PARTISAN REVIEW
123
Somewhat in this regard, Foucault says Borges inspired him to a laugh–
ter out of which flew - brilliantly -
The Order of Things.
I return
to concrete universals.
In the story, "Guayaquil," the narrator notices his own pomposity
and yet dislikes the same pomposity in his Jewish antagonist, especially
when it expresses the narrator's own opinions.
If
this situation contained
merely a self-doubting narrator and a clever Jew, I'd see them as creeps,
but Borges suggests one man reflects another whether any man likes
it or not; thus we destroy one another, or let ourselves be destroyed, in
spasms of suicidal self-hatred. The active horror is stimulated, perhaps,
by the fact and the pretentions of J ewish-special-rootless-individuality
(upon which the first Jew in the book, an anti-Zionist, actually gloats) ;
and the stimulation is intensified when Jewish cultural assimilation
makes ideas of rooted birthright ridiculous, particularly in South Amer–
ica where, unless you're Indian, they are ridiculous to begin with. In
"Guayaquil," the second Jew has this effect. Borges's real subject, then,
is himself, but he is sensitive to the phenomenology of anti-Semitism
and sympathetic to the sensitivities of Jews. Nevertheless, I think that
Kafka - the most significant and influential writer of this century–
would assure Borges that he, the Jew from Prague, the one who wrote
stories, has 'been ludicrously overrated. Then, if possible, he would drop
the subject and cook up his Kiplings.
In the other stories - where it should be noted Jews don't ap–
pear -lives are embittered by repressed violence or perverted or ended
by knife fights. Two knife stories, to which Borges calls attention in his
Preface and Afterword, advance the theme that knives, not people, kill.
OUf
National Rifle Association will now doubt the efficacy of their re–
cent campaign, on TV and a million bumper stickers, arguing that
people, not guns, kill. But this is the kind of paradox that Borges en–
joys: a conservative artist humanizes a deadly thing; his counterpart in
the business world makes humanity that thing, deadly and dehuman–
ized. Borges himself does the latter in a story where two enemies are
told to run .a race after their throats have been cut. They do so.
It
is a
terrific story, reminiscent of moments in Flannery O 'Connor where some
quality like personal animus makes fiery efects without destroying the
aesthetic object. Terrific, reminiscent of, but not so good as O'Connor.
Borges achieves his perfections in a mode less shocking. H e thinks so,
too.
Most of the foregoing discussion, I'm afraid, comes too close to
familiar, serious, complicated facts of modern experience, and it is un–
dermined by Borges - again in the delicate Preface - where he says
