SOURCE: “‘Todos queriamos ser heroes de anecdotas triviales’: Words, Action and Anecdote in Borges' Poetry,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies,Vol. LXXIV, No. 1, January, 1997, pp. 73–93.

[In the following essay, Sanger considers the function of “self-enacting discourse” in Borges's poetry.]

In his speech on the topic of arms and letters in Chapters 37 and 38 of the first part of Cervantes' novel, Don Quixote, as a knight errant, naturally upholds the superiority of arms over letters, arguing that the soldier's goal of peace is nobler, and that his life entails greater sacrifices and requires physical, as well as mental, strength. However, when he ends his speech reiterating his desire to ‘hacerme tamoso y conocido por el valor de mi brazo y filos de mi espada’, we are told of the impact his words have had on the barber, the priest and the others assembled at the inn: ‘En los que escuchado le habían sobrevino nueva lástima de ver que hombre que, al parecer, tenía buen entendimiento y buen discurso en todas las cosas que trataba, le hubiese perdido tan rematadamente en tratándole de su negra y pizmienta caballería.’¹ The phrase points up one of the great ironies of the novel: that, though Don Quixote has chosen to devote himself to arms and the world of action, his real talent lies in words, especially words that advocate or describe action.

When Pierre Menard sets out to write Don Quixote in Jorge Luis Borges' well-known story [“Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”], it is no accident that one of the three fragments he completes is precisely Chapter 38. Borges' narrator, of course, understands why Don Quixote should argue in favour of arms; the surprise is that, three centuries later, ‘el don Quijote de Pierre Menard—hombre contemporáneo de La trahison des clercs y de Bertrand Russell—reincida en estas nebulosas sofisterías!’. Four possible explanations are put forward:

Madame Bachelier ha visto en ellas [nebulosas sofisterías] una admirable y típica subordinación del autor a la psicología del héroe; otros (nada perspicazmente) una transcripción del Quijote; la baronesa de Bacourt, la influencia de Nietzsche. A esa tercera interpretación (que juzgo irrefutable) no sé si me atreveré a añadir una cuarta, que condice muy bien con la casi divina modestia de Pierre Menard: su hábito resignado o irónico de propagar ideas que eran el estricto reverso de las preferidas por él.²

The question is left hanging: Does Pierre Menard really favour arms? Could it be that Cervantes' novel secretly sides with letters? And what, we may wonder, about Borges himself?

In Borges' poetry, the debate between the life of action and that of letters is one of the most constant themes, and the answer he develops is not always as equivocal as in ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’. Like a wiser Don Quixote, Borges the poet devotes himself to words that represent and, in their own way, become action. Of course, he phrases the question in a slightly different way from Don Quixote. For the knight errant and for his creator, who, we should remember, was a soldier long before he became a novelist, the life of letters included the study and practice of law: a ‘letrado’ was a lawyer, and the aim of ‘letras’ (or ‘learning’ in J. M. Cohen's translation), as Don Quixote states, is ‘poner en su punto la justicia distributiva y dar a cada uno lo que es suyo, y entender y hacer que las buenas leyes se guarden’.³ This means that, although such letters have a very real influence on the real world, they are not the most glamorous of careers. As a means of securing justice, if somewhat less effective, Don Quixote's free-lance vigilantism, with the lofty aim to ‘desfazer tuertos y enderezar agravios’, has the incomparable advantage of rewarding one with renown—especially when those you defeat are forced to go mumble your name and wondrous deeds before the lady you serve.

For Borges, in contrast, the life of ‘letras’ usually means the life of a writer—a career concerned not with justice but one, as he often reminds us, that promises everlasting renown. Borges' idea of what the life of action might be in his day is less specific. The most logical choice would have perhaps been something like the life of another famous Argentinian from a well-to-do family, Che Guevara: a combination of idealism, romance and altruism. But, leaving aside the politics, Borges never really seems to consider the life of action as a possibility in his own day: unlike Don Quixote, he is unwilling to believe that the heroisms of an earlier time can be repeated in the present. In ‘Página para recordar al coronel Suárez, vencedor en Junín’, a poem written in the last years of the first Peronist regime, Borges contrasts the battle his great-grandfather fought against the Spaniards with the predicament of his own time:

Su bisnieto escribe estos versos y una tácita voz
desde lo antiguo de la sangre le llega:
—Qué importa mi batalla de Junín si es una gloriosa
memoria,
una fecha que se aprende para un examen o un lugar en el atlas.
La batalla es eterna y puede prescindir de la pompa
de visibles ejércitos con clarines;
Junín son dos civiles que en una esquina maldicen a un tirano,
o un hombre oscuro que se muere en la cárcel.(4)

Though, as the illustrious ancestor reminds his great-grandson, the battle is eternal or, to put it another way, the struggle continues, Borges the poet preferred to fight it in its older and grander variants. The figures who exemplify the life of action for him are all from the past and enveloped in a bookish mist—either the Saxons and Danes of the sagas, gauchos like Juan Muraña or his own military forbears who fought in the Wars of Independence or on the Argentinian outback.

If, unlike the knight errant, Borges does not consider the soldier's life as a career option, this does not mean he renounces the idea of action. Instead, alongside the description of heroic military feats undertaken by historical figures, Borges does something else—he presents the life of letters, or significant moments in it, as a life of action. This he does by portraying speech as an action that occurs in a certain context, and by using that context to give words the force of the ‘magical symbols’ they once were, as he writes in the prologue to La rosa profunda (420). Quevedo's composition of a memorable verse thus becomes as important as the beheading of Charles the First or the battle of Junín. By showing words he has composed for these figures as actions in certain contexts, Borges is advancing a general argument in favour of his own particular guild (the Men of Letters) against Don Quixote's claim that the life of action is superior. He is also making his own words into something more than words, into action.

I

The narrative form that Borges uses in order to make his argument is one that he denigrated at the start of his poetic career: the anecdote. This has not often been considered the chief glory and strength of modern poetry. Lorca, when he wanted to downplay the poem's popularity, spoke dismissively of ‘La casada infiel’ as ‘pura anécdota andaluza’ and such detractors of contemporary poetry as A. S. Byatt continue to use the term with disapproval, most damningly in conjunction with the adjective ‘prosey’. The pejorative connotations of the term arise mainly from the claim that all anecdotes make: namely, that the events recounted actually occurred. This claim to historical veracity is the ostensible raison d’être of all anecdotes and present in what Heinz Grothe, in the only monograph on the subject, calls ‘the first scientific definition of the anecdote’, that of Dalitzsch:

Anekdote ist die einen Einzelmenschen behandelnde, kurze Geschichte ohne Nebenhandlung, in der durch individuelle Züge des Handelns und Sprechens die Characteristik einer Persönlichkeit oder Kennzeichnung einer gemeinsamen, womoglich allgemein-menschlichen Eigenschaft einer Gruppe von Menschen geboten wird. Dabei ist wesentlich, dass diese Geschichte entweder tatsächlich auf einer historische Begebenheit zurückgeht oder wenigstens den Anspruch erhebt, für historisch genommen zu werden in Bezug auf das zu charakterisierende Individuum.⁵

(The anecdote is a brief tale without a subplot which has a single protagonist and which, through the particular details of the action and speech, reveals the characteristics of a person or the general qualities of a group of people. Therefore it is essential that this story is either actually based on historical fact or at least claims to be historical fact as far as the individual in question is concerned.)

