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i—lE.Sl§

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

Self. Reader. Persona:
Whitman, Borges and Their Experimental
Trinity

presented by
Joseph John Benevento

has been accepted towards fulfillment

of the requirements for
x

the Ph . D. degree in _EnglJ_sL

Major pr

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity lnsn'tutian

Michigan State

  
 

 
 

University, {4 -

 

042771

 

REMOTE STORAGE

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
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DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

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SELF, READER, PERSONA:

WHITMAN, BORGES AND THEIR EXPERIMENTAL TRINITY

By

Joseph John Benevento

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1983

.— F--.-—

A?é—<y9vé

ABSTRACT

SELF, READER, PERSONA:
WHITMAN, BORGES AND THEIR EXPERIMENTAL TRINITY

By

Joseph John Benevento

Jorge Luis Borges has long admired Walt Whitman's

poetic "trinity.' According to Borges, this trinity
consists of the writer and his reader joined together
by the third member, the character or persona "Walt
Whitman,” who is in fact a composite of the writer or
self and of each one of his readers. Whitman makes the
reader a character in his poetry, thereby creating a
dialogue between writer and reader, by inviting each
reader to find a place in the open-ended composite
figure ”Walt Whitman."

Variations and adaptations of the Whitman trinity
can be found throughout Borges' fiction. Borges also
creates an open—ended atmosphere that invites reader
participation, and Borges also presents a "Borges"
character who is a composite of self and reader. Both
authors believe that the self can best be discovered
through dialogue with the reader within the creative
process itself. They therefore employ throughout their

work notions of the double self or of the self who can

represent all the others, in part to suggest the

 

Joseph John Benevento

interchangeability of writer and reader, self and other.
They constantly encourage the reader to become actively
involved, in a creative and primary way, in the work of
art itself. They accomplish this task most directly by
presenting a composite persona who is potentially both
writer and reader. Indeed, if the reader will join the
writer in the venture of the creative process itself,
the power and vista of the composite character become
limitless.

Whitman and Borges even have a final ironic parallel
in their writing; the later work of both men features a
retreat from active dialogue and an attempt to hide
behind a persona which is employed as a disguise for
self instead of as a means of communication.

Borges' fiction is suffused with the adaptations
of the trinity concept that he discovered in Whitman's
early poetry. Borges' considerable influence on much of
modern fiction, especially in such areas as reader en—
gagement and narrative point of View, help to link Whit—

man, in his role of literary theorist, to the mainstream

of contemporary fiction.

To my parents, Joseph P. Benevento and Mary
Benevento for teaching me what can never be learned
at a university, and to my wife, Carmen R. Cid—Benevento,
without whom my work and my life both would be senseless

endeavors.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my dissertation director,
Professor E. Fred Carlisle, for his overall guidance,
and in particular for his sharing of his expertise on
Whitman. I would also like to thank Professor Donald
Yates for first showing me the connection between Whit-
man and Borges, and for his frequent helpful suggestions
as well as his careful stylistic comments on each chapter
of the study in process. I thank Professor Stephen Tchudi
for his support and guidance. And finally, a special
word of thanks to Professor Cathy Davidson for her prompt,
careful and insightful reading of each chapter of this
study, and for her honest and encouraging commentary,
without which this dissertation would have been twice

as difficult to complete.

iii

Preface

In the text of this study virtually all quoted
matter from Borges' work is rendered in English for the
convenience of my audience. All translations of Borges'
work that appear in the text are my own, unless other-
wise noted. I have Professor Donald Yates to thank for
assuring the accuracy of these translations, and only

myself to blame for the injustice they do to Borges'

originals.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION
Chapter One, Self: ”What is a man anyhow?".
I - Some Biographical and Psychological
Affinities . . . .
II - A Focus on Identity . .
(A) One For All- The Many In One . .
(B) The Recurrent Self, The Eternal
Return .
(C) The Double Self, The Self As Other
NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

Chapter Two, Reader: The Search For "E1 Lector
Complice"

NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO
Chapter Three, Persona: The Composite Self

I - The Whitman Persona .
II - The Borges Persona

NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE.

Chapter Four, Persona; A Farewell to Self and
Reader

NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR .
Conclusion

NOTES FOR CONCLUSION .
BIBLIOGRAPHY .

Primary Sources
Secondary Sources

Page

12
15
15
24
26

38
46

56

62
111
118

126
145

161

165
203
207
214
215

215
217

INTRODUCTION

To the casual reader of Walt Whitman and Jorge Luis
Borges, important connections between the two writers
are not apparent. The finest work of Whitman, his free
verse poetry, bears little ostensible resemblance to the
best work; of Borges, his short stories and essays. On
the surface, the bard of optimism and expansiveness
does not seem compatible with the careful weaver of sad
labyrinths. Though both men would surely be listed
among the most important and influential writers of
their respective countries, and even of their respective
centuries, they might appear to belong to different
traditions, and to have pursued vastly different goals.

However, anyone who can claim even a general
familiarity with the works of Borges knows that his
knowledge of and interest in Whitman has been extensive.
Borges has written essays about Whitman,l alluded to
him often in both his poetry and prose,2 presented
lectures on his poetic methods and innovations,3 and
even published a translation of selections from Leaves
of Grass.4 Borges has been familiar with Whitman since
first reading him in Geneva in 1917, and his first

I

published poem, ”Himno al mar,‘ (”Hymn to the Sea") was,

1

by Borges' own admission, an attempt to be as much like
Whitman as possible.5 Critics, predictably enough, have
duly noted that Borges' early poetry, in both form and
subject matter, is partially modeled on Whitman.6 Borges
has admitted that there was a time when he felt Whitman
to be "poetry itself.”7

However, Borges has also claimed that Whitman was
merely a stage he had to go through in his poetry, as,
for example, Keats and Swinburne were stages.8 Clearly,
Borges' later poetry, which often employs fixed meters
and rhyme, is not modeled on Whitman,9 yet even if it

I

were, the fact remains that Borges fame does not arise

primarily from his work as a poet. Though his poetry

has always been well—received, Borges'

best writing has
usually been done in the short story, sketch or essay
form, and these works have rarely been thought to have
important stylistic or theoretical similarities to the
work of Walt Whitman.

Hence, it is not surprising that although most book
length studies of Borges will include several references
to Whitman, one does not find chapters or normally even
consecutive pages devoted to the Whitman - Borges
connection, and there are relatively few articles on the
subject.10 Perhaps there are not enough critics who are

well-versed in the work of both men because the careful

reader of Whitman who is also a careful reader of Borges

can discern that Whitman's influence on Borges extends
beyond his poetry, and is at the heart of Borges' finest
prose.

Within his work, Borges refers to Whitman at least
as frequently as he does to authors whom he usually
claims were influential in his writing, such as Chesterton,
Stevenson, De Quincey, Kipling and Poe. Actually, Whit-
man's name appears more frequently in Borges‘ prose than
in his poetry, and some of Borges' finest short stories
such as "El Aleph" and "Deutches Requiem” have obvious
Whitmanic elements.11 In Borges' essays and lectures
on Whitman, the focus is not on Whitman's poetic
Stylistics, but is instead on his contributions as an
experimenter in literary theory and form. As early as
1931 in his essays on Whitman in his book Discusidh,
"Nota sobre Walt Whitman,” (”Note on Walt Whitman"), and
"El otro Whitman” ("The Other Whitman"), Borges also was
acutely aware of and interested in the way that Whitman
engaged the reader by attempting to make him an active
participant in his language experiment.

The basic framework for this study was given to me
by Borges himself, through a lecture he gave on Walt
Whitman at the Michigan State University campus on

12 The basic content of the lecture

January 12, 1976.
differed little from what Borges has been saying about

Whitman for the past fifty years, but there were a few

subtle and important additions.

In this lecture Borges stressed his appreciation of
Whitman as one of the great literary experimenters of all
time. He argued that Whitman's accomplishments, in his
early editions of Leaves of Grass, especially, have rarely
been appreciated as experimental, precisely because the
experiment was so successful. He further argued, as he
had in ”Nota sobre Walt Whitman” forty-five years earlier,
that what Whitman had done was to create a composite hero,
"Walt Whitman,” based on an idealized version of himself,
but including all men and women, and hence the only fit
hero for democracy. This ”Whitman" persona, often con—
fused with the historical Whitman, was in itself a fine
achievement, but Borges claimed that Whitman went even
further in his innovations. Whitman actively sought to
include the reader as an active participant in his
experiment, as another member of the trinity of self,
reader and persona. The persona would serve as a type
of intermediary to facilitate communication between the
author and reader. Borges thus conceives of Whitman's
finest work as a trinity of self, reader and persona,
with the persona functioning as both an intermediary
and as a catalyst to invite and provoke the reader into
an active role in the work of art.

While all of this information was available in

. / . . . .
earlier Borges p1eces 1n D1scu31on or in his 1ntroduct10n

to his translation of selections from Leaves of Grass,
what Borges went on to say that night in East Lansing
made his view of Whitman appear to be far more than a
disinterested theory. Borges claimed that, to the best
of his knowledge, no one had ever duplicated Whitman's
experiment. He admitted freely that poets such as Sand-
burg or Masters or Neruda had follwed aspects of Whitman's
style or thematics, but he insisted that no one had
really followed up on the literary theory of the trinity.l3
Borges then went on to hypothesize that if someone were
to follow up on the theory today the result would be,
"quite different, maybe as good, but quite different."
My contention in this study is that Borges is, by
and large, correct in all he has had to say about
Whitman's literary experiments and their degree of

success. However, Borges is ironically incorrect in his

assertion that the experiment has never been duplicated.

ll

Borges himself is the writer who has done something, as

good but quite different,” with the literary theory that

he inherited from Whitman.l4 It is precisely because
Borges'specific adaptations from Whitman are so

ostensibly distinct that they have gone to this point
largely unnoticed. Whitman was not just a stage that

Borges passed through. Emir Rodriguez Monegal is correct
n15

in asserting that Borges "never really got over Whitman.

Ronald Christ is also correct in his argument that Whitman

was the model for Borges' adaptation of a persona, though
Christ did not pursue the extent or full significance of
that connection, nor examine its relation to Borges'
treatment of the reader.16 Borges has fashioned his own
self— reader- persona trinity, in large part on the

model that he discovered in the works of Whitman.

The initial obstacles that prevent one from readily
seeing the connection between Whitman and Borges can be
overcome without great difficulty. Though Whitman's
best work is mostly in poetry and Borges' mostly in prose,
and though Whitman is usually thought of as an optimist
and Borges as a skeptic or pessimist, both men are
fascinated by the riddle of identity, and they employ
analogous means in attempting to solve that riddle.
While it would be difficult, and perhaps foolish, to try
to ”prove” that Borges took much of his theory and prac—
tice in writing directly from Whitman's "trinity,” and
while there can be no argument about the significant
differences that do exist between the two authors, I
still believe that it is possible to demonstrate that
Jorge Luis Borges is as much, if not more, of a
legitimate literary successor to Walt Whitman as is Carl
Sandburg, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda or
any of the other writers generally viewed as owing some

degree of debt to Whitman.

 

Whitman and Borges share two important preoccupations.
They both have as a principal and recurrent purpose
throughout their writings the discovery and definition
of self, and they both spend a great deal of time
analyzing and discussing the essence of the creative act.
Hence, not surprisingly, for both men the study and
creation of the work of art is closely tied to their
search for andanalysis of self. Though Whitman and
Borges are both, in that sense, ”self—centered,"
paradoxically, they both conduct the search for self
through attempts at communication and what Borges
calls a "shared investigation” with the reader, often
by means of the persona as a kind of intermediary or
bridge.

In chapter one the investigation into Whitman and
Borges' relation will begin with a recounting of some
important biographical and psychological affinities
that invite the way towards a further investigation.
Borges and Whitman's great preoccupation with identity
will be amply documented, and three categories of self-
analysis will be discussed. Both Whitman and Borges
frequently deal in their writings with the notion of
one man who can stand for, represent or be all the others.
They are both also intrigued by the idea of a recurrent

self and the possibility of a double self.

The search for self is clearly central to both men,
but both men saw that such a search, coupled with a
desire for reader response, could produce a search for
self that could be shared. Thinking of all men as
the same man allows for the writer legitimately to
feel that he can speak for all. The notion of a recurrent
self is tied to a longing for permanence, and a dialogue
with future readers insured by the printed word that
actively seeks such dialogue. The idea of a double
self allows for the viewing of self as other, which not
only makes the type of persona that both men employ
possible, but also, like the two preceding views of
self, allows for an interchangeability between writer
and reader, self and other, that further legitimatizes
the reader's participation. So for Whitman and Borges
the search for self, far from being unamenable to
artistic or rhetorical concerns, is in fact closely
tied to both.

Chapter two will examine the ways in which Whitman
and Borges actively courted what Julio Cortazar would

I

I .

later call in Rayuela ”el lector compllce,' or the
accomplice reader. Emphasis will be placed not only on
how the two men tried to engage the reader in their

writings, but also on additional evidence from their

journals, interviews and other sources that suggests

 

that such an accomplice reader was something that both
men saw as crucial both to their own art and to the
writings of authors to come. The reader's place within
the trinity will also be kept in mind, since the engaged
reader is engaged in part to allow the self an opportunity
for self—knowledge and discovery.

In chapter three the complex workings of the Whitman
and Borges personae will be analyzed. The question of
persona in both writers is a complex one because there
are widely divergent opinions among critics over just
how much either man was in control of the personae
that they created. Many critics argue that Whitman
became progressively less able and/or willing to
distinguish his historic self from his artistic or
idealized self, and Borges in the brief essay ”Borges
y yo" (”Borges and I") freely admits the difficulty
that such distinctions cause him.

My thesis in chapter three is that Whitman and
Borges produce much of their best work when a genuine
trinity is functioning, when Whitman and Borges invest
their respective works with a genuine sense of self
and seek a genuine response from their readers, by
means of a composite persona that is loosely based on
the author but potentially inclusive of all the readers

as well. When the Whitman or Borges persona is

10

functioning at its best, the reader discovers a genuine
avenue through which to enter actively into the work
of art.

Chapter four will emphasize the fragility of such
an ideal trinity by arguing that both Whitman and Borges
in their later years produced work in which the persona
was used more and more as a device to hide or obscure
the real self, and hence to thwart both reader engagement
and real self—examination. Both men in their old age
allowed themselves to be honored as literary gurus,
which in turn allowed them to feign a complacency that
rarely had been present in their earlier works.

Whitman at times tried to pretend that there was no
distinction between his persona and his person, that

he was leaving in his book a genuine record of his
specific personality. Borges at times has tried to
pretend that his ideal has always been to keep himself
out of his work; he has consistently denied wanting to
perpetuate the memory of Borges. Yet both men attempted
to do the same thing from opposite angles, to obscure
the true self behind a persona pretending to be the only
self that mattered. Persona in their later works shifted
from a composite of self and reader to a distancing or
obscuring device for the author.

The conclusion to the study will assess how important

the idea of a trinity and the workings of a persona are to

 

 

 

11

the works of the two authors. Whitman's influence in
Latin America, already considered extensive, will have
another outlet, in the mainstream of contemporary Latin
American fiction. Borges' work, which has itself been
so influential, has been significantly influenced by
Whitman, a Whitman of literary theory and vision that

we in this country should perhaps learn to value more.

 

 

         

 

NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

1 "Nota sobre Walt Whitman," and "El otro Whitman,"
both appear in Discusion, (1931). Whitman is a partial
subject or reference 01nt of several other essays, among
them, "Valery como Slmbolo, ” from Otras Inquisiciones,

(1960).

Borges poems with Whitman allusions include, "Patt-
hew 25:30," and ”Camden, 1892.”

3 One such lecture is documented in, ”Walt Whitman:
Man and Myth,” Critical Inquiry 4 (June 1975), 707-718.

4 Entitled Hojas de Hierba (Buenos Aires: Jiméhez

Editores,l969), these selections include translations of
"Starting From Paumonok," ”Song of Myself," generous
selections from "Children of Adam" and "Ca1amus," and

several other shorter poems.

5 See, "An Autobiographical Essay," in El Aleph and
Other Stories, 1933- 69 (New York. E. P. Dutt ton and Co.

19705, 216. (The ”Essay" was composed initially in

Englishp by Borges in collaboration with Norman Thomas de
Giovanni, the two men also collaborated on the transla-
tions in the volume.)

Cesco Vian in his book, Invito alla lettura di

Jor e Luis Borges (Milan: U. Mursia e itore, 19 p. 63,
cIaims that Borges' meter and line length in his early
book of poetry, Luna de enfrente. are modeled in part on

Whitman's. Gene Bell-Villada further Claims that Borges'
early poetry in general is written, "in a free verse

medium apparently modeled in form as well as content
after Walt Whitman. " Bor es and His Fiction (Chapel Hill:
University of North CaroIina Press, 19815, p.

7 "An Autobiographical Essay," p. 217.

8 Ibid.

 

12

l3

9 In his preface to his poem, "La rosa profunda”
("The Unending Rose") which appears in his collection,
El oro de los ti res, translated by Alistair Reid as
The GoId of the Ti ers (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,
19775 Borges c1aims that while Whitman was justified to
"do away with rhyme,” each poet must find what is right

for himself. This statement helps explain Borges' return
to traditional forms such as the sonnet or milonga.

10 One of the few articles comparing the two men is
simply titled, "Borges y Whitman” by Didier T. Jaen,
His ania 50 (March 1967) 49-53. Though Jaen argues that
the two men share more similarities than are at first
apparent, and though he even begins to compare the ”other"
Whitman to the ”other” Borges, he ends up settling for a
discussion of a few incidental similarities in a few of
the poems of each man.

11 See Bell-Villada, p. 221, or Carter Wheelock,
The M thmaker (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969),
who 1n dlscussing a passage from ”Deutches Requiem" that
deals with Whitman says, ”In these words Borges attributes
to Whitman characteristics of the nominalist or Alephic

world view; Whitman enumerates or catalogues like Dante
or like Carlos Argentino Danieri," p. 161.

12 This lecture was the first of a series entitled
Preferences that Borges delivered on the Michigan State
campus in the winter and spring of 1976. Though I was
not attending Michigan State at that time, and hence was
not in attendance at the lecture, I have since see it on
videotape, and listened to it numerous times through the
voice library of Michigan State.

13 In another discussion of Whitman's trinity that
serves as a foreward to Homa e To Walt Whitman (Didier
Tisdel Jaen, English trans at1ons an notes University,
Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1964) Borges has
this to say: "Strange to say, Whitman has many imitators-
and no disciples. People think that they are Walt Whitman
if they are sufficiently breezy, slangy and unmetrical.
The plan of making a character out of the writer and the
reader has not been attempted again, and for all we know,
it may be impossible,” p. xvii.

14

14 Discussion of a literary trinity of self, reader
and persona which is limited to the works of two authors,
naturally leads to the consideration of the possibility
that this trinity may be functioning on some level in the
works of a good many authors. Some reader response
critics, for example, would argue that a literary work
always calls for the active participation of its reader.
Walker Gibson, on the other hand, stresses the inevita—
bility of the literary persona in his book Persona (New
York: Random House, 1969). These critics and others
will be dealt with in the appropriate chapters of this
study. For now, I will only assert that Whitman was
perhaps one of the first writers to try consciously to
allow the reader to become an active accomplice in the
work of art. Borges clearly believes that this is the
case, and he has been especially impressed by Whitman's
means of inviting reader participation, the use of a
composite persona made up of both writer and reader,
which may not have been consciously attempted again
until the advent of Borges and his fiction. Whitman
and Borges, through the use of this composite character
both consciously attempt to be observers and participants
of their work simultaneously, to be, as Whitman phrased

it in "Song of Myself,” "Both in and out of the game and
watching and wondering at it.”
15 ’

Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Jor e Luis Bor es: A
Literar Bio ra h (New York: E. P. Dutton anh Co.,
19785, p. 14%.

16 Ronald Christ, ”Borges Justified: Notes and
Texts Toward Stations of a Theme,” in, Prose for Borges,
Eds. Charles Newman and Mary Kinzie, (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1974), pp. 46—81. This article
makes some of the most important connections between
Borges and Whitman that can be found, and will be re-
turned to at several points in the study.

Chapter One

Self: ”What is a man anyhow?”

I — Some Biographical and Psychological Affinities

An obvious problem in comparing the work of Borges
and Whitman is that they not only lived and wrote in two
different centuries, but also in two different countries,
cultures and languages. Additionally, Whitman is best
remembered as a poet, and Borges is most regarded as a
short story writer and essayist. While these factors
cannot be ignored or minimized, there still exists an
interesting range of similarities between the two authors,
which help to counterbalance the more readily noticeable
differences in their backgrounds, and which may help to
suggest why they evolved a similar preoccupation with
identity in their writings.

In ”A Backward Glance O'er Travel‘d Roads"

Whitman claimed that nobody could ever understand him
or his work without specific reference to nineteenth
century American life in all its particulars. Such

an attitude would suggest an inherent difficulty in
comparing Whitman to a twentieth century Latin American

author. However, Borges is hardly a typical twentieth

15

16

century Latin American author. For example, after
Spanish itself, Borges' second language is certainly
English. Borges has English blood from his father's
side, and his paternal grandmother, Fanny Haslam,

lived in the Borges household and helped teach the

young Borges English. Most of Borges' early reading

was done in English, in his father's library of English
and American books. In his "Autobiographical Essay" and
elsewhere Borges has stated that these early readings
were among the most important events in his entire life,
and they are what he remembers most vividly from his
childhood. Borges has even published a few poems and
his autobiographical essay in English, and has frequently
been interviewed or given talks in English. Hence, in
discussing Whitman's possible influence on Borges,

one has the additional advantage of being certain that
Borges has read and appreciated Whitman in the original,
which is of course not usally the case when comparing
authors who wrote in two distinct languages.

Borges has in fact had a deep and penetrating
interest in nineteenth century American literature in
general. He has co—authored a textbook on American
literature,1 held the position of professor of English
and American letters in Buenos Aires, and frequently
written about or expressed great interest in prominent

nineteenth century American authors such as Poe,

17

Hawthorne and Emerson. Furthermore, Borges c1aims little
real affinity with twentieth century literary movements,
scoffs at the notion of himself as a modern author, and
virtually lays claim to being more of a contemporary

of Whitman than of Neruda or Corta'zar.2 Indeed, most

of Borges' literary heroes, including Stevenson,
Chesterton, Poe, Emerson, De Quincey, Swinburne,
Carlyle, and Hawthorne were all either contemporaries

of Whitman, or men who wrote about or were written about
by Whitman. Hence, though Borges may certainly exagger—
ate his lack of affinity for modern literary movements,

II

perhaps hoping to forget his connections with ultraismo,"
or to evade connections with contemporary movements he
has helped to promote, it is still clear that in a real
sense Borges is more in line with Whitman's literary
world and all of its accomplishments than the average
twentieth century author may be.

Of course this affinity has an ironic base.
Whitman, who laided claim to being so tied to nineteenth
century America, is, in fact, now considered by many
to have been the first ”modern" poet, while Borges,
who is so responsible for many of the innovations of
modern fiction, lays claim to being a nineteenth century
author. Somehow the two men manage to meet, perhaps

timelessly, in the middle.

Both men share some basic biographical similarities

18

as well. Both had fathers who could be termed ”free-

thinkers' (Walt Whitman senior was a devotee of Thomas
Paine and Elias Hicks; Jorge Guillermo Borges of Herbert
Spenser and of philosophy in general) who, in spite of
competence in their respective fields, never had a

great deal of practical success. Indeed, both the
Whitman and Borges families made key moves when the
respective authors to be were very young, in part because
of family finances.3 In some sense it can be argued
that the two writers inherited from their fathers an
inability, or at least a reluctance, to integrate
philosophical and practical concerns, a trait that later
may have helped to develop both men's sense of a double
self. Both men, like their fathers, saw little relation
between their work-a-day worlds and their philosophical
or aesthetic interests, especially when they were
developing as writers and thinkers.

Whitman and Borges both wrote for newspapers, gave
lectures, and held non-writing positions such as
carpenter (Whitman) or library clerk (Borges) in order
to earn a living that their writing did not usually
provide. Their careers as writers always seemed at odds,
or at least separate, from their everyday lives.
Whitman's family or his working class acquaintances had

little knowledge of or appreciation for his poetry.

Borges also felt alienated from his fellow workers at

19

the library where he worked from 1937—46, while in the
process of producing some of his finest work. This

sense of alienation was heightened by his, "co—workers
flawless ignorance of his fairly important reputation

as a poet and literary critic."5

Both Borges and
Whitman at key points in their careers sensed a distinc-
tion between their literary and everyday selves, a
distinction which made it easier to consider the literary
sides of their personalities as an "other” self. This
distinction even carried over to Whitman's correspondence,
where it is rare to find a literary allusion of any sort,
as if Whitman had been trying to keep the two lives
separate.6 Therefore, it may be more than a coincidence
that the lack of recognition both men suffered from, and
the practical need both men faced to spend much of their
time in non—literary pursuits, seemed to cause in both
men a sense of separation between their literary and
everyday selves. This sense of division would later
play an important role in their evolvement of self in
their writing.

Another source of conflict for both men was in

their ambivalence about the "man of action, the man of

physical strength and bravery. Borges never claims to

be "one of the roughs,’ and most of his mentors, from
his father, to Rafael Cansinos—Assens, to Macedonio

Fernandez, to Alfonso Reyes were all men of intellect,

 

20

not physical force. Still, Borges' fascination for the
gaucho or for the "compadrito" (street tough) is well-
documented, whether it be in Historia universal de la
infamia, (A Universal History of Infamy) or in stories
such as "La intrusa," ("The Intruder”), "E1 otro duelo"
("The Other Duel"), or "E1 sur," (”The South"). A
desire to be someone he is not, (a desire acted out
most clearly in the autobiographical, "El sur," in which
the protagonist, a bookish sort, gets the opportunity to
die a ”man's death" in a knife fight), runs throughout
much of Borges' work. In a more recent work, the poem
"Tankas," Borges laments not having been a military man
as his ancestors were; instead he bears the shame of the
"man who counts the syllables."

Both Borges and Whitman reveal in several instances
their great admiration for their military ancestors, who
had fought with distinction in the wars against the
European colonizers.7 While Borges freely admits his
sense of shame (and perhaps even exaggerates it) in not
having been a man of action or physical toughness,
Whitman was unwilling to admit that he was not just such
a "rough." However, his now famous letter to John
Addington Symonds, in which he invents six illegitimate
children to try to dissuade Symonds from believing in the
homosexual base for the ”Calamus" poems, is just one

rather uncomfortable proof that Whitman felt a good deal

21

of insecurity in trying to maintain a "manly" front. The
attempt to work through or mask their ambivalence over
matters of virility or physical toughness is often
apparent in the work of both men. Perhaps they both

sensed a division between art and really" manly
endeavors, a division which further encouraged them to
look upon their literary selves as separate selves.
There are also some ironic parallels in the writing
careers of both men. Whitman's first writing was for
newspapers, but his first literary attempts, aside from
some bad poems, were some short stories written under
the influence of Hawthorne and Poe, a few of which were
published in the same journals that published those
authors.8 Borges' first creative work published was
poetry which revealed a marked Whitmanic influence.
While Borges' early poetry was far better than Whitman's
lurid and melodramatic fiction, neither man's early
published work in any way anticipated the sudden
emergence of their master works. Whitman's 1855
Leaves of Grass and Borges' El jardih de senderos gue
se bifurcan, (later expanded witheasection called
"Artificios" to form the present Ficciones) both were
strange, unexpected works of genius. Both men were
middle—aged before their best writing began. After

these middle—age writing peaks, both authors gradually

began to write with ”diminishing effectiveness,” (as

 

 

 

 

22

William Carlos Williams termed it in Whitman's case)
well into their old age. This lessened power coincided
somewhat with their increasing physical infirmity. In
1873 Whitman suffered the first of many strokes, which
left him partially paralyzed and often bed-ridden for
the remainder of his life. Borges has been almost
totally blind since 1955.

The parallels in their writing careers continue in
their old age in that both men became types of literary
"gurus," with hosts of admirers and/or interviewers,
who made the trip to Camden or Buenos Aires to pluck the
remaining words of wisdom from the two old men. Late
in life both authors achieved a notoriety based mostly
on works they had written when they were much younger.
Yet both men seemed to prefer their later work, and
were happy to share such opinions with their interview—
ers.lo However, the strict veracity of some of those
interviews may be somewhat in question, since Whitman
referred to himself at that time in his life as a
"furtive old hen," and Borges has Suggested in at least
one story that he may not be wholly honest during
interviews.11 Both men, as they advanced in age and
reputation, learned well how to play the part of the
revered old author.

Another possible alliance between the two men is

that both have been said to have had types of mystical

23

experiences. Borges has published the account of his
experience in three separate sources,12 and the mystical
experience that Bucke, Cowley and others really believe
Whitman had, is dramatized in canto five of "Song of
Myself." For both men, then, these experiences found an
important place in their writing. However, neither man

need be considered a ”mystic, though certainly that
label has been applied often enough to Whitman, because
in both men‘s work the search for self is closely

allied with a sense of the other. The key to self-
realization for both men often rests upon the recognition
of the reality of relation to an other.

