"Nevertheless, formally adventurous writing, like all truly challenging art, remains itself "subversive" in the way it provides its own kind of resistance ... It resists reduction to pure discourse, to just another way of making an argument or asserting a point of view, which in an era of increasingly simplistic political rhetoric must still count for something. Most importantly, it resists the temptation to certainty, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) disclosing the contingency not just of our beliefs and actions but as well the very medium such writing uses to depict those beliefs and actions."The debate between "formally adventurous writing" and politically relevant critical writing is also reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's critics during the Peron presidency in Argentina (i.e., we have major real-life problems now, forget your existential magical writing crap) -- see also this article in Slate, of all places. I think Borges replies to this in The Paris Review's Art of Fiction interview: "[Joseph] Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious," a view that he evidences in his writing with plenty of Schopenhauer the-universe-is-not-rational references. Most of his collected stories in Ficciones are intertwined with truth and fiction, and in the Art of Fiction interview, Borges says of Ficciones: "They were all more or less autobiographical."
Despite his claims to write plainly, you can pretty much craft a separate thesis from every story in this collection. Stylistically, it's like the lovechild of Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; weirdly magical stories with nightmarish undertones. What are dreams? What is reality? There are labyrinths, non-linear paths, theories on infinite and the functions of time and math, and a mystical obsession with libraries, books and writing that I really enjoyed. The earlier stories in the collection stuck with me more, but maybe by the end I was just having Borges fatigue. Some favs: "The Babylon Lottery", "The Library of Babel", "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". They were so interesting I hate to relegate them to a single sentence all bunched together, but honestly I'd need to reread them like three more times to put together a semi-comprehensive post. Ain't nobody got time for that right now.
Random recurring allusions: Thomas DeQuincey, whose 1882 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater must've been a stylistic influence for Borges, and Martin Fierro, a famous epic Argentinian poem with a John Wayne / Clint Eastwood-esque protagonist.
Bottom line, part I: I'm not head-over-heels with Borges, but I'm intrigued enough to read more of his work (or re-read). What I'd really like to get my hands on and wrap my mind around is a solid Kafka-Borges-Marquez comparative piece.
Bottom line, part II: Going back to the beginning of the post, required reading #2 is to go to Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, page 430, "L'Illusion Comique": "Thus there were two histories: the criminal one, composed of jails, tortures, prostitutions, arsons, and deaths; and the theatrical one, tales and fables made for consumption by dolts."
 |
| The Paris Review; The Art of Fiction |
