How Borges Wrote

Daniel Balderston

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813939643
• eBook ISBN: 9780813939650
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process through the marks he left on paper.

Balderston has consulted over 170 manuscripts and primary documents to reconstruct the creative process by which Borges arrived at his final published texts. How Borges Wrote is organized around the stages of his writing process, from notes on his reading and brainstorming sessions to his compositional notebooks, revisions to various drafts, and even corrections in already-published works. The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Borges's manuscripts, allowing the reader to see clearly how he revised and "thought" on paper. The manuscripts studied include many of Borges's most celebrated stories and essays--"The Aleph," "Kafka and His Precursors," "The Cult of the Phoenix," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Emma Zunz," and many others--as well as lesser known but important works such as his 1930 biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego.

As the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borges's creative process, this will become a definitive work for all scholars who wish to trace how Borges wrote.

1

Reading

Estos ejemplos, que al azar de mis lecturas he ido anotando, podrían, sin mayor diligencia, multiplicarse . . .

EVARISTO CARRIEGO

One of the most notable features of Borges’s manuscripts, particularly those of his essays and lectures, is the profusion of bibliographical references in the left margin; these are sometimes rather cryptic due to a system of abbreviations. Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez crack some of this code in the introduction to Borges, libros y lecturas, in which they list a number of these abbreviations (32–33). Their transcribed annotations connect in a tight system with the notes in the left margin of the manuscripts, so that, for instance, in the manuscript of a lecture on Buddhism from 1950 (published by Alicia Jurado in Borges, el budismo y yo), the reference to “Garbe 327” (figs. 21, A36) on page 10 of the manuscript (page 45 of the book) connects to a reference in the second volume of Garbe’s Die Samkhya-Philosophie: Eine Darstellung des Indischen Rationalismus (Rosato and Álvarez 149). Similarly “Garbe 387” (45), a reference to an empty mirror that Borges compares in the margin to 1 Corinthians 13:12 (Paul’s “through a glass darkly”) also appears in Rosato and Álvarez (149). There are also references that are internal to Borges’s own works, as can be seen on page 17 (52 of the published version) of the same manuscript (figs. 22, A37). Here the reference to the famous (but perhaps apocryphal) Heraclitus fragment and the quotation from Plutarch had already appeared in the plaquette version of “Nueva refutación del tiempo” (1947), as had the quotation from the Camino de la pureza (see Obras completas 763, 770, 771). He has not checked the quotations again against some original, satisfied that he got them right the first time. The books represented in Rosato and Álvarez were just a fraction of the books in which Borges wrote—they are currently working on a second volume, and then perhaps there will be a third—but the sample is sufficient to confirm exactly how Borges used his reading in his writing.

Fig. 21. References to Garbe’s Die Samkhya-Philosophie, from manuscript of a lecture on Buddhism from 1950 (see fig. A36).

Fig. 22. Reference to Borges’s own “Nueva refutación del tiempo,” from manuscript of a lecture on Buddhism from 1950 (see fig. A37).

The system of work was as follows, then: when Borges read a book he would note down the page reference and a few words of a quotation in the original language, or occasionally write a brief paraphrase, and when he was writing something he would check the quotation for precision, rendering it into Spanish or paraphrasing it.

“Sobre el ‘Vathek’ de William Beckford” (“On William Beckford’s Vathek”)

I will start with an example from one of the less-studied essays in Otras inquisiciones, Borges’s most important collection of essays (published in 1952). An example of a textual beginning—what rhetoric (and later genetic criticism) calls an “incipit”¹—is the first sentence of the essay “Sobre el ‘Vathek’ de William Beckford” (1943), a text remembered mostly for the boutade that in the case of the Beckford novel, “el original es infiel a la traducción” (732; the original is unfaithful to the translation [Selected Non-Fictions 239]). The essay begins: “Wilde atribuye la siguiente broma a Carlyle: una biografía de Miguel Ángel que omitiera toda mención de las obras de Miguel Ángel” (729; Wilde attributes this joke to Carlyle: a biography of Michelangelo that would make no mention of the works of Michelangelo [Selected Non-Fictions 236]). With the help of Rosato and Álvarez, it is possible to find the precise source: they note that Borges writes at the end of the 1935 Boni edition of The Essays of Oscar Wilde the following brief phrase: “Carlyle once . . . 373” (fig. 23).

Fig. 23. Transcription and image of Borges’s marginalia in The Essays of Oscar Wilde, from Rosato and Álvarez’s Borges, libros y lecturas.

Rosato and Álvarez transcribe from page 373 the following words from Wilde’s essay “Coleridge’s Life”: “Carlyle once proposed in jest to write a life of Michael Angelo without making any reference to his art, and Mr. Caine has shown that such a project is perfectly feasible” (353), from a commentary on the biography of Coleridge published by Hall Caine in 1887. In the Borges essay another biography is at stake: that of William Beckford by Guy Chapman, published by Scribner’s in 1937, which does indeed lack an extended discussion of the novel Vathek, as Borges states in his essay, though it includes passing references to the book. Borges’s essay, after the opening reference to Carlyle, continues:

