Borges's Philosophy of Poe's Composition
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.3.0458
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoOver the past three decades, several scholars have analyzed the rich literary relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Argentine poet, short story writer, and intellectual Jorge Luis Borges. Maurice J. Bennett examined Borges's tale "La muerte y la brújula" alongside Poe's Dupin trilogy in his article "The Detective Fiction of Poe and Borges" in 1983 and then followed that article with "The Infamy and the Ecstasy: Crime, Art, and Metaphysics in Edgar Allan Poe's 'William Wilson' and Jorge Luis Borges's 'Deutsches Requiem'" in 1986.1 John T. Irwin published what remains the most in-depth study of Poe and Borges to date in 1994. His book, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, not only reveals Borges's centennial doubling of the Dupin tales with his own trio of detective stories but also stands out as an impressive volume of inter-American and interdisciplinary literary criticism that brings Poe's and Borges's fiction, chess theory, Greek mythology, psychoanalysis, mathematics, and a myriad of other subjects into a conversation that demonstrates the complexity of the literary relationship between Borges and Poe.2 Most scholarship on Poe and Borges, including the work of Bennett and Irwin, focuses primarily on the fiction of each author and only occasionally refers to their critical writings.3 At the same time, much Poe/Borges scholarship—especially the scholarship available in English—views Borges as a world writer reacting to Poe as both a precursor and a literary peer while deemphasizing the cultural context in which Borges interprets Poe.Borges refers to Poe in over 130 articles, essays, and prologues, from his first written reference to Poe in 1923 to his last words about him in 1986, the year Borges died. He also mentions Poe in scores of interviews and collaborative works of literary criticism throughout his life. The sheer number of references over the course of the more than sixty years of Borges's writing career demonstrates both Poe's lasting influence on Borges as a writer and thinker and Borges's profound influence on how Poe was read and interpreted in the Río de la Plata region and in Spanish America during the twentieth century and how he is still understood in the twenty-first century. Both the extent and the influence of Borges's readings of Poe in his literary criticism beg further study.In this article, I analyze several of Borges's critical approaches to Poe while outlining the regional context in which Borges offered these interpretations and examining the impact of his analysis, aspects that are lacking in many comparative readings of these two authors. I read Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" as a theory for writing fiction, and I engage Borges's first interpretation of Poe's famous essay—a 1935 newspaper article entitled "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe"—to demonstrate how Poe's Dupin trilogy enacts his theory far better than the theoretical essay itself. I examine Borges's descriptions of his own writing process to show how he consistently performs intellectual tricks espoused by Poe—for example, the hiding of an object in plain sight—while overtly professing that the muse rather than the intellect serves as his creative spark. Finally, I reveal how Borges's literary criticism both alters Poe's Spanish American image from poet-prophet to masterful story writer and constructs a predecessor for Borges's own short fiction.4Borges began his literary career in the 1920s as a radical poet and a talented literary critic who challenged the aesthetics of the dominant literary movement of the time—Spanish American modernismo. Launched by the 1888 publication of Rubén Darío's Azul, modernismo was primarily a poetic movement concerned with beauty and art for art's sake.5 Although Darío was Nicaraguan, he spent a significant amount of time in Buenos Aires, and some of modernismo's most important writers hailed from the Río de la Plata region, including Borges's fellow Argentine Leopoldo Lugones. When Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 after a seven-year stay in Europe with his family, the young poet entered a literary climate saturated with thirty years of modernista literature, and he almost immediately challenged the norm by attempting to create an Argentine branch of the avant-garde poetic movement he had joined in Spain called ultraismo. Young Borges was particularly critical of Lugones, and although Borges's zeal for ultraismo soon faded, his disagreements with Lugones and the modernistas in general remained visible until much later in his career.6The modernistas revered Poe as a poet-prophet, and as John Eugene Englekirk demonstrates in his seminal text on Poe's literary relationship with the Spanish-speaking world from the late