Rediscovering Borges

In the past few weeks, I’ve read books that touch down in all sorts of settings – a novel about sacrifice and drive set in the Amazon (Ann Padgett), a collection of Eudora Welty stories, Jane Eyre (I became a little obsessed with the movie adaptations), a nonfiction tome on Dreiser (still plugging away at an essay that’s almost, finally, done) and a slim book of Borges’ nonfiction. It’s a pretty wide variety—no canon in sight. And then I found an essay by Tim Parks in the NYR blog arguing for contemporary writers to revisit the purpose of a canon:

“Perhaps the problem [with the contemporary novel] is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture….”

The comments from readers range from agreeing with the author to calling his take on one's culture (local) outdated and futzy. Most of the time I’m glad to understand culture as something broader than what Parks seems to have in mind. But his essay also struck a chord – some latent anxiety, maybe, of inevitable dissonance between the habits of synthesis and the ability to generate something honest.

But then! I read the Borges collection, A Universal History of Iniquity, a volume of not more than one hundred pages that re-imagines world events through time: the woman pirate, the widow Ching; the deception of Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv; the death of 19^th century New York gangster Monk Eastman; the loyalty of men in service to the lord of the castle of Ako, and the chilling fate of an arrogant theologian, Melancthon, who wrote out of fear. “…[W]hat he wrote on the paper one day, he did not see the next; for this happens to every one there when he commits any thing to paper from the external man only, and not at the same time from the internal, thus from compulsion and not from freedom, it is obliterated of itself…” Every story in the collection produced a chill of reader’s delight and recognition, and not because Borges stuck to the four corners of his neighborhood, but because he attempted to inhabit so many places and he succeeded.