Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

is, in a certain sense, in eternity, or rather in the present. Then he said what was the use of his describing a person in forty or fifty lines when that description was blotted by the illustration. I think some editor or other proposed to Henry James an illustrated edition and first he wouldn’t accept the idea, and then he accepted it on condition that there would be no pictures of scenes, or of characters. For the pictures should be, let’s say, around the text, no?—they should never overlap the text. So he felt much the same way as you do, no?
    BURGIN: Would you dislike an edition of your works with illustrations?
    BORGES: No, I wouldn’t, because in my books I don’t think the visual element is very important. I would like it because I don’t think it would do the text any harm, and it might enrich the text. But perhaps Henry James
had
a definite idea of what his characters were like, though one doesn’t get that idea. When one reads his books, one doesn’t feel that he, that he could have known the people if he met them in the street. Perhaps I think of Henry James as being a finer storyteller than he was a novelist. I think his novels are very burdensome to read, no? Don’t you think so? I think his novels are very … James was a great master of situations, in a sense, of his
plot
, but his characters hardly exist outside the story. I think of his characters as being unreal. I think that the characters are made—well, perhaps, in a detective story, for example, the characters are made for the plot, for the sake of the plot, and that all his long analysis is perhaps a kind of fake, or maybe he was deceiving himself.
    BURGIN: What novelists do you think could create characters?
    BORGES: Conrad, and Dickens, Conrad certainly, because in Conrad you feel that everything is real and at the same time very poetical, no? I should put Conrad as a novelist far above Henry James. When I was a young man I thought Dostoevsky was the greatest novelist. And then after ten years or so, when I reread him, I felt greatly disappointed. I felt that the characters were unreal and that also the characters were part of a plot. Because in real life, even in a difficult situation, even when you are worrying very much about something, even when you feel anguish or when you feel hatred—well, I’ve never felt hatred—or love or fury maybe, you also live along other lines, no? I mean, a man is in love, but at the same time he is interested in the cinema, or he is thinking about mathematics or poetry or politics, while in novels, in most novels, the characters are simply living through what’s happening to them. No, that might be the case with very simple people, but I don’t see, I don’t think that happens.
    BURGIN: Do you think a book like
Ulysses
, for example, was, among other things, an attempt to show the full spectrum of thought?
    BORGES: Yes, but I think that
Ulysses
is a failure, really. Well, by the time it’s read through, you know thousands and thousands of circumstances about the characters, but you don’t know them. And if you think of the characters in Joyce, you don’t think of them as you think of the characters in Stevenson or in Dickens, because in the case of a character, let’s say in a book by Stevenson, a man may appear, may last a page, but you feel that you know him or that there’s more in him to be known, but in the case of
Ulysses
you are told thousands of circumstances about the characters. You know, for example, well, you know that they went twice to the men’s room, you know all the books they read, you know their exact positions when they are sitting down or standing up, but you don’t really know them. It’s as if Joyce had gone over them with a microscope or a magnifying glass.
    BURGIN: I imagine you’ve revealed a lot about English literature to your students.
    BORGES: Nobody knows a lot about English literature, it’s so rich … But I believe, for example, that I have revealed Robert Browning to many young men in Buenos Aires who knew nothing whatsoever about him. Now I’m wondering if Browning, instead of writing poetry—of course he should have written poetry—but I think that many of Browning’s pieces would have fared better, at least as far as the reader goes, had they been written as short stories. For example, I think that he wrote some very fine verses in
The Ring and the Book
. We find it burdensome because I suppose we’ve grown out of the habit of reading