In Our Time - Jorge Luis Borges

Episode Date: January 4, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, best known for his intriguing short stories that play with philosophical ideas, such as identity, reality and language. His work, which includes poetry, essays, and reviews of imaginary books, has had great influence on magical realism and literary theory. He viewed the realist novel as over-rated and deluded, revelling instead in fable and imaginary worlds. He declared "people think life is the thing but I prefer reading".Translation formed an important part of his work, writing a Spanish language version of an Oscar Wilde story when aged around 9. He went on to introduce other key writers such as Faulkner and Kafka to Latin America, liberally making changes to the original work which went far beyond what was, strictly speaking, translation.He lived most of his life in obscurity, finding recognition only in his sixties when he was awarded the International Publishers' Prize which he shared with Samuel Beckett. By this point he was blind but continued to write, composing poetry in his head and reciting from memory.So how has Borges' work informed ideas about our experience of the world through language? How much was his writing shaped by his travel abroad and an unrequited love? And how has his legacy inspired the next generation of great Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa?With Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford University; Efraín Kristal, Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Los Angeles; Evelyn Fishburn, Professor Emeritus at London Metropolitan University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. George Louis Borges, whom some considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, is best known for his work that plays with ideas such as identity, reality and language.

His work, which includes poetry, essays, storage and reviews, had a great influence on magical realism and literary theory. He viewed the realist novel as overrated and deluded, revelling instead in fable and in imaginary worlds. He declared, quote, people think life is the thing, but I prefer reading, unquote. Translations form an important part of his work. He wrote a Spanish-language version of an Oscar Wilde story

when he was aged about nine. He went on to introduce other keywriters, such as Faulkner and Kafka to Latin America, liberally making changes to the original work which went far beyond, it was, strictly speaking, translation. He lived most of his life in intellectual obscurity, finding recognition only in his 60s

when he was awarded the International Publishers Prize which he shared with Samuel Beckett. By this point he was blind, but continued to write, composing poetry in his head, and reciting from memory. So how has Borgue's work informed ideas about our experience of the world through language? And how has his legacy

inspired the next generation of Latin American authors, such as Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Maria Vargas Loza, and those beyond South America. Joining me to discuss the life and work of Borges is Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies Assockrod University, an author of a recent biography on Borges. Her friend Crystal, Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Los Angeles,

and Evelyn Fishburn, Professor Emeritus at London Metropolitan University, an honorary research fellow at University College London. Edwin Williamson, let's begin with Borges the man and his background, his rather extraordinary family. Well, Borges came from very distinguished, Argentine family. Among his ancestors, he could count conquistadors, Spanish conquistadors, colonial governors, even one of the founders of the city of Buenos Aires. There were two ancestors he was especially proud of and who were revered by the family. One was Colonel Isidora Suarez,

who distinguished himself in the Wars of Independence. He led a cavalry charge in the Battle of Hunin, one of the final battles against the Spanish, and he was promoted to Colonel by Simon Boliva himself. And the other great hero in the family was Colonel Francisco Borges, who was his grandfather on his father's side, and who was a distinguished soldier who had commanded various garrisons on the Indian frontier, who had put down a number of gaucho rebellions, but who had been killed in battle in 1874.

Now, these two great family heroes were revered by the Warheads family. Their swords were displayed on the walls of the house. They had pictures all over the house and all their various objects displayed for people to see. It was particularly on the mother's side, his mother's side, she derived a very strong sense of being a patrician at the time. In fact, the Acevedo family, her native maiden name, had come down in the world. Their lands had been confiscated by the dictator Rossas

in the middle of the 19th century. And much of Donia Leonor, Asevedo de Borges, motivation in life seems to have been to restore the glory and status of the family. And in that sense, her son was a bit of a disappointment. Well, Borges felt that he must have been a disappointment to his mother, certainly. He does say that, as a young,

boy, he felt he could not become a man of action and that in itself would have made him somehow unworthy in his mother's eyes. But on the other hand, he had a very different impression from his father. His father was a very different character from his mother. His father was half English. Boris's father was bilingual and Boris himself grew up bilingual. It was a man, a self-doubting personality. He was a man who graduated in law but wasn't happy with that. He tried teaching psychology. He wasn't particularly happy with that either. He really wanted to be a writer.

