Studies in a Dying Culture

UNITAS OPPOSITORUM: THE PROSE OF JORGE LUIS BORGES by Stanislaw Lem, in Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Franz Rottensteiner (New York: Harvest / HBJ, 1986).

I wish Lem would have elaborated more on his generalizations, because what he locates as Borges’ central weakness may cohere with what I would see as Borges’ limitations. Lem underestimates the brilliance of many of Borges’ stories, particularly the ones I’ve analyzed: “The Congress”, “The Aleph”, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. Lem lists four stories he considers Borges’ best; along with “Pierre Menard” they are “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” “Three Versions of Judas.”

Lem admires the logical, paradoxical structure of these stories. He finds that in each, “Borges transforms a firmly established part of some cultural system by means of the terms of the system itself.” Underneath the comical surface of Borges’ metaphysical play, Lem finds the premises serious, and though fantastic, the stories are rigorously logical and therefore curiously “realistic.”

Here is a telling phrase: “The author therefore has the courage to deal with the most valuable goals of mankind just as mankind himself does. The only difference is that Borges continues these combinatory operations to their utmost logical conclusions.”

Lem finds that Borges operates by way of transformation of conservative premises, and never offers anything new: “Borges is successful because in any single case he never questions the implied premises of the model structure that he transforms. . . . He never creates a new, freely invented paradigm structure. He confines himself strictly to the initial axioms supplied by the cultural history of mankind.”

But Borges cannot place in real history the religious and metaphysical conceits he parodies: these ideas ‘are just “fictitious,” “freewheeling,” “privately invented” meaningful structures. . .’ His twists on philosophical systems are logically irrefutable. “To refute them, it would be necessary to call into question the total syntax of human thought, and thinking in its ontological dimensions.” There is no real causality or progress in the development of human thought.

Lem also finds that the replication of Borges’ basic ideas throughout his body of work diminishes it. Lem boils down Borges’ method to “the unity of mutually exclusive opposites.”

His literary game with its borderline meanings always begins where opposites repel one another with their inherent force; and it ends as soon as they are joined together. But we can see a trivial weakness in Borges’s work in the fact that there is always the same mechanism of conversion (or a closely related inversion).

The final effect is the perceptibility of the limitations of Borges’ imagination: “In its utmost depths, the structural topology of Borges’s work acknowledges its relationship with all mechanistic-determinist kinds of literature, including the mystery novel.” Borges is fundamentally a librarian. But this point of departure is obsolete: “Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago.” He extrapolates on the cultural heritage of the past, but he has nothing to say about the future. Lem concludes:

His work, admirable though it may be, is located in its entirety at an opposite pole from the direction of our fate. Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot “alloy” our world’s fate with his own work. He has explicated to us paradises and hells that remain forever closed to man. For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them.

I think Lem is quite perceptive in all this, but still there is something missing. Paradoxically, Lem fails to place Borges himself in history. How does one explain the appearance of a literary avant-garde in Argentina, or anywhere in Latin America, at a particular time? Or to generalize the pattern, how to explain the ideological/artistic manifestations of the evolution of modernity? It seems to me that Argentina, like the USA, historically embodies a peculiar combination of the primitive and the futuristic, albeit with historical differences. This is the very feeling I got from studying “The Congress“. Fleshing out Lem’s perspective with the full dimensionality of Borges’ work and trajectory would refine our explanation of its place in history, and might likely add insight into Borges’ political conservatism. This conjuncture of Borges and Lem excites me.

See also:

Borges Ironizing Idealism: I Dream Too Much by Ralph Dumain

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web

SPIRIT-WORK ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

I return sun-burned from a long afternoon out on Pennsylvania Avenue between the National Archives and Freedom Plaza, digging WorldFest. I arrived at Pennsylvania and 9th NW after 2 pm, after Ritchie Havens had already begun his performance, and then I got the spirit. Ritchie was balding and somewhat gray, but in great shape and energetic as ever. He played for an hour and a half, with two accompanists (at times), one fellow on electric piano and the other on lead guitar. Ritchie played mostly his old standards from the ’60s. He played sweet songs like “Tupelo Honey” and “Just Like a Woman”, interspersed with somber, urgent, high tension songs that came from the time of Vietnam and civil rights struggles (with lyrics like “Who are these men?” and “What are you going to do about me?”). I felt as if I had reconnected with life. Tears ran down my face under the hot sun during a good portion of the concert. The crowd went nuts. The people were mixed by race and even by age. The audience clapped, some danced in the street. I felt the spirit rising up.