nineteenth century to the early 1930s—Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature—this poet-prophet from the north was one of the primary influences on modernismo. Englekirk avers that "in Spanish America Poe's fame as a poet has … long since outdistanced his renown as a writer of tales," and he claims that "almost all of the followers of Modernism were directly or indirectly influenced by Poe."7 Englekirk even suggests that Poe will never again have the influence in the region that he had over the modernistas: "Inspiration from Poe is by no means a thing of the past. But we must not expect to encounter any such palpable evidence of his influence as has been the case in our study of the Modernistas."8 Englekirk's study slightly predates Borges's first attempts at fiction, and he only mentions Borges once, calling him a poet who radically departs from the aesthetics of modernismo.9 What Englekirk could not have foretold, however, was that this young poet would transform Poe's reputation in the Río de la Plata region and throughout Spanish-speaking America by writing Poe-influenced fiction and, of most importance in this article, by completely redefining Poe in his literary criticism as a story writer rather than a poet.Borges was not the first writer in the region to seriously and repeatedly approach Poe's fiction. That distinction belongs to the Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga, who published multiple Poe-like stories and openly claimed Poe as one of his revered literary models. The first rule in Quiroga's "Decálogo del perfecto cuentista," which he published in the pages of the Buenos Aires literary journal Babel in 1927, states "Cree en un maestro—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chejov—como en Dios mismo" ("Believe in a master—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chekhov—as in God himself"), and his fifth rule closely resembles Poe's own ideas on effect: "No empieces a escribir sin saber desde la primera palabra adónde vas. En un cuento bien logrado, las tres primeras líneas tienen casi la importancia de las tres últimas" ("Do not begin to write without knowing from the first word where you are going. In a well done story, the first three lines are almost as important as the last three").10 Quiroga's fiction, with its horror, naturalism, and regional color, often deviates from modernismo's aesthetics, but his career coincided with modernismo, and he did not challenge it. Indeed, Quiroga had a long-lasting relationship with modernismo. His first major publication, a short collection of poems entitled Los arrecifes de coral, was a modernista endeavor, several of his close friends were well-known modernista writers, and he first discovered the jungle that came to dominate his life and his writing while traveling as Lugones's photographer.11 As Englekirk argues, Quiroga was one of the most important fiction writers of both the Río de la Plata region and Spanish-speaking America by the early 1930s, and his fiction "inspired and guided" several of the "younger prose writers" in the region.12 However, Quiroga's work did not change the way his friends and contemporaries read Poe and understood his image.13 Poe remained for the modernistas the melancholy bard with the tragic biography. Borges's literary criticism, in contrast, first delicately and then blatantly challenged Poe's place as a poet and as a muse for the modernistas by emphasizing Poe's favoring of reason over inspiration in his most un-modernista work—"The Philosophy of Composition."Borges takes up Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" early and often, returning to the essay several times between his 1927 article "Indagación de la palabra" and his 1985 and 1986 prologues to two collections of Poe's tales translated into Spanish.14 To date, however, only one scholarly article—Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan's "Idea de Edgar A. Poe en la obra crítica de Jorge Luis Borges"—offers extended analysis of Borges's readings of "The Philosophy of Composition," and his article does not mention Borges's 1935 article "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe," which serves as Borges's primary piece of criticism about Poe's famous essay.15 "The Philosophy of Composition" invites Borges's attempt to shift the focus on Poe away from his poetry and toward his fiction since Poe begins the article in which he supposedly reveals the modus operandi behind his most famous poem—"The Raven"—by theorizing the concept of plot: "Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen."16 The fact that the essay opens with a discussion of plot, the essay's focus on effect, and the narrative aspects of "The Raven" itself all suggest that Poe's poetic theory is really (or, at least, alternately) a theory for writing fiction, regardless of Poe's efforts to cast "The Philosophy of Composition" as a poetic theory by analyzing a poem rather