And yet, however much he tried as a poet and as a novelist, he failed, he published one novel, which didn't do very well. So Borges' father was, if you like, discontented with his position in Argentina, as opposed to the mother, who was very proud of her patrician ancestry. So they form a kind of strange, conflictive dynamic for Borges when he's young. And he lived with her until she was 99. Yes, indeed. Evelyn Fishman, despite this great affiliation to Argentina,

the Borges family left in 1914 and went to Geneva. Why did they go there? And what effect did it have on him? Well, they went there originally because of his father's failing eyesight and for him to have an operation there. And then they were caught by World War I in Geneva. There were father, mother, sister and the maternal grandmother. So the household moved together, as it were.

The Geneva years were enormously formative for his intellectual and his emotional maker. He said later on in life, in a work called Atlas, that of all the cities in Europe, Geneva is the most propitious to happiness. And I think this reflects the happy years that he spent his late teens in Geneva. It would be just too long a list to say what he learned there. I mean, he already was, as Edward mentioned, completely bilingual, to Spanish and English. He added French, he added Latin,

and he taught himself German. He read widely in French literature. English literature he continued to read. He discovered Walt Whitman, and he said that he got from Walt Whitman, he got the joy of writing, of being in the world and writing. But I'll come to German

because I think that's the most impressive. He taught himself German through reading Heine. This allowed him to go where he wanted to go. That is to read Schopenhauer in the original, which he did.

And Schopenhauer was a great influence in his life. He met two friends, Jewish friends, Abramovich and Hichlinski, who remained friends close friends till the end of his life. And from then he got not only the warmth of friendship,

which he hadn't had before in Argentina, perhaps, the introduction to culture in general and love of culture and to Jewish culture in particular. Was there any pressure on him to have a career outside writing or was he encouraged to be this bookish young man who interested in the avant-garde when they moved to Spain? on the way back to Argentina. There was no pressure for him to do anything but right.

And even there was very little pressure on him then. The only pressure came when he had an accident in 1938. And that's what he started. So we've got a young man who's immensely well read, learning in languages, teaching himself about literatures, encountering the avant-garde, intellectuals in Geneva, and then he'd go back through Spain,

the avant-garde in Spain, and goes back to our... Argentina, Efra, and Crystal. He began in literary journalism. Can you tell us about his early writing career? Yes. I mean, when he came back to Argentina, he was very much involved in literary journals. He wrote articles for the Sunday newspaper. He also worked in women's journals. And this is quite extraordinary because in his work in women's journals, he began to infuse his prose with the works of many writers. that were completely unknown to Argentina.

Through by educating Argentine women in fashion magazines, any number of extraordinary writers, Schopenhauer, Thomas Mann, Kafka, T.S. Eliot began to be talked about in Argentina. And these early articles were the seeds of some of its most extraordinary contributions to the essay. For example, the essays on T.S. Eliot were the seeds to these wonderful,

essays he later wrote about writers creating their own precursors, about the realities that literature creates and the reinterpretations that we must take on board with respect to previous writers once a new writer comes into being.

This was the experimental ground for some of his most interesting ideas. It's fascinating because a lot of this is would think it's almost impossible to think of a writer became a write of such major seriousness as well, starting off in women's magazines in this country then or now or at other times. I didn't think it's quite true to say that he started off writing women's magazines. In the 1920s after return to Argentina, he in a sense founded the Argentine avant-garde. At that time he was actually a poet and he had already been made his mark in the Spanish avant-garde in Madrid.

But in Buenos Aires he became a very important poet. and he considered himself at that time as a poet. He didn't see himself as a writer of fiction. He wrote three books, Fervor of Buenos Aires, Moon Across the Way, and San Martin Notebook. And in these books, you can see, and in his literary essays of the 1920s,

you can see a very different boroughs from the boroughs that became famous later on. He's a very impassioned poet. He's an expressionist poet, influenced by German expressionist. and a great, great admirer, as even said, of Walt Whitman. Can I go back to Eiffrin then to talk a little bit about these three books of poetry? There were fewer and fewer poems in these three books of poetry.