Whitman and Borges both gained from their personal
experiences a sense of disjuncture between their
personal, everyday livesandtheir careers as writers.
Both men needed to expand the borders of conventional
literature to allow for a reintegration of self. The
normal distinctions between poetry and prose were
redefined by Whitman, and Borges has claimed that the

13 a comforting position to

distinctions are arbitrary,
anyone attempting to compare Whitman's poetry to Borges'
fiction. In general, Whitman and Borges both sought to
blur the distinctions between art and life, so as to
encourage the search for self by artistic means. Both

men were keenly interested in the potentials of language,

from poetry to slang,14 and both connected this

24

fascination with language and art to the search for self.
Both understood that the search for a means of optimal
expression and communication was a way to the self.
Hence in both men's work the pervasive search for self
and for an explanation and definition of identity goes
along with an attempt to define and express who the
writer is and who or what the reader can be. Hence

both men's fascination with the creative process is

wedded to their search for identity.

II - A Focus on Identity

Whenever critics discuss the major themes of Borges

15 and few would argue with

they always list identity,
Whitman's own assertaion that his writings deal from
first to last with "the personal critter." Yet it is
equally true that both men are concerned with the "not
me" as well; in fact Whitman explains in ”Specimen Days"
that the ”relation between the me and the not me” is the
most crucial philosophical question. Borges and Whitman
often times seem to be the only major characters in their
respective works. Borges, in fact, has admitted that he
is his stories' only protagonist,16 and he has also
frequently pointed to the autobiographical elements in

many of his stories.17 Yet for both men the focus on

self is often on the self as other, or on the self in

25

relation to others. Indeed, Borges' admission to the
autobiographical elements in his stories is itself a
paradox, since he has so often argued against the
existence of the individual.

At times Borges and Whitman seem diametrically
opposed on the question of identity because Whitman
stresses that the self is all important, while Borges
emphasizes the futility of personal pride.18 However,
both men see the various possibilities of relation.
Whitman's ”Personalism-Ensemble" concept allows for the
individual and for his union to the whole, while Borges
essays such as ”Everything and Nothing" and ”De alguien

a nadie" (”From Someone to No one”) from Otras

 

Inguisiciones stress an awareness of personality
contingent upon, but also threatened by a sense of
identity with all. Using the terms of the Borges essay

"Everything and Nothing,‘ one might say that Whitman
more often puts his emphasis on the ”Everything,” while
Borges seems more convinced of the ”Nothing.” Yet it
remains true that both authors continually play with
a concept of identity intimately related to a concept
of otherness.

The remainder of this chapter will investigate
three characteristic themes of identity that Whitman and

Borges utilize in their writing: the idea of one man

standing for, or being all men, the idea of a recurrent

26

self, and the variations on the theme of a double self,
or self as other. While the usage of such themes is
clearly important to both men's resolution of self, it
is also clear that all of these themes have related
artistic or rhetorical ends. The idea of many in one
not only legitimatizes one man speaking for all, but
also suggests that the writer and reader are inter-
changeable, if each person entails all persons. The
recurrent self suggests the perpetuation of identity of
the essential self through art, and also suggests that
the reader in this life may be the writer in the next.
Finally, a double self or self as other facilitates both
reader participation and the creation of a persona. In
both men the search for self is allied to a search for
an audience willing to consider various alternatives
that aid in the establishment of an extended notion of

self.

(A) One For All - The Many In One

The first poem of any real and lasting merit that
Whitman ever published (for the first time in July, 1855)
opened with three of the now most famous lines in
American literature: ”I celebrate myself,/ And what I
assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me

as good belongs to you.” In "Song of Myself," especially

27

in its 1855 version which was still without a title,
Whitman began his attempt to speak as a representative
hero. Throughout the poem he continually seeks to make
clear his ability and willingness to identify himself

with all of the creation. Whether one chooses to see

19

the main character of the poem as a ”kosmos,” a poet-

'7
prophet of democracy,”20 a lyric-epic rhetorician,”"l

or even as a shameless charlatan,22

his attempt to stand
as a representative being for all of mankind remains
persistently clear. He claims brotherhood with "all

the men ever born,"

or he presents a catalogue of humani—
ty and then calmly states: ”and these one and all
tend inward to me and I tend outward to them/ and such
as it is to be of these more or less I am.”

Whitman's representativeness seems to know no
bounds. He is of the "old and young, of the foolish

I

as much as the wise.‘ He does not "decline to be the

I

poet of wickedness also.‘ He assures us that if he is
not speaking for all of us he is wasting our time as
well as his own. He speaks the ”the thoughts of all men
in all ages and lands... If they are not yours as much
as mine they are nothing or next to nothing." Whitman
cannot go on writing poems unless he can believe that he
speaks legitimately for all: "All I mark as my own you
shall offset it with your own/ Else it were time lost

listening to me.‘ Whitman's democracy in this poem is a

28

democracy of identity; all of us deserve the same
because we are essentially the same: ”In all people I
see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less/ and
the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.” Whitman
stands for the dignity of all and takes on their defense:
"Whoever degrades another degrades me/ And whatever is
done or said returns at last to me.”

Whitman's identification is complete when he can be

I

"the hounded slave,‘ or the "Fireman with breastbone

broken,” when he can say, ”I am the man, I suffer'd, I

I

was there.‘ Though clearly one man could not be all the
people that Whitman claims to ”be" in this poem, nor do
all the things he claims ability to do, one man who is
in some sense all the others can make these claims for
us all. By means of the ”Whitman” character, the writer
Walt Whitman was able to create a device that allowed
for the separateness and distinction of each individual,
but simultaneously united and identified all. Whitman
the writer never claims that all the others are merely
projections of his ego; he instead insists that the

others are not ”mere dreams or dots.‘ Individuality is
one key part of the ”Personalism—Ensemble" concept
developed by Whitman. The character "Walt Whitman” of
”Song of Myself” and some of the other poems is the

exemplification of that concept. This persona (which is

 

29

of course the principal subject of chapter three) is a
composite character modeled in part on Whitman, but open-
ended enough to include all of humanity.

Whether the real man Walt Whitman was himself more
of a mystic,23 or a humanist,24 or some strange combina-
tion of the two, the claims that the character "Whitman"
makes for identity in "Song of Myself” are quite
obviously part of his reason for being confident that
he can speak for all. Even if some of his readers "do
not know how immortal” or divine or unified they are,
”Whitman"<xn1calmly state, ”I know.” "Whitman" is
aware of and can be all things because the writer Walt
Whitman has allowed for all of the readers to have an
opportunity to contribute their part to the composite,
to also be "Walt Whitman.” It is the strength within this
composite that allows for the confidence and optimism
of ”Song of Myself."

Whitman certainly is not so confident or resolute
in all of his poetry, nor does the same ”Whitman” persona
of the early poems constantly reappear, but the notion of
one man who is made up of all the others is an idea that
he returns to often. Though some have accused Whitman
of egoism, or even egomania, his poetry, (especially up
to 1860) no matter how self-celebrating or self-centered,
does not often leave out at least some awareness of and

identification with the other.

 

30

In "I Sing the Body Electric," while there is a
focus on the individual body, there is also a suggestion
that the reader too can revel in his or her body, as well
as a reminder that none of the benefits of life can be
"for you only and not for him or her." In "Salut Au
Monde," Whitman allows the reader to ask him questions,
("What do you see Walt Whitman?”) and affirmatively

answers that all of mankind around the globe is equally,

"inevitable... Each of us here as divinely as any is here.”

In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Whitman again admits that
all the good and evil of the others is contained within
him, "The wolf, the snake, the hog not wanting in me.”
Again he contains all that any other individual might
contain, and he has felt all that they might feel.
"There Was A Child Went Forth" is a poem of
identification of the child with every object in the
world of the not-me. The ”first object he looked upon

I

that object he became.‘ This merging or identification

is repeated in "The Sleepers,’ in which the medium of
the dream allows Whitman to "dream in my dream all the
dreams of the other dreamers, and I become the other

I

dreamers.‘ Even in a seemingly defeated poem such as,

"As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life," in which the process
of identification seems to be thwarted, or to have a
negative effect, Whitman's merge with the sea and land

eventually reassures him that the "flow will return."

 

 

31

Therefore, he can even identify with the sea scum and be,
”But a trail of drift and debris." None of this would
be possible if Whitman meant here to suggest that his
literal personal self alone was capable of a cosmic,
mystical awareness of his total identity with all of the
uniVerse. As will be made clear in the subsequent chap—
ters, it is only the ”Whitman" persona, that includes
the accomplice reader and is expanded and augmented by
that alliance, that is thereby capable of an expanded
and augmented vision.

While Whitman's later, usually shorter poems do not
always make his identification theme as explicit, his
later prose such as "Specimen Days" or ”A Backward

Glance O'er Travel'd Roads,’ makes clear that his

attempt was from first to last to set himself up as a

representative for the "divine average.‘ Of course, the
very fact that Whitman chose himself for the model of
representative man has caused much misunderstanding about
Whitman's celebration of self. Whitman, in making the
boldest claims for himself usually does so with the
understanding that he wants and expects his readers to
make the same claims for themselves. Whitman usually
recognizes relation to the other. Even when he claims,
in "Song of Myself," that ”Nothing, not God is greater

H

to one than one's self is, the very next line is, ”And

whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his

32

funeral dressed in his shroud."

The opening lines of the first of the ”Inscription”
poems that begin the final editions of Leaves of Grass
state a seeming paradox: "One's self I sing, a simple,
separate person/ Yet utter the word democratic, the

word En-Masse.‘ Whitman's Personalism-Ensemble concept
is a confusing one to those who believe that a separate
person, by definition, cannot be an integral part of any
ensemble. Some people quite naturally believe that it is
a contradiction to claim to be, ”Both in and out of the
game and watching and wondering at it.” However, George
Herbert Mead, the American philosopher and sociologist,
whom one of his students referred to as a potential,

"25

"Walt Whitman of the realm of thought, in his

discussion of "Self” in Mind Self and Society, suggests
that all of us are made up of an "I” and a "me." The
me is that socialized part of ourselves tied to,
derivative from, and in some sense identical with, all
of the other me's that comprise society. The I is that
part of each self which is never static or fully
definable, which exists in a constant state of becoming.
The I balks against the conformity of the me and is the
cause of change, questioning, rebellion, creativity, in

26

short, individuality. Mead's I and me construct

corresponds well to Whitman's Personalism—Ensemble notion.

 

33

It is no coincidence that Ronald Christ employs Mead's
ideas to good advantage in his discussion of Borges'
methodology and its relation to Whitman, a discussion
that will take on added relevance in the subsequent
chapters. In any event, Mead's theories demonstrate
that Whitman's paradox of strong individuality wedded
to a sense of identification with all the others is by
no means a unique or necessarily eccentric theory.

Borges' conviction that there are no real differences
between individuals, that one man readily can stand for
all, has been a recurrent theme from his earliest poems
and essays to his most recent fiction. Whether he
believes in any autonomy for the individual or not is
a matter of some debate, since he has given contradictory
answers to this question, sometimes within the same essay,

. .l . .
as in ”Nueva refutac1on del t1empo," (”A New Refutatlon

7 In either case,

of Time") from Otras Inguisiciones.2
the notion of one man standing for all of us is a key
thematic device throughout his work.

In Borges' book of essays entitled Inquisiciones
(his first of three books of essays written in the 1920's
and since deleted by Borges from any list of his complete
works) appears the essay "La naderia de la personalidad,"

(”The Nothingness of Personality.”) These early essays

were almost certainly later rejected by Borges for their

34

stylistic extravagances and not for their content per se,

because Borges denial of a separate autonomous I in the
essay in question is something he much later reiterates
in essays such as ”Nuestro pobre individualismo,”

("Our Poor Individualism") and "De alguien a nadie"
("From Someone to No one") from Otras Inguisiciones.
Interestingly enough, Borges brings Whitman into the
discussion in "La naderia de la personalidad,” for the
first of many times to come. He disagrees with Whitman's
notion that to name everything is synonymous with
identifying with all, but he does note that Whitman was

the first American to believe that "to try to express

yourself and want to express all of life are the same

I II

thing.‘ Though in "De alguien a nadie Borges claims
that it is a ”fallacy" to believe that not to be one
thing is somehow to be all things, and though Borges
suggests that if one man can be all men then none of us
is anyone, it remains true that Borges uses the idea of
one for all as an expansive notion in much of his
work,28 though his expansiveness is rather distinct
from Whitman's.

Examples of Borges' idea of one man standing for all
of us are numerous in his short stories. "La forma de

la espada,” ("The Shape of the Sword”) from Ficciones,

initially seems to be little more than a trick story.

35

John Vincent Moon recounts his tale as if he were the
hero of the piece, the man betrayed, only revealing his
true identity at the end of the piece as the traitor
Moon. Moon claims that he has employed this technique
so that his listener, (in this case "Borges" himself,
taking on with us the role of audience) will hear his
entire story to its conclusion before despising him.
However, as J. M. Cohen points out, there is a meta—
physical identity here between betrayer and betrayed,29
and as George Mc Murry notes, the shock we feel at the
end of the story demonstrates that "any man can be all
men."30 Once we have discovered Moon's real identity,
we can recall with heightened perspective some earlier
lines of Moon's in the story: "What one man does is as
if all men were doing it. . Perhaps Schoepenhauer is
right; I am the others, any given man is all men."
Moon the coward can recall the story from the hero's
perspective so authentically because in some sense he too
is the hero.

The idea of one man's actions being representative
of the actions of all people recurs in the opening story

I

of Ficciones ”Tlhn Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.‘ In this story
Borges tells us that in the "vertiginous act of coitus”
all men are the same man, and that every man who recites

a line of Shakespeare is William Shakespeare. In "Tema

del traidor y del heroe,” ("Theme of the Traitor and the

36

Hero”) also from Ficciones, Borges narrates the story of
Kilpatrick, a man remembered as a hero, who was actually
a traitor. Upon being discovered by his associates,
Kilpatrick had agreed to participate in an elaborate
hoax. He allowed himself to be assassinated by his
former compatriots, the Irish nationalists, who made

the death appear to be an assassination perpetuated

by their opposition. In this way their cause would be
served by having a ”hero” martyred, instead of a "traitor"
exposed. The trick element in the story is present, of
course, but again what saves the story from mere trickery
is the notion that all of us contain the potential to be
both hero and traitor; none of us can decline to be,

like Whitman in "Song of Myself," "the poet of wickedness
also."

"El fin" (”The End”) from Ficciones presents the
reader with the hypothetical killer of the fictional
character Martin Fierro, who, upon killing Fierro,
somehow seems to merge with him: "His task of avenger
completed now he was no one. Better said he was the
other, he had no further destiny on the earth and he had
killed a man." As Mc Murry notes, "Borges himself has
pointed out if one man is all men when he kills another

he kills himself as well. We might reason then that the

hypothetical killer becomes nobody, or perhaps his victim,

37

who is also nobody."31

In stories in El Aleph such as ”Los tedlogos,"

("The Theologians") ”Emma Zunz,” or "La espera" ("The
Waiting”), or in stories from El informe de Brodie
(Brodie's Report) such as "Guayaquil" or ”E1 duelo”

("The Duel") again and again there is the suggestion that
apparently distinct or antagonistic personalities are
actually identical, or mere mirrors of continuing
archetypes. Underlying all of these variations is the
suggestion that one can stand for or contain all the
others. Even Emma Zunz, the highly specifically
motivated murderer from the story of the same name, loses
her specific vengeance upon completing her deed. Borges
ends her story with the subtle suggestion that Emma

has served an archetypal sense of vengeance, and hence
the specifics of her story become meaningless in this
larger context.

Ideas of a recurrent self or a double self all
really evolve in some sense from an acceptance of the
possibility that we all may be more than finite or
fixed individuals. Though Borges' tone usually seems
so distinct from Whitman's, and though he seems to derive
little joy from notions that Whitman at least sometimes
finds uplifting, Borges like Whitman may also believe

both in a real individual and in the possibilities

38

/
inherent in the concept of the many in one.32As Ana Maria

Barrenchea suggests, Borges employs an expanded notion
of self in his works to release the individual from the

33 In so doing Borges

bonds of finitude and mortality.
also helps to release both the reader and writer from the
conventional gulf that separates them. If one man can

be all men then what "one man does” (and writing is one

form of doing) "is as if all men were doing it."

(B) The Recurrent Self, The Eternal Return

Another aspect of self that Whitman and Borges
characteristically explore in their search for personal
identity is the idea of a recurrent self, and the allied
notion of an eternal return. Neither man seemed to have
any faith in the Christian concept of an eternity in
heaven or hell on the basis of performance in one life—
time. Both writers evolved a concept of infinite time
and recurrent self to thwart the grave; both men seem
to consider seriously the notion of both life and self
as a continuous process of being.

In "Song of Myself” the last few cantos are reserved
for Whitman's farewell, yet somehow this farewell is not
permanent. Though each person must travel the road for
him or herself, Whitman remains somehow in some form to

help us: "You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,/

39

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless." He
concludes, "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged./

Missing me one place search another/ I stop somewhere

waiting for you.‘ Either Whitman will return, or he
never really departs, as long as there are readers who
are truly engaged by his character.

This notion of recurrence becomes a favorite device
of Whitman to be used both playfully and in full earnest-
ness. In the frontispiece poem of the final edition of
Leaves of Grass, which begins, ”Come said my soul,”
Whitman suggests the possibility of returning "invisibly"
after death for the sake of the "chants resuming."

For Whitman, then, from the first poem of the book, the
recurrent self is linked to the idea of perpetuation
through art. Whitman often asks us how we can be sure
that he is not somehow by our sides at the very moment
that we are reading his poetry. Whitman, ”garrulous

to the last," does not want to let go of his "fancy,"
and he need not do so, so long as there is a reader
willing to consider that he lives on through his
impartation of self in his book, for the purpose of
dialogue with his future readers.

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is perhaps Whitman‘s most
obvious treatment of the notion of an eternal return.

For Whitman as for Borges the repetition of an action

by succeeding generations guarantees somehow the continuity

 

40

of the actors. Distance, time and place, ”avail not,‘l
for we have all been "struck from the float forever

held in solution.‘ Therefore, since Whitman has experi—
enced all and felt all that his future readers are feeling,
we have to concede the validity of his questions: "Who
knows but I am enjoying this?/ Who knows for all the
distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for
all you cannot see me?”

Whitman seems to delight in this sort of direct
address to his reader, returning to it again and again.
In ”Full of Life Now,” from ”Calamus" he ends the poem
by advising us to, "Be not toocertain but I am now with

1'

you. Whitman's recurrence is linked to his book, but

also to his reader's acceptance of his terms. In ”So

H H

long from "Songs of Parting he claims identity with
his book with the well known lines, ”Camerado this is

no book/ Who touches this touches a man." Whitman seems
to understand that his return is predicated on how much
of himself is contained in his work. Yet he also some-
times speaks of a return not specific to himself or his
book. In "Song of Myself” he proclaims that to be
president is but a ”trifle" because we ”will more than
arrive there everyone and still pass on.” While
Whitman's view of time seems to be more progressive and

evolutionary than purely circular or repeatable, the

idea of our return to future lives is still there. Also,

41

if everyone will get to be president and still pass on,"
then certainly the reader can more readily expect to be
the writer, either now, or at some future time.

Borges dealings with recurrence are more specifi-
cally linked to a cyclical or labyrinthine vision of
time and the notion of an eternal return, but his over—
all treatment of the subject is still close to Whitman's,
and serves similar ends. In his book of essays

Historia de la eternidad (The History of Eternity),
Borges deals with the idea of an eternal return at length,
anticipating in this 1935 book the use of the concept in
many future poems and stories. In the title essay
Borges mentions the nightingale of Keats and a cat
discussed by Schoepenhauer as creatures who are eternal
because they live in an eternal present and have no
concept of mortality (this eternal cat appears some
years later in the story ”El sur"). Still, Borges

takes this notion further by arguing that for us as well
there has been but one "I" all along, in a continuous
process of being. Borges quotes his own essay,

"Sentirse en muerte" ("To feel oneself in death" would
be the literal translation) to corroborate the notion
that we too live in an eternal present, that what

happened before continues to happen and will continue

to happen in the so-called future.

 

42

In ”La doctrina de los ciclos" (”The Doctrine of
the Cycles”) Borges again deals with Whitman, this time
in relation to Neitzsche, who was a prime proponent of
the idea of an eternal return. Borges claims that
Nietzsche attempted to make the belief in an eternal
return (an unending circle of time where all things can
and will happen until they are repeated again) a cause
for celebration. Borges says that Nietzsche wanted to
”be Walt Whitman, he wanted to fall in love minutely with

his destiny.‘ Borges does not share the feeling that

a belief in an eternal return need be a happy one, since
there is no escape from our condition if it is true (a
sadly worked out example of the rigors of this circle

is later portrayed in the story "El inmortal,” "The
Immortal”). Still, it is interesting to note that once
again Borges links Whitman to an idea that fascinates
him, and notes that their only real difference is a
temperamental one over how to interpret the phenomenon
of recurrence.

Borges utilizes the notion of recurrence continually
in his fiction to create a world of almost infinite
possibility and relation. In a short piece entitled
”La trama” ("The Plot") from El hacedor Borges matches

the destinies of a nameless gaucho and Julius Caesar,

linked by having both been betrayed by trusted friends.

43

The ”Pero Che," of the gaucho is equivalent to the ”Et

tu Brute" of Caesar, though the gaucho has no way of
knowing that he has been killed because of destiny's
preference for symemtry, "he did not know that he was
dying so that a scene could be repeated." In ”Guayaquil"
from El informe de Brodie a similar theme is enacted.

The two men in the story become unwitting doubles of

San Martih and Bolivar, which suggests, as Mc Murry puts
it, "the eternal return of an archetypal solution.”34
In "El encuentro" ("The Encounter”) from the same
collection, two men at a party fight an unexpected duel,
which, unknown to them, is essentially between two
weapons that had somehow retained the essence of a former
unresolved animosity between two enemies. In all these
cases the essence of the deceased individuals lived

on somehow through time. The tone is distinct from
Whitman's, but the possibility of recurrence is what
matters.

In "El jardih de senderos que se bifurcan,” (”The
Garden of Forking Paths") from Ficciones the almost
ridiculous coincidence that the Chinese spy should
encounter and then need to kill the very man who has
figured out the secret of the spy's ancestor's book that

is also a labyrinth, is counteracted by the message of

that book itself. Within it all things are possible,

 

44

and all possible destinies will eventually come to pass
in the almost infinite realm of possibilities. In some
lives the paths of the two men do not even cross, in

some they are friends, and in this most bizarre set of
circumstances, the spy must kill Albert to let the Germans
know the British munitions site. What is essential here
is the idea that any particular set of occurrences is

but one set of possibilities, and each of us has infinite
opportunity and variety awaiting. This idea is also
suggested at the end of "La muerte y la brujula" (”Death
and the Compass”) from Ficciones when Lonnrot calmly
discusses with Scharlach the ”next time" that Scharlach
will kill him, as if they are fated to meet again and
again under slightly different circumstances. Obviously
there is again significance in all of this for the writer-
reader relationship. In one of life's ”forking paths"

I am the author, while in another I am the reader; thus
in some sense I am already both.

While this notion of recurrence is usually taken
more in a personal vein by Whitman, both authors
recognize that a work of art is in part a living example
of how essences live on beyond the physical life of an
author. In "Profesidh de la fe literaria," ("Profession

of Literary Faith") from the second of Borges' three

rejected books of essays, El tamaho de mi esperanza,
(The Size of My Hope), Borges early on admits a desire

 

45

to write a ”few eternal pages.’ Whitman's constant

probing of the reader, his insistence that he might
still be with us, was almost an invitation to keep him
alive by our continuing the dialogue with his genuine
self through the reading process itself. Borges does
not usually align his interests in recurrence to a
personal wish for continuity, but he is not entirely
immune to the potential charms of the notion either. In
"Le regret d' Heraclite” from El hacedor, in two lines
which Borges attributes to a fictional author, he
regrets that in all his lives he has yet to be, ”the
man in whose arms Matilde Urbach swooned." In "Delia
Elena San Marco," a short sketch from the same book,
this time using his own name and that of a deceased
woman that he loved, Borges wistfully wishes that in
some future life he and Delia will meet again and wonder
if in a past life they ”were Borges and Delia."

Hence, though it is true that Borges has often said

that if he should live again he wants no recollection

35 it is equally true that both Whitman

of this life,
and Borges look to the notion of a recurrent self as a
way of perpetuating their present identities, or the
essence of those selves that can perhaps be purified

through the creative process. Both saw their writing

as a natural means to such self perpetuation.

 

46

(C) The Double Self, The Self as Other

A final important element of self that both authors
explore thoroughly is the idea of a double self. Indeed
the double self, or seeing the self as other, is a rich
and varied approach for both men. Sometimes the
distinction is made between the public and private self,
at other times between the hero and traitor or winner
and loser. Borges and Whitman both make distinctions
between the "real“ self and a somehow less genuine self,
or between the artistic or idealized self and the
historical or everyday self. For both men the distinc-
tions are not easy ones; it often becomes difficult to
tell the selves apart. In all cases, however, the two
men try to come to terms with a sense of doubleness
that seems never to be completely absent from their work.

In "Song of Myself" several variations of the
double appear. The "Me myself" stands apart from the

”trippers and askers," "idle” and "unitary,' and manages

to be, "Both in and out of the game and watching and

'l

While to some this may seem like a
36

wondering at it.
solitary or Romantic characterization, the notion of
being both "in and out of the game" can suggest a

simultaneous ability to be subject and object, to see

the self as other, which George Herbert Mead has

suggested is a very real part of being fully human.

 

47

In that light, such an ability stands out as an important
part of a whole self who recognizes himself as others

see him. Though Whitman may be ”in character" while
making this assertion, some of his early "disciples”
documented Whitman's real ability to see himself as an

37

object. As early as 1847 Whitman was to write in a

journal that he often had the feeling of himself "as two,‘

and as late as his old age conversations with Horace
Traubel, Whitman somewhat playfully confessed to not
knowing, ”which Walt Whitman I am."38
In canto five of "Song of Myself" the doubleness
seems to be of body and soul, except that Whitman does
not express a preference: "I believe in you my soul,
the other I am must not abase itself to you,/ And you

I

must not be abased to the other.‘ Some critics have
noted, though, that the various doubles seem at times
to be contradictory or incoherent. They argue that
Whitman mixes a cosmic representative self with his
everyday self in an ineffective and confusing manner,
which Whitman himself could not really control.39
When Whitman speaks of ”the other I am,” he may not have
an other clearly in mind, according to these critics.
Therefore, just how much critical control Whitman had
over his sense of doubleness or over the various

personae he employed will become a crucial question when

persona is discussed at length in the third and fourth

I

 

48

chapters of this study.

In later poems Whitman‘s sense of doubleness turned
against him at times, most notably and most devastatingly
in ”As I Ebb‘d With The Ocean Of Life”:

Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open
my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes

recoil upon me I have not once had the least

idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real

Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether
unreach‘d Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock
congratulatory signs and bows
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every
word I have written.
In this poem, then, the dangers of doubleness are
more apparent than the advantages. Somewhere the "real”
self stands back unable or unwilling to be touched by
poetry. While some see this poem as a more realistic
presentation of a fallible self than is rendered in
earlier Whitman poems, in some ways the usage of a double
here is in fact more Romantic than normal for Whitman.
Whitman's lament here can be taken as a typical Romantic
complaint of being unable to express the unexpressible.
In that regard it is similar to a Borges poem, ”Matthew
25 30,” (which ironically alludes to Whitman as a
successful model of a poet), which ends with Borges‘

lament that he has yet to "write the poem.‘ However,
just as "As I Ebb‘d With The Ocean Of Life,” ends
with Whitman‘s calm assurance that the ”flow will

return," Borges also rarely believed for long in the

 

49

futility of the attempt at self-expression. Still,
Whitman's poem may have served as a signal of his
realization that the real self is not easily reached.
The "real” self may need the persona to help facilitate
communication with others, a communication necessary to
the achievement of greater self-awareness.

In poems such as "That Shadow My Likeness,” and
"Goodbye My Fancy,” Whitman‘s doubles are the authorial
or idealized self versus the mortal individual. Leslie
Fieldler argues that Whitman's "fancy" in "Goodbye My
Fancy” is precisely his poetic persona that he is loath
to part with, and whom he hopes need not be erased by
the death of its creator, the man Walt Whitman."0
In the same essay, Fieldler contends that "That Shadow
My Likeness" is a richly ironic poem because in it the
persona is speaking about the man Walt Whitman as if he
were a shadow less real than the persona that he created.
Such a perspective is remindful of the distinction that

' or in

Borges makes in his famous sketch ”Borges y yo,‘
his story from Ficciones, "Las ruinas circulares,"
("The Circular Ruins”) only two of the many places where
Borges deals with his own sense of doubleness.

Borges, like Whitman, and to some extent, perhaps,
because of him, is fascinated by the variations on the

theme of a self that entails, comprehends or comprises

the other. Borges employs the idea in his poetry,

50

fiction and essays. In fact one of his later books of
poetry is entitled, E1 otro,el mismo (The Other, The

Same). Still, generally his most interesting use of the

 

double is within his fiction.

