Abstract
This chapter analyzes the aesthetic variant of the renunciation archetype. In Borges’s poet stories, the king-and-ascetic pair morphs into a king-and-poet pair, with renunciation serving an artistic goal. The discussion traces this aesthetic appropriation back to the ancient and Renaissance tradition of artists’ lives, and explores ascetic conceptions of art from Romanticism and Symbolism to modern art’s debt to Cynicism, focusing on Borges’s poet stories and artist stories from the Borgesian hypertext (by Flaubert, Schwob, Yourcenar, and Yi Mun-yol), where renunciation is a requirement of the creative process.
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Notes
- 1.
CF 124.
- 2.
Recently illustrated by Ross Posnock.
- 3.
As Ronald Christ argued in his seminal study, allusion is the key to Borges’s art: all plots, all characters are allusions to other plots, other characters: Christ 37.
- 4.
Working similarly to Proppian “functions” (Propp 29).
- 5.
From the 1975 collection The Book of Sand.
- 6.
“From Someone to Nobody”, SNF 343. I discuss this essay later in the context of the Romantics’ cult of Shakespeare.
- 7.
The Poet’s indifference to the luxuries displayed before him as the Emperor shows off his palace (CF 318) shows he is a variant of the ascetic paradigm.
- 8.
Underlining their “secret kinship”, Alexander and Diogenes are said to have died on the same day (SNF 382). For a Jungian reading of the twin polarities, see Rowlandson 22.
- 9.
E. Kris and O. Kurz Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist (revised edition 1979). As late as the eighteenth century, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun recycled stock painter anecdotes in her own autobiography: once Marie-Antoinette knelt down to pick up her brushes for her (Vigée Lebrun I, 68). Another anecdote was recycled in Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece: to meet the emperor, the painter Mabuse, a drunkard but also a genius, wore a paper costume painted like damask, having drunk up the money for the real damask (Balzac 27). Some of Kris and Kurz’s examples are drawn from Asian cultures: more on this later in the discussion of Yourcenar’s painter story, “How Wang-Fo Was Saved”.
- 10.
Although the authors focus on visual arts (3), their findings have much in common with our poet stories.
- 11.
There is further evidence of this in the case of Flaubert’s Saint Anthony : see below.
- 12.
Gombrich’s introduction, Kris and Kurz xii. Stock motifs include the early revelation of talent, for instance the child artist drawing his sheep (24–38); the painted object mistaken for a real one (61–66); the artist so absorbed in his work that he forgets to eat or sleep (125–129); the king honoring the artist as an equal, for instance picking up his brush for him (40–41), the work of art coming to life (69–72), etc.
- 13.
If hagiographies often align themselves on heroic biographies, artist lives draw on both traditions: Kris and Kurz 32.
- 14.
Kris and Kurz 131.
- 15.
On Borges’s reworking of the Romantic genius myth, in particular in the English and American context, see Christ 207–226.
- 16.
The biographical formula is summarized at the heart of “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)”: “Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment—the moment when a man knows forever more who he is”: CF 213.
- 17.
“What we do know… is that within the poem lay the entire enormous palace, whole and to the last detail” (318).
- 18.
“No sooner… had the poet uttered his poem than the palace disappeared, as though in a puff of smoke, wiped from the face of the earth by the final syllable” (318).
- 19.
“Unable to summon the courage to speak it again aloud, the poet and his king mouthed the poem, as though it were a secret supplication, or a blasphemy” (453).
- 20.
On the secular rearticulation of asceticism as a modern aesthetic principle, see also Harpham (1995: 357–358) and Krul 123–125.
- 21.
SNF 506.
- 22.
These essays (except the final one, the prologue to The Temptation of Saint Anthony) are all collected in SNF: “The superstitious ethics of the reader” 52–55; “The total library” 214–215; “On the cult of books” 358–362; “A defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet” 386–389; “Flaubert and his exemplary destiny” 389–393.
- 23.
“Gustave Flaubert , Las tentaciones de san Antonio”, Biblioteca personal, OC IV: 597–598. Borges only lived to complete 64 of the 100 projected prologues.
- 24.
“L’œuvre de toute ma vie”: letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 5 June 1872, Correspondance VI: 385; quoted in Bollème 252.
- 25.
Borges seemed unaware that there were actually three successive versions of the Saint Anthony: the manuscript of 1849, the longest, read privately to his friends just before Flaubert’s trip to the Orient; a second draft written in 1856, and the definitive, shorter version of 1874, written just before Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert 1968: i–ii).
