a lottery run by a sinister panel of judges, or a novel held to represent the labyrinths of infinite time. An obsessive theme was the duel, the clash for supremacy between two rivals—Borges chose mostly hoodlums or adventurers, but he could also write teasingly about contests between theologians, society ladies, and even the two great South American liberators, Bol’var and San Mart’n, at their enigmatic encounter in Guayaquil. The duel became a metaphor for the yearning to assert identity by eliminating a rival, though Borges often liked to show how the victor might in the end be no more than a mirror image of his victim.

Borges's pronounced metaphysical concerns fostered the view among critics that his writing belonged in an ideal, timeless space, a kind of literary utopia, and this perception was underscored perhaps by the blindness that afflicted him a few years before he became famous, which lent him the aura of an otherworldly, sightless bard, capable of reaching into the vast storehouse of world literature and making present to us the eternal forms of a fading heritage. This impression of timelessness was further reinforced by the hazy chronology of his output. He had a habit of appending additional texts to later editions of his books, texts that had often been written years before, or indeed after, those books had first been published. He also continually revised the poems of his youth, purging them of local color and even omitting a good number altogether from successive editions of his collected works. In the case of three books of essays from the 1920s, he opted for outright suppression, steadfastly refusing to have them reprinted in his lifetime and claiming that he had done his best to buy up all extant copies and consign them to the flames.

Little wonder, then, that Borges's career appears to be so full of gaps, discontinuities, reversions, and turning points. Why did he try to disguise or conceal his youthful writings? Why did he abandon poetry at the age of thirty? Why did he cease writing stories in 1952 to take up poetry once more? And why, when he started telling stories again, did his writing appear to lose so much of the abstract, metaphysical quality that was so notable in his earlier ficciones? If there is a thread that runs through that maze of questions, it is Borges's conviction that writing, ultimately, is a form of autobiography. At the height of his fame, he confessed to an interviewer,

"I have felt my stories so deeply that I have told them, well, using strange symbols so that people might not find out that they were all more or less autobiographical. The stories were about myself, my personal experiences."

He was, in fact, restating a belief first expressed in one of the youthful books of essays he wanted to suppress. In an essay called "A Profession of Literary Faith," he had written, "...All literature is autobiographical, in the last instance. Everything is poetic inasmuch as it confesses a destiny, inasmuch as it gives us a glimpse of one." The "autobiographical substance" of a work, he conceded, might at times be rendered invisible by the "accidents" that embodied it, but it subsisted all the same, "like a heart beating in the depths."

The career of Borges was a quest to discover what it meant to be Borges, and it is this search for a destiny that I would invoke as justification for my undertaking a biography of so elusive a writer. My attempt to get a sense of this hidden search has taken nine years—roughly twice as long as I had anticipated. As might be expected in an enterprise of this length, there have been frustrations and setbacks, but if there was anything that sustained me through these difficulties, even at the cost of prolonging the enterprise itself, it was the discovery of new material—in the form either of fresh sources or of new insights—that lit up further reaches of the autobiographical hinterland of Borges's oeuvre. Chronology turned out to be the key, for only by reconstructing the sequence of events in the life and relating these as far as I could to the order of composition of the work was it possible to discern the contours of personal experience and finally take the pulse of the "heart beating in the depths" of the writing.

Fairly early on in my research, I was able to glimpse the elements of a story that held the promise of drawing together the seemingly disparate parts of Borges's life. I began to suspect that his insistence on amending or erasing his youthful writings was motivated not so much by an aversion to his early poetics as by a wish to cover up some matter that had caused him particular pain. In due course I was able to gather evidence that revealed that he had indeed undergone an experience in his mid-twenties that had driven him to the brink of suicide and almost destroyed him as a writer. Borges never directly spoke of this experience, but it became evident that it had been pivotal to his development, for it was as a result of that trauma that he ceased being a poet, and it was largely on account of it that he discovered the kind of writing that would eventually make his name. In one of Borges's most famous stories, "The Garden of Forking Paths," a character asks another, "In a riddle whose subject is chess, what is the one word that is forbidden?" And the reply is, "The word chess." Likewise, the one subject that was never openly declared by Borges in fact haunted the work of his middle years and was encrypted in signs, symbols, and motifs virtually everywhere in his texts. Only when love was finally revealed to him was he able to exorcise the ghosts of the past and arrive at the serenity, and indeed happiness, that characterized the last two decades of his life.

Needless to say, the myriad inventions and subtleties of literature cannot be reduced to the circumstances of mere biography, but a writer's life is the seedbed of his work, and from this biographical study, I would contend, there emerges a fuller, more human, more richly faceted Borges than the anemic bibliophile of legend would suggest. Borges was a man riven by inner conflicts, a man who, far from holding himself aloof from the great issues of his time, was deeply imbued with a sense of history. The fact that he was Argentine was critical in this respect. According to Borges, Argentina had come into being as an act of faith in the possibility of inventing a nation, and for the whole of his life he remained seized by the dream of building the patria, but even though he had been born at the height of Argentina's golden age, when the country was among the most prosperous in the world, it fell to him to witness its appalling descent into violence and disarray. Borges's fears over the destiny of the nation ran parallel with the quest for a destiny of his own, and not the least of his achievements was to have made his readers recognize themselves in that predicament—he converted the anxiety of being an Argentine, as it were, into an emblem of a universal condition, for in brilliant, lucid, powerful writings, he was to imagine the dissolution of the self and insinuate the horrors that might attend on its passing.

Edwin Williamson is the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish at Oxford University and a fellow of Exeter College. His books include The Penguin History of Latin America.