than a short story, by describing beauty as "the sole legitimate province of the poem" (164), and by suggesting that "melancholy is the most legitimate of all poetical tones" (164). Indeed, Poe's discussion of effect recalls his readings of fiction rather than poetry in his own literary criticism. For example, in his second review of Hawthorne's stories, he claims that "the prose tale" is only slightly inferior to "a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour" and that a quality writer of tales "conceive[s], with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect."17 "The Raven" certainly has a plot and a dénouement, and it does create the effect of melancholy that Poe argues for in "The Philosophy of Composition." However, these facts point to the story-like or narrative quality of this poem rather than creating a theory of poetry. Borges notes that "Poe aplicó a sus cuentos la misma técnica que a sus versos; juzgó que todo debe redactarse en función de la última línea" ("Poe applied to his tales the same technique that he used in his verse; he believed that everything should be written with the last line in mind"), and Borges, too, applied Poe's so-called poetic theory to prose, suggesting that Poe's argument that long poetry does not exist "es trasladable a la prosa" ("is transferable to prose").18Borges both subtly and blatantly supports his claim that Poe is not a poet but a master fiction writer throughout the various summaries and analyses he offers of "The Philosophy of Composition." He provides his most in-depth reading of Poe's essay in "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe." Much later in his career, Borges devotes several paragraphs to "The Philosophy of Composition" in both Introducción a la literatura norteamericana and "El cuento policial," and while each of these pieces more explicitly praises Poe's fiction over his poetry, Borges summarizes more than analyzes Poe's essay in these later works.19 In "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe," Borges does not conspicuously state that Poe's fiction trumps his poetry. Instead, he pulls a trick from Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and leaves several clues hidden in plain sight that allow the reader familiar with Borges's later commentary on Poe to see that Borges subtly develops and states his argument about the superiority of Poe's fiction over his poetry as early as 1935.Borges published "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe" in the pages of the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa in August 1935, just months after publishing his first collection of fiction—Historia universal de la infamia.20 After a short summary of the essay, Borges notes that literary critics typically reject Poe's description of how he purportedly wrote "The Raven," claiming that some scholars dismiss the essay as a ploy on Poe's part to cash in on the fame of the poem while others reject it out of fear "que el misterio central de la creación poética hubiera sido profanado por Poe" ("that the central mystery of poetic creation had been desecrated by Poe").21 Borges suggests that a "más inteligente y letal" (2) ("more intelligent and lethal") critic than the group to which he alludes "pudo haber denunciado en aquellas hojas una vindicación romántica de los procedimientos ordinarios del clasicismo, un anatema de lo más inspirado contra la inspiración" (2) ("could have denounced in those pages a romantic vindication of the ordinary procedures of classicism, an anathema against inspiration from the most inspired"). Borges leaves these critiques behind, stating, "se adivinará que no comparto esas opiniones" (2) ("it will be guessed that I do not share those opinions"), and he claims to believe Poe's theory, at least to a point: Yo—ingenuamente acaso—creo en las explicaciones de Poe. Descontada alguna posible ráfaga de charlatanería, pienso que el proceso mental aducido por él ha de corresponder, más o menos, al proceso verdadero de la creación. Yo estoy seguro de que así procede la inteligencia: por arrepentimientos, por obstáculos, por eliminaciones. (2)(Perhaps naively, I believe Poe's explanations. Apart from a possible burst of charlatanism, I think that the mental process alleged by him corresponds, more or less, with the true process of creation. I am sure that intelligence proceeds thus: by contradictions, by obstacles, by eliminations.) Borges's suggestion that Poe's essay comes close to describing how the poetic process really functions demonstrates Borges's own penchant for reason, and by accepting Poe's analytic account of how he supposedly creates a poem, Borges reads the tragic and melancholic poet-prophet against the iconic Poe of the modernistas and subtly begins to cast Poe as a predecessor for the ratiocinative fiction he will publish over the next decade and a half.Borges accepts Poe's overarching analytic method and agrees that an artist