Jorge Luis Borges

The Borges magic. If you'd been to the first Charles Eliot Norton lecture, you were under the spell again in four seconds. If the second lecture was your first, it took a minute longer.

Jorge Luis Borges is 68 and has been publishing poetry, "fictions," and essays since the early twenties. North American readers have discovered the Argentine's magic only in the last few years. The international audience began gathering in 1961, when Borges and Samuel Beckett shared the International Publishers' Prize.

To speak of Borges as the greatest Argentine writer, or as one of the greatest Hispanic writers, is inadequate. While criticized for neglecting the national characteristics of Argentina, Borges addresses himself to universal concerns and achieves universal appeal. His South American background contributes to the amalgam of literatures and cultures of which Borges is the timeless, placeless hybrid.

Harvard audiences have heard Borges recite Latin, French and German extemporaneously and translate all into flawless English. He quotes as readily from The Divine Comedy as from Beowulf. He has taught graduate students Anglo-Saxon, lectured at the University of Texas, made a hobby of Old Norse poetry and extended his metaphysical range to Egypt to Arabia to China.

Educated in Geneva and Spain, Borges, as John Barth notes, "seems to have read almost everything." His lectures and writings are scholarly without being bookish. (He deprecates "Cyclical Light," an early poem, as "priggish." "Of course I was young when I wrote it. I had to work in all those Greek names.") The broad background frames but never inhibits his intelligent, singular and personal world. Robert Lowell, introducing the fantast at a reading Wednesday night, called Borges' work amid that of other writers "always an oasis in a sea of competence."

The spell Borges generates in person with directness and simplicity is felt by the reader entering his fiction. A representative invention, "The Circular Ruins," begins:

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the Zend tongue is not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent.

The bizarre concreteness of this alien reality seduces us to accept the fantasy. The convincing stylistic precision restrains the unreal reality from becoming nonsense. In the next paragraph we become involved in the magician who works to dream a man and "insert him into reality" and who later learns that he himself is "a mere appearance, dreamt by another." Borges has taken us from reality to illusion without our awareness of the change.

The essence of life and the universe to Borges is an inexplicable maze, a labyrinth: "I have only my perplexities to offer you. I am nearing seventy, I have given the major part of my life to literature, and I can only offer you--doubts." He values the innumerable philosophies that he knows, not as solutions to the enigma--for it is not solvable--but as esthetically enjoyable constructs.

"Attracted by metaphysics, but accepting no system as true," according to Andre Maurois, "Borges makes out of all of them a game for the mind." In the chaos of the universe, the power of the imagination becomes the important thing. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Terris," a beneficent secret society of scholars formulates, over three centuries, an imaginary planet. The 40-volume encyclopedia describing Tlon--man's most vast undertaking--is discovered in a Memphis, Tenn., library in 1944. Tlon contains a "doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death" and has a word for "the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed." The system's imaginative power allows it to replace the real world--to imagine itself into existence. The whole universe might be a dream which might be dispelled at any moment.

Borges speaks of "the advantage of briefness." He sees no need to bore himself with writing an entire book "to develop an idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes." His fictions seldom exceed 10 pages. He calls them "footnotes" to hypothetical books, since he believes in "the certitude that everything has been written." Rediscovery and rearrangement, not "originality," are his objects. In the second Norton lecture Borges assured his audience that the world will never suffer a shortage of metaphors, even though they can all be classified in some ancient, fundamental pattern. As with a kaleidoscope, a limited number of basic elements has an almost infinite number of combinations.

Every reader, Borges believes, can see himself clearly and momentarily in the mirror of the book, each receiving a different reflection. The function of his art is to provide this brief personal insight.

No man has a fixed identity, despite such flashes of clarity. In the parable "Everything and Nothing," Borges describes Shakespeare exhausting all the guises of reality, unable to perceive any "fundamental identity of existing." The last paragraph imagines the playwright's final awareness:

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself." The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one."