Another Borges interview

I found another Borges interview entitled "Merely a Man of Letters." It was conducted by Denis Dutton and Michael Palencia-Roth, editors of Philosophy and Literature, in 1977.

http://www.denisdutton.com/jorge_luis_borges_interview.htm

The interview is especially interesting in the context of recent class discussions. I think it sheds new light on some of his stories. Here are some parts I really liked, but you should definitely read the full thing!

Denis Dutton: Why don’t you tell us about some of the philosophers who have influenced your work, in whom you’ve been the most interested?

Jorge Luis Borges: Well, I think that’s an easy one. I think you might talk in terms of two: those would be Berkeley and Schopenhauer. But I suppose Hume might be worked in also, because, after all, of course Hume refutes Berkeley. But really, he comes from Berkeley — even if Berkeley comes from Locke. You might think of Locke, of Berkeley, and of Hume as being three links in an argument. But when somebody refutes somebody else in philosophy, he’s carrying on the argument.

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Borges: Oh, well, yes, I’ll explain very easily…. Encyclopedias have been, I’d say, my life’s chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. Well, I used to go to the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires — and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, or a librarian, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Of course, afterwards, I had that book at home, by my hand. And then I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. And then one night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden, and the Druids — a treasure trove, no? — all in the same volume, of course, “Dr–.”

Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. Where, for example, you would have, let’s say, a language and then a literature that went with the language, and then a history with it, and so on. Then I thought, well, I’d write a story of the fancy encyclopedia. Then of course that would need many different people to write it, to get together and to discuss many things — the mathematicians, philosophers, men of letters, architects, engineers, then also novelists or historians. Then, as I needed a quite different world from ours — it wasn’t enough to invent fancy names — I said, why not a world based on, let’s say, Berkeleyan ideas?

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DD: You share one thing certainly with philosophers, and that is a fascination with perplexity, with paradox.

Borges: Oh yes, of course — well I suppose philosophy springs from our perplexity. If you’ve read what I may be allowed to call “my works” — if you’ve read my sketches, whatever they are — you’d find that there is a very obvious symbol of perplexity to be found all the time, and that is the maze. I find that a very obvious symbol of perplexity. A maze and amazement go together, no? A symbol of amazement would be the maze.

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Borges: Well, perhaps no systems are attainable, but the search for a system is very interesting.

MP-R: Would you call your work a search for a system?

Borges: No, I wouldn’t be as ambitious as all that. I would call it, well, not science fiction, but rather the fiction of philosophy, or the fiction of dreams. And also, I’m greatly interested in solipsism, which is only an extreme form of idealism. It is strange, though, that all the people who write on solipsism write about it in order to refute it. I haven’t seen a single book in favor of solipsism. I know what you would want to say: since there is only one dreamer, why do you write a book? But if there is only one dreamer, why could you not dream about writing a book?