Why Read the Classics? (34 page)

Ponge’s sense of proportion and discretion—which is at the same time the sign of his practicality — is reflected in the fact that in order to talk about the sea he has to take as his theme the shores, beaches and coasts. The infinite never enters his pages, or rather it enters them when it encounters its own borders and only at that point does it really start to exist
(Sea Shores):
‘Profiting from the reciprocal distance which prevents coasts from linking up with each other except via the sea or by tortuous twists and turns, the sea allows every shore to believe that it is heading towards it in particular. In reality, the sea is courteous with all of them, actually more than courteous: it can show maximum enthusiasm and successive passions for each shore, keeping in its basin an infinite store of currents. It only ever marginally exceeds its own limits, it imposes its own restraint on its waves, and like the jelly-fish which it leaves for fishermen as a miniature image or sample of itself, it does nothing but ecstatically prostrate itself before all its shores.’

His secret is with every object or element to fix on its decisive aspect, which is nearly always the one we usually consider least, and to construct his discourse around that. To define water, for instance, Ponge homes in on its irresistible ‘vice’, which is gravity, its tendency to descend. But doesn’t every object, for example a wardrobe, obey the force of gravity? This is where Ponge by distinguishing the very different way a wardrobe adheres to the ground, manages to see—almost from the inside—what it is to be liquid, the rejection of any and every shape in order simply to obey the obsessive idea of its own gravity …

A cataloguer of the diversity of things
(De Varietate Rerum
is how the work of this new, understated Lucretius has been defined), Ponge also has a couple of themes to which, in this first collection, he constantly returns, hammering away at the same cluster of images and ideas. One is the world of vegetation, paying particular attention to the shape of trees; the other is that of molluscs, particularly seashells, snails, and shells in general.

With trees, it is their comparison with man that constantly emerges in Ponge’s discourse. They have no gestures: they simply multiply their arms, hands, fingers—like a Buddha. And in this way, doing nothing, they get to the bottom of their thoughts. They hide nothing from themselves, they cannot harbour a secret idea, they open out entirely, honestly and without restrictions. Doing nothing else, they spend all their time complicating their own shape, perfecting their own bodies towards greater complexity for analysis … Animate beings express themselves orally, or with mimetic gestures which however instantly disappear. But the vegetable world expresses itself in a written form that is indelible. It has no way of going back, it is impossible to have a change of mind: in order to correct something, the only thing it can do is to add. Like taking a text that has already been written and
published
and correcting it through a series of appendices, and so on. But one also has to say that plants do not ramify
ad infinitum
. Each one of them has a limit.’

Must we conclude that things in Ponge always refer back to a spoken or written discourse, to words? Finding a metaphor of writing in every written text has become too obvious a critical exercise for it to yield any further benefit here. We can say that in Ponge language, that indispensable medium linking subject and object, is constantly compared with what objects express outside language, and that in this comparison it is reassessed and redefined—and often revalued. If leaves are the trees’ words, they only know how to repeat the same word. ‘When in spring … they think they
can sing a different song, to come out of themselves, to extend to the whole of nature and to embrace it, they still transmit, in thousands of copies, the same note, the same word, the same leaf.
One cannot escape from the tree by solely arboreal means’

(If there is a negative value, or something damned, in Ponge’s universe, where it seems as if everything is saved, it is repetition: the sea’s waves breaking on the shore all decline the same noun, ‘a thousand important lords and ladies all with the same name are thus admitted on the same day to be presented by the prolix and prolific sea.’ But multiplicity is also the principle of individualisation, of diversity: a pebble is ‘a stone at the stage when for it the age of the person, the individual begins, that is to say the age of the word.’)

Language (and work) as the person’s secretions is a metaphor which recurs several times in the texts on snails and seashells. But what counts even more (in
Notes for a Seashell)
is his eulogy of the proportion between the shell and its mollusc inhabitant, as opposed to the disproportion of man’s monuments and palaces. This is the example the snail sets us by producing its own shell: ‘What their work consists of does not involve anything that is extraneous to them, to their necessities or their needs. Nothing that is disproportionate to their physical being. Nothing that is not necessary and essential for them.’

