as ‘think pieces’, tales about ideas rather than people. The volume contained several chapters of other valuable insights and observations, including one which comprised a perfect discussion of the philosophical basis of so much of Borges’s work.
Yet oddly the book was peppered with misconceptions and strange little inaccuracies that turned some of its arguments comic. At one point, to illustrate a particular thesis, the volume cited a four-page tale from Borges’s first fictional work, A Universal History of Infamy, claiming that the piece was ‘loosely derived from the Arabic’ and that it was ‘one of Borges’s earliest inventions’. But the story was not by Borges at all. While indeed a similar tale figures in an Arabian collection, the one borrowed by Borges here was an almost straight transcription from the medieval text of the Spanish infante Don Juan Manuel. As it turned out, Borges deliberately chose the story and put it into his own collection for the simple reason that as narrative – as the kind of imaginative narrative he was to make his hallmark – it was a better piece of work than he was then, in the early 1930s, capable of writing. That, it seems to me, is the point that should have been made.
Elsewhere in the same study, discussing another of the tales from A Universal History of Infamy, the author got a more serious detail wrong. Citing a lead given him by an American Borges commentator, Ronald Christ, the author states that Borges’s version of the Tichborne claimant story was derived from an account of it in Philip Gosse’s History of Piracy. It is difficult to comprehend what place the story of the great swindle of Victorian times, involving a noted old Catholic family and the supposed return of their long-lost son, could possibly have in a survey of buccaneers. I once pointed out to Christ that his interpretation had been based not on a reading of Gosse but on an error committed by an Argentine typesetter who, in a reprint of the Historia universal de la infamia, misplaced the linotype slug that accurately credits the source of the Tichborne story to the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Christ later acknowledged this in print and recounted how a simple printer’s error had led to what he called, poking fun at himself, ‘inevitable interpretive fictions’.
Some forty pages after first speaking of Gosse in the volume I reviewed, its author made the following full-blown reference to this same story, perpetrating yet another ‘inevitable interpretative fiction’:
As readers of Borges’ story we might … compare his Tichborne claimant with the original…. By comparison with Gosse, Borges’ story is the most blatant of fictions and all the more interesting for being so. He no more wants to imitate Gosse than Bogle [a character in the story] wants to imitate Roger Tichborne. On the other hand, it is Gosse’s story that we have to see as the ‘reality’ from which Borges’ translation departs…. The two versions vary in their circumstances, Borges having invented, for his purposes, quite different circumstances from those invented, or selected, by Philip Gosse.
While I was engaged in the translation of A Universal History of Infamy back in 1971, Borges made me a gift of several of the books he had used as source material when writing his tales. One of them was the Gosse volume, which had been utilized – quite logically – for a story about Chinese pirates. There is no connection or reference whatever in Gosse to the Tichborne affair, therefore I cannot even begin to speculate on what led the commentator to become so carried away by a text that does not exist. But then how typical of Borges, the sleight-of-hand master of bogus attributions and of texts that go missing, to subsume his interpreters in this way.
The story does not end there. In his notes to a 1998 compendium of Borges’s stories, Andrew Hurley – twenty-six years after Christ’s confession of error – could still claim in a statement that is a model of unclarity and equivocation that Gosse’s history is the source given by Borges, but ‘In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his “plays with sources”; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition….’ So much for Hurley’s scholarship and his insight into Borges’s mind. So much for the acumen of the Borges estate in specifying that Hurley’s compendium be based on a substandard edition of Borges’s works. So much for the competence of Borges’s Buenos Aires publisher. A mere glance by any of these at the original edition of the work in question would have been enough to correct the typographical error, set the record straight, and bring to an end decades of waffle and absurd supposition. In the preface to one of his story collections, Borges mocked a standard reference work ‘dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente’ – of which each new edition makes you yearn for the previous one. He laughed when we translated the passage and, with a tinge of sadness, added, ‘My complete works.’
My point is that these interpreters have been so cowed by Borges that rather than read what is there on the page with a bit of common sense they have instead been overly eager to intellectualize, to construct theories, to pit themselves against Borges in playing a far more complicated game than he ever intended. Blame for this to some extent can be laid to the fact that Borges is often studied in English, in poor translations, without reference to his Argentine roots. English-speaking critics, when they first came across Borges’s work in the early 1960s, appeared to believe that he had sprung from nowhere. Because his work drew on all Western (and Eastern) culture, his admirers often branded him a European writer. So did his detractors at home. Paradoxically, these virulent nationalists – because Borges refused to dabble in local colour, because he displayed maverick qualities such as a fondness for irony and subversion, because he thought for himself and was not afraid to speak his mind – could not see his profound roots in Argentine soil.2 My greatest discovery when I went to work with Borges in Buenos Aires was to find that his books could not have been written by anyone but an Argentine.
Down the years there has been an uncanny and unholy tendency in academic circles – American ones, in particular – to overinterpret. I suppose this came about for two reasons. One is because the grinders out of doctoral theses do not understand how writers write. As a result of the verbal fireworks perpetrated by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, they erroneously believe that the prose writer’s basic unit is the word, when in fact an author works in ideas, pages, paragraphs, or sentences, all guided by cadences – in short, a flow, a sweep, not a dribble. Towards the end of his life, Borges told a London audience that to him literature was made
Not just juggling with words. I try to forget the words and to say what I have to say perhaps not through the words but in spite of the words, and if a book is really good you forget the words.
A second reason for overinterpreting is that the academic, like the politician in office, must perpetuate himself in his position. Therefore, it has been a matter of interpreting or perishing, of putting every word under the microscope and finding the hidden fauna. In Borges exegesis this has often amounted to dwelling on single words and overloading them with significance.
A favourite anecdote about this brand of overloading concerns a private interview I once had with a professor at a Pennsylvania university. He was teaching a Borges story in English and asked me what the significance of the colour red was on the walls of a particular building in a certain Borges story. I imagine he wanted it confirmed that the hue stood for bloodshed and violence, thus foreshadowing the conclusion of the tale in question. Perhaps it did, though I doubt it. (Perhaps it even had a remote political significance, but I doubt that too.) For one thing, I always noted a concern in Borges not to give his endings away, a tendency that made him shun foreshadowing. Not to give their themes away when he attached epigraphs to at least two of his stories, he quoted no words but cited only the name, chapter, and verse of his sources.
Chagrined and disbelieving, my professor walked away when I told him that what Borges had described was the actual colour of an actual structure, one that belonged to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares.3 I knew the place, for once – when Borges was having marital difficulties – he and I had holed up there for a few days. The building, as was common in those parts, was simply red. I never got the chance to tell the professor that
