Cathedral

We tried to get to the Bill Reid Gallery, but it's closed Mondays and Tuesdays so will have to wait. We decided to check out Christ Church, the Anglican cathedral, instead. Oddly enough, almost the first thing we saw on entering was a collection of three Bill Reid prints, which are on display at the back of the church, just under Susan Point's "Tree of Life" stained glass window.


Christ Church has to be the least impressive cathedral I know. Indeed, it's less impressive than the majority of British parish churches. In part that's because it's now so comprehensively overlooked by the office towers that surround it; in fact it has to be one of the lowest buildings in downtown Vancouver. But even before it was outpaced by the city in which it is set, it can't have been the most prepossessing of structures. At the best of times, the building seems to hug the ground, as though afraid of both heights and, more generally, public interaction. The style is Gothic Revival without the Gothic's sense of the vertical. It's testament to the surprising timidity of Britain's imperial ambitions here at the turn of the twentieth century: it's as though Vancouver's early settlers were (already) afraid to make too much of a statement.

As the building is so non-descript, it's therefore no great surprise that in 1971 most of the congregation agreed to have it torn down, a plan that only failed after wider public disapproval.

But the cathedral has its redeeming features, and you have to be one of the few who actually go inside to appreciate them. It's understandable that not many cross the threshold: they are hardly enticed to do so. Because of the church's squat horizontality, you imagine that its interior could very easily be oppressive: the soaring heights of the traditional Gothic cathedral are what draw your eyes up and impart the impression of transcendence. But Christ Church is saved by the fact, first, that someone had the good sense to paint the interior walls white (though they weren't always that way) and, second and more importantly, that the exterior stone gives way to wood once you are inside. The ceiling is made of cedar planking, while the beams and floor are old-growth Douglas Fir. The floor is particularly striking and beautiful, and it's shocking to think that for fifty years (before a 2003/2004 renovation) it was hidden beneath fiberboard and linoleum.

Inside the cathedral, then, there is little of the sense of weightiness or frigidity that sometimes attends nineteenth-century churches built in the Gothic style. The wood is warm and welcoming, and the soft light that survives the heavily stained glass (not to mention the persistent Vancouver rain) is transformed from gloom to glow.

It would have been nice had the architecture taken still more from the vernacular West Coast tradition. If anything, if you are looking in Vancouver for the sense of awe and grandeur that a cathedral is supposed to impart you are more likely to find it in the Arther Erickson design for the Museum of Anthropology's main hall, whose concrete and glass is based on indigenous post and beam. (In nearby Victoria, you might look to the Empress hotel!) By contrast, Christ Church feels homely and domestic at best. But the fact that it does feel comfortable--that it isn't simply forbidding in its awkwardness--has everything to do with the care taken on its upholstery, if not on the structure itself.

Miserere

Someone has uploaded footage of last year's Vancouver riot and put it to music (Allegri's "Miserere") sung by my brother.

Audain

A very quick visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery this afternoon only gave us time to zip around some of the current exhibit "Shore, Forest, and Beyond".


This is the private collection of a local property developer (turned cultural philanthropist) and his wife, and it focusses on British Columbian art from nineteenth-century indigenous masks and carved wooden chests to contemporary conceptual photography. Rather incongruously, it also includes a significant number of works on canvas by the Mexican muralists (Rivera, Siquieros, Orozco, Tamayo). The fact that these pieces sit very uneasily with the rest of the collection was highlighted by the fact that several of the labels were quite blatantly wrong: the title of Tamayo's "Figura de pie," for instance, was translated as "Pious Figure" rather than "Standing Figure," which gives rather a different impression of what that picture is all about.

As for the British Columbian art, there were a large number (over twenty) of Emily Carrs, from different stages of her career. Which only served to remind me how little I like this most iconic of West Coast artists. In the catalogue Audain himself writes that originally he didn't think much of Carr, but that he came round to her by way of a comparison with Gauguin: "what Gauguin had done for the landscape and people of Tahiti, Emily Carr had done for the Northwest Coast" (24). But this is a back-handed compliment at best. It only underlines both artists' exoticization of difference, and the way in which they frame the cultural and racial other within a vision of a lush natural habitat. And the viewer knows (but the artists never show) that this habitat is shortly disappearing thanks to modernization and indeed the early stages of the development that will subsequently give Audain the cash to buy up the pious inscription of what that development supposedly destroys.

