An extract from David Gallagher’s fine book review for TLS on Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Borges, edited by Daniel Martino. Borges looks slightly different seen through the eyes of Adolfo Bioy, if one reads the full article.
«One feature of the literary discussions is that both Borges and Bioy have prodigious memories – one remembers Borges’s story “Funes, the Memorious”, about a Uruguayan farmhand who simply could not forget anything at all. Funes “knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once”. The two friends are able to recite verse endlessly to each other. One of their tests of whether a poem is good is whether one can memorize it easily. Bioy says there must be a flaw in Browning’s “Memorabilia”, because he cannot remember the last strophe. Borges agrees, although characteristically he proceeds to recite it. They both intensely dislike Neruda’s poetry and one of the reasons they give is that it does not stick in the mind. Borges suggests that Neruda probably does not even remember his own poems and would probably not notice if a reader missed a line or two.
Borges’s best literary insights occur when, instead of being judgemental, he makes one of those dazzling, irreverent associations that are a central feature of his fictions. He suggests to Bioy that Kafka and Jesus have a similar way of apprehending the world, through images and parables, and then quotes his atheist father as having said that, in that respect, Jesus was very like the gauchos of the pampas. He suggests that the two most arresting themes in literature are the fall of Troy and Christ’s Passion. However, he later compares the death of Jesus unfavourably with the death of Socrates. “Socrates was a gentleman and Christ a politician looking for compassion.” Borges is also good on other kinds of literary comparison. American realism, he says, “shows violent, brutal, vulgar people without irony, as though the author were one of them”. French realism, on the other hand, is always ironic. “Zola appears always to be saying ‘that is what man is like’”, as from a distance. Borges quotes Sir Thomas Browne as saying that a gentleman is always unassuming and unobtrusive, that he tries to avoid being a nuisance. By contrast, he quotes the Argentinian writer José Luis Lanuza as saying that a gentleman is someone who deliberately imposes his presence, is a nuisance, and is constantly on the watch lest somebody slight him. Borges says that that is the Spanish view of a gentleman, one which he considers absurd. “For who is not resigned to being at times slighted and defeated?”»
Read the full article here: http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2646781,00.html
