Borges Reading Hazlitt Reading Borges

Each and every day without fail I receive hits on my note on Hazlitt’s essay On the Feeling of Immortality in Early Youth.
immortality
They emanate from India only where Hazlitt is on an English Honours course and where relevance and relatability bow before a traditional curriculum. Unless it is a cozening feature of Google I am top of their hit parade or near it. Should Hazlitt be such an obscure figure that my marginal gloss persists for years? Jorge Luis Borges would have been surprised for Hazlitt, Stevenson and De Quincey that he read as a child were central to his imagination.

Consider this incitement to Pierre Menard:

‘What a pity’, said some one, ‘that Milton had not the pleasure of reading Paradise Lost! He could not read it, as we do, with the weight of impression that a hundred years of admiration have added to it — ‘a phoenix gazed by all’ — with the sense of the number of editions it has passed through with still increasing reputation, with the tone of solidity, time-proof, which it has received from the breath of cold, envious maligners, with the sound which the voice of Fame has lent to every line of it!

(from Is Genius Conscious of its Powers)

Borges gives that lateral nod of respect to Hazlitt in The Cult of the Phoenix:

That the members of the cult should, in a Jewish milieu, resemble Jews proves nothing, what cannot be denied is that they, like Hazlitt’s infinite Shakespeare, resemble every man in the world.

He further dedicates an essay to this myriad minded man:

Haunted, hounded, he began imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caesar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man—that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Proteus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, and Iago says, with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to famous passages.

(from Everything and Nothing)

Hazlitt on Milton and Shakespeare:

The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past," and present:—all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave," are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. 

Borges Reports

In an afterword to Doctor Brodie's Report Borges writes about his creative process. It is clear that he holds to the older classical theory of having a genius which he leaves alone to her work. He does not attempt to guide her by a nagging intention.

Walking down the street or along the galleries of the National Library, I feel that something is about to take over in me. That something may be a tale or a poem. I do not tamper with it; I let it have its way. From afar, I sense it taking shape. I dimly see its end and beginning but not the dark gap in between. This middle, in my case, is given me gradually. If its discovery happens to be withheld by the gods, my conscious self has to intrude, and these unavoidable makeshifts are, I suspect, my weakest pages.

What then are we to say to the banal epiphany of the Brillo Box? At best I would describe it as craft work involving the careful application of paint and precise copying of a given model. We have forgotten that up to the 1950‘s whole studios were given over to the production of line drawings, illustrations and art work for mass media. Then and even now artisans known as monumental sculptors could knock out an angel reading in the book of life by hand in a few days. Socrates worked at that trade before he took up the contrarian gadfly business. In India long generations of artisans work at such crafts producing statuary in metal and stone for temples. They don’t claim to be artists though some of their ancient models have a refinement of form that is excellent.

I don’t claim to know much about art but I know what Arthur C. Danto likes. By sleight of definition he has brought respectability to the excesses of the exhibition catalog.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto with notes by Pierre Menard

When I first read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto it was as the paper of 1974. Not being aware then that there was book of the same name with the same theme in an expanded form I thought that Danto should have read Borges’s work Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote(pub.1941). This would perhaps have modified his position that a true interpretation follows an understanding of the intent of the author of the work. As those of you who keep up know, Danto does in fact enlist Menard in his book. Even if you think that intent plays a minor part in the production of great art the question must be asked – has Danto actually grasped the intent of Borges and if he hasn’t, isn’t therefore his interpretation faulty?

Reading the story a few times and it is a masterpiece which eludes the definitive, some observations will I think stand. The voice is that of an effete aesthete who for reasons which are unstated is performing a scalpel job on Menard. He seems a Prufrock (1915) with extra added resentment. This is evident from the catalogue of the works and pomps of Menard which are in short; futile, otiose and doomed. The Quixote project then is the crowning achievement of sublime idiocy. The sere bise of irony blows steadily.

To this third interpretation (which I judge to be irrefutable) I am not sure I dare to add a fourth, which concords very well with the almost divine modesty of Pierre Menard: his resigned or ironical habit of propagating ideas which were the strict reverse of those he preferred.

There is a semi truth, a Menardian truth, to the view that quotation is not just that thing that is quoted but has the sheen of intention hovering ectoplasmically over it. The Brillo Box is an emanation in a subtle medium neither cardboard nor indeed plywood.

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?

(James E. Irby trans.)

Mr. Addison, Mr. Locke, and M. Malebranche on time

Mr. Addison reflects on the words of Mr. Locke(from no.94. Vol.1. The Spectator)
Spectator

Mr. Locke (Essay: Bk.2.Chap14) observes
'That we get the Idea of Time, or Duration, by reflecting on that Train of Ideas which succeed one another in our Minds: That for this Reason, when we sleep soundly without dreaming, we have no Perception of Time, or the Length of it whilst we sleep; and that the Moment wherein we leave off to think, till the Moment we begin to think again, seems to have no distance.'
To which the Author adds,
'And so I doubt not but it would be to a waking Man, if it were possible for him to keep only one Idea in his Mind, without Variation, and the Succession of others: And we see, that one who fixes his Thoughts very intently on one thing, so as to take but little notice of the Succession of Ideas that pass in his Mind whilst he is taken up with that earnest Contemplation, lets slip out of his Account a good Part of that Duration, and thinks that Time shorter than it is.'

The idea that you can lengthen time or feel it as longer by occupying your mind on many subjects or shorten it by focussing on just one has something to recommend it. It is the experience of many people that concentrating the mind can make time fly whilst the bored flitting from topic to topic can seem to drag.

Addison mentions Enquiry after Truth(pub.1674/5)by Mallebranche published before Locke’s Essay (1690):

“That it is possible some Creatures may think Half an Hour as long as we do a thousand Years; or look upon that Space of Duration which we call a Minute, as an Hour, a Week, a Month, or an whole Age.

”(Locke’s summary)

Henri Bergson has a similar idea of the subjectivity of the flow of time. The buzzing of the wings of a bee can be very slow to an awareness working at a higher rate or like the darting of a mouse might be slow for a cat. Duration he would define differently from Locke, Addison, and Malebranche as not an extent of time measured conventionally rather the force of all that has passed impinging on the present moment. This is preserved for use and is accessed or channelled through the brain which is an organ of action.. All that is not relevant to immediate use is filtered out. When immediate action is not required as at the point of death all that was previously ignored presents itself. Bergson takes seriously the reports of their whole life passing before them of people who thought they were about to die. I would consider this panoptic capacity as the mind of a sage and an indication of a naturalistic continuum.



Jorge Luis Borges peeps through this keyhole:
From The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges:

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand...