As a student, I had a passion for Sartre and I firmly believed in his thesis that the writer's commitment was to his own times and to the society in which he lived, that 'words were actions', and that, through writing, a man might influence history. Today such ideas seem naive and may even invite a yawn-we live in an age of smug scepticism about the power of literature as well as about history-but in the 1950s the notion that the world could be changed for the better and that literature should contribute to this struck many of us as both persuasive and exciting. By then, Borges' influence was beginning to be felt beyond the small circle of the magazine Sur and his Argentine admirers. In a number of Latin American cities, among the literary set, ardent followers fought over the scarcer editions of his books as if they were treasure and learned by heart those visionary random lists, or catalogues, that dot Borges' pages-the particularly beautiful one from 'The Aleph', for instance-and helped themselves not only to his labyrinths, tigers, mirrors, masks and knives, but also to his strikingly original use of adjectives and adverbs. In Lima, the first of these Borges enthusiasts I came across was a friend and contemporary of mine, with whom I shared my books and my literary dreams. Borges was always an inexhaustible topic of discussion. In a clinically pure way, he stood for everything Sartre had taught me to hate: the artist shrinking from the world around him to take refuge in a world of the intellect, erudition, and fantasy; the writer looking down on politics, history, and even reality and shamelessly displaying his scepticism and his wry disdain for whatever did not stem from books; the intellectual who not only allowed himself to treat ironically the dogmas and idealism of the left but who took his own iconoclasm to the extreme of joining the Conservative Party and haughtily justifying this by claiming that gentlemen prefer lost causes. In our discussions, I tried to show with all the Sartrean malice I could command that an intellectual who wrote, spoke, and behaved the way Borges did somehow shared responsibility for all the world's social ills, that his stories and poems were little more than 'bibelots d'inanite sonore', mere trinkets of high-sounding emptiness, and that history with its terrible sense of justice-which progressives wield, as it suits them, like the executioner's axe, the sharper's marked card or the conjurer's sleight of hand-would one day deal him his just deserts. But once the arguments were over, in the discreet solitude of
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Dec 1, 1999
Michael Schwalbe + 1
Open Access