For example, in ”Los tedlogos,” from El Aleph, two
theologians are so antagonistic to each other that one
of them finally causes the other to be burned at the
stake as a heretic. Yet when the second man dies, also
by fire, upon his arrival in heaven he discovers that
to God he and his rival, "formed but one person."
Borges‘ doubles are often made up of seeming opposites.
In the intricate metaphysical detective story, "La
muerte y la brdjula (”Death and the Compass”) from
Ficciones detective Eric Lannrot believes that he is
solving a crime, by attempting to think like the other,
the criminal. However, the real murderer is not the
Jewish Kabbalist seeking the name of God through
ritualistic murder, as Lannrot had been led to believe
by his own over-intellectualization of the case. The
murderer is, instead, his own arch rival, Red Scharlach,
who has trapped Lannrot in order to kill him, by antici-
pating every false assumption that Lbnnrot would make,
by more accurately thinking like the other. Scharlach
and Lbnnrot, seeming opposites, are really two sides of

the same coin, a fact further suggested by the redness

51

in both their names, (Lbnnrot and Scharlach suggesting
red and scarlet respectively, especially to someone with
a little German.) The master detective who attempts to
think like the criminal, to become the other, is at
least as old as Poe's ”The Purloined Letter,” but in
Borges' story it is the criminal who prevails, though

in some sense there is no victor, because the elaborate
escapades of the two men have really been a bizarre

form of suicide.

More intricacies upon the pattern of the double are
evident in the stories, "Las ruinas circulares” and "El
sur" from Ficciones and ”E1 otro” (”The Other”) from El
libro de arena (The Book of Sand). "Las ruinas circulares"
deals with a kind of magician who has decided to attempt
to dream a man, to bring a being to life by sheer will,
artistry and concentration. The long and arduous process
of creation is catalogued up to the point that the
"son” is complete. Clearly a parable for the creative
process itself, the story ends with a devastating shock
when the creator discovers that he himself is the mere
figment of a prior creator. Whether this story
demonstrates, as Rodriguez Monegal suggests, how Borges
tried to overcome a sense of being his father‘s golem,
or whether it is, as Christ asserts, a model for Borges‘

artistic process, perfected from Whitman's model - the

creation of an artistic double or persona so that the

52

original can dissappear—42 certainly what is true is
that Borges believes that the artistic process and the
search for self are bound in a fundamental way.

In ”El sur," the two selves dealt with have a
highly autobiographical base. Juan Dahlmann essentially
is Jorge Luis Borges; they have similar family back-
grounds, and the accident that befalls Dahlmann is taken

43 For Dahlmann as for

right from Borges' own life.
Borges the contrast is between the sedentary bookish
self and the self still tied to ancestral longings for
bravery and adventure. Dahlmann‘s wish-fulfilling and,
fighting a knife fight instead of dying from a clumsy,
freakish accident and subsequent infection, demonstrates
the doubleness of Borges‘ everyday self, the self
conversant in art and literature, and the self tied to
the Romanticized world of battles, glory and the gaucho
code.

In "El otro" the two selves presented in a fascin—
ating dialogue are the very young Borges of his Geneva
school days and the contemporary Borges, an old and
finally renown author and visiting professor at Harvard.
The young and old men debate over the normal Borgesian
preoccupations with time and identity, and charmingly

disagree over who is dreaming whom. One subject of

disagreement, characteristically, is Whitman. The old

53

Borges shows an awareness of Whitman‘s use of persona,
while the younger man indignantly protests that his
Walt Whitman is "incapable of telling a lie." Borges'
ability to sit calmly on a park bench and literally
"talk to himself,” demonstrates graphically the ease
with which he can conceive of self as other.

Still, the short sketch "Borges y yo" (”Borges and
I" or ”Borges and Myself”) is perhaps the most perfect
description of this sense of doubleness. In ”Borges
y yo" the distinction is made between Borges the public
figure, the one to whom things happen, and the private
self who seems to lose everything to this public man.
Borges has termed this distinction to be between the
spectacle and the spectator. The "I” lives so that
"Borges” can create literature that in part justifies
the "I." The "I” comes to realize that he can only be
perpetuated through “Borges” even though the ”I”
recognizes himself less in the works of ”Borges" than
in the works of many others, or in the ”labored strumming
of a guitar.” Still this distinction between "Borges”
and "I" is not even that neat because at the end of the
piece comes the admission that "I don‘t even know which

one of us is writing this page,‘ a statement reminiscent
of Whitman‘s ”I don't know which Walt Whitman I am."

Also the distinction between the private and public

54

selves again reminds one of Mead's distinction between
the "I” and the ”me."

Whitman and Borges' preoccupations with the ways of
looking at self serve both purposes of self—examination,
and an exploration into an experimental theory of the
creative process. The trinity that Borges adapts from
Whitman arises from similar preoccupations with self and
art, but it is distinct enough in its particulars to
account for the different tonesiflthe two men‘s work.

To be engaged in the work of art and yet able to stand
back from it, this is a goal that Borges derives in part
from Whitman.44 Both seek reader engagement as a real
way to self discovery, and both come to view persona,
which at its best can encompass both writer and reader,
spectator and spectacle, observer and participant,

self and other, as the best means toward such
engagement.

Whitman and Borges attempt to engage in dialogue
with the other because it may be only through such
dialogue that they can best discover and realize their
true selves. As Georges Gusdorf argues in Speaking,
"The detour through others always leads me back to
myself,"['5 or as Martin Buber has argued, we are only
really alive when we are in communion with the genuine
other, "All real living is meeting.”46 Gusdorf's notion

that the personality of the writer is created as it is

55

expressed through communicationl'7

also bears great
relevance to the use of persona by both men. Whitman
and Borges seem to adhere to such convictions, and that
is why their search for self normally involves an other,
an other especially invited by these experimental writers
to join in the dialogue of the experiment in progress.

In the next two chapters the reader and the persona‘s
roles in the ideal trinity will be examined. Then chapter
four will cover how the process of true dialogue can

48 Persona that

degenerate at the slightest relaxation.
can unite reader and writer and aid in self—illumination,
can help to obliterate and obscure the self when used
more as a mask in the conventional sense, or as a defense
against genuine entry into the work. When persona is
used to obscure the self instead of to launch a "shared
investigation" between writer and reader, then the

reader‘s participation, his capacity to serve as an

"accomplice,” is no longer fully realizable.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

Jorge Luis Borges, with Esther Zemborain de Torres,
An Introduction to American Literature (translated by L.

CIark Keat1ng and Rohert O. Evans5, (Lexington: Univer-

sity of Kentucky Press, 1971).

Borges explicitly stated in a television interview
with Dick Cavett on May 6, 1980 that, ”I think of myself
not as a modern writer; I think of myself as a nineteenth
century writer." He went on to say that, "I think of
literature in terms of the nineteenth century and the
beginnings of the twentieth century...I have no affinity
with surrealism, dadism or other tomfoolery."

3 Whitman's family moved from near Huntington, Long

Island to Brooklyn when he was not yet four. Borges'
family moved from Buenos Aires to the suburb of Palerno,

"a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires,”
(Rodriguez Monegal, p. 48).

Especially good sources for the biographical infor—
mation presented in this section are: Justin Kaplan, Walt
Whitman, A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980) and
Gay Wilson AIIen, The Solitar Sin er,(New York: Macmillan
and Co., 1955). For Borges see Rohrrguez Monegal, and
Borges' own autobiographical essay.

5 Donald Yates, "Behind 'Borges y yo,'" Modern
Fiction Studies 19, (Autumn 1973) 317—324, p. 321. This
articIe also contains a vivid recounting of an anecdote
which Borges related that synthesizes his sense of
separation between the everyday self and the ”Borges" or

writing self:

One day the pimp and dance hall entrepreneur
came across a reference to a writer names Jorge
Luis Borges. ”Look here" he exclaimed to Borges,
”This fellow has the same name as you. How
about that, che, do you know who he is?” Borges
looked at the biographical note and the photo

of himself taken at a time when he had a
moustache and beard and answered, ”No, I really
don't know him." p. 321.

56

 

 

 

 

 

57

6 Whitman: The Corres ondence, Edwin H. Miller,
editor, (New YorE: New York University Press, 1961).
In his introduction Miller notes this lack of literary

references in the letters and states that Whitman ”en—

deavored to separate the inseparable- Whitman the man and
Whitman the poet," p.

7 Borges' pride in his military ancestry, besides
being frequently noted in interviews, is‘fiocumented in
such poems as, "Isidore, Acevedo," and "Pagina para
recordar a1 Coronel Suarez, Vencedor en Junin, " (”Page
To Commemorate Colonel Suarez, Victor at Junin. ")

Whitman, "prized his ancestry and its long and patriotic
association with American history... In the Revolutionary
War a maternal ancestor fought under the command of John
Paul Jones, while a paternal great uncle was killed in

the battle of Long Island.” The Columbia Enc clo edia
(New York: Columbia University Press, 19685 p. 2822.

8 See Kaplan, pp. 114—117. Kaplan discusses the
tales at length and also notes that James Russell Lowell

felt that the stories had been written ”a la Hawthorne,”
while others have seen the influence of Poe.

9 William Carlos Williams, ”An Essay on Leaves of

Grass," in Whitman, A Collection of Critical Essa s
(Roy Harvey Pearce, ed1tor5 (EngIewood CIiffs: Prentice

Hall, 1962) p. 147.

10 Whitman in a letter dated July 6, 1865 extols the
virtues of ”Drum Taps" over Leaves of Grass, and many
years later declares that, "When L11acs Last in the Door—
yard Bloom'd,” ”Passage To India," and "Chanting the
Square Deific,” were his finest works. See, Whitman:

The Corres ondence (VI) p. 246, and Horace TraubeI, With
WaIt Whitman in Camden (V1) New York: Mitchell KinnerI ,
19155 p. 156. Even more surprising are Borges' claims.

In the already quoted Dick Cavett interview, Borges claims
that his finest books are, in poetry, E1 otro, el mismo,
and Historia de la Noche and in fiction, E1 1nforme de
Brod1e and E1 Iihro de arena.

11 The story is "El otro" ("The Other”) and it
appears in El libro de arena.

58

12 Borges' account of his feeling of being an
”abstract perceiver of the world," during a quiet walk
in a "timeless" old section of Buenos Aires is first
documented in ”Sentirse en muerte,” in the early book
of essays, E1 idioma de los Ar entinos, 1928. Though
Borges has Slnce rejected that Book as a whole, the
short piece ”Sentirse en muerte” has been reprinted in
the title essay oleistoria de la enternidad, 1935, and

in "Nueva refutacion deI t1empo,” which can be found in
Otras Inquisiciones, 1960.

13 See Richard Burgin, Conversations With Jor e Luis
Bor as (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 19685
p. 55, in which Borges claims that the writing of poetry
and fiction are not essentially different tasks.

14 Whitman's discussion of slang and the potenti-
alities of the American idiom can be found in his essays,
”Slang Today in America," and ”An American Primer."

Of course Borges' collection of essays, El idioma de los

Ar entinos, (The Lan ua e of the Ar entines5 is v1ta11y
concerned

wit the uniqueness of Argentine expression.

15 For example, Donald Yates in his article, "The
Four Cardinal Points of Borges," lists Borges‘ three
major themes as ”time, infinity and identity,” in The

Cardinal Points of Bor es (Lowell Dunham and Ivar IVEsk,
ed1tors5 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968)

p. 28. J. M. Cohen in his book, Jor e Luis Borges
(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 19735 thinks that the
three principal themes are "time, identity and the
relation of truth and fiction,” p. 66.

16 See, "Borges at N.Y.U.,” in Prose For Borges,
p. 400.
17

See the afterword to The Book of Sand (Norman
Thomas di Giovanni, translator5 (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1977) in which Borges, in speaking of the story ”The
Congress" states, "I have woven into the story-as is my
habit- a number of autobiographical elements."

18 Such an emphasis comes out clearly in stories
such as "Las ruinas circulares," in which the creator
discovers that he too has been created, or in "E1 muerto,‘
("The Dead Man,”) in which a young tough who thinks he is
in control of a gang has really been proscribed for
execution after a period of mock respect for his leader-

ship.

59

19 Ward Welty, "The Persona as Kosmos in ‘Song of
Myself;'" Walt Whitman Review 25 (1979), 98—105.

20

Roland D. Sawyer, Walt Whitman The Pro het Poet
(Boston: Gorham Press, 1913.5

21 David Daiches, "Walt Whitman Impressionist
Prophet,” in Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years Later

(Milton Hindus, ed1tor5 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1955) pp. 109-122.

22 Esther Shepard, Walt Whitman‘s Pose (New York:

Harcourt, Brace and Co., 19385.

23 A few of the best of the many Whitman as mystic
in ”Song of Myself" arguments can be found in:
V. K. Chari, Whitman in the Li ht of Vedantic
M sticism (Lincoln: Univer81ty of Nehraska Press, 1964);
Ma colm Cowley's Introduction to Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass, the First (1855) Edition pp. vi1-xxxvii.
For a counterargument to these and other Whitman as mystic

assertions see, Joseph Benevento, ”Whitman and the
Eastern Mystic Fallacy, Calamus 20, (June 1981) 12—23.

24 Among those who have argued convincingly for
Whitman's relation to and focus upon humanity see:
E. Fred Carlisle, The Uncertain Self: Whitman's

Drama of Identit (East Lansing: Michigan State
Univer51ty Press, 1973)

G. S. Amur, ”Whitman‘s Song of Man- A Humanistic
Approach to 'Song of Myself,'” Walt Whitman Review 18
(1972) 50—56.

25 See, George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, Societ
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19345 p. xxxv.

26
194-199.

27 This essay stresses the irreality of time, space
and the individual only to reverse itself at the end with
the poignant confession that "The world, unfortunately,
is real, I unfortunately, am Borges."

28 Mary Kinzie believes that, "Despite Borges‘
derogation of the idea that 'somehow not to be is to be
everything,‘ this is so constant a premise in his fiction
that it not only suggests the jump from the single to the
divine but just as forcefully grounds the descent into an
other which is smaller than the self," Mary Kinzie,
"Recursive Prose," in Prose for Borges p. 39.

See Mead's chapter on "Self," especially pp.

60

 

29 Cohen, p. 59.

30 George R. Mc Murry, Jor e Luis Bor es (New York:
Frederick Ungar Co., 1980) p. 95.

31 Ibid, p. 91

32

In the Cavett interview, as well as in his conver-
sations with Richard Burgin, Borges explains his general
disenchantment with politics with reference to his own
strong individualism.

33 ”Borges dissolves the awareness of personality
so he can free man from the limitations of his world."
Ana Maria Barrenechea, Bor es The Lab rinth Maker, (edited
and translated by Robert Lima5 (New York: New York
University Press, 1965) p. 81.

34 Mc Murry, p. 12.

35 See Burgin, p. 107. Borges expresses the wish
that if he were to return it would be with ”no memory

of having been Borges.”

36 For example, E. Fred Carlisle argues that the
progression of self in ”Song of Myself," is from "concen-
tration on the monological self to discovery of the
dialogical self," Carlisle, p. 180.

37 John Burroughs, Whitman, A Study (Boston:
1896)

Houghton, Mifflin, , Then Whitman had a curious
habit of standing apart, as it were, and looking upon
himself as of some other person,” p. 96.

38 Traubel, (V1), p. 108.

39 See Allen, p. 160, "The ambiguity of the I is
disturbing and inconsistent."

40 Leslie Fieldler, "Images of Walt Whitman,” in
Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years Later. Ed. Milton

Hindus. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955)
pp. 55—73.

/
41 Emir Rodriguez Monegal, "Borges: The Reader as

in Prose For Borges, p. 119.
Christ, pp. 66-70.

Writer,‘
42

61

43 In 1938 Borges suffered a severe gash on the head
from an open window casement, and an infection subsequent—
ly developed that almost proved fatal. Hence his experi-
ence closely parallels Dahlmann‘s.

44 James Britton, in speaking of the various roles

that a writer can choose from, speaks principally of the
role of spectator versus the role of participant. While
Britton very carefully distinguishes between the two
roles, he does not seem concerned about the possibility
of attempting both roles at once. Borges and Whitman
seem to believe that, with the help of the reader and
persona, they can be, ”Both in and out of the game and

watching and wondering at it." See James Britton. The
Develo ment of Writin Abilities, (London: Macmillan,
19755.

45

Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (Lg Parole), Translated
by Paul T. Brockelman. (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1965), p. 66.

46 Martin Buber, I and Thou, Translated by Walter
Kaufmann, (New York: Scr15ner and Sons, 1970) p. 62.

47 Gusdorf, p. 74.

48 Ibid, p. 75: ”at the slightest relaxation the
new form degenerates into formula. There comes a moment
when the power is lost, when style seems an empty
imitation of itself, a whole jumble of conditioned
responses in which the person is the victim rather than
the master."

 

 

 

Chapter Two

Reader: The Search For ”El lector cdmplice”

In his widely acclaimed experimental novel, Rayuela
(Hopscotch), Julio Cortazar attempts to define a new
readership and a new writer-reader relationship. In
chapter seventy—nine the character Morelli, an obvious
spokesman for Cortazar‘s literary theories throughout
the novel, presents his ideas for the development of a
"lector complice," or ”accomplice reader,” who would
replace the conventional reader of earlier novels.
Morelli argues that a new theory of reading is needed
because in the past the reader was limited and
restricted by the conventions of the novel. Morelli
laments the fact that these conventions and restrictions
have come to be considered necessities, and that the
more the novel limits us, "to its own ambit... the better
the novelist is thought to be."1 Morelli proposes a new
novel that, instead of selfishly clutching the reader,
would invite him to become ”an accomplice as it whispers
to him underneath the conventional exposition."

Morelli seeks a reader who is unafraid to grapple with a

text which no longer promises easy answers or eventual

resolution.
62

 

 

63

The new kind of novel and its ”accomplice" reader
both arise from a rejection of literature as it is
normally understood. The reader is given a far more
creative and primary role to play. The new novel must
take this reader into account, and the new novelist
can no longer write merely to impart a lesson or express
a View on life or art. The new novelist opts for a
third possibility:

...that of making an accomplice of the reader,
a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him,
provided that the reading will abolish reader‘s
time and substitute author's time. Thus

the reader would be able to become a copartici—
pant and cosufferer of the experience through
which the novelist is passing, at the same
moment and in the same form. ...give him
something like a facade, with doors and windows
behind which there operates a mystery

which the reader-accomplice will have to

look for (therefore the complicity) and
perhaps will not find (therefore the co—
suffering). What the author of this novel
might have succeeded in for himself, will

be repeated (becoming gigantic, perhaps, and
that would be marvelous) in the reader-
accomplice. As for the female—reader, he

will remain with the facade and we already
know that there are very pretty ones among
them... With which everything turns out
happily, and as for those who rotest

they can go soak their heads."

Readers of Rayuela well know that Cortahar‘s novel,
in its subject matter and especially in its extraordinary
setup, is a fine example of the kind of novel that
Morelli calls for, and that Rayuela is one of the most

important novels to come from Latin America in the past

64

several decades. However, not many critics seem aware
that the theory of readership considered experimental
and even revolutionary by the admirers of this novel
had already been attempted successfully by Whitman in
his poetry and by Borges in his short stories. Indeed,
by way of the influence of his countryman Borges,
Cortazar was introduced to perhaps the most essential
member of Whitman's trinity, the participating reader.
Indeed the reader that Whitman seeks out throughout
his poetry and prose is highly analogous to Cortazar‘s
"lector complice."

Whitman‘s active, participating reader is a
persistent concept throughout his creative work, and
is also what Borges considered to be the most daring
part of Whitman's experimental trinity. Like Morelli's
ideal reader, the reader Whitman seeks would also be
a travelling companion who is willing to deal with
uncertainty, with half-hints or even less than half-
hints. Whitman's ideal readers are confident of their
ability to supply much of the matter themselves; they
believe in their roles as coparticipants in the work.
In fact, both Whitman and Borges have put more emphasis
on the crucial need for such a reader, on his importance
and centrality to the creative act and on the artist's
inability to complete the act without a discerning,

/
participating reader than Cortazar ever did in Rayuela.

65

Though it is not my purpose here to draw lengthy
comparisons between Whitman and Cortazar, it is still
interesting to note that a theory considered avant
garde by Cortazar's readers in the 1960‘s was already
well developed by Whitman by the 1860's. Borges, it
seems, was one of the few readers who really appreciated
and understood Whitman‘s readership theory, and was
then able to adapt its principles to his own fiction.
Both Whitman and Borges seek out a genuine other in
the reader to help with the search for self and to
encourage a similar investigation on the part of the
reader. In other words, Whitman and Borges, often accused
of not having any "real” characters in their work aside
from themselves, are innocent of that accusation
precisely because they always assume the reality and
importance of their readers, whom they encourage to
contribute to the development of the work of art.
Both men sought an accomplice in the reader, someone
willing to be an equal partner in their literary and
self—exploratory ventures. No reader is turned away
who comes to the work willing to help in the search,
willing to take part in the, ”perpetual journey,"
instead of expecting resolution, neatness and a set of
ready—made answers.

Whitman's belief in the need for an active reader—

ship is a persistent one throughout his poetry and prose,

 

 

 

 

 

 

66

though later on in his career he came to recognize that
the potential for accomplice readers was not as great
as he had at first envisioned. An examination of
Whitman‘s prose pronouncements on the need for such a
reader, and the nature of what reading should be, must
first be undergone in order to investigate how these
ideas carried through in his poetry, and how they later
came to play a prominent part in the works of Borges.

Whitman's 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass is noted
for its definition of a new poet and his new poetry,
but is also at least as concerned with the new reader.
When Whitman asserts that the "United States themselves
are essentially the greatest poem," his explanation of
that statement ends in his assurance that what the
United States is ”best or most in" is not in its

"legislatures," ”colleges,” "churches,‘ nor even its
"inventors," but "always most in the common people."
Whitman's new readership is to come first from the
common people of the United States because through their
political institutions and in their everyday lives they
had already accepted the notion that "all men are
created equal.” Hence they can most naturally assume
the role of coparticipant in the work of art because
they alone would be naturally set against conceiving of

an author as a superior being of any sort. Whitman's

complaints against European, or as he called it,

67

"feudal" literature, were not only complaints about the
princes and kings that peopled the pages of such
literature, but also against the traditionally hier—
archical set-up of author over reader which he sought
to eliminate. Clearly a democracy seemed to be the
ideal location for such an experiment.

Later on in the preface Whitman states that the
poet has to bring, "everything to bear on your
individual character"; the poet cannot take the people
for granted but must treat them as individuals. The
poet is always aware that, ”the others are as good as

I

he, only he sees it and they do not.‘ The ”great poets
say we are no better than you, what we enclose you
enclose. Did you suppose there could be only one

I

Supreme? There can be unnumbered supremes.‘ Whitman's
meanings often have philosophical and poetic import at
once. Clearly the idea of many supremes can be taken,

and has been taken, as a belief in some form of pantheism.
However, on a poetic level, Whitman is denouncing the

old writer—audience relationship which set the writer

on top, from where he preached down at the people. All
readers in potential are equal to the writer and by a
full participation in the poem they can come to an
appreciation of their own powers. Whitman wants a

democratic readership; no reader should feel unequal

to put him or herself squarely in the writer‘s place.

68

There is an encouragement of interchangeability here
that stems in part from notions of the self as other
already considered in the first chapter of this study.

Whitman‘s closing line to his 1855 preface, "The
proof of the poet is that his country absorb him as
affectionately as he has absorbed it,” has often been
misunderstood. Many have seen that sentence, in
retrospect, as an ironic line in which Whitman called
for a general approval which he never received.
Certainly Whitman was disappointed by his lack of
popular appeal, but the closing line of the 1855
preface is more sophisticated than the naive call for
popular acceptance that it is too often considered
to be.

The statement sets forth a basic tenet of Whitman's
readership theory. For this poetry to be successful
Whitman's reader must absorb the "poet" (who is in fact
the composite poet—persona to be discussed in the next
chapter) as much as the person Walt Whitman has attempted
to absorb the reader by the creation of the poet-persona
which encompasses his genuine self. The reader must
find his or her place in the work, must fit into the
poems as fully and as trustingly as Whitman himself has.
Self and reader must meet, in part through the unifying

device of the composite persona or character, "Walt

 

 

69

Whitman," who has no possibility of success if the
reader will not add his or her part to the composite.
Otherwise there can be no meeting, no dialogue, no true
"proof” of the success of the poet. As later examples
from Whitman's prose will demonstrate, he fully hoped
that his readers would take "Song of Myself” especially
to be their poem. As Cowley, Fieldler and others have
suggested, the original rendition of the poem was a
far more anonymous one,7 and was thereby even better
suited to allow each reader to place him or herself
inside. Whitman wants his readers to abandon the
feudal models just as they had abandoned feudal politics
and join him as equals in the poetic experiment.
Whitman's anonymous reviews and other writings
about the early editions of Leaves of Grass reinforce
the readership theory espoused in the 1855 preface. In
an unpublished preface he wrote for the 1855 edition,
Whitman informs his readers that, "Indeed I have not
done the work and cannot do it. But you must do the work
to really make what is within the following song-
which if you do I promise you return and satisfaction
earned by you yourself far more than ever book
before has given you."9 Clearly Whitman believes
that the readers must make the book, must absorb it

and place themselves into the work as co-creators.

 

 

 

 

 

70

In an anonymous review written by Whitman thatis reprinted
in Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years Later Whitman notes
that the poet of Leaves of Grass calls for the reader

to go "hand in hand” with him on the journey. The poet
also seems to enjoy enticing the reader, "Rather is his
pleasure to elude you and provoke you for deliberate

I

purposes of his own.‘ Even before he wrote Leaves of

Grass Whitman was interested in the notion of an active

 

reader. Allen tells us that as early as 1849 Whitman
heartily approved of an article on Tennyson that
suggested that the best art called for suggestion for

its effect and self-exertion on the part of the reader.10
Whitman continued to call for the active reader for many
years, though later in life he began to appreciate what
a rare being such a reader really was.

In ”Democratic Vistas" Whitman's misgivings about
democracy in the United States extend to his discourage—
ment in not encountering more active readers. Whitman's
complaint that a great literature needs great readers
was fully consistent with his notion that the reader
had an equal responsibility to the fruition of the work
of art. "Literature has yet to recognize the people,"
he laments in this essay, but he also implies that the

people are not responding to a literature that is

attempting such recognition. His literature is democratic

 

 

 

 

 

71

in its stance that all are equal partners to it. However,
the readers must first awake from their accustomed lack
of responsibility that conventional literature had

lulled them into:

In fact a new theory of literary composition
for imaginative works of the very first class
and especially for highest poems is the sole
course open to the States. Books are to be
called for and supplied on the assumption that
the process of reading is not a half sleep

but in the highest sense a gymnast's struggle,
that the reader is to do something for himself
or herself, must be on the alert, must himself
or herself construct indeed the poem,
argument, history, metaphysical essay, the
text furnishing the clue, the start or
framework. Not the book needs so much to

be the complete thing, but the reader of

the book does.

Whitman wants the reader to go through the book and
experience what the writer himself needed to go through
to compose the work. As Gusdorf would put it a century
later, since good writing is a result of tremendous
effort and struggle, then the reading should be
correspondingly challenging.11 In the 1876 preface
Whitman reiterated his notion that his poems were
meant to be for all people, calling Leaves of Grass the

II

poems of average identity (of yours whoever you are now
reading these lines)... To sing the song of that law
of average Identity of yourself consistently with the
devine law of the universal is a main intention of

those Leaves." Whitman also refers to the, ”half hints

and even less than half hints,” that he believes are

 

 

 

 

72

his responsibility to supply; we must do the rest
ourselves, and so much of the final meaning is left
to us.

In an essay entitled, "Poetry Today in America,”
Whitman claims that the new poetry, "Like all modern
tendencies has direct or indirect reference to the
reader, to you or me, to the central identity of every-
thing, the almighty Ego.” Near the conclusion of his
Specimen Days once again Whitman tells his ”poetic
student and friend" that, "I only seek to put you in
rapport. Your own brain, heart, evolution, must not
only understand the matter, but largely supply it."
In "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," Whitman
explicitly announces that, "I seek less to state or
display any theme or thought and more to bring you,
reader, into the atmosphere of that theme or thought,

there to pursue your own flight.‘ Bucke‘s early biography
of Whitman quotes the poet as saying, "I am sure my book
necessitates that its reader transpose him or herself
into that central position and become the actor,
experiencer himself or herself of every page, every
aspiration every line.”12 In fact Whitman confesses

to Bucke that he may know less about the meaning of
Leaves of Grass then some of his readers.

