The Art of Fiction 39

BORGES I don’t intend to show anything. [Laughter]. I have no intentions.

INTERVIEWER Just to describe.

BORGES I describe. I write.

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BORGES When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

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BORGES in Old Norse, and I think, also, in Celtic poetry, a battle is called a “web of men.” That is strange, no? Because in a web you have a pattern, a weaving of men, un tejido. I suppose in medieval battle you got a kind of web because of having the swords and spears in opposite sides and so on. So there you have, I think, a new metaphor; and, of course, with a nightmare touch about it, no? The idea of a web made of living men, of living things, and still being a pattern. It is a strange idea, no?

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BORGES I remember what Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and not more. Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless. He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.

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INTERVIEWER You like jokes very much, don’t you?

BORGES Yes, I do, yes.

INTERVIEWER But the people who write about your books, your fiction in particular …

BORGES No, no—they write far too seriously.

INTERVIEWER They seldom seem to recognize that some of them are very funny.

BORGES They are meant to be funny.

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BORGES many writers from here tell me, “We would like to have your message.” You see, we have no message at all. When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don’t think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself, no?

INTERVIEWER You have said that a writer should never be judged by his ideas.

BORGES No, I don’t think ideas are important.

INTERVIEWER Well, then, what should he be judged by?

BORGES He should be judged by the enjoyment he gives and by the emotions one gets. As to ideas, after all it is not very important whether a writer has some political opinion or other because a work will come through despite them

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INTERVIEWER What about metaphysical ideas, then?

BORGES Ah, well, metaphysical ideas, yes. They can be worked into parables and so on.

INTERVIEWER Readers very often call your stories parables. Do you like that descriptions?

BORGES No, no. They’re not meant to be parables. I mean if they are parables … [long pause] … that is, if they are parables, they have happened to be parables, but my intention has never been to write parables.

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[Borges speaks highly of Henry James]

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BORGES In fact, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think Frost is a finer poet than Eliot. I mean, a finer poet. But I suppose Eliot was a far more intelligent man; however, intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It’s a thing of its own; it had a nature of its own. Undefinable

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INTERVIWER How would you define fantastic, then?

BORGES I wonder if you can define it. I think it’s rather an intention in a writer. I remember a very deep remark of Joseph Conrad—he is one of my favourite authors—I think it is in the foreword to something like The Dark Line, but it’s not that …

INTERVIEWER The Shadow Line?

BORGES The Shadow Line. In that foreword he said that some people have thought that the story was a fantastic story because of the captain’s ghost stopping the ship. He wrote—and that struck me because I write fantastic stories myself—that to deliberately write s fantastic story was not to feel that the whole universe is fantastic and mysterious; nor at it meant a lack of sensibility for a person to sit down and write something deliberately fantastic. Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.

INTERVIEWER You share this belief?

BORGES Yes. I found that he was right. I talked to Bioy Casares, who also writes fantastic stories—very, very fine stories—and he said, “ I think Conrad is right. Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.”

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BORGES a writer always begins by being too complicated: He’s playing at several games at the same time.

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BORGES I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.

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INTERVIEWER Do you expect the many people who read your work to catch the allusions and references?

BORGES No. Most of those allusions and references are merely put there as kind of private joke.

INTERVIEWER A private joke?

BORGES A joke not to be shared with other people. I mean, if they share it, all the better; but if they don’t, I don’t care a hang about it.

INTERVIEWER Then it’s the opposite approach to allusion from, say, Eliot in The Waste Land.

BORGES I think that Eliot and Joyce wanted their readers to be rather mystified and so to be worrying out the sense of what they had done.

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INTERVIEWER Some readers have found that your stories are cold, impersonal, rather like some of the newer French writers. Is that your intention?

BORGES No. (Sadly) If that has happened, it is out of mere clumsiness. Because I have felt them very deeply. I have felt them so deeply that I have told the,. Well, using strange symbols so that people might not find out that they were all more or less autobiographical. The stories were about myself, my personal experience. I supposed it’s the English diffidence, no?

INTERVIEWER Then a little book like the little volume called Everness would be a good book for someone to read about your work?

BORGES I think it is. Besides, the lady who wrote it is a close friend of mine. I found that word in Roget’s Thesaurus. Then I thought that word was invented by Bishop Wilkins, who invented an artificial language.

INTERVIEWER You’ve written about that.

BORGES Yes, I wrote about Wilkins. Be also invented a wonderful word that strangely enough has never been used by English poets—an awful word, really, a terrible word. Everness, of course is better than eternity because eternity is rather worn now. Ever-r-ness is far better than the German Ewigkeit, the same word. But he also created a beautiful word, a word that’s a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair: the word neverness. A beautiful word, no? He invented it, and I don’t know why the poets left it lying about and never used it.

INTERVIEWER Have you used it?

BORGES No, no, never. I used everness, but neverness is very beautiful. There is something hopeless about it, no? And there is no word with the same meaning in any other language, or in English. You might say impossibility, but that’s very tame for neverness: the Saxon ending -ness. Neverness. Keats uses nothingness: “Till love and fame to nothingness do sink”; but nothingness, I think, is weaker than neverness. You have in Spanish nadería—many similar words—but nothing like neverness. So if you’re a poet, you should use that word. It’s a pity for that word to be lost in the pages of a dictionary. I don’t think it’s ever been used. It may have been used by some theologian; it might. I suppose Jonathan Edwards would have enjoyed that kind of word or Sir Thomas Browne, perhaps, and Shakespeare, of course, because he was very fond of words.

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BORGES I think that a poet has maybe five or six poems to write and not more than that. He’s trying his hand at rewriting them from different angles and perhaps with different plots and in different ages and different characters, but the poems are essentially and innerly the same.

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BORGES I don’t like to attack people, especially now. When I was a young man, yes, I was very fond of it, but as time goes on, one finds that it is no good.

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BORGES [On his hoodlum stories.] Nothing is said of the sentiments of the characters—I got that out of the Old Norse saga—the idea that one should know a man by his words and by his deeds, but that one shouldn’t get inside his skull and say what he was thinking.

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INTERVIEWER You once wrote that all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians.

BORGES I didn’t say that. Coleridge said it.

INTERVIEWER But you quoted him.

BORGES Yes, I quoted him.

INTERVIEWER And which are you?

BORGES I think I’m Aristotelian, but I wish it were the other way. I think it’s the English strain that makes me think of particular things and persons being real rather than general ideas being real.

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BORGES You know, English is a beautiful language, but the older languages are even more beautiful: They had vowels. Vowels in modern English have lost their value, their color. My hope for English—for the English language—is America. Americans speak clearly. When I go to the movies now, I can’t see much, but in the American movies, I understand every word. In the English movies I can’t understand as well. Do you ever find it so?