Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

Forking Paths,” and you don’t like that one.
    BORGES: I think it’s quite good as a detective story, yes.
    BURGIN: I think it’s more than a detective story, though.
    BORGES: Well, it should be. Because, after all, I had Chesterton behind me, and Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story. Far more than Ellery Queen or Erle Stanley Gardner. Well,
Ellery Queen’
s quite a good story.
    BURGIN: You once edited some anthologies of detective stories, didn’t you?
    BORGES: I was a director of a series called the Seventh Circle, and we published some hundred and fifty detective novels. We began with Nicholas Blake; we went on to Michael Linnis, then to Wilkie Collins, then to Dickens’s
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, then to different American and English writers, and it had a huge success, because the idea that a detective story could also be literary was a new idea in the Argentine. Because people thought of them, as they must have thought of Westerns, as merely amusing. I think that those books did a lot of good, because they reminded writers that plots were important. If you read detective novels, and if you take up other novels afterwards, the first thing that strikes you—it’s unjust, of course, but it happens—is to think of the other books as being shapeless. While in a detective novel everything is very nicely worked in. In fact, it’s so nicely worked in that it becomes mechanical, as Stevenson pointed out.
    BURGIN: I know you’ve always tried to avoid seeming mechanical in your fiction and also seeming too spectacular. But I was surprised to hear you say that “The Immortal” was overwritten.
    BORGES: Yes, I think I told you that it was too finely written. I feel that you may read the story and miss the point because of the laboured writing.
    BURGIN: Was the story perhaps inspired by Swift’s immortals in
Gulliver’s Travels
?
    BORGES: No, because his immortals were very different. They were doddering old things, no? No, I never thought of that. No, I began thinking of the injustice or rather how illogical it was for Christians, let’s say, to believe in the immortal soul, and at the same time to believe that what we did during that very brief span of life was important, because even if we lived to be a hundred years old, that’s nothing compared to everlastingness, to eternity. I thought, well, even if we live to a hundred, anything we do is unimportant if we go on living, and then I also worked in that mathematical idea that if time is endless, all things are bound to happen to all men, and in that case, after some thousand years every one of us would be a saint, a murderer, a traitor, an adulterer, a fool, a wise man.
    BURGIN: The word, or concept, of destiny would have no meaning.
    BORGES: No, it would have no meaning. Consequently, in order to make that idea more impressive I thought of Homer forgetting his Greek, forgetting that he had composed the
Iliad
, admiring a not too faithful translation of it by Pope. And then in the end, as the reader had to be made aware that the teller was Homer, I made him tell a confused story where Homer appears not as himself but as a friend. Because, of course, after all that time he was ignorant. And I gave him the name of the wandering Jew Cartaphilus. I thought that helped the tale.
    BURGIN: We seem to be talking about violence and also about the problem of time, but that’s not unusual, really, since you’ve often linked these problems, for instance, in a story like “The Secret Miracle.”
    BORGES: Yes, I think I wrote that during the Second World War. What chiefly interested me—or rather, I was interested in two things. First, in an unassuming miracle, no? For the miracle is wrought for one man only. And then in the idea—this is, I suppose, a religious idea—of a man justifying himself to God by something known only to God, no? God giving him his chance.
    BURGIN: A very personal pact between the two.
    BORGES: Yes. A personal pact between God and the man, And also, of course, the idea of, well, this is a common idea among the mystics, the idea of something lasting a very short while on earth and a long time in heaven, or in a man’s mind, no? I suppose those ideas were behind the tale. Now maybe there are others. And then, as I had also thought out the idea of drama in two acts, and in the first act you would have something very noble and rather pompous, and then in the second act you would find that the real thing was rather