Richard Burgin
A CONVERSATION WITH BORGES
INTERVIEWER: Your stories almost always have their source
in other works of literature or in philosophical concepts, for example,
"Pierre Menard." I wonder how you feel about that story.
BORGES: You know, that was the first story I wrote. But it's not wholly
a story ... it's a kind of essay, and then I think that in that story
I think you get a feeling of tiredness and scepticism, no? Because
you feel of Menard as coming at the end of a very long literary
period, and he comes to the moment when he finds he doesn't want
to encumber the world with any more books. And that, although his
fate is to be a literary man, he's not out for fame. He's writing for
himself and he decides to do something very, very unobstrusive, he'll
rewrite a book that is already there, no? - and very much there,
Don Quixote.
And then of course that story has the idea, what I said
in my first Lecture here, that every time a book is read or reread,
then something happens to the book, no?
INTERVIEWER:
It
becomes modified.
BORGES: Yes modified, and every time you read it, it's really a new
experience.
INTERVIEWER: As you see the world's literature as constantly changing,
as continuously being modified by time, does this make you feel a
sense of futility about creating so-called original works of literature?
BORGES: But not only futility, I see it as something living and growing.
I think of the world's literature as a kind of forest; I mean, it's tangled
and it entangles us but it's growing. Well, to come back to my in–
evitable image of a labyrinth, well, it's a living labyrinth, no? A
living maze. Perhaps the word labyrinth is more mysterious than
the word maze, no?
INTERVIEWER: Maze is almost too mechanical a word.