Of the BC modernists, I rather preferred Edward Hughes's depictions of maritime activity--ferries, fishing vessels, and the small ports that dot the province's coast and outlying islands. They are painted with an apparent naiveté, but it is precisely the somewhat naive attention to detail (the baby's pram on the wharf, the boat's name "Imperial Nanaimo") that makes them rather more reliable records of the process by which indigenous culture was edged out in the Pacific Northwest.

And when it comes to the painting of nature, I was pleasantly surprised by Jack Shadbolt's "Butterfly Transformation Theme 1981," a large canvas in six panels that revisits the butterfly motif and transforms it into something between an exuberant celebration of natural vitality and an almost pop art revelry in artifice and abstraction.

cardigan

This afternoon to the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, which as I have mentioned before is one of my favourite galleries in the Lower Mainland, with a great little bookstore specializing in photography.

But right now the gallery is between exhibitions, so we had to content ourselves with the North Vancouver museum downstairs. The woman there commented that she hadn't expected anyone to come in today, what with the snow and all. She turned the lights on specially for us.


The permanent exhibit is small but interesting, charting North Vancouver's history from its establishment as a logging camp called Moodyville in the 1880s, though to its industrial heyday as port and home to shipyards in the mid twentieth-century, and now its post-industrial stress on tourism as gateway to Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour ski resorts, as well as the rather tacky Capilano Suspension Bridge which bills itself as "Vancouver's top attraction."

The museum always has a temporary exhibit, too, which is often very thoughtfully put together and curated. Right now the show is "Made in B.C.: Home-grown Design," a survey of British Columbia's products from (predictably) the staples of timber and shipping to graphic design, architecture, transport vehicles, school yearbooks, stamps, and goodness knows what else. Still, it's rather obvious that in fact British Columbia has never been a place in which very much got produced: its economy has been based on the extraction or cultivation of raw materials (strangely, though, I saw no mention of the current top export, BC Bud) or on the movement of goods.

Now, if anything, the province's major product is the image of Vancouver itself, built up and burnished through international extravaganzas such as Expo 86 and the 2010 Winter Olympics. No wonder Vancouverites were so embarrassed when a bit of street disorder seemed to sully the city's supposedly good name. We worry about our city's sparkling image the same way residents of Detroit care about the car industry or Venezuelans keep half an eye on the price of oil.

For better or worse, Vancouverites have always aspired to be good citizens, or to seem so at least. One of the most striking objects in the "Made in B.C." exhibition, and just about the first thing you see as you enter the room, is a cardigan knitted by a (male) worker employed by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway sometime at the turn of the twentieth century. As part of the design he had stitched the names of the various towns at which the railway stopped. It's not quite a tattoo, but it's close: a gesture of bearing witness to his employer's achievements on his own body. This may look like hegemony, but of course to call it that only begs the unanswerable question: "What was he thinking?"

Tanabe

Today to Burnaby Art Gallery, which has a show of works on paper by Takao Tanabe.


I'd never heard of Tanabe, but I liked what I saw. The pictures were mainly landscapes, mostly of Canadian scenes (the West Coast, the Rockies, the Prairies), often verging into abstraction.

I liked best the series of pictures of the Prairies, which were on the cusp between landscape and abstract: graphite on dark paper, a thick line roughly outlining the horizon and maybe rain above or grass below.

Burnaby Art Gallery was interesting too: occupying an old mansion house that has more than its fair share of history; the building was previously used variously as a monastery, a cult's headquarters, and a fraternity house.

prize!

As I arrived at work this morning, someone I didn't know shouted my name from across the street, and then came running over. He wanted to give me a bottle of Prosecco, for my talk last month on "From Access to Interactivity" at "Access 2011." Many thanks to the librarians. Fine people!

And then this afternoon, the folk from the Modern Language Association were in touch. I've won a prize! Well sort of: an honorable mention. For "an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures."

