In the opening chapter of VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) the spectral narrators mention a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons:
Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).
When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment. (Chapter I)
The adjective 'incalculable' comes from 'calculate' (determine the amount or number of something mathematically). At the beginning of his essay Sobre los clásicos ("On Classics") included in the expanded second edition of his book Otras inquisiciones ("Other Inquisitions," 1952) J. L. Borges points out that calculus means in Latin "a little stone" and that the Pythagoreans used pebbles even before the invention of numbers:
Few disciplines could be of greater interest than etymology; this is owing to the unforeseeable transformation, over the long course of time, of a word's original meaning. Given such transformations, which may border on the paradoxical, a word's origin is of little or no value in the clarification of a concept. Knowing that, in Latin, "calculus" means a small stone, and that the Pythagoreans used such stones before the invention of numbers, does not allow us to master the mysteries of algebra. To learn that a "hypocrite" is an actor and a "person" a mask is hardly a valuable tool for the study of ethics. Similarly, to understand our current designation of a "classic," it is of no utility that this adjective comes from the Latin classis, a fleet, which later would assume the meaning of order. (Let us recall in passing the analogous information contained in the term "ship-shape.")
So what is now a "classic" book? Within arm's reach I have the definitions furnished by Eliot, Arnold, and Sainte-Beuve, undoubtedly reasonable and luminous, and I would be grateful to concur with these illustrious authors, but I did not consult them. I am now sixty-odd years old; at my age, coincidences or novelties matter less than what one believes to be true. Therefore I will limit myself to my own thoughts on the subject.
My first stimulus was A History of Chinese Literature (1901) by Herbert Allen Giles. In his second chapter I read that one of the five canonical texts which Confucius edited was The Book of Changes or I Ching, composed of sixty-four hexagrams which exhaust possible combinations of six whole or partial lines. One of the schemes, for example, consists of two whole lines, one partial line, and three whole lines, laid out vertically. A prehistoric emperor had discovered them in the carapace of one of the sacred turtles. Leibniz thought he detected a binary system of numeration in the hexagrams; others saw an enigmatic philosophy; still others, like Wilhelm, a tool for the divination of the future since the sixty-four figures correspond to the sixty-four phases of any undertaking or process; and while others espied the vocabulary of a particular tribe, some gazed upon a calendar. I remember now that Xul Solar used to reconstruct this text with matches and toothpicks. For foreigners The Book of Changes risks seeming like a mere chinoiserie; yet thousands of generations of very educated men have read it and referred to it with devotion, and will continue to read it. Confucius told his disciples that if destiny granted him a hundred more years of life, he would consecrate half of it to its study and its commentaries or outgrowths.
Quite deliberately I chose a simple example, a reading which requires an act of faith. I arrive now at my thesis. A classic book is that which a nation or a group of nations – or time itself in its length – has decided to read as if everything in its pages were deliberate, fatidic, as profound as the cosmos, and capable of endless interpretations. Predictably, these decisions vary. For Germans and Austrians Faust is a work of genius; for others, one of the most famous forms of tedium, such as Milton's second Paradise, or the work of Rabelais. Works like The Book of Job, The Divine Comedy, and Macbeth (and, for me, some of the sagas of the North) promise long immortality. Yet we do not know the future, apart from knowing that it will be different from the present. A preference may well be a superstition.
I do not have the vocation of an iconoclast. Until the age of thirty I believed, under the influence of Macedonio Fernández, that beauty was the privilege of very few authors; now I know that it is common, lurking even in the casual pages of the mediocre or the conversations of the street. In this way, my ignorance of Malaysian and Hungarian literature is perfect; yet I am sure that if time were to grant me the chance to study these traditions, I would find in them everything the mind requires to nourish itself. Linguistic barriers do not intervene as much as political and geographic ones. Burns is a classic in Scotland; South of the River Tweed, however, he is of less interest than Dunbar or Stevenson. In short, the glory of a poet depends on the excitement or apathy of the generations of anonymous men who put him to the test in the solitude of their libraries.
Literature may evoke eternal emotions, yet how it does so, even without intention, must constantly vary for it not to lose its virtue. These means persist to the extent that they are recognized by the reader. Hence it is dangerous to confirm the existence of classic works, or their eternity as such.
