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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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In childhood, time is not the same form of intuition as in your teens, and time in middle age has a different temporality than it does in old age.
We're let me put it this way.
We don't grow old in time, instead time itself ages as we live out our days.
Now that's saying a lot because it's saying that as we go through life, we enter into very different extensions, dimensions, or realities of this finitude we call time,
the nature of which remains inscrutable to even the most discerning philosophers.
Even when we stay put, the flow of things takes us into different temporal configurations as if into different continents.
I have no idea what the average age of the entitled opinions listener is, but I'm pretty sure that if you're listening to this show, you know what I'm talking about, or if you don't, you eventually will.
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I was talking about time having its own aging process linked to our accumulation of days.
In fact, maybe the reason human beings age in the first place is so that time can assay or experiment a greater range of possibilities.
The same thing is provisionally certain, time is discloseative of truth, and truth is time bound.
So what is true at one stage of life is not necessarily so at another.
When I first read the opening verses of the four quartets many years ago, I was sure I had stumbled upon the timeless truth of time itself.
Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future.
What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.
Now those last verses are pretty devastating.
What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.
Or let me say they were devastating back then when I believed that there exists only one timeline that whatever does not get realized in this particular unfolding of events that we call reality is doomed to remain an empty altogether primitive, or what TSLD calls speculative possibility.
That's why when I was younger I used to grasp at things a lot driven by an impulse to actualize the array of possibilities that presented themselves to me.
But that's a formula for madness.
The madness of a Machiavelli for example who believed that there is only one world, the world of the real, the world of things as they are not as they ought to be for example.
Be that as it may I no longer believe that possibilities exist simply in order to be realized they exist to give a penumbra of density to human experience.
They exist to intimate the adjacency or multiplicity of other worlds than the one in which my provincial configuration of the real takes place.
Of course this philosophy I'm expounding is a product of my own age, an age when I know in my own body that there are ever so many possibilities I will never turn into reality no matter how hard I try.
Time has led me to the conclusion provisional to be sure that in other configurations of time and other timelines or alternate realities every possibility gets its proper due.
Therefore there is no need to clasp vainly at the ghosts that surround you.
There is a reason why most of what informs life remains in a state of potentiality not actuality.
It's a way of protecting actuality from falling into the abyss or what the Greeks called the Apedon.
Time or our understanding of it is further complicated by the fact that the temporal unfolding of an individual's life always takes place within the unfolding of a particular historical age.
In other words personal age is bound not only to geological and biological time but to historical time as well.
Thus something that was true in one epoch reveals its unfounded nature as that epoch gives way to another or to put it form you lay at clear.
It forms you lay at clear. Time is ostensive. It is revelatory of truth or of the appearance of the phenomenon.
Another way to express the same thought is to say that time is always implotted and that even the most sedentary among us always finds himself or herself within times story like labyrinth.
This hour which is devoted to the life and work of the Argentine writer Borges we will have occasion to meditate further on times intrinsic complexity for no one thought more obsessively about that complexity than Borges.
Joining me in the studio today is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht otherwise known around here as Zep.
He is a professor of comparative literature at Stanford and well known to the entitled opinions brigade thanks to his three previous appearances on this program.
Neither Zep nor I is what one would call an authority on Borges and we will try to use that disclaimer to our advantage by thinking freely and riskfully about this author whom we both admire greatly but who also raises some doubts in us. Zep welcome back to entitled opinions.
Thank you for inviting me.
In Germany on leave this year on a sabbatical writing a book so welcome back for this thanks giving weekend and sorry about the big game.
I am very sorry about that but I could only express it in Argentinian's damage.
By the way I am going to insist on this thing which is the adjective about Argentinian and Argentine because I was told when I went to Cornell in 1980 as a graduate student that Borges had actually been there.
A couple of years before and this very wasp English professor kept using the adjective Argentinian and Borges very politely at a certain point says I believe the adjective is Argentine.
It's I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Zep you've written an article which was based on a talk you delivered about Borges which is one of the few things that you've published on him where you say that you always get very nervous whenever you have to teach or talk about Borges because you imagine him walking through the door or looking through the window and you have this nightmare of him looking at you with that understanding and desperate smile that wise people reserve for very small children and for complete idiots.
No.
That obsession with Borges being in the classroom and I mean the man is so unbelievably sophisticated.
There's nothing you can imagine he has not read.
I mean you could not imagine you could have a counter Borges or provoke Borges with something that would be new for him.
And at the same time the sophisticated level of reflection about what he is doing, the self-awareness is so complex and not such a high level that there is an obsession that once you talk about Borges.
That he looks across your shoulder or confronts you with this benign smile.
And it would probably be better if you had the imagination that he would just scold you but he wouldn't.
He would treat you like an idiot and that's of course a worst case scenario for a literary critic who pretends to have some philosophical thought from time.