Clearly Whitman sets forth tenets about the

writer—reader relationship that later prove quite dear

73

to Borges. The writer needs the reader, for the reader
in a real sense creates the writing, fills in and expands
upon the meanings. The author is there to suggest,
entice, perhaps even goad, but the reader must become

an equal partner, must seek to contribute to the work

as fully as possible. The apt symbol for the book that
both Whitman and Borges wanted to deliver is present

II

in Borges‘ poem, "Arte poética. In that poem Borges
says that art is like a river, which is always the
same river, but also never the same because it is
constantly flowing, always in process. Everyone comes
to the same work of art but no one ever perceives
exactly the same thing. Whitman clearly wanted his
poetry to attain its different levels of meaning from
the different people willing to enter into it fully.
However, Whitman came to realize that the great
reader he envisioned was a rare species indeed. In
”Ventures on an Old Theme," he states that, ”To have

great poetry we need great audiences.‘ In the preface
to "GoodbyebbrFancy," he says, "To have great heroic
poetry we need great readers- an heroic appetite and
audience. Have we at present any such?" Borges
applauded Whitman's experimental view of the reader

as perhaps his greatest triumph of all, but during his

lifetime few fully active readers were apparent. John

74

Burroughs may have been in that group, in part because
he had direct contact with Whitman. Burroughs was
aware that ”Whitman always aimed to make his reader an

13 He also

active partner in his poetic enterprise.”
felt that, ”One source of his charm is that we each see
some phase of ourselves in him... Whitman's aim is
only to thrust the riddles before you, to give you a
new sense of than,andstart the game afresh."14
Still, readers like Burroughs were in the minority.
In his old age conversations with Horace Traubel, Whitman
recognized this fact very well, but still clung tenacious-
1y to the concept of the active, participating reader.
Whitman argues for the open—endedness of his work by
telling Traubel, "1 maybe do not know all of my own
meanings,” and again, "I am still looking for some of

f."15

the meanings mysel Whitman and Traubel agree with

the notion that perhaps half the greatness of Homer and

Shakespeare resides in their readers.16

Whitman jokes
with Traubel over how much of a Whitman expert he has
become, predicting that, ”it will after a while get to
be ‘I Horace Traubel, a cosmos, of Camden a son' and so
forth. That is what the Leaves amount to anyhow-that's
what I mean them to amount to, there is a certain point
in their evolution where they cease to be my creation,

possession."17 This sentiment is reinforced towards the

end of the first volume of conversations, ”It does not

75

seem like my book- it is your book too- anybody's who

chooses to claim it.”18

And while that statement might
seem like a commonplace if spoken by most other authors,
coming from Whitman it serves to summarize a life long
commitment to the active encouragement of full reader
participation in his work.

The problem is that only those who really did choose
to claim the book as their own, by putting themselves
into the composite, or by joining the author on the
poetic journey as coparticipants, could catch the entire
"drift.” So Whitman must sadly admit to Traubel that,
"It has often occurredtonm that perhaps all through the
poems I assume too largely the responding sympathetic

”19 Later on (in volume two of the

gifts of the reader.
Traubel interviews) Whitman accepts the idea that,
though his book is still potentially for everybody, it
will likely attract only a minority: ”I don't look for
a vast audience, for great numbers of endorsers,
absorbers, just now- perhaps not even after a while.
But here and there- every now and then— one, several
will raise the standard, Leaves of Grass will finally
find its way."20 Here and there the poem was to find
an audience, but perhaps Borges was the first reader-

writer who could fully implement a practical appreciation

of Whitman's theory.

 

76

So Whitman, from 1855 right up to the time of his
death, argued for an active readership through his prose
works. One then wonders just how prevalent this notion
really was in his poetry- what did Whitman do to encourage
and create the accomplice reader in his actual works of
art? Are there examples in his poetry of the reader
actively sought after as coparticipant? Are there
opportunities for the reader to put him or herself in
the poet's place? Is Whitman intentionally open-ended
or inconclusive in order to allow us to ”pursue our
own flight”? Is a proper reading of Whitman's work in

essence a ”shared investigation,‘ as Borges would put it?
I believe that the answer to all of these questions is
yes, and with the help of some accomplice critics and a
close look at a few of Whitman‘s key poetic statements

on the new art of reading, the evidence can be readily
shared.

Fortunately, there have been several critics who
have paid some attention to what Whitman was attempting
to do with his readers. For example, Roy Harvey Pearce
contends that Whitman's ”Calamus” poems are all about
how to be a good reader; the "I” of these poems includes
the reader, according to Pearce.21 He argues that in
"Calamus" and in ”Children of Adam" Whitman defined the

poetic process and the reader's role in it. Charles

Feidelson argues that the I and you in "Song of Myself"

 

 

77

merge; the audience is potentially both the subject
matter and the creator of the poems.22 Feidelson feels
that Whitman's poetry is "primarily a reflection of the
literary method in which the writer and his subject

”23 James Miller

become part of the stream of language.
notes that Whitman encouraged the reader to be independent;
"the reader must make his own discoveries through his

"24 Leslie Fieldler contends that "no

own experience.
poet engages the reader with so fervid and intimate a
clasp, no writer describes the act of reading so eroti—

cally.”25

However, Fieldler believes that this phenomenon
results because Whitman is so unsure of a readership,
because he begins to suspect that there are few
accomplices out there: "It is an odd subject for the
Great American Poem ("Song of Myself") the celebration
(half heroic, half comic) of the mating between an I

whose reality is constantly questioned and an even more

"26 Fieldler suggests that Whitman merely

elusive you.

doubled the self to assure himself of a responsive

audience, a charge that Christ levels against Borges,

whom he says took his cue from Whitman.27
However, Whitman's belief in a real other is

proved by his conviction that the reader must participate

in and contribute to the poems. Whitman may have con—

ceived of a double self, but this conception did not

alter his conviction that each reader could be a real

78

and active participant in the work of art. Whitman
believed, as he told Traubel, that "a great many of my
readers credit my writings with things that do not
attach to the writings themselves, but to the person who
reads them— things they supply- bring with them.”28
Whitman never conceived of his readers as "mere dreams
or dots”; he sought the genuine other for participation
in his poetic experiment.

Don Bogen notes that Whitman‘s original version of
"Who Learns My Lesson Complete,” from the 1855 Leaves
of Grass, contains direct invitations for audience
participation, and seeks a genuine other outside the poem.
Bogen argues that the original poem is seeking from its
audience, "direct participation in the creation of the
poem.”29 Each of us must individually experience the
lesson in order to learn it. "In a sense the poet is
asking the reader to trade places with him, to be the I
who espouses personal wonder and then moves outward to

"30 For Bogen

embrace a you who is Walt Whitman.
the poem‘s key lines are the last two, which are deleted
in later versions of the poem: ”Come, I should like to
hear you tell me what there is in yourself that is not
just as wonderful / and I should like to hear the name
of anything between Sunday morning and Saturday night

that is not just as wonderful.”

Thomas Rountree has argued that all of ”Song of

79

Myself” is a vivid example of Whitman‘s principle of
”indirect expression" in action. Only the reader,

through reciprocity, can bring meaning to the poem, for

as Whitman said in the 1855 preface, a great poem is a
beginning to a man or woman. Rountree notes the frequency
of direct address in the poem as a prime example of
Whitman‘s attempts to elicit a response.31 Eric

Birdsall also has noted that Whitman's poetry called for

an "active and necessary partner."32

Among book length
studies, one work which gives a thorough examination of
the I—you relationship in Whitman‘s poetry is E. Fred
Carlisle‘s The Uncertain Self: Whitman's Drama of
Identity. Carlisle‘s thesis is that Whitman‘s poetry
elaborates a self "that emerges and exists mainly in

"33 Carlisle stresses, therefore,

relationship with others.
that Whitman's work must be approached as a ”man speaking
to others... the poem is not just an object of analysis
but instead a spoken word that engages the reader and
calls on him to respond.”34 Carlisle argues that Whitman
discovers the value of the dialogic self through the
process of writing poetry and through the evolvement of
his poetic persona. Carlisle thereby makes distinctions
between the monologic and dialogic self and prefers

the latter because it stands in relation to others; it

does not see the others as mere extensions of itself.

Even so, one must admit that, for the most part, the

 

 

 

80

only real character in the actual poetry is ”Whitman.”
The only recognized and engaged other is the reader
himself who is outside the poem, but who is invited to
step inside and thereby make the poem dialogic. Only

an accomplice reader can rescue Whitman from accusations
of self—centeredness, by agreeing to share in the compos-
ite persona made up of self and reader. Whitman's poems
consistently express this need for a genuine other to
participate in the poetry in order to make it whole.

In the ”Inscriptions” poems that begin the final
editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's invitation begins.
In "Shut Not Your Doors,” Whitman tells us, "the words
of my book nothing,the drift of it everything." It is
a book that the intellect will not grasp so much as the
"untold latencies" that will ”thrill” to it. In ”Poets
to Come" Whitman claims that he has written but a few

"indicative words for the future.‘ He turns his head to
us and then ”averts his face/ Leaving it to you to prove
and define it/ Expecting the main things from you.”

Since his poetry is for all of us, we are all potentially
"poets to come," Each reader who will pick up the
"latencies" will have a start towards a new way of
viewing both life and art. Whitman's words often have
this dual philosophical and aesthetic significance. In

the simple words of ”Poets to Come" he is claiming that

all of his readers are potential writers, the main things

 

 

 

81

are left to us. This belief hithecreative potential

of the reader is shared by two of Borges' most interesting
fictional authors, Pierre Menard and Herbert Quain.
Whitman's belief in the reader's potential opens up a
wealth of new possibilities to the discerning and

creative reader.

The "Calamus” poems are, as Pearce noted, good
places to look for a discussion of the reading process.
In "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In Hand," Whitman
emphasizes the difficulty of the journey he is calling
on his readers to make. "The way is suspicious, the
result uncertain, perhaps destructive/ You would have
to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your
sole and exclusive standard.” This passage echoes
Christ's statement that one must ”give up all else to

follow me.‘ Just as Christ tells the rich man that he
should not follow him if he cannot give up all of his
possessions, Whitman tells us that if we do not comprehend,
”that which I hinted at,” simply to ”release me and

depart on your way." Still, in spite of the Christ
parallels, Whitman‘s hints are at least as poetic as

they are religious or philosophic. The road is uncertain
precisely because the poet no longer can give guarantees;
it is up to the reader to make of or take from the poems

what he or she can. This is why harm may come as easily

as good; the experience of reading is as much involved

 

82

in risk taking and personal agitation as the process that
was involved in writing the poems.

If the reader is not ready to take Walt Whitman by
the hand and join him in the search, then the hints will
never be understood, and the reader should return to
more conventional poetry. When Whitman says to "give up
all else” he suggests that to understand his poems we
have to revolt against the limitations of conventional
literature. Borges is right to call Whitman‘s work a
bold, incredible experiment. If the reader is not ready
for the close commitment called for by Whitman, if the
reader is not ready to ”touch" the writer, then the book
cannot function properly. Indeed part of the very
function of the book is to ”certainly elude you," but
the accomplice reader is ready to accept that premise.

When Whitman says in ”Scented Herbage of My Breast,"
”I do not know whether many passing by will discover you
or inhale your faint order, but I know a few will,” he
is noting that he already realizes, by 1860, that his
work is too indirect, his hints too ”faint" to have mass
appeal. Still his work is out there, is natural like
the calamus plant, and hence is available to anyone
willing to make the effort, willing to venture "In Paths

Untrodden."

In "I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing,” Whitman

beautifully expresses his need for others; no joyous

 

 

 

83

leaves can sprout from his creativity without a responding
other: ”But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves
standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew

' He is not a Romantic writer who can create

I could not.’
from the depths of his separate soul; his writing calls
for the participation of the reader. In ”Full of Life

Now, the closing "Calamus" poem, Whitman suggests that
even after death he will return, will be made real again
by those readers willing to take his poetry to heart:
"Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems,

I

seeking me.’ Whitman thereby suggests that the dialogue

need never end since one can never be too sure that he

is not ”now with you.‘ Whitman's search for relation

occurs most genuinely outside the poem in that he seeks
relation with his readers; yet the reader who is willing
to participate thereby enters into the poem and the poetic
experience.

While Whitman‘s reference to this process and the
reader‘s part in it is constant, especially in poems
written before old age,35 there are perhaps three poems
in which Whitman most clearly spells out his faith in
the active reader‘s potential and necessity. All of
these poems were written before 1860; they are "Salut
Au Monde," "Song of the Open Road," and ”Song of Myself.”

"Salut Au Monde” is the poem that Borges has specifi-

cally alluded to in essays and lectures as the poem in

84

which the accomplice reader is most directly evident.
While this poem has too often been discounted as a

simple geography book catalogue of places and people

that Whitman felt impelled to list, it is in fact far
more innovative in its pattern than a first glance might
indicate. The poem begins, ”0 take my hand Walt Whitman/
Such gliding wonders, such sights and sounds." One

has to ask, if Walt Whitman is being addressed then who
is the speaker? Clearly, as Borges so well appreciated,
the speaker is the reader, who attains direct partici-
pation in the poem by being able to address "Whitman”
directly. In the next chapter the nature of the character
”Walt Whitman" will be examined carefully; for now the
necessary fact is that the person Walt Whitman who wrote
"Salut Au Monde” has let us view the composite persona

in formation. If his readers will take him by the hand,

I

together they can become ”Walt Whitman,‘ who only is
capable of the tremendous vision and unity of the poem.
As Gusdorf has said, the perfect communication

36 And this

releases us from all sense of limitations.
poem is about transcending all limitations by joining
ourselves with the writer, who thereby is buoyed by
identity and relation and can thus express the message
of the poem-universal relation and brotherhood. ”What

do you see Walt Whitman?" ”What do you hear Walt

Whitman?" are questions by Whitman the person or ”self”

85

and by the readers; two members of the trinity converge

to cause the tremendous vista of the third. It is not

Walt Whitman the historic person who haughtily claims

connection with the universe just because he can name

many people and places. It is Whitman and his companion

readers joined together and thus limitlessly able to see

relation and connection. Hence by the disarmingly simple

device of allowing us to ask questions of the character

"Walt Whitman," Whitman has allowed us a direct way

into the entire process and signification of the poem.37
It is of course no coincidence that ”Song of the

Open Road” follows ”Salut Au Monde” in the final edition

of Leaves of Grass. As Carlisle argues, ”Song of the

Open Road” is one poem where Whitman defines the genuine

self as one tied to relation, discovering who he is

through encounter. On the aesthetic level, the poem is

not realized until it is encountered genuinely by the

reader who is willing to take the author by the hand.

Carlisle believes that by the end of the poem Whitman

has discovered that, "self discovery is itself a process,

a live-long endeavor- it does not take place in a moment

of mystic illumination, nor does one move steadily

towards it as if it were the summit of a great mountain.”38

As Carlisle points out, Martin Buber believed that real

moments of full humanity occur between the I and the you,

or, from a literary standpoint, writer and reader; they

86

can never be located solely in the I or the you.

Clearly Whitman‘s whole theory of reading is therefore
compatible with Buber's definition of relation. The I
needs the you to create the poem's meaning, the poem
may seem to be a constant but it is never the same to any
reader or even to the same reader twice. Carlisle's use
of Buber is fruitful here especially in its elucidation
of the idea that Whitman's love making to the reader or
his challenging of the reader are not mere gimmicks, but
are instead based on the most authenticrxfneeds. When
Whitman states in ”Song of Myself” that if his thoughts
"are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next
to nothing.” he really seems to believe that this is
true. Without the reader‘s generous participation the
creative act is incomplete.

Hence in "Song of the Open Road," the invitation to
travel with Whitman is an invitation to a journey of the
self and the soul, but it is also a poetic adventure.
"Whoever you are come travel with me! Traveling with me

you find what never tires.‘ Whitman claims that on his

II

journey we will find ”realization, ”adhesiveness" and
the "efflux of the soul," if we open ourselves up to the
process of communication. Carlisle is right to assert

that Whitman discovers in this poem that self discovery

is a process; it is in large part the communication

process, and one prime avenue of that process is Whitman's

 

87

new theory on the relation between writer and reader.
Again easy resolution is not promised, "Listen I
will be honest with you,/ I do not offer the old smooth
prizes, but offer rough new prizes." Clearly his poems
are, on some level, those "new prizes." Whitman wants
us to know "the universe itself as a road, as many roads,

I

as roads for traveling souls.‘ This notion is very
similar to Borges' idea in ”The Garden of Forking Paths,"
which is also a work that deals with life‘s meanings
and the provincerxfart and its audience. The forking
paths suggest the infinite possibilities of life and the
many different ways any one work of fiction can be
interpreted, or even that more than one interpretation
possibly may be valid at the same time. The open road
is also the delineation of a process that suggests both
an approach to life and an open-ended continuity and
reciprocity in poetry. Both men constantly mix the
philosophical with the aesthetic.

"Song of the Open Road” concludes with a question,
a device typically employed by Whitman to encourage
open-endedness: "Will you give me yourself: Will you
come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as
long as we live?" Whitman here almost implores us to
join him in his poetic and life experiments, even though

he realizes that we must all decide freely to travel the

road; as he phrased it in ”Song of Myself,” "you must

88

travel it for yourself." Only the you can bring itself
to communion with the other; no poet or person can force
reciprocity. In ”Song of the Open Road," Whitman
ardently asks each reader to become a "traveling

II

companion, thereby anticipating, by over a hundred

years, Cortazar's similar plea for such readers in
Rayuela.

"Song of Myself," by far Whitman's longest poem,
and generally recognized as his most important, unsur—
prisingly has key things to say about the reader. From
its very first lines the poem establishes the I as a
composite, "I celebrate myself,/ And what I assume you
shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good

I

belongs to you.‘ Some have denied Whitman the right to
"assume” for all of his readers; however, he only really
does so for the active, participating reader who willingly
joins him on the journey that is the poem. The shelves
"crowded with perfumes” in the second canto can certainly
be taken for book shelves which are cluttered with
attractive and ”fragrant” works, but the "atmosphere" of
Whitman‘s poem has no "taste of the distillation."

When in that same canto Whitman addresses the reader
directly, he does so to ask a question that has probably
made quite a few literary critics uncomfortable, "Have

you practis‘d so long to learn to read? Have you felt

so proud to get at the meaning of poems?" The calm

89

disdain of these lines can be devastating, but their
real intent is to reveal that the old way of interpreting
literature misses the mark; literature should not have
a fixed or definitive meaning for us to "get.” Instead
Whitman asks us to:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall
possess the origin of all poems,
...You shall no longer take things at second
or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the
dead, nor feed on the spectres in books
You shall not look through my eyes either nor
take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them
from yourself.

II

The reader is the "origin of all poems, there is
no literature without a reader to respond to the writer.
Yet what Whitman is proposing is more than a commonplace
because he suggests a method of reading that is primary
and participatory, hence no longer a second or third hand
process. All that we read we will filter through ourselves,
thereby recreating it, or really creating it fully for the
first time. Hence Whitman's poem is in part about how to
read his poem; he has placed the hints in his book, and
it is up to us to make the discoveries for ourselves
first-hand.

When Whitman later in the poem says that what he
confides in us, "I might not tell everyone but I will
tell you." he is presenting a richly ironic line. Anyone

who reads that line can be "you” but the only you who is

really addressed or engaged here is the individual,

 

 

 

90

accomplice reader. Hence throughout the poem the you is
indeed elusive and never fixed; it is up to someone out-

side the poem to allow for the possibility of a genuine

dialogue with a real ‘you.’ Everyone is invited to the
"meal equally set, no one is turned away,” but not all
will accept the invitation.

Whitman sees communication as the key to under—
standing of the self, and as the key to what the
creative process can uncover. Speech he refers to as

the "twin of my vision.‘ Speech is personified long
enough to tease the poet, ”Walt, you contain enough, why
don't you let it out then?” Obviously the answer to that
question is that communication implies risk— will the
self find corresponding willingness for openness and
reciprocity in the reader? Whitman understands that he
is asking the reader to take risks; everyone must
ultimately make the decision to travel the road for
himself or herself.

Whitman wants to believe that, "It is you talking
as much as myself, I act as the tounge of you,” but he
knows that this is only as true as the reader will
allow it to be. Without reader compliance all that he
asserts is "nothing or next to nothing." So at the end
of the poem Whitman is almost wistful when he says,

”Listener up there! What have yOu to confide in me? ..

Talk honestly for no one else hears you, and I stay only

91

a minute longer... Will you speak before I am gone? Will
you prove already too late?" The poem has to end at some
point on the page; Whitman can do only so much to
encourage the reader to participate. Hence at the end of
the poem he can only promise to "stop somewhere waiting
for you”; the poem ends but its meanings can reverberate
through the thoughts of the participating reader. Whitman
intentionally leaves the poem open-ended to allow for
maximum reader input. Therefore, as early as 1855,
Whitman had already set down in both prose and poetry

the basic tenets for a reading theory that still is
considered avant garde today.

Many critics seem to have been confused by Whitman‘s
attempts at communication with his reader. Gay Wilson
Allen insists that Whitman should have resigned himself
to the fact that he was merely, "an author speaking through

the medium of literary art,"39

instead of trying to make
love to his readers. Martin Green complains that Whitman
wanted "partisans, not critics”; however Green never
realizes that though he is essentially correct in that
assessment he is missing the fascinating potential
inherent in the coparticipating partisan that Whitman
envisioned.4O Borges is among the still relatively

select number of such partisans who appreciate the

theoretical innovations that Whitman pioneered,

 

 

 

 

 

92

particularly those regarding the reader, and so Borges
has consistently developed and refined the experiment
in his own writing.

Borgeslikehhitman believes in the necessity of the
active reader, believes that the reading creates the
writing, and gives the reader opportunities to get
directly involved in the work of art. He also gives the
reader a variety of options and choices, and believes
that the question is often superior to the answer, if
indeed an answer is possible. Like Whitman, Borges is

inclined to say, ”I answer that I cannot answer, you must

find out for yourselves.‘ Finally, Borges, like Whitman,
treats the reader as real, as perhaps the only certain
"given” in his work, for only a genuine other can have
the effect upon his work that Borges has always claimed
the reader is capable of.

Ronald Christ accuses both Whitman and Borges of
having no real other represented in their work, of merely
doubling;the self. He also accuses Borges of merely
employing interviews as another way of talking to
himself."1 While there is evidence to suggest that
Borges sometimes plays the role of ”Borges” while being
interviewed by people who are more interested in his
fame than in his person, this fact does not preclude

the possibility that Borges may sometimes use these

interviews, just as he sometimes employs his fiction,

 

93

as opportunities to reveal fascinating aspects of his

genuine self. For example, in the introduction Borges

wrote for Richard Burgin‘s Conversations With Jorge

II

Luis Borges, he refers to dialogue as a form of shared

investigation,"

suggesting thatijltalking to Burgin he
has learned more about himself. Quoting Whitman from
"When I Read the Book," Borges says, "I think I know
little or nothing of my real life," but implies that
dialogue is one means available to a greater awareness
of self. Borges also tells us that he is rich in
”perplexities not certainties,” and these he is willing
to share with Burgin, as he has with the readers of his
fiction. Borges also expressed to Burgin a belief that,
”every time a book is read or reread then something
happens to the book."['2 Borges believes that the reading
has a great and always varied effect on the writing.
Borges has always maintained that the reading is
in some sense more important than the writing. Alistair
Reid insists that Borges takes pains to identify himself
first as a reader.£'3 Rodriguez Monegal has quoted
Borges' early pronouncement to his readers in Fervor de
Buenos Aires that, ”Our inconsequential selves differ
but little; the circumstance that you are the reader and
I the writer of these exercises is accidental and

irrelevant."44 As with Whitman, Borges' relation

to his reader stems initially from his ideas on identity

 

94

and unity, but the aesthetic consequences of the
writer-reader interchangeability are again to democratize
the relationship, and to expect much from the average
reader, at least in potential. To Borges the reader is
extremely essential, and very real.

As A. C. Dyson points out, "His insistence that
each reader adds more to the work he reads than the author
did could make us more, not less real than the author

himself.”45

Borges really does seem to believe what

he says in "T16n, quar, Orbis Tertius; the person who
recites the lines of Shakespeare becomes, in some sense,
William Shakespeare. The reading creates the writing,
and the reader has a creative role to play. As Dyson
notes, in Borges' ”The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges
”allows the reader to add twists of his own.”l'6 Dyson

also points out that Borges' conclusion to The Book of

Sand expresses the hope that his book will, ”go on

 

branching out in the hospitable imaginations of those

['47

who now close it. The emphasis is always on an

open—ended questioning.

Borges has called Whitman, "perhaps the most
complex and daring adventurer in all literature,"48
and it is his relation to his readers that Borges was
impressed by. "When you are reading Walt Whitman you

hear Walt Whitman's voice, a dialogue is created.”l'9

95

Borges also attempts to create such a dialogue; though
Borges is less directly intimate with his readers,

(he does not claim, even figuratively to hold our hands,
nor does he ever address us as "reader dear”), he does
wish to share the creative process with us first-hand.
However, instead of spelling out his theories in essays,
Borges created essay-form fiction, in which he could
present his theory and simultaneously show it in action.
"Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” and "Examen de la
obra de Herbert Quain," (”Pierre Menard, Author of the

I

Quixote,’ and ”An Examination of the Work of Herbert
Quain,”) are the two stories in which Borges most
explicitly presents his View of the participating reader
and his potential. These two stories introduce a view
of the writer-reader relationship that Borges utilizes
and develops throughout much of his subsequent fiction.
Borges‘ fiction is indeed rich in ”perplexities,
not certainties." As he says in his introduction to
Otras Inguisiciones it is the imminence of a revelation,
not the revelation itself, that makes up the aesthetic
event. The writer can only suggest; the reader must
complete the act as he or she sees fit. In Pierre
Menard and Herbert Quain Borges introduces two
prototypical writer-readers who show the way to a reading

of Borges, and to all of the writers who were to follow

his example. His theory on the reader is very similar

96

to Whitman's, and if its end results seem different
that is only because what Borges wants to share with
his readers is a sense of confusion and even chaos,

which is different from the sense of cosmos that Whitman

often seeks to explore with us.50

On the surface, ”Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,”
is a comic story, a type of elaborate hoax. The story is
written in essay form by a pedantic narrator who
recounts the literary works of a recently deceased
friend, Menard. The humor comes in part from the
ridiculous obscurity of all the published works considered,
even though most of Menard's interests correspond to
Borges' own. In any case, the narrator argues that
Menard's greatest work is an ”invisible” one that he
never published- his rewriting of two chapters and a
fragment of a third of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Menard
does not translate, memorize, modernize or copy the
work, he rewrites verbatim as Pierre Menard, thereby
rejecting the notion that the creation of this book
should be unique to Miguel de Cervantes. Menard sought
to create pages that would coincide line for line with
Cervantes' masterpiece, but be by Menard. He meant to
"continue being Pierre Menard and arrive at the Quixote
through the experiences of Pierre Menard." Both the
narrator and Menard himself, through letters he had

written to the narrator, inform us that Menard's Quixote

 

l
I
,1

97

is far more significant than. the publication of the
original work by Cervantes. After all, Cervantes wrote
spontaneously and as himself; Menard had to try to
recreate a work without any of the aids or perspectives
that were natural to Cervantes, such as Spanish local
color or Catholicism. Menard's work, therefore, is

superior to Cervantes'

because it arises from a purer
aesthetic principle; it can in no way be accidental or
incidental. While these claims of Menard seem pre-
posterously amusing and pretentious, they do force us to
reflect on the dynamics of reading, and on what our

role as readers really is.

In one rather amusing but extremely effective
passage in the story, the narrator quotes two identical
passages from Don Quixote, the first by Cervantes, the
second arrived at independently by Menard. The narrator
finds Menard‘s version vastly superior; its concepts and
language are both surprising, richly ironic and
extraordinary in Menard, but predictable and inevitable
in Cervantes. The conventional reader of this story—
essay has a source of amusement and satire in this story
of a pretentious and obscure writer who tries to claim
precedence over Cervantes. However, the accomplice
reader goes beyond the joke (though enjoying that too),

I

and in so doing discovers in Menard a prototype for Borges

reader, someone who recreates a work of literature by

98

putting his or her own particular self into the work

and making it his or her own, without changing any of the

words. Menard is essentially an argument for Borges'

notion that the reading creates the writing, and even

the writer, though the creativity of the reader normally

remains an ”invisible” work. It is nearly as challenging

a task for us to read the Quixote with full understanding

as it was for Cervantes to write it. The near impossi¥

bility but undiminished nobility of attempting the

task makes an active sensitive reading of the Quixote

a type of Quixotic activity all its own. Furthermore,

Menard, averyumrked individual, creates the Quixote in

a way unique to himself, just as any active reader must

do.51
Don Quixote is an appropriate vehicle for Menard,

and thus for Borges, because in it Cervantes, by mixing

fact and fantasy so elaborately (as when Don Quixote and

Sancho get to read about their own exploits) has created

an early example of the kind of open—ended work of art

that Borges ardently believed in. Don Quixote shares

with Leaves of Grass and many of Borges‘ stories a quality

of open—endedness; within the characters of Don Quixote

and Sancho Panza we are implicity invited to locate

our own. Additionally, just as we can think of Menard's

attempt as a mere farce, so did many people once consider

 

 

 

99

Cervantes' work to be merely an elaborate joke.
However, to a participating reader, Cervantes' work
redefines heroism and forever blurs the borders of
reality and fiction; it does not merely, ”smile Spain's

chivalry away.‘ Menard reminds us that the Quixote
started out as an ”agreeable book,” but is now a
formidable classic. Clearly, then, it is the readers
who have accounted for half of Cervantes' greatness over
the years, just as Whitman had said was the case with
Shakespeare and Homer.52
Menard refuses to accept the idea of author worship
He believes that, ”To think, to analyze, to invent are
not anomalous acts, they are the normal breath of the
intelligence. To glorify the occasional fruition of
the function; to make treasures of the old and foreign
thoughts... is to confess our languidness or barbarity.
All men ought to be capable of all ideas and in the future
it will be so.” What Borges is saying here through
Menard is that readers to come will have more of an
ability to participate in the work of art, to take
actively their parts as inventors and creators, and will
be thereby less prone to give all the credit to the
specific author whose job was to suggest or initiate
the investigation. It is every reader‘s province

and right to share equally in the creation of the work of

art; to bring his or her particular self to bear upon it.