Anecdotes are merely anecdotal because they recount actual events that somehow fall short of the magical transformations we require of art. True but trivial, they are more journalism than literature, raw material rather than polished work.

The most obvious way the anecdote lays claim to historical veracity is by dealing with figures and national traits that are known to its audience; it does not create new characters. In direct oral communication, this means that the raconteur, aware of the make-up of his audience, will often speak of mutual acquaintances. In published texts and on radio and television broadcasts, one has no such assurance and the whole realm of mutual acquaintances and figures from one's private life is eliminated. The subject of the anecdote becomes either the famous or the raconteur himself. The fact that collections of published anecdotes, such as the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, are usually ordered by the name of the subject attests to the importance of the reader's ability to recognize the subject.

Of course, a story that concerns a historical figure is not necessarily true. The real test of an anecdote is a poetic one: if not historically verifiable or even accurate, it need only be symbolically true. Grothe writes:

Der Urstoff einer Anekdote kann weit zurückreichen. Ob er ‘wirklich wahr’ ist, also tatsächlich geschehen, oder ob er ‘erdacht’ worden ist, das ist eigentlich unwichtig: wesentlich ist, dass das besondere Geschehnis, so wie es geschildert wird, hatte geschehen können.⁶

(The basis of an anecdote may lie deep in the past. It is basically unimportant whether it is ‘really true’, i.e. actually happened, or whether it was ‘invented’: what is essential is that the particular event as it is represented could have happened.)

In his ‘Nota sobre Walt Whitman’, Borges makes the same point rather more forcefully:

Un hecho falso puede ser esencialmente cierto. Es fama que Enrique I de Inglaterra no volvió a sonreír después de la muerte de su hijo; el hecho, quizá falso, puede ser verdadero como símbolo del abatimiento del rey.⁷

This test of poetic or symbolic truth is what governs the elaboration of anecdotes in poetry; this is particularly true of poems which present a historical situation that cannot be verified, say, the thoughts of Whitman as he looks at himself in the mirror for the last time.

Because the anecdote purports to recount an actual event, involving real figures, it is natural to see it as the record of that event—that is, as an instance of narrative in which language plays a role analogous to the sculptor's marble, merely representing the action of the story. It is narrative at its simplest, a story that tells us something that actually occurred, recounted by an apparently trustworthy and objective narrator whose motives are more or less transparent—or, at least, do not form the main intrigue of the story. Even the self-aggrandizing personal anecdote, the what-Winston-Churchill-said-to-me-when-I-met-him tale, lays claim to being the record of an event.

Things, however, are not quite this simple. In defining the anecdote as ‘something unpublished; a secret history’, Dr. Johnson followed etymology and Greek and Latin usage. Whatever else it may be, the anecdote is first and foremost an oral form and, though Grothe has no qualms about treating it as a ‘literary genre’ (introduced into German literature by an Italian and gaining great popularity in the eighteenth century), we should. No one writes anecdotes; we tell them, record them or write them down. In other words, there is something inherently oral about the anecdote, and the transition from the spoken to the written form involves a modification and loss of these qualities. For this reason, whenever poets have sought to bring poetry closer to the ‘language of men’, as Wordsworth did, the anecdote has been a natural form for them to choose.

There is a further sense in which the anecdote is an oral phenomenon: it is a form that is enormously concerned with direct speech and its context. As any collection of them will illustrate, the most typical anecdote involves someone recounting what someone else said in certain circumstances. For this reason, it can be seen as the most basic instance of narrative—the simplest possible combination of description and dialogue, of what Plato called diegesis and mimesis. In some cases, this use of direct speech has been taken to be the defining characteristic of the anecdote: Grothe quotes an anonymous eighteenth-century editor who claimed that the anecdote always contained ‘eine charakterisierende Herzens-oder Geistsäusserung’ (a characteristic utterance of the heart or spirit).⁸ There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, anecdotes that end in actions or gestures rather than words; nonetheless, these gestures and actions themselves can often be interpreted as speech acts of one sort or another. Even the ‘resourcefulness’ anecdote, the what-so-and-so-did-when-such-and-such-happened story, often carries a symbolic meaning that resembles verbal exchanges.

The anecdote, then, represents action—yes, but the action that it represents most often is speech. To return to Dr. Johnson's definition, it is unpublished utterance: what is unpublished, though, is not the circumstantial detail of the framing narrative but the direct speech which this circumscribes. In other words, the anecdote is speech, originally perhaps something like the scattered bon mots of orators, and the framing narratives, or circumstances, simply come attached, like the bibliographical references of a published work. In fact, the editor of the proceedings of a recent colloquium on the subject defines the anecdote as ‘un apophtègme en action’, and cites Chamfort's Caractères et anecdotes as illustrating particularly well ‘ce passage d’une forme aphoristique à une forme narrative’.⁹ A great many anecdotes simply supply the context for memorable or epigrammatic speech.

The context, however, is essential. From a certain perspective, it is possible to claim that all poems that situate speech in a certain context are anecdotal. Telling us who said what and where and when, such poems bind their words to particular circumstances which we, through lack of empathy or understanding, may be unwilling to identify with or look beyond.¹⁰ The combination of direct speech and circumstance or ‘framing narrative’ that characterizes anecdotal poems also stands behind other forms of poetry. When information regarding these circumstances is incorporated into a character's speech and the framing narrative is discarded, the result is a dramatic monologue. If the framing narrative is discarded completely and no information incorporated into the speech, the result is an occasional poem—a work which, while not recounting an anecdote, refers implicitly to one, most often in its title.

II

There is no development that characterizes Borges' mature poetry (that is, the works that followed Cuaderno de San Martín [1929]) more than his adoption and continual use of the anecdote. As a young ultraísta, he denounced the ‘anecdotismo gárrulo’ of his contemporaries and championed metaphor as the ‘elemento primordial’ of poetry;¹¹ as an aging poet, however, it was the anecdote that his imagination repeatedly resorted to. Following Borges' own theoretical preoccupations, however, most critics have concentrated on metaphor as the barometer by which to measure the changes in his poetry. Thus Guillermo Sucre traces the poet's evolution from the extravagances of ultraísmo to the sobriety of a poetry that is ‘pobre e inmortal’.¹² The official source of this view is Borges' 1950 essay, ‘Lametáfora’, which recants on ultraísta claims and advocates the simple and eternal similes while criticizing the Islandic kenningar and the baroque conceits of Góngora. In the well-known story, ‘La busca de Averroes’, it is worth noting, the same theme surfaces: Borges has the character Averroes defend the use of a cliché (the blind camel of destiny) against the argument that ‘cinco siglos de admiración la habían gastado’.¹³

The absolute predominance that the ultraístas gave to metaphor had other consequences. Since they assumed that metaphor was solely the creation of individual genius and not also popular speech, the diction and sentiment of their work tended to remain self-consciously literary. The poems of Borges' first book, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), are wistfully descriptive evocations of the Argentinian capital. The gently ironic lines the later Borges addresses to a minor poet of the Anthology might almost serve to describe the poet of that early volume:

Dieron a otros gloria interminable los dioses,
inscripciones y exergos y monumentos y puntuales historiadores;
de ti sólo sabemos, oscuro amigo,
que oíste al ruiseñor, una tarde.

