Michael Duffy - Book review: Jorge Luis Borges’s Course on English Literature
“Reading should be a form of happiness” - Jorge Luis Borges
IT’S HARD to fall asleep in lecture when you’re on the edge of your seat. Borges kept his students perched in this position throughout his 1966 course on English literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and now keeps us there as we read these transcripts. Instead of giving us information about literary works or decoding them, he tells and retells their stories. The informative, enlightening remarks that we expect to be in a lecture never quite arrive, as Borges launches into plot summaries that unfold into lively retellings. Getting ready to discuss a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Borges scratches his head: “I do not remember all the details,” he says, “but I do remember the plot.” We are blessed to hear many, many plots throughout Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature.
This runs against the foundational dogma of the modern study and teaching of literature. Written over the gates into modern literary studies is the phrase: “DO NOT JUST SUMMARIZE THE PLOT.” Heeding this warning, professors now pack your average English survey lecture with readings, counter-readings, contexts, updates on the state of research, and sophisticated theories. Instead of retelling stories, contemporary literature professors tell you about everything, anything else: context, information, politics, interpretations, or background.
But while the modern study of literature tells students plenty about the books they are reading, Borges gives them an education in the books themselves. And the pleasures of Professor Borges are in the way it doesn’t resemble literary study today. It is most compelling in the moments it is entirely at odds with the way you’ve been taught to analyze books.
Of course, Borges isn’t a full-on rebel. He fulfills many of the basic functions expected of a professor. His course is comprehensive enough. It runs the entire gamut of English literature, from Beowulf to Robert Bridges, Wiglaf to Wilde. The major authors or texts lectured upon include Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon epic poetry (some translated by Tennyson), various Anglo-Saxon elegies, Macpherson, Johnson, Boswell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning, Rossetti, Morris, Stevenson.
His lectures are also well-formed. They have a distinct preoccupation and theme: the epic, the frankly mythic, the horrible and grotesque — everything Borges loved. Ignoring novelistic realism — the only person who comes close is Dickens, and Borges is really only interested in his exaggerated, unrealistic characterization — Borges restores something wild to the venerable empirical, hard-headed English tradition. Today it might appear in the course catalog as “The Fantastic in English Fiction.”
Borges does engage in some literary criticism in these lectures. There are many nice, witty judgments hanging on clear, ringing phrases. On the inability to fix the English language in some official diction, as some tried to do in the Enlightenment: “The language belongs to fishermen, not scholars.” On Leibniz and the best of all possible worlds: “I think having a toothache is enough to convince us that we don’t live in paradise.” On Wordsworth’s bad poetry: “We must remember that he was not only a good walker, he was also an excellent skater.” Speaking about Carlyle’s history: “The Scots in general tend to be more intellectual than the English. Or better said, the English are usually not intellectual and almost all the Scots are.” And Dickens: “The characters Dickens creates live in the perpetual rapture of being themselves”; “Thackeray portrays the upper classes because he knows them well; Dickens because he felt plebeian.”
All this makes the editors Martín Arias and Martín Hadis quite happy, because they want to make Borges into a venerable and effective professor. There is very little irony, very little jokiness, in their minds, about the book’s inflated title. They are relieved that these transcripts finally allow the display of what they call — as rendered into English by Katherine Silver, the book’s translator — Borges’s “erudition.” They are happy to see that Borges can now appear not only as the venerable, wise lecturer he was on many occasions, but also a good teacher.
But any reader familiar with Borges (or even his reputation) already knew of his encyclopedic mind. And it is truly hard to believe, reading these transcripts, that Borges was the proficient teacher in the professional sense that we understand it today: it’s hard to imagine him setting off with gusto to meetings with the department chair, supervising dissertations, deciding on new hires.
If Borges does indeed teach well, it is not because his “erudition” is a scholarly apparatus of data, dates, knowledge of the state of a field, his immersion in the “critical conversation,” and so on. It is his vast memory for stories, anecdotes, comparisons, characterizations, images, both by poets and about poets, which he could rattle off without any notes, blind, up on the podium... read more:
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