I made a mental note of something that impressed me very much about Ritchie, about how he Africanizes Caucasian folk music. Though I have been away from what was called “folk music” for over two decades, I too had a guitar and I remember the stuff that was sung and played back then in the “folk” style. There are two things that impress me most about Havens. One is the spiritual, gospel feel of his voice. The other is the intense percussiveness of his strumming. The audience responded whenever he intensified the speed and the volume of his strumming, so he knows what he is doing. This sounds very African to me, though it is folk guitar, not so much because of the rhythm, though he does break up the regularity of the rhythm sometimes, but because of the intense, insistent percussiveness. I hear that same insistence, from the rock bottom all the way out into the atmosphere, that I hear in the playing of an African drummer, who creates an infinite presence in the beat of his drum because he has to get down, get down all the way and make his statement boom all the way out. Ritchie only got more intense as the concert went on. He told little stories in between his songs, about strange people, about the ’50′s, about women. About the world only beginning as a unified entity, whereupon he sang “Here comes the sun”. I remember towards the end of the concert he performed his song on the 12 signs of the zodiac.

Finally, he caught us by surprise, because instead of pausing after his penultimate song, he segued immediately into the chant he made famous at Woodstock: “freedom … freedom … freedom … freedom…..” The crowd lost control. Ritchie Havens became spirit-possessed. So did the audience. I lost my usual public reserve. I was sweating and my feet were aching on the mercilessly hard pavement, but I got the spirit. I started hopping from one aching foot to the other, my hands were clapping in rhythm with the rest of the audience as if we were in a black church in Alabama. I almost folded myself in half like a West African dancer. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child ….” What is there about that song that makes the soul explode? It was magic, spirit-work. We sanctified Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ritchie stood up, kicking his legs in the air. Even while finishing the song, he danced about the stage. Then his guitarist did a reprise of Jimi Hendrix’s electric rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Ritchie was transported. He jumped about the stage. The crowd was beside itself. We, too sing America—we sing it our way, out of our own feeling, out of our own aspiration, out of our own desperation, out of our own infinite passion—we too sing America, for us, the people! And we clapped in time. Ritchie was back in front of his microphone, fist over his heart, bending his body, toward us. He called out to us over and over: “I know you’ve got it, deep down in your heart. Come on, give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me! We still got it. Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!” He couldn’t get enough, and neither could I. The audience was Africanized—call and response, call and response, call and response—wave upon wave of soul energy aching for infinity shaking spirit-possessed filling the space of grand boulevard between puniness of white house and puniness of capitol, coming under the sun coming and it’s all right.

Afterwards, I waited my turn in line by the fence surrounding the area behind the stage. I grabbed his hand and wrist and said “I had to thank you for giving me the spirit.” He said: “We still got it.” I said: “It’s bruised and pained, but it’s still there.”

— Ralph Dumain
29 May 1994

The next time I saw Ritchie Havens was on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, also in Washington, DC, I think on Adams Morgan Day, another street festival. I ran into him on the street and gave him a copy of the above piece.

Earlier in life, I saw Ritchie perform once in Buffalo. As it happens, my erstwhile drum teacher Emile Latimer played with Ritchie at Woodstock.

I mourn the passing of an era, and I mourn the passing of Ritchie Havens today.

Ritchie Havens
January 21, 1941 – April 22, 2013

I encountered Aant Elzinga in 1986 at a joint meeting of four scholarly societies concerned with the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and technology. I contacted him many years later and with his permission digitized some of his marvelous essays:

The Man of Science in a World of Crisis: A Plea for a Two-Pronged Attack on Positivism and Irrationalism

“Objectivity & Partisanship in Science”

“Scientism, Romanticism and Social Realist Images of Science”

“The Growth of Science: Romantic and Technocratic Images”

The first is a virtual manifesto, which I wish I had encountered when it came out, as it sets itself up against a philosophical duality that runs through a century and a half of the history of ideas.

I just discovered The Humaniora/Society Blog, a Scandinavian academic blog on the humanities, that seems to be moribund, but there still is some interesting material on it. Lo and behold, there are two articles by Elzinga on it:

Evidence-based science policy and the systematic miscounting of performance in the humanities (28/04/2009). Paper given at workshop on evidence-based practice, University of Gothenburg, 19-20 May 2008.

The humanities in a time of changing demands, boundaries and reconfigurations (17/02/2009).

The first is a more technical paper on the politics and rewards structure of academia, but obviously there is an ideological dimension to the bean-counting approach to scholarly productivity.  The second paper addresses three ideological orientations to valorizing the humanities: the symbolic, instrumental, and critical. Obviously, the question of the relevance and survival of the humanities in a profit-driven world is an urgent one for those who feel there is something endangered that must be preserved, however couched in the dry language of policy studies such considerations may be.