(190)

If it is hard to find one poem in the collection that does not place the poet in the city streets at dusk, it is harder still to see how such work could ever be considered avant-garde. The poems are simply too intent on nostalgically reconstituting the city of the poet's birth.

The delicacy of these early poems contrasts sharply with the robust polemic of the essays that accompanied them. In an article entitled ‘Ultraísmo’, published in Nosotros in 1921, Borges vigorously attacked the two dominant poetic schools of the period:

Antes de comenzar la explicación de la novísima estética, conviene desentrañar la hechura del rubenianismo y anecdotismo vigentes, que los poetas ultraístas nos proponemos llevar de calles y abolir. Y no hablo del clasicismo, pues el concepto que de la lírica tuvieron la mayoría de los clásicos—esto es, la urdidura de narraciones versificadas y embanderadas de imágenes, o el sonoro desarrollo dialéctico de cualquier intención ascética o jactancioso rendimiento amatorio—no campea hoy en parte alguna.¹⁴

The most interesting part of this manifesto, however, are not the jabs that Borges takes at the Parnassian followers of Rubén Darío; it is his criticism of ‘el anecdotismo vigente’ and the so-called ‘sencillistas’ who propagated it:

Por cierto, muchos poetas jóvenes que aseméjanse inicialmente a los ultraístas en su tedio común ante la cerrazón rubeniana, han hecho bando aparte, intentando rejuvenecer la lírica mediante las anécdotas rimadas y el desaliño experto. Me refiero a los sencillistas, que tienden a buscar poesía en lo común y corriente y a tachar de su vocabulario toda palabra prestigiosa. Pero éstos se equivocan también. Desplazar el lenguaje cotidiano hacia la literatura, es un error. Sabido es que en la conversacion hilvanamos de cualquier modo los vocablos y distribuimos los guarismos verbales con generosa vaguedad […] El miedo a la retórica—miedo justificado y legítimo—empuja los sencillistas a otra clase de retórica vergonzante, tan postiza y deliberada como la jerigonza académica, o las palabrejas en lunfardo que se desparraman por cualquier obra nacional para crear el ambiente. Además, hay otro error más grave que su estética. Ni la escritura apresurada y jadeante de algunas fragmentarias percepciones ni los gironcillos autobiográficos arrancados a la totalidad de los estados de conciencia y malamente copiados, merecen ser poesía. Con esa voluntad logrera de aprovechar el menor ápice vital, con esa comenzón continua de encuadernar el universo y encajonarlo en una estantería, sólo se llega a un sempiterno espionaje del alma propia, que tal vez resquebraja e histrioniza al hombre que lo ejerce.¹⁵

The poets are reprimanded for their use of everyday language and for their autobiographical subject-matter; it is noteworthy that the two are seen to go hand in hand. And the autobiographical impulse is what leads them, ‘with the miserly desire to profit from the tiniest fraction of life’, to pass off such personal anecdotes as poetry.

There are, we may note, several difficulties that Borges fails to consider here. Firstly, if one writes autobiography in anything other than a low anecdotal style, there is a danger that the author's self-importance will sabotage the whole venture. Julius Caesar and Charles de Gaulle attempted to solve the problem by composing their memoirs in the third person. (Affecting just the ‘shameful’ plain-speaking rhetoric Borges criticizes, present-day politicians hire ghost writers to compose their memoirs in the first person, as if that were a guarantee of their sincerity.) When Wordsworth describes childhood card games as ‘strife too humble to be named in verse’ or Seamus Heaney likens himself to ‘a fleet god’ running through the tunnels of the London Underground, we may start to wonder just who the author thinks he is.¹⁶ Likewise, if an author decides to write his autobiography in a form that is not anecdotal, the suggestion that he or she perceives an overall and perhaps divinely-inspired pattern or destiny to their lives can be similarly disconcerting.

For Borges, the answer to this dilemma is simple: not to write autobiographical verse. Or, rather, since all verse is inescapably autobiographical, not to write verse that is autobiographical in the traditional manner. This is how that 1921 ultraísta manifesto ends:

Un resumen final. La poesía lírica no ha hecho otra cosa hasta ahora que bambolearse entre la cacería de efectos auditivos o visuales, y el prurito de querer expresar la personalidad de su autor. El primero de ambos empeños atañe a la pintura o a la música, y el segundo se asienta en un error psicológico, ya que la personalidad, el yo, es sólo una ancha denominación colectiva que abarca la pluralidad de todos los estados de conciencia. Cualquier estado nuevo que se agregue a los otros llega a formar parte esencial del yo, y a expresarlo: lo mismo lo individual que lo ajeno. Cualquier acontecimiento, cualquier percepción, cualquier idea, nos expresa con igual virtud; vale decir, puede añadirse a nosotros […] Superando esa inútil terquedad en fijar verbalmente un yo vagabundo que se transforma en cada instante, el ultraísmo tiende a la meta primicial de toda poesía, esto es, a la transmutación de la realidad palpable del mundo en realidad interior y emocional.¹⁷

In other words, there is a part of the self that is unbounded by time and space and has the potential to be anyone. As Borges writes in a famous story from Ficciones, ‘Acaso Schopenhauer tiene razón: yo soy los otros, cualquier hombre es todos los hombres, Shakespeare es de algún modo el miserable John Vincent Moon’.¹⁸ The same idea is restated in the prologue to Borges' last book, Los conjurados: ‘No hay poeta, por mediocre que sea, que no haya escrito el mejor verso de la literatura, pero también los más desdichados.’¹⁹ In writing about Walt Whitman or Robert Browning, the poet is being just as autobiographical as if he were writing about his own life—he is writing about his own life, his own imaginative life. In this sense, this 1921 essay foreshadows all of Borges' later doublings and disguises of the self, while providing a rationale for the kind of anecdote he would eventually use.

