S 'H F-PA ROD Y
353
does indeed make currently accepted divisions seem tiresomely arbi–
trary, the effect of its utterly zany yet precise enumeration
is
to
momentarily collapse our faith in taxonomy altogether, to free us
from assumptions that govern the making of classifications, including
those of an encyclopedia of no verifiable existence. Self-parody in
Borges, as in Joyce and Nabokov, goes beyond the mere questioning
of the validity of any given invention by proposing the unimpeded
opportunity for making new ones.
Invention creates life in literature in the sense that invention
is
itself the act and evidence of life. It
is
a way of being present, in
every sense of that word. Borges
is
for my taste too little concerned
with the glory of the human presence within the wastes of time, with
human agencies of invention, with Christs, and he is too exclusively
amused by the careers of competing systems, the failed potencies of
techniques and structures. We remember the point of his texts,
especially since it
is
so often the same point, but he gives us no
people to remember or care about. Our greatest invention so far
remains ourselves, what we call human beings, and enough inventing
of that phenomenon still goes on to make the destiny of persons
altogether more compelling in literature than the destiny of systems or
of literary modes. Nothing we have created, in politics or literature,
is
necessary - that is the central aspect of the literature of self-parody
which humanly matters.
