Borges versus Proust: Towards a combative literature

Comparative Literature, Winter 2003 by Conley, Tim

Sin comprender me ofrecio uno de los primeros.

Yo le tendi uno de esos imprudentes billetes americanos que tienen muy diverso valor y el mismo tamano. Lo examino con avidez.

-No puedo ser-grito-. Lleva la fecha de mil novecientos sesenta y cuatro. (Meses despues alguien me digo que los billetes de banco no llevan fecha.)

-Todo esto un milagro-alcanzo a decir-y to milagroso da miedo. Quienes fueron testigos de la resurrecion de Lazaro habran que dado horroizados.

No hemos cambiado nada, pense. Siempre las referencias librescas.

Hizo pedazos el billete y guardo la moneda.

Yo resolvi tirarla al rio. Ela arco del ascudo de plata perdiendose en el rio de plata hubiera conferido a mi historia una imagen vivida, pero la suerte no lo quiso. (LA 20)

He held out one of the silver pieces to me; he didn't understand.

I handed him one of those ill-advised American bills that are all of the same size though of very different denominations. He examined it avidly.

"Impossible!" he cried. "It's dated 1964"

(Months later someone told me that banknotes are not dated.)

"This, all this, is a miracle, he managed to say. "And the miraculous inspires fear. Those who witnessed the resurrection of Lazarus must have been terrified."

We haven't changed a bit, I thought. Always referring back to books.

He tore the bill to shreds and put the coin back in his pocket.

I had wanted to throw the coin he gave me in the river. The arc of the silver coin disappearing into the silver river would have lent my story a vivid image, but fate would not have it. (CF 416)

The imperfection of this wonderful story is stressed (and is in fact its ultimate coup) because the separate selves remain at odds, and the field of logical contradictions and paradoxes between them (the result of their meeting, as anyone who has had the teenager's conversation about traveling back in time and obstructing a past self from entering the time machine will tell you) inexorably widens.

The moral detachment of the artist can be effected either by the artist's selfassertion as, in Samuel Beckett's phrase, a "pure subject ... exempt from the impurity of will" (90) or by the subjugation of morality by the will (of the artist or art itself). Although it may be generally said that Proust's attempt at moral detachment is of the first kind and Borges's the second, the subjective calls to both writers (and their narrators), specifically in dreams, and arouses a disgust that transcends the moral. Le temps retrouve offers the example of love:

Si je m'etais toujours tant interesse aux reves que l'on a pendant le sommeil, n'est-ce pas parce que, compensant la duree par la puissance, ils vous aident a mieux comprendre ce qu'a de subjectif, par exemple, l'amour, par le simple fait que-mais avec une vitesse prodigieuse-ils realisent ce qu'on appellerait vulgairement vous mettre une femme dans la peau ... (R 3:911)

If I had always taken so great an interest in dreams, was this not because, making up for lack of duration by their potency, they help us better to understand the subjective element in, for instance, love through the simple fact that they reproduce-but with miraculous swiftness-the process vulgarly known as getting a woman under one's skin ... (M-K 3:949)