Each of us loses faith in his art and his artifices. I, who have resigned myself to doubting the indefinite persistence of Voltaire or Shakespeare, believe (this evening, on one of the last days of 1965) in that of Schopenhauer and Berkeley.
A classic book is not a book (I repeat) which necessarily possesses these or some other qualities; it is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.
Borges wrote the addendum to his essay Sobre los clásicos on one of the last days of 1965. It seems that Hugh Person (the main character in Transparent Things) first meets his wife Armande on Thursday, July 29, 1965 (the previous day, July 28, 1965, was Armande’s twenty-third birthday):
He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.
Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.
They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three American kids began pulling sweaters and pants out of a suitcase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a heap of comics - by now taken care of, with the used towels, by a brisk hotel maid). One of the two adults, catching Armande's cold eye, responded with a look of good-natured helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.
Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam."
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -
"Julia."
Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh, posture, rhythmics - things like that.
Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English. Asked to guess her nationality he suggested Danish or Dutch. No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up. (Chapter 9)
The daughter of Charles Chamar and Anastasia Potapov, Armande believes that Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied; "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
At the beginning of Canto the Eleventh of Don Juan Byron mentions Bishop Berkeley (in whose eternalness Borges believes on this evening of one of the last days of 1965):
When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
And proved it—'twas no matter what he said:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it! I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,
And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
In VN's novel Priglashenie na kazn' ("Invitation to a Beheading," 1935) Cincinnatus C. is accused of an obscure crime called gnoseologicheskaya gnusnost' (gnostical turpitude) and described as neprozrachnost' (opacity). Cincinnatus lives in a dystopian totalitarian city whose inhabitants are transparent to each other.
In Sobre los clásicos J. L. Borges mentions Goethe's Faust (regarded by the Germans and Austrians as a work of genius, and one of the most famous embodiments of boredom for others). After the death of Person Senior, a prostitute takes Hugh Person to a hotel room where a Russian novelist ninety-three years ago had worked on a novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow:
She took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse – to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly ninety-three years ago. The bed – a different one, with brass knobs – was made, unmade, covered with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip, and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the night-shirted, bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon which our Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes again. (Chapter 6)
Faust, a story in nine letters (1856) is a story by Turgenev, the author of an essay entitled Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860). Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) is a story by J. L. Borges. Its hero is a namesake of M'sieur Pierre, the executioner in Invitation to a Beheading.
The characters in Transparent Things include Monsieur Wilde, a Swiss businessman:
There were only two people there, a woman eating a snack in a far corner (the restaurant was unavailable, not yet having been cleaned after a farcical fight) and a Swiss businessman flipping through an ancient number of an American magazine (which had actually been left there by Hugh eight years ago, but this line of life nobody followed up). A table next to the Swiss gentleman was littered with hotel pamphlets and fairly recent periodicals. His elbow rested on the Transatlantic. Hugh tugged at the magazine and the Swiss gentleman fairly sprang up in his chair. Apologies and counter-apologies blossomed into conversation. Monsieur Wilde's English resembled in many ways that of Armande, both in grammar and intonation. He had been shocked beyond measure by an article in Hugh's Transatlantic (borrowing it for a moment, wetting his thumb, finding the place and slapping the page with the back of his fingers as he returned the thing opened on the offensive article).
"One talks here of a man who murdered his spouse eight years ago and – "
The receptionist, whose desk and bust he could distinguish in miniature from where he sat, was signaling to him from afar. She burst out of her enclosure and advanced toward him:
"One does not reply," she said, "do you want me to keep trying?"
"Yes, oh yes," said Hugh, getting up, bumping into somebody (the woman who had enveloped the fat that remained of her ham in a paper napkin and was leaving the lounge). "Yes. Oh, excuse me. Yes, by all means. Do call Information or something."
Well, that murderer had been given life eight years ago (Person was given it, in an older sense, eight years ago, too, but squandered, squandered all of it in a sick dream!), and now, suddenly, he was set free, because, you see, he had been an exemplary prisoner and had even taught his cell-mates such things as chess, Esperanto (he was a confirmed Esperantist), the best way to make pumpkin pie (he was also a pastry cook by trade), the signs of the zodiac, gin rummy, et cetera, et cetera. For some people, alas, a gal is nothing but a unit of acceleration used in geodesy.