 

 

 

 

 

100

Borges has never believed in political democracy as
unfailingly as Whitman did, but he is an aesthetic
democrat; he argues for the effect that any reader can
have on the work and he encourages all readers to pursue
the possibilities of an active readership.

”Pierre Menard" is not really an example of Borges'
agreement to, "Eliot's famous dictum that every new work
of art alters our perception of previously existing

works of art,"53

though some have made that assumption.
Borges' story is in the Whitman tradition and hence
opposed in principle to Eliot's influence. To Borges

it is every reader, not every new work of art or artist,
that can and must change our understanding of the text.
Like Whitman, Borges plans to create art that will take
this principle as a given, and create a literature
specifically geared to giving the highest rewards to those
readers most actively engaged in a coparticipation with
the author.

As James Irby notes in his article on ”Pierre Menard"
(which discusses Borges' influence on modern American
authors) the writer-reader relationship in the story,
”thoroughly confounds the premises of all traditional
commentary; that the author has authority and priority,
that the reader's status is subsequent and subservient,

54

and that a text has distinct borders and consistency.”

Borges gives a new respect to the reader's role in ”Pierre

101

Menard," a role he elaborates upon further in examining
the opus of another fictional author, Herbert Quain.
Quain, like Menard, is the author of obscure works
which appear fairly insignificant on the surface, but
are, under closer examination, highly suggestive works
that are closely tied to an understanding of the reader's
role in the work of art. The story "Examen de la obra

de Herbert Quain,‘ also is set up as an essay, in which

a friend of the recently deceased author reviews the

works produced by Quain. One of the first things

revealed about Quain is his disagreement with the literary
theories of Flaubert and Henry James. Unlike these
authors, Quain believed, we are told, in the commoness

of literature, to the extent that he felt that ”there is
scarcely any street talk that doesn‘t reach it." Quain

I

also values ”asombro,‘ shock or surprise, in literature.
Clearly, Quain is within the Whitman—Borges school.
Whitman had felt that literature was common, was alive
in the common people, and Borges has said that he too
believes that poetry is, ”happening all the time. I do
not suppose poetry is something exceptional, I suppose

"55

poetry is happening all the time. Borges also

values ”asombro,‘ particularly as a device to jolt the
reader away from his normal expectations. Borges,

like Quain, wants the reader to feel the question, the

102

uncertainty, and the open-endedness of the literary
endeavor.

Quain‘s first novel, The God of the Labyrinth, is a
detective novel with an accomplice reader very much in
mind. Borges has been a consistent admirer of the form,
perhaps because, as P.D. James explains, in such novels
a reader is invited to participate, to work along with
the detective, avoiding the same pitfalls and false

clues to arrive at the proper solution.56

In Quain‘s
novel there is an additional twist; after the detective
comes to an elaborate and ingenious conclusion, discerning
readers uncover a clue sentence, ("They all believed
that the meeting between the two chess players had been
accidental") which tells them that the detective's solution
is erroneous. The reader able to understand this clue is
at first disconcerted, but if he or she goes back and
rereads pertinent passages, the "correct” solution can
be arrived at. Hence here the reader has an opportunity
to outsmart the detective and to be more of a participant
in the story than the main character. However, only the
careful reader who is willing to forego the expectation
of getting the answer from the author can derive the
additional pleasure.

The next of Quain‘s works discussed is the novel

April March which is a complex work made up in fact of

nine separate works of three chapters each, all of which

 

103

share the same initial chapter. The initial chapter is

a dialogue between two unknown characters; the subsequent
versions allow for all sorts of development from the
initial dialogue, in all sorts of chronological and
unchronological orders. The notion of chapters fitting
into different patterns is of course later developed in
Cortazar's Rayuela. The play with chronology is notable,
though of course more fully developed, in such works as
Alejo Carpentier‘s Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps)
and Carlos Fuentes‘ La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death
of Artemio Cruz). While Borges need not be the exclusive
or even primary source for any of these ideas in these
authors, the point is that this examination of Quain's
work is in part a blue—print for the new type of novel
and short story possible if the new type of audience

can be defined and identified.

Quain's drama, The Secret Mirror, concerns a
reappearance of the characters of the play's first act
in the play's second act, but with different names.

One of the characters of act two turns out to be the
author of the wish—fulfilling first act of which he is
the hero. This example of a play within a play within
a play is Borges' tribute to similar devices employed
in Hamlet and Don Quixote. Borges discusses the

consequences of such a set-up in his essay, ”Partial

 

 

104

Magic of Quixote,‘ in which he suggests that Quixote
and Panza‘s opportunity to read about themselves
troubles us so much because if fictional characters can
be readers of their own lives then what prevents us
as readers from being fictional characters in someone
else's fiction or dream? This premise is of course a
principal one in Borges‘ ”Las ruinas circulares”
("The Circular Ruins") also in Ficciones. Borges
wants the reader to share his sense of irreality, and
one effective way to help us along is by obscuring the
boundaries between ”real life” and fiction.

Still, Quain‘s most noteworthy and inventive work
is a book entitled Statements. Quain wrote it in support
of his belief that the conventional reader was essentially
an endangered species: "There is not a single European
(he reasoned) that is not a writer in potential or

actuality.‘ While Quain did admit that not everyone might
see him or herself as a writer, or have the same initial
facility for invention, he believed that the active,
participating reader was the rule, not the exception. He
therefore created his book, Statements, which consisted
of eight beginnings of plots intentionally fouled up or
cut short by Quain so that the readers could have the

impression that they were free to salvage the plots in any

way they saw fit. Quain takes reader participation about

105

as far as it can go- he begins with the plot, but lets
the reader find the true meaning- even to the extent of
taking the plot in any direction that he or she desires.
This is of course the kind of fiction that Borges thinks
is worthy of the new reader, and the writer who creates
with that reader in mind.

Indeed Borges claims that the plot of, "Las ruinas
circulares," which as I have noted relates to Quain's
drama, was lifted from one of the plots h1Statements.
Clearly, Quain was satisfied to give the hints, the
atmosphere, and then let his readers be free to

II

”pursue their own flights, to paraphrase Whitman.
Hence these two stories are Borges' equivalent to Whitman's
prefaces and other prose about his poetic method; they
map out the kind of reader that Borges is interested in
addressing, and the indirect method by which he or she will
be characteristically addressed.

Ronald Christ comments on how Borges‘ groundwork
in the two stories discussed above affects the rest of
his opus. Open-endedness, "asombro," the multiplicity
of possibilities (with more than one correct solution
possible), indirection, these are the trademarks of a
Borges short story. "Borges takes pains to show at
many forks in his work that while a character or persona

chooses only one of the possible turns, the reader is

invited not only to consider the road not taken, but

 

 

 

 

 

106

to consider the same road as both taken and not taken.”57

Christ's name for this technique is ”alternate plotting,”
and he traces it through ”Herbert Quain," and through
Borges‘ essay, "Narrative Art and Magic,” to such stories
as, "The Garden of Forking Paths,” and "The South." In
”The South" there are at least two possible solutions
as to what has happened to Juan Dahlmann, but preference
is never given to either. In "The Garden of Forking
Paths” the character Albert explains the theory of the
book discussed in the story, but in so doing also helps
to define Borges' method: ”In all fictions when one
man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the
expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts ui
Pen he chooses simultaneously all of them. He thus
creates various futures, various times that start
others, which in their turn will branch out and
bifurcate in other times.”58
Christ makes some very convincing points in this
essay and his connections of Borges to Barth, Pychon
and Coover are substantial. However he never recognizes
Whitman's connection to this theory. Borges has adapted
Whitman's ideas on the active, participating reader so
cleverly that even one of the few critics who has seen

Whitman‘s influence on Borges' prose on some level does

not appreciate the important tie—in here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

107

Borges has always been a strange sort of aesthetic
democrat because he has always found it difficult to
conceive of many people reading his work. His anecdote
about wanting to thank each of the thirty—seven purchasers
of his book Historia de la eternidad is a good clue to
the fact that he understood earlier in his career than
Whitman did that the accomplice reader was going to be
a rare person almost by definition, though membership
was open to anyone potentially. Hence many years later

in his introduction to The Book of Sand Borges denies

 

writing either for the masses, or for a "select few,”
but instead claims to write, “for my friends and to ease
the passage of time.” With a little critical license
the word friend can be translated to mean companion or

accomplice. His group is not the ”select few because

that would imply entry by status or education, neither
of which will guarantee an appreciation of Borges.
More fundamentally, Borges works on the premise that

II

we as readers must ”select him, it cannot be the
other way around. The only guarantee for membership
is a willingness to participate in the work of art

in an intimate if tenuous way with the author, for a
shadowy, uncertain reward. Clearly the masses on the
whole will be unlikely to make such a commitment, but

individuals are ever eligible. As Whitman and Borges

both believe, the potential is there for any reader to

108

be a coworker in the creative process. No one is
uninvited, but few will choose a full, active participa—
tion. The few who do will almost naturally be deemed

I

"amigos” or, in Whitman‘s terms, ”camerados.‘ Borges'
characteristic open—endedness is an invitation to the
readers to participate, to form their own questions and
possible answers. His sense of the readers potential to
affect the work of art, to "enrich" his work, as he has
phrased it, is as persistent as Whitman‘s own sense of
this potential, and it arises from a similar foundation.
Whitman and Borges both reject conventional
notions of the writer—audience relationship. For example,
Walter Ong suggests that creative communication is a
one way process; the author takes on a character or
characters and performs, the readers come as they are
and witness the performance. There is no audience
participation expected in the normal drama or film or
story or poem; the audience is ever aware that what they

59 Whitman and Borges

are viewing or reading is unreal.
both reject the casual acceptance of the irreality of
art; both try to obscure the borders between fact and
fiction and between poetry and prose. They want the

reader to be inside the work, they seek out active

participation which their works are geared to.

This view of the reader as essential participant

and not mere spectator relates closely to the ideas of

109

such twentieth-century philosophers as Martin Buber and
Georges Gusdorf (since Borges read and lectured on Buber
extensively this is not a great surprise). Buber argued
that the reader had to feel addressed by literature,

that essentially in reading a book we had to believe

what Whitman said, ”who touches this touches a man."
Whitman and Borges both work under the premise that a you
is essential to the completion of the work of art. Since
their life philosophies are so closely aligned to their
aesthetic principles it can also be argued that both seek
the way to the self through dialogue and cooperation
with the other. Both need the other to attain signifi-
cation. "1 require a you to become, becoming I say you,”

Buber tell us.”60

Relation is reciprocity according to
both Buber and Gusdorf, and this reciprocity, the essence
of relation, is constantly sought out by Whitman and
Borges. Only the reader can return the book its sense
of a real person, can change the ”it" of the book back
into a "you” in Buber‘s terms.61
Neither Whitman or Borges can be termed confessional
writers. Their presentations of self are not highly
specific recountings of inadequacies or emotions or
neuroses that are typical of some modern writers.
Though such confessional writing is often viewed as

the height of honesty, because it seemingly leaves the

self bare to the reader‘s examination, it is certainly

110

not ideal in a reciprocal sense, since the reader is
given no opportunity to give his or her own sad story,
in vivid detail, to the writer. Hence the more ”honest”
such writing is, the more it guards its writer from
contact and response. Only in the type of composite
persona that Whitman and Borges introduce into their
work is a responding reader provided for. As Gusdorf
noted, in perfect communication all sense of limitations
is case aside.62 Gusdorf also reminds us that great
literature needs a great audience. Borges and Whitman
attempt to give that audience, that reader, every
opportunity to reach their full potential. Luis Harss
says of Borges: ”Like Walt Whitman with whom he often
identifies, he assumes a generic position where personal
experience takes on an infinite and plastic ambiguity
in which there is something for everybody."63
Both Whitman and Borges bring their specific selves
into their work only long enough to invite a corres—
ponding venture of self on the part of the reader. It
is wrong to assume that the work of either man is
egocentric. Their work is in fact other-centered, on a
reader sincerely and actively sought as an active
participant, a traveling companion, who is often engaged

by means of a composite persona who comprehends both

writer and audience.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO

1 . I
Julio Cortazar, Ho scotch, (translated by Gregory
Rabassa) (New York: PantEeon Books, 1966), p. 396.

2 Ibid.

 

3

4 In Ho scotch the reader is offered two ways to read
the novel. gfie can read it straight through from Chapters
1 - 56 as a "regular" novel, or one can follow the alter—
nate idea of interspersing the optional chapters that
come after Chapter fifty-six in an order sketched out
by the author in the beginning. These chapters fill in
and enrich the meaning of the conventional narrative,
but also draw the reader in first-hand to the art of
novel making itself.

Ibid, p. 398.

 

5 Louise Rosenblatt in her book, Literature_a§
Exploration (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938) argues
that, The reading of any work of literature is, of
necessity, an individual and unique occurrence involving
the mind and emotions of some particular reader," (p. 32).
She also goes on to say that, "Every time an individual
experiences a work of art, it is, in a sense, created
anew,” (p. 133). Through these statements and others
throughout her book Rosenblatt became a forerunner of
reader response criticism, a view of the literary work
as dependent on the reader's own creative responses.
However, what Rosenblatt and most of the other reader
response critics fail to recognize, or deal with suffi-
ciently, is that author intention must play a critical
role in the evolvement of any work of art. Whitman and
Borges fully intend to attempt the creation of works
that will allow for entry by the discerning and hard work-
ing ”accomplice" reader. To suggest that all works of
literature, no matter how didactic or how egocentric, are
equally open to reader response or participation, or to
suggest that all readers no matter how inflexible are
equally open to the possibilities of dialogue with the
author, is to deny the entire focus of the attempt that
Whitman and Borges both consciously made to involve the
reader in the work of art as coparticipant.

lll

112

Rosenblatt agrees with Whitman's ideas here,though
she makes no mention of Whitman anywhere in her text:
"The study of literature can have a very real and even
central relation to the points of growth in the social
and cultural life of a democracy, (p.v, Rosenblatt).

7 Cowley, pp. vii-viii; Fieldler, pp. 55-56.

8 The linking of democracy to reader participation
further suggests that truly reciprocal literature only
became possible for most readers when hierarchical
politics could be replaced by a democracy of equals.

Jean Paul Sartre therefore argues in his book Literature
and Existentialism (translated by Bernard Frechtmani

(New York: The Citadel Press, l964)that"1iterary
glory... is a struggle against history, ...In short
actual literature can only realize its full essence in

a classless society," p. 154.

9 John Broderick, editor, Whitman the Poet, Materials
For Study (Belmont, Ca: Wadswort Pu is ers, p.

10 Allen, The Solitary Singer, p. 133.

ll Gusdorf, p. 88.

12

Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman (New York:
Johnson Reprint Co., 1970) p. 63. Gerald Prince in his
article, ”Introduction to the Study of the Naratee," in
Reader Res onse Criticism (edited by Jane P. Tompkins)
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)

pp. 7-26, argues that the "naratee,” (the fictional
character who is being told the story within the story
itself) can be the link between writer and reader. How-
ever, as Jane Tompkins notes in her introduction, Prince
still views the reader as the, ”flawed but reverential
seeker after the truths of literary art," p. xiii. Whitman
and Borges both go beyond the naratee; they allow the
reader him or herself the possibility of active entry
into the work. Through their personae they allow the

reader to take on the rights of the author, even as they
as authors take on the rights of a reader.

 

13 Burroughs, p. 143.
14 Ibid, p. 180.
15

Traubel, p. 72, and p. 156.

113

16

 

Ibid, p. 174.
17 Ibid, p. 219.
18 Ibid, p. 436.
19 As quoted in Broderick, p. 63.
20 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, (V2)
(New York: D. Appleton 5Ha“EETT‘I§U§7’EET‘ZTHT““‘
21

Roy Harvey Pearce, ”Whitman Justified: The Poet

in 1860,” in, Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essa s

(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prenctice Hall, 19625 p. Sl.
22 Charles Feidelson, "Whitman as Symbolist, in

Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essa 5, pp. 82-88,
p. 82.

23

24 James Miller Jr., Walt Whitman (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1962) p. 51.

25 Leslie Fieldler, ”No in Thunder,” in Walt Whitman,

(Penguin Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Murphyi
(Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 354.

26

ll

Ibid, p. 88.

Ibid.

 

27 Christ, p. 56.

28 As quoted in A Centur of Whitman Criticism
(edited by Edwin H. Miller} ZBloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1969) p. xli.

29 Don Bogen, "I and You in 'Who Learns My Lesson

Complete': Some Aspects of Whitman's Poetic Evolution,”
Walt Whitman Review, 25, (September 1979) 87-98, p. 97.

30 Ibid.

 

31 Thomas Rountree, "Whitman's Indirect Expression,”
PMLA 73, (December 1955) 544-555.

32 Eric Birdsall, "Translating The Hints: Whitman's
Theory of Poetry,” Walt Whitman Review 26, 113—123.
p. 117.

33

Carlisle, p. xiii.

 

114

34 Ibid, p. xv.

 

35 For example, in "Song of the Answerer, the poet
is not one who merely supplies "the” answer, instead he
can "translate" the hints so that all people can receive
them. In "Myself and Mine," Whitman is proud to posit,
"unanswerable questions." In "To You" from "Birds of
Passage,” Whitman again employs direct reader address,
"whoever you are now I place my hand on you that you
be my poem." In "By Blue Ontario's Shore,” which is
essentially a poetic paraphrase of the 1855 preface,
Whitman challenges his audience with the line: "Who
are you that wanted to be told what you knew before?”
The poem, ”As I Lay With My Head On Your Lap Camerado,"
from "Drum Taps" by its very title challenges the
reader to abandon his notion of the book as product,
and to conceive of it as a person attempting to elicit
an equal contribution from another person. In "A Song
For Occupations," Whitman reminds us that even if we have
never seen our own names in print that does not mean we,
”are any less immortal.” Finally, "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry” is a poem concerned with relation and reciprocity
that suggests that it is through the reciprocal adventure
of the poem that this unity is best divulged: "What the
study could not teach,what the preaching could not
accomplish, is accomplished, is it not?"

36

37 "Salut Au Monde” is therefore the result of a
conscious effort on Whitman's part to allow the reader
entry into the work. While some reader response critics
argue that there are no meanings in literature independent
of reader response (see, for example, Stanley Fish,
”Interpreting the Variorum,” in Reader Res onse Criticism
pp. 164-184) others such as Wolfgang Iser Have acknow-
ledged that the writer must consciously work to create
a literature that allows for reader participation. Iser
claims that the reader is the active co-creator of the
work: "A literary text must therefore be conceived in
such a way that it will engage the reader's imagination
in the task of working things out for himself, for read-
ing is only a pleasure when it is active and creative. In
this process of creativity the text may either not go far
enough, or it may go too far, so we may say that boredom
and overstrain form the boundaries beyond which the
reader will leave the field of play." (Iser, "The Reading
Process: A Phenomenological Approach," in Reader Response
Criticism, pp. 50—69, p. 51.) Iser is thus intereste
in the "unwritten" or implied part of the text, and is
implicitly faithful to Whitman's notion that the author

Gusdorf, p. 77.

115

must leave hints or half hints so that the reader can be
left to ”pursue his own flight.”

38
39

40 Martin Green, from "Twain and Whitman: Reapprai-

sals,‘ as presented in Walt Whitman (edited by Francis
Murphy) pp. 425—427. Green complains that, "In reading
Whitman, therefore, despite moments of pleasure, a

reader has to force himself to go against his nature as
a reader.”

41

Carlisle, p. 8.
Allen, p. 466.

Christ, p. 53.
42

43 Alistair Reid, ”Borges as Reader," in Prose For

Borges, p. 94.
44

Burgin, p. 26.

/
As quoted by Rodriguez Monegal, in ”Borges, The

 

 

 

Reader as Writer," in Prose For Borges, p. 100.

45 A. C. Dyson, ”You Fictional Reader,” Critical
Quarterly 24, (IV) 5-27, p. 26.

46 Ibid, p. 12.

47 Ibid.

48 In "Walt Whitman: Man and Myth” op, cit. p. 714.

49 Ibid.

50

Borges made these distinctions between his sense
of chaos and cosmos in a recent interview given to the
New York Times. Speaking of the horrors of the present
world Borges explained: "Those who think of it as a
cosmos not a chaos maybe feel safe, I do not," Michiko
Kakutani, ”For Borges Public Acclaim is a Surprise," New
York Times, Saturday, October 2, 1982, p. 15.

51 Norman Holland believes that readers replenish
a text, so that meaning is a combination of the readers
projection and what is already there. The reader essen-
tially makes over what is already there in his own image,
in order to understand the author's "identity theme."
According to Holland a genuine goal of the literary work
is the sharing and mingling of the identities of author

 

 

 

a.

 

 

116

and reader. (See, Holland, ”Unity Identity Text Self”

in Reader Res onse Criticism, pp. 118-133. Hence what
occurs in ”Pierre Menard” is very much in line with
Holland's theories. Both Whitman and Borges are ideal
subjects for readerresponsecritics because what they
both attempted to accomplish is very much in line with
what these critics believe is always happening in
literature. It is therefore valuable to investigate the
conscious means by which Whitman and Borges allowed for
reader entry into the work. Certainly the author's aware-
ness of the reader, and his intentions towards him or her
must be given serious consideration in any discussion of

the reader's ability to recreate or even create a work
for the first time.

52 Both Whitman and Borges implicitly seem to have
arrived at a theory of literature which suggests that
truly great literature has always somehow allowed for
an active or creative role for the audience or reader.

53 Kakutani, p. 15.

54 James Irby, "Some Notes on Pierre Menard," in
Sim 1v a Man of Letters— Panel Discussions and Papers
rom the Proceedings of a Symposium on Jorge Luis Borges
at the University of Maine at Orono. (Carlos Cortinez,
editor), (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1982),
pp. 155—164, p. 156.

55 As quoted in Borges' talk "Simply a Man of
Letters" from the book of the same title, pp. 1-24, p. 4.

56 P. D. James, "The Heart Pounding Pleasure of
Whodunits,” Kalamazoo Gazette, Famil Weekl Sunday,

August 22, 198 .

57 Ronald Christ, ”Forking Narrative,” in Simply a
Man of Letters pp. 75-88, p. 76.

58 As quoted in Christ, "Forking Narratives" p. 82.

59 Walter Ong, The Barbarian Within (New York: The
Macmillan Co., 1962), p. 64, ”the audience itself has no
occasion or opportunity to speak."

60 Buber, p. 62.

61 Ibid, p. 91

62

Gusdorf, p. 77.

117

63 Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the
Mainstream (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) p. 121.

 

 

Chapter Three

Persona: The Composite Self

Ronald Christ‘s article, "Borges Justified: Notes

I

and Texts Toward Stations of a Theme,‘ makes some very
explicit connections between Borges and Whitman. In

fact, Christ is one of but few critics who have seen
important relationships between aspects of Whitman's
literary theory and method and what could be viewed as
adaptations of that theory and method in many of Borges'
stories and sketches. More specifically, Christ claims
that the Borges persona of those stories and sketches is
derived in large part from Whitman's own use of a persona
within his poetry.1 Christ contends that both men,
realizing the need for an "other” in their work to justify
and clarify the self, decided to formulate and present
doubles of their own selves in their work in order to
guarantee a response. However, Christ's arguments do not
take into account the importance that both men attached

to the active participation and response of their audience.
Christ sees the persona in isolation instead of as an

active transitionary device between writer and reader.

Even though Christ explains how important a familiarity

118

 

 

 

 

119

with the work of Buber and Mead is in understanding Borges'
use of persona, he still somehow fails to see that the use
of persona in the work of both Whitman and Borges is
grounded in the relation between writer and reader. 80
even though Christ is correct in his assessment of
Whitman's importance to the development of the Borges'
persona, and correct in pointing to Buber and Mead as
prime elucidators of the meaning of persona in both

men‘s creative work, he does not seem to appreciate that
the persona for both men is often a composite of self

and reader created for the purpose of dialogue, and

by no means merely a double of the self.

Christ believes that Borges accepted the fundamental
credo of both Buber and Mead; i.e. that the only way to
find the self was through relation to the other. Mead
explains that each person has to take the other into him—
self, has to learn to become an object to himself and see
himself as others see him. In that sense a doubling of
self is a sound first step on the way towards a healthy
development because it entails viewing the self as an
object. Christ argues that Borges needs precisely this
kind of objectification in order to function as a writer:
”In order for Borges to be Borges to Borges he must
imagine an other against whose background he can stand
out-the one literally a foil for the other."2

Of course to Mead the idea of a double self was only

120

a start towards a real incorporation of the other into
the life of the self. To Mead there could be no self

I

without society, or the "generalized other.‘ However,
Christ contends that Borges' society is the fairly
exclusive society of writers, and that they are the only
others ever even implicitly incorporated into his con-
ception of persona. Hence, though Christ claims that
Borges' method is practically a duplication of Mead's

3 Christ's actual interpretation of Borges' use

theories,
of a persona causes Borges to appear to fall short of
Mead's conceptualizations on all counts. To Mead, merely
doubling the self would be insufficient to bring about
a genuine sense of the ”generalized other”; Borges could
never incorporate the "me” representative of all of
society against which to counterpose his individual ”I”
if that ”me" were just a variation of his own "I."
Furthermore, it seems far more likely that Borges'
society is a far more inclusive one than Christ imagines,
for Borges has always proudly been a member of the society
of readers, and his persona is employed throughout his
fiction to encourage the participation and membership
of his readers in the creative process itself.

Christ knows that Borges admired Buber, read his
work extensively, and even presented lectures on it.

Christ feels that Borges was committed to Buber's notion

that ”all real living is meeting,” but that Borges

 

121

I!

believed that the ideal setting for such meeting” was
"through the written page.”4 Borges longed to communi—
cate, to ”meet" in an authentic fashion, but Christ
believes that Borges felt insecure about the reader's
response. However, since Borges did see "meeting" as
fundamental to his art, he had to create the respondent
himself, the other Borges. Christ claims that ”Whitman

is the model for the procedure,"5

but that Borges went
beyond Whitman in perfecting the model in the short
sketch "Borges y yo.” In that sketch, of course, we

I!

meet the ”Borges figure who guarantees the work of the
“I” even though he is far from identical with him. A
similar procedure is at work in many of Borges' stories
as well: l'In literature Borges becomes himself, a
storyteller, by including an other within his own bound—
aries (recall Whitman 'I am broad, I contain multi—
tudes,')."6 Hence Christ contends that ”Borges' work is
essentially a lonely monologue with no real response
possible." He also believes that Borges like Whitman is
the only real character in his work, an admission that
Borges has at times made himself.7

Essentially then, Christ's claim is that ”Borges
did not become the other, he doubled himself,”8 a lesson
he learned in large part from Whitman. Christ thereby

holds to the belief that persona in their works is

essentially a presentation of an idealized or poeticized

122

version of self which stands in relation to no one other
than the self. If this belief really were true, then
Borges and Whitman could never be said to be genuine
adherents to the philosophy of either Buber or Mead.
Buber especially stressed the importance of the genuine
other, the authentic you which made the I real. There
is never any room in his treatment of self for the I
merely to figment the you, nor are there any possible
benefits derived from such a figmentation. Mead also
insisted that the only way really to understand the
self was to take on the role of the other, since man
is the ”role—taking animal."9 The essence of selfhood
is contained in seeing the reality of the others and
being able to incorporate that reality into a living
sense of self. The society must constitute the individual
as much as the individual constitutes society. Finally,
both Buber and Mead would agree that the only way to talk
to yourself is through the dialogue with others. The
"meeting" cannot be "fixed”; the only real meeting, by
definition, must involve a genuine other.

Actually, Christ is right in arguing that Buber and
Mead help to explain the personae in the work of Whitman
and Borges, but Christ stops short of comprehending the
full range of implications that the former pair's
philosophies have to the latter's pair's evolvement of

persona in their creative work. As was made evident in

123

the previous chapter of this study, Whitman and Borges'
concern for their readers is legitimate and pervasive,
and their readers are, in fact, the genuine others in
their work. To be a self you must be a member of a
community, says Mead, and that community for both
Whitman and Borges goes beyond their own selves merely,
and even beyond the coterie of other writers. ”This is
the city and I am one of the citizens," boasts Whitman

in ”Song of Myself," and although Borges is usually

less boisterous in making similar claims, neither man
consistently denies relation merely to engage in
sophisticated monologues. Their art, by their own
definitions of art, would have been severely limited

if no ”other" were sought, if the reader were not invited
to participate. By ignoring the importance of the reader
in the work of both men, Christ misinterpreted the role
and function<xfpersona in both men's work.

Again the irony is that Christ is correct to assert
that "Whitman is the model for the procedure” that Borges
followed; however, that procedure is far more complex than
a mere doubling of self. While Borges may be the only
character in his work he often is precisely that, a
"character" named "Borges" who, like the "Whitman"
persona is actually a composite that can include both
author and audience. The Borges persona is often a

universalized reader or a specific individual who takes

124

on "everyman" status or capabilities. Whitman's
representative, idealized ”Whitman" is indeed a key
source for Borges' implementation of such a persona.