can pinpoint some of the moments of poetic creation. He does, however, argue that Poe had to simplify a complex process and that "The Philosophy of Composition" only provides its reader with a summarized version of Poe's real thought process: La complejidad de las operaciones descritas no me incomoda; sospecho que la efectiva elaboración tiene que haber sido aún más compleja, y mucho más caótica y vacilante. En mi entender, Poe se redujo a suministrar un esquema lógico, ideal, de los muchos y perplejos caminos de la creación. (2)(The complexity of the described operations does not bother me; I suspect that the real elaboration had to have been even more complex, and much more chaotic and vacillating. In my opinion, Poe limited himself to supplying a logical, ideal outline of the many and perplexing paths of creation.) Borges's words mirror Poe's own, who suggests that "most writers—poets in especial—… would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought … which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary historio" ("Philosophy," 163). Poe's description of this complexity fascinates Borges, not only in "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe" but in his lifelong reading of Poe, as his marginalia in his editions of Poe's works demonstrate. In Borges's personal copy of R. Brimley Johnson's 1927 edition of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: The Poems and Three Essays on Poetry, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Miscellanies, he notes the following on the inside of the text's back cover: "elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—p. 192."22 The small size of Borges's script suggests that Borges made this note after writing "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe"—probably in the 1940s or 1950s—since both Borges's widow and literary heiress, María Kodama, and the founding curator of the Borges Collection at the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, C. Jared Loewenstein, affirm that Borges's handwriting decreased significantly in size between the 1920s and the 1950s as he neared blindness in 1955.23 However, this text also contains a note in Borges's medium script that cites a short passage from Pym, demonstrating that Borges owned this edition as early as the 1920s and most certainly by 1935 when he penned his first article on Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition." Either way, this note shows that Poe's portrayal of the poet's mental process stood out to Borges long after he first analyzed it in the pages of La Prensa.Notwithstanding this fascination, Borges does not fully accept Poe's theory because Poe's mathematical description of how he wrote "The Raven" denies even the slightest possibility of inspiration and ignores the reality that the artist's preferences or past experiences function as variables rather than constants in this poetic calculus. Once Poe has logically decided on the need to repeat the word "nevermore" throughout his poem, he is left with the problem of how to justify the use of this refrain. He solves the conundrum thus: "I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone" ("Philosophy," 165). Poe's explanation suggests that his solution to this dilemma is not only a logical answer but the logical answer, that thinking the problem through analytically creates a chain of thoughts with only one possible resolution—a speaker without reason requires an animal, parrots are known to mimic human speech, ravens are also known to mimic human speech and are far more melancholy than parrots, a raven will be the speaker of the refrain. Poe's explanation shows little internal debate or wrestling between options—the thought of a creature without reason "immediately arose," the idea of a parrot "very naturally" appeared but was "superseded forthwith by a Raven" (165). This explanation shows a line of thought, but it is much more direct and clean than the "elaborate and vacillating crudities" (163) of the poet's mental state that Poe claims he will reveal to the public. In short, Poe casts the problem of justifying the repetition of "nevermore" as a mathematical equation, and as the analytic poet, he offers the only possible solution.Borges astutely demonstrates that Poe's explanation becomes a part of the theory Poe seeks to craft in the essay rather than a recounting of his mental process. He states, "En los eslabones examinados, la conclusión que el escritor deriva de cada premisa es, desde luego, lógica; pero no es la única necesaria" ("La génesis," 2) ("In the examined links, the conclusion that the writer derives from each premise is, of course, logical; but it is not the only necessary one"). Borges then offers another possible solution, arguing that if Poe needed an irrational speaker to repeat "nevermore" he could have chosen "un lunático, resolución que hubiera transformado el poema" (2) ("a lunatic, a resolution that would have