Paris Review - Jorge Luis Borges

BORGES

There's a book I must speak about—nothing unexpected about it—that book is Huckleberry Finn. I thoroughly dislike Tom Sawyer. I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn. All those silly jokes. They are all pointless jokes; but I suppose Mark Twain thought it was his duty to be funny even when he wasn't in the mood. The jokes had to be worked in somehow. According to what George Moore said, the English always thought: “Better a bad joke than no joke.”

I think that Mark Twain was one of the really great writers, but I think he was rather unaware of the fact. But perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes. I remember what Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and not more. Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless. He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it. In this country, though, there is a tendency to regard any kind of writing—especially the writing of poetry—as a game of style. I have known many poets here who have written well—very fine stuff—with delicate moods and so on—but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be kind of sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets or writers at all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them—except four or five, I should say—seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it. They take things for granted. They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic.

Paris Review - Jorge Luis Borges

BORGES

I describe. I write. Now as for the color yellow, there is a physical explanation of that. When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That's why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends . . . well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring. I said, “Yes, to you, but not to me, because it is the only color I can see, practically!” I live in a gray world, rather like the silver-screen world. But yellow stands out. That might account for it. I remember a joke of Oscar Wilde's: a friend of his had a tie with yellow, red, and so on in it, and Wilde said, Oh, my dear fellow, only a deaf man could wear a tie like that!

INTERVIEWER

He might have been talking about the yellow necktie I have on now.

BORGES

Ah, well. I remember telling that story to a lady who missed the whole point. She said, “Of course, it must be because being deaf he couldn't hear what people were saying about his necktie.” That might have amused Oscar Wilde, no?

INTERVIEWER

I'd like to have heard his reply to that.

BORGES

Yes, of course. I never heard of such a case of something being so perfectly misunderstood. The perfection of stupidity. Of course, Wilde's remark is a witty translation of an idea; in Spanish as well as English you speak of a “loud color.” A “loud color” is a common phrase, but then the things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever. If you think of life as a dream, that is a thought, a thought that is real, or at least that most men are bound to have, no? “What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.” I think that's better than the idea of shocking people, than finding connections between things that have never been connected before, because there is no real connection, so the whole thing is a kind of juggling.

La invención de Morel

Stevenson, hacia 1882, anotó que los lectores británicos desdeñaban un poco las peripecias y opinaban que era muy hábil redactar una novela sin argumento, o de argumento infinitesimal, atrofiado. José Ortega y Gasset - La deshumanización del arte, 1925 - trata de razonar el desdén anotado por Stevenson y estatuye en la página 96, que "es muy dificil que hoy quepa inventar una aventura capaz de interesar a nuestra sensibilidad superior", y en la 97, que esa invención "es praticamente imposible". En otras páginas, en casi todas las páginas, aboga por la novela "psicológica" y opina que el placer de las aventuras es inexistente o pueril. Tal es, sin duda, el común parecer de 1882, 1925 y aun de 1940. Algunos escritores (entre los que place contar a Adolfo Bioy Casares) creen razonable disentir.

Prólogo de Jorge Luis Borges ao livro de Adolfo Bioy Casares

As previsões de Sangiácomo

Agora o velho, para me fazer esquecer o desgosto de Pumita, quer meter-me em politica. O doutor Saporano, que é um homem muito sagaz, diz que ainda não sabe qual é o partido que me convém. Mas aposto consigo o que quiser que na próxima half-time obtenho um lugar no congresso.

As Noites de Goliadkin

Afinal de contas, que contributo deve o nosso século, criança blasée e de cabelos embranquecidos, ao cepticismo profundo de Anatole France e Júlio Dantas? Creia, meu caro Parodi, que todos sentimos a falta de uma certa dose de inocência e simplicidade.

Ficções

Ao cabo de nove ou dez noites compreendeu com certa amargura que nada podia esperar dos alunos que aceitavam passivamente a sua doutrina, mas sim dos que arriscavam, às vezes, uma contradição razoável. Os primeiros, embora dignos de amor e de afeição, não podiam elevar-se a indivíduos; os últimos preexistiam um pouco mais.