A final important complication to the understanding
of persona in both men's work is that Christ is also
correct to argue that both men eventually sought to
"become” their idealized selves. Late in both men's lives
it became increasingly difficult to tell Whitman from
"Whitman" or Borges from "Borges." However, it can be
demonstrated that both men intentionally courted this
"confusion," and that each of them could and did
exercise control over and distance from their personae
when it suited their goals to do so. Persona is a
conscious and well—crafted device in both men's work, and
there is evidence that both were consistently in control
of their deployment of persona. In their creative
work they employed persona as a device to include self
and other under one heading, to allow for dialogue and
communication between the two. In their early work
especially, both authors relied upon the reader to
complete the process. They did not see the self as
sufficient to create the persona, they needed the
readers' input into the composite. Only the older
Whitman or Borges would attempt to "become" the personae
without the readers' aid. However, if Mead and Buber are

correct, then the only way that Whitman and Borges ever

 

 

 

125

really could "become' "Whitman” and "Borges" was through
the creative process, through the audience's reading

of their writings. Both Buber and Mead conceived of
self as a process, not a substance. Hence the only
opportunity to transcend the specific "I" and become the
idealized or universalized "I" is through the communi—
cation process of the written page.

It becomes difficult to pin down the third member
of the trinity precisely because persona includes the
other two members and sometimes ostensibly "is” the
self that presents it, for, in Mead's term, the individual
constitutes the society as much as the society constitutes
the individual. However, the individual always needs
the society to form an integrated self. Hence Whitman
and Borges' attempts to be the idealized self without
the audience's participation had to fail by definition.
That intriguing forn1of.fai1ure is the subject matter of
the final chapter of this study. In this chapter an
examination of persona within the work of art, where it
functions as a unifier of writer and reader, self and
other, will help demonstrate how Borges derived from

Whitman the role and function of the final member of

the trinity.

 

 

 

 

 

126

I - The Whitman Persona—

It is difficult to show that Whitman's creation of
"Whitman" relied upon the reader for input and was set up
to be a composite of.self and reader because many critics
have claimed that Whitman was virtually identical to the
character in ”Song of Myself," while many others have
claimed that the real man bore no resemblance at all to
his totally fictionalized creation. Before one can begin
to advance a theory on the makeup of ”Walt Whitman” it
seems appropriate to establish a certain familiarity with
some of the already advanced theories on who or what
”Walt Whitman" was and is.

Whitman's "disciples," who often wrote under the
direct influence of Whitman himself, saw little need to
separate the man from his poetry. John Burroughs claimed
that in Whitman, "the artist and the man are one.”10
Burroughs speaks of an everyday Whitman who, like the

H

figure in the poem, is charismatic and adhesive."
Edward Carpenter claimed that Whitman's own personality
was the organic center of Leaves of Grass, ”The ultimate
form of his poems is the form of himself."11 Richard M.
Bucke also believed that Whitman was a great man, indeed
he saw him as one of the greatest men of all time, and
this man was one with his poetry: ”With Walt Whitman his

body, his outward life, his inward spiritual existence

and his poetry were all one.”12 The self—possessed,

127

superably confident, happy, expansive, larger-than—life
figure of "Song of Myself," ”Salut Au Monde" and other
poems was essentially the real Walt Whitman. None of
the disciples would deny that the real man could not

in fact do all the things the poetic character could do,
but the essence of the character they found squarely in
the person Walt Whitman. Of course, if their claims were
true then the poet Walt Whitman would hardly need the
reader to participate in the creation of "Walt Whitman,"
since he essentially would have been formed long before
the poems were written.

On the other extreme are those who argue that
Whitman could scarcely have been less like the character
he created. Among the adherents to that position are
critics as diverse as Esther Shepard, Leslie Fieldler
and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges has stated in several
places that there is little to no relation between the
"Whitman of his mere biography and the Whitman he wanted

to be and now is.”13

Borges argues that the divine
vagabond who is supposed to be the author of "Song of
Myself" would have been incapable of writing it, or
putting it through its many revisions.l4 Fieldler
argues that the real Walt Whitman was a ”furtive,
stubborn, half-educated, guilt-ridden individual,"

lacking the spontaneity, health, or adhesiveness of his

portrayal, but somehow, ”finally the master of the actual,

128

living by sheer will the mask he dreamed."15

Both Borges and Fieldler think positively of Whitman
for having the ability to enact such a transformation
with so little tangible resemblance to the character he
forges. Others like Esther Shephard found only contempt
for Whitman's "pose,"l6 demonstrating outrage in
Shephard's case, or bemusement in the case of Amy Lowell
upon uncovering in Whitman the "disconcerting dash of

the poseur.”l7

Fieldler and Borges, Shephard and Lowell,
no matter how distinct in their attitudes towards Whitman,
are aligned in their opinion that the character could
scarcely be further removed from the real man. If this
were true the attempt at a composite would be futile
since Whitman would not be bringing his real self in any
sense to the composite.

Hence, both seeing Whitman as virtually identical
with "Whitman” or extremely different from him prevents
the possibility of the "Whitman" character being a
composite of self and reader. However, it is not
especially difficult to argue against either extremist
position because the standpoints essentially cancel
each other out.

William James, in his book, The Varieties of Religious
Experience lists Whitman in the section entitled "The

Religion of Healthy Mindedness."18 He claims that Whitman

had a personality, ”organically weighted on the side of

129

cheer."19 For someone as astute as James to be thus
misled,<nu2would have to assume that there was more to
Whitman than the weak, lonely, quiet individual that
Borges and Fieldler describe. Both Gay Wilson Allen
and Edward Miller argue that Whitman had at least some
of the qualities of the created character, "Some of the
characteristics the man Whitman actually possessed,"20
argues Allen, and Miller asserts that indeed the "aura
was real.”21 Clearly though, Whitman was not always
expansive, adhesive or optimistic; a look at the 1860
Leaves of Grass alone can dispel that notion. As Borges
argues, one need only look at Whitman's journalistic
writings or his day to day biography to understand that
he was a real man with real failings and quirks. Even
so, it is less than accurate to argue, as Floyd Stovall
does, that the Whitman of "Song of Myself,” is as much

a literary character as any character in Homer or
Shakespeare.22 After all, there are no characters
named "Homer" or "Shakespeare" in the respective works
of those two men.

Neither of the extremist positions can account for
the simple fact that Whitman is in some ways very much
like "Whitman,” but in many other ways distinct. Whit—
man's persona—character is highly complex, and in some
ways even goes beyond contemporary notions of what

23

function a persona can accomplish. Whitman's persona

130

allows the reader as well as the writer to wear the mask,
both author and reader are invited to find themselves,
and each other, within the composite persona—character
"Whitman." James Miller is one critic who has caught
the essence of what Whitman attempted to do, ”The I in
any one Whitman poem is not so much a personal reference
as a fusion of several characters, a composite character
who existsrm)place other than in the poem."24 The last
part of Miller's statement is especially apt; the
character only exists with the reader's participation,
and hence cannot really exist outside the poetic process.
Whitman is somewhere in ”Whitman" but ”Whitman" is
by no means only Whitman, or as Miller puts it, ”The
I in Leaves of Grass is never simply the historical
Walt Whitman, but it always embraces him and goes beyond
to the ideal."25 The persona "Walt Whitman” is both
more and less complex than the historical person. He is
less complex, obviously, because he does not have all of
the characteristics, psychology or complexity of the real
man. However, he is more complex because he is not tied
to Whitman merely, but is open—ended enough to allow for
all readers present and future to participate in his
formation, to allow for the expansiveness needed to create
the authenticity Whitman sought. James Miller is not
alone in considering the ”Whitman" persona-character to

26

be a composite figure, but part of the reason that

131

the ”Whitman" figure has always been so controversial is
because Whitman himself, especially in later life, was
more than willing to contribute to the confusion over
his relation to "Whitman."27

However, even as Whitman often allowed the confusion
to multiply, he also often enough made evident that he
fully appreciated and could manipulate the differences
between himself and his character. Walt Whitman was
always somewhere in "Walt Whitman," but for the composite
to be complete we as readers also needed to be given the
chance to be somewhere in ”Walt Whitman” too. Whitman
was well aware of this fact, and he wrote poetry specifi—
cally geared to invite us to complete the persona by
joining in it with him. ”Walt Whitman," especially in
poems written up to 1860, was meant to be both male and
female, rich and poor, ”of old and young, of the foolish
as much as the wise.” "Walt Whitman" is a composite
figure who only comes fully alive in process; on both a
literal and figurative level, he can only exist when the

poetry is read and accomplice readers are found, willing

to become actively involved in his creation.

Whitman's full awareness of the distinctiveness of
his persona from his person is revealed in both his poetry
and prose. His personal correspondence sometimes allows
us to glimpse this awareness. For example, Anne Gilchrist

was an intelligent and well—read individual who was so

132

taken by the persona presented in Whitman's poetry (and
perhaps unconsciously supplying her part only too dili—
gently to the composite) that she wrote from England to
propose marriage to Whitman, a proposal that included an
ardent promise to bear his children. Whitman was so
taken aback by the effect his character had had on

Gilchrist that he carefully drafted a letter to her to

explain to her that she had mistaken his creation for him.

He explained, "I am by no means that benevolent, equable,

happy creature that you portray."28

More telling still
was a letter Whitman wrote to be sent to M. D. Conway
in November of 1867, that was then to go to his British
publishers in order to fend off some bad press that he
was receiving about his personal lifestyle. Whitman

insisted in this letter that, ”The author of Leaves of

Grass is in no sense or sort whatever the rough or

 

eccentric or vagabond or queer person that the commenta-
tors (always bound fortfluaintensest possible sensational

29 Interestingly, in

effect) persist in making him.”
both letters Whitman blames others for "portraying" him
as someone who is just like his character, when it was
Whitman himself who often aided in the presentation of
such a portrayal.

Whitman's poems also offer clues to his own manipu-

lation of persona. As E. Fred Carlisle points out, Whit—

man's "Calamus" poems, ”Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In

 

 

 

 

 

 

133

Hand,” and ”Are You The New Person Drawn Toward Me?”

both further demonstrate Whitman's awareness of the

30 In the

separateness of his persona and his person.
latter poem Whitman explicitly asks his readers such
questions as, "Do you suppose you will find in me your
ideal? Do you think I am trusting and faithful? Do
you see no further than this faqade, this smooth or
tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing
on real ground towards a real heroic man?” The implied
answer to each of these questions is that each reader
must reevaluate who he thinks "Whitman” is. Whitman has,
as in a play, stepped out of character, which has the
effect of making us more aware of the mask. However, if
he wants us to participate, he must get us to join him
not only in the "play," but in the character itself.
Leslie Fieldler has pointed out that both ”Goodbye
My Fancy" and "That Shadow My Likeness," are instances
where Whitman separates the created character and the
real man, except that in both of these poems favor and
primacy are granted to the creation, as if it were somehow
more real than the being that first created it. Of
course within the realm of the literary work, and with
the cooperation of the accomplice reader, in some ways
the persona is more of an authentic and essential self

then the finite mortal who helped give it life. The

persona is enriched by any and all individuals who will

134

bring their own sense of self to the poems. Ience many
of Whitman's poems work best when the persona is
functioning as a catalyst between writer and reader,

or as an opportunity for the audience to participate
directly in the poem itself. When this occurs an open—
ended poetry results, and an "I" is presented that is
both intimate and universal at once.

Malcolm Cowley's reintroduction of the 1855 edition
of Leaves of Grass and his introductory essay to the
edition are both relevant to an understanding of the
composite persona-character that appears in much of
Whitman's early poetry. The 1855 Leaves of Grass has
Whitman's earliest and perhaps most fully intact
renditions of the composite figure. "Song of Myself,"
as well as "There Was A Child Went Forth," "Song of the

Answerer,‘ "The Sleepersfl'"ASong For Occupations,”

and "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?" are all more
committed to the trinity concept in their original
versions than in later editions of Leaves of Grass.

For example, "Song of Myself," the first of the twelve
then nameless poems of the original edition, was, as
Cowley explains, a virtually anonymous poem in its

initial publication. The book itself had no author's
name, and the only clue to authorship was Walter Whitman's

name on the copyright notice. Cowley asserts that the

man in the frontispiece portrait (an actual daguerrotype

 

 

 

135

of Whitman) was the, "putative author but actual hero
of the extraordinary book."31 Not to be confused with
the Walt Whitman of daily life,this person was, a
"dramatized or idealized figure." In 1855 he had, "no
local or family background" (lines such as ”of Manhattan
the son," or "I thirty-seven years old," did not yet
exist). Cowley sees the Whitman figure as a ”representa—
tive figure, who by achieving union with his transpersonal
soul had realized the possibilities latent in every
man and woman.”32 Cowley's republication of the 1855
edition serves to allow us a graphic look at how the
original idea of the composite persona as something
distinct from Whitman's person, though loosely based on
it, was first conceptualized. Unfortunately this
conceptualization was allowed to weaken as the years
passed.

As noted earlier in this study, Don Bogen's article
on ”Who Learns My Lesson Complete," demonstrates how
Whitman's revisions of that poem withdraw it from full

33 These same kind of revisions and

reader engagement.
deletions are also noticeable in some of the other 1855
poems. For example, in "There Was A Child Went Forth,”
Whitman deemphasizes reciprocity by deleting the final

line, "And these become of him or her that peruses them

now. In ”Song of Myself," as Cowley notes, Whitman's

intrusion of more of his personal biography weakens the

 

 

 

 

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composite's representativeness. Whitman also tones down
the character's potential for identification, as when he
has an ancestor tell the story of the frigate fight in
canto thirty-five, instead of telling it from a first
person participant's standpoint, as in the original.
Subsequent revisions of "Song of Myself” did tend to
obscure somewhat Whitman's original intention of letting
the character be an idealized everyman. Cowley actually
believes that shortly after 1855 Whitman began to suffer
a kind of ”megalomania to such an extent that he was
losing touch with the realities or at least the human

possibilities of American life."34

However, Cowley may

go too far in that assessment. Though Whitman's increased
unwillingness to keep himself separate from his "Whitman"
character is apparent, even the 1892 version of ”Song of
Myself” presents a clearly composite character who is

not meant to be merely Whitman. Also, Whitman, though

at times thoroughly involved in playing the role of
"Whitman," seemed always to recognize that the two were
distinct.

The 1855 edition, aside from the copyright notice,
mentioned Whitman's name only once, "Walt Whitman, an
American, one of the roughs, a kosmos," which clearly
was an invitation to see "Whitman” as a representative

figure. As Borges has noted, Whitman thereby presented

a hero fit for democracy because all of us could be

 

 

 

 

 

 

137

equally represented in the composite, even though there
would still be one, single, heroic figure. Though
subsequent revisions may have weakened the composite's
position, the sense of the persona as composite and
representative never left the poem. "Whitman" still

claims to be ”of old and young of the foolish as much

as the wise."

He still insists, ”I am the mate and
companion of people all just as immortal and fathomless
as myself / They do not know how immortal, but I know.”
The reason that the ”I" knows is because the ”I" is really
a ”We," the power and vision granted to the persona who
is all of us. What the individual in isolation cannot
do or see the idealized composite persona can. This
character is therefore unique; instead of saying ”We”
while meaning ”I” as his contemporary Queen Victoria
was known to do, ”Whitman" says ”I" but means ”We."
Yet somehow the I also manages to stay intact and
singular, and thereby is similar to Mead's consideration
of the Me (plural) and I (singular) that exist in us all.
Hence no person need be "afraid of the merge”
because it is a process from which we still emerge with
our individuality intact, even as Whitman does. Yet
the merge, the mix and union with others, is necessary
for personal growth and for artistic meaning. ”Whitman"
says in canto sixteen, "I resist anything better than

I

my own diversity.‘ As in an analogous line later in the

 

 

 

 

138

poem, ”I am broad, I contain multitudes,” Whitman allows
"Whitman” these obvious statements of plurality to
invite us to uncover how we are as much ”Whitman" as he
claims to be of us. ”In all people I see myself, none
more and not one a barleycorn less." All men and women
are equal to and invited to join in the composite.

"Whitman" in Song of Myself" is made ”divine...
inside and out,” by contact and convergence with the
reader, or by the process of communication itself. He
also insists that without the readers' willing partici—
pation they too will be diminished in potential, ”I do
not ask who you are,/ you can do nothing and be nothing
but what I unfold you.” The persona represents adhesive-
ness and the capacity for response. No one should stand
in isolation. The persona is an idealized being, but
not merely Walt Whitman's idealization of his limited
self, but his conceptualization of a being who represents
the potential for collaboration and expansiveness by
himself and his readers.

Several other of the original 1855 poems employ a
similar persona. "A Song For Occupations," which
followed "Song of Myself” in 1855, also presents an
open-ended persona seeking response. The original
version contains lines later deleted in which Whitman
opens his poem by telling us that he was "chilled with

the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us."

139

Clearly, to help circumvent the normal impediments
between writer and reader, "Whitman” was created. The
"Whitman" first person persona of the rest of the poem
seeks to break down all barriers between poet and audience.
He looks for reciprocity and equality. ”Were I as the
head teacher or charitable proprietor or wise statesman
what would it amount to? Were I to you as the boss
employing and paying you would that satisfy you?"

Whitman wants his readers to discard the old notions,
the hierarchical set-up of writer over reader, or any
hierarchical set up. The persona allows us to find a
way into the poetry as equals. ”Neither a servant or
master am I”; all are called equally to bring their part
to the whole, all insights all viewpoints, all occupations
are welcome and needed within this poetry. The persona
here informs us that he brings, ”what you much need yet

always have.’ The persona is a forum to allow individuals
to communicate, to merge as one during the process of the
poem. The entire relationship is reciprocal and equal.
”If you see a good deed remarkable in me I see just as

much remarkable in you.”

Neither the president or the
rich or educated are better than "you" within the venture
of the poem. It is relation that matters, and all are
equal to it. The persona in the poem is nameless; the

I is a composite of us all within the poem where we can

all find a place.

140

The "I" of "The Sleepers” is at once intimate and
universal. The persona in this poem can be intimate
enough to present a scene in the poem's eighth section
in which the people of all nations are, in sleep, all
holding hands and unified. "Whitman” is the one and
the many through the medium of sleep, which like death
makes us all equal. And since all of us also dream we
are all potential authors of the dream vision that is
the poem. So the persona is at once intimate and
universal, specific and diffuse, Whitman, but also any
of the other readers ready to share the vision.

"Song of The Answerer” also more clearly involves
a sense of who the persona really is in its 1855 rendition
than in revised versions of the poem. The 1855 poem opens
with six lines not present in later editions, in which
the poem is explicitly set up to be the answer to the
question, "How should the young man know the whether
and when of his brother?" The poem to come is the
answer to that question: "And I answered for his
brother and for men, and I answered for the poet and

sent these signs.’ What then follows is a definition
and explanation of who the "answerer" is, in terms that
do not necessarily place Whitman in that role more or
less than any of the rest of us. The poem is written by

Whitman in part to explain who "Whitman” is, and what

the function of the poetic persona or ”answerer" can and

 

141

must be. Hence the answerer has a ”universal welcome.”

”The person he favors by day or sleeps with at night is

blessed... He resolves all tounges into his own and
bestows it upon men.... and any man translates, and any
man translates himself also... He is the joiner, he sees

how they join."

That compilation of lines from the poem collectively
gives an apt description of the Whitman persona as he
appears in the 1855 Leaves of Grass especially. The
persona is he who unites writer and reader, hence he is

l

the "joiner.' The person he favors is "blessed" because

that person can more readily enter into reciprocity, the

source of all 'real living" according to Buber. The
persona brings with it a means of communication, the
poem itself; hence he can be said to translate the
language of the I and the you into a composite We that
all then receive as their own tounge. This is only
possible, though, if the readers are also willing to
work, "and any man translates himself also."

Part of what the answerer reveals is that he does
not have all the answers: "What can be answered he
answers and what cannot be answered he shows how it cannot
be answered.” All people from all occupations, whether
Jew or Gentile, mechanic or poet, see him as one of their

own because they in fact help to comprise who is is, and

they can thereby all see themselves in him. As long as

 

 

 

 

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this is so, they will continue to bring their own selves
to the work of art. In this light "Song of the Answerer,”
takes on a subtler shade of meaning. It is the explan—
ation of a complex reciprocal relationship, instead of
the ramblings of a braggart poet.

"Salut Au Monde" is of course the other poem where
the persona is very clearly spelled out or created
before our eyes. In "Salut Au Monde" the reader is
invited to participate directly in the formation of the
"Whitman" character-persona. The writer and reader join
to form "Walt Whitman" and together ask their creation
what this new union enables him to see and hear. Of
course the composite I is capable of tremendous compre—
hension and expansiveness, and his litany of sights and
sounds, ”I hear the locusts in Syria... I hear the
workman singing... I see the great round wonder rolling

I

through space,‘ all serve to demonstrate how limitless
the potential power is when writer and reader join forces.
The power of such union and its end results are well
described by "Whitman” in "Song of Myself”: "My ties and
ballasts leave me, I travel I sail,/ My palms cover
continents,/ I am afoot with my vision." This "vision”
has been granted through an equal give and take by author
and audience. ”A kelson of the creation is love,"

”Whitman” tells us in "Song of Myself." Love, a

reciprocal emotion, is what keeps the universe and each

 

 

 

 

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individual integral. The ”answerer” knows that we can
only grow or gain insight while attempting the search
together.

Whitman never negated or tried to dismiss the role
of "Whitman" in later editions of Leaves of Grass, even
if he diminished or confused his effectiveness through
revision or deletion. For example, an "Inscriptions"
poem, ”Me Imperturbe," first published in 1860, again
presents the "Whitman” character. We are warned of his
presence with the line, ”Master of all and mistress of
all; ”Whitman" is explicitly sexless and composite.
here. Yet the individual speaks through "Whitman” in
the line, ”Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety,
foibles, crimes less important than I thought.” Even
at this point, though, "Whitman" speaks for any individual
within the composite who discovers that individual short-
comings are made insignificant by the dialogue and
communion of the I and you.

Another well thought out feature of the final
editions of Leaves of Grass is the consecutive grouping
of "Salut Au Monde," "Song of the Open Road,” "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry," and ”Song of the Answerer.” 'All of these
poems are poems of relation and ask the question of

l

”Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,‘ "What is it then between us?”
In each of them the composite character who has been all

things good and evil as in ”Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,‘l

 

 

 

 

 

144

or who acknowledges his relation to all other people,

the ”delicious burdens” he takes along with him in

"Song of the Open Road," envisions a world where all is
possible if the reader will acknowledge and help to
formulate the possibilities. Time, distance and place
"avail not"; the persona can become alive again and the
person Walt Whitman can be identified only if the reader
will participate in the poem. He or she can do so

most directly by becoming the main character along with
Whitman as in ”Salut Au Monde" or "Song of the Answerer,"
or by realizing the process of self discovery through the
other in both life and art as in ”Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
or "Song of the Open Road."

Though by as early as 1860 Whitman had serious
doubts over whether or not his invitation to the reader
would ever be fully accepted, and though his later
poetry reflects a frailer conception of the possibilities
of communication, as in "A Noiseless Patient Spider,"
Whitman never did give up on his readers entirely, nor
did he ever rescind his offer to them to become "Walt
Whitman" with him. He knew that the attempt to be ”Walt
Whitman” without them would be doomed to failure because

the persona, as he himself had defined it, needed to be

a collaborative effort.

 

145

II — The Borges Persona—

It seems at first to be more difficult to link the
Borges persona to Whitman's influence than it was to
demonstrate that Borges admired and employed many of
Whitman's ideas on the reader's role in the work of art
in his own fiction. As has been noted, Borges has
described the Whitman persona as a composite of Whitman
and of every one of his readers, and he has consistently
been recorded as an admirer of Whitman's experimental
creation ”Walt Whitman.” However, the Borges persona
does not seem to be that closely related to the "Whitman"
character. The optimism, expansiveness, heriosm, or
larger—than-life characteristics of "Whitman" are not
evident in ”Borges.”

Even so, the narrator and/or main character of a
typical Borges story does have a great deal in common

with ”Whitman ' Indeed the open-ended, composite persona

is at least as common to Borges fiction as it is to
Whitman's poetry. The "Borges” character or narrator or
persona that appears with great frequency throughout his
fiction is normally presented as a kind of universal
reader, (an individual who is reading or being told the
narrative line even as we are) or else he is a character
who starts out to be a specific, everyday man but ends

up having universal characteristics. There are even a

few occasions where both kinds of figures appear in the

 

 

 

 

146

same story. In ”El acercamiento a Almotabim,” ("The
Approach to Almotasim") ”Borges” is ostensibly doing a
book review and hence is no more the creator of the plot
than we are. Meanwhile, within that plot the main
character discovers that all men are the same man. In
"La forma de la espada" ("The Shape of the Sword”)
"Borges" is being told the story by another man, even

as we are, but this second narrator, John Vincent Moon,
tells the story as if he were someone else because he
has concluded, ”I am the others, all men are the same
man.” So though "Borges" is not the ”fleshy, sensual”
optimist that "Whitman" sometimes is, he is still someone
who invites the readers to imagine that they are as
much the creators and interpreters of the story as the
author himself. ”Borges" as much as ”Whitman" invites
participation and entry into the work.

Borges also has allowed "Borges" to intrude into
his everyday life and has left himself open to the
question of whether or not he can distinguish Borges from
”Borges.” In "Borges y yo,” he confessed that such a
distinction was somewhat beyond him. Rodriguez Monegal
has argued that over the past thirty years or so Borges
has allowed himself to become "Borges" more and more;
upon acquiring international notoriety Borges, "ceased

”35

to be a writer and became a seer. By entitling one

/
of his chapters, "The Old Guru,” Rodriguez Monegal

 

 

 

 

 

147

clearly suggests that Borges, like Whitman, has allowed
the authorial self to "be” him more and more. As Harss
puts it, there is some doubt as to whether ”Borges wrote
his books or they wrote him,”36 because ”Borges" the
authorial character and persona is created within the
literature itself, even as ”Walt Whitman" is. Both

men allowed the second self to obscure the first, in part
as a graphic argument in favor of blurring the conven—
tional distance between fact and fiction.

However, Borges, even in writing ”Borges y yo,”
clearly recognizes that there is a distinction between
the real and the created self. Furthermore, Borges
wrote Ficciones and El Aleph, which most critics consider
to be his best works, before worldwide fame could
influence him, and so he could more readily employ the
”Borges” composite persona as an effective literary
device. This composite persona is there to encourage
participation and to escort the reader into the work by
suggesting to the reader that he or she is as much the
creator of the work as the author himself is. ”Borges”
does not share "Whitman's" "personality," but his goals
are similar: to communicate with the reader through the
work of art, and to confuse or even destroy any sense of
distance between author and reader.

Thomas Lyons' article, ”Borges and the (Somewhat)

Personal Narrator,” describes the Borges narrator who

148

appears throughout his fiction. In Borges' work we
find, ”an intruding, non-dramatized, often distant yet

familiar first person narrator.”37

Lyons points to many
devices that Borges employs intentionally to obscure
literary distance and to cast doubt on historical
reality. Lyons' notes Borges' use of footnotes (not
typical of fiction) and his deployment of real people
within his fictions (for example, Bioy Casares in "Tlon,"
and Rodrfguez Monegal in "La otra muerte") as some
instances of Borges' intentional confusion of the
traditional borders between fact and fiction. The Borges
narrator often claims to be as unaware of all the rele-
vant facts and circumstances of a given story as the
audience itself is. He does so to put himself on even
footing with the reader. Lyons emphatically disagrees
with critics who suggest that Borges is aloof or
condescending within his fiction. Indeed Lyons contends
that Borges' narrator attempts to be one of us: ”the
casual, humanized narrator appears throughout an everyman
who you could fit the shoes of."38
Borges wants us to be as close to the telling of the
story as the author himself. He therefore presents a
persona who is often as confused or puzzled as any reader
would be, a persona presented as someone just trying to

make sense of a confusing situation as any reader would.

The creation of the full "Borges” persona is therefore a

149

two way endeavor, if we choose to let it be. Lyons

argues that the Borges narrator always at least implicitly
demands participation from his readers, instead of
"passivity or mariginality." Borges' persona brings us
into intimate contact with the material. Just as Borges
through the events of ”El Zahir" becomes an everyman who
is yet "partially Borges," we as readers become one

with the everyman "Borges" too, and yet never cease to

be at least partially ourselves.

The "Borges" narrator makes an appearance in the
very first story of Ficciones, Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
In it Borges sets up the narrative as something that
began as a parlor conversation between himself and his
friend Adolfo Bioy Casares. Of course the ensuing events
of the narrative which lead to the uncovering of the
secret world of "Tlon" help make apparent that it is
really "Borges" we are dealing with in his role as
universal reader, as he gradually comes to unravel the
mysteries of T15n along with us. Tlon is a world created
on paper, a fictional world that by its pervasiveness
stands, by the end of the story, as a threat to surplant
the ”real” world. Hence, in the very first story of
Ficciones, the threat or promise of a Borgesian world
disturbing or surplanting our world is presented but
simultaneously assuaged by Borges' position as one of us.

He does not take credit for the creation of Tlon, just

 

 

 

 

150

as he characteristically will not take credit for any

of his other ”fictions.‘ He is instead an observer
and commentator on Tlon, as any of the rest of us can
be, even though Tlon has many identifiably Borgesian
characteristics (such as len's philosophers valuing
”asombro,”
So the "Borges" narrator never takes credit for what the
author, the man Borges, apparently created; he always
suggests that it is equally the creation or problem of
us all. Indeed when the narrator of this story announces
that his part of the narration is about to end, ("Here
ends the personal part of my narration") he insists that,
"The rest is in the memories, (when not in the hopes or
fears) of all my readers.” He treats the world of Tlon
as if it were as alive to us as it is to "Borges."