I probably would do it with great courtesy. I remember a quote of his about every time he reads a review, a critical review of his work that he invariably agrees with the criticism but that he feels that he could have done a much better job himself.
He's attacking himself.
That's exactly the word and of course I mean he talked a little bit biography.
It was from one of those as they say in South America old families, old Argentine families, with an enormous amount of cultural, enormous amount of social sophistication.
I mean look at every photo of his how he's stressed impeccably, a little bit old fashioned.
But everything is always this kind of perfect belated, historically belated elegance and that is another thing.
You know you would imagine that he would treat you like like Ira Gao about might have treated you. I mean this is kind of the period.
Well you mentioned the word belated and I would like to jump right into one of the main themes that I hope we will explore today in our conversation which is about belatedness in two senses.
One in the piece of yours that I read today you speak about a certain postmodern Borges which belonged to its time I guess when he was promoted and discovered in the 60s in France by people like Foucault and the others.
And that this postmodern Borges who had a big, he was troubled relationship to Moder Nismo and that he was coming at the end of a long tradition and therefore he was very
very excitational in the postmodern way that there is a sense that the postmodern interpretation of Borges is itself out of date or no longer belongs to the kind of a stemung of our age.
So this is one way in which there's a after the fact legacy of an interpretation of Borges which you also want to find a way to renew.
And then there's another way in which Borges himself is very self-conscious about being belated, extremely belated as a writer who's coming at the end of a long, bi-millenier, trimal, and a history of literature.
Yeah, I mean look, I mean the way you have done because we could even emphasize that, I think there are two dimensions of belatedness.
I mean Borges became internationally famous and probably more famous in France and very soon at the top American University so that invitation by Cornell that you're talking about, electricity is at Harvard, made him famous, more famous, more popular quote, unquote, "outside Argentina" than he had been in some country where it had been one of the respected poets for 50 years then.
And this was exactly the moment where it was big intellectual news, I'm not saying for the top philosophers but for the kind of average academic intellectual that there's a plurality of worlds.
This was the moment when Borges became really internationally popular.
And as we said in our discussion before we came to the show that the fact that the introductory quote in Michel Foucault's Limoides shows the order of things from 1966, the Borges quote, is that the first one is the first one.
The first quote is from a moment when Borges was much less well known than now, I bet that most of the first readers of Foucault didn't know who was referring to.
And interestingly he refers to this strange encyclopedia that Borges invents from a Chinese encyclopedia.
And this encyclopedia presupposes an epistemology in a world that is completely unthinkable for us.
So it is, I mean what Foucault wants to preface his book once and say, well, there are different epistemologists.
There's a plurality of words, there's not but just one word.
This is the moment when Borges is a smash hit internationally, but it is more the reading I think that made him famous and there's nothing wrong with it.
It is a reading in the first place exclusive almost of his short narratives, Quentos, no poetry.
And it's a philosophical reading, there's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing much literary in there.
Whereas there is another belatedness and maybe to do it in a non-Borgesian way, I would like to say that belatedness that reminds me of the one cultural product that outside Argentina is the most popular and that's tango.
I'm not quoting any specific tango, poetry or tango lyrics, but I think tango is always something looking through a window that has become dirty, remembering how he would be.
And there is a belatedness in Borges in relation to the great literary tradition at the end of which he finds himself.
But also in relation to his home city of Buenos Aires, in relation to his family.
This is a great, great traditional family, grand family of Buenos Aires, and he's still the last male member of that family and his no children.
So everything is belated, everything is at an end, but it is in that sense, a belatedness that has very little to do that I would like to preface as being much more substantial, substantive and substantial, than the belatedness of the plurality of worlds.
Do you believe that belatedness is something that has a particular pathos throughout South America?
I mean, there is, for example, to quote the grand Brazilian national author, Machado Diaz, is a late 19th, early 20th century novelist to it.
And his tonality has much to do with Stern.
There is, for example, a description of the, I mean, an ongoing description, all of his five great novels, of the society in still colonial and then republican Rio de Janeiro in the late 19th century, always feel you are too late.
But I think it has remained much more strongly rooted and has developed this own type of just reality in Argentina more than in Brazil.
I would not say that there's anything belated about Brazilian culture today, despite of the loser tradition and project is Brazilian tradition of South Argy at the solitude topic.
You know, I mean, Brazil today is just, I mean, as prone to believing in progress as any country, especially now that they have to circle world, deal with the Olympics.
Where's in Argentina this has become the just reality of national culture?
I mean, just tell you that this is not only about literature.
I mean, you have to see that the present date president, and less than you are a kid, the German in Kilhena, she's a complete remake of a bit of bet on.
I mean, all she has to do is to look like a bit of bet on, not to remind people of a bit of it. And she gets elected.
And her husband, of course, tried to look like Hundamingo.