Here's what they say:

A study that moves elegantly and daringly from political theory to cultural analysis, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America puts Latin America on the map as a complex region in which hegemony, habit, and affect are constantly being contested and renegotiated in response to the vitality of the multitude. Jon Beasley-Murray does this through a series of engaging discussions of contemporary theorists who dialogue directly with Latin American test cases highlighting the relation between Peronist populism, hegemony theory, and the limits of civil society. With clarity, intellectual rigor, and conceptual sophistication, Beasley-Murray seeks to challenge the dominant critical paradigms of the cultural-studies-oriented humanities and social sciences.

I think I may be drinking that Prosecco tonight.

wiki

The Saturday photo, part XVII: in Hawaii, at Honolulu International Airport:

poster

I pass this poster every Monday, in the building where I teach a class on Human Rights. Seeing it always induces a kind of cognitive dissonance, as my class is explicitly not a defence of human rights, but a critique. I happen to think that that's the business of universities: critique, questioning, critical reflection.

Anyhow, the poster is an advert for UBC, featuring a solitary figure on a mountain top and with the slogan "Human Rights Defended... From here." I have little idea what it's supposed to mean, and there's not a word of explanation either on the poster itself or anywhere on the UBC website. The image certainly doesn't seem to have much to do either with the university or with human rights.

Any ideas?

Interactivity

Here's the keynote address I gave recently to "Access 2011: The Library is Open": "From Access to Interactivity".

You can also, if you are so minded, watch a video of me delivering the talk.

It's about Borges, libraries, library fines, open source, primitive accumulation, and difficulty, among other things. What follows is the opening paragraph or two:


Librarians have seldom been paid a handsome wage. At the Miguel Cané Library, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Almagro Sur, in the late 1930s the going rate was some 210 Argentine pesos a month. On the other hand, it could hardly be said that the work was particularly taxing. The library assistant tasked with cataloguing found that he could do his job in an hour or so each day, which left plenty of time for reading, thinking, and writing. Sometimes he got to thinking about the library itself, or about the place of the library in the world. He thought, for instance, that in some ways the library was a mirror of the world: after all, if you wanted to find out about some aspect of the world, you could come to the library and look it up. The library had books of Geography, History, Physics, Maths, Literature, Art: every conceivable topic. It might be an unprepossessing building in the suburbs of a city in an obscure Southern Hemisphere country, at the periphery of civilization, but a library had everything. You could spend your life there, without ever exhausting what it had to offer. If the library was big enough (and the assistant librarian imagined a library that had every book ever published, and perhaps even every book that could conceivably be published) you could even get lost in it. The library was a labyrinth, but also a rather miraculous thing, a double of the universe.

In September 1945, the library assistant published a short story about just such a miraculous double of the universe, hidden in an obscure corner of Buenos Aires that was nearly as unlikely as the Miguel Cané library itself. In this story, the narrator, a rather awkward and shy middle-aged man, discovers that an acquaintance of his, an aspiring but not very talented poet, has a secret. He still lives in the house where he grew up, which is located on a non-descript city-centre street. But the house harbors a surprise: on the staircase in a basement under the dining room is an object that is only some “two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained within it” (Borges, “The Aleph” 283). This is “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist” (281). This strange, mysterious thing takes the logic of the library to the limit: it is the absolutely universal contained within an extremely limited, compressed and particular space. The poet calls it an “Aleph,” the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the number one in Hebrew, which in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition is the number that contains all other numbers. As the narrator tells us of his encounter with the Aleph, in it he “saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid [. . .] saw horses with hand-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand” and so on and so forth (283). He is practically struck dumb by the experience: “I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity” (284).