- 26.
Several important critical studies focus on the interaction between the successive versions of Saint Anthony and Flaubert’s other fictions. See especially Bem, Séginger and Neiland.
- 27.
My translation. In the original: “San Antonio es también Gustave Flaubert . En las arrebatadas y espléndidas páginas terminales el monje quiere ser el universo, como Brahma o Walt Whitman” (598).
- 28.
On Whitman’s significance for Borges, from the discovery of Leaves of Grass in adolescence, to the lifelong translation work, see Kristal (2002: 46–55).
- 29.
Flaubert (2001: 190).
- 30.
“The temptation has passed; Anthony kneels in prayer” (Lafcadio Hearn, “Argument”, in Flaubert 2001: 6).
- 31.
After much traveling throughout Europe and America, Hearn (1850–1904) settled in Japan, married a Japanese woman, became a Japanese citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo, making a living as a university professor and journalist and writing over a dozen books about his adopted country. He also converted to Buddhism. For a biographical sketch highlighting Hearn’s intellectual affinities with Flaubert , see Marshall C. Olds’s Foreword (Flaubert 2001: ix–xiv).
- 32.
On the circumstances in which Flaubert uttered his famous (or famously apocryphal) declaration “Madame Bovary c’est moi”, see Leclerc (2014). Flaubert’s sympathetic symptoms as he was writing the fictional scene of Emma Bovary’s nervous breakdown, are graphically described in his letter to Louise Colet (Correspondance II: 483).
- 33.
On this obsessive self-fashioning as a saint Anthony of letters at the time of the first Temptation, see Séginger 14–19. In a letter to Maxime Du Camp Flaubert fantasizes himself as a “brahmin” and a “hermit” (Correspondance I: 263; quoted in Séginger 18).
- 34.
Flaubert studies Buddhism, quotes the Baghavad-Gita, extols solitude and renunciation to attachments: Correspondance I: 263; Séginger 53.
- 35.
In 1871 Flaubert wrote to Frédéric Baudry, a philologist and childhood friend, that he was reading Lalitavistara, and desired to know more about its theology. He also mentioned that he had read Jules Barthélémy St Hilaire’s two books on Buddhism (Du Bouddhisme, 1855, and Le Bouddha et sa religion, 1862): Flaubert (1982: 186).
- 36.
See Flaubert (1922). Letter CXCI, 25 July 1871.
- 37.
Flaubert (2001: 32–33). Flaubert compared current political disputes to ancient theological debates: Brooks 24.
- 38.
“On the cult of books” appeared in 1951; both “A defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet” and “Flaubert and his exemplary destiny” appeared in 1954.
- 39.
“On the cult of books”, SNF 360. The same idea is repeated almost word for word in the 1954 essay (SNF 393). Hence Flaubert’s name is linked both to realism and to its destruction: Flaubert, who forged the realist novel with Madame Bovary, “was also the first to shatter it”, leading to James Joyce and the novel’s “magnificent death” (SNF 389).
- 40.
Joyce 194–195.
- 41.
Flaubert (1922): Letter CCXLV.
- 42.
“Je ne veux rien publier. C’est un parti pris. Un serment que je me suis fait à une époque solennelle de ma vie” (8–9/8/1846; quoted in Bollème 38 and Séginger 18). Some of Borges’s late artist characters exhibit this heroic self-abnegation.
- 43.
“The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader”, SNF 54. This early essay, dated 1931, shows the depth of Borges’s familiarity with Flaubert’s works, biography and correspondence, and proves that Borges’s fundamental ideas were articulated very early on, and would only be refined or modulated in later years.
- 44.
In similar vein, the Odyssey, which Borges could only read in translation, was “an international bookstore of works in prose and verse” (“The Homeric Versions”, SNF 70).
- 45.
“Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny”, SNF 392.
- 46.
The book itself, far from protecting Anthony from the devil, becomes the site of temptation (Flaubert 2001: xxx). Thus, opening the Bible at random, Anthony lands on a scene of animal slaughter from Acts X:11–13; another attempt leads him to the massacre of the Jews’ enemies in the Book of Esther IX:1–16 (Flaubert 2001: 15–16). Anthony’s hallucinations are “not the product of dreams and raptures, but a monument to meticulous erudition” (Flaubert 2001: xxv).
- 47.
On this kinship, see Bernheimer 65–78.
- 48.
