Borges on Writing

“When writers die they become books" -Borges

In a short essay titled Borges and I, the Argentinian writer reflected on his “two selves”. One of them was himself. The other, a famous author known as Borges.

“I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him. (…) Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page. “

It’s a striking meditation on the nature of the writer’s work. In a sense he creates an image of himself in and through his writing, one which will achieve a kind of immortality or posterity. As Borges joked, “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

Here we can identify two of Borges’ enduring obsessions, and indeed fears: mirrors and labyrinths. There’s a great story about how Borges, as a child, visited a house of mirrors. And in that moment he realized that two mirrors could create an infinite labyrinth from which there was no escape. For Borges, the two are always connected: the mirror is a source of both fear and wonder, with the labyrinth as its impossible localization. It’s a theme that continued to haunt Borges -very fruitfully, one might say- for the rest of his life.

Indeed, Borges once wrote that he suffered from a recurring nightmare in which he was alone in a room with a mirror. When he looked in the mirror, he saw that his reflection was wearing a mask. As he put it, “I see myself reflected in a mirror, but the reflection is wearing a mask. I am afraid to pull the mask off, afraid to see my real face, which I imagine to be hideous. There may be leprosy or evil, or something more terrible than anything I am capable of imagining.”

In another version of the dream he takes off the mask, revealing yet another mask underneath. The scariest part isn’t what lies underneath the mask, but rather the idea that the masks could be infinitely redoubled. Here we have once again the theme of the house of mirrors. What if the true horror is that there is nothing underneath the mask, just more masks?

As the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič has pointed out, the existential dread incurred by an encounter with one’s double is therefore never about a competition between the two. Rather, the emergence of a Doppelgänger always create an ontological insecurity within the subject as such. I.e. “What if the fake is not you, but me?”“ The mirroring opens up an abyss, not between two figures, but within the solitary subject as such. Or, to put it in Freudian terms, we have here the uncanny discovery that what seems familiar is suddenly alien to us.

The mirror is also the site of a disembodied gaze. It can feel like a mirror is watching us. As Borges put it in a poem titled “mirrors”:

The glass is watching us. And if a mirror
hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room,
I am not alone. There's an other, a reflection
which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show.

(…)

I have been horrified before all mirrors
not just before the impenetrable glass,
the end and the beginning of that space,
inhabited by nothing but reflections

And yet the Borgesian “spectrophobia” is not just a problem, but -in a sense- its own solution. The only way to neutralize the gaze of the mirror is to put another mirror in front of it. I like to think that for Borges the act of writing was a way of taking control of his own reflection, bending it to his will. If there was no escaping the mirror’s gaze, then what if one could trap the mirror in it’s own recurrent gaze? The act of writing was a way to to overcome, and take control of his fears. By playing the role of “Borges, the writer”, he became his own double, and the double became him.

I think that everyone, to some extent, experiences this. We realize that who we are to others differs from who we are to ourselves. And we have to find ways of reconciling ourselves with the fact that we can be different people in different situations. As the cliché goes, we contain multitudes. But it also means that we can choose the roles we play, we can choose the masks we wear. And perhaps there’s something liberating about the idea that there is no ‘true' self. In fact, that we can create a version of ourselves, “a double”, that serves us.

As Borges put it, the “task of art” is therefore to take the stuff of life and transform it into something else. This is an unending task, and yet one which grants us meaning and purpose.

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours.”

This means that creativity allows us to tap into a kind of infinity of our own making. It allows us to confer upon the contingencies of our lives the dignity of our own necessity. Everything that happens to us, both the good and the bad, can make its way into our work. Moreover, this “project” or “task” allows us to really access life in a more meaningful way. We live to create, and we create to live. The promise of art is therefore that it liberates us from our finitude, not because we expect to be remembered, but because we live without-time in the perpetual present of our work.

This, then, is true immortality. Not to live forever, but to to have something worth living for.

Julian

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