But if the Aleph is a fantastical version of the library, a library that takes up the smallest amount of physical space but encompasses the entirety of the universe, there is one significant difference between the two. The library is public, while the Aleph is private. The incompetent poet emphases, “his words fairly tumbl[ing] out,” that “It’s mine, it’s mine; I discovered it in my childhood, before I ever attended school” (280). It’s his prized possession, and he keeps it absolutely to himself, hiding it from everyone else. He only shows it to the narrator in desperation, as his landlords threaten to tear down the house and so destroy the basement, the staircase, and the secret they harbor. But the narrator, having seen this precious thing, is struck by a fit of jealousy and refuses to help the pathetic poet’s campaign to preserve his precious property. Cruelly, the twist in the tale comes when the narrator refuses to admit that he has seen unusual at all in the cellar, and suggests therefore that the poet must be suffering from some kind of delusion. He should “take advantage of the demolition of his house to remove himself from the pernicious influence of the metropolis [. . . ]. I clasped him by both shoulders as I took my leave and told him again that the country--peace and quiet, you know--was the very best medicine one could take” (284). The poet will pay the price for keeping his Aleph secret, a private hoard rather than a public good: by prohibiting access he has sacrificed even his own opportunity to enjoy this miraculous discovery. He will be laughed out of town as a madman if he so much as mentions the existence of this all-capacious universal library.

The universal and all that comes with it--the university, the library--is always in peril if it is treated as private possession rather than common treasury. It would be nice if we could conclude that, by contrast, it is in safe hands if it is the property of the state. But shortly after publishing the story of the Aleph, its author, the library assistant, was summarily fired and offered in compensation only the post of “the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets” (qtd. in Williamson, Borges 292). Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina’s greatest writer (and incidentally also the country’s most famous librarian), was out of a job.

Read more...

monsters

I wrote recently that Borges's fiction is often structured around scenes whose drama derives from the structural logic of the cinema. And some time ago, in a reading of a number of stories from Historia universal de la infamia and Ficciones I suggested that their guiding logic was often an accumulation of almost imperceptible (and seemingly random) deviations from the norm.

Putting these two observations together, I think we see how there are various possible relations between what we can call the logic of minimal deviation and the structure of the cinematic scene. Sometimes one leads to the other, sometimes the two complement each other, sometimes they are in tension, and so on. At times Borges seems to be asking how much deviation (or how many minimal deviations) are required to provoke a scene. At other times he wonders how many deviations any particular scene can handle. And there are still other cases in which he proposes that it is only by making a scene that the logic of gradual accumulation can be brought to a halt.

Take "La muerte y la brújula," for instance. Here the detective, Lönnrot, carefully and slowly follows the "periodic series of bloody deeds" (147; 147), each of which is but a slight variation on its predecessor, until he arrives at the climactic scene that gives (renewed) sense to the series itself. Or "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which begins with a paradigmatically cinematic scene: a dinner with Borges's friend Bioy Casares, a glance at a mirror that provokes a citation and then the fruitless search for its origin. This then opens up a concatenation of curious circumstances, each one of which could easily be overlooked: an additional encyclopedia article, a package from Brazil, a compass packed in a crate of table service, a dead man who owns an unusually heavy metal cone. Together, however, they constitute a new world.

Or, for another type of relationship between the scene and the imperceptible deviation, see "El milagro secreto" ("The Secret Miracle"). This is the story of Jaromir Hladík, a Czech scholar who is captured by the Nazis in Prague in early 1939. He is soon tried and sentenced to death by firing squad. In the interval between the sentence and its execution, Hladík reflects upon his life's work and the fact that it is soon to be cut short. He asks God for a year in which he could complete his masterwork, a verse drama entitled The Enemies. It hardly seems that this wish is to be granted when the characteristic scene of the firing squad is assembled: a bare yard, soldiers hanging around waiting for the appointed hour, the offer of a final cigarette, a cloud in the sky, a heavy drop of rain. But then all of a sudden "the physical universe stopped" (172; 161). And Hladík is indeed given his year, in the course of what for everyone else is but an instant, in which he can work out in his head the completion of his play. When finally he finishes his task, chooses the last epithet, "the drop of water rolled down his cheek. He began a maddened cry, he shook his head, and the fourfold volley felled him" (174; 162). Here, then, the scene contains the imperceptible deviation that in turn allows for the concatenation of revisions in which the book is completed before we then return back to the scene for its dramatic conclusion.

Either way, however, I think that what's at issue for Borges is the connection between habit or the routine, with its many repetitions none of which is quite like the last, and drama or the exceptional. How does the dramatic scene, with all its novelty, arise from routine repetition? Why is it that we are suddenly confronted with a decision or choice that only in retrospect we can understand has been a long time brewing in all the vagaries of chance? Or how, by contrast, does the scene itself become routinized or habitual? For after all, in Hladík's case, the firing squad scene was absolutely unexceptional from the point of view of those at the other end of the gun. Is then drama just habit viewed from some other perspective, whereby the otherwise imperceptible variation suddenly comes to take on unusual significance? And cannot even the most compelling of scenes, or the most vital of confrontations, be reframed such that the differences they invoke become strangely inconsequential?

So, for example, in both "Tema del traidor y del heróe" ("The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero") and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" ("Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"), the most imperceptible of differences are suddenly given dramatic import. And we will see above all in two stories in El Aleph--"Los teólogos" ("The Theologians") and "Emma Zunz"--how distinctions that are quite literally matters of life and death can, with a sudden twist of perspective, suddenly come to matter not in the slightest.

But in Ficciones the emphasis is on how habit and its banal repetitions can, like the mirror against which Bioy Casares warns us in "Tlön," produce monsters.

Borgesian

My aim was to write a post a week this semester about Borges, much as I did a few years ago for José María Arguedas. I'm behind, but hoping to catch up. Here is what I have written to date:

• Borges (preview / "Borges y yo")
• fervor (Fervor de Buenos Aires)
• criollismo (Inquisiciones)
• scenes (Historia universal de la infamia)
• monsters (Ficciones)

Also:

• chance ("The Widow Ching--Pirate," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "The South," and "The Library of Babel")

Related:

• hatchet (Williamson, Borges: A Life)
• interactivity (Access 2011 keynote address)

scenes

Historia universal de la infamia manifests Borges's interest in performance: the ways in which the self is not a given, but is rather a role that we play. Sometimes we play no other role than the one we are given, which is why perhaps it seems so true to us, and why we easily confuse what is after all mere habit with some kind of abiding essence. At other times, however, characters find themselves faced with a decision: will they act this way or that. This is a dramatic choice between the different selves that they could potentially be. Perhaps infamy itself is precisely the result of some such decision, a deviation from an allotted role in favor of some other performance.

Almost all the stories in the collection revolve around some kind of imposture. Most obviously, "El impostor inverosímil Tom Castro" ("The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro"), which is based on the Tichborne Case, a nineteenth-century cause célèbre in which one Arthur Orton claimed to be the long-lost Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne Baronetcy. Borges observes that Orton's performance gained credibility from the fact that he was in so many ways so different from the person he claimed to be: where Tichborne had been slim, dark-haired, reserved, and precise, Orton was fat, fair-haired, outspoken, and uncouth. Borges's point is that presumably an impostor would try to copy at least some elements of the original he was mimicking; the very fact that there was no such attempt at impersonation seemed to prove that Orton must be the real thing. The best disguise is no disguise at all; in the best performance there is no distance between the role being played and the person playing it.

"El impostor inverosímil" features an eminence grise in the shape of Orton's accomplice Ebenezer Bogle, who plays the part of Tichborne's manservant. When Bogle dies, Orton quite literally loses the plot and ends up "giving lectures in which he would alternately declare his innocence and confess his guilt" (40; Complete Fictions 18). Borges calls Orton Tichborne's "ghost," presumably in that he shows up after the latter's death, like some kind of strange revenant. But it is surely equally true that Orton himself is haunted by Tichborne. By the end he has spent so longer playing the role that it's as though he's know quite sure who he is, and he will let the public decide: "many nights he would begin by defending himself and wind up admitting all, depending on the inclinations of his audience" (40; 18).

In "El asesino desinterado Bill Harrigan" ("The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan"), there is no third party: neither the eminence grise nor the ghost that compelled Orton's transformation. Or rather, there is but it is impersonal, mechanistic: New York tenement boy Harrigan turns himself into the cowboy out West who will be Billy the Kid by acting out melodramatic models provided by the theater. In turn, he will become an iconic part of the myths of the Wild West propagated by Hollywood.

Borges suggests that the History he is telling us is a series of "discontinuous images" that he compares a movie. But it is even better described as a series of scenes in the cinematic sense: briefer than a theater scene but more dynamic than any single image, the filmic scene is a situation in a single space defined by mise-en-scène, a dramatic confrontation, and the position of camera angles or lines of sight. Indeed, the scene is very often the basic unit of Borges's fiction. (In this collection, think particularly of "Hombre de la Esquina Rosada" ["Man on Pink Corner"] or the ending of "El tintorero enmascarado Hákim de Merv" ["Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv"].)