And as I understand it, he was influenced by a lover fire he was having, which turned out to be a very unhappy one. Can you talk to something about the background of the poetry and then a little about what that was? After the experience in Geneva and the experience in Madrid, in which he first brought German expressionism from German expressionism from Geneva to Madrid and then became very engaged

with avant-garde movements in Madrid. He returns to Argentina and he writes, I think, this remarkable book, Fervor of Buenos Aires, a remarkable book of poems, which was not that well received or understood when it came out,

but I think it's an extraordinary work in that it's a work that in which he infuses into the city of Buenos Aires a metaphysical aura that will also characterize some of its other works in the future. You begin to see the seeds of any number of themes

that will later on reappear in its work. The theme of a world is a labyrinth, the theme of circular time, the theme of the paradoxes of the mirror, are all beginning to be worked out in this book. And you also have this extraordinary persona, a persona that identifies itself with objects and themes, and streets and then becomes them,

as if a collective will is creating the world in which you live. These early poems, which are wonderful, were, as I said, were not that well understood or even that well received at the very beginning, and yet he was very proud of them. He knew that he had done something important, and I think you have the seeds of many things that were to come. In that time, as I understand it,

Edwin, who was his great love affair with Nora Lack, Can you describe what part that played? Because he seemed to play an important part in his development as a writer. His first great love affair was with Concepcion Guerrero, a young girl. And this was the love affair he was, if you like, having, whilst he was writing for a world of Buenos Aires. And you can trace the effect of his love for Constellon Guerrero in those poems. But later in the 1920s, he breaks with Concepcion Guerrero,

and he becomes fascinated and infatuated with this young woman poet, who was his mentor and part of his group, and this was the red-haired woman Nora Lang of Nordic ancestry. And we don't know whether, in fact, she was fully reciprocated in this love affair, but clearly she, like Concepion Gavira before her, infused his enthusiasm and his passion for writing. He had, as I saying earlier,

Whitman as his hero, the idea of poetry. Poetry's highest goal was to write in a kind of rapture in which you would feel at one with your city with the world. And then, of course, what happens then is that in 1926, Nora Lang falls in love with Borges' arch rival on the avant-garde, a poet called Oliverio Hirono. And when she falls in love with Hirono, this, I believe, was a personal disaster for Borges and provides the seed for his eventual abandonment of poetry and his turn towards fiction, an essay writing around about 1929, 1930.

Anne Boleyn, you want to say. Yes, I wanted to say that what I find most interesting about his love affairs is how he translated this experience immediately into literature. I think that's where the greatness of the man lies. It's because of his fiction that we are talking about him so much today.

Nevertheless, life had an effect on his fiction. Oh, absolutely. You talked earlier about the serious accent in 1938. Yes, absolutely. Can you just describe what that was? was and why that had an effect on his literature? Well, he was rushing up to meet a woman and he brushed himself against an open window

and he suffered from septicemia and he was in a coma for about eight days. He describes that the hell of being in this coma. And after that he thought he might have lost his mind. So he tried his first fiction because he thought if he fails it on this, it doesn't really matter. He hadn't succeeded before. It's a new genre. But he didn't. He wrote this wonderful, wonderful story, Pierre Menard, author of Don Quicksort.

Can I talk, Edmund Wynne, can you briefly, I'm afraid, tell us about this story, Pierre Menard, the author of Don Quicksot? Well, as the evening has just pointed out, it emerges from a personal crisis, that accident, Christmas Eve, 1938. But we must also remember that bore his father with whom he had a very troubled relationship died in February of 1938. and in some ways Pierre Menard is a story about trouble relations between sons and fathers. It's a story about a French writer in the 20th century who decides he wants to repeat Cervantes' great masterpiece, Don Quixot, not by copying it out, but somehow by writing it from scratch so that it will coincide line by line and word for word with Cervantes. Now, you can see that in a sense is a story about a literary parasite, because if Pierre Menard had succeeded in actually writing or rewriting the whole of Don Quixot,

then he would really have knocked Cervantes off his pedestal as the great father figure of the novel, the great father figure of Spanish literature. So that in a sense by doing that, Pierre Menard was trying to deprive Cervantes of his unique authority as the creator of Don Quixot. In a sense, it's an attack on the whole concept of literature. originality. Emlyn, you were trying to get in. Well, I'll just come in.