Curiously, the translators, Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, left out Raymond Roussel, who was a key influence for Foucault, although admittedly a relatively obscure writer for English-speaking readers. In the original: “Après Le Livre de Mallarmé deviendra possible, puis Joyce, Roussel, Kafka , Pound, Borges” (Foucault 1983: 107).
- 49.
In fact, it seems likely that he has read closely Borges’s essays on Flaubert , in particular “Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet”, which makes a case for the kinship between sainthood and stupidity. Borges quotes critic Emile Faguet’s epigram, “Bouvard and Pécuchet is the story of a Faust who was also an idiot” (SNF 387), and recalls the long tradition of placing wisdom in the mouths of holy fools, madmen or idiots (SNF 388). The link, Foucault observes, runs throughout Flaubert’s fiction, connecting Charles Bovary to Félicité, to Bouvard and Pécuchet, and to Anthony whose wish is to be annihilated in pure matter (Flaubert 2001: xliii).
- 50.
“The Analytical language of John Wilkins”, SNF 231. Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things opens with an allusion to the impossible Chinese taxonomy of animals in the Borges piece (Foucault 1970: xv). On the Borges-Foucault intertext, see O’Sullivan 109–121.
- 51.
Quoted in The Courage of Truth: Foucault (2012: 171).
- 52.
The 1992 edition of La Croisade des enfants (The Children’s Crusade) carries a preface by Borges. On the recent renewal of interest in Schwob , see Berg (2007).
- 53.
Borges’s original title is Historia universal de la infamia. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni translates “infamia” as “infamy” (Dutton, 1972), and Andrew Hurley as “iniquity” (CF 1). However, since “Infamy” retains the wordplay with “fame” or lack thereof (both in the case of the protagonists and of the author, who was still far from famous in 1935), I use the words “infamy” and “infamous” throughout this section.
- 54.
Schwob’s intertext, especially Le Roi au masque d’or, was first pointed out by writer and translator Roger Caillois in his “Translator’s postface” (Borges 1971). See Caillois (1973: 29–32) and Levine (1973: 24). The Autobiographical Essay of 1970 indirectly admitted the filiation: “En Infamia no quería repetir lo que hizo Marcel Schwob en sus Vidas imaginarias”. See Zonana (2000: 675). Later still, Borges chose Imaginary Lives as one of his hundred favorite books in his Personal Library, acknowledging it as a source for History of Infamy: OC IV: 601.
- 55.
According to Bernès, Borges re-read Schwob and Remy de Gourmont just before his death: OCP I, 1484.
- 56.
OCP I, 1483–1484.
- 57.
Schwob (1990). On the Stevenson-Schwob intertext, see Kleingut de Abner 265–271.
- 58.
Kleingut de Abner 89, 137.
- 59.
Schwob published a study of slang and Villon; Borges was drawn to milongas and lunfardo.
- 60.
Schwob translated works by Stevenson, Oscar Wilde , De Quincey, DeFoe, among others (Lhermitte 32; Viegnes 244). On Schwob’s passionate relationship to books, see Stead 29–49.
- 61.
“They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men”, Borges wrote in the Preface to the 1954 edition (CF 4). On hypertextuality and rewriting in Schwob, see Lhermitte, especially 25–144.
- 62.
“Los señores Burke y Hare (asesinos)”, September 1933; “El Capitán Kid”, October 1933; “La muerta que escuchó la queja de la hermana enamorada”, December 1933; “El incendiario”, January 1934; “Petronio no se abrió las venas”, March 1934. All published in Revista Multicolor: García (2011).
- 63.
Levine (1973: 25).
- 64.
These features can be traced further back to Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, one of Schwob’s main models: Salha (2015).
- 65.
OC IV: 156.
- 66.
Schwob (1924: 20).
- 67.
The “Capsule Biographies” were written in the late thirties, directly after the Infamy narratives, and published in the magazine El Hogar. A selection is included in SNF 153–173.
- 68.
Lucretius, Petronius, Cecco Angiolieri, Gabriel Spenser, and Cyril Tourneur. Schwob owned a copy of Vasari’s Lives in English translation: Lhermitte 110. On the Vasari-Schwob intertext, see Lhermitte 105–110. On the dialogue with Paul Valéry’s essay on Da Vinci, see Jullien (1996: 263–275).
- 69.
On the artist-criminal comparison, and on the image of the biographer as counterfeiter, see Salha (2015) and Christ 129–130.
- 70.
On the sustained 1001 Nights analogy, see Kleingut de Abner 163–168.