That is why Ponge calls snails saintly. ‘But saintly in what? In their precise obedience to their own nature. Know yourself, then, first of all. And accept yourself as you are. Along with your flaws. In proportion with your own measure.’

Last month I ended an article on another—very different—sage’s testament (Carlo Levi’s) with a quotation: Levi’s eulogy of the snail. Here I am now ending this essay with Ponge’s eulogy of the snail. Could the snail be the ultimate image of contentment?

[1979]

Jorge Luis Borges’ critical acclaim in Italy goes back some thirty years now: it began in 1955, the date of the first Italian translation of
Ficciones (Fictions)
, which appeared under the title of
La biblioteca di Babele (The Library of Babel)
, published by Einaudi, and culminates today with the publication of the collected works in Mondadori’s Meridiani series. If I remember correctly, it was Sergio Solmi who, after reading Borges’ stories in French, spoke enthusiastically about them to Elio Vittorini, who immediately suggested doing an Italian edition and found an enthusiastic and congenial translator in Franco Lucentini. Since then Italian publishers have been competing with each other to publish the Argentine writer’s works in translations which now Mondadori has gathered together along with several other texts which have never been translated before. This will be the most comprehensive edition of his
Opera omnia
to date: the first volume, edited by Borges’ faithful friend Domenico Porzio, is published this very week.

This popularity with publishers has been accompanied by a literary-critical acclaim which is both the cause and the effect of the former. I am thinking of the admiration for Borges expressed by even those Italian writers who are furthest from him in terms of their poetics; of the in-depth analyses that have been carried out in order to reach a critical definition of his world; and also, especially, of the influence he has had on creative literature in Italian, on literary taste and even on
the
very idea of literature: we can say that many of those who have been writing in the last twenty years, starting with those who belong to my own generation, have been profoundly shaped by him.

How can we explain this close encounter between our culture and an oeuvre which embraces a wide range of literary and philosophical legacies, some familiar to us, others very unfamiliar, and which modulates them into a key which is definitely as remote as could be from our own cultural inheritance? (Remote, at least in those days, from the paths trodden by Italian culture in the 1950s.)

I can only reply by relying on my memory, trying to reconstruct what the Borges experience has meant for me from the beginning down to today. The starting point, indeed the fulcrum, of this experience was a pair of books,
Fictions
and
The Aleph
, in other words that particular genre which is the Borgesian short story, before I moved on to Borges the essayist, who is not easily distinguishable from the narrator, and then Borges the poet, who often contains the nucleus of narrative, or at least a nucleus of thought, a pattern of ideas.

I will start with the major reason for my affinity with him, that is to say my recognising in Borges of an idea of literature as a world constructed and governed by the intellect. This is an idea that goes against the grain of the main run of world literature in this century, which leans instead in the opposite direction, aiming in other words to provide us with the equivalent of the chaotic flow of existence, in language, in the texture of the events narrated, in the exploration of the subconscious. But there is also a tendency in twentieth-century literature, a minority tendency admittedly, which had its greatest supporter in Paul Valéry—and I am thinking in particular of Valéry the prose writer and thinker — and which champions the victory of mental order over the chaos of the world. I could try to trace the outlines of an Italian vocation in this direction, from the thirteenth century through the Renaissance and seventeenth century down to the twentieth century, in order to explain that the discovery of Borges was for me like seeing a potentiality that had always only been toyed with now being realised: seeing a world being formed in the image and shape of the spaces of the intellect, and inhabited by a constellation of signs that obey a rigorous geometry.

But perhaps to explain the consensus that an author arouses in each of us, we should start, rather than from grand classifications by category, from motives more precisely connected with the art of writing. Amongst these I would put in first place his economy of expression: Borges is a master of concision. He manages to condense into texts which are always just a few pages long an extraordinary richness of ideas and poetic attraction: events
which are narrated or hinted at, dizzying glimpses of the infinite, and ideas, ideas, ideas. How this density is conveyed without any sense of congestion, in his limpidly clear, unadorned and open sentences; how this style of brief, tangential narration leads to the precision and concreteness of his language, whose originality is reflected in the variety of rhythm, of syntactic movement, of always unexpected and surprising adjectives; all this is a stylistic miracle, which is without equal in the Spanish language, and for which only Borges knows the secret recipe.