George Steiner said of Borges that he was a miniaturist, and I think it's important to bear this in mind. We need to stress that Borges was neither a philosopher nor an ideologue, nor perhaps even a very original thinker. He was a

very original writer, fiction writer, and it's what he did with these insights. He had insights which were later developed, and he is de rigueur, as a quotation as an epigraph to end. Foucault, Baudriard,

Jeanette, they all, Jeanette, they all have sentences of Valkis to introduce what they then systematize. The Pamis' best known story Effren Crystal is the Garden of Fulking Paths. His stories play on lots of love at once

in one way. It's a detective story. He brought popular genres into his writing. And can you just give us some idea of that? I'm trying to give the listeners who might not know Borgh's work, some idea of the actual works themselves before we move on to discuss them further. Sure. It's a wonderful story, the Garden of Forking Paths.

Borges had just translated Henri Michaud's A Barbarian in Asia, which is of course the idea that a European as a barbarian is living in Asia. And then he begins to think, well, what if I invert what Michaud has done? And I tell the story of an Asian in Europe. So he imagines this individual, Yu Tsun, a Chinese man who has very little sympathy for Europeans, who is living in London and working as a spy for the Germans during the First World War. And then he gets involved in a mission. And the mission, he realizes that in order to fulfill his mission,

he must kill randomly an individual called Albert, who he seeks out in a phone book. and when he meets this Albert who he needs to kill, he realizes that this Albert is an English sinologist who has discovered the secrets of his own past. And the secrets of his own past

involved a strange character who he thought was strange, an ancestor who at first wanted to create an infinite labyrinth to entrap all of his people and gives up this project to write a book that was supposed to be

that was received as a strange and incoherent book. And yet the book that this man wrote is a book that has prefigured not only what Yud Tsun is living at the moment, but also many other possible worlds in which sometimes he appears and sometimes he doesn't appear. And when he realizes all of this, his sense of keeping faith to himself and a sense of showing that he is superior to his Europeans, compels him to kill this man in any event. And ring up London and say job completed. He doesn't have to ring.

He doesn't have to ring. It's a piece in the newspaper. That's right. He knows that when his name is associated to the murder of Albert, the Germans will know what to do. Can you summarize, Edwin, how this play with the reality and fiction and the imagination and so on. It goes into, as it might even call,

hoax, book reviews and so on. Can you give us a generalized idea? Yes. I mean, Borges was a great literary prankster. He was a bit of a trickster, and he liked playing games, blurring the divisions between reality and fiction. He used to, for example, introduce real friends of his into his fictions, like his friend Bjorkasares into Klearn.

Or he would write a story in the form of a scholarly article and introduce notes and allude to, non-existent books. An example is a story he calls the approach to Almutasim, which he first published in 935, and it purports to be the first detective novel ever written by a native of Bombay. And he discusses the plot of the 1932 edition.

Then he goes on to discuss the changes of that plot in the 1934 edition. and he says that the first edition written by this Indian lawyer was reissued by Victor Golanks in London with a prologue by Dorothy L. Sears. Now, so convincing was this spoof that Borges' friend, Adolfo Biotasas, who was also a writer, sent off to his book cellar in London

to order that book, which of course was non-existent. So Borges loved this kind of thing. Coming back to you for a moment, Evelyn Nick, he knew that he would go blind. Now, I know you don't like as much of the interaction between the life and the work, but that was an enormous factor for somebody who seemed to, you know, prefer books to, not some people say life's a thing, but I prefer books. How did that affect his writing, his literature?

Because he went blind in his middle age, late middle age. Well, he then wrote mainly poetry, things that were more contained. But it's always been a sort of great wonder to me and to everybody else. the way in which he remembered things that he had read, and he continued to live in his past reading. And, of course, he had people reading to him all the time. His mother read to him. And anyone who spoke English had instant access to Borges in Argentina

because he would just say, oh, come along and read to me. So I think that, in a way, he continued very much in the literary world, involved in a very vivid, alive way. Do you think it had any influence on what he wrote about and the way he wrote about it? It must have done. I mean, as you said before, everything, and he once said something about a man,

things that he's writing about this, that and the other, mountains and rivers and whatever, and in the end it's the patient labyrinth that he has traced are the lines of his own face. But can I just say something because it causes a lot of misunderstanding. with the hoaxes. And Edwin is quite, quite right

when he talks about the hoaxes and it's something that is important in his work because it appears so often, but not quite as often as we think. I've done a lot of work on illusion in Borges, and I've always found that although he uses the illusion counter-culturally, he might say somebody wrote

something that they didn't write, but the person is right to give it an air of veracity. On the whole, you can see what it is that he is setting up and on the whole there aren't that many illusions that are false the vast majority of them are opposite illusions

which he then creates an interplay between what he has misquoted he reads creatively in the bloom's own term what he has misquoted and how he's applying it and I think that is where a lot of the inventiveness of his work

I think we must move to translation here, referring Crystal. He was great interested in it, as I think I've said. He translated in a way Oscar Wilde's Happy Prince when it was about nine. But he was doing a lot more than translating, wasn't he? Can you explain why that was and what he was doing?

