My Two Problems: 1

       Through the rest of the academic year 1975/76, my once-a-month fiction readings were a program of excerpts from and around the LETTERS novel, still under construction. Reading "live" from that book presented a small problem, set forth below; but at one of the first tryouts of the program, that small problem was overshadowed by another more considerable.

       In October 1975, Michigan State University staged an elaborate homage to Jorge Luis Borges. The elderly writer was flown up to East Lansing from Buenos Aires, together with his secretary-guide-companion-nurse, and established in a year's residency, from which he would make frequent excursions about the country. Borges translators and Borges critics were assembled to read papers and tributes.

       By reason of my "Literature of Exhaustion" essay, I was invited to the feast, but given permission to read from my fiction instead of preparing yet another essay in praise of Borges. I accepted, pleased to pay my respects again to the great man, whom I hadn't crossed paths with for seven years, and confidently assuming that my reading from LETTERS would be but one more of the preliminaries to Sr. Borges's own public presentation, the culmination of the festivities.

       However, in an exquisite lapse of good judgment, the orchestrators of the homage climaxed the several-day celebration by scheduling Borges's main appearance in the afternoon of the final day, to be followed by a testimonial banquet, to be followed in turn and presumably wrapped up by. . . my reading. I was appalled at that impossible programming, and said so. No help for it, my hosts explained: The old chap is 77; he tires easily and therefore prefers to do his number in the afternoon.

       He did, impressively indeed, stringing together anecdotes and comments upon his work in an informal but practiced spiel to a large, reverent audience which he could not see. Well, I said to myself: Hard as this act will be to follow, at least Borges himself will tire early as promised and not attend my anticlimactic coda to the main event. Alas, dinner gave the man new energy; he insisted not only upon coming to my reading, but upon sitting front row center, flanked by his companion and his American translator, where I could see his reaction to every line. For that hour I could almost have wished myself blind; but the show had to go on.

       Good evening.

       Our situation tonight is of course impossible.

       In 1966, in an effort to come to terms with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, which I admired more than my own, I wrote an essay called "The Literature of Exhaustion." Among other remarks which have risen from that essay to haunt or embarrass me since -- whether because they were marvelously misunderstood or because they were understood correctly -- was this one: "Our century is more than two-thirds done; it is dismaying to see so many of our writers still following Dostoevsky or Flaubert, when the real problem seems to me to be how to follow not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who've followed Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers." How does one follow Nabokov, Beckett, Borges?

       I did not imagine in 1966 that I would have to confront the problem in this literal a fashion. It delights me that the writer I was praising nine years ago "in the evening of his career" has spoken to us today in the vigorous afternoon and left the evening to us poor epigones. I am in the position of the heroine of my novella about Scheherazade's younger sister, Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the king's bed for 1001 nights, watching Scheherazade and him make love and listening to all those stories. The Genie in my story exclaims at one point:

       "All those nights at the foot of the bed, Dunyazade!. . . You've had the whole literary tradition transmitted to you -- and the whole erotic tradition, too! There's no story you haven't heard; there's no way of making love that you haven't seen again and again. I think of you, little sister, a virgin in both respects: All that innocence! All that sophistication! And now it's your turn: Shahryar has told [his younger brother] Shah Zaman about his wonderful mistress, how he loves her as much for herself as for her stories -- which he also passes on; the two brothers marry the two sisters; it's your wedding night, Dunyazade. . . But wait! Look here! Shahryar deflowered and killed a virgin a night for a thousand and one nights before he met Scheherazade; Shah Zaman has been doing the same thing, but it's only now, a thousand nights and a night later, that he learns about Scheherazade -- that means he's had two thousand and two young women at the least since he killed his wife, and not one has pleased him enough to move him to spend a second night with her, much less spare her life! What are you going to do to entertain him, little sister? Make love in exciting new ways? There are none! Tell him stories, like Scheherazade? He's heard them all! Dunyazade, Dunyazade! Who can tell your story?"

       Well, one must try. Like the mountebank in Anatole France's story "The Juggler of Our Lady," I can pay tribute only by doing my tricks, and must pray that you -- and Señor Borges -- will accept them in that spirit.

       My second problem is less serious by comparison. I want to read to you from work in progress, since you can read my works in print for yourself. But alas, after spending several years writing fiction for the ear, out of my interest in the oral narrative tradition, I have -- as André Gide used to say -- walked to the opposite corner of my imagination: The work in hand really is for print, not for reading aloud. Therefore I shall talk about it a bit and read around it some: hors d'oeuvres served up too late, after the chef d'oeuvre of this afternoon.

 << PrevPage  [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]  ... NextPage  >>