It was appalling, continued the Swiss gentleman, using an expression Armande had got from Julia (now Lady X), really appalling how crime was pampered nowadays. Only today a temperamental waiter who had been accused of stealing a case of the hotel's Dole (which Monsieur Wilde did not recommend, between parentheses) punched the maître d'hôtel in the eye, black-buttering it gravely. Did – his interlocutor suppose that the hotel called the police? No, mister, they did not. Eh bien, on a higher (or lower) level the situation is similar. Had the bilinguist ever considered the problem of prisons?
Oh, he had. He himself had been jailed, hospitalized, jailed again, tried twice for throttling an American girl (now Lady X): "At one stage I had a monstrous cellmate – during a whole year. If I were a poet (but I'm only a proofreader) I would describe to you the celestial nature of solitary confinement, the bliss of an immaculate toilet, the liberty of thought in the ideal jail. The purpose of prisons" (smiling at Monsieur Wilde who was looking at his watch and not seeing much anyway) "is certainly not to cure a killer, nor is it only to punish him (how can one punish a man who has everything with him, within 'him, around him?). Their only purpose, a pedestrian purpose but the only logical one, is to prevent a killer from killing again. Rehabilitation? Parole? A myth, a joke. Brutes cannot be corrected. Petty thieves are not worth correcting (in their case punishment suffices). Nowadays, certain deplorable trends are current in soi-disant liberal circles. To put it concisely a killer who sees himself as a victim is not only a murderer but a moron." .
"I think I must go," said poor stolid Wilde.
"Mental hospitals, wards, asylums, all that is also familiar to me. To live in a ward in a heap with thirty or so incoherent idiots is hell. I faked violence in order to get a solitary cell or to be locked up in the damned hospital's security wing, ineffable paradise for this kind of patient. My only chance to remain sane was by appearing subnormal. The way was thorny. A handsome and hefty nurse liked to hit me one forehand slap sandwiched between two backhand ones – and I returned to blessed solitude. I should add that every time my case came up, the prison psychiatrist testified that I refused to discuss what he called in his professional jargon 'conjugal sex.' I am sadly happy to say, sadly proud, too, that neither the guards (some of them humane and witty) nor the Freudian inquisitors (all of them fools or frauds) broke or otherwise changed the sad person I am."
Monsieur Wilde, taking him for a drunk or madman, had lumbered away. The pretty receptionist (flesh is flesh, the red sting is l'aiguillon rouge, and my love would not mind) had begun to signal again. He got up and walked to her desk. The Stresa hotel was undergoing repairs after a fire. Mais (pretty index erect) - (Chapter 25)
The essays in Borges' Other Inquisitions include Sobre Oscar Wilde ("About Oscar Wilde"). The title of Borges' collection of essays subtly hints at the Spanish inquisition. A character in Dostoevski's novel Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan Karamazov is the author of The Grand Inquisitor, a story within the story. After the murder of his father brother Ivan goes mad and is visited by the devil. The spectral narrarors (including Mr. R., the American writer of German descent whom Hugh Person visits in Switzerland) in Transparent Things seem to be the devils.
In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions fra Karamazov mumbling his inept all is allowed:
Among our auditors were a young priest
And an old Communist. Iph could at least
Compete with churches and the party line.
In later years it started to decline:
Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in
Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.
Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept
All is allowed, into some classes crept;
And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,
A school of Freudians headed for the tomb. (ll. 635-644)
It is Ivan Karamazov who says that, if God does not exist, all is allowed. In Canto Three of his poem Shade mentions empires of rhyme and Indies of calculus:
But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call
When morning finds us marching to the wall
Under the stage direction of some goon
Political, some uniformed baboon?
We'll think of matters only known to us -
Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;
Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern
Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern;
And while our royal hands are being tied,
Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride
The dedicated imbeciles, and spit
Into their eyes just for the fun of it. (ll. 597-608)
The Chamar caste (cf. Armande Chamar) is a historically marginalized community in India, traditionally associated with leatherworking and related occupations. The term "Chamar" is derived from the Sanskrit word "charmakara," meaning "leather worker". In the Indian caste system, Chamars are classified as a Scheduled Caste, which is part of the broader Dalit community, formerly known as "untouchables."
In Canto Four Shade calls his poem (that requires some moondrop title) "this transparent thingum:"
Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 957-962)