One of the remarkable things about Borges as a translator, and it actually begins with this first translation, which was published, I think, in 1910 in a newspaper of Buenos Aires, the Happy Prince, by Oscar Wilde, is that he would simply translate, he would actually often modify. And even in that translation, in the translation of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, he changes the gender of a character, so

that a male swallow becomes a female swallow in his story. And in doing that, he has to rearrange all kinds of other things in order for the story to work out, female edges, become male adjectives and so on. And this is really a pattern. He's translated throughout his life. The number of works that he translated are massive. And oftentimes, he would make very important changes. I mean, for example, in his translations of Walt Whitman's poetry, he would introduce sometimes infinite regresses in poems where there weren't any. In his translation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Perloin Letter, he changes the gender of the main character of the story. in the original, in post-original,

the main character of the story is a woman and probably the Queen of France. In his translation, it is probably a man who works at the royal palace but has no royal status. And when Borges talked about that story in interviews, he would talk about the man.

And he was criticized for misunderstanding the story, and he would reply, no, he was referring to his translation of the story, not to pose original. What do you think, and as I understand it, he did the same, with Faulkner and Kafka, whom he introduced to an audience who had not met them before,

saving his translation. What's your view about the liberal way in which he translated these authors? Of course, when he took these liberties, he took these liberties at a time in which most of these authors were completely unknown, at least in the context of Latin America. So he could get away with a lot of things that no one could get away with today. And I think that what's extraordinary about the liberties that he

took, is that you get, on the one hand, a window into his creative process. You really can see this literary genius, this literary mind at work in very specific ways. And at the same time, I think that in broader terms, the liberty, the kind of spirit that brought this liberty into the translation also gave a great sense of liberation, not just to him, but to many other Latin American writers with respect of how they could use and transform many other works of literature. Edwin Williamson is fascinated by translators they appear in his stories too, but what's your view of his translations as translations when people, most people in ideas are still extraordinary fastidious about this? I see that really as appropriations as much as translations

because what Boris was doing is again playing with texts and trying to demonstrate the fluidity of these texts that they could, you know, they were all, in a sense, I think one has to, I think it all stems from Borges' very strong belief that however magical and beautiful language was, it was in some sense, insufficient to describe the fullness of reality. And I think that, in a sense, language is a symbolic system, so therefore words themselves cannot comprehend or fully represent reality. That means that any kind of human discourse is, to some extent, a fabrication, an invention, a fiction. And once you adopt that position, then you can play around with discourses, trying to show their inherent limitations, their inherent arbitrariness, but also they become the playthings

of the writer. And in some respects, then Borgesa translation is inherently something that you can, that can betray. Tradutore, traditori, well, that for him is the intrinsic nature of Language necessarily betrays its relationship, fall short of reality. So it's a kind of a betrayal in its very representation of reality. Evelyn, I'm back to... What I wanted to say is on language, language can't represent the world adequately. And there's a wonderful story, Fulness and Memorius, in which Fulness, who has had an accident and has total vision and total memory,

cannot understand that one should have the same word, dog for the dog seen at 314 from the front and 315 from the side. But of course, fullness dies of congestion, pulmonary congestion, because he's weighed down by all this knowledge and he can't do anything with the knowledge. And I think that what we are saying points to the thing is not just that language is unknowable,

it's that reality is unknowable, the universe is unknowable, God is unknowable, and that brings me to perhaps the most important metaphor of Borges and that is the labyrinth. And I'm coming back to an original point that I made about his readings in Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah, which, of course, he read totally unorthodox, an unorthodox way counter-culturally.