transformed the poem"). Borges's suggestion of an idiot as the speaker of the refrain not only shows that Poe could have arrived at a different final solution but that each step in the thought process allows for different outcomes, an idea that Borges later plays with in his infinite portrayal of time in his own "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan."24 Poe's first step in his justification of the repetition of "nevermore" is to claim that the speaker must be irrational, and to meet this requirement, in the second step, he opts for the animal over the human even though humanity offers several options for beings with little or no reason—the child, the lunatic, the drunk. Borges's comment reveals that the poem's portrayal of a talking raven rather than a ranting lunatic is the result of a decision—it represents a choice made by Poe rather than an inevitable outcome. One could argue that the poet's ability to choose is a part of the creative process that Poe claims to be unveiling to the public in "The Philosophy of Composition," but Poe's descriptions of the process suggest that each "correct" step or link has only one "correct" answer and that by following the chain the poet arrives at the only possible outcome.Poe's descriptions of his creative process as one of intellect rather than inspiration mirror the deductive process he displays in his Dupin trilogy, with the poet thinking in the same terms as Poe's analytic detective—C. Auguste Dupin. In Poe's inaugural detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Dupin suggests that "there is but one mode of reasoning" that can solve the locked room conundrum that the story presents and that "that mode must lead to a definite decision."25 Upon surveying the scene, Dupin determines that the murderers must have escaped the house either from the bedroom where the murder took place or from the adjoining room. Then, step by step, he eliminates the doors and the chimneys from both rooms and the windows from the adjoining room as possible escape routes. After a thorough examination of one of the bedroom's windows, Dupin recounts, "the conclusion was plain, and again narrowed in the field of my investigations. The assassins must have escaped through the other window."26 Dupin's deductive logic foreshadows Poe's description of his mind's workings while composing "The Raven." However, Poe does a more complete job describing Dupin's thought process about the escape route than he does describing his own arrival at the raven as speaker. Dupin considers, investigates, and then rejects the house's other rooms, the multiple doors, the chimneys, and the first window along his path before finding the window with the broken nail while Poe considers and eliminates only one option—a parrot—before arriving at the raven as the solution to his repetition conundrum.27Poe's portrayal of Dupin's analytic/creative mind rather than his portrayal of his own mind in "The Philosophy of Composition" begins to reveal "the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought" (163) that interest Borges. However, Poe's repeated use of "must" in his description of Dupin's analytic method suggests that Dupin's narrative is also controlled, ordered, and limited. Poe uses the word "must" twenty times in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Typically, the word comes from Dupin's lips—or, more precisely, from the narrator's recounting of Dupin's words. Dupin speaks the word sixteen times total and ten times in only the few paragraphs in which he discovers that the window was the murderer's means of escape and thus solves the locked room conundrum. The word receives Poe's emphasis via italics seven times—all within Dupin's examination of the murderer's means of escape—leaving the narrator and the reader with the feeling that Dupin never makes a wrong turn. His logic always works, and his solution must be correct. However, Dupin, like Poe, gives the story's narrator only a summary of his thought process, for as Borges suggests about Poe's descriptions of how he wrote "The Raven" "sin duda, el proceso completo era irrecuperable, además de tedioso" ("La génesis," 2) ("doubtless, the complete process was irretrievable, as well as tedious").Borges is satisfied with this type of order and control when it appears in detective fiction. In fact, he often praises order as one of the detective genre's saving graces: En esta época nuestra, tan caótica, hay algo que, humildemente, ha mantenido las virtudes clásicas: el cuento policial…. Yo diría, para defender la novela policial, que no necesita defensa, leída con cierto desdén ahora, está salvando el orden en una época de desorden. Esto es una prueba que debemos agradecerle y es meritorio.