Here the key scene is the moment of transformation of Harrigan into Billy: a notorious Mexican gunfighter named Belisario Villagrán enters a crowded saloon that is outlined with cinematic precision and visuality ("their elbows on the bar, tired hard-muscled men drink a belligerent alcohol and flash stacks of silver coins marked with a serpent and an eagle" [64; 32]); everyone stops dead except for Harrigan, who fells him with a single shot and for no apparent reason. Again, the visual detail as the Mexican's body is slow to register the indignity: "The glass falls from Villagrán's hand; then the entire body follows" (65; 33). In that moment, Billy the Kid is born "and the shifty Bill Harrigan buried" (66; 33).

But even if it is Bill's "disinterested" (unreflective, habitual) killing that turns him into a legend, there is always a gap between that legend and his behavior. He may learn "to sit a horse straight" or "the vagabond art of cattle driving" and he may find himself attracted to "the guitars and brothels of Mexico" (66, 67; 33, 34), but a few tics from his East Coast days remain: "Something of the New York hoodlum lived on in the cowboy" (66; 33). The task of replacing one set of habits (or habitus) with another is never quite complete. But it is not as though Harrigan were the "real" thing and Billy the Kid a mere mask. Rather, it is that the new performance is informed by the old one. As always in Borges, there is never anything entirely new under the sun, even the scorching sun of the arid Western desert.

hatchet

Edwin Williamson's Borges: A Life is the standard biography in English. But it is, sadly, not a good book.

Williamson is frankly obsessed with Borges's sexual history. The irony is that there really isn't that much to be obsessed about: Borges had a whole series of crushes on various women, but so far as one can tell they were very seldom consummated; he didn't marry until he was almost 68; and both Borges himself and the women with which he was in one way or another involved were almost all very discreet and have left little in the way of written record of their relationships.

Inevitably, then, Williamson is reduced to conjecture. There is much talk about what "must have" or "may have" been the case: "the truth may have been that he needed to feel close to the woman he loved" in order to write his longest fiction, The Congress (279); "he may have blamed Perón for coming between him and" a woman he asked to marry but who refused (332); the violence of his reaction upon hearing that another former crush was to marry someone else "must surely have been due to the symbolic significance of the occasion" (358); the woman who would become his second wife "must have been a soothing presence" from the time he first met her (370). And so on and so forth.

More seriously still, and in lieu of any other evidence, Williamson turns to Borges's writing and reads it often as though it were almost directly confessional and autobiographical. So, for instance, almost any number of the earlier fictions are read as barely-disguised accounts of a putative love triangle between Borges and fellow writers Norah Lange and Oliverio Girondo. So Williamson has much to say about the "autobiographical subtext" of the novel outlined in "El Acercamiento a Almotásim," which "can be discerned without difficulty" and features "a woman--Norah Lange--[who] seemed to represent a higher truth" (180). Likewise, in "Hombres de las orillas," the protagonist's "mysterious passivity suggests that Borges himself was at a loss to explain why Norah Lange had left him for his rival" (172). Moreover, most of Borge's contributions to the newspaper Crítica are "a cryptic record of his feelings and attitudes to Norah Lange" (195). Meanwhile in "The Aleph" Williamson once again zooms in on an "autobiographical subtext" which, apparently, "alludes to his thwarted love for Norah Lange" (202). And reading the books described in "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain" we are told that "as with everything Borges wrote, there was an autobiographical subtext [. . .], a grieving heart beating in the depths of the narrative, as it were" (215).

Admittedly, the biographer's bias may well be to read the work in biographical terms. But the problem is that, here, such reductive interpretations edge out any other possible reading. Williamson has little if any concern for the aesthetic dimensions to Borges's poetry or prose. Indeed, he evinces scarcely any interest in literature at all. Everything has always to shed light on the life. And yet, especially in the case of Borges, it should surely be the writing that counts. For, however you look at it, the life is frankly not that interesting. This was a man of habit and routine: he lived with his mother until her death at the age of ninety-nine, and with their maid for another nine years thereafter; for decades he dined two or three times a week with his friends Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; though he travelled both when young and when old, for the middle 35 years of his life from 1924 to 1961 he never once left the River Plate. If his romantic life was, as it seems, characterized by a series of fantasies and self-delusions, then it is precisely the creative power of fantasy that is of interest, not the banal details of who didn't do what with whom.