- 71.
Lhermitte 126.
- 72.
Rabaté analyzes the lives of marginals in the context of Decadent imagination (184). Kleingut de Abner connects Schwob’s predilection for marginal protagonists both to Villon’s celebration of low-lives in his slang ballads, and to the marginalization of Jews at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (33–43).
- 73.
“Crates , Cynic ” shares the motif of the young and beautiful patrician woman who falls in love and renounces everything to follow the ascetic’s way of life to the bitter end. Schwob’s portrayal differs significantly from historical accounts. According to those, he was of noble birth, highly educated, and he eventually adopted a violent view of religion, leading a guerilla-like existence in the hills of Piedmont, plundering villages and killing villagers in the name of saint Paul (Pierce 2012). By contrast, Schwob’s Fra Dolcino is a hippie avant la lettre, a humble and gentle soul, naïvely attached to a childhood memory: “He asked that they should not be stripped, but burned in their white mantles, like the apostles on the lamp-shade in the refectory of the Franciscans” (114). On Schwob’s use of Franciscan sources, see Fabre 217–219.
- 74.
Fra Dolcino and his martyred Order of Apostles became icons of the revolutionary left in Italy in the 1970s, celebrated by Nobel prize-winning playwright Dario Fo in his Mistero Buffo. Schwob’s imaginary biography is also a key hypotext for Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose: Cornille 298.
- 75.
Tacitus 385–386. Emphasizing the story’s sensationalism, Borges translated the title as “Petronius did not open his veins” (Kleingut de Abner 280).
- 76.
Schwob 93; translation modified.
- 77.
Another quixotic hero is Major Stede Bonnett, who becomes a pirate after reading too many piratical adventures: “Nearly every evening he called his servants together under a grain shed to read them stories of the great exploits achieved by the pirates of Hispaniola or Turtle Island” (235). In his prologue to Imaginary Lives, Borges compares Schwob himself to Don Quixote , the “enchanted reader” (“maravillado lector”): OC IV: 601.
- 78.
Book VI is devoted to Crates , with Chapters 6 and 7 devoted to his disciple Metrocles and his wife Hipparchia . Schwob’s life of Empedocles is also based on Diogenes Laertius . Borges’s claim that Schwob wrote about historical characters of whom almost nothing is known is not correct in this case: Zonana 680.
- 79.
Borrowed from Diogenes Laertius , VI, 5, 87.
- 80.
Ashamed of his pathological flatulency, Metrocles wanted to die. In order to comfort him, Crates ate a large quantity of lupins, then “broke wind in the presence of his disciple and asserted that nature subjected all men to the same evil (…) Then he farted some more, took Metrocles by the hand, and led him away”. Translation mine. Lorimer Hammond censors this passage of Schwob’s text, which is based on Diogenes Laertius, VI, 6, 94. On Diogenes’s shamelessness, see Sloterdijk 167–169.
- 81.
Crates beating relatives come to take him home, insulting prostitutes, humiliating Alexander, or abusing fellow Athenians: Diogenes Laertius , VI, 5, 88–92.
- 82.
Diogenes Laertius VI, 7, 98.
- 83.
On hagiography and personal myth in Schwob’s renunciant characters, see Lhermitte 328.
- 84.
Hipparchia resembles the saintly heroines of Schwob’s Livre de Monelle, while Crates , a Greek Cynic turned sacrificial saint, recalls the Indian king in the earlier story “Le Dom” (published in Cœur double in 1891) who renounces his palace and his family, Buddha-like, for an ascetic life of unimaginable squalor and pain: Fabre (2006: 37–52).
- 85.
Lhermitte 493.
- 86.
Crates’s doctrinal legacy boils down to a handful of sayings, passed down in anecdotal form; the ancient Cynic tradition in general contained very few texts and a rudimentary doctrinal framework: Foucault (2012: 202).
- 87.
Foucault (2012: 181). On Peregrinus and the bridge between ancient Cynics and early Christian ascetics, see also France 18–19.
- 88.
Foucault (2012: 182–185).
- 89.
“Borges ou le voyant” (Borges, or the seer), first given as a lecture at Harvard on 14 October 1987, collected and published posthumously in En pèlerin et en étranger. Essais (Yourcenar 1989: 233–261).
- 90.
Halley 185–189.
- 91.
Yourcenar translated from English, ancient and modern Greek, and Japanese: Barbier 12.
- 92.
