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LEONARD MICHAELS
that he is not a "commited writer." I'm not a committed critic, but I
don' t know precisely what Borges means. He says he doesn' t intend to
be persuasive, but no artist ever has that as a primary intention. Per–
haps Borges thinks the uncertainties of mind, world, and history make it
impossible to be a committed writer. Specifically, he says, "someday
we will deserve not to have governments." Perhaps, then, human nature
itself forbids, both in life and art, and there is no context in which com–
mitment makes reliable, continuous sense. Why then join any party? Or,
perhaps, a committed writer - one who is crippled by some narrowing
conviction; for example, the idea of a better non-existent world than
the one in which, at the moment, we cannot know if we live - loses
both his art and his ability to entertain. Borges says, in his stories, he
hopes to entertain. In life, he says, he speaks his mind and makes himself
a target. This is clear enough in
Doctor Brodie's Report,
which con–
tains stories full of duels and a Preface where modesty and contempt
smile together. But Borges's title story, the be&t and last in the book,
derives from Swift - the stupendous genius of imaginative commit–
ments!
Here Borges elaborates an element in the entertaining fourth book
of Gulliver. Where Swift uses the Yahoos for a certain argumentative
purpose, Borges uses them for another, similar to Swift's, but, I think,
more generalized and pessimistic - in a sense, more committed. In
Swift the Yahoos are, perhaps, an aspect of Gulliver's
sanity
and part
of a rhetorical proposition which accommodates arguments - hateful
to Swift - for a society invented by <human reason; in the imagined
situation, where Instinct and the relations of thought and feeling are
forever disengaged, the effect is not entirely unappealing. Borges dis–
penses with implicit argumentative respect for enlightened ideas, and
exposes a potential for extreme and hideous degeneration in customs
and institutions of civilized human being - rather as if, without Swift's
horses, he sits in the conservative camp. Whether he does or not, the
story is first rate.
Like the others this story is an exercise in "distance," treating
matters far away, imperfectly recorded or recalled, or, when heightened
by precise, circumstantial detail, made to seem questionable for just
that reason. Such things are unstraightforward; they make for a false,
pretentious proximity, as dangerous perhaps as friendship. Nevertheless,
Borges supplies them in a quick, clean, direot manner that recalls the
splendid abundance of Isaac Singer, another writer much concerned
with friendship, especially in his last novel,
Enemies, A Love Story.
In
a paragraph these writers can create the solid, various life of a street,