The criticism of the anecdote found in these early declarations echoes criticisms made by other avant-garde groups in Spain and France at the time. It also contrasts sharply with the practice of the mature Borges. Beginning with the collections entitled El hacedor (1960) and El otro, el mismo (1964), some of whose contents were composed as early as 1943, we find poem after poem presenting us with short anecdotal situations: historical figures (writers, soldiers, philosophers) go for walks, dream up lines of verse, read newspapers and—most frequently—die. In Sucre's words, this later poetry ‘sigue el fluir de una meditación que no desdeña lo cotidiano, lo anecdótico’.²⁰ In the prologue to Elogio de la sombra (1969), Borges seems to admit as much, suggesting slyly that these developments are due to his readers' demands:

No soy poseedor de una estética. El tiempo me ha enseñado algunas astucias: […] preferir las palabras habituales a las palabras asombrosas; intercalar en un relato rasgos circunstanciales, exigidos ahora por el lector …

(315)

These ‘circumstantial details, which readers now demand’ are in large part the framing narratives of the anecdote: when and where and to whom such a thing was said. The prologue to Los conjurados reiterates the claim in very similar terms:

En este libro hay muchos sueños. Aclaro que fueron dones de la noche o, más precisamente, del alba, no ficciones deliberadas. Apenas si me he atrevido a agregar uno que otro rasgo circunstancial, de los que exige nuestro tiempo, a partir de Defoe.²¹

Given the often abstract nature of Borges' thought, such details are perhaps welcome. If his poetry is at times overly cerebral (his conquistador proclaims ‘Yo soy el Arquetipo’ [483]), such details help mitigate the tendency towards abstraction.²²

This adoption of the anecdote does not, however, have the consequences one might expect. In his book on the Generation of 1927, Tony Geist comments on an ultraísta manifesto (that of Prisma 1921) in the following manner:

Borges et al. intiman aquí, sin llegar a enunciarlo, uno de los postulados básicos del ultraísmo. Para conseguir esta independencia de la metáfora, que produce en el poema ‘la contextura … de los marconigramas’, es imprescindible la supresión de la anécdota. De la realidad exterior, que rehuye el poeta, procede la anécdota, la historia vulgar que sujeta la metáfora y facilita su comprensión y traducción. Sólo la figura liberada de todo nexo con el mundo extrapoético puede crear un poema ‘despojado de todas sus vísceras anecdóticas y sentimentales, podado de toda su secular hojarasca retórica y de su sofística finalidad pragmática’.²³

This connection to exterior reality, as we have seen, is made through its claim to historical veracity and its use of historical figures, and by the fact that it is primarily an oral form. That is, the anecdote uses both the personalities and the language of the streets.

Borges' anecdotes do not, however, tend to bring the reader any closer to what Geist calls exterior reality; nor do they concern the ‘historias vulgares’ of contemporary life. And only very rarely are they autobiographical in any traditional sense. Instead, the great majority of them concern the historical and literary figures of a bookish past. This tends to confirm the least generous estimates of his poetry: that it consists mainly of outmoded and ceremonious exercises in which the dust of libraries supplants the fire of original inspiration. Hence, the relentless parade of names, the patriotic odes (‘Oda compuesta en 1960’, ‘Oda escrita en 1966’), the eulogies (of England, France, the German language, wine and chess) and the elegies, the sonnets and the tightly-rhymed quatrains. The value of the poems, one might then argue, consists mainly in the insights they provide into the mind of their creator: they are seen as exhibits in the arcane field of Borges studies, the literary allusions and esoteric references to be deciphered by initiates who share the enthusiasms of their author and know the precise significance of such references in their master's universe.

There are, thankfully, other ways of looking at Borges' poetry. If, as he argued in that 1921 ultraísta manifesto, the self is nothing more than ‘a collective noun designating the sum of all states of consciousness’, including those imagined, then the poet's imaginary experience of other writers' lives and works constitutes a part of his own identity. Sixty-two years later, the answer Borges gave to a question at a conference both explains this reliance on such literary and historical figures (which I have suggested is characteristic of the published anecdote) and illuminates his notion of the self:

Question: Señor Borges, it seems that some authors end up hating their characters a bit, like Unamuno maybe with Augusto Pérez. Is there a Borgesian character that you don’t like that much now, or for which you lack any affection at all?

Borges: But I’ve never created a character. It’s always me, subtly disguised. No, I can’t invent anyone—I’m not Dickens, I’m not Balzac—I can’t invent people. I’m always myself, the same self in different times or places, but always, irreparably, incurably, myself.²⁴

And that self is what you imagine it to be.

The first collection of Borges' mature poetry, El hacedor, begins with a quatrain in which the poet savours the irony of his fellow creator, God, in placing a blind man amidst so many books:

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
Esta declaracion de la maestría
De Dios, que con magnífica ironía
Me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

(119)

If what follows is unabashedly literary in subject matter (‘Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca’), it is because the poet's reading material forms a part of his experience that he assumes is much more interesting than the banal details of his daily life. At the end of his 1977 Obra poética, in the epilogue to Historia de la noche, Borges is still in his library, foreseeing our objections:

De cuantos libros he publicado, el más íntimo es éste. Abunda en referencias librescas; también abundó en ellas Montaigne, inventor de la intimidad. Cabe decir lo mismo de Robert Burton, cuya inagotable Anatomy of Melancholy—una de las obras más personales de la literatura—es una suerte de centón que no se concibe sin largos anaqueles. Como ciertas ciudades, como ciertas personas, una parte muy grata de mi destino fueron los libros. ¿Me será permitido repetir que la biblioteca de mi padre ha sido el hecho capital de mi vida? La verdad es que nunca he salido de ella, como no salió nunca de la suya Alonso Quijano. (558)

Borges' argument is the same as Cervantes': literature and literary models condition our perception of reality, and therefore are part of it. The use of literary allusions to defend one's use of literary allusions, referring to Montaigne, and then Burton, is almost self-parody. It is also an example of words doing and saying at the same time—what one might call ‘self-enacting discourse’, that carries out what it describes. The paragraph both makes a verifiable statement about the world (are Montaigne's essays and Burton's Anatomy full of literary allusions?) and, like Austin's performative, does something (alluding to Montaigne and Burton) that can only be done in words. In a library full of words saying things, Borges is performing little tricks, making them do things.

III

One of the authors most often alluded to by Borges is Emerson and the sonnet that bears his name as its title (237) is typical of Borges' procedures. It presents a picture of the New England writer at a certain point in time and space, something like a vignette from an imaginary biography. Both the title and the demonstrative of the poem's first verse, ‘Ese alto caballero americano’, show the author assuming that the reader will recognize his subject; it is also assumed that we will recognize the significance of the poem's other literary reference, the volume of Montaigne that Emerson closes. The poem's first eight lines sketch, in a fashion that recalls the evocative mode of Borges' early work, a picture of Emerson abandoning his reading and walking out towards the sunset:

Ese alto caballero americano
Cierra el volumen de Montaigne y sale
En busca de otro goce que no vale
Menos, la tarde que ya exalta el llano.
Hacia el hondo poniente y su declive,
Hacia el confín que ese poniente dora,
Camina por los campos como ahora
Por la memoria de quien esto escribe.

The last six lines then transcribe his thoughts in first-person direct speech. (Though this thematic division follows the Italian model of two quatrains and two tercets, the poem is actually a modified Shakespearean sonnet, rhymed ABBA CDDC EFFE GG, a form often used by Borges). Thus we move from an exterior vision that places the poem's subject in context to direct speech presenting his thoughts—the one to be weighed against the other.

Mere evocation, however, is not the poem's goal; if we look closely at the details of the first eight lines, we can see that Emerson is portrayed at a moment in his life that, more than defining, may be described as epiphanic. It is the point that Borges has defined on more than one occasion:

Cualquier destino, por largo y complicado que sea, consta en realidad de un solo momento: el momento en que el hombre sabe para siempre quien es.²⁵

Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.

(170)

This revelation of the self, then, occurs just before death. If we reread the first two quatrains allegorically, it is clear that Emerson is dying. Montaigne, the subject of one of Emerson's best-known essays, is just the kind of author one reads for consolation at the end of one's life; to be closing the book on him and then walking into the sunset is, in figurative terms, to die twice—to die the death of the East Coast intellectual and the very Western death of a man of action.

But there is also another sense in which Borges' Emerson closes the book on Montaigne. In this final moment, able to see the (apparently limitless) limits of his achievements, he discovers who he is and yet, unlike the great French stoic, is unwilling to accept the picture he sees:

Piensa: Leí los libros esenciales
Y otros compuse que el oscuro olvido
No ha de borrar. Un dios me ha concedido
Lo que es dado saber a los mortales.
Por todo el continente anda mi nombre;
No he vivido. Quisiera ser otro hombre.

The paradox of the last line, Emerson's dissatisfaction with his life despite his great renown, may refer to some detail of the real Emerson's life or thought.²⁶ The more likely cause, though, is that Emerson regrets having devoted his life to literature and philosophy.²⁷ He has not lived—that is, he has not lived the life of action. In closing the book on Montaigne, Emerson is closing the book on books.

Practically all the anecdotal poems that Borges wrote about historical figures end with similar epiphanic moments. In fact, an inordinate number of them concern writers who, like Emerson, are about to die. After reading them, one is left with the feeling that Borges is using the other figures to contemplate vicariously his own death: Snorri Sturluson, Whitman and Heine, among others, are shown facing their own deaths in evocative sonnets. The revelations they experience often consist of paradoxes similar to that of ‘Emerson’: Snorri, the author of bloody sagas glorifying the bravery of his countrymen, realizes that he is a coward; Whitman realizes that he, the aging man of flesh and blood, is no longer the Walt Whitman of the poems that will survive him; and Heine, in contrast, is told by the poet that his poems will not save him from death. In other poems, the epiphany presented is one of artistic creation: Quevedo thinks of a memorable line, Petrarch invents the sonnet, and Cervantes (over and over again) dreams of Don Quixote.

In a sense, these poems might be more accurately described as vignettes. They have none of the accidental, fortuitous or surprising qualities that usually colour anecdotes about the famous. Nor do they portray their subjects in society, speaking with other people, as most such anecdotes do. Instead, they use atmospheric details to construct portraits that attempt to grasp, in solitude, an essential part of their subjects' characters—most often, that final picture of themselves that they apprehend just before death. Although they implicitly claim to be historically true, we as readers have no way of verifying their accuracy and, more significantly, realize that neither has Borges—what counts then is their poetic (or symbolic) truth. We judge them as fabrications to place beside our own imaginary pictures of their subjects. And, in doing so, we judge the justice of Borges' imagination.

Nonetheless, the poems are also more than disinterested vignettes or portraits. In each case, the poet has his motives and the subject has something to tell him. If we take the model of the meeting-the-famous anecdote, the poem then becomes the narration of the encounter between Borges' imagination and Emerson. The key point in these poems is the shift from the social niceties and exterior description of the subject to the presentation of the inner revelation he experiences, i.e. what he has to tell the narrator—and sometimes what the narrator has to tell him. At this point, the poem moves from representing action to presenting speech. In the sonnets, this shift usually occurs after the first two quatrains; this thematic division following the Italian model contrasts with the modified Shakespearean sonnet of three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed ABBA CDDC EFFE GG, that Borges often uses. The result is that the Italian form seems superimposed upon the Shakespearean model and the rigidity of the thematic division is mitigated formally. This shift in perspective casts the narrator, sometimes rather clumsily, into the role of an omniscient, mind-reading clairvoyant. As in other sonnets, the thoughts and words of the subject in ‘Emerson’ are introduced by the verb ‘pensar’ placed at the start of the ninth verse. (In some poems, the verb ‘saber’ is used.) What follows the verb, however, is first-person speech. It is both the momentary revelation of the self that Borges often refers to, and something else: speech delivered with authority. In other words, Borges is borrowing the figure of Emerson to endow his own words with significance and power. In passing, we can note the verbal ambiguity that binds verses 7–9:

Camina por los campos como ahora
Por la memoria de quien esto escribe.
Piensa: Leí los libros esenciales …

The obvious subject of the verb form ‘piensa’ is Emerson walking through the fields; there is, nonetheless, another third-person singular antecedent for the verb, the ‘quien esto escribe’ that immediately precedes ‘piensa’. The grammatical subject of the verb, then, is both Emerson and Borges: they are both united in the rather grand intonations of the first person that follows.

In ‘Emerson’, we know from the title who the subject of the poem is and therefore are led to have certain expectations, which the poem both fulfils and frustrates. Employing a favourite Borges trick, the sonnet entitled ‘Camden, 1892’ (239) reverses this procedure: it describes an apparently banal and everyday scene only to reveal its significance in the final verse. An old man turns away from the newspapers and his coffee to look at himself in the mirror:

Piensa, ya sin asombro, que esa cara
Es él. La distraída mano toca
La turbia barba y la saqueada boca.
No está lejos el fin. Su voz declara:
Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritman
La vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.

These poems simulate or reproduce what might be called the chance-encounter-with-the-famous anecdote: we start off with mundane details, maybe something mildly intriguing, are introduced to a curious figure or activity, and then are flabbergasted to discover who or what it was. Unlike ‘Emerson’, ‘Camden, 1892’ is able to present its subject in his casual wear and slippers. (Not that Whitman would have had it any other way.) The surprise, then, is how the everyday or apparently insignificant then becomes invested with meaning.

There are other differences. In ‘Camden, 1892’, the verb ‘pensar’ is used to introduce an indirect account of Whitman's last thoughts; it is only with the rather declamatory ‘su voz declara’ that we move into direct speech. Although the declaration is grandiose, we note that the speaker's mouth is ‘saqueada’—‘pillaged’ or ‘looted’. The poet has exhaled his wonderful poetry and is now all used up. The tedium and banality of his present contrast with the glorious declaration: ‘Yo fui Walt Whitman.’ ‘I was Somebody’ is not something one would normally say in everyday (non-theatrical) life, as those who can speak usually still are. Borges' Whitman has become his verses and the whole of the poem builds up to the final lapidary declaration which, like and unlike that of Ozymandias in Shelley's sonnet, asks us look upon his works and rejoice.

In both poems, we are presented with direct speech in the voice of the poems' subjects. Like an officious master of ceremonies, the narrator tells us (or doesn’t) who this poem's subject will be, hints at how eminent he is and then bids him speak for himself. There is, it seems, nothing more important in these poems than the attempt Borges makes to endow a certain set of words with authority—the authority accorded to age and eminence. The words ‘Yo fui Walt Whitman’ become a performative, a verbal enactment of the poet's death.

