Jun. 30, 2010 - Issue #767: The Bestest of Edmonton 2010

Hop Scotch

Latin passages

Among the most memorable moments in Jorge Luis Borges' 1939 melancholy story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is the comparative analysis of a passage from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote with a like passage from the unfinished Quixote written by the recently deceased Menard, a writer who sought not to "compose another Quixote ... but the Quixote itself." The passages in question are, inevitably, identical—or so it might appear. Borges notes a "vivid" contrast in style. He finds Menard's Quixote "more subtle" than Cervantes'. Each time I revisit "Pierre Menard" I laugh at this masterstroke of absurdity, yet upon consideration the conceit isn't absurd in the slightest. Borges attests that Menard's quixotic desire to re-create Don Quixote enriches the art of reading. Time changes words, context changes the nature of literary ambition—what Milan Kundera refers to as the "consciousness of continuity"—and Borges, a great advocate for re-reading, implies that every reading of a text offers us a new text.

The durability, or re-readability, of Borges' work, not to mention its considerable foresight with regards to the still-unfolding destinies of art and technology, is surely the central reason why there have been so many Borges collections, the latest in English being Everything and Nothing (New Directions, $12.50), one of ND's "Pearl" series of affordable, sturdy paperbacks with clean, modern designs.

Everything and Nothing "collects the best of Borges' highly influential stories and essays," a claim obviously open to dispute—there is no "Aleph" here, no "Funes the Memorious"—yet finally untroubling, since what matters to me at least is that there remain enticing, accessible editions of Borges out there to be discovered by new generations, and for such purposes Everything and Nothing is a welcome new product. "Pierre Menard" opens the book, followed by "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which describes the contents of the 11th volume of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a book left in a bar by one Herbert Ashe, a deceased English railway engineer. The Encyclopedia offers some of the philosophical notions held by the inhabitants of Tlön, a presumably non-existent planet that nevertheless boasts sophisticated theories of time, views metaphysics as a branch of fantastic literature, and believes that all books are the work of a single atemporal and anonymous author.

The sequencing of these stories is inspired, since there are fascinating and provocative ideas raised in "Tlön"—particularly those concerning literature and authorship—that enrich our reading of "Pierre Menard" retroactively. This tactic seems to backfire however in the placement of "Borges and I" just before "Everything and Nothing," two pieces whose too-obvious similarities discourage the reader from appreciating their disparate characters. A relatively minor offense, of course, and quickly forgiven once we move onto Everything and Nothing's final selections, a pair of lectures taken from the elegant and elegiac late collection Seven Nights. In "Nightmares" he considers the possibility that dreams are a form of fiction, that life may be a dream and we are all each dreaming each other, that dreams may be our "most ancient esthetic activity." In "Blindness" he considers the secret virtues of the titular affliction, comparing his own blindness with that of other authors throughout history, as well as other librarians, noting the irony of his—it turns out, non-unique—situation of being appointed director of Argentina's National Library just as he was seriously beginning to lose his sight.

He ends this moving essay with a phrase from Goethe: "everything near becomes distant." Typically for Borges, with a minimum of words, Goethe's words are ruminated upon in such a way that its application to the condition of blindness balloons outward until each of us seem caught up in this sense of all things slipping out of our grasp, the universe expanding and urging us to never forget that we are on unstable ground and must never cease to reach out for new sources of wonder and warmth.

Speaking of blindness, the Portuguese novelist and controversial polemicist José Saramago died last month, and if the announcement of his departure shocked me it wasn't because of his age—he was 87—but his sheer productivity right up to the end. How many examples in literature do we have of authors who created such a bold, challenging and prolific body of work at an age as advanced as Saramago's? (I'm sure Borges would have an answer.) Like many Anglophone readers I discovered Saramago with his Nobel Prize-winning Blindness, published in translation in 1997 and written when the author was already a septuagenarian. I've read everything since, which is a lot, and not much that was written beforehand. The novel concerns a plague that renders nearly all of humanity blind, and its sentences that go on for pages, with several exchanges of dialogue mounting atop one another so that it can become difficult to discern who's speaking, struck me as a brilliant way of making the reader almost feel as blind, in some sense, as the characters. When I first read Blindness I hadn't yet realized that pretty much all of Saramago's fiction is written in the same style. This style lends itself to a seemingly infinite number of uses.

Saramago's prose, exalted in structure, colloquial in word choice, seems simultaneously carved in stone and transcribed from the most intimate conversations. His critique of consumer culture, which was perhaps most eloquent and compelling in The Cave, which will forever change how you look at West Edmonton Mall, was often aligned directly with his mercurial Marxism, and his fantastical conceits were often regarded, or at least marketed, as allegories. Yet Saramago's best stories were far too humane, spontaneous, and mysterious to be neatly summed up in any sort of one-to-one metaphorical framework or reduced to didacticism. My experience with his novels has usually gone like this: I enter immediately engrossed and fascinated; halfway through, the seemingly endless digressions are wearing me out; by the end, the grand conclusion arises as though from a fog, my mind is sufficiently blown, and I treasure every page, even the ones that frustrated me, and feel like I've genuinely been through something, something that has caused me not to feel closer to Saramago's world view, but to rigorously question my own. His contentious, often poetic voice will be missed, but his texts remain, and thanks to the inherent sluggishness of translation, it seems we still have some new ones to look forward to. V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus