Lonnröt of course is right. He recognises that there is the banal reality of facts and probable causes and there is the aesthetic and existential need for pattern; the effort of the nineteenth-century novelist and historian to imply that the two are one does not hold up. But in Borges' brilliant story Lonnröt's intuition leads to his own demise, for the villain is, in this story, one step ahead of the detective. He has, in fact, produced an ‘interesting’ series of crimes precisely because he knows that Lonnröt has a weakness for the ‘interesting’, for the type of explanation in which chance is most fully eliminated. So, as a result of this, he ends up, like Oedipus, as the victim as well as the solver of the crime. But the ultimate victor is, of course, neither the villain nor the detective, but the story. Borges has succeeded in writing a story that avoids the vagaries of chance, the arbitrariness of Valéry's sentence about the marquise, that is as gripping as any detective story, and yet makes us recognise that it is human agency that is always at work.
It is precisely because Borges senses the world as ‘thrown’, ‘offered’, ‘abandoned’ (Barthes' surprisingly Heideggerian terms) and because for him, as for Proust and Kafka and Virginia Woolf, writing is a way of surviving in such a world, that he wages constant war on the classic tradition of fiction. In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ he imagines the answer to P.G. Wodehouse: a book in which the arbitrary would be abolished. In all books, he has a character here say, one incident leads on to another and the paths not taken are passed over in silence; but in the book of the Chinese ancestor of one of the two protagonists every possible forking of the paths is followed up and a garden of infinite paths is envisaged. It is envisaged in Borges' story, however, only in order to bring home to the reader that which is other than all these forks, the now in which a person, a flesh and blood individual, an ‘existing individual’, as Kierkegaard would say, meets his death: ‘Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now.’
Anecdotes, like the chain of past tenses of the classic novel, cannot ever convey that sense of ‘the now’, the sense that everything that happens to us happens precisely now. Anecdotes, rather, take us away from the now into a before and an after. In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Borges approaches the problem in a different way. The narrator becomes aware of a purely imaginary world which is slowly encroaching upon our own, a world in which everything grows slender and pure and without density, in Barthes' words, a world frighteningly like the world of novels, but also like the one, the story suggests, which the Nazis tried to impose on our world in the years 1933 to 1945. In a very modern gesture of passive resistance or quiet heroism the narrator wages his own battle on this by retiring to a hotel by the sea to pursue, like a latter-day (stoical) St Jerome, his translation into Quevedian Spanish of Sir Thomas Browne's baroque masterpiece, Urne Burial. I say stoical because he is no longer confident that what he is doing is passing on the tradition, as St Jerome was doing. He has lost confidence in time. What he hopes for, simply, is that the quiet daily work of translation will keep him anchored to reality and prevent his being sucked into the seductive world of Tlön. That is the best that, in our modern world, we can hope for.
Borges' most famous story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, is his most ingenious, witty and melancholy exploration of these themes, with the quietly heroic narrator of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ turning into a demented Quixote- or Ahab-like artist determined to escape the Arbitrary and to find the Necessary at any cost. A fin de siècle Symbolist writer devotes his life to rewriting Don Quixote, not in his own modern way but in Cervantes' way, that is, trying to feel himself into the necessity behind every arbitrary sentence of Cervantes. As always in the best of Borges the story is wonderful because it is so rich — not only is the central idea fascinating, but the world of hushed reverence he conjures up is both accurate and hilarious. ‘It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes’, says the awed narrator.
The latter, for example, wrote (part one chapter nine):
…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an enquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases — exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor — are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard — quite foreign, after all — suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.
Any commentary on this would risk turning into another parody. So let the reader reread, and ponder.
Behind Pierre Menard, of course, stands the figure of Mallarmé, of all the nineteenth-century writers the one most obsessed with finding a way to write that would defeat the vagaries of chance. His mature poems are so difficult because his whole effort is directed towards creating a dense network of meanings or half-meanings, which emerge momentarily only to be overtaken by others as the syntax suddenly seems to deny the meaning one had been heading for. As one of his finest critics, Malcolm Bowie, puts it, ‘each word is a gravitational centre around which possible meanings of the entire sentence gather’. He goes on, very finely: ‘These virtualities will of course become fewer as we move towards a relatively stable syntactic armature for the poem. But the meanings we relinquish do not simply disappear: the atmosphere of multiple potentiality which they create is part of Mallarmé's substance.’
Here is one of Mallarmé's most famous poems:
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd-hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.
(a prose translation will be found in the notes)
The first thing to note is that this is clearly a sonnet. The second is that, unlike Baudelaire's poem on the swan, it does not have a title. The third is that, once one plunges into the poem one seems to find oneself in a labyrinth from which it is almost impossible to emerge. The first line is already rather odd, but anyone with even a little bit of French quickly realises that we are dealing with a subject, aujourd'hui, ‘today’, preceded by three adjectives. True, it is difficult to add these three together to create a full picture of the day, which is what we take to be the task of adjectives, for they seem to belong, somehow, to slightly different, overlapping worlds: vierge, ‘virgin’, suggests purity; vicace, ‘vivacious’, can, with an effort, be made to apply to an entity like the day, though it chimes oddly with vierge, even if linked to it by sound; while bel, ‘beautiful’, seems to us too bland to come as the climax of three adjectives, yet it again locks into the line acoustically. Even so, this is the end of any relative ease of response, for instead of the expected verb, arriva, ‘arrived’, perhaps (the day dawned), we have both a question, ‘is it going to?’ and an almost incomprehensibly violent action, nous déchirer, ‘tear us’, or ‘tear for us’, followed by a clause, ‘with a drunken blow of wings’ (meaning what?). Tear what? ‘this hard lake forgotten’ — but if it is forgotten, what kind of an object is it? And this in turn is qualified — the lake seems to be haunted, under its coat of hoar-frost, by the transparent ice of flights that have not taken place, of birds that have not flown away.