Borges, Second Edition: The Passion of an Endless Quotation

5. Borges and García Márquez: On How to Put Life into Words, and How to Recount Them

FIVE BORGES AND GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ On How to Put Life into Words, and How to Recount Them Dispersed in disperse capitals, Solitary and many, We placed at being the first Adam, Who gave things their names. —Jorge Luis Borges “Then,” he said, “the first thing a writer must write are his memories, when he is still able to remember everything.” —Gabriel García Márquez In part they are contemporaries; they share the same continent, the same language, the fervor of readers beyond number and an uncommon glory. Passionate readers themselves, these writers frequent similar readings in an equally prized library featuring the same authors: Cervantes and Faulkner, Quevedo and Conan Doyle, Alfonso Reyes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, good old ancestral dictionaries. They knew how to lavish military grandfathers with familiar references and epic affects, how to regale marveling mythic grandmothers with memories, with heroic episodes and quotidian anecdotes, all with a childlike eagerness for adventures both supernatural and domestic. A beauty inscribed in countless pages spares none of its wonders, translated into almost all populous languages, evoking intimate histories, regal houses and fabulous cities where imagination dwells and swells thanks to myths that multiply 43 44 BORGES illusion. It would be unfortunate, however, to advance greater civil affinities between them or to persevere in an obstinate comparison where a reader’s prudence might determine that this should be avoided, a comparison in which the investigator, perhaps, has already engaged or still persists with ponderous care. For the sake of approaching the work of the narrator, essayist, and poet that is Borges, one might define it in accordance with a negative generic consideration: he didn’t write novels, although he continued to read them to the last page and provided commentary on them on more than one occasion: “In the course of a life dedicated to literature, I have read very few novels; and in the majority of the cases I have only arrived at the last page out of a sense of duty.”1 Novelist of colossal accomplishments, journalist or reporter by trade, García Márquez dedicated to the newspaper the sort of attention appropriate to a profession that didn’t interfere with the enchantment and mystery that literature cultivates, and this even though sometimes the specious truth of the chronicle2 —with or without the capitalization —would give name for years to a weekly paper or go on to coin and quantify the title of his celebrated novel. Among his memories he had already exalted that happy coincidence of functions that, in so many other cases, would serve to perturb: Carried away by the game of literary enigmas, I began to drink without moderation the cane rum with lemon that the others were drinking in slow sips. The conclusion of all three was that the talent and handling of information by Dumas in that novel, and perhaps in all his work, was more a reporter’s than a novelist’s.3 Both are authors of well-known autobiographies and they also put before themselves the difficult task of passing from things to words, “from roses to letters,”4 or from words to words. Borges managed to concentrate the extremes of his literary life in a succinct, collaboratively dictated “essay.” García Márquez chose to prolong it through a copious book, many hundreds of pages long, wherein the event of being, of doing and of saying it, are confused in one and the same discourse. Among his sayings and the facts that they register, an insinuated or torrential humor leaks out; with distinct grace, sparks of verbal intelligence ignite a “reality” that, questioned and elusive, remains in quotes, as if it could only exist in writing, saved by a typography that, within a frame, marks the vacillations of a particular sense, questioning and abrogating it. For Borges the real tiger, more than a symbol or a poetic license that lies in wait among stripes and traces, more than “a series of literary tropes,” is 45 BORGES AND GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ the one that reveals the other tiger, neither more nor less true than the one that is in the verse. With García Márquez the severity of reporting is not forgotten, resolving a problematic relation that remains problematic in spite of its enunciation: “ ‘Even reality is mistaken when the literature is bad,’ he said, weak with laughter...