Borges's "Ulrike" - signature of a literary life

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by Alice E.H. Petersen

When readers of Borges reach for his later works, they arc often a little disappointed by what they find. Collections like The Book of Sand (which contains the short story "Ulrike") and Doctor Brodie's Report, which both appeared in the 1970s, are often passed over because they lack the obvious touches of "Borges" associated with metaphysical whimsy and the yellow tigers that stalked the works of an earlier age. Many critics resort to paraphrase instead of analysis, as if there is no more to be done with Borges but reiterate his own tales. Writing about The Book of Sand, Gene Bell-Villada complains that there are "no over-arching concerns, thematic or otherwise . . . . Although certain subjects do recur, they do not add up to any systematic set of preoccupations" (Bell-Villada 255).

I suggest that the line of Borges's narrative development precludes the explicit statement of "over-arching concerns." Over the years, the concerns of Borges have become so familiar to both author and reader that the barest hint of a personal preoccupation in the text suffices to recall a vast expanse of meaning. The preoccupations remain the same, but the manner of revoicing them has changed. In "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal," Borges comments: "it may be that history is the history of the different intonation given a handful of metaphors" (Labyrinths 227). It would not be untrue to suggest that the history Borges speaks of is not just literary history but also the personal history of a literary career. It may be that Borges's last works arc not his greatest, but they are nonetheless the signature of a lifetime of significant literary activity.

Borges's consciousness of the past involved not just an awareness of literary tradition but also a sense of his own career as it developed within that tradition. He saw that he was not unaltered by his creative life, writing, "I think a writer is being changed all the time by his output. So that perhaps at first what he writes is not relevant to him. And if he goes on writing, he'll find that those things are ringing bells all the time" (Barnstone 92-93). Thus, he continued, everything was to be found in one way or another in that first book of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923).

Borges was never one to be weighed down by the anxieties of influence. Rather, he reveled in the possibility of being indebted to the past. His method of freeing himself from the ancestral writer was to rewrite that ancestral figure, in effect, to recreate the past. He writes in "Kafka and His Precursors," "the writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future" (Labyrinths 236).

A footnote referring the reader to a collection of T. S. Eliot's essays, Points of View, indicates the source of the model of artistic invention which Borges appropriated in "Kafka and His Precursors." In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," contained in this collection, Eliot describes all existing works of art as forming an ideal order, changed by the introduction of new works:

What happens when a new work of art is created is some thing

that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which

preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among

themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the

really new) work of art among them.... Whoever has approved this

idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not

find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present

as much as the present is directed by the past. (Points of View 25-26)(1)

For Borges, the theory of Platonic archetypes is the means by which the individual, through the act of literary creation, becomes part of the timeless; it also became the means by which he realized his unique position as a writer as well as his own necessary subjugation to tradition.

Borges recognized that rewriting a tale brings fresh life to both ancestral and contemporary texts. The unique intonation of each writer ensures that what goes on within the text remains a movement forward, a dynamic pulse toward the next reincarnation of the archetype. The word within the text is charged with a sense of imminence, of becoming. Borges writes concerning this:

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time,

certain twilights and certain places--all these are trying to tell us

something, or have told us something we should not have

missed, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a

revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic

reality. (Labyrinths 223)

As the author becomes older, and his sense of tradition stronger, the fragility of the contemporary text becomes more pronounced; the voice that reiterates is both humbled by its forbears, but at the same time borne up by their example. To return to a dominant theme in Borges's work--there are very few metaphors, and these few are merely renewed by successive generations after the manner that most pleases them. However, the manner of renewing the metaphor must be in keeping with the simplicity of the ideal archetype, and this is the responsibility and the prerogative of the individual voice. One of the strengths of Borges's late works lies in his espousal of the simplicity required by the basic forms of tradition. At the age of 80, he verbally renounced the willful obscurity and baroque style of earlier days: "now I am daring and I write in a straightforward way and use no word to send a reader to the dictionary, and avoid violent metaphors" (Barnstone 123).