But what he got from there would fascinate and is a central strategy to use that word in his stories, is the idea of an eternal truth, an eternal text, the word of God, which is not knowable to man. So that is, as it were, the labyrinth. God may or may not see the centre of that labyrinth, but man errs in the labyrinth, in the different paths of the labyrinth,

trying to get to that truth. Can I bring effort in for a moment, then back to you? I mean, what I wanted to do was actually tie some of the points, actually, that Evelyn just made, but to the nitty-gritty of the process of Borges' writing. For example, he loved to translate works of writers who were already transforming works of others. For example, he translated the cruel stories of Villiers de Lille-Addam, and Villiers de Lid-Aid-Dal-Dam wanted to make famous cruel stories even crueler.

So, for example, when Villiers-Dill-D-D-Dam rewrites Edgar Al-Lam, pose the pit and the pendulum, you have a situation like Poe's, in which an individual is in a pit, and like Poe, you think that this individual is escaping. But no, Villiers calls the story the torture of hope. Because the character thinks he is escaping, he's actually not escaping, he will be killed.

It is the torture of hope. When Borges translates the story, he eliminates the theological differences between the Dominican priest in Villiers' story who tortures a Kabbalistic rabbi because these theological differences would have mitigated the cruelty of the story. And he changes the title from the torture of hope

to hope because the title had given away the ending. Now, Borges realized that by eliminating the theological elements of that story, he made it better, he made it crueler. but he also realized that a nice literary idea had fallen by the wayside when Bileet treated the theme. So then he writes a story called the writing of the god

in which an apocryphal priest in the pit decifers the writing of his god could obliterate his torturer, could obliterate the universe, but this knowledge that he has gained is so overwhelming and so powerful that he allows himself to die. Can I just pick up on that?

This is exactly the point I was hoping to make it. I think one overlooks an important theme in Borges, and that is the theme of mystical illumination. Conventionally, critics tend to dwell on his belief in the insufficiency of language, the idea of all human discourses are, in a sense, fictional, the idea that words fall short of reality. But for that very reason, there is a deep yearning in Borges to transcend language, And you cannot know the world through reason,

you cannot know the world or describe it or comprehend it through language. The only way is through some instant revelation, through some mystical illumination. Now, Ephraim has mentioned the writing of the God, the God's writing. I can also think of the Aleph, where you have, Bor has attempted to try and write in a way which would represent, although that's condemned to failure, but would represent a God's vision of the universe

where everything within the universe could be perceived in one eternal instant. He've also got the Congress, for example, which is his longest short story. And there you have a wealthy rancher who wants to create a Congress of the world and have a representative of each nation language, a book, trans-tlipper, universal language,

and then he realizes that all that is futile. And he receives a kind of mystical illumination which gives him and his members of the secret society a sense that they're all part of pantheistic unity. So I think this is a countervailing tendency in Boris. Embellin. Yes, I absolutely agree. But on the other hand, I think one has to read Borkas always

with the idea, with his skepticism in mind, with irony in mind. To mention just the alif, comes undermined. The alif being in the story, a small coin, microcosm, of course, in which is reflected the whole of the universe. He has this fantastic experience of seeing the alif, and he comes out of the, the bodice-like character comes out of the cellar, and commits an act of absolute petty vindictiveness. And then the alif is deconstructed by saying that there are many alifs either here, there,

and everywhere. And there he has that fantastic passage I saw, I saw, and everything that. he sees in the Aleph, the total vision. But this total vision doesn't lead to anything other than vindictiveness and to a long list of other mirrors in literature which mirror the universe and the aliph itself, which is in Kantor's theory of the Mengenli, where any number can be symbolic of any number.

So in a way, he doesn't trivialize, but he dilutes the experience by showing that actually it is everywhere and available. I think there's a dialectic throughout Borges' work between, if you like, writing like Whitman, this impassioned expressionist ecstatic writing, writing as rapture, and writing, if you like, in the vein of Kafka, which is that of the disabused, disillusioned, end of the ironic, neurotic writer. And at every stage in Borges' work, you'll find that either the Whitman aspiration or the Kafka practice will be present in some degree. and I think this is why, on the one hand, in the Aleph, you got the yearning to have that mystical illumination, but on the other hand, you have the undermining of that yearning because of his having to write within human discourse.

