Sphinx

One of the slightly awkward aspects of reviewing Laura Jansen’s Borges’ Classics recently for Classics for All was that I couldn’t for the life of me find my copy of his Collected Fictions, so had to rely partly on memory and partly on Laura’s summaries of key pieces. Now that I’ve found it again and am re-reading some old favourites, it seems that this may have been a good thing, as otherwise the temptation to do nothing but quote choice extracts, head off on any number of tangents and then have even more problems getting the review down to a manageable size would have been too great – as it was, I had at least another couple of thousand words of notes and arguments that had to be omitted. It make me admire even more Laura’s success in keeping her book to a reasonable length, rather than trying to tackle every aspect that invites discussion.

One thing that I regularly forget is how funny Borges can be, above all in the self-parodic persona he adopts for his ‘literary’ essays. If one took him seriously, one might end up with a very skewed idea of his approach to literature. How can he be offered up as a key figure in classical reception, for example, when he says things like the following, from ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’?

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.