The very next story in Ficciones, ”E1 acercamiento

I. . . . .
a AlmotaSim,' was written so conv1nc1ngly 1n the style
I
of a book review that both Bioy Casares and Rodriguez
Monegal have admitted to trying in vain to locate the

39 Of course the proposed novel is

novel in question.
an idea of Borges' that was never written, but by
treating it as a real novel by a real other person Borges
gets to take on the rights of a reader, to be "Borges"
along with the rest of us. In the story itself, the

main character is made aware that the search through

others always leads back to the self. Borges has

shock or surprise, over truth or verisimilitude).

 

 

151

explained in his comments on the story that this piece
represents one man's realization that one man can stand
for all men. Hence, ”E1 acercamiento a Almotasim” has
both the external "Borges" reader and the internal
universalized character.

”Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, and "Examen de
la obra de Herbert Ouain," discussed in detail in chapter
two, contain two other fictionalized authors who are
types of universalized readers, but they also are both
presented by narrators who take on the rights of readers
by examining the works of both authors along with us.
Borges thereby attributes some of his best and most
innovative ideas to other sources; he does not take
credit but instead pretends to be just another reader
or reactor to the ideas, a habit he picked up from
Macedonio Fernandez, according to Rodriguez Monegal.'+0
"Borges" has the opportunity to discuss Borges stories
with us, or is it the other way around? (Is it Borges
who discusses the creations of ”Borges" with us?) In
either case, the real creator of the original ideas in
”Tlon," "Almotasim, "Pierre Menard" and ”Herbert Ouain,"
never overtly takes credit for these creations.

In both ”La loteria en Babilonia" ("The Lottery in
Babylon") and ”La biblioteca de Babel" (”The Library of

Babel”) the first person narrator immediately begins his

story with a statement that identifies him as a

 

 

 

 

 

152

representative self, an everyman who yet maintains the
rights of the "I.” Even the language of the two initial
declarations is similar: "Like all the men of Babylon I
have been proconsul, like all of them I have been a slave,”
and, ”Like all the men of the library I have traveled

in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book,
perhaps the catalogue of catalogues." Both stories also
involve variations on a similar theme. The representa—
tive, nameless narrator in the first story tells the
history of the lottery by which all men are ruled,

while in the latter story we hear of the history of the
library and the quest for the eternal book. Hence both
narrators weave parables of life itself, in the first
case the world as chance, and in the second a world
minutely organized to the last detail.

However, Borges has a way of making these obviously
opposite approaches to life seem remarkably similar. In
each case the various doubts about the supposed ruling
mechanisms, the lottery and the library, are so prevalent
that the quality of wonder and questioning seems to be
the crucial human constant, regardless of whether chance
or destiny rules. Both narrators are everyman in search
of an answer that they will not find, but which they
still must search for. Yet both men are also individuals

who only implicitly speak for us all. Indeed the strange

 

 

 

 

153

settings and ruling metaphors of both stories do not
encourage our immediate identification with either
narrator. Borges has adapted from Whitman the ability
to present an I that is really a large We, but never
totally lacking in its individuality. Such an arrange-
ment of course encourages us to place our own "I” into
the composite as well.

Again and again Borges finds ways to not take credit
for the story he has created, either by introducing a
second source or by questioning the veracity of his own
narrative and thereby encouraging alternative interpre-
tations. In ”El jardih de senderos que se bifurcan"
("The Garden of Forking Paths”) the narration of Yu Tsun
is prefaced by "Borges," who claims that the ensuing
narrative is a verbatim transcript of an uncovered diary
whose first several pages are missing. In ”El inmortal"
the uncovered manuscript is supposed to be that left
by the ”immortal" himself, Joseph Cartaphilus. In

"Funes e1 memorioso, though the narrator is recounting
something from his own past he makes no claim to strict
veracity, ”This inaccuracy (a good thing it is that the
reader is already aware) has no other plot than that

dialogue of fifty years ago. I won't try to reproduce

V

his words, lost now forever.’ So when ”Borges” presents
us with another's transcript the account is to be taken

as verbatim, but when it is a firsthand account then its

154

accuracy is constantly open to question.

In ''El muerto' (”The Dead Man") the narrator again
says that he does not recall or know all the details of
the story since the story was not something he experi-
enced, so he apologizes to the reader in advance: ”I

don't know the details of his adventure; when they are

revealed to me I'll have to rectify and amplify these

V l

pages.’ "Borges' forgets the exact circumstances that
initiated his investigation in the story "La otra
muerte" ("The Other Death”) because he has "lost the
letter” that started him on the quest for Pedro Damian.
Borges rarely wants us to think of the narrator as
reliable; he would rather have us offer our interpre—
tations and points of view to the tale as it unfolds.
Borges even directly uses a plural narrator at times
that on the surface may seem like an ”editorial we” only,
but, given the generally composite nature of his persona,
may in fact mean more. In ”La muerte y la brujula”
("Death and the Compass"), which is told mostly from a
third person perspective, there are a few shifts to a

I! II

we pronoun, as in the line, "None so rigorously bizarre,

shall we say.‘ A similar circumstance prevails in ”Emma

Zunz," another apparent third person narrative with the
sudden shift to first person plural: "suffice it for us
to say that that afternoon she went to the pier." So

there is often an underlying "we" simultaneously creating

155

and interpreting the story even as it is otherwise being
presented in a fairly straightforward third person format.
Even when "Borges" is himself a character in the
story he rarely is any more in the know than the rest of
us supposedly outside the story are. In ”La otra muerte,"
"Borges" is fooled right along with the rest of us con-
cerning Pedro Damiah's past. He believes the initial
story of Damiah's cowardice even as we do since we have
no reason not to believe it. The next time Damian is
mentioned to ”Borges" he interrupts to tell the speaker
that he is already aWare of Damian's cowardice. Hence
he is as shocked as we are to discover that the speaker
remembers Damiah as a courageous soldier. Damiah was
somehow able to change his past through an act of will,
but "Borges" is every bit as perplexed by this information
as we are. After the fact, ”Borges" offers several
possibile solutions to explain the strange occurrence,
but he eventually admits that he is not even sure how
much of all he has described actually happened and how
much of it he may have imagined. We as readers fit in

readily with ”Borges" as confused, surprised participants

I
in the uncovering of Damian's story, so much so that one

IV

is tempted to forget that we owe our sense of asombro”

to the creative mind of the author Jorge Luis Borges, who
somehow has disassociated himself from his own invention.

Finally, there are several stories in which a

 

 

156

character begins a story as an individual, sometimes
Borges himself, but ends up as a universal figure, an
everyman no longer entirely or solely concerned with
the problems or concerns of the mere individual. In
"La escritura del dios” (”The Handwriting of God") the
Indian priest, Tzinacah, is very much an individual;
he is a high priest imprisoned by the hated conquistadores.
His mind is very specifically bent upon revenge. He
searches for the ”handwriting of God” that will bring
him the meaning of life itself and release him from his
imprisonment. However, when he discovers what he seeks
and becomes all knowing and all powerful, he no longer
is concerned about the specific problems of Tzinacan,
even though in some sense he still is Tzinacan.

In ”El Zahir” Borges is jolted by the death of
Teodelina Villar, a very specifically Argentine
celebrity, and his concern for her is almost idiosyncratic.
Somehow though, a twenty cent piece he receives for change
the night of her funeral becomes for him the Zahir, an
unforgettable object which eventually causes him to be
in danger of losing all specific sense of self. Hence
the coin has transformed him from Borges to ”Borges,":
”I am not he who I was before, but I still am allowed
to recall and perhaps even relate what has happened. I

am still, even partially, Borges.‘ That passage in

itself is a good description of what taking on the

 

 

 

157

literary persona entails. It implies a surrender of
self (yet not a total surrender) in order to take on
the others, to make the imaginative leap beyond the
specific. Of course Borges is not as convinced as
Whitman that this imaginative journey will bring happy
results. At the end of "El Zahir" he is unsure whether
the obsessed focusing upon the Zahir, the one object that
has come to imply the universe, will lead to madness or
a vision of God. The Zahir is, then, perhaps a symbol
for the individual work of art, in which the author
attempts to merge with the audience without a total
surrender, with neither party ever sure of what the end
result will be.

"El Aleph” has the same set—up as "E1 Zahir” — a
woman that Borges loved has died — though this time it
is someone he knew personally, not a stranger admired

by reputation. In a very indirect way Borges love for
Beatriz Viterbo leads him to the Aleph, "a point in
space that contains all the other points." While the
Zahir was the one thing that implied the all, the Aleph
is the all contained in one space. Hence the Zahir

and the Aleph are a set, just as the lottery of Babylon
and the library of Babel were- two sides of the same
coin- to use the metaphor of the Zahir itself.

Borges has admitted that a central problem to the

composition of "El Aleph” was to do what Whitman had

 

 

 

158

already done quite successfully, "the partial enumer-
ation of an infinite aggregate.”"1 In trying to describe
the Aleph, ”Borges" is hampered by language and its
linear flow, since the vision of the Aleph reveals all
things simultaneously. ”Borges" rival, Carlos Argentino
Danieri, does not even consider this problem; his use of
the Aleph is selfishly geared to the writing of a dread—
fully exhaustive poem. However, "Borges" realizes, in
the Whitmanic spirit, that mere listing is insufficient.
Hence his catalogue presented in the story itself is

far briefer and far more powerful than Danieri's poem.
The final lines of it: ("I saw my face and my entrails,
I saw your face and I felt vertigo and I cried because
my eyes had seen that secret and conjectural object
whose name usurps all men but who no man has seen, the
inconceivable universe,”) are a powerful statement of
what the expanded persona is privy to. After viewing
the Aleph all people and things seem familiar to
”Borges"; he recognizes everyone he sees on the street.
Instead of joy, however, this power frightens "Borges";
relation is not without its hazards. He has no assurance

that a "kelson of the creation is love, the universe he
sees is a confusing place in which idiots like Danieri
win poetry prizes while genius like Borges' goes

unrewarded. However, he cannot deny relation once he

has seen the Aleph. In some sense the expanded vision

159

of the "Borges” persona brings Borges and his readers an
expanded and augmented sense of confusion, but also an
increased sense of sympathy for our fellow sufferers.

The "Borges” persona is, therefore, a composite
character who is, as we have seen, either a reader with
the same rights and shortcomings of the rest of us as
readers, or else an everyman who represents us or
contains us in his vision, especially if we see our own
place in the composite. Borges' means of introducing
this character to the reader are not always original.
The idea of having a story be presented as a long lost
diary or an old memory recalled are hardly new. However,
in Borges these devices are all geared to a Whitmanic
presentation of persona, a persona who is ostensibly
the author, but is in fact a potential composite of
author and reader.

Borges developed a far subtler "Borges" than
Whitman's ”Whitman," less flamboyant and less obviously
larger—than—life. However, "Borges” is as apt as
”Whitman" to invite the reader to take his or her place
alongside him, to have the reader believe that he is a
necessary part of the work in progress.

Persona helps encourage direct reader participation,
which in turn is necessary to a true understanding and
development of self. The reader joined to the writer

creates a persona of seemingly unlimited vista and

 

 

 

160

potential, impossible without the cooperation of both.
Whitman and Borges chose to ignore or deemphasize

the need for the reader in the formation of persona in

their later years, and in much of their later work.

Both found their personae so attractive that they

attempted to become those characters without the reader's

necessary aid. As we will see in the next chapter, trying

‘1'

to write too much in character" weakened the potential
for real dialogue in some of their later work. However,
at its best the composite self, or persona, did serve

as a unifying device, a "joiner' for self and other,
writer and reader. Whitman and Borges never abandoned
that potential, and it was in fact their attraction

to it that caused both men to fall more readily into
the respective roles of "Whitman" and ”Borges" in their
daily lives, especially once the notoriety of those
characters began to overwhelm their actual creators.
Even so, the persona who unites reader and writer and
helps in the emergence of self is firmly established,

and is still at work today, in some of the finest work

of both men.

 

 

 

NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

1 Christ, "Borges Justified: Notes and Texts Toward

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stations of a Theme," in Prose For Borges, pp. 46-81.
p. 67
2 .
Ibid, p. 49.
3 Ibid, p. 56.
4 Ibid, p. 51.
5 Ibid, p. 67.
6 Ibid, p. 56.
7 Ibid, p. 64.
8 Ibid, p. 56.
9 Mead, p. xx.
10

Burroughs, p. 104.

11 Edward Carpenter, Days With Walt Whitman (London:
G. Allen, 1906), p. 113.

12 Bucke, p. 53.

13 As quoted in Borges' introduction to his trans—

lation of selctions from Leaves of Grass, Hojas de Hierba,
p. 21.

/
14 "Nota sobre Walt Whitman," in Discusion, p. 107,
"the mere happy vagabond who puts forth the verses of

Leaves of Grass would have been incapable of writing
_____"_________
them.

15 Fieldler, ”Images of Walt Whitman,” p. 57.

16 Esther Shepard, Walt Whitman's Pose (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., I938).

17 Amy Lowell, "Walt Whitman and the New Poetry," in
Walt Whitman, Ed. Francis Murphy, p. 223.

161

 

 

 

 

162

 

18 William James, The Varieties of Reli ious
Ex erience A Stud in Human Nature {New York: Longmans,
Green and Co., l9l35 p. 78.

19 Ibid, p. 83.

20 Allen, The Solitary Singer, p. 157.

21 Edward H. Miller, A Century of Whitman Criticism,
p. xii.

22 Floyd Stovall, from ”Walt Whitman and The American
Tradition,” as quoted in, Whitman The Poet Materials For
Study, p. 162.

23

Whitman's use of persona does differ somewhat
from what such critics as Walker Gibson, Walter Ong and
Susan Sontag have to say about persona. In his book
Persona (New York: Random House, 1969) Walker Gibson
suggests that a persona is always implicitly understood
to be a character who will do the talking for the author.
Whoever this character is greatly affects the message

of the work because, as Sontag suggests, "the mask is
the face," (as quoted in Gibson, p.v.). Gibson, there-
fore, views persona as a device by which the real author
participates in a kind of role playing by means of a
character, "certainly less complex than its human
inventor." (p.4.)

Walter Ong argues that, in taking on the role of the
other, in "realizing in a specially intense way one's
identity (in a sense) with someone who (in another sense)
one is not, remains one of the most human things a man
can do," Walter Ong, The Barbarian Within (New York:
Macmillan and Co., 19625 p. 54. To that extent, Ong
is reminiscent of George Herbert Mead. However, Ong
points out that persona is a one way mask, the author
wears it, not the audience, which leads to the "curious
one way nature of artistic communication."

So Gibson, Ong and Sontag all argue that the persona
is a major way for an author to deliver a message, the
persona itself being a large part of the message. Certain—
ly Whitman's persona does fit that description. However,
both Whitman and Borges' personae are unconventional in
that they are used often as open-ended, two way devices
to foster communication. Since persona for them is a
composite of self and reader, unlike Gibson's definition
of the persona as less complex than its creator, Whitman
and Borges' personae can be more complex, since the
attributes and impressions of each reader can be added
to the composite.

163

4 James Miller, Walt Whitman p. 67.
25

26 For example, John Kinnaid in "Leaves of Grass
andtjuaAmerican Paradox," in Whitman A Collection of
Critical Essa s believes that the character in 'Song of
Myself” is three distinguishable personae at once, "Walt
Whitman, (1) an American, (2) one of the roughs, (3) a
Kosmos,” p. 30.

27 Whitman's escape into "Whitman” was more pro—
nounced in old age, but had begun much earlier. As
early as 1855 in an anonymous review which Whitman wrote
of his own Leaves of Grass that appeared in the United
States Review Whitman enthusiastically sings the praises
of 'Whitman”: "an American bard at last. ..unaware that
there was ever hitherto such a product as a book or
such a being as a writer,“ as quoted in Walt Whitman
Francis Murphy, editor, (Middlesex, England: Penguin,
1969). Clearly Whitman sometimes encouraged seeing the
character and writer as one, and thereby contributed to
the potential confusion between the two.

28

Ibid, p. 158.

 

As quoted in Bucke, p. ix.

29 See, Whitman, The Correspondence (Vi) p. 348.

30 Carlisle, p. 18.

31 Cowley, p. viii.

32 Ibid, p. xxxiii.

 

33 Don Bogen, "I and You in 'Who Learns My Lesson
Complete': Some Aspects of Whitman's Poetic Evolution,"
Walt Whitman Review 25,(September 1979) 87—98.

34 Cowley, p. xxviii.

/
35 Rodriguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary

Biography, p. 435.

36 Harss and Dohmann, Into The Mainstream, p. 103.

37 Thomas Lyons, "Borges and the (Somewhat) Personal
Narrator,” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (Autumn, 1973)
363-372, p. 363.

164

38 Ibid, p. 370.

 

39

40 Emir Rodriguez Monegal, "Borges: The Intellectual

Background," in Simply a Man of Letters, pp. 175-190,
p. 189.

41 See El Ale h and Other Stories, specifically the
Borges commentary on the stories, appended to the end

of the collection, p. 264.

See Rodriguez Monegal, p. 265.

 

 

Chapter Four

Persona: A Farewell to Self and Reader

As was noted in the first chapter of this study,
there are certain parallels between the writing careers
of Borges and Whitman. Both men labored in relative
obscurity for a number of years before achieving their
finest work in middle age. Both authors gradually went
from these writing peaks to a final period of, "dimin-

I

ishing effectiveness,‘ denouements that were surely
augmented by their old age physical disabilities,
Whitman's strokes and partial paralysis, and Borges'
blindness. Both the elder Whitman and the elder Borges
adopted similar writing strategies in their final years.
Both men virtually gave up the attempt to communicate
with the reader by means of the composite persona. Both
authors instead opted to try to be that persona on their
own, thereby at once masking or even obliterating their
true selves within their work, and also eliminating the
possibility of active reader participation. Whitman

and Borges had both stressedtflmadifficulty of the perfect
reciprocal relationship between writer and reader. Per-

haps in their declining years they did not feel equal to

such a difficult venture, and so decided to take a more

165

166

conventional track. Perhaps also, both writers were
disappointed by the lack of readers' response that they
had received, and thereby felt compelled to present works
that were less intricate and demanding.

In the last twenty or so years of their respective
lives Whitman produced poetry and Borges created fiction
which often appeared to be either a parody of their
earlier work or a glaring contradiction to it. There
is little if any venturing of self, especially in com-
parison to that earlier work. Any invitations to reader
engagement are hollow ones because in both men's cases
the notorious persona is now masquerading as the genuine
self. There can be no real dialogue, by definition,
without a genuine I and you. In their later work at
least one of these two essential members is missing,
and often both are absent. Only the persona, the medi-
ating device, remains, except that now it is a sham
device, inserted to replace the self, instead of
functioning asa.liaison between self and other. Both
men decided to "be" the persona as much as possible,
to accept the life of literary guru or savant both
within and outside of the work of art. The elder Whitman
plays the prophet, the elder Borges the detached story-
teller; the questions and needs of the inner self are
denied or sublimated. While their later work is not

usually poor, it is basically a rejection of the trinity

 

167

concept, and thereby goes against much of the main thrust
of some of both men‘s finest work. They each wanted to
replace their imperfect selves with the persona purified
through art, but their attempts were doomed to failure
because the persona had no right to existence without
the participation and communion of the self and reader.
Whitman made significant efforts to deny that he
had not always been synonymous with the character ”Walt
Whitman" of Leaves of Grass; hence in later years he
began to claim that Leaves of Grass was little more than
his own personal story. In "A Backward Glance O'er
Travel'd Roads,” for example, Whitman claims that, ”The
driving force behind the writing of Leaves of Grass was
a desire to articulate and faithfully express in literary
or poetic form and uncompromisingly my own physical,
emotional, moral, intellectual and aesthetic personality.”
He goes on to say that, "Leaves of Grass indeed (I
cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the out—
cropping of my own emotional and other personal nature—
an attempt from first to last to put a Person, a human
being (myself in the latter half of the 19th century in
America) freely, fully and truly on record.” What Whitman
says in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads” would be
true enough if ”Whitman” were saying it because that
composite of America and its people is truly on record

in much of Leaves of Grass. However, for Whitman to try

168

to have us believe that his own self, in all its detail,
is what exists in Leaves of Grass is to deny that he
ever attempted to use ”Walt Whitman" as a representative
figure, and to imply that the entire book is just one
elaborately narrow self-glorification.

Hence this old age reminiscence challenges the
validity of the "trinity" of self, reader and persona
that is at work in many of Whitman's finest earlier
poems. Indeed, by the time Whitman composes ”A Backward
Glance" one has to question whether he even appreciates
and recognizes what his best work really is. In "A
Backward Glance” Whitman claims that the Civil War had
the greatest and most lasting effect on his poetry;
however, most critics would now agree that the vast
majority of Whitman's finest poetry was written before

I

the Civil War. Even "Passage to India,‘ usually con—
sidered one of Whitman's most important post Civil War
poems, is in serious contradiction to all the poetic
principles that informed his earlier work, as will be
demonstrated later in this chapter. Perhaps, as Allen
1 claims, Whitman was never the best judge of his own
work,2 or perhaps Whitman consciously rejected his
earlier attempts because they had not met with the
reciprocity he felt was necessary to their success.

Instead he turned to a prophetic, bardic style of poetry

in which the poet could be restored to a lofty position

169

and declaim poetic truths, instead of needing to rely
on an audience to help supply them. He became the
prophet only when his attempt at reciprocal poetry met
with an insufficient response.

Whitman seemed to make at least a somewhat conscious
decision to play the part of ”Whitman” more and more both
in and out of his poetry. This fact is nowhere more
noticeable than in his conversations with ”disciple”
Horace Traubel. In these conversations the reader can
sometimes catch Whitman shifting to "Whitman" in mid-
sentence. For example, when Traubel mentions the writer
Stoddard who had written uncomplimentary things about
Whitman, Whitman's response is, "I do not blame him, but
I am sorry for Walt Whitman.”3 Whitman later recalls
for Traubel an instance in which a man asked him if he

were not "sorry on the whole' for having written the sex
poems. Whitman's reply was, ”Don't you feel sorry on
the whole that I am Walt Whitman?"4 By this point in
time Whitman feels that he is interchangeable with
”Whitman," or at least he pretends to see no distinction
between the two. Even when Traubel announces to Whitman
that Mrs. Harned, Traubel's sister, has given birth,
Whitman feels the necessity to bless her in "Whitman's"
name: "Who could better realize what that means- who

better understand— who more thoroughly rejoice in? Give

the new mother my love— tell her I glorify her in my

170

thanksgivings- that Walt Whitman glorifies her- tell her
that."5 Since Whitman himself never married or raised

a family of his own, some people might feel that many
others might, "better understand" what the birth of a
new child signified. However, ”Whitman," with his com-
bined lusty manliness and reverence for procreation and
motherhood could certainly lay claim to special insight
and understanding of a mother's joy at the birth of her
child, and so it is as ”Whitman” that the old poet
delivers his congratulations.

The elder Whitman wanted to be "Whitman" so much
that he began to pretend that no imperfect being named
Walter Whitman had ever existed. To try to accomplish
such a feat, however, he had to resort to trickery or
even deliberate lies. For example, Traubel once
questioned him on the various styles he had gone through
in clothing and behavior throughout the years, stages
documented by Chase6 and others, but denied by Whitman:
"I always dressed as I do now and spoke and acted as I
do now- that's all I know about it— that's all I can

7 Of course there still exists physical

tell you.”
evidence in the way of photographs and portraits to show
that Whitman is lying to Traubel in this instance, and
we also have Kaplan's word that Whitman actually

supressed certain photographs which he felt did not fit

in with his final self portrait as benevolent seer.

171

His biographers also tell us, as does Whitman himself,
that the poet destroyed many letters he felt might
conflict with the persona, letters, ”too sacred, too
surely and only mine to be perpetuated.”9 Whitman
sought to wipe out those aspects of the self that were
unattractive or inconsistent with his final image of
himself. Unlike the poet of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,"
or "Song of Myself” he is no longer willing to admit
that he is no better or worse than any other man or woman.
He goes so far as to "assiduously revise every page,”10
of Bucke's 1883 biography, and to also edit the manu-

ll

scripts of O'Connor and Burroughs. It is little

wonder that those "disciples" found Whitman and his
poetry to be as one, since Whitman himself was there to

insure that their opinions would not conflict with his

own.

Whitman, as Fieldler explains, attempted to enact
an inverted book fraud by counterfeiting the author
instead of the book, "Whitman had only to become in

public life the person he invents, that is to say to

"12

counterfeit himself rather than the text. However,

such contrivances have left Whitman forever open to
attack from people such as Esther Shephard or Harvey
13

O'Higgins. And as much as Shepard's invective seems

mean spirited or narrowly focused, she does have at

least one telling complaint, "No one except Walt Whitman

 

172

himself requires that an artist should be what his poem
is."14 Whitman's problem is precisely that; he tried to
become "Whitman" more and more in his later years. As
a result his earlier poetry, written at a time when he
more often kept himself distant from "Whitman,” is also
misunderstood as an attempt at self-aggrandizement. The
open-ended, reciprocal nature of that poetry is thwarted
to some extent by the attempt of the later Whitman to
deny the distinction between himself and "Whitman,” a
distinction that is crucial to an understanding of his
pre-Civil War poetry. The elder Whitman seems to want
to leave us only two choices; either to condemn him as
a fraud or to admire him as a prophet and sage, a
literally larger-than-life character. However, his
earlier work is too important and too clearly distinct
in its use of Whitman" as an agent of reciprocity and
engagement to allow us to give in to the sales pitch of
the "good grey poet."

As Fieldler suggests, Whitman needs to be rescued

"15 because much of

from ”parody as well as apothesis,
his best poetry is a human and sincere attempt at
dialogue. While it may be true that "the legendary
person he had created and released had taken a life of
its own and could make strange conversions long after

the poet's death,”16 it is equally true that the only

real chance for dialogue between Whitman and future

 

 

 

 

173

generations is in those poems where Whitman includes a
genuine sense of self. Only then can the persona be
employed to invite the participation of the reader on
a poetic journey with that self.

In the past few decades Borges has also renounced
his earlier approaches to fiction and gradually dis-
engaged himself from his art, leaving behind in his work

only that disinterested observer ”Borges.‘ Borges has
patterned his old age disappearing act on Whitman's so
closely that he can sometimes be caught referring to
himself as a ”garrulous old man.”17 Characteristically
though, Borges' escape has been more subtle than Whitman's.
Whitman tried very noticeably to equate the self and
persona, to pretend that his self was extremely

important and that the marvelous ”Whitman" character,

was, in fact, that very same self. Borges, perhaps

in part because he saw the obvious problems in Whitman's
plan, opted for a less noticeable ruse. Borges claims

to be truly unconcerned with self and yet ”resigned to
being Borges,"l8 until death might bring oblivion.
However, what Borges is really resigned to do is no longer
to venture the self in his works, not even in the under—
stated way that he once did, and instead to let the
”Borges" character stand for him both in and out of

his art.

In Ficciones and in El Aleph Borges had a subtle

174

but ultimately powerful inclusion of self in most of

the stories, and the "Borges" character or narrator was

a means also to get us involved in the work. In El
informe de Brodie and El libro de arena the trick devices
for reader inclusion are still there, but Borges himself
usually is not; he has little personal stake or genuine
venture into the work himself. He has allowed "Borges”
to take over almost entirely, and has thereby shut out
both self and reader, even as Whitman did. As Rodriguez
Monegal points out, there came a time when Borges
irrevocably became "Borges": ”By being 'Borges' he had
obliterated himself, he had finally ceased to matter."19
Borges gets away with this escape more successfully
than Whitman, that is he attracts less attention to it,
because he has learned from Whitman's efforts, and
perhaps from those of other authors whose personae he

20

has studied. More importantly, Borges had never made

huge claims for the self, in fact he had negated the

self's autonomy throughout his work, even while subtly
including the self throughout it. In his later work all
Borges had to do was continue to deny the self's importance
while now really refraining from personal venture into his
work. However, even though this decision has caused less
controversy than Whitman's analogous choice, it still
remains as full a rejection of reader engagement and the

overall trinity concept as Whitman's was, and it leads

175

generally to a weakening in the complexity and richness
of the creative work that the elder Borges produces.

The Borges of Ficciones and E1 Aleph was a simul-
taneous observer— participant who invited us to share
those same roles. The Borges of the later fiction is
most often a disinterested observer Only, who neither
himself attempts participation nor invites ours. Borges
is now fond of saying that he has finally found his voice,
but ironically his later work is characterized by a loss
of personal voice. Like Whitman, he seems unaware or
unwilling to admit that his later work lacks the richness
or value of his materpieces. How else can one explain
the fact that Borges claims "La intrusa" to be his finest
story or that E1 informe de Brodie and El libro de arena
are his best books of fiction? These books no longer
risk the self or reveal its vulnerability; they are, like
Whitman's later work, more safely conventional.

