Tag Archives: J.L. Borges

Reid and I: a writer’s double life

Leonid Pasternak, The Passion Of Creation (1892). Public domain (Wikimedia)

Reid’s public self at the Avon Valley Festival (photo: Amanda Curtin)

In 1960 a very short story called ‘Borges y Yo’ appeared in Argentina. Its author, on the verge of becoming internationally famous, was Jorge Luis Borges. Translation soon made this story widely known under the English title ‘Borges and I.’ It begins abruptly: ‘The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.’ The first-person narrator goes on to describe someone who is almost identical with himself, but from whom he feels somewhat alienated.

‘It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.’

Ultimately they comprise an inseparable dyad, as the story’s final sentence suggests: ‘I do not know which of us has written this page.’

It’s an amusing way of depicting the tense relationship between any literary figure’s public persona and the more private self who quietly does the writing.

In the opening piece of his essay collection The Writing Life (2014), David Malouf considers the distinct selves involved in writing and living. ‘There’s a gap,’ he says, ‘a mysterious and sometimes disturbing one, between the writer’s daily self, his walking and talking self … and the self that gets the writing done.’

Another essay in the same book, ‘When the Writer Speaks,’ picks up the theme:

‘The real enemy of writing is talk. There is something about the facility of talk, the ease with which ideas clothe themselves in the first available words, that is antithetical to the way a writer’s mind works when he is engaged in the slower…deeper business of writing.’

Malouf refers to a short story by Henry James, ‘The Private Life,’ in which the narrator is astonished to discover that the person who publicly poses as the admired author Clare Vawdrey, entertaining people with plausible literary conversation, is not the person who, invisibly secluded, writes Vawdrey’s books. There is an arrangement of convenience between those two distinct people. As Malouf remarks, James’s tale dramatises a fundamental truth about literary activity: ‘The social self is a front…behind which the real writer can hide.’ The latter is ‘a creature of solitude, of the inner life.’

Like any writer, I’m acutely conscious of this tension described by Borges, Malouf and James – and I feel quite ambivalent about what often seems to be my double life. When I glance back at the ‘Events’ page of my website I’m reminded of the umpteen different literary and para-literary activities that have engaged much of my time in recent years. I’ve attended numerous meetings related to the writing life, such as Board sessions of the Australian Society of Authors. I’ve given presentations under the auspices of the Copyright Agency, WritingWA, the State Library, national and state English Teaching conferences, the National Trust and other bodies. I’ve run writing workshops for several schools and for groups such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Peter Cowan Writers Centre. I’ve lectured on literary topics to metropolitan and regional branches of the Mature Adults Learning Association, and to U3A and Probus groups.  I’ve been a featured guest speaker at several different literary festivals. I’ve given countless talks about my books in libraries, town halls, universities, community centres, bookshops, local museums and other venues. Book clubs have invited me along to the-author-meets-his-readers discussions. And so on.

While I enjoy all such encounters, I’m also haunted by Malouf’s admonition: ‘Too much time talking about writing, not enough doing it.’ Perhaps I should follow the example of Henry James’s Vawdrey and hire someone to impersonate me in public so that, unobserved, I can get on more productively with the solitary task of writing?

 

Memory loss and retrieval

memory

Any visitor to an aged-care home knows that chronic forgetfulness, in its extreme form, is severely disabling. Few things are sadder than the bewilderment of a person no longer able to make connected sense of a series of events, no longer able to bring past knowledge to bear on present situations. Losing the capacity to remember can eventually betoken dementia and the dissolution of individual identity.

Ironically, total recall is also disabling; and this phenomenon, though much less common, sheds light on the nature of memory. It’s the theme of ‘Funes the Memorious,’ a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Because of a brain injury the character called Funes cannot forget any detail of what he perceives. He is cursed to carry all of it vividly in his head forever – an intolerable burden because he is entirely immersed in the accumulated particulars, unable to generalise or be selective, and therefore unable to interpret his world. So his prodigious aptitude is significantly different from memory, which sorts, arranges and weaves, creating a narrative structure through which experience acquires meaning.

What is true of individual identity is also true of social identity. Researchers working across disciplines have shown how personal and group memory become intertwined in a psychological process fundamental to history and culture. If a civilisation loses its memory, forgetting or repressing fundamental experiences that have collectively shaped it in the past, it will tend to fall apart; and if on the other hand it becomes submerged in a cumulative mass of information without being able to discern meaningful narrative patterns in it, that too will cause its collapse.

img_mnemosyne

Mnemosyne, Greco-Roman mosaic,    2nd c. AD, Antakya Museum

Memory has a more central importance in culture and in learning than we sometimes recognise. Ancient Greek mythology provides an insight into this matter. Our word mnemonic comes from the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, who had a pre-eminent cultural status: she was mother of the nine muses, including lyric and epic poetry, dance and music, tragedy and history. Seen as the inventor of language, Mnemosyne presided not only over writing but also over the practice of memorisation required to preserve stories in oral tradition.

With Mnemosyne in mind, I find myself at a point in life (probably not quite the end, perhaps not even the beginning of the end, but well past the end of the beginning) where I often look back over roads I have travelled along and forking paths that have made me hesitate. Occasionally this remembering may be regretful or nostalgic, but for the most part it draws me into inquisitive reflection. I think about the functioning of memory, about how it informs narrative linkages between personal or professional trajectories and the larger meandering history of fields of study – particularly about continuity and change in the subject called English. I recall pivotal moments in my working life, ponder conscious and unconscious decisions I made, trace the foreseen and unforeseen consequences of choosing this option rather than that. Back there in the past I see crooked lines of stepping stones (some seemed at the time to be obstacles) across which I made my stumbling way as a student, teacher, curriculum reformer, author. I glance over my shoulder at the different genres of the things I have written, trying to reconstruct a chain of circumstances that motivated me to produce those various books and articles and other items. Retrospection leads me to ask how I happened to wander into English teaching; why so much of my energy, over the decades, has been invested in language, literacy and literature; why I never confined my activities to one sector of education but kept engaging with schools as well as with universities; why I turned my productive efforts from poetry to polemics, from literary theory and cultural history to the writing of novels…

[The musings reproduced above are the opening paragraphs of an essay I was invited to contribute to the just-published issue (23.2) of the British educational journal Changing English.]