But though the figures of these poets are borrowed and the words put in their mouths, the ultimate responsibility—and authority—rests with Borges. It is he who has concocted the situation and who reports the words; he, furthermore, edits them, thinks them worth reporting and suggests the significance they have. If ‘Emerson’ hints at the tacit link between narrator and subject, other poems show the narrator moving to direct speech, addressing the subject of the poem. The sonnet about Heinrich Heine, ‘París, 1856’ (240), ends with Borges shifting from this third-person clairvoyance to second-person address:

Piensa en las delicadas melodías
Cuyo instrumento fue, pero bien sabe
Que el trino no es del árbol ni del ave
Sino del tiempo y de sus vagos días.
No han de salvarte, no, tus ruiseñores,
Tus noches de oro y tus cantadas flores.

Here, it is not the famous writer who has something to tell the poet but rather the opposite. The encounter is closer to the typical anecdote: it rouses one of the characters to significant, if not terribly original or memorable, direct speech. In this sense, the poem is an event, an encounter between Borges and the shade of Heine—and not an attempt by Borges to squeeze some wisdom from a vignette. The narrator's mind-reading clairvoyance, what he knows about Heine and about time, is what presumably gives him the authority to dispatch the German poet in this fashion.

In all these poems, Borges' apparent omniscience, his ability to enter the minds of his characters, masks something else: the poet's absolute power and freedom to invent whatever he wants. When Borges pretends to be reporting the words or thoughts of another character, he is following a convention adopted to give those words power and significance; he is also disguising the fact that he has the power to determine exactly what those words will be. The use of a famous third person mitigates this power to some extent: if the sonnet is about Emerson, the poet is forced to consider what the reader's idea of Emerson might be, and to provide a convincing portrait of him. This, in turn, may lead to certain ethical concerns involved with the writing of history. Given that one is using the name of a real person, how ‘true’, in a symbolic sense, must one's portrait of him or her be? Can a writer simply manipulate events and personalities to suit his own ends? For the most part, Borges' philosophical idealism short-circuits such inquiries. Nothing exists outside the mind. We all have our own different Emersons, and they are part of ourselves.

If the clairvoyance of such poems as ‘Emerson’ wears thin after a while, it is because we sense that Borges is not acknowledging the true source of the words—himself. ‘Una rosa y Milton’ (213), one of Borges' best sonnets, is explicitly about the power the poet has to rescue, or invent, objects and events arbitrarily from history. Remembering the etymology of the word, we might even read the poem as a symbolic justification (and modus operandi) for Borges' ‘anthology’ of famous last words from the poets:

De las generaciones de las rosas
Que en el fondo del tiempo se han perdido
Quiero que una se salve del olvido,
Una sin marca o signo entre las cosas
Que fueron. El destino me depara
Este don de nombrar por vez primera
Esa flor silenciosa, la postrera
Rosa que Milton acercó a su cara,
Sin verla. Oh tu bermeja o amarilla
O blanca rosa de un jardín borrado,
Deja mágicamente tu pasado
Inmemorial y en este verso brilla,
Oro, sangre o marfil o tenebrosa
Como en sus manos, invisible rosa.

The subject-matter recalls a quandary formulated by Coleridge and cited by Borges in Otras inquisiciones: ‘Si un hombre atravesara el Paraíso en un sueño, y le dieran una flor como prueba de que había estado allí, y si al despertar encontrara esa flor en su mano … ¿entonces, qué?’²⁸ Here, Borges, who always ‘figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca’ (120), retrieves a rose from the dusty past and bids it to open and glow, like a rose, in his verse.

Unlike the Heine sonnet, however, this poem retains the fortuitous quality that often characterizes oral anecdotes. It is not destiny, as the poet claims, but the arbitrary power of poetic creation that accords him the gift of naming the flower. The last rose Milton lifts to his face could just be any rose—in fact, as the last six lines make clear, it is just any rose. Borges tells us he doesn’t know whether it is red, yellow or white, gold, blood or ivory. But neither did Milton know its colour: the significance of it being Milton is that he, like the author of the poem, is blind. The poem thus conjures up the flower only to make it disappear, ‘tenebrosa / Como en sus manos, invisible rosa’. The poet makes us see and then makes us not see. The poem thus becomes an event—it doesn’t recount one. The last six lines, as in so many of the other sonnets, contain direct speech that leads us inside the mind of the poem's subject, ‘tenebrosa / Como en sus manos’. The words, however, are the narrator's. By addressing the flower, his words do what they say—they summon the rose into existence. Borges is drawing our attention to the particular actions that words—and men of letters—are capable of. At the same time, he is acknowledging the real source of his words, and the arbitrary power that he, as poet, possesses.

IV

In the poems examined so far, Borges has shown men of letters in moments when their speech has become tantamount to action. There is, however, another side to the coin—that of the men of action and their approach to words. The most impressive and idiosyncratic of Borges' poems dealing with the life of action is ‘Poema conjetural’ (186—87). As a dramatic monologue, it does away with the shift from external to internal that characterized the sonnets; instead, it has to integrate an external vision of its speaker into his speech in a way that balances lyric revelation with narrative detail. The conjecture of the poem's title consists, in the first instance, of the poet's imagining the lawyer Francisco Laprida's description of his own death in battle. Besides the apparent impossibility of someone lucidly describing his own death, there exists the further unlikelihood that Laprida's thoughts before death would include the opening description of the battle:

Zumban las balas en la tarde última.
Hay viento y hay cenizas en el viento,
se dispersan el día y la batalla
deforme, y la victoria es de los otros.
Vencen los bárbaros, los gauchos vencen.

The poem's prefatory note tells us that these are his thoughts before death: ‘El doctor Francisco Laprida, asesinado el día 22 de septiembre de 1829 por los montoneros de Aldao, piensa antes de morir:’. Nonetheless, being caught up in the fighting and fleeing, there is no reason why he should need to describe it—even to himself.

Of course, these anomalies are caused by the need to integrate an external perspective into Laprida's speech. Part of the problem is that the setting of the poem supplies the speaker with no obvious interlocutor. In Borges' short story-cum-dramatic monologue, ‘Deutsches Requiem’, a Nazi war criminal defiantly addresses the court that will sentence him to death: we accept his descriptions of himself and his work because we know it is part of an exculpatory explanation directed at others. In ‘Poema conjetural’, there is no such audience—if Francisco Laprida is talking to anyone, he is talking to himself. The poem is thus what Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls ‘interior speech’.²⁹ But rather than the chaotic string of impressions such a term might lead us to expect, Laprida presents us with a beautifully constructed and rhetorically polished oration. There is nothing inherently ‘interior’ about the style of the poem; one might, in fact, question whether there is anything inherently ‘interior’ about any style of writing. There is likewise no attempt to emphasize the drama of the situation by making it affect the speaker's descriptive abilities: no enemy bullet is going to stop him from finding le mot juste. The entire poem, with its dramatic setting and descriptive felicities, is really just Laprida's last words, an elaborate equivalent of the direct speech that closes so many of Borges' sonnets.

