Borges on Art

Author: (Argentina) Borges
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: Borges is renowned for his novels and poetry, but he wrote the most of essays and notes. In terms of text length, his novels and poems combined are only roughly comparable to these articles. In the past, many domestic publications introduced Borges by calling such writings "prose." In reality, Borges did not write the usual kind of prose that recounts people and events or describes landscapes and objects. Instead, he wrote art essays that specifically discuss creative issues. This is one of the most skilled literary forms he mastered. It should be noted that these witty and philosophically rich essays are not merely the result of abstract speculation but also include impressions directly from life—country lights, urban fights, daggers and lutes, and the noisy yet sorrowful tango. Borges, who served as a literature professor for twenty years and the director of the National Library of Argentina for eighteen years, lived surrounded by books and literary works throughout his life. Yet, he was not the kind of scholar who only wanted to hide away in a study. His discussions on creative art, much like the act of creation itself, seemed to seek the spiritual traces of humanity from suffering and lamentation. Therefore, these intellectual essays are deeply emotional, such as those on nightmares, metaphors, time, the rhetorical intentions of Dante's The Divine Comedy, the narrative rules of detective fiction, and so on. Such enigmatic debates made him so eloquent that nothing he said could be intimidating. Solving philosophical problems with clean, straightforward language is indeed a rare talent in the world. In an introduction to Shakespeare's plays, he wrote, "I have read many articles about Macbeth, and I have forgotten most of them." (William Shakespeare, Macbeth) His candid admission of having "forgotten most of them" reveals an elegant arrogance, showing no intention of engaging with those pretentious scholars. With just one sentence, he dismissed a lot of trouble. Borges had a somewhat unconventional view on many aesthetic issues. For example, he expressed "reluctant skepticism" about whether Shakespeare expressed an infinite and enduring legacy, while firmly believing that the works of second-tier writers or even casual discussions could contain something comparable to classic works. The reason classic texts are considered classics is because of a dynamic historical process—the factors that give rise to classics are largely attributed to certain opportunities for reception. (On the Classical) In Kafka's novels, he traced Kafka's aesthetic precursors, found the temporal and spatial connection between individuals and groups in Keats's poetry, and discovered the psychological trajectory where fantasy and reality collide in Hawthorne and Poe. These unbound aesthetic insights were always fresh and vivid, revealing a certain foresight. It is known that reception aesthetics began challenging textualism in the late 1960s of the last century, but Borges had already indicated the path of hermeneutics based on his aesthetic experience as early as the 1950s. He discovered history in the interaction between the author, the work, and the reader, rather than defining the author and the work based on history. The interpretive logic here is like the age-old question of whether the chicken came before the egg, and it remains confusing to many scholars today. In Borges's artistic labyrinth, there are several paths leading to philosophy, from Plato to Pascal, from Jewish mysticism to Eastern Zen. His thoughts diverge endlessly, guiding readers into the realm of profound ideas. This is also a distinctive feature of Borges's art essays. In fact, many aspects of his thinking were at the forefront of academic discourse at the time, and even some newly acclaimed theories after the 1960s could vaguely be discerned from his works, such as Foucault's archaeology of knowledge and Habermas's theory of communicative action. Of course, Borges did not intend to be a philosopher. His greatest interest still lay in the relationship between reality and imagination, and the mysteries of time and the infinite. For a writer, the question is to what extent one can wield their "magical" art. This is not philosophy, nor is it a serious aesthetic issue—it all depends on experience and emotion. Borges's entire collection of art essays exceeds one million words, comprising four hundred and seventy-six pieces. This book selects seventy-six of them, drawn from his ten essay collections: Evaristo Carriego (1930), Collected Essays (1932), A History of Eternity (1936), Further Essays (1952), Collected Introductions (1975), Borges Speaks (1979), The Seven Nights (1980), Nine Essays on Dante (1982), Miscellaneous Writings (1986), and Private Libraries: An Anthology of Introductions (1988).