Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

ideas in
The Iliad
. First, that Achilles is fighting to subdue a city which he’ll never enter, and that the Trojans are fighting a hopeless battle because they know that ultimately the city will fall. So there is a kind of nobility, don’t you think so? But I wonder if Homer felt it in that way?
    BURGIN: If I might ask you about one more parable, “Parable of the Palace.”
    BORGES: Well, the “Parable of the Palace” is really the same parable, the same kind of parable as “The Yellow Rose” or “The Other Tiger.” It’s a parable about art existing in its own plane but not being given to deal with reality. As far as I can recall it, if the poem is perfect then there’s no need for the palace. I mean if art is perfect, then the world is superfluous. I think that should be the meaning, no? And besides, I think that the poet never can cope with reality. So I think of art and nature, well, nature and the world as being two different worlds. So I should say that the “Parable of the Palace” is really the same kind of thinking as you get in a very brief way in “The Yellow Rose” or perhaps in “The Other Tiger.” In “The Other Tiger” the subject is more the insufficiency of art, but I suppose they all boil down to the same thing, no? I mean you have the real tiger and “el otro tigre,” you have the real palace, and “el otro palacio,” they stand for the same thing—for a kind of discord, for the inability of art to cope with the world and, at the same time, the fact that though art cannot repeat nature and may not be a repetition of nature, yet it is justified in its own right.

Literature as pleasure;
The Maker;
the literature of literature; a change in direction;
Don Quixote
and Cervantes; Hiroshima; death and the problem of infinity; dissolving reality …
    BURGIN: You know, I was thinking of how, during all our talks, you have often emphasized enjoyment, that one should primarily enjoy literature. Do you think pleasure is the main purpose of literature, if it can be said to have a purpose?
    BORGES: Well, pleasure, I don’t know, but you should get a kick out of it, no?
    BURGIN: Yes.
    BORGES: Well, if you allow me to attempt slang, yes I think that should be so. You know I’m a professor of English and American literature and I tell my students that if you begin a book, if at the end of fifteen or twenty pages you feel that the book is a task for you, then lay that book and lay that author aside for a time because it won’t do you any good. For example, one of my favourite authors is De Quincey. Well, as he’s a rather slow-moving author, people somehow don’t like him. So I say, well, if you don’t like De Quincey then let him alone; my task is not to impose my likes or dislikes on you. What I really want is that you should fall in love with American or English literature, and if you find your way to a few authors or a few authors find their way to you, then that’s as it should be. You don’t have to worry about dates. And I should advise you to read the book, to read the foreword if you care to, and then you might read an article or so in any old edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, because the new ones are no good, no? And then take any history of English literature, it might be Andrew Lang, it might be Saintsbury, though I’m not overfond of him, it might be Sampson, though he’s intruding his likes and dislikes, but I would say any of those three, though Andrew Lang stops at Swinburne, from Beowulf to Swinburne. Now as to American histories of literature, there’s a very amusing book by a man called Lewisohn.
    BURGIN: Ludwig Lewisohn?
    BORGES: Yes, but of course, his work is based on psychoanalysis and I wonder if you can psychoanalyse Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jonathan Edwards, no? I think it’s rather late in the day. And if you were a contemporary, it would be far more difficult because you’d have too many facts about them. It’s a pity, no, that that whole book is based on what seems to me a wrong approach? And as I say, as to examinations, I won’t ask you the dates of an author because then you would ask me and then I would fail. But, of course, I think it’s all to the good that you should think of Dr. Johnson as belonging to the eighteenth century and of Milton belonging to the seventeenth, because if not, then you couldn’t understand them. Now, as to those birth dates, that may or may not be important. As to the dates of their