But then the day eventually comes when, in order to learn something about a certain topic, you decide finally to open one of the many unread books, only to realize that you already know it. What has happened? There is the mystical-biological explanation, whereby with the passing of time, and by dint of moving books, dusting them, then putting them back, by contact with our fingertips the essence of the book has gradually penetrated our mind. There is also the casual but continual scanning explanation: as time goes by, and you take up and then reorder various volumes, it is not the case that that book has never been glanced at; even by merely moving it you looked at a few pages, one today, another the next month, and so on until you end up by reading most of it, if not in the usual linear way. But the true explanation is that between the moment when the book first came to us and the moment when we opened it, we have read other books in which there was something that was said by that first book, and so, at the end of this long intertextual journey, you realize that even that book you had not read was still part of your mental heritage and perhaps had influenced you profoundly. I think one can say this of Borges and his relation to Royce or Peirce. If this is influence, it is not two-way influence.
The theme of the double: Why did I put a double in The Island of the Day Before? Because Tesauro (in the chapter on novels in his Cannocchiale aristotelico) says that you have to do so if you want to write a novel in the baroque manner. Following Tesauro’s rules, I put the twin brother in the opening chapter of my novel, but then I did not know what to do with him. At a certain point I found a way of using him, however. Would I have put him in if (leaving aside Tesauro’s suggestion) I had not been influenced also by the theme of the double in Borges? And what if I had had in mind instead the theme of the double in Dostoyevsky? And what if Borges had been influenced by Tesauro, whom he perhaps absorbed indirectly through other baroque authors?
In these games of intertextuality and influences one must always be careful not to go for the most naive solution. Some of you at this conference recalled how Borges refers to a monkey hitting the keys of a typewriter at random and in the end writing The Divine Comedy. But be careful, for the argument that, if one denies the existence of God, then one must admit that the creation of the world happened rather as in the case of the famous monkey, was used countless times by fundamentalist believers in the nineteenth century (and also later) against the theory of evolution, as well as against the theory of the random formation of the cosmos. In fact, this theme is more ancient even than that; we could trace it back to Democritus’s and Epicurus’s discussions of the clinamen …
This morning someone mentioned, referring to Fritz Mauthner, the question of whether real characters are like the characters of an ancient Chinese language (which then leads to Borges’s idea of the Celestial Emporium). But it was Francis Bacon who first said that real characters had to be the same as Chinese ideograms, and that was what started the whole search for the perfect language in the seventeenth century. It was against this idea that Descartes launched his attack. Borges certainly knew this, either through Mauthner or directly from Descartes’ famous letter to Father Mersenne, but did he also know Francis Bacon’s discussion on real characters and Chinese ideograms? Or did he rediscover the topic through his reading of Athanasius Kircher? Or reading some other author? I believe it is fruitful to let the wheels of intertextuality rotate fully in order to see how the interplay of influence works in unexpected ways. Sometimes the most profound influence is the one you discover afterward, not the one you find immediately.
Now I would like to underline some aspects of my work that can not be called Borgesian, but as we are coming toward the end, I will mention only two.
First and foremost is the matter of quantity. Naturally one can write Leopardi’s “L’infinito,” which is a very short work, and one can write Cantu’s Margherita Pusterla, which is a long and unbearable book; but on the other hand The Divine Comedy is long and sublime, while a brief sonnet by Burchiello is simply entertaining. The opposition between minimalism and
maximalism is not one that entails value. It is an opposition of genre or procedure. In this sense Borges certainly is a minimalist, while I am a maximalist. Borges writes under the sign of rapidity, moves quickly to the conclusion of his story, and in this sense it is hardly surprising that Calvino admired him. I, on the other hand, am a writer who delays (as I wrote in my Six Walks in the Fictional Woods).
Perhaps also for quantitative reasons, I think one could define my writing as neo-baroque. Borges is fascinated intellectually by the baroque and the way the baroque maneuvers concepts, but his writing is not baroque. His style is limpidly classical.
But I prefer to pick out some strong Borgesian ideas, which cannot be reduced to a single quotation, and which probably constitute his most profound legacy, and therefore represent the way he influenced not just me but many others.
Someone mentioned narrative as a model of knowledge. Certainly Borges’s fabulist narratives have influenced us in showing how one can make philosophical, metaphysical statements while telling a parable. Here too, of course, we have a topic that begins with Plato, or even with Jesus—if I may say so—and finishes with Lotman (with a textual modality as opposed to a grammatical modality), with Jerome Bruner’s psychology (narrative models actually aid perception itself), and with the frames of artificial intelligence. But it seems certain to me that Borges’s power of influence has been fundamental in this sense.
Now I would like to consider the call (and that is why I spoke of Borges as a delirious archivist) to reread the whole encyclopedia in the light of suspicion, and in a counterfactual way to seek the revelatory word in the margins, to reverse the situation, to make the encyclopedia play against itself.
It is very difficult to escape the anxiety of influence, just as it was very difficult for Borges to be a precursor of Kafka. Saying that there is no idea in Borges that did not exist before is like saying there is not a single note in Beethoven that had not already been produced before. What remains fundamental in Borges is his ability to use the most varied debris of the encyclopedia to make the music of ideas. I certainly tried to imitate this example (even though the idea of a music of ideas came to me from Joyce). What can I say? Compared with Borges’s divine melodies, so instantly singable (even when they are atonal), memorable, and exemplary, I feel as if I blow into an ocarina.
But I hope that still someone will be found after my death who is even less skillful than me, someone for whom I will be recognized as the precursor.
An abbreviated version of a paper given at the conference on “Relaciones literarias entre Jorge Luis Borges y Umberto Eco,” held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (with the assistance of the Department of Italian Studies and the Emilio Goggio Chair of the University of Toronto).
ON CAMPORESI: BLOOD, BODY, LIFE
It is difficult to say who Piero Camporesi is. Over the course of fifteen books he has studied the various aspects of what is called “the material life”—our customs, behaviors, and in particular the “lower” functions, those connected with the body, food, blood, feces, sex—and thus he is certainly a cultural anthropologist. And yet one expects a cultural anthropologist to carry out “fieldwork,” exploring the customs and myths of some civilization that still exists.
Camporesi, on the other hand, reads texts. He reads literary texts, or, rather, texts that belong to the history of literature. In fact, if you go and check what his academic field is you will see that he is a historian of literature (Italian literature, as is indicated in the list of faculty at Bologna University, but Camporesi makes frequent incursions into other literatures).
However, Camporesi reads and discovers texts that histories of literature have ignored, because they deal with everyday questions, moral or physical problems. Some official histories of literature have taken these texts into consideration, but from the point of view of their style, not of their content. Camporesi, on the other hand, has spent his life rediscovering and rereading them as witnesses to a way of life. Camporesi is therefore a cultural anthropologist who, in order
