Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

long poems in blank verse. But had he written it in prose, had
The Ring and the Book
been written as a novel, and the same story told over and over again by different characters, he might have been more amusing, no? Though he would have lost many fine passages of verse. Then I should think of Robert Browning as the forerunner of all modern literature. But nowadays we don’t, because we’re put off by the …
    BURGIN: … poetic technicalities.
    BORGES: Yes, the poetic technicalities, by the blank verse, by the rather artificial style. But had he been, let’s say, well, yes, had he been a good prose writer, then I think that we should think of Browning as being the forerunner of what is called modern literature.
    BURGIN: Why do you say that?
    BORGES: Because when I told the plots of his poems to my students, they were wild about them. And then, when they read them, they found them, well, a task. But if you tell somebody the framework of
The Ring and the Book
, it’s very interesting. The idea of having the same story told by different characters from different angles, that seems to be, well, more or less, what Henry James would have liked to do—a long time before Henry James. I mean that you should think of Browning as having been the forerunner, quite as good as the forerunner, of Henry James or of Kafka. While today we don’t think of him in that way, and nobody seems to be reading him, except out of duty, but I think people should enjoy reading him.
    BURGIN: You’ve linked Henry James and Kafka before—you seem to associate them in your mind for some reason.
    BORGES: I think that there is a likeness between them. I think that the sense of things being ambiguous, of things being meaningless, of living in a meaningless universe, of things being many-sided and finally unexplained; well, Henry James wrote to his brother that he thought of the world as being a diamond museum, a museum of monsters. I think that he must have felt life in much the same way.
    BURGIN: And yet the characters in James or in Kafka are always striving for something definite. They always have definite goals.
    BORGES: They have definite goals, but they never attain them. I mean, when you’ve read the first page of
The Trial
you know that he’ll never know why he’s being judged, why he’s being tried, I mean; in the case of Henry James, the same thing happens. The moment you know that the man is after the Aspern papers, you know, well, either that he’ll never find the papers, or that if he does find them, they’ll be worthless. You may feel that.
    BURGIN: But then it’s more a sense of impotence than it is an ambiguity.
    BORGES: Of course, but it’s also an ambiguity. For example, “The Turn of the Screw.” That’s a stock example. One might find others. “The Abasement of the Northmores”—the whole story is told as a tale of revenge. And, in the end, you don’t know whether the revenge will work out or not. Because, after all, the letters of the widow’s husband, they may be published and nothing may come of them. So that in the end, the whole story is about revenge, and when you reach the last page, you do not know whether the woman will accomplish her purpose or not. A very strange story … I suppose that you prefer Kafka to Henry James?
    BURGIN: No, they stand for different things for me.
    BORGES: But do they?
    BURGIN: You don’t seem to think so. But I think that Henry James believed in society; he never really questioned the social order.
    BORGES: I don’t think so.
    BURGIN: I think he accepted society. I think that he couldn’t conceive of a world without society and he believed in man and, moreover, in certain conventions. He was a student of man’s behaviour.
    BORGES: Yes, I know, but he believed in them in a desperate way, because it was the only thing he could grasp.
    BURGIN: It was an order, a sense of order.
    BORGES: But I don’t think he felt happy.
    BURGIN: But Kafka’s imagination is far more metaphorical.
    BORGES: Yes, but I think that you get many things in James that you don’t get in Kafka. For example, in Henry James you are made to feel that there
is
a meaning behind experience, perhaps too many meanings. While in Kafka, you know that he knew no more about the castle or about the judges and the trial than you do. Because the castle and the judges are symbols of the universe, and nobody is expected to know anything about the universe. But in the case of Henry James, you think that he might