Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

count. And then we have what the prosecutor and the defense attorney say. The prosecutor and the defense attorney use legal jargon, and it is as if they were not even talking about the story: they are continually held up by legal issues. That is, they speak, we can say, from
outside
the story.
    Then there is something that could be what the woman would have said. And at the end, we have a kind of monologue by the count, who has been sentenced to death. Here the count abandons all subterfuge, all lies, and he tells the truth. He tells how he has been tortured by jealousy, and how his wife deceived him, how she took part in the first deception of him. When he married her, he believed that he was marrying a woman with money. They deceived him, and she was an accomplice in this deception. And as he is saying these things dawn is breaking. And, horrified, he sees the gray light of morning. They come to get him to take him to the scaffold. And then he concludes with these words: “
Pompilia, ¿vas a dejar que me asesinen?
” That’s what the man who murdered her says. “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?” And then the pope speaks. The pope here represents wisdom and truth. The pope thinks it is just for the murderer to be executed. And then we have a few reflections of Browning’s.
    Now, I have compared Browning toKafka. 19 You might remember that poem“Fears and Scruples,” I looked at at the beginning, that poem about the ambiguity of the relationship between the believer and God. The believer prays but does not know if there is a listener, an interlocutor. He does not know if there is really a dialogue. But in this book—and this is the fundamental difference between Browning and Kafka—Browning
knows
. He is not just playing with his imagination, Browning believes that there is a truth. Browning believes there is, or is not, a guilty party. He believes, that is, he was always attracted to, the ambiguity, the essential mystery of the human relationship to the universe, but Browning believed in a truth. Browning wrote this book, he imagined, he re-created this criminal episode in order to be able to confer a truth. And he believed he had come to it by using, of course, that metal he called baser, the metal in the gold alloy, the metal of his imagination.
    Browning was essentially an optimist. There is a poem by Browning titled“Rabbi Ben Ezra.” 20 Rabbi Ben Ezra was a Spanish rabbi. 21 Chesterton says that it is typical of Browning that, when he wanted to pronounce his final truth about the world, about mankind, about our hopes, he put this truth in the mouth of an obscure Spanish rabbi from the Middle Ages, a forgotten rabbi, about whom we know only that he lived in Toledo and afterwards in Italy, and who was always complaining about his bad luck. He said that he had such bad luck that if he had taken to selling candles, the sun would have never set, and if he had taken to selling shrouds, men would suddenly have become immortal. And Browning puts in the mouth of this Rabbi Ben Ezra the idea he came to about the world, the idea that everything we do not achieve on earth, we will achieve—or we are achieving—in heaven. And he says that what happens to us, what we see, is like the arc of a circumference. We see merely a fragment or even a very small curve, but the circumference—happiness, plenitude—exists elsewhere, and it will exist for us. Browning comes to the idea that old age is not only a decline, a mutilation, an impoverishment. Old age is also a plenitude, because in old age we understand things. 22 He came to believe this. This poem is another of Browning’s great poems, and it concludes with this idea: that old age is the perfection of youth.
    I began with the metaphor of the arc fragment and the full and complete circumference. There is a vast bibliography about Browning. There is an encyclopedia written about Browning, with often absurd explanations of his poems. 23 It says, for example, that the poem“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” is a poem about vivisection. 24 There are other absurd explanations. But perhaps the best book about Browning, a delightful book to read, is a book thatChesterton published in the first decade of this century, in the year 1907 or 1909, I think, and it is part of that admirable series,
English Men of Letters
. 25 Reading a biography of Chesterton, written by his secretary,Maisie Ward, I read that all of Chesterton’s quotations of Browning in the