ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I’m still reading Labyrinths: having finished the Fictions, I’m now enjoying the essays.  In the current context of the identity politics brouhaha, I particularly liked ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ because it tackles issues relevant to ‘Australian’ literature and what its authors may write about.  (You can read the article here).  It’s interesting that this was a live issue in 1951, eh?

But the essay I want to discuss here is ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’ because I have recorded my adventures with Don Quixote here on this blog (and note that I do not presume to call my blundering thoughts a ‘review’!)  Borges has some interesting things to say about Quixote, which may redress a little of my naiveté in reading the book.

Borges notes that in contrast to other classic books like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Commedia and Shakespeare’s plays, Quixote is a realistic work, but the realism is not that of 19th century realism.  Joseph Conrad, he says, did not need the supernatural because to include it would be a denial that the everyday was marvellous. Henry James thought that reality was poetic enough but for Cervantes the real and the poetic were mutually incompatible.

To the vast and vague geographies of the Amad’is, he opposes the dusty roads and sordid wayside inns of Castille; imagine a novelist of our time centring attention for purposes of parody on some filling stations.  Cervantes has created for us the poetry of seventeenth century Spain, but neither that century nor that Spain were poetic for him. (p. 228)

So, Cervantes is precluded from the marvellous, but he has to include it in order to parody it. He has to insinuate it with subtlety in his secret, nostalgic farewell to the pastoral novel and the novel of chivalry.  He does this by inserting a novel within a novel, in the sixth chapter of the first part where the priest and the barber inspect Don Quixote’s library.  One of the books is Galatea by Cervantes himself, and the barber knows the author, but doesn’t care for his work, saying that

he is more versed in misfortunes than in verses and that the book contains some inventiveness, proposes some new ideas and concludes nothing.  (p. 229)

This says Borges, is a character passing judgement on the author of the book that the character is in.

Furthermore, in the ninth chapter, it turns out that the entire book is a pretence:

… the entire novel has been transplanted from the Arabic and that Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the market-place of Toledo and had it translated by a morisco whom he lodged in his house for more than a month and a half while the job was finished. (p.229)

I remember being baffled when reading the second part of Don Quixote to find that the characters of the first part are the readers of the second part. But Borges compares this to the play within a play in Hamlet, where the imperfect correspondence of the principal and secondary works lessens the efficacy of this inclusion. (p.230).  Apparently something similar happens in the Ramayana when Rama hears his own story, and also in the Thousand and One Nights about which Borges is not kind:

This collection of fantastic tales duplicates and reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities, and the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian carpet. (p. 230)

In another work, The World and the Individual (1899) by Josiah Royce, the reader asks us to imagine that the soil of England has been levelled and a map of England drawn upon it.  The map is perfect, no detail is omitted, and therefore, crucially, the map must show a map of the map, and that map must have a map, and so on in infinity.

Why, asks Borges, do these stories bother us?

… these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional world can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.  In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written. (p.231)

*chuckle* You may be reading a fictitious post by a fictitious person in fictitious cyber space!

Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Title: ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in Labyrinths
Translated by James E. Irby
Publisher: Penguin Australia 2011, first published 1962
ISBN: 9780143566342
Source: Kingston Library

Available from Fishpond: Labyrinths (Popular Penguins) and good bookshops everywhere.