Borges versus Proust: Towards a combative literature

Comparative Literature, Winter 2003 by Conley, Tim

In an essay considering between Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens "whose era" of poetry the twentieth century may be said to be, Marjorie Perloff recognizes "the problem that came to obsess Modernism: whether poetry should be lyric or collage, meditation or encyclopedia, the still moment or the jagged fragment" (23). In a spirit akin to Perloff's, the present essay reorients the problem by substituting prose as its focus and suggesting that the differences between the two authors examined here typify some of the primary choices available to avantgarde prose. Proust and Borges are among the greatest non- and perhaps even anti-totalizing (pace Sartre, who recognized Proust as a totality, an overwhelming mythology located in a person) prose writers of the twentieth century, and they are almost certainly the most ardent resisters of completion. As such, they are eminent examples of the tendency towards authorial abortion, self-sabotage, and error that is the idea (in place of an ideal) of modernism and postmodernism.3

The literary criticism of Tlon permits the invention of authors by attributing texts that might otherwise seem unrelated to "a single author, and then in all good conscience determin [ing] the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres" (CF 77). If we were citizens of T16n, then, a natural approach to the problem of comparison here would be to determine what sort of author penned both A la recherche and Ficciones-an approach that would, I think, result in the emergence of the ideal author of Tlon, whose oeuvre explodes with contradictions, theses, and antitheses at every degree of style and substance. Borges-Proust, as this Tlonist construct may be christened, is as unstable a compound as any chemist might wish for. Just as the transposition of respective authorial function and works, as elegantly exemplified by the case of Pierre Menard, is a technique that "fills the calmest books with adventure" (CF 95), to imagine "The Library of Babel" as written by Proust is a proposition that enthralls by its potential as much as it eludes real possibility. Differentiating between authors so often characterized as incomparable is a difficult imperative to face because it seems counterintuitive, but it is for this quixotic reason (like the impossibility of remembering the world without oneself) that it is an imperative.

And with that, the bell rings and the first round begins.

Round 1. Time

Probably the most obvious basis for comparison between Proust and Borges is the question of how time and temporality are dramatized and examined (both words seem inadequate) in their respective writings. Because a very considerable corpus of commentary has swelled up around such questions in analyses of both authors' works, in the space of this essay I have not even the leisure to summarize, say, their respective responses to Bergson. Instead, I will highlight a few significant points of divergence regarding how time is perceived and represented.

Both Borges and Proust measure out a sense of time in their language, and it is by their respective grammatical measure, the musical scale or what might simply be termed style, that we recognize a given sentence-content notwithstanding, even translated-as the work of one or the other author. This is obvious, and yet the particular philosophies that generate these distinct styles are worth closer attention. In Time & Sense Julia Kristeva refers to a "time of language" in Proust, that which "rushes into the breach" between "perception and memory" (204). Losing and regaining time, then, constitute the inevitable and only choices set before a conscious being, but are themselves qualitative feats of the imagination. Indeed, the very experience of this moment being swallowed up by the next is inextricably mediated by the sensory web of memory, fancy, and desire. In Le cote de Guermantes, the narrator lusts after Mme. de Stermaria very much as an instant, a time sought though not (apparently) strictly lost: