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Why do I feel the need to defend values that many people might take to be perfectly obvious? I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance toward my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where—if not exactly satisfied with my words—I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature—and I mean the literature that matches up to these requirements—is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.
[...] Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in with what I ought to write—the relationship between a given argument and all its possible variants and alternatives, everything that can happen in time and space. This is a devouring and destructive obsession, which is enough to render writing impossible. In order to combat it, I try to limit the field of what I have to say, divide it into still more limited fields, then subdivide these again, and so on and on. Then another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the detail of the detail of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the infinitely small, just as I was previously lost in the infinitely vast.
cute
The fact is, my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. These are two different drives toward exactitude that will never attain complete fulfillment, one because "natural" languages always say something more than formalized languages can—natural languages always involve a certain amount of noise that impinges upon the essentiality of the information—and the other because, in representing the density and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be experienced.
Will the literature of the fantastic be possible in the twenty-first century, with the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two paths seem to be open from now on. (1) We could recycle used images in a new context that changes their meaning. Postmodernism may be seen as the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate its alienation. (2) We could wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world.
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various "codes," into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.
Among the values I would like passed on to the next millennium, there is this above all: a literature that has absorbed the taste for mental orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of poetry, but at the same time that of science and of philosophy: an intelligence such as that of Valéry as an essayist and prose writer. (And if I mention Valéry in a context in which the names of novelists prevail, it is partly because, though he was not a novelist and indeed—thanks to a famous quip of his—was thought of as the official liquidator of traditional fiction, he was a critic who understood novels as no one else could, defining their specificity simply as novels.)
If I had to say which fiction writer has perfectly achieved Valéry's aesthetic ideal of exactitude in imagination and in language, creating works that match the rigorous geometry of the crystal and the abstraction of deductive reasoning, I would without hesitation say Jorge Luis Borges. The reasons for my fondness for Borges do not end here, but I will mention only the main ones. I love his work because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of an attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic); because they are texts contained in only a few pages, with an exemplary economy of expression; because his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures. As an example let us take his most vertiginous "essay" on time, "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" (The Garden of Forking Paths), which is presented as a spy story and includes a totally logico-metaphysical story, which in turn contains the description of an endless Chinese novel—and all this concentrated into a dozen pages.
[...] The stories that I am interested in narrating are always stories about a search for human completeness, integration, to be achieved through trials that are both practical and moral at the same time, and that constitute something above and beyond all the alienation and division that is imposed on contemporary man. This is where any poetic and moral unity in my work should be sought.
[...] But this Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith is some place: it is a pity I am now too old, but something your children should do first thing is to work with them for a while to learn the trade (there is an enormous students’ office): send them for an apprenticeship with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, then they can learn philosophy, music, and all the rest, but first of all a man has to know how to work Wall Street. They also do a huge amount of propaganda for investments, with brochures based on the principle that money breeds money, with maxims about money by the great philosophers, and this propaganda for the cult of money is constant in America: if by chance a generation grows up that does not put money above all else, America will go up in smoke.
[...] We discuss the sad state of American literature, which is stifled by commercial demands: if you don’t write as the New Yorker demands, you don’t get published. Purdy published his first book of short stories at his own expense, then he was discovered in England by Edith Sitwell, and subsequently Farrar Straus published his work, but he does not even know Mrs Cudahy, and the critics don’t understand him, though the book is, very slowly, managing to sell. There are no magazines that publish short stories, no groups of writers, or at least he does not belong to any group. He gives me a list of good novels, but they are nearly all unpublished works which have not been able to find a publisher. Good literature in America is clandestine, lies in unknown authors’ drawers, and only occasionally someone emerges from the gloom breaking through the leaden cloak of commercial production. I would like to talk about capitalism and socialism, but Purdy certainly would not understand me; no one here knows or even suspects that socialism exists, capitalism wraps itself round and permeates everything, and its antithesis is nothing but a meagre, childish claim to a spiritual dimension, devoid of any coherent line or prospects. Unlike Soviet society, where the totalitarian unity of society is totally based on the constant awareness of its enemies, of its antithesis, here we are in a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists nor even any awareness of the possibility of an alternative other than that of individualist escapism.
[...] anyway this woman, who was young and Jewish but with a real feeling for nature, says a propos of The Baron in the Trees that she loves ‘to ride’, but never ‘rides’ because her husband never takes her, but that I must certainly know how to ‘ride’ well. I tell her that I have never been on a horse in my life, so we fix up to meet again the next day and they also lent me a pair of little Mexican riding boots. It is clear that this is ‘the right way of approach to America’, because one has to go through all the means of communication in historical sequence and eventually I will arrive at the Cadillac.
this is understatedly funny