The real reason Laprida has for describing himself to himself is revealed in his middle name, Narciso. This, nonetheless, is convincing enough: the narrator's narcissistic dwelling on the details of his defeat and death manages to fulfil, without undue clumsiness, the practical necessity of supplying us with enough circumstantial information to understand what is happening. In other words, the arrogant tone of Laprida's voice is the perfect vehicle for conveying the necessary self-description:

Yo, que estudié las leyes y los cánones,
yo, Francisco Narciso de Laprida,
cuya voz declar´daó la independencia
de estas crueles provincias, derrotado,
de sangre y de sudor manchado el rostro,
sin esperanza ni temor, perdido,
huyo hacia el Sur por arrabales últimos.

The whole poem is a self-dramatization, in which Laprida looks in the mirror and, with great aesthetic self-regard, describes himself dying. In fact, given the rapturous tones in which Laprida describes it, one is led to assume that he, like his creator, has often imagined the circumstances of his death. And, like the poem, this death is a composition.³⁰

In discussing the young Borges' objections to the anecdotal poetry of his contemporaries, I noted that he failed to take into account the risks of writing autobiography in anything other than a low anecdotal style—namely, that the author's self-importance may sabotage the whole venture. ‘I looked resplendent in my white uniform as I strode energetically up to the podium to receive the well-deserved medal from the President of the Republic’ is a claim that one instinctively wants to dispute when made in the first person; in the third person, it is much easier to let pass. In ‘Poema conjetural’, the autobiographical arrogance of the first-person narrator is balanced by his fascination with the details of his defeat and death. The final effect, then, is that of a proud man taking a morbid, quasi-sexual delight in his submission to lowly reality:

Yo que anhelé ser otro, ser un hombre
de sentencias, de libros, de dictámenes,
a cielo abierto yaceré entre ciénagas;
pero me endiosa el pecho inexplicable
un júbilo secreto. Al fin me encuentro
con mi destino sudamericano.

It is this curious morbidity and his fatalism, rather than his pride, that make him most intriguing. He is, we discover, the opposite of Borges' Emerson—a soldier who dies in action but who wished to be a man of letters. In fact, as a trained lawyer, he is, in Cervantes' terms, a man of letters; his ‘South American’ destiny, however, requires that he forgo such cultured, literary aspirations and submit to a violent and ignominious death in a remote and swampy province.

The revelation Laprida experiences before death is, for readers of Borges, no surprise; here, it is spelled out with a kind of rhapsodic pedantry:

A esta ruinosa tarde me llevaba
el laberinto múltiple de pasos
que mis días tejieron desde un día
de la niñez. Al fin he descubierto
la recóndita clave de mis años,
la suerte de Francisco de Laprida,
la letra que faltaba, la perfecta
forma que supo Dios desde el principio.
En el espejo de esta noche alcanzo
mi insospechado rostro eterno. El círculo
se va a cerrar. Yo aguardo que así sea.

Even to his own considerable detriment, Laprida takes aesthetic pleasure in witnessing the completion of fate's design. The description he gives is practically a catalogue of all the different ways of representing death in Borges' work: ‘los espejos, laberintos y espadas que ya prevé mi resignado lector’, as he referred self-mockingly to them in the prologue to Elogio de la sombra (316).

Unlike many of the sonnets, however, ‘Poema conjetural’ does not end with this revelation of self. Instead, Borges has his speaker describe the very end of his life in the same elegant unrhymed hendecasyllables:

Pisan mis pies la sombra de las lanzas
que me buscan. Las befas de mi muerte,
los jinetes, las crines, los caballos,
se ciernen sobre mí … Ya el primer golpe,
ya el duro hierro que me raja el pecho,
el íntimo cuchillo en la garganta.

There is no attempt at psychological realism, horror, exclamations and so forth; the death has all been composed and imagined beforehand, and the adjectives chosen. Borges is attempting to make words do the impossible: to send them into battle and through death. The dilemma recalls Ginés de Pasamonte's response when asked by Don Quixote whether he has finished his life story: ‘¿Cómo puede estar acabado [… ] si aún no está acabada mi vida?’.³¹ Laprida's words end only when the knife slits his throat.

In portraying the experience of a violent death, ‘Poema conjetural’ works by understatement. The key to this is Laprida's morbid aestheticism and a kind of aristocratic bearing and fatalism that prevents him from doing anything unbecoming in the face of death. If we believe there is an actual death in the poem, it is because of the speaker's very composure and fascination with his death, and not any high-pitched attempts at conveying horror. For Francisco de Laprida, a man of action who wished to be one of letters, the poem is an attempt, perhaps his only attempt, to make that action into words. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that his words should be wordy and descriptive; that, though a dramatic monologue, the poem should be almost more concerned with description than speech. It is, to paraphrase Orwell's famous comment on Auden's ‘Spain’, not the poem of a man for whom death is just a word but, rather, the poem of a man who wishes to make his death into words. This means it is both the description of a man's death, and the dramatic monologue of someone trying to describe his death.

According to its own premises, ‘Poema conjetural’ is spoken or ‘thought’ by a man of action. Ultimately, however, it is the poem of a man of letters—the poet whose conjecture the poem is. Like Emerson, Laprida wishes, or wished, for a fate that is not his own. Unlike Emerson, his wish is fulfilled: thanks to the conjecture, or intervention, of the poet, the action of his life and death do become words. Although the poem gives a rhapsodic description of Laprida's death in action, the real victors of the poem—and perhaps the cause of the speaker's ‘júbilo secreto’—are the instrument of the conjecture that transforms his defeat into victory: words. In this sense, ‘Poema conjetural’ makes the same argument in favour of the life of letters as the many sonnets concerned with the lives of famous poets. Even when they are romanticizing the soldier's life, the poet's words, like Don Quixote's, uphold his own vocation.

V

How does the mature Borges' use of the anecdote contrast with his early criticism of anecdotal poetry? By dealing primarily with historical and literary figures, his later poems avoid ‘esa voluntad logrera de aprovechar el menor ápice vital’ that afflicts autobiographical poets. Language and the imagination, he argues, can permit us to be (or to pretend we are) other people in other times. Why then use them to dwell on mundane details of our actual lives? Instead, by using other figures (and a certain amount of mundane detail to create dramatic tension, as in ‘Poema conjetural’), Borges is able to deal with what he views as truly significant themes. Francisco Laprida's dramatic monologue is simply a developed anecdote, a long series of last words uttered in exceptional circumstances. One can bolster this argument further with references to Borges' view of the self, and to the Kabbalah, as Borges no doubt would.

The other criticism of his early anecdotal contemporaries concerned their use of everyday, colloquial language: ‘Desplazar el lenguaje cotidiano hacia la literatura es un error.’ True to this axiom, the poems of his early books remained descriptive treatments of the streets of Buenos Aires, poems which attempted to use language to evoke certain moods and places in the same way an artist might use paint. With the introduction of the anecdote, this approach changed: his poetry started to concern itself with the context and power of speech. In sonnets such as ‘Emerson’, Borges uses a described context to endow flat statements with a sense of drama and authority: the aim is not to stop the reader dead in his tracks with an arresting image but, with a short narrative, to give certain words as much power as possible. Thus the very banal statement that ends ‘Una mañana de 1649’ (276), the sonnet about Charles the First going to his beheading:

No lo infama el patíbulo. Los jueces
No son el Juez. Saluda levemente
Y sonríe. Lo ha hecho tantas veces.