Reading Borges, I have often been tempted to draw up a poetics of concise writing, proclaiming its superiority over prolixity, and contrasting the two mentalities that are reflected in the favouring of one tendency over the other, in terms of temperament, idea of form and tangibility of content. For the moment I will simply say that the true vocation of Italian literature, just like any literature that values the poetic line in which each word is irreplaceable, is more recognisable in brevity than in prolixity.

In order to write briefly, Borges’ crucial invention, which was also what allowed him to invent himself as a writer, was something that in retrospect was rather simple. What helped him overcome the block that had prevented him, almost until he was forty, from moving from essays to narrative prose was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written, written by someone else, by an unknown invented author, an author from another language, another culture, and then to describe, summarise or review that hypothetical book. Part of the legend that surrounds Borges is the anecdote that the first, extraordinary, story that he wrote using this formula, The Approach to Almotasim’ when it first appeared in the journal
Sur
, convinced readers that it was a genuine review of a book by an Indian author. Similarly, all Borges’ critics regularly point out that each text of his doubles or multiplies its own space through other books cited from an imaginary or real library, works that are either classical or erudite or simply invented. What I am most interested in stressing here is that with Borges we see the birth of literature raised to the second degree, as it were, and at the same time literature as derived from the square root of itself: a potential literature’, to borrow a term that would later be fashionable in France, but whose forerunners can all be found in
Fictions
in the ideas and formulae for those works which could have been written by Borges’ own hypothetical Herbert Quain.

It has been said many times that for Borges only the written word has a full ontological reality and that the things of this world exist for him only
inasmuch as they refer back to things which have been written. What I want to underline here is the circuit of values that characterises this relationship between the world of literature and that of experience. Lived experience is only valued for what it can inspire in literature or for what it in turn repeats from literary archetypes: for instance, there is a reciprocity between a heroic or daring enterprise in an epic poem and a similar deed actually happening in ancient or contemporary history which makes one want to identify or compare episodes and values from the written event with those from the real event. This is the context in which the moral problem resides, which is always present in Borges like a solid nucleus in the fluidity and interchangeability of his metaphysical scenarios. For this sceptic, who seems to sample philosophies and theologies impartially, only for their value in terms of spectacle or aesthetics, the moral problem is constantly restated in exactly the same terms from one universe to the next, in its elementary alternatives of courage or cowardice, violence caused or suffered, and the search for truth. In Borges’ perspective, which excludes any psychological depths, the moral problem surfaces reduced almost to the terms of a theorem from geometry, in which individual destinies form an overall pattern which everyone has to recognise first before choosing. Yet it is in the rapid instant of real life, not in the fluctuating time of dreams, nor in the cyclical or eternal time of myths, that one’s fate is decided.

At this point we should remember that Borges’ epic is made up not only of what he read in the classics, but also of Argentine history, which in some episodes overlaps with his family history, with the daring deeds of military ancestors in the wars of the emerging nation. In ‘Poema conjectural’ (‘Conjectural Poem’), Borges imagines in Dantesque style the thoughts of one of his ancestors on his mother’s side, Francisco Laprida, as he lies in a marsh, wounded after a battle, hunted down by the tyrant Rosas’ gauchos: Laprida recognises his own fate in that of Buonconte da Montefeltro, as Dante portrays him in
Purgatorio
canto 5. Roberto Paoli has pointed out, in a detailed analysis of this poem, that more than Buonconte’s death, which is explicitly cited, it is the preceding episode in the same canto that Borges draws on, the demise of Jacopo del Cassero. There could be no better exemplification than this, of the osmosis between what happens in literature and what happens in real life: the ideal source is not some mythical event that took place before the verbal expression, but a text which is a tissue of words and images and meanings, a harmonisation of
motifs which find echoes in each other, a musical space in which a theme develops its own variations.