Well, the last question I want to ask in terms of the interpretation of Borges is whether more than a piece more in the Latin American context was itself such a belated phenomenon vis-a-vis the European sources that from which it's brang, you know, symbolism, malad-mayon, all the other kinds of things.
That Borges, along with a few others, was quite disenchanted with this belatedness of Latin American mo d'etnees.
One, therefore, he felt that he had to move into a different sphere and not just repeat an old formula that had come been inherited from Europe.
Yeah, it's this is a very interesting entry into our topic.
Of course, if you think of the first Latin American poet who is deliberately Latin American poet, Ruben Dario, Nicaraguar, Ruben Dario.
So he wants to be a modernista and he wants to know everything that's going on in Paris.
Now, there has been a reception in Latin American in the last two decades, I would say, that tries to say that something original about this modernismo.
There was a map of colloquium that one of our former graduate students, Ron Cesar de Casper, Roger organized here, that had the map turned upside down and had Latin America on top, and was saying this is the first real modernist, it's South America.
Now, this is very, very Brazilian to say today.
What is specific about Argentina and about Borges in that sense, and I'm seeing myself emphasizing this belonging of Borges to Argentine culture.
Is to say that just being belated, I mean, always like five or ten or fifteen years behind is no good, nor is it credible by any means to turn the map upside down, that will not work either.
And I think to play in another topic, I mean, there's kind of this working through, to work things through with a certain just to edit with a certain intensity, with a certain tenacity, almost intellectually speaking.
That is specific for Borges is neither first him more than his, but which was always second-hand, nor this kind of dramatic upheaval or attempt to turn it around.
There's something very specific about that that I think has to do with Argentina, but that nobody has pushed as far as systematically and patiently as Borges.
So I thought we would talk about the poetry later, but I'd actually like to talk about it right now because you've told me when we were first talking about doing this show that you thought that Borges was much more compelling in this poetry than is Fixion.
And I have to thank you for that because I've discovered in Borges a truly amazing poet and I wasn't aware of what a remarkable poet is.
Now, there are two poems that stress this belongingness to Argentina quite dramatically, and one is the famous poem about the mythical foundations of Buenos Aires.
And I know that you want to say a few words about that and it's a kind of long poem, so maybe we can't read the whole thing, but could I ask you to read a bit of that poem and do a little commentary?
I'd love to.
So now I hope I have it here.
It's not mythological. I mean, it's mythic in the origin from the theoretical Buenos Aires.
So I think that it's a very important poem that I've heard from the poem, which is a very important poem, which is the first poem in the first poem.
So what I like about this poem and what is really kind of delivering a mythical discourse is that you have this question of the poem,
this question of how did something get started? I mean, any mythologies or how where does the city come from?
And you find with a certain soft irony, he quotes certain things like sirens, there were sirens, and there's a certain type of, there's a certain type of heaven.
So you find many, many motifs that you would expect in a mythological discourse, ironically quoted, but then you have this right in the very first line,
and you have this interesting, the last word of the very, if you put rest a real, this when you hear it, a baro, dirt, the ground, the earth.
And you have this development of the color of the Rio de la Plata, I mean, the Silver River, but the Silver River, I mean, river played, is actually absolutely not silver, the mythologist's brown, it's dirty, it's earthy.
And this earthiness, which you would normally not associate with a poet as cerebral, as intellectual as Borthas, goes through this poem, and what I like about it, there are these moments where all of a sudden it becomes every day of one aside is in the 1920s when it was probably written.
And I think from a stance that is towards the end, "ul almaemro sado," this is interesting, where I mean, because almaemro sado is the title of a poem that you like a lot to, which is about Borthas's neighborhood, Palermo, "ul almaemro sado,
"como rebeiste naipi brio, en la trusti en la conbezar un un truco, " "
"ad almaemro sado floratio en un compadri, y a patron de vasquina y ares en kidoiduro,
"a primero ganito sal bivalore sonte consular c'acos forte,
"sabaneres su gringo, "
"ad corra lonsegur o y apunyaba y regoyin,
"adum piano mandama tangos des sal borti dó,
"see that's what I like about it because you have here two names in the last answer I read from the 1920s.
"E regoyin written in capital letters is the great politician to grant the last more or less democratic, not too democratic by South American,
and some democratic politician before there was a long, long, long series of dictators and dictatorships.
And then dangos des sal borti dó, this is a specific composed of tangos.
And this is what I saw in normalcy like about how this is a mythical discourse,
not only mythological discourse, not a mythological discourse,
how he juxtaposes these very concrete references,
like the one to the dirt, like the one to the color of the river with names.
So this is a very specific 1920s environment,
and in that sense, all of a sudden the final two lines,
"amissimés a quenta que pés a buenos aides la hous cotanette d'ernacoume lagué laite,"
has a different meaning.