Ephra, you want to come in love. Yes. I mean, one of the other things that I think is wonderful about Borges is that Borges was fascinated with many philosophical and theological perplexities. and he had this acumen which allowed him to turn those philosophical and theological perplexities

into very compelling and very attractive literary ideas. So he's the kind of writer that beguiles and disconcerts with exactly the same conceits. Borge's reputation

suffered more than little because of his political allegiances adwin. He was sympathetic to fascist dictatorships in Argentina, in Chile and in Spain. Do you think that it had a very bad impact on his reputation? Well, this reputation he acquired in 1976 in the late 70s with his declarations in support of Pinochet and General Vidala

and even General Franca, who died the year before, really became an albatross around his neck. And even today, he has this reputation of being a political reactionary. in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. But he did declare his support for the history. He did, but you have to see that in the context of his whole political development. In fact, Borges, in his youth, was the support of the Radical Party in Argentina. He was a social democrat, if you like.

He even became actively involved. He saw himself as a public intellectual. And in a sense, Borges always saw himself as a public intellectual. At every major juncture in Argentine history, Borges took a position and took a public position and declared himself for a particular stance. And in the 30s, he was one of the leading intellectuals in Argentina to speak out against anti-Semitism, against the Nazis, against anti-fascism, and against the rise of a right-wing Catholic nationalism, which eventually spawned Peron and Evita.

And it was this opposition to Peron, I think, which perhaps marked the late his later political ideas. What he did in the end of the 70s is less easy to explain away. I know you're a magnificent apologist for him, as we've heard in this programme. I just wondered, let's stick to that. I mean, he supported three fascist dictators, and most of the people who loved his work would not do so, or not have done, so.

I'd be very disappointed to put it mildly. He did recant within a year or two. I mean, he did realize that he'd made a mistake, and when... He realized he'd made a mistake, or realized he was he was. wrong? He realised he was wrong to support Pinochet and Vidella, particularly Vidala. He realized that he had misconceived what they were about. He thought that they would overthrow the last perinist government and then prepare the ground for the return of democracy and he realized he was

completely wrong there. And when news of the disappearances and the dirty war came out, he He strongly spoke in support of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and he campaigned for bringing to justice of those military personnel responsible for these disappearances. And towards the end, he described himself as a pacifist and an anarchist. Well, I'm afraid I'm going to ask you, and if you can't, go to do it, that's perfectly all right by me. Just to briskly tell us what you think is legacy. see is. Can I start with you,

a friend Christo? Well, I think that Borges is a writer that has allowed many readers to consider the possibility that the impossible and even the preposterous

can be sometimes more compelling than the real. Emily? Well, I'd like to quote something that Borges said, and that is, if I'm rich in anything, it is in perplexities, not uncertainties. And I think he has destabilized, received truths

without negating them completely. I think whenever you read him, you've got to read him against something that he had said, a sort of declaration at the end of an essay, and yet and yet denying time. And then he says, the world is real. I unfortunately am Borchis.

So there's this sort of realist creed, and the perplexities of which he is proud. And I think we have to always read with that interplay because the fact that every story has its own counter-argument is extremely important. So we mustn't say Borges is against time, or Borges is against individuality, but just show the tension that there is between individual time,

subjective time and chronological time, say, as an example. the secret mirror, though. Finally, Edwin. Well, I think his literary legacy, I mean, he did influence a lot of writers, not just in Argentina and Latin America, but in Britain, the US, France, and Italy. I think what he does is he actually rehabilitates fantasy as a vital resource of the serious writer of fiction, and he also expands the bounds of serious fiction by allowing writers to actually write in the vein of a folk tale, fable, parable, an obituary, a, book review and so on, so it extends a range.

He uses his use of fantasy, all right, he is in a sense the father of magic realism broadly understood, but what he does is he introduces fantasy into an otherwise realistic setting as a tool through which he can then explore philosophical, ethical, and in some case, historical and even philosophical issues. On a broader cultural level, I think his legacy is he's a writer for a post-religious age. I mean, at the end of his life, he said that doubt was the most precious gift of all. And doubt was creative in that sense. It opens up the possibility of dreaming.

At the very end of his life, he said that he had never achieved anything through the intellect. He was simply a weaver of dreams. So he elaborates this semi-mystical view of writing as a form of dreaming, where the writer is a kind of almost involuntary medium for some mysterious. power. Well, thank you all very much indeed for introducing a great number of listeners, I'm sure, to a writer there'd be absolutely fascinated by. Thank you very much, Abdon Fishburn, Ephraim Kirstle, and Edmund Williamson, thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about

history, science and philosophy at bbc.co.uk, forward slash radio 4.