Again and again, Williamson comes out with the notion that Borges was looking for a "new Beatrice" to enable a "Dantean vision" of literature as a "project of salvation through writing" (243). There may be many ways to read Borges, but this is surely among the least interesting, and least productive.

Or perhaps it is the second-least interesting and productive. For Williamson's other major idée fixe is even more ponderous. This is the theory that Borges's life and art were guided by the struggle between the "sword of honor" bequeathed him by his mother, with her anxiety about her criollo heritage and breeding, and what is either the "dagger of desire" (359) or the "dagger of rebellion" (463) inherited from his father, who was not particularly rebellious but who did once try to encourage his son's sexual initiation (via what seems to have been a rather traumatic encounter with a Geneva prostitute). Borges struggles between the choice either to live up to his somewhat invented patrician upbringing, an image carefully nurtured by the woman that Williamson simply calls "Mother," or to risk Mother's wrath with any number of possible personal or political betrayals of family and class. This is the "deep-seated conflict between sword and dagger" (144) that structures Williamson's biography.

In practice, the endless invocation of the "sword of honor" or the purported conflict between sword and dagger is a heavy-handed refrain, a blunt dichotomy that on the one hand steadily unravels (is it a dagger of desire or of rebellion, or is perhaps the opposing term to honor in fact "the solipsism fostered by his father's library" [435]) and, on the other, has to be endlessly restated precisely to ward of the threat of the unraveling. Frankly, by the end I was thoroughly sick both of "Borges's Dantean dream" (429) and of "the ancestor's sword of honor" (44), "the ancestral sword, associated with Mother" (145), "the oppressive authority of the ancestral sword of honor" (211), "the sword of honor his mother held dear" (286), "Mother's ancestral sword of honor" (318) and all the other slight repetitions of the same simplistic basic concept.

Ultimately, the most disappointing aspect of Williamson's book is the way in which it takes one of the most sophisticated and subtle writers of the twentieth century, a man whose writing is always alive to complication, ambiguity, allusion, uncertainty, and undecidability, and writes a Life that not only shows precious little curiosity about that writing (or about literature in general), but also precious little understanding of it. This is a book that might was well have been written with a sword or a dagger. It's a hatchet job, not in the sense that Williamson denigrates his subject (au contraire, he is if anything far too forgiving, not least about Borges's anti-democratic impulses and his many political mis-steps of the 1970s and 1980s), but because it is as crude as anything written with a hatchet has to be. And that, in the end, is the worst denigration one can offer to a writer as careful, as precise, as subtle, and as sophisticated as Borges.

bafflement

The Wednesday quotation, part XVI: Stephan Collini from his excellent, if frightening, account of recent UK government policy on higher education:

The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you "want" – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from "the student experience") are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. ("From Robbins to McKinsey." London Review of Books 33.16 (25 August 2011)

criollismo

If Borges continually returned to his first book of poetry, endlessly tinkering with it and republishing it in slightly different form so that it would truly prefigure "everything that he would do afterwards" (Obras completas 33), his approach to his first book of prose was quite different. He refused to allow Inquisiciones ("Inquisitions," 1925) to be reprinted, and indeed the story goes that he bought up old copies so that nobody else could get their hands on them. This book, and the two following collections of essays that Borges treated with equal disdain, circulated in grubby photocopies, passed between fans like underground Samizdat. It was only after the author's death that his widow permitted their official republication.