- Yeah, let me read that in English for our listeners who might not follow the Spanish,
because I think this is very interesting.
Hard to believe when Ocitis had any beginning,
I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.
- Yeah.
So this is precisely the way he realizes that there is no beginning,
is that the mythological motifs, I mean like the sirens and so forth,
and so forth are completely juxtaposed with something very everyday,
with very something very cotidian, the reference to this politician,
the reference to a certain wall in his neighborhood right across the street from his house,
so that there is no sequence, there is no end to see it,
there's not nothing that is earlier.
And that I think this concreteness that I want to bring out in Borges,
that I think due to this philosophical belatedness motif has been underestimated in Borges,
something that I think deserves to be brought out today,
deserves to be emphasized today.
- And I would also remark that this feeling that Buenos Aires,
it's hard to believe that it had any beginning,
I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.
For someone like Borges who had an acute awareness of temporality obviously,
and of history, and of everything being, having its proper place in a temporal continuum,
the fact that Buenos Aires seems to be eternal or to be outside of history,
of the tyranny of history, makes it about as close to a place that we would call home
as it could be for him.
- That's exactly important because I wanted to say that when he says it is as eternal as air and water,
this is not air and water in general, this is not a platonic concept of air and water,
that's a very specific air.
That's the air of Buenos Aires and that's the water of Buenos Aires,
it's the dirty water of the Rio de la Plata,
and that has always been this way.
You cannot imagine that it has always been without baro, without dirt,
and in that sense it is eternal.
So it is not eternal, it's ethereal way, it is not eternal,
it's a philosophical way, it's not eternal, platonic way,
it is eternal in the way that it has always been around.
I mean, like like like like like geological configuration, like geological layers.
- Well, let me read in English this other poem, which is about Buenos Aires,
and then we can move on to the short stories and parables,
but it is also about Buenos Aires, it's called a street with a pink corner store,
and actually Harris finds out it used to be the production manager
for a couple of years of the show, sent me a picture of this pink corner store
that's still there in Buenos Aires that he took over the summer.
- Unfortunately now becoming a very fancy neighborhood with fancy brand name stores.
- Yeah.
- It's a fate of all authentic things.
So the poem reads as follows,
"Gone, into night are all the eyes from every intersection,
and it's like a drought-anticipated rain.
Now all roads are near, even the road of miracles.
The wind brings with it a slow, befuddled dawn.
Dawn is our fear of doing different things, and it comes over us.
All the blessed night I have been walking,
and its restlessness has left me on this street, which could be any street.
Here again, the certainty of the plains on the horizon,
and the barren terrain that fades into weeds and wire and the store,
as bright as last night's new moon.
The corner is familiar like a memory with those spacious squares and the promise of a courtyard.
How lovely to attest to you,
Street of Forever,
since my own days have witnessed so few things.
Light draws streaks in the air,
my years have run down roads of earth and water,
and you are all I feel strong, rosy street.
I think it is your walls that conceived sunrise,
store so bright in the depth of night.
I think, and the confession of my poverty is given voice before these houses,
I have seen nothing of mountain ranges rivers or the sea,
but the light of Buenos Aires made itself my friend,
and I shape the lines of my life and my death with that light of the street.
Big, long, suffering street,
you are the only music my life has understood.
That is the most specific,
the mythic foundation of Buenos Aires,
because I think it is exactly what we are talking about before.
You have this very specific description.
This is one street, and it is very, very important,
and I am happy that Harry showed you that picture.
This is not just a generic street of Buenos Aires.
This is one specific street and one specific neighbourhood,
and that is in Palermo, and there is still something left of it,
and this is associated with eternity.
So there is a very specific pink colour that is at time.
It is very specific, I would say it is the air not even a Buenos Aires of that street,
which is a term.
I find that a poem like this belies, if that is not too strong a word,
or at least renders problematic the sort of brainy kind of theory of multiple timelines
and multiple histories and alternate realities that Borges is known for,
in many of his short stories, where he conceives of plurality of worlds
and a plurality of realities, and this one seems to anchor everything
in one particular incarnation or embodiment of the real,
and he says basically, this is my only reality,
the only one I know, it is the only music my life has ever understood,
and that there might be other worlds, there might be other Buenos Aires
with similar configurations, but here in this particular space and moment is where I belong.
I mean, I have the impression, I mean, it is not certain because Borges,
I mean it was one of his very idiosyncratic things, he was always anticipating,
you know, critics after his death, and he very deliberately did everything to confuse us,
and to confuse them.
You know, there is an endless number of conditions of complete works,
and deliberately, so you cannot never quote any addition as to decisive addition and so forth and so forth,
but there is a very interesting essay from very early Borthus happens to be from 1926,
and the title of that is El Tamaniyudemis Baransa,
so I would say the extension, the size, the enormous size of my hope, that's the...
