Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

Sir Thomas Browne or Doctor Johnson, George Bernard Shaw or John Bunyan, or the men who wrote the Saxon Elegies. I think of them as
men
even as I might think of the many characters in Dickens or in Shakespeare. While I get the sense, of course I may be wrong, I get the sense that when I’m thinking about Spanish literature, I’m thinking about books rather than about men. Really, because of my ignorance. I’m attracted to Cervantes even as I’m attracted to Dickens and Shaw—because I can imagine him. But in the case of other writers, I can hardly imagine them, I think of their books. I wonder, for example, had I the chance to talk to Lope de Vega, I wonder what we would have spoken about.
    BURGIN: He wrote eighteen hundred plays, or something like that.
    BORGES: Yes, I would think of his plays rather. While if somebody said, “You’ll be having supper with Sir Thomas Browne, or even with Doctor Johnson”—of course, he would have been full of sweeping statements—I would have said, “I’ll enjoy this evening; I can imagine it.” Well, Cervantes is one of the few Spanish authors I can imagine. I know, more or less, what a chat with him would be. I know, for example, how he might apologize for some of the things he’s written. How he wouldn’t take himself too seriously. I’m sure of it, even as in the case of Samuel Butler or Wells, so one of the reasons why I feel attracted to Cervantes is that I think of him not only as a writer, one of the greatest of novelists, but also as a man. And as Whitman says, “Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man.” But I hardly ever get that feeling with Spanish books, or with Italian books. But I get that feeling, I get it all the time, when I’m reading American or English literature.
    BURGIN: But now, I’m curious, you have this parable of Cervantes, and you have written other parables about Dante and Homer and Shakespeare; I was wondering how you got the idea, because I don’t know of any other writer who has ever done this. I mean, to have written parables in which you tried to imagine or re-imagine the history of particular compositions or of their authors’ lives or destinies?
    BORGES: I think the explanation is fairly simple. The explanation is that I am interested in literature, not only for its own sake, but also as one of the many destinies of man. I mean, as I am interested in soldiers and in adventures and in mystics—well, I come from a military family and so on—I am also interested in literary men. I mean, in the fact of a man dedicating himself to his dreams, then trying to work them out. And doing his best to make other people share them. I’m interested in literary life. Of course, I’m not the first writer to do that because there are many Henry James stories about literary subjects, about literary men.
    BURGIN: You’ve really based your whole literature on literature itself in a way.
    BORGES: Yes. That may be an argument against my literature, and yet why? In many of my stories and poems the central character is a literary man. Well, this means to say that I think that literature has not only enriched the world by giving it books but also by evolving a new type of man, the man of letters. For example, you might not care for the works of Coleridge; you might think that outside of three or four poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” maybe “Time, River, and Imagining,” what he wrote is not very interesting, it’s very wordy, and very perplexed and perplexing stuff, confused and confusing stuff, and yet I’m sure that you think of Coleridge as you might think of somebody you had known, no? I mean, that though his writing is sometimes rather unreal, yet you think of him as being a real man—perhaps because of his unreality also, and because he lived in a kind of haze world or dream world, no? So that I think literature has enriched the world not only through books, but through a new type of man, the man of letters.
    BURGIN: Have you ever tried writing in a more realistic way, basing your stories not on literature but on developed characters and …
    BORGES: Yes. I have done that.
    BURGIN: You did try that first?
    BORGES: No, no. I’m going back to that. I wonder if you’ve seen the last edition of
El Aleph
?
    BURGIN: “La intrusa,” yes, that’s a very atypical story of yours in some ways. But in some ways it isn’t.
    BORGES: No, but I find that “La intrusa” is a different