So Borges seemed to want to expunge these early essays from his literary career. And yet he named his most famous book of essays, published over a quarter of a century later, in 1952, Otras inquisiciones: "Other Inquisitions," a title that alludes to the existence of the earlier book, however much he had tried to repress its memory. As James Irby notes, the later collection's

curiously ancillary title is therefore ambiguous and ironic. "Other" can mean "more of the same": more efforts doomed to eventual error, perhaps, but certainly more quests or inquiries into things, according to the etymology. But "other" is also "different," perhaps even "opposite." ("Introduction" to Other Inquisitions)

Why would Borges want to turn his back on these initial forays into prose? They are, perhaps, too florid and baroque for the mature author's taste. The language employed is formal, complex, and often almost archaic. But I don't think it's merely a matter of style--which could in any case be amended, as with the early poems. I suspect it's more a matter, as Rose Corral argues, of Borges wanting to distance himself from his early "criollismo," that nationalist strain within his work that sought "to recover and at the same time transform the great Argentine tradition of oral literature, that is, the gauchesque" ("Acerca del 'Primer Borges'" 158). In the 1930s and 1940s, Borges will transform himself into the great cosmopolitan intellectual, best-known for his "games with erudition, his mix of authentic and apocryphal citations, his astonishing mosaic of allusions, his universalism as an imaginative strategy, his literary fabrications" (158). Such a transformation required the suppression of his initial Inquisitions.

Yet Borges never completely abandons the criollista strain in his work (we will see the continued obsession with violence and primitivism in a story such as "El Sur," for instance), and equally it is not as though the other, cosmopolitan and erudite, Borges is missing from this early collection. Far from it. So if there are two Borges ("Borges and I"), it's not so much a matter of a split between "early" and "late," but more a tension that is present throughout his career. We can trace a constant play between on the one hand what we might call the "materialist" Borges whose avatar is the tight-lipped gaucho and, on the other, the rather more familiar "deconstructionist" Borges whose figure would be the labyrinth of linguistic signifiers in constant flux.

Of course, this divide is immediately complicated (and to some extent undone) by the fact that the gaucho is very much a literary creation, a mythic apparition, and that Borges is always fascinated by the possibility of giving solidly material form to his verbal jeux d'ésprit.

Meanwhile, another (and perhaps not unrelated) characteristically Borgesian tension becomes visible within Inquisiciones: the presence of a strikingly singular tone or "voice," which articulates a series of arguments that withdraw any claim to that voice.

To put this another way: it's quite remarkable how fearless Borges is in these literary "inquisitions." He covers a huge swathe of cultural territory, from the Spanish Golden Age poet Francisco de Quevedo or the relatively obscure seventeenth-century English author Sir John Browne, to paragons of European modernism such as James Joyce, Miguel de Unamuno, or Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as Argentine and Uruguayan writers Hilario Ascasubi or Fernán Silva Valdés. In each case, the young Borges is unwavering in the self-confidence of his own critical judgments and achievements: "Quevedo is, above all, intensity" (48); "I am the first Hispanic adventurer to have reached Joyce's book" (22); "Silva Valdés [. . .] is the first young poet to bring together Hispanic culture as a whole" (69).

And yet if, in these somewhat swashbuckling (some might say pompous...) raids on the literary canon, Borges is happy to talk about "Hispanic culture as a whole" ("la conjunta hispanicidad"), elsewhere, and no less stylishly or unremittingly, he undercuts the notion that we can speak even of "the self as a whole" ("el yo del conjunto," 93). Borges categorizes, judges, dissects, and dispatches: he puts other writers in their place. But the "I" that makes these judgments is always somehow out of reach. It's no longer, it seems, even a matter of "Borges and I": Borges may remain, a literary figure associated with a series of definitive judgements; but the "I" fades away or, better, fails ever to coalesce in the first place.

The clearest instance of this tension is perhaps found in "La nadería de la personalidad" ("The Nothingness of Personality"). Here, like a refrain, Borges repeatedly claims that "There is no such coherent I" (93, 94, 96, 98, 103) and that "The I does not exist" (102). And yet these adamant declarations can only be made by an "I" that insists on the coherence of the case that it is making. The first three sentences, for instance, all begin with verbs in the first person singular: "I want [. . .]. I think [. . .] I want [. . .]" (92). The self is nothing, but this essay--and indeed the entire collection of essays--only finds coherence precisely in the presumption of an articulate self defined in terms of stylistic brillo and argumentative panache.

And does this second tension map onto the first? Is it not the essence of the Argentine criollo to perform his individuality with brillo and panache, even as he argues that such individuality is necessarily a fiction?