The poem ends with the throw-away phrase that a harried mother might direct at a truant child. What makes it effective is the build-up and the story, the context that it is placed in.

Because of its emphasis on the act of speech, the anecdote permitted the mature Borges to examine, with the arrogance and insecurities of any writer, the contrast between the life of letters and the life of action. The real quandary for Borges, as for his Emerson, was: how can a life of letters become a life of action? As a young ultraísta, Borges attempted to transform the world with metaphor and ended up describing it, in a melancholy literary way. By presenting the figures of other writers in his later poetry, and placing words in their mouths, Borges was able to show their words as actions in their lives. In ‘Una rosa y Milton’, it is Borges himself whose words become an action—the action of summoning up the last rose Milton raised to his face. This desire to convert words into action is carried to the extreme in ‘Poema conjetural’: through the figure of Francisco Laprida, Borges was able to charge verbally into battle and beyond. Francisco Laprida's unfulfilled wish to be a man of letters makes his wordy death that much more plausible.

For the mature and late Borges, poetry is this attempt to make words into action:

La palabra habría sido en el principio un símbolo mágico, que la usura del tiempo desgastaría. La misión del poeta sería restituir a la palabra, siquiera de un modo parcial, su primitiva y ahora oculta virtud. (420)

Unlikely as it may seem, this idea stands behind all Borges' occasional verse, his invocations and his eulogies and his odes. The anecdote, however, creates its own occasion; it provides him with another form to attempt this task, and a context in which to reflect upon it. Looking back on his youth in the prologue to El otro, el mismo (1964), he wrote:

En su cenáculo de la calle Victoria, el escritor—llamémoslo así—Alberto Hidalgo señaló mi costumbre de escribir la misma página dos veces, con variaciones mínimas. Lamento haberle contestado que él era no menos] binario, salvo que en su caso particular la versión primera era de otro. Taleseran los deplorables modales de aquella época, que muchos miran con nostalgia. Todos queríamos ser héroes de anécdotas triviales.

(173)

Speaking of repetition and anecdotes, Borges tells an anecdote of which he, however much he regrets it, is the hero. Saying becomes doing, the words action. The libraries and literary salons were perhaps as good an arena for heroism as the pampas and battlefields.

Notes

1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Barcelona: Juventud, 1971), 394.

2. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (Madrid: Alianza/Emecé, 1971), 56.

3. Cervantes, El Quijote, 389.

4. Jorge Luis Borges, Obra poética, 1923–1977 (Madrid: Alianza/Emecé, 1977), 193. Unless otherwise indicated, all poems, prologues and epilogues are quoted from this edition.

5. Heinz Grothe, Anekdote (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), 7. My translation.

6. Ibid., 94–95. My translation.

7. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 252–53.

8. Grothe, 6. My translation.

9. Alain Montandon, L’anecdote (Actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, 1988) (Clermont-Ferrand: Université Blaise Pascal, 1990), vi.

10. It is instructive to look at the example of a poet who tried to eschew almost all external referents in his work. Writing about Mallarmé's occasional verse in the Times Literary Supplement, 27 January 1989, 75, Richard Sieburth points out:

    Critics have occasionally deplored what they take to be the later Mallarmé's waste of time and talent on such futile fulfilments of epistolary obligation—mere distractions from his real work, mere excuses to go on deferring his ultimate book. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the greater portion of Mallarmé's correspondence as the empty observance of the rituals of civility—just as it would be misleading to isolate his ‘major’ poetry (all fifty pages of it) from the hundreds of vers de circonstances that he so delighted in inscribing on fans, flyleafs, Easter eggs, or stones. Try as he might to eliminate all traces of chance or personal voice from the field of pure poetic language, most of Mallarmé's writing in fact tends to be profoundly occasional, that is, grounded in accidental social or public circumstance and, more often than not, ironically miming a desire for dialogue.

    In this light, one is tempted to see Mallarmé's occasional verse as the return of what he repressed from this ‘major’ work. The tombeaux, éventails, and other vers de circonstances carry out literally the act that anecdotal poems represent in their framing narratives: they place their utterances in the external world.

11. Gloria Videla, El ultraísmo (Madrid: Gredos, 1971), 201–03.

12. Guillermo Sucre, Borges, el poeta (México: UNAM, 1967), 50.

13. Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (Madrid: Alianza, 1971), 101.

14. Quoted in César Fernández Moreno, Esquema de Borges (Buenos Aires: Perrot, 1957), 50.

15. Ibid., 50–51.

16. See William Wordsworth, Prelude in The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), Book 1, 1, 540; Seamus Heaney, Station Island (London: Faber, 1984), 13.

17. In Fernández Moreno, 55–56.

18. Borges, Ficciones, 138.

19. Jorge Luis Borges, Los conjurados (Madrid: Alianza, 1985), 13.

20. Sucre, 55.

21. Borges, Los conjurados, 14.

22. In the prologue to La cifra, Borges appears to recognize this:

    Mi suerte es lo que suele denominarse poesía intelectual. La palabra es casi un oxímoron; el intelecto (la vigilia) piensa por medio de abstracciones, la poesía (el sueño), por medio de imágenes, de mitos o de fábulas. La poesía intelectual debe entretejer gratamente esos dos procesos.

    See Jorge Luis Borges, La cifra (Madrid: Alianza, 1981), 11.

23. Anthony Leo Geist, La poética de la generación del 1927 y las revistas literarias (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1980), 53.

24. Carlos Cortínez, ed., Borges the Poet (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1986), 57.

25. Jorge Luis Borges, Prosa completa (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980), II, 44.

26. In fact, the poem probably alludes to Emerson's epigram: ‘The scholar is enchanted by the magic of words on the page until he ends up leading a life as thin and dry as the paper they are printed on.’ I quote, paraphrasing, from memory since I have been unable to locate the sentence, either in Emerson's work or the context in which I first read it.

27. These last lines echo, in less harsh terms, the effect of an earlier poem, ‘El poeta declara su nombradía’, which, after cataloguing an apocryphal Arabian poet's enormous success, ends with the wish, ‘Ojalá yo hubiera nacido muerto’ (167).

28. Jorge Luis Borges, Prosa completa (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980), II, 139.

29. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 205.

30. In Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1957), Robert Langbaum discusses ‘the self-descriptive convention’ in Shakespeare ‘whereby the good characters speak of themselves frankly as good and the wicked as wicked’; this, he argues, is ‘the entirely adequate expression of an absolutist world-view’ (162). One might claim that Laprida's own self-description derives from a similarly absolute view of the world, as both the mention of ‘barbarians’ at the start of the poem and the description of the ‘ruinosa tarde’ suggest.

31. Cervantes, El Quijote, 209.