And there actually, some of the motifs that we have now kind of re-actualized in reading the
"Fundathion Mituloche" kind of Buenos Aires,
is medical and Buenos Aires, and reading the poem that you read.
They are there, so he talks about this pink corner, he talks about the street in Palermo,
where he's from, and interestingly, in the last couple of decades of his life,
he has never taken that essay, El Tamaniyudemis Baransa, and his complete works,
and it was only published after his death by his widow Maria Kodama,
who's Japanese, Argentine, Japanese Argentinian,
she's a colleague of us, she's a little re-critic because she found it interesting.
This is an essay from 1926, where, I mean, he even uses the word "realism"
when he says there is a "dode" of "realism" when you want to be realist,
you want to have references, use the word "referente", and that, of course,
as you were using the word "bilying", was "bilying" what then made him famous,
and I have the impression in the 60s, 70s, when he was really world famous,
due to this multiple word "borchez".
This was something that he didn't really destroy or hide,
but that he wanted to break it.
And precisely because he wanted to break it that, in the years of his international success,
I think it is interesting, this essay where he declares,
as this is so to speak, I mean, this is after, between the two first collection of poems
that he published because he started as a poet exclusively,
and he says, "This is my program, I want to have this realism without being realism in the sense of the novel,
I want what poetry is all about, is about reference, I would like to use the word,
I mean, it's not him, you want to conjure up certain things, like he does in this two poems that we were reading."
And he's sympathetic to that, and I think that's the Borges, which I was a discovery for me that is confessional on the one hand,
and individuated in place and time, and he's a real person,
and he's a real incarnate human being, unlike characters in literature.
And now we should really speak about a certain vision that he has a literature as opposed to the real world,
and I actually received a quite interesting communication from a listener of entitled opinions from England,
Rachel Falconer, who teaches at the University of Sheffield, and there she mentions a 1948 essay that Borges wrote on the false problem of Ugo-Lino,
Ugo-Lino being this character in Dante's Inferno, who is, we don't know, he's locked up in the Tower of Hunger,
with his children, his children die before him, and Dante has his last line in the soliloquy where it becomes completely ambiguous,
semantically, whether Ugo-Lino actually cannibalized his children out of hunger or not.
And let me read this to you, because I think it can get us into Borges's notion of literature as another world to that of the real.
He writes in real time, in history, whenever a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates and loses the others,
such as not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion.
In that time Hamlet is sane and is mad.
In the darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugo-Lino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses,
and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty is the strange matter of which he has made,
thus with two possible deaths did Dante dream him, and thus will the generations dream him.
And then Rachel Falconer goes on to mention the comment that Colvino has on this essay of Borges saying, "Colvino now,
which a conception of ramified time is deer de Borges because it is the one which dominates in literature. In fact, it is the condition which makes literature possible."
So question number one, this idea of ramified time, he has created a literature in which the ramifications of time has found a beautiful articulation and expression.
At the same time you mentioned that his complete works are an impossible ramification. You don't have any one real definitive corpus,
what you have are multiplicity of possibilities of different versions of the same story.
So what do you make of this claim of Borges that in literature characters can be suspended in this undulating uncertainty?
I think it's the word or ambiguity, undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, and that they're made of this undulating imprecision as opposed to what we were talking about in relation to the poems where Borges seems to be saying, "I am this very precise individual on this precise street at this precise time."
In general, not only about Borges, I mean I'm always skeptical about general definitions of literature at large, saying literature does this or that.
And I'm even more skeptical about them and they go philosophical.
Literature does something philosophical because they're more asking myself, "So we have philosophy already. I mean, do we need literature to have a theory or philosophy of possible worlds?"
If I would ever venture, which I don't, but something like a meta-historical general definition of literature, general description of literature,
you can do it with much more go in the direction of the concrete. I mean it's more concrete than other texts. I'm not more general, not more philosophical.
Now, in that sense then, I doubt whether what I mean this is a quote and you're listening in Rachel, or Colique is perfectly entitled entitled opinions to quote Borges on that.
But I'm asking myself whether this is what he's describing is really what he is doing and whether he's doing himself a favor.
I mean I have to say, in the know from conversations that we have, this is not, I mean Dante for me is definitely not the poet who leaves things in suspension.
I mean Dante is not the person who can be one way or the other way.
I mean, they are multiple readings like with any demanding text, not any demanding literary text, but I mean for me Dante is one of the great poets of conch.
It's an epiphenic poet. And I think that is the case with with with with Borges too.
I mean there's this one beautiful famous short story or another short story really.
I mean about the the bifurcation of paths and they're as que cisibu furca.
Now then you have two worlds and then each of them generates more and more and more worlds, but I would say ultimately you can add at one time
you can always only be in one world and that's a word of concreteness. So that what is eliminated in that world is not virtually there.
