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LEONARD MICHAELS
acts this way at his first opportunity. The other Jew comes from Prague,
a man "nothing out of the ordinary," yet remarkably disgusting in his
manner and attire.
But, evidence of anti-Semitism, which all of this isn't, is, even if
it were, qualified out of existence by such contradictions as "ordinary"
and disgusting. They are not failures of invention in the aging Borges,
but complexities in point of view. Furthermore, if the Jews are stereo–
typical, they are also creatures of a thematic obsession. Examples of this
occur in the first two stories where a man who appears god-like to his
humble associates is, in both stories, sacrificed by them; first nailed to
a cross, then betrayed by the Jew as described above. Besides figuring in
the author's theme - the unbearable intimacy of friendship and other
sacrosanct connections - the Jews are dramatically justified by antag–
onists whose moral inadequacies they reflect, exploit, and in dishonor–
able ways, overcome. These are Jews of art, not life. That's part of the
problem.
The Afterword of
Doctor Brodie's Report,
where Borges completes
his Preface and thus embraces his book, contains more personal data.
Here Borges says he identifies with the Jew of the friendly hoodlum.
His confession is artistically sincere and as fascinating as the stories of
the Jews. Neither story is extraordinarily good, but both are so skill–
fully turned as to merit the attention of non-paranoid literary analysts
who, beneath every verbal surface, don't discover themselves. But one
needn't be paranoid to wonder if recent imaginative literature, by some
political conservatives, obliges us to consider anti-Semitism as a technical
or conventional feature of the highest art. Presumably unrelated to Jew
hatred in the real world, it is somehow an expression of simultaneous
yearnings for atavistic vitality and the clean conscience of impeccable
form (which applies equally well, I admit, to Rudyard Kipling and
Mark Spitz ), particularly when poetic genius feels threatened by bour–
geois, democratic, liberal ideas. The convention, which doesn't exist in
Borges, might still bring, to hyper-sensitive readers, intimations of a
Semiticized-Kantianism, for, in the pages of Borges, the congenital sub–
jectivity of space and time seems to make a little room for the Jew.
An archetypally rootless figure of isolated consciousness has been
squeezed into the ghetto of the manifold (Kant's vision of the inex–
tricable entanglements of perceptual phenomena and the telephone
system of New York City). And why not? Traditional circumstances of
place are no part of the metaphorical Jew's psychological essence and so
he thinks freely, having no other choice, like the mind itself - which,
in Borges, is liable to pop up anywhere at any moment, like a Jew.