Tan compleja es la realidad, tan fragmentaria y tan simplificada la historia, que un observador omnisciente podría redactar un número indefinido, y casi infinito, de biografías de un hombre, que destacan hechos independientes y de las que tendríamos que leer muchas antes de comprender que el protagonista es el mismo. Simplifiquemos desaforadamente una vida: imaginemos que la integran trece mil hechos. Una de las hipotéticas biografías registraría la serie 11, 22, 33 . . . ; otra, la serie 9, 13, 17, 21 . . . ; otra, la serie 3, 12, 21, 30, 39. . . . No es inconcebible una historia de los sueños de un hombre; otra, de los órganos de su cuerpo; otra, de las falacias cometidas por él; otra, de todos los momentos en que se imaginó las pirámides; otra, de su comercio con la noche y con las auroras. Lo anterior puede parecer meramente quimérico; desgraciadamente, no lo es. Nadie se resigna a escribir la biografía literaria de un escritor, la biografía militar de un soldado; todos prefieren la biografía genealógica, la biografía económica, la biografía psiquiátrica, la biografía quirúrgica, la biografía tipográfica. (729)

(So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we could have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same. Let us greatly simplify, and imagine that a life consists of 13,000 facts. One of the hypothetical biographies would record the series 11, 22, 33 . . . ; another, the series 9, 13, 17, 21 . . . ; another, the series 3, 12, 21, 30, 39. . . . A history of a man’s dreams is not inconceivable; another, of the organs of his body; another, of the mistakes he made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of his dealings with the night and with the dawn. The above may seem merely fanciful, but unfortunately it is not. No one today resigns himself to writing the literary biography of an author or the military biography of a soldier; everyone prefers the genealogical biography, the economic biography, the psychiatric biography, the surgical biography, the typographical biography.) (Selected Non-Fictions 237)²

This connects to the comments on the paradoxes of writing biographies that can be found at the beginning of the second chapter of Evaristo Carriego in 1930: “Que un individuo quiera despertar en otro individuo recuerdos que no pertenecieron más que a un tercero, es una paradoja evidente. Ejecutar con despreocupación esa paradoja, es la inocente voluntad de toda biografía” (113; That an individual should want to awake in another some memories that belong only to a third is an obvious paradox. To fulfill this paradox casually is the innocent desire of every biography).³ That is to say, Borges has a deep and long-lasting concern with how to write a life, in his essays as well as in his stories.

The reference to Carlyle forms part of a series of quotations. It is not found in the published works of Carlyle but rather in the diary of William Allingham (unpublished until 1907, but obviously available to some readers in the years before); it also appears in the biography of John McNeill Whistler by Joseph and Elizabeth R. Pennell (1908); in these sources it is clear that Carlyle was not jesting.⁴ Borges simply repeats (and translates) Wilde’s comment on Carlyle’s “jest.”

An examination of Borges’s sources will often point beyond the immediate context of the words quoted because the quotation indicates an interest in other series of textual details that are also pertinent to the interpretation of Borges’s texts. In this case it is worth noting that the section of the Wilde book in this particular collection is a series of brief reviews that Wilde wrote about recent biographies: of Ben Jonson, Longfellow, Coleridge, Dickens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,⁵ and George Sand, the majority of them published in the Great Writers series funded by Walter Scott (1826–1910), not the Scottish novelist but an industrialist in Newcastle upon Tyne who founded a publishing house intended to bring the classics to readers of modest means. Wilde’s opinions about the series tend to be negative. With regard to the biography of Coleridge, he writes: “for all that, it is not the real Coleridge, it is not Coleridge the poet” (372). He continues:

The incidents of the life are duly recounted; the gunpowder plot at Cambridge, the egg-hot and oronokoo at the little tavern in Newgate Street, the blue coat and white waistcoat that so amazed the worthy Unitarians, and the terrible smoking experiment at Birmingham are all carefully chronicled, as no doubt they should be in every popular biography, but of the spiritual progress of the man’s soul we hear absolutely nothing. Never for one single instant are we brought near to Coleridge; the magic of that wonderful personality is hidden from us by a cloud of mean details, an unholy jungle of facts, and the “critical history” promised to us by Mr. Walter Scott in his unfortunate preface is conspicuous only by its absence. (372–73)

This is followed by the paragraph that opens: “Carlyle once proposed in jest to write a life of Michael Angelo without making any reference to his art, and Mr. Caine has shown that such a project is perfectly feasible.” Wilde continues:

He has written the life of a great peripatetic philosopher and chronicled only the peripatetics. He has tried to tell us about a poet, and his book might be the biography of the famous tallow-chandler who would not appreciate the Watchman. The real events of Coleridge’s life are not his gig excursions and his walking tours; they are his thoughts, dreams and passions, his moments of creative impulse, their source and secret, his moods of imaginative joy, their marvel and their meaning, and not his moods merely but the music and the melancholy that they brought him; the lyric loveliness of his voice when he sang, the sterile sorrow of the years when he was silent. (373)

What is notable here is Wilde’s insistence on the inner life of the creator. This can be related to Borges’s strategies in the essay on Beckford, which accounts for Beckford’s life in part of a sentence—“William B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Reading
• 2 Jottings
• 3 Notebooks
• 4 Possibilities
• 5 Copies
• 6 Typescripts
• 7 Revisions
• 8 Fragments
• Appendix 1: Manuscripts Consulted
• Appendix 2: Facsimiles with Transcriptions
• Appendix 3: Facsimile Pages Excerpted in Text
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Illustration Credits
• Index