So I think the reading that Borges suggests of Dante in the court we are discussing and and indirectly of course the reading of his own literary production that he's suggesting falls
It's pray a little bit too much to what was fancy intellectually and I'm not I'm not I'm not relying that I'm not belittling that, but but in the 1970s 1960s and early 1980s, which I think is is not the intellectual mood the intellectual stimming.
You know the topic we've been talking about that we are in today. So I'm not saying it's illegitimate, but but I feel a it is not what really Borges is strength is and it is be certainly not the reading of Borges that can make a difference today.
Yeah, I mean that's really I think the question we're talking about. So if you read Borges in in 2009 2010.
I mean this is our academic year the academic year we are in. How can you read them to get something out of Borges you would not easy to get out of a different poet and I think it is not by leaving things in suspension by ultimately reverting and returning to an approach of literature is that type of discourse that produces multiple meanings multiple readings.
Well on the other hand it is undeniable that characters and literature until there that there is a way in which you will you know is and is not a cannibal.
I mean I don't want to go the deconstructive thing and say there is an undecidability is kind of a.
The official undecidability in the text because that's that's also been now. However, as long as Dante the author has left it ambiguous in the phrasing of what happened.
There are going to be readers who might insist on one option or the other and there is a way in which in literature characters are not held.
There is a law of reality as we are in real time where possibilities get closed off every time we are faced with a decision.
That's true. But look I think that due to the complexity of many literary texts and I will actually go back as far as Homer.
Most characters for example in the Iliad or in the Odyssey of course allow for multiple readings.
I do think however that the realization of the multiple readings and talk about multiple readings and acting as if producing this multiplicity of readings and juxtaposing them all and say oh we have a multiplicity of readings as if this was the ultimate way of reading literature.
This is where I don't know whether I disagree with you but I disagree with the general tendency. I think literature allows for multiple readings.
But in each moment that you read you read it in different ways and I think that's what you said about time in general about time through anything general.
I mean a novel which by many biographical coincidences of randomness have read several times in my life.
At first when I was 18 years old and the last time for one of your radio shows, namely Muslims, men without qualities, I read it very differently each time and people read it differently and we have been talking about different gender readings.
But each time that you read it you read it in one way and I think I think if you suspend a uglino and say well he may be this or he may be that that is not the strength.
So I want to quote a colleague from Germany a classes at the Grand Specialists in Aristotle who says what we really have to achieve in the reading of literature is a second immediacy and I like this idea of a second immediacy.
So I mean we are aware of the multiplicity of meanings but the strength is not to stay there but to go back and say no this is what Achilles was like.
This is what he was like and this is what he is like in the very moment you read him and this is what I call epiphanic and this is I think the strength of border is actually in the strength you want to bring out.
As opposed to the in my sense perhaps exceedingly cerebral and intellectual realization yes that these texts can produce a multiplicity of means.
Not denying that they can only am asking myself whether this is the actual strength of such poems of such sort stories or of Dante.
Yeah.
Well let's move on now to this question of the what the labyrinth which is a huge figure in Borges's fiction and in his psyche actually.
And I don't want to rehearse all the common places about the you know the labyrinth in Borges what intrigues me in rereading stories.
I reread in with particular attention to stories for today's the garden of the forking paths which was pretty well known to me and the death and the compass.
Now I'm going to assume that our readers know these stories and if they don't know them they should go and read them and then they can re listen to our show but this is a short story the garden of the forking paths which seems on the one hand to articulate a theory of multiple.
Times and alternate realities and suggests that what is happening in this particular timeline is not going to be what happens in another timeline.
And it ends with you know the the main protagonist killing someone who is expounding his grandfather or his ancestors a theory of the labyrinth and so forth.
But I don't want to go through that I just want to draw your attention to the last line where he says he knew this penultimate he knew my problem was to indicate the city called Albert and that I had found no other means to then to do so than to kill a man of that name which is the Albert that he kills.
He does not know no one can know my innumerable contrition and weariness.
I don't know if that's well translated or not I don't have the Spanish here he does not know no one can know my in your real contrition and weariness.
The same motif of a certain sadness comes at the end of death and the compass where both the gangster chief.
What's the name Sharlock or something and the one the detective whom he kills.
Londra it have this sense of the futility and sadness and he speaks about the futile cry of the bird in the garden and the kind of infinite sadness with which the you know the gangster kills the detective.
It's if to suggest that although there may be this multiplicity of worlds and other realities we are actually committed to this one and in this one if things are not fulfilled if that that one will never be free of the kind of longing that is innate to the experience of the real.
Londra I would like to come back to a formulation that you're at the very beginning at the opening of the program in your monologue that I had never heard neither from you and let alone from Borges before.
