The first was at the University of Michigan. On Tuesday, the 2nd of March 1976, he spoke first to a relatively small gathering of students and faculty, and later in the afternoon to a capacity crowd in the Modern Languages Building, where various questions were put to him, some by Professor Donald Yates of the Department of Romance Languages, who wrote up the event as "A Colloquy with Jorge Luis Borges" for The Gyspy Scholar (1976), published by Michigan State University. The colloquy is most easily found in Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations (1998), edited by Richard Burgin. The relevant Tolkien section is as follows.
Question: I’d like him to comment on how that relates to the creative aspects of the reader, that he brings to his reading of Borges. I feel sometimes as though…
Borges: Well, how is the case of Borges different from the case of any other writer? When you are reading a book, if you don’t find your way inside it, then everything is useless. The problem with The Lord of the Rings is you’re left outside the book, no? That has happened to most of us. In that case, that book is not meant for us . . .
Yates: In Chicago, last night and here before and every place else, people come to Borges eager to find out his opinion on Tolkien.
Borges: Well I could never. . . I wish somebody would explain it to me or somehow convey what the book’s good for. Those people say if I like Lewis Carroll, I should like Tolkien. I am very fond of Lewis Carroll, but I am disconcerted by Tolkien.
Yates: Last night you mentioned the difference between Tolkien and Lewis Carroll. You said Lewis Carroll is authentic fantasy and Tolkien is just going on and on and on.
Borges: Maybe I’m being unjust to Tolkien but, yes, I think of him as rambling on and on.
The second instance was in a filmed program, the popular "Firing Line" hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. It was taped in Buenos Aires on 1 February 1977, and originally broadcast on PBS in the U.S. on 18 February 1977. The full segment, "Borges: South America's Titan," can be viewed here (the Tolkien comments are at timestamp 32.30 and following). Here is a transcription of the segment, slightly edited.
Buckley: Would you go so far as to say that a writer who seeks fame ought not to read books that children can enjoyably read?
Borges: No, no.
Buckley: What about Tolkien, for instance?
Borges: Well, Tolkien--I have found him--I have only found in him utter boredom. I have never got inside his books.
Buckley: When who got inside his books?
Borges: I have never got inside his books. I have always been an outsider. I attempted that "Brotherhood--" Is it "The Brotherhood of the Rings?"
Buckley: Yes. "The Lordship of the Rings," isn't it?
Borges: "The Lordship of the Ring." I don't know. But in any case no rings were awarded me, no. I tried to enjoy him: I did my best. I was in Scotland at the time, doing American theater. Read him, laughed very loudly, but at the same time I felt I got nothing out of the reading. To compare him to Lewis Carroll is blasphemy. I'm so fond of Lewis Carroll.
Here at least Borges admits that he "attempted" The Lord of the Rings. We don't know how far he got. He says he was in Scotland at the time, and it seems Borges was there three times, in the spring of 1963, the late summer of 1964, and the spring of 1971 (after this time in Scotland, Borges went to Oxford where he was awarded an honorary doctorate on 29th April--one wonders if Tolkien attended, or if Tolkien ever read Borges). It could have been on any of these three visits to Scotland that Borges attempted the read Tolkien, for none seem to have any specific association with American theater. And who read Tolkien to him? His sister accompanied him on the first trip; a friend María Esther Vasquez on the second. But it remains unknown who might have read Tolkien to him. And more significant;ly, how much of The Fellowship of the Ring was read to him? I would think not much. Certainly the Prologue and the first few chapters might lead Borges to say he laughed very loudly, but soon after that the tone of the book changes, becoming darker, so it seems that Borges read very little of the book in order to arrive at its humor and his own boredom, such that he (and William F. Buckley Jr.) could not even recall the book's name correctly. Alas.
If, as you suggest, Borges may have given up on LR after the first few chapters, he'd be one of a list of authors who were misled by the opening. Mervyn Peake apparently likewise, and Colin Wilson, by his own testimony, on his first try. Later he was persuaded to try again and this time became a fan.
ReplyDeleteHe seemed to approve of at least some of Lewis' space trilogy, Perelandra appears among the excerpts he gave in Extraordinary Tales. As, I think, does Rudolf Steiner (whose angels do appear elsewhere, in the Book of Imaginary Beings). Which begs the question did he know Barfield ? Or Lewis' (or indeed Tolkien's) non-fiction. The Discarded Image surely would have appealed.