Yourcenar’s father, Michel de Crayencour, sponsored the publication of her first two books of poetry, helped her invent her anagrammatic pen name, and gave her his own abandoned novel to rewrite (Savigneau 53, 59–60). On Borges’s complex relationship to his father’s literary ambitions, in particular to the novel El caudillo, which he also contemplated rewriting, see Rodríguez Monegal 79–84.
- 93.
On Yourcenar’s censorship, destruction or rewriting of early texts, see Yourcenar (1984: 188), Allamand 169 and Vázquez de Parga 99.
- 94.
As examples of generative motifs Golieth lists Borges’s epiphanic experience “Feeling in Death” (SNF 324) and Yourcenar’s quasi-mythical lost draft Remous (on which also Savigneau 62–63): 173–174.
- 95.
Yourcenar (1984: 202).
- 96.
Vásquez de Parga 102.
- 97.
Postscript, Yourcenar (1990: 145). On the popularity of Chinese stories at the time, from Malraux to Pearl Buck and Hergé, see Lescart 21.
- 98.
See Allamand 12 on prefaces that obstruct access to text. A majority of critics have taken Yourcenar’s assertion about the Daoist fable at face value: Laude 83; Vásquez de Parga 100; Julien 120; Zhu 1282; Grassi 75, and Song 85. Conversely, only a few have taken a critical distance toward Yourcenar’s assertion, recognizing the source as (pseudo-) Japanese.
- 99.
Hearn 1901: 37–54. Hearn’s Orientalist retelling of his sparser source-text, fellow novelist Kôsai Ishikawa’s Yasô Kidan (published in translation as Ghost stories for the Night Lecture in 1894), included embellishments that found their way into Yourcenar’s tale, such as the noise made by the oars of the approaching boat: Inaga 117–120. Inaga’s finding is referenced in Hayashi 247, Zhang 316, and Lescart 22.
- 100.
On the rewriting of the Ma Liang legend, see Zhang 316–320, Lescart 22 and Song 85–92.
- 101.
The last one was included for its artist theme, despite not being Oriental (Yourcenar 147). Painters and painting feature prominently in other Yourcenar stories from the Thirties: Terneuil 54.
- 102.
Kris and Kurz 47, 95, 127–128. The Japanese translator of Kris and Kurz’s book, Hiroshi Oonishi, compiled Japanese artist anecdotes in an appendix to his translation, published in 1989: Inaga 120.
- 103.
Laude 84.
- 104.
Balzac (2001: 13).
- 105.
Inaga 122. On the sacrificial structure of the romantic artist story and the rivalry between creation and procreation, see also Jullien (1992: 293–296).
- 106.
Zhu 1282.
- 107.
Chinese painting is conceived in quasi-mystical terms, as the revelation of secrets (Cheng 226; quoted in Julien 124).
- 108.
Zhu 1282.
- 109.
Filaire 66.
- 110.
Filaire (61–63) reads the ending as a euphemistic death narrative. Naturally the children’s version, which also leaves out Ling’s sacrificial wife, is more like a fairy tale, with illustrations evoking the playful magic of Harold and the Purple Crayon.
- 111.
Mun-yol 123.
- 112.
Howard 81.
- 113.
Only later, in her American career, would she take active positions on Civil Rights, the Vietnam War and environmental causes: Barbier 9–10.
- 114.
Lescart 28.
- 115.
On the intertwining of modern Korean literature and its sociopolitical context, see Fulton 628.
- 116.
The Author’s preface acknowledged the similarities as a motivation: Mun-yol xiv. The belated encounter between Yi Mun-yol and his North Korean half-brother is the subject of the memoir An Appointment with my Brother (1994).
- 117.
On this sin and its resemblance to the original sin of Catholicism, a religion introduced into Korean culture via the Jesuit missionaries in China, see Mun-yol ix.
- 118.
All the more since Mun-yol’s earlier novel, Our Twisted Hero, a semi-autobiographical story about the rise and fall of a small-town bully, was meant to be understood as an allegory of Korea’s political history: Suh 727. On Yi Mun-yol’s pessimistic view of society, see Riotto 534–535.
- 119.
In premodern times poetry was the measure of an educated man, professionally and personally. It conferred tangible class benefits. A mastery of poetry, acquired through years of arduous schooling, was essential for government office and hence was tested in the civil service exam that granted admission to the ranks of the scholar-bureaucrat literati who administered the nation. The composition of poetry was an omnipresent recreational activity among men, with public displays of virtuosity and impromptu challenges (Fulton 625; 630).