I think that this is very very strong if you say that what is actually happening in Borges and what is actually happening at each single path if you want is surrounded by an infinity or almost infinity of possibilities.
Now that the interesting thing at least for us today is not the existing multiplicity of possibilities and multiplicity of opportunities but the effect of condensation of density for what happens that the surrounding possibilities offer.
I mean you can only kill with regret if you are surrounded by other possibilities.
You can only have a feeling of belatedness if you are aware of what you lose by opting for what you're opting for and so forth and so forth and so forth.
I think that you're intuition that this entire motif of multiple worlds ultimately has a potential of condensation for what is actually chosen.
What is real is important.
I mean I was in a very different context talking about about contingency in the Germans as of counting against randomness.
I was saying if you have a theory of randomness and contingency you can always look back and can say well it could have been otherwise and you can of course look into the future and can see these are the possibilities we have.
But in the present you don't have this dimension.
In the present you don't have this alternatives.
In the present there's a beautiful way of expressing that in German as felt the image so it falls into your life.
It falls into your lap is not quite adequate.
It's felt it's who and you have to grasp it but you have no alternative.
And if that moment of the present in which it is felt it's who it falls into your life is surrounded by this possibilities then the complexity of that moment, the density of that moment is of course much higher than if it just happens in one moment and the next moment and the next moment.
Yeah I agree and insofar as I agree I disagree with some readings of Borges for example Harold Bloom who sees him as a Gnostic who has his profound pessimism about the created world.
I don't agree with the that sentence that actually Bloom quotes from Anamaria, but in Chea, where she says Borges I'm quoting is an admirable writer pledged to destroy reality and convert the
man into a shadow.
Now I know that there's a way in which Borges believe that that's what literature does.
But if you read his little parable called Borges and I where he speaks about the fact that there are two Borges as one is the author and the other is the person.
And that what he feels is that the vitality and life of the person is always evacuating itself into the author who is destroying reality and creating characters who are just shadows.
That he does not have this mystification of art as something that redeems the loss of life for the sake of art.
In fact you get that motif of the sadness coming back at the end of that one page story where he says let me read years ago I tried to free myself from him the author and went from the mythologies of the outskirts to the games with time and infinity.
I think he's describing when he went from that poetry that we were reading to this new kind of postmodern, you know, multiple world thing.
But those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion or to him.
I do not know which one of us has written this page.
There's true pathos and unlike the Borges of the stories one has a confession that perhaps art is not sufficient consolation for the loss of life and the loss of immediacy and this density that you're referring to.
Yeah, look, I mean, I was interested in that you were quoting Anamari Abarana Chaya because I think she deserves to be mentioned in the program and she was probably the greatest Borges critic among Borges contemporary.
She was more or less Borges's age.
She was a very, very beautiful woman.
Actually I had the privilege of meeting her in a very old age.
Anamari Abarana Chaya, she was not not Mrs. Borges in the sense that the relationship, but she was the one who knew everything about Borges.
And she was also from one of those grand families, Baranetia family and she was unmarried and she had this kind of modern type of Catholic commitment.
And for these families, like for Borges and like for him, what happened in Argentina since the 1930s that intensified by the forest as they saw it, of Beren and Evita and what happened after the first day.
And what happened after that.
And I mean, this this, this, this, this, this international, famousness really, fame starts in this, during this this dictatorship, it's the Argentina's called El Prothezo, which was arguably one of the worst dictatorships in the 20th century.
You know, with this, up by the theaters, people who really disappeared forever.
For them, this moment was a moment where the temptation to say literature is that which undoes a certain reality or literature can produce other worlds, was a strong temptation.
And, and I mean, I can actually remember conversation with Anamari Abarana Chaya back in 1989 about that when Borges had just died three years ago.
That's, that's what you wish.
And yet, why this is legitimate by a graphically plausible and, and maybe the way Borges, I mean, I have alluded to that before.
That is probably why he bracketed this, I think very revealing and very interesting essay from the 1920s.
Why did this plausible that this is what they wanted in the 1970s, 1980s?
I think it is a not the totality of Borges literature.
And it is not the way we can read him today.
And I think that with this possibility and, and with this possibility given to literature to undo worlds, to undo concrete worlds, what you have been saying that the concreteness of the moment of the present being surrounded by this halos of possibilities.
That is really another formula to reading, but has it not even saying it's the correct way.
I'd like to bring in one other biographical, hugely important thing I would imagine for Borges, which is his blindness because if one believes in a committed way in alternate realities and other timelines, then Borges would have imagined I'm sure and did that there is another kind of alternate reality where Borges is not go blind, where he does not lose what the early poetry makes it very, very important.
He does not lose his eyesight precisely because of a sense that this is his world and his commitment is to the particular right here and now.
I mean in the first place and that is interesting, there are until the present day friends of Borges, people were close to Beno couple who doubt that he was ever blind.