ReplyDeleteActually, not sure there are any Lewis references in Borges' Extraordinary Tales, but there are two in Book of Imaginary Beings taken from Perelandra
Delete' ‘An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis’
Delete['up above the shoulders the neck rose like that of a horse.....mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills'],
and ‘A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis’,
['First came what looked like branches of trees, ..... the branches suddenly resolved themselves into
long wiry feelers and the dotted lights became the many eyes of a shell-helmeted head']
reprinted by permission of C. S. Lewis, from Perelandra'
The entry taken from Steiner are 'Thermal Beings', bodies animated by fire spirits, or archangels.
I find the comparison to Lewis Carroll quite strange, as the flavor of the Alice fantasies doesn't resemble that of Tolkien's books at all. Yes, they both "played" with made-up words but that's about it. I would have thought that Tolkien being a great scholar of Old English, and an authority on "Beowulf," would have led Borges to look for, shall we say, Anglo-Saxon attitudes in his work. After all, "The Lord of the Rings" isn't donnishly Carrollian but rather a modern instance of Northern myth making, a la "Beowulf," the Nibelungenlied and the Icelandic sagas--all of which were definitely of interest to Borges. A pity that someone didn't give him more of an overview of the entire story rather than just read about a birthday party among hobbits. That might come across as lukewarm Lewis Carroll.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that a lot of people who say they don't like Tolkien never read the whole thing and give up early. Then they judge three books by a couple of chapters.
ReplyDeleteI pretty much agree with what everyone above has said.
ReplyDeleteIt took me a couple of tries before I could penetrate LOTR. Do you suppose Borges might have been confusing LOTR with The Hobbit? I'm not a fan of the latter.
ReplyDeleteAs to the timing, and to Borges's specific comments, I think it doubtful he referred to The Hobbit.
DeleteI think that Borges might have preferred _The Hobbit_. But in any case, let me retell a story from Prof. Charlie Sugnet of the U of MN. He was a great fan of Borges's early work as it was translated in the 60s--which of course was Borges's early Ficciones and such, from decades earlier, and his later work wouldn't come into English until much later. Those early stories had great impact in English as well as in Latin America and Europe. So sometime in the 70s--maybe later, when Borges visited Minnesota, Charlie was dispatched to pick him up at the airport and guide him around for some appearance or other. Charlie was all primed to talk about those wonderful stories, or maybe the work that they'd inspired from Calvino or Marquez or any number of other writers. But Borges cut him off: "Oh! You are an English Professor!" He only wanted to talk about _Beowulf_, which fortunately, Charlie had read back in grad school, but since then his work had included a thesis on Victorian fiction and a focus on more contemporary writing.
ReplyDeleteThere is another Inkling angle to Borges' work. In that supposedly biographical account of his first encounter with blindness, which inspired him to write his first stories, "Tlon, Uqbar" and so forth, or maybe "The Library of Babel," and so on, he is listening to his mother read to him from C.S. Lewis's _Out of the Silent Planet_ when he suddenly can see light, and is inspired to write again. He's afraid to try to write poetry, because if he fails that would be too crushing. So he determines to try to write a short story. Is it purely happenstance--a coincidence of biography-- that his account cites CSL, and a book with that title? In any case, he must have at least had some familiarity with CSL's work. Oh, here, I've found that passage: It was on Christmas Eve of 1938—the same year my father died—that I had a severe accident. I was running up a stairway and suddenly felt something brush my scalp. I had grazed a freshly painted open casement window. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became poisoned, and for a period of a week or so I lay sleepless every night and had hallucinations and high fever. One evening, I lost the power of speech and had to be rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation. Septicemia had set in, and for a month I hovered, all unknowingly, between life and death. (Much later, I was to write about this in my story “The South.”) When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet,” but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell to crying. My mother asked me why the tears. “I’m crying because I understand,” I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would try to write a story. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of ‘Don Quixote.’ ”
ReplyDeleteCreatures from the Space Trilogy appeared in Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings.
DeleteAs someone who, while recognizing that Borges was a great author, was never attracted to his work, I can't help but wonder whether, since Borges apparently was one that considered (at least based on whatever limited exposure he had to it) Tolkien's work to be "boring, absurd, or contemptible", Tolkien had "similar opinions of [Borges] works."
ReplyDelete