(In this chaotic era of ours, one thing has humbly maintained the classic virtues: the detective story…. I would say in defense of the detective novel that it needs no defense; though now read with a certain disdain, it is safeguarding order in an era of disorder. That is a feat for which we should be grateful.)28 In a pair of articles, Borges even speaks of detective fiction's order as one of the genre's three "musas glaciales" ("glacial muses"), a strange phrase that suggests a fusion between intellect and inspiration, a cold and calculating type of muse.29 However, Borges is not satisfied with Poe's simplistic ordering of chaos in "The Philosophy of Composition," not because Poe offers a very ordered summary of his thought process but because Poe refuses to discuss the gaps or spaces in that process. Borges suggests that this mental exercise requires either inspiration or experience to move from the necessity for an irrational speaker to a parrot and then to a raven rather than a lunatic or a drunk. He argues that in Poe's essay cada eslabón es válido, pero entre eslabón y eslabón queda su partícula de tiniebla, o de inspiración incoercible. Lo diré de otro modo: Poe declara los diversos momentos del proceso poético, pero entre cada uno y el subsiguiente queda—infinitesimal—el de la invención. Queda otro arcano general: el del las preferencias. ("La génesis," 2)(each link is valid, but between link and link a particle of darkness remains, or of irrepressible inspiration. I will say it another way: Poe declares the diverse moments of the poetic process, but between each subsequent step the infinitesimal moment of invention remains. Another general secret remains: the secret of preferences.) For Borges, then, Poe's step-by-step explanation of how he decided to have a raven speak his gloomy refrain is logical, but it was possible that he could arrived at another conclusion. Poe could have chosen a different route, but in these moments or gaps of thought between irrational being to parrot to raven, Poe's own experiences, preferences, and/or the muse which he denies exists prod him from one point to the next until he arrives at a solution rather than the solution.Poe does show the gap or void that Borges sees as essential to the writer's thought process, but once again, he does so in his detective fiction rather than in "The Philosophy of Composition." In the opening pages of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the narrator seeks to reveal Dupin's acumen through a brief example in which the Frenchman finishes the narrator's thoughts for him, or, in effect, reads the narrator's mind. When the narrator asks for "the method—if method there is— by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter," Dupin replies, "That you may comprehend all clearly, we will first retrace the course of your meditations…. The larger links of the chain run thus—Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer."30 Dupin's reference to the "larger links" supports Borges's claim that any attempt to reveal the human thought process provides a summarized or tidied version of the chaotic or vacillating activities of the brain, and his detailed explanation of how he moves from one step to the next also reveals experience, revelation, and even guessing. Almost every mental leap Dupin makes, from the moment he observes the narrator mutter "stereotomy" to the moment in which he vocalizes the narrator's thoughts on Chantilly, relies on personal conversations he has recently had with the narrator. His experience fills in the spaces or serves as the informing muse between each link, guiding him from one step to the next. Dupin's confident step-by-step explanation of his thought process makes the movement between links or steps appear infallible, but his reference to Epicurus in which he ponders "how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony" reminds the reader that Dupin, too, offers informed guesses that end up being correct.31 When interpreted with Borges's critique of "The Philosophy of Composition" in mind, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" both prefigures and exemplifies the analytic thought process that Poe attempts to elucidate in his famous essay, since the story suggests that something other than intelligence exists between each link in the poet's or analyst's chain of thought while the essay ignores this possibility.Borges summarizes his partial acceptance of Poe's poetic theory in the penultimate paragraph of "La génesis de 'El cuervo' de Poe" as follows: Qué conclusiones autorizan los hechos anteriores? Juzgo que las siguientes: primero, la validez del método analítico ejercido por Poe; segundo, la posibilidad de recuperar y fijar los diversos momentos de la creación; tercero, la imposibilidad de reducir el acto poético a un puro esquema lógico, ya que las preferencias del escritor son irreducibles. (2)(What conclusions do these facts authorize? I suggest the following: first, the validity of the analytic method exercised by Poe; second, the possibility of recovering and pinpointing the diverse moments of crea
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