As I said, he lost a little bit of his eyesight. Some people think actually he was fond of the idea of blindness because of Homer in this great tradition of blind poets and this association, this irresistible association of blindness and imagination.
He has actually a very interesting series of four lectures towards the end of his life, I think it's from the early 1970s given in one-sided way, he says that this is this very kind of, it's belated voice, would speak like this.
Saben came, sort of, he was born in Rehalmante, Berlok, or his Bien, so this kind of only the blind people can know what a beautiful red is.
So it could well be that in a strange way that then became a reality he was embodying blindness.
I mean there are these pictures I think that I've mentioned this essay that he was kind enough to mention, where it's embracing trees like blind people, there's this poem about a Saturday afternoon in his apartment when he's touching things.
So it could well be that and this is the point I want to make, being blind or playing blindness is not something about an alternative world, but it is an intensification of the world we have.
So that Bortchus, you know, when this discourse about colors, we're saying only if you are blind, I mean, so if a certain capacity of your body, I would not only say of your brain to project,
the color is not bothered by the interventions from outside.
So that this old man who walks through his apartment and embraces things, that this intensifies a relationship with the world in the present that is rather stronger than less referential.
Well I'm looking here at all the motifs and themes that I was hoping that we were going to cover in our hours that which is the labyrinth, the mirror, the compass, the encyclopedia and some other texts, but as usual with you things go very fast and in the few minutes that we may not want to ask you about two other things that related to the biography.
And maybe you have to choose one of the two, his love for concepts, and the disappointment that he felt for never getting the Nobel Prize.
Yeah, I mean the Nobel Prize of course for something he was, I mean he was a poet of doctors, I mean he was somebody who was enormously learned.
Do you think he did not get it for political reasons?
Definitely, I mean if you see the choices that the Swedish Academy, the positive choices that have been in the last couple of years, I mean I think the poet they chose this year German Romanian, their only choice for PC reasons.
I mean in the first place nobody knew her before that doesn't mean she's not good but it's really not very substantial, but she was a victim under Charles Cresco and she's pushing that.
If you see some of the choices, I mean Bödges of course was living in Argentina during that dictatorship, during a process, so there is no evidence whatsoever, no, no, any probability that he ever collaborated with him or so.
But he wasn't a victim, I mean this was not this was outside his world, I mean he signed certain...
Apparently he once made a compliment about Pinochet, that Pinochet was a gentleman and that he was a very literary person and this according to some people is what destroyed his chances for getting a Nobel Prize, but that's...
Well I think it's what you're saying is more important that he never posed that's a victim and he was not one that politicized his...
I mean I mean I don't want to risk my job but the liberal university in the United States, but I mean Pinochet is probably what's probably...
more complex figure than most of our colleagues and students would imagine. I mean Pinochet was actually the choice of the president and he was the choice because it was a very cultivated man.
And then Pinochet turned out what he was but it was not... I mean Bödges also and this is something very dear to you and me, Bödges understood the role of the intellectual as somebody who had a huge distance from certain sectors of everyday life and with that a huge liberty.
To say at any given moment but he felt he wanted to say and you know he never said anything positive about Bidella about the Argentine dictator in that case maybe I should say Argentinian dictator.
But I think had he been an ego reader or let's say you know a specialist or an expert reader of Dante, what has would have taken the liberty to mention that and that is rather something to be admired than not but clearly I think this is why I did not get the Nobel.
Well in an alternate reality, Bödges would be walking through the door to sit down and comment on our conversation that we've been having about him in the last hour.
I would very much hope that he would invite us for tea because I mean you know there's this irony about Argentine culture.
Why they had this Falkland war with England and with Britain but what people in Argentina always want to be English.
The most sophisticated the more and that's what borders wanted to be so I maybe he would like to have a late morning tea with us now that would be as good as we could do because if he would like to discuss his literature with us we would look like idiots.
And I was also thinking what kind of music I should end the show with and I know that I'm sure that he had no fondness for rock music but if he were a rock musician rather than a writer I'm sure he would have been in the progressive rock mode and so I chose the song from the most beautiful
and were the progressive rock band of the early 70s gentle giant and our show with.
Well that's a belatedness of course.
Yes progressive rock band from the early 70s.
Exactly.
That's very boring.
Thanks for coming on Zeph.
Thanks Robbie.
See you soon.
There coming over to our written bridge.
Lord do you see the man who is poor but rich?
What do you wish and what do you wish who would you give?
Where are you from?
Where do you tell me?
You tell me you're gonna rest a world called me different.
Please stay with me I'd like to help.
Then he said how can I speak when I'm talking to speak with this boy under so bring me aid and I'll sing.
I'd love to say you're different in need I'd like you help please take me home I'll stay with you.
I'd like to speak with you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ You're the girl ♪
(downbeat music)