- 120.
This stranger turns out to be Noh Jin, another political outcast. See note 124. Noh Jin returns a second time, twenty years later, to condemn the Poet’s “popular” poetry, which expresses support for his grandfather’s actions, thus aggravating the double bind that ensnares Kim.
- 121.
On han as the Korean counterpart to Western tragedy, see the translators’ introduction, x–xi.
- 122.
Koh 644–645.
- 123.
This double renunciation echoes the earlier semi-autobiographical trilogy, A Portrait of my Youth (1981), which chronicles an adolescent’s identity search outside the family structure: Koh 646.
- 124.
Confucius’s Analects advise that when the emperor is unjust, the just man should desist: “A great minister serves his ruler by means of the Way, and if he can’t, he will quit” (Confucius 11:22). Noh Jin is another victim of the unjust political system: because he comes from the historically rebellious northwestern region, he is not even allowed to compete in the public examinations, and makes a miserable living as a wandering teacher (66). On Noh Jin’s scathing criticism of Kim, see Note 120.
- 125.
That this liberation is in no way guilt-free is symbolized by the bamboo hat, which serves to shield the Poet from the weather but also from his guilt at abandoning his family (104–105).
- 126.
This occurs after the poetry contest (70), when he leaves his family (125), when he finally cuts emotional ties to his grandfather (162). See Fulton 628 on the omnipresent theme of confinement, whether physical, spiritual, political, or psychological, in Korean literature.
- 127.
On scholar-renouncers in the Chinese cultural context, and on the topical emperor-renouncer relations, see Yongjia 7–15.
- 128.
Translators’ introduction, xi.
- 129.
Like Kim Sakkat, Borges’s poet refined his art from a perfectly crafted product in the rhetorical tradition of the kenningar to the “startling opacity” of a magic spell: Heller-Roazen 43.
- 130.
Posnock 375. Martin (1912–2004) left the circle of Abstract Impressionists in New York City as her career was taking off, renouncing painting for seven years to become a hermit in New Mexico. Only then did she start painting again, in her signature ascetic style that is rather a kind of painterly meditation.
- 131.
Martin, who attended Suzuki’s seminar in the early Fifties, practiced daily meditation, and retained a lifelong interest in Buddhism, Taoism and Christian mysticism (Posnock 367).
- 132.
Posnock 367.
- 133.
Posnock 78.
- 134.
Sontag 295–296; quoted in Posnock 134.
- 135.
Posnock 135, applied to Duchamp and Rimbaud. Also see Posnock reading Blanchot reading Rimbaud, linking Rimbaud’s renunciation to the mystical goal he ascribed to poetry (18).
- 136.
Both reasons are argued by Nichanian 7–8.
- 137.
Borges also notes the retrospective affinity of “Bartleby the Scrivener” with Kafka’s tales: “Kafka’s work casts a curious ulterior light on ‘Bartleby’” (ibid.).
- 138.
Posnock 175.
- 139.
“25 August 1983” stages a dialogue between a younger, more ambitious “Borges” and an older, sadder “Borges” who has committed suicide, renouncing his unfinished book and his life. “Blue Tigers” is analyzed in Chapter 4.
- 140.
Although “Shakespeare’s Memory” was not the last story published (it appeared in 1980), Borges later decided to put the story in final place, using its title for the entire volume, clearly giving it prominence and closure. On the compositional history of the final collection, see OCP II: 1444–1446.
- 141.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Borges’s deathbed story pays homage to his favorite Kipling story, “The Finest Story in the World”.
- 142.
This alludes to Victor Hugo, who called Shakespeare “un homme-océan” at the beginning of William Shakespeare (12, 159). On Borges’s reworking of Hugo’s genius myth, see Jullien (1995: 145–152).
- 143.
The poem “Herman Melville” connects the ocean metaphor with the idea of literary archetypes: “that other ocean, which is Writing, and… the outline of the archetypes” (SP 377).
- 144.
Compare the conclusion to the famous essay “A New Refutation of Time”: “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges” (SNF 332).
- 145.
The two texts were positioned side by side in PA (115, 118).
- 146.
See Novillo-Corvalán 2008 on the interface between Borges’s Shakespeare parables, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Romantic myths of Shakespeare, in particular Coleridge.
- 147.
Posnock 16.
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Jullien, D. (2019). From Ascetic to Poet: Poetic Renunciation. In: Borges, Buddhism and World Literature. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04717-7_3
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