Notes
1 Benny Albert of The New York Times (Endymion, May — June 1964).
2 Don Mulligan of the Associated Press, ibid.
I KNOW YOU, MASK
4 Kan, Precious Jewel, will be the day on which Katún 5 Ahau declines. It will be the time when skulls pile up and flies weep along the streets of the town and at the resting places along the streets of the town.
Humor and timidity generally go together. You are no exception. Humor is one mask and timidity is another. Do not allow anyone to remove both at the same time.
THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF JORGE LUIS BORGES
What kept the foolish flies from savoring your lunch of distinguished fowl was its superb tail.
When I discovered Borges in 1945, I did not understand him; in fact, I was stunned. Looking for Kafka, I found Borges’ prologue to Metamorphosis and confronted for the first time his world of metaphysical labyrinths, of infinities, eternities, tragic trivialities, and domestic relations comparable to the most carefully imagined inferno. A new universe, brilliant and fiercely attractive. The passage from that prologue to everything Borges has written was, for me and for so many others, something as necessary as breathing, and as dangerous as coming perilously close to the edge of an abyss. Following him meant discovering and descending to new circles: Chesterton, Melville, Bloy, Swedenborg, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf; it meant renewing old relationships: Cervantes, Quevedo, Hernández; finally, it meant returning to that illusory paradise of the ordinary: neighborhoods, films, detective novels.
And then there was his language. Today we accept it with a certain naturalness, but in those days his Spanish, so tight, so concise, so eloquent, had the same effect on me as thinking that someone was dead and buried and then, without warning, seeing him alive and well on the street. Through some mysterious art this language of ours, so dead and buried for my generation, suddenly acquired a strength and power we thought it had lost forever. Now, it seemed, Spanish could once again express anything with clarity and precision and beauty; one of our own could tell again, and interest us again, in an aporia of Zeno, and one of our own (I don’t know if this is another again) could raise a detective story to the level of art. We were subjects of resigned colonies, skeptical regarding the usefulness of a language that had been squeezed dry; we owe the restoration of faith in the possibilities of our inescapable Spanish to Borges and his excursions through English and German.
Since we are accustomed to a certain kind of literature, to specific ways of handling a story or resolving a poem, it is not strange that Borges’ methods take us by surprise, and from the very first we either accept or reject him. His principal literary device is precisely this surprise. Beginning with the first word in any of his stories, everything can happen. But a reading of all the stories together demonstrates that the only thing that could happen is whatever Borges, possessed of implacable logical rigor, had proposed from the start. For example, the mystery story in which the detective (a victim of his own intelligence, his own subtle plotting) is pitilessly trapped and killed by the scornful criminal; or the melancholy revision of the presumptive work by the Gnostic Nils Runeberg, in which it is concluded, with tranquil certainty, that God, in order to truly be Man, did not incarnate in a superior human being like Christ, or Alexander, or Pythagoras, but in the baser, and therefore more human, vessel of Judas.