Borges' Classics

Borges's jubilant eclecticism has inspired an equally diverse scholarly response. Much of it could be characterized as a genre of “Borges and ...,” in which readers isolate one aspect of the oeuvre and, in many cases, bring to bear on Borges's writing an expertise that, in conventional terms, at least, exceeds Borges's own. Thus, consulting a bibliography of Borges Studies, we might begin to compose a catalogue: Borges and Latin America, Argentina, or Buenos Aires; Borges and modernism, mathematics, or metaphysics; Borges and philosophy (continental, analytic, or “literary,” not to mention individual philosophers such as Kant or Schopenhauer, Peirce or Plato); Borges and religion (Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, in dogmatic or heretical forms); Borges and space, visual art, and his predecessors or successors; and so on. As her own bibliography acknowledges, Laura Jansen's Borges' Classics is not the first to do Borges and the classics. Her expertise in scholarship on the Greek and Roman canon and her exposition of controversies and conventions of Classical Studies bring a unique perspective to the interpretation of an internationally celebrated author. Jansen's study focusses on those texts in which Borges alludes to classics, contending that these moments may be systematized into a “Borgesian classicism” that she qualifies as “global” or “cross-cultural.” This practice of reading classics not only shines light on these locos (comunes and inusitatos) and relates them to fairly commonplace interpretations of Borges's work, but also, Jansen argues, has the potential for reinvigorating study of classical antiquity.Borges' Classics begins by making the case that Borges's oeuvre offers “pioneering rereadings” of classics (3) and that these textual engagements constitute a coherent vision of classical antiquity, characterized by being “cross-cultural” (17), “ever-expansive and atopic” (21). Such an argument conflicts with interpretations of Borges that emphasize (and celebrate) Borges's use of literary, philosophical, and other subject matter in a sort of bricolage, indifferent to the truth value of the pieces he assembles, attending only to their combinatory possibilities and effects. No matter. Jansen's comprehensive collection of relevant passages show, as other readers have done with other motifs, a coherence in Borges's compositional principles and, with them, distinctively “Borgesian” ideas and values. What Jansen calls Borges's “physics of reading” certainly describes his approach to classics, highlighting the role of subjective agency in making sense of spatial and temporal heterogeneity and fragmentation, along with the inevitable impact of forgetting and historical and cultural relativity. Of course, Borges's “physics” applies to any reading and, in fact, to reality in general. But the focus on classics allows Jansen to call classicists—in chapter 1 and the later “Interlude” of chapter 6—to a style of interpretation and knowing that embraces connections to the myriad contexts in which Greek and Roman artifacts and traditions (historical, literary, mythological, etc.) appear and might yet appear. Although this may sound revolutionary to a classicist, attending to the “destabilizing” effects of temporal and cultural differences and reconfiguring “our (Western) mode of recollecting the past” have been a feature of the humanities at least since the rise of so-called “theory” in the 1960s.And Borges had a role in that event, as his work explores the meaning of identity and the proper name, the protocols of interpretation, and the authority of canonical texts and concepts. While Jansen acknowledges and discusses some of these theoretical issues, her readings in chapters 2 to 5 and in her discussion in chapter 7 of “Successors of Borges' Classicism” maintain a traditional approach to literary studies, uncovering a particular set of gestures and ideas attributable to the author named Borges. The results are informative and, at times, insightful, even surprising, both for what we may learn about Borges and for lessons about the classics. Chapter 2 argues that Borges adopts Heraclitus's understanding of time as flux and draws out the consequences for literary, historical, and cultural relationships to the past. Today, says Jansen, this conception of time can act as a “therapeutic alternative” to a search for a complete, definitive meaning for past events. Chapter 3 discusses the presence of Homer in Borges's oeuvre, as a key to understanding the “fluctuating identity” of literary figures we conventionally think of as belonging to the past. Not surprisingly, Homer did not live exclusively in the past, nor should we limit that proper name to one person, be he writer or reader, Greek or Argentine. Discussion of Virgil in Chapter 4 relates Borges's poetics, expounded in the prologue to La rosa profunda, to the Roman poet's evocation of the materiality of the text and the mysterious passage from knowledge to emotion. The lessons about Virgilian motifs of lenta manus and lacrimae rerum especially earned this reviewer's gratitude. The final chapter demonstrates—in discussions of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Derek Walcott—that Borges's “impact” includes a continuation of the characteristics of “Borges's global classicism,” as the three authors put into practice his vision of literary influence, show their appreciation of the role of classics in their composition and conceptualization of literature, and share his multicultural and multidisciplinary tastes and themes.To call this an exposition of Borges's “classicism” seems an overstatement. In fact, one of Jansen's copious bibliographic notes raises some doubts about Borges's bona fides as a classicist. In it, Jansen informs us that a fellow classics scholar has observed that what appears to be the fiction writer's “personal selection” of favorite Virgilian passages corresponds to traditionally favored motifs (93, no. 27). Perhaps Borges paid the price for his broad range of interests by sacrificing the specialized expertise we demand of institutionally sanctioned classicists. Although his poetry, essays, and fictions are a testament to a life spent in archives and at a desk, at literary tertulias and editorial meetings, they also bear witness to time spent on park benches and trains, taking walks and looking at stars, scenery, and monuments. As Jansen knows, it is odd but appropriate that a book about Borges should take on a theme that restricts our view in a way that opens his work out so widely (to nothing less than “the globe,” if not the universe), and that a study of Borges should become the self-characterization of an accomplished scholar and her discipline

Ancient history · Art · Literature · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Classics · History · Latin American Literature Analysis · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez