Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

have had his personal theories or you feel that he knows more of what he’s talking about. I mean that though his stories may be parables of the subject, still they’re not written by him to be parables. I think he was really very interested in the solution, maybe he had two or three solutions and so in a sense I think of Henry James as being far more complex than Kafka, but that may be a weakness. Perhaps the strength of Kafka may be in his lack of complexity.
    BURGIN: I think of James as being able to create characters, whereas Kafka has no characters. Kafka is closer to poetry really. He works with metaphors and types as opposed to characters.
    BORGES: No, there are no characters.
    BURGIN: But James could create characters.
    BORGES: Are you sure of that?
    BURGIN: You don’t seem to think so.
    BORGES: No, I think that what is interesting in James are the situations more than the characters. Let’s take a very obvious example. If I think of Dickens, I’m thinking of Sir Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield. I think of people, well, I might go on and on. While if I think of James, I’m thinking about a situation and a plot. I’m not thinking about people. I’m thinking about what happened to them. If I think about
What Maisie Knew
, I think of the framework of a hideous story of adultery being told by a child who cannot understand. I think of that and not of Maisie herself and not of her parents or of her mother’s lover and so on.
    BURGIN: You also said that you don’t think
Ulysses
has any real characters either.
    BORGES: No.
    BURGIN: What do you think of when you think of that book? The language perhaps?
    BORGES: Yes, I think of it as being verbal. I think I said that we know thousands of things about Daedalus or about Bloom, but I don’t think we know them. At least I don’t. But I think I know quite a lot about the characters in Shakespeare or in Dickens. Now—I’ll qualify this, I suppose you can help me out—in the case of
Moby-Dick
, I think that I believe in the story rather than in the characters, because the whole story is a symbol, the white whale stands for evil, and Captain Ahab stands, I suppose, for the wrong way of doing battle against evil, but I cannot believe in him personally. Can you?
    BURGIN: To think only in terms of an allegory or a symbol seems reductive of the text; it reduces the story of one of its elements.
    BORGES: Yes, of course it does. That’s why Melville said that the book was not an allegory, no?
    BURGIN: But I don’t think it’s so specific that you can say the whale stands for evil; maybe the whale stands for many things—you feel many things, but you can’t perhaps verbalize the exact thing that the whale stands for. I mean, I don’t like to think of it in terms of algebra, where one thing equals another.
    BORGES: No, no, of course the idea of the whale is richer than the idea of evil.
    BURGIN: Yes.
    BORGES: Of course, I’m not allowed to see the work in Melville’s mind, but you think of Captain Ahab as being more complex than any abstract statement.
    BURGIN: Yes. Ahab has presence, he has real presence on the page, but I don’t really think of him as a real man.
    BORGES: I think of Billy Budd as being a real man.
    BURGIN: Yes.
    BORGES: And Benito Cereno—but in the case of
Moby-Dick
, the whole thing is so overloaded with gorgeous language, no?
    BURGIN: Shakespearean, almost.
    BORGES: Shakespearean and Carlylean also, no? Because you feel that Carlyle is in Melville.
    BURGIN: What about “Bartleby the Scrivener”—did you like that story?
    BORGES: Yes, I remember an anthology that came out in Buenos Aires, well, about six months ago. Six Argentine writers could choose the best story they knew. And one of those writers took that story, “Bartleby.”
    BURGIN: The best story of Melville or the best story by anybody?
    BORGES: I mean by anybody.
    BURGIN: One story from all of world literature, that’s very difficult.
    BORGES: Yes, but I don’t think the aim was really to find out the best stories in the world by any means. I think what they wanted was to get an anthology that people might want to buy, no? That people might be interested in. Then one took “Bartleby,” and one took, I don’t know why, a very disagreeable and rather bogus story by Lovecraft. Have you read Lovecraft?
    BURGIN: No, I haven’t.
    BORGES: Well, no reason why you should. And somebody had a story about a mermaid by Hans Andersen, I suppose you know it. Well, it’s not a very