Walter Ong has claimed that James Joyce is a better
writer than Edgar Allan Poe, in large part because of the
greater personal detachment that Joyce achieved from his

work.21

Ong's thesis, in simplified form, is that the
greater the personal detachment one can achieve the more
likely that one's art will be praiseworthy. Gay Wilson
Allen approves of a similar criterion when he claims that

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "Passage

to India” are among Whitman's best works because they are

 

176

among the few where he achieved this ideal detachment.22

The elder Borges claims that a fine compliment to give
an author would be to say that he wrote in ”an almost
anonymous style."23 However, too much detachment leads
to disengaged art, art with no sense of immediacy or
importance. The ideal that Whitman and Borges had
instead uncovered was that an author should seek to be
"both in and out of the game and watching and wondering
at it,” to be both observer and participant at the same
time, and to invite us to do the same. In their later
work, however, both men refuse to renew this sense of
art as process, which they had come to treat as a
reflection of life itself. As Georges Gusdorf has said,
the genuine effort must never cease because, ”at the
slightest relaxation the new form degenerates into
formula. There comes a moment when the power is lost,
when style seems an empty imitation of itself, a whole
jumble of conditioned responses in which the person is

the Victim rather than the master.”24

Indeed Borges
freely admits the self parody of his later work, and
Wallace Stevens is only one reader who noticed Whitman's
frequent attempts to "write like himself."25 When
Whitman and Borges gave up the renewal of self within
their art they allowed for their work to be devoid of

self and devoid of an active accomplice reader.

While there is no general accord as to exactly when

177

Whitman's poetry began to lose its genuine sense of self
and its active invitation to reader participation,
certainly "Passage to India” is a keynote of the shift,
particularly since it is often regarded as one of
Whitman's last major poems. As Roy Harvey Pearce notes,
Whitman's overall failure as a prophetic poet, and more

specifically his failure in "Passage to India,‘ is largely
a result of his turning away from his main poetic
strengths: ”Whitman fails as a prophetic poet precisely

”27 Pearce

because he was such a powerfully human one.
questions the validity of the human situation in ”Passage
to India.” He believes that one of the poem's final

phrases, ”O daring joy but safe,‘ amounts to a contradic-
tion in terms. Whitman wants the joy of the venture with-
out the genuine risking of self that occurred in such
poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" or ”Song of the Open
Road." Whitman's poetry up to and including his 1860
edition of Leaves of Grass had frequently warned the
reader that the journey was neither guaranteed or safe,
though it was necessary for growth. In "Passage to
India” he seems to be convinced only too ardently that
the real venture is indeed too risky, so that a ”safe"
one must be substituted.

As Carlisle notes of "Passage to India," Whitman

offers no real invitation to others nor seeks relation

or reci rocit ; he ”ex resses merel a va ue, abstract
Y y

 

 

 

178

willingness to suffer because of the joy it will bring.”
Whitman seeks to stack the deck in his favor, to offer
hollow guarantees based on his own inflated heroism, a
heroism totally unrelated to his earlier democratic
ideals or the notion of an I-you dialogue expressed in
earlier poems. Indeed, a study of ”Passage to India"
will reveal that its form and message both run counter
to the trinity concept as expressed in poems such as
”Song of Myself,” "Salut Au Monde" or "Song of the Open
Road."

In conventional poetry the poet expresses himself
to an audience of listeners or readers. This implied
hierarchy of poet to reader was what Whitman tried to
dissolve, especially in his poetry from 1855-1860. Whit-
man's poetry of that time period sought the equal meeting
of the I and the you to form together a composite ”I" to
redirect the meaning and intent of the creative act.

When Whitman turned away frmnthiSpremise he did not
always merely revert to the conventional relationship
of poet to reader. He was so impressed with the power
of the composite "I" that he sought to be that "I"
without any aid. "Passage to India” is the most
direct result of that later attempt. In it Whitman
tries to be the larger—than-life poetic hero he had
known could only be possible with the democratization

of literature. Ignoring that fact, Whitman poses as

28

 

 

 

 

179

"Whitman” the poet—prophet who does not need others in
order to achieve vision and mastery. In earlier poems
Whitman had almost always admitted that if his answers
were not our truths as well then they were "nothing or

V

next to nothing.‘ Now, however, he and his soul,
with the help of God, can find all the answers by
themselves.

Instead of addressing another person in ”Passage to
India,” the only "you" addressed in the poem by Whitman
is his own soul. Indeed, "Passage to India," is, in some
ways, just a rehash of "Salut Au Monde,” except that the
you of the reader has been replaced by the soul, so that
a true dialogue has given way to an actual monologue.
Even the styles of the two poems are similar; ”Passage
to India" has a succession of "I see" and I hear"
passages just like ”Salut Au Monde," but unlike ”Salut
Au Monde" in which "Whitman” was created before our eyes
by the joining of the I and you, in "Passage to India,"
Whitman, with no one's aid claims a vision equal to that
of the "Walt Whitman" of the earlier poem. So the poet
in "Passage to India" ii the inflated, pompous figure
that Whitman is often accused of being. He was always
rescued from that accusation in earlier poems by the
realization that the claims that were made for "Whitman”

were made for us, and indeed potentially by us, in the

process of the poem. However, since ”Passage to India”

180

has no mention of the other, no invitation to the
reader, one can only assume that the claims that Whitman
makes in the poem he makes for himself alone.

When the ”poet" within Whitman's poetry was as
dependent for his existence upon the readers as he was
upon Whitman then all claims made by that poet seemed
potentially reasonable, since in the perfect communication
all sense of limitation is lost. However, the attempt
by Whitman the man to be the poet-prophet by himself is,

in ”Passage to India,‘ a distorted picture of a non—
existent self. The poet in "Passage to India" is seen
as the ”true son of God,” who will make all things

right and understandable for the rest of us. The poet
therefore has in this poem reestablished his position of
superiority over the others; the reader has no role to
play other than that of an impressed listener. Whitman
suggests the propriety of hero worship; in addition to
himself he points to Columbus, ”history‘s type of courage,
action and faith,” and there is no suggestion that we
are all his equals. Whitman approves of the "efforts of
heroes" and of their effects, and is implicitly pleased
that his own heroism, the greatest of all, that of the
poet—prophet, will also, "fill the earth with use and

' If all of this were not undemocratic enough,

beauty.‘
Whitman "tops” it by an out-and-out rejection of the

others. He says to his soul, "We can wait no longer/

181

Let others deprecate, let others weep for sins, remorse,

humiliation./ 0 Soul thou pleasest me, I thee."
”Passage to India" was not the first poem in which

Whitman communed with his soul, but his past doublings

VI

of self had usually led to the conclusion that a kelson
of the creation is love," that sympathy and equality

were the universal truths. In "Passage to India” he
implies that he has waited too long for the others to

come round, and so now he will "go it alone" with God's
guarantee of safe passage. He feigns generosity by

saying that he will suffer for the others (”For others
sake to suffer all”), but this is just a weak Messianic
comparison, another way to glorify the self at the expense
of the others. Unlike Christ, though, Whitman has given
up his bonds to humanity by having no part in the dialogue
of man. God is his answer now, he alone insures perfection
in a way that the others, by definition, could not. Whit-
man has lost both his sense of adventure and of personal
venture, as well as most of his trust in the reciprocity
of relationship. He looks instead for the ”daring joy

but safe," which is one of the sadder lines in American
literature, since it signals the defeat of one of the
literature's most daring experimenters, who has decided

to opt instead for safety and feigned superiority and
equanimity.

Although Whitman's poetry on the whole probably

 

 

 

 

 

182

reached its peak around 1860, from time to time he
produced poems that were not as unrealistically focused

V

as "Passage to India.‘ In ”Prayer of Columbus," although
the idea of full reciprocity has been abondoned, Whitman
does present an honest appraisal of self. The poem is,
from start to finish, an imaginative look into the mind
of Columbus that is simultaneously a grippingly accurate
expression of Whitman's own feelings. Whitman is
certainly, in his own mind, every bit as much the
”batter'd wreck'd old man” of the poem's opening.

Like Columbus he is ”old, poor and paralyzed," and he
believes that his "terminus” is near, though in fact

it was almost twenty years away. When Columbus laments,
”The voyage balked, the course disputed, lost, I yield

my ships to Thee," there can be little doubt that

Whitman is also referring to his own poetic voyage,

which at that time was at perhaps its lowest point, and
the disputes and derision that his innovations had caused.
He has lost faith in the reciprocal potential of his
America. The only faith remaining is a faith in God,
which certainly takes on a different form for Whitman
than it would have for Columbus, but still signals a

search for support from other worldly sources. Whitman's

only hope, which he places on Columbus as well, is ”the

II VI

prophet's thought, the vision of authors in new tounges

I hear saluting me.”

183

Whitman can only hope that he will later be recog—
nized as Columbus was, as a great hero and explorer
whose discoveries were not fully appreciated in their
own time. Since Whitman has in fact received such
recognition the poem has acquired added force since his
death. Neither man received a tangible reward on earth,
and Whitman could only look to the future. Hence in
this poem Whitman's prophecy is accurate, but even so
his use of a persona is along more conventional lines
than in earlier poems, and there is no attempt to
encourage reader participation. Columbus, and by
implication, Whitman, are two unfortunate yet still
larger—than—life heroes, who were virtual martyrs to
their most worthy causes, the physical and spiritual
discoveries of America. They are men that we as readers
are encouraged to admire, but can in no sense be.

Of course Whitman's loss of faith in reciprocity
dates back even further than either "Prayer of Columbus”

or even "Passage to India.‘ "A Noiseless, Patient
Spider," first published in 1863, already reveals
Whitman's loss of faith. A far more tenuous look at the
possibilities of relationship is offered in this
balanced two stanza poem, in which each stanza is made
up of one five line sentence. Whitman compares his

soul's searching to a spider's releasing of its web.

So gossamer like are the potential connections, and so

 

184

uncertain the objects to catch on to, that the spider
must constantly send its web out of itself to have even

a chance to progress on its journey. The web of Whitman's
soul may be, as James Miller suggests, the web of
language,29 which Whitman must ceaselessly venture,
”seeking the spheres to connect them/ Till the gossamer
thread you fling catch somewhere O my soul." This poem
succeeds in part because of its honesty; there is no
hiding behind an impervious ”Whitman” persona, as

occurred in "Passage to India.”

However, in poems such as "Passage to India” or
”Darest Thou 0 My Soul” (from ”Whispers of Heavenly
Death”) Whitman does get caught up in his attempt to
glorify the self by equating that self with an idealized,
inflated figure. As Martin Buber suggests, once the I
has decided to turn its back on the you, ”the ego
occupies himself with my manner, my race, my works, my
genius,”3O which is exactly what Whitman does in much
of his later poetry and prose, both of which deny the
reciprocity of the initial venture. Yet in becoming
so narrowly self-centered Whitman actually presents less
of his real self in his later works, except for infre—
quent glimpses as in ”Prayer of Columbus” or "A Noiseless
Patient Spider."

The shift in Borges' work, away from an investment

of self, and towards an implicit denial of the reader,

185

is not as immediately noticeable as Whitman's because
Borges' initial inclusion of self had been somewhat
understated, and he still ostensibly seems to be inviting
reader participation even in his later stories. Borges
merely claims that his later work is intentionally less

complex and "baroque” and less reliant on "asombro' for
its effect, hence ostensibly more straightforward and
accessible.

Instead, most of the stories of El informe de Brodie
and El libro de arena are merely more conventional and
devoid of any real inclusion of self. The typical
protagonist of the later Borges stories is less likely
to be a man of letters than was the case in Ficciones
or E1 Aleph; Borges identifies far less with these later
characters. Borges is aware that his later work is,
like Whitman's,based on a deliberate decision not to
pursue the writer-reader relationship, and no longer to
allow the self to be vulnerable or approachable. Still
he pretends that his later work is, if anything, more
accessible, and he has even convinced some critics that
such is the case. The real difference is that Borges
in his earlier masterpieces pretended to be just an
observer, but was really simultaneously a participant.

He was ip many of the stories and so by implication were

all the other observers, the other readers of the work.

In later works he continues in the role of observer but

186

quietly slips out of the participant's role, just as
quietly locking us out of a chance for active entry
into the work of art. There can be no I—you dialogue
without the I.

Most of the stories in Borges' later fiction have
little of anything of importance to do with the person
Jorge Luis Borges. He has succeeded in becoming nothing
more than a teller of tales, and ironically, his work
comes closer to failure the more he succeeds in his
attempt to keep himself out of that work. Hence the
really crucial difference between Ficciones and El Aleph
on the one hand and E1 informe de Brodie and El libro de

arena on the other is that Borges is more personally

 

involved in the first two books, and more concerned with
the reader's role as interpreter and participant than
he is in the simpler, more imitative later stories.

While Borges often plays "Borges' for interviewers
who are not really familiar with his work, whether it

be a New York times reporter or a TV interviewer like
Dick Cavett (as we have seen in earlier chapters) there
are interviews with Borges in which he reveals more of
his real self. For example, Fernando Sorrentino believes

that in his Seven Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges

he spoke to the man and not just to his representative

IV

"Borges. Borges himself seems to concur; he claims that

talking to Sorrentino was for him a learning experience:

187

"Fernando Sorrentino knows my work- let us use that
term- better than I do; this is due to the obvious
fact that I have written it only once and he has read
it many times, a fact which makes it less mine than
his... Fernando Sorrentino is, in a word, one of my

"31 Of course one should be

most generous inventors.
wary of any Borges statement, but his respect for
Sorrentino does seem genuine. For example, he admits
to Sorrentino what he has admitted to relatively few
others, that he knows that Ficciones and El Aleph are
superior to El informe de Brodie. When Sorrentino
begins to complain about the lack of complexity in
El informe de Brodie Borges hands him his standard

”Borges' line, explaining that he has tired of dealing
with labyrinths and mirrors and has decided instead to
write more direct stories. However, this sort of answer,

which would satisfy one of Borges less generous or

VV'

inventors,

well-informed leaves Sorrentino unconvinced.

He insists that the earlier stories are far superior

and that he still much prefers them to anything in

E1 informe de Brodie. Borges then admits that, ”it is
only logical for what I am writing now to be inferior

to what I wrote earlier."32 Borges cannot bring himself
to try further to deceive a true accomplice reader, even
though most others will remain fair game to the "Borges”

treatment .

188

Actually, Borges has explained, perhaps inadver—
tently, why El informe de Brodie and El libro de arena
do not measure up to his earlier works. In a book enti-
tled Borges on Writing, an entire section of the book is
devoted to how Borges came to compose the story ”El otro
duelo” (”The Other Duel”) from E1 informe de Brodie.33
Towards the end of Borges on Writing though, Borges speaks
in a more general way about literature, and implicitly
denigrates the kind of story typified by ”El otro duelo”
itself: "Literature is not a mere juggling of words;
were it not for the deep inner feeling literature would
be no more than a game, and we all know that it can be

much more than that."34

What ”deep inner feeling" can
possibly be behind the telling of ”E1 otro duelo,” a
story of two ignorant, bloodthirsty simpletons who
participate in an inane, brutal final competition by
seeing who can run farther after they have both had their
throats slit by their executioners? Borges' only
interest here can be in the actual telling of the story
itself; no venture of self, no ”deep inner feeling” seems
possible for writer or reader. The same sort of criticism
can be leveled at another story from Brodie "La intrusa,"
(”The Intruder”) which Borges also speaks highly of.
Where is Borges the individual in this tale of two

heartless and cruel brothers who settle a potential

conflict between them when one of them decides to murder

189

the woman who had inadvertently come between them?
Neither Borges nor very many of his readers can be
located anywhere in that story either. With no "deep
inner feeling" then, by Borges' own definition, these

stories seem to be "no more than a game.‘ Generally the
stories of El informe de Brodie and El libro de arena
are readable and interesting, but they give one the

' instead of emanations

feeling of being "just stories,’
of life that are close to both writer and reader.

The venture of self in Borges' earlier work is
apparent to any discerning reader, and the pain of the
uncertain years in which Borges composed these master-
works also comes through clearly. Obviously, stories
such as ”E1 Aleph,” "El Zahir,” and ”El sur" all have
clear autobiographical connections. Stories such as
"Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, ””Examen de la obra
de Herbert Quain," ”Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius," and ”El
acercamiento a Almotasim” all deal with fictional
authors and/or books that Borges has dreamed up himself,
but has decided to present as the work of others so that
his readers can share more completely in the actual

creation of the work of art. Even stories with no

apparent direct connection to Borges, such as "Funes e1

”Las ruinas circulares, "La muerte y la

/
and ”La casa de Asterion

I
autobiographical ties. Rodriguez Monegal, for example,

memorioso,

/ .
brujula,’ have very pOignant

190

has this to say, ”Like the Minotaur in "La casa de
Asterion, Georgie had no idea of his uniqueness."35
Such a connection is not mere fancy on Rodriguez Monegal's
part; Borges himself has claimed that this story arose,

”36

"from feeling lonesome, from feeling useless, so that

it has come to be seen as a "labyrinth of his inner
self."37

One of Borges' great strengths in his two masterful
collections was the presentation of characters like
Asterioh, or Juan Dahlmann, Eric Lonnrot or Tzinacah, or
even "Borges" himself, who all seemed so distinct but
who were all connected to each other by virtue of all
having some sort of vital connection to a ”deep inner
feeling" that Borges, by means of these characters,
could share directly with his audience. Only in Borges'
later work does he retreat almost exclusively into his

V

character or narrator ”Borges,’ and no longer concern
himself with a venturing of self in his work.

One of the reasons that the later Borges frequently
points out Whitman's inability to pass himself off as

"Whitman"38

is precisely because he was concerned about
how successful he himself would be in a similar attempt
to lose the self behind the well established persona,
while simultaneously changing the rules by which that

persona could come into existence. In his later work

Borges feigns a greater concern for directness even while

 

 

 

 

191

his real self seeks complete escape from detection or
confrontation both in and out of his work,
The preface to El informe de Brodie purports to map

out Borges' new approach to fiction:

I have tried, I don't know with what degree of
success, to write direct stories. I do not
dare affirm that they are simple; there isn't
on this earth a single page, a single letter
that is, since all postulate the universe

whose most notorious attribute is complexity....
I've rejected the surprises of a baroque style
and of those that furnish an unexpected ending.
I have prefered, in short, the preparation of
an expectancy over that of a surprise. For
many years I believed it would be allowed for
me to achieve a good page by means of variations
and novelties; now having completed my
seventieth year, I believe that I have found

my voice.

Borges claims that he wants to write ”direct stories,"
but then goes on to say that he does not really believe
in directness or simplicity. Implicitly, Borges is admit-
ting that he does not fully believe in what he is now
attempting, a simple or conventional story. He is
suggesting that such narratives may rest upon false
assumptionsaboutboth life and art. In fact, Borges
claims to pattern El informe de Brodie on Kipling and
El libro de arena on H. G. Wells; instead of surpassing
their efforts, as he had frequently done in the past, he
now seems satisfied with merely imitating them. Borges
also pretends that his rejection of a ”baroque” style

and surprise endings has freed him from too much reliance

on "variations and novelties.” However, admirers of

 

 

 

192

Ficciones and El Aleph remember that the surprises in
those stories were never merely tricks employed for shock
value. Even in a story such as "El muerto," (”The Dead
Man”) about a ”compadrito," Benjamin Otalora, who is not
a Borges type, the shock he receives before he is killed
is not merely a trick because it helps demonstrate an
important Borgesian concept. Even when we think we are
in control, as Otalora did, we may in fact be totally
manipulated by others. This theme is repeated in poems
such as ”El golem” and ”Ajedrez” and in the story "Las

ruinas circulares."

Borges' point, that there is never
really any way to be sure of who is controlling whom, who
is the creator and who the created, reverberates not only
in these stories and poems, but in his overall approach
to reader participation. So even a story such as ”El
muerto" helps to advance his overall aesthetic values,
while it is simultaneously an entertaining and surprising
narrative.

Virtually all of the surprise endings of Ficciones
and El Aleph serve some sort of additional aesthetic or
philosophical purpose. Borges uses ”asombro” to jolt
his readers into a realization of the world's complexity,
and to invite us to take on the role of skeptical

' later

observer-participant along with him. So Borges
attempt to disparage the aims of his earlier style is

really too simplistic to be convincing. His claim to be

193

writing more direct and accessible stories is really a
denial of his faith in the reader's ability to contribute
his or her part. ”La resignacioh de ser Borges," his
supposed acceptance of being who he really is, is really
a resignation of his responsibility as a writer to
present the self for the purposes of examination and
dialogue. He has decided instead to let "Borges" do all
of the talking.

Actually, in terms of outward style only, Borges'
later stories do not differ much from his earlier ones,
but as Gusdorf noted, any relaxation of genuine effort
will cause the form to degenerate into formula. A
close inspection of the narrative style or point of
view in the two later books reveals that again we are
faced with no omniscient third person narrators, but
instead with an array of first person narrators who tell
stories that they were told by others, or have read, or

that happened to them in the distant past.39

So again
Borges gives himself the rights of a reader, he again
suggests that he is no more involved in these stories
than we are, except that now that assertion is closer
to the truth. Neither Borges nor his readers have a
very personal stake in most of these stories.

Borges used the device of the unreliable or second

hand narrator to mask his participation or personal

stake enough to invite the reader's own active

194

participation. The suggestion was always that the work
belonged at least as much to the reader as to the writer.
In the later stories the point of View employed seems

only to serve to distance us from the stories, not to
encourage a confusion between the world of fact and fiction
or to give us a sense of complexity or universality. Both
author and reader seem to be restricted to the role of
spectator, and we do not care very inuch about most of

the participants.

Just as ”Passage to India” was, in some ways, a
weaker rendition of ”Salut Au Monde,” "El indigno" ("The
Unworthy One”) is partly a rehash of ”La forma de la
espada" (”The Shape of the Sword”) and ”El otro duelo”
("The Other Duel”) of ”Los tedlogos” (”The Theologians").
”Los tedlogos" is a story of two theologians and rivals
so caught up in their religious differences that one of
them ends up having the other burned at the stake as a
heretic. The surprise ending reveals that upon the

second man's death, also by fire, to God he and his

rival ”formed but one person.‘ Of course such a
surprise serves the additional purpose of having us
recognize that even the most apparent opposites can be
fundamentally indistinguishable, or that one person
always needs the other for completion. In either case,

the story again serves the additional aesthetic and

philosophical aims; the surprise is not merely for the

195

surprise's sake. "El otro duelo'l on the other hand,
while also a story about two arch rivals (who are clearly
very similar in their brutishness and their macho valor)
does not seem to suggest anything but that these two men
are curiosities whose fate is a kind of grim entertainment,
both for us as readers, and for the men who placed wagers
on their death race. Borges can have no personal stake
in the lives of these men; they seem more foreign to him
and to us then do the theologians. These two arch

rivals do not invite reflection or self-analysis, their
story cannot be expected to live on in the readers'
minds. Borges' only connection to the story is in its
telling, and our's only in being the audience to its
narration.

In "La forma de la espada” a trick story is redeemed
from mere trickery by the fact that the coward who has
told the story from the hero's standpoint has done so
convincingly enough to suggest that, "I am the others,
all men are the same man." In "El indigno" the traitor,
the "unworthy one,” Santiago Fischbein, tells his own
story with no attempt to hide or confuse his role as
traitor. In some ways, though, Santiago Fischbein does
come a little closer to Borges' self than most of the
other characters in El informe de Brodie, especially in
these lines: "We all resemble the image others have of

us. I felt the contempt of the people so I despised

196

myself. At that time it was important to be valiant
and I knew myself a coward. Women intimidated me; I felt
the intimate embarrassment of my fearful chastity. I

I

had no friends my own age.‘ These lines could have as
easily arisen from Borges' adolescence as from Fischbein's;
both men grew up in an outer world of compadritos while
being raised in a very distinct home environment. So

"El indigno has some of the elements of earlier

Borges stories. ”Borges” is recounting a story that

was supposedly told to him years before by Fischbein, a

story he now recalls on the occasion of Fischbeins's

death. Fischbein seems quite unlike Borges, but is in

some ways a Borges type, an elucidator of the Borges self.
However, there is one distinction; Borges makes no

attempt in "El indigno” to connect Fischbein's actions

to the rest of humanity. Most readers probably do not

empathize with a man who would deliberately betray the

one person who had trusted him and given him respect.

We cannot put ourselves in Fischbein's shoes because

we are not invited to do so. Ferrari, the man betrayed,

has no connection or relation to Fischbein; at no time

in this story do we feel that one man can be all men,

that Fischbein and Ferrari could be related or trade

places. If Fischbein is meant to stand for Borges in

any way it is for a Borges so impressed by his own sense

of unworthiness that he believes now only in the lack of

197

relation between himself and others. Just as Whitman
had seen himself as the separate figure aligned to the
hero Columbus, Borges may be aligning himself here with
the traitor Fischbein. He prefers to remain the unworthy
one, with no intimation that the betrayer and betrayed
are one and the same man. One man is merely one man;
as Borges had poignantly admitted at the end of ”Nueva
refutacion del tiempo," "unfortunately, I am Borges."
So even in stories in which the Borges self still makes
an appearance there is no longer any attempt to connect
or identify that self with all the others.

The stories in El libro de arena are, if anything,
even less committed than those of El informe de Brodie.
In El informe de Brodie the reader senses that Borges
has yet to commit himself entirely to the abandonment
of his old ideals. Hence in a story such as "Guayaquil,“
which deals with an old Borges favorite, the eternal
return, the narrator, in typically Borgesian fashion,
suggests that the only way to understand his situation
is by becoming an observer as well as a participant:
"Also to confess a deed is to cease being the subject
to become a witness, to be someone who observes and who
narrates and who no longer acted." In these lines
Borges points to a typical narrative method of his
finest stories, using "Borges” as a way to get the

distance of an observer from his own feelings and actions,

 

 

 

198

and simultaneously letting us do the same thing. So in
stories such as "Guayaquil” or ”E1 indigno" aspects of
the intricacies of point of view and plot that Borges
had once handled so adroitly do partially reappear. In
El libro de arena (The Book of Sand) the abandonment of
the former style seems more complete. Borges' own
comments on these stories in the afterword to the book
or in interviews, reveal his lack of close relation to
them. In speaking of the story "Ulrica" (”Ulrike")

for example, he claims that the theme of love is normally
absent from his prose, with "Ulrica" being the only
exception. Readers of ”El Aleph," however, know that
Beatriz Viterbo is a much more realistic love interest
than the Poeish heroine Ulrica. The story "There Are
More Things" is an imitation of sorts of the work of
Lovecraft, who is, as Borges tells us in the afterword,
"a writer who I've always judged to be an involuntary

parodist of Poe.‘ When Borges then goes on to say

that ”There Are More Things” is the "lamentable fruit”

of his attempt to write like Lovecraft, he is less guilty
of false modesty than is usually the case. Borges is

so desirous of escaping the concerns of the self in

this volume that his virtual parody of Poe ("Ulrica") is

insufficient; he must also parody a parodist of Poe in

"There Are More Things."

 

 

199

Even a few of the more interesting stories in the

IV

collection such as "El otro” or E1 congreso do not ring

entirely true. In ”El otro” ("The Other”) Borges
literally talks to himself, which is, as we remember
from Mead, the first step in really incorporating the
others. However, in "El otro” Borges is satisfied to
not go beyond the first step, thereby settling for
monologue. ”El congreso" (”The Congress") is, as

Borges explains, a story in which there is a project,

”so vast that it becomes confused in the end with the
cosmos itself, and with the length of all days.”

Borges admits that the ending of the story is something
he himself has never experienced: ”I have never achieved
a similar revelation, I have tried to dream one.” He
further explains to Sorrentino that his purpose in the
story "was to narrate something in which I didn't fully
believe to see how it would turn out.”40 No author
should be faulted for experimentation, but Borges'
latest experiments are far more conventional and
cautious than his earlier ones. The imitations of
Stevenson, Kafka, Chesterton, Kipling, Poe, Lovecraft and
Wells that appear in his later fiction are not nearly

as effective as his earlier stories that were influenced
by these men but never directly derived from their work.
El libro de arena too often opts for sensational or

unlikely effects in place of the intricate metaphysical

200

miracles of the earlier stories. "Borges” has taken
over more and more, to the virtual exclusion of Borges
and the reader.

Borges has expressed his admiration for the oral
folk tale because in such a story there is constant
revision; each successive teller of the tale will replace,
edit or delete information until the tale is virtually

perfect.41

In this statement Borges expresses his old
confidence that each reader who can also be an inter-
preter or creator of the work will successively enrich
that work. In Ficciones and El Aleph Borges constantly
tried to present tales with so many ”forking paths” so
many Herbert Quain—like ”statements" that the readers
could enjoy much of the freedom of the folk tale while
getting a genuine authorial sense of self within the
work. In El informe de Brodie and El libro de arena
there seems to be far less opportunity for reworking any
of the material, far less chance that these stories

will live on in the imaginations of the readers. The
style may be less baroque, but it is also less inviting,
less open to interpretation. What really is left to the
imagination in ”La intrusa" or "Juan Muraha" or ”E1

otro duelo” or "Ulrica” or "E1 soborno”? Borges has left
himself out for the most part, so that the opportunity

for dialogue is no longer present. By doing so he has

denied his earlier trinity of self, reader and persona,

201

even as his model for the procedure, Walt Whitman,
denied them in his old age. We are at least fortunate
that Borges made no attempt to revise his earlier
stories as Whitman did with so many of his poems; Borges
has at least left his masterpieces intact, masterpieces
in which the trinity really lives, and in which the
blueprints for a new kind of reader response literature
exist. These blueprints have indeed been useful to a
new generation of both North and South American writers.
Borges is no more successful than Whitman in his
attempt to keep his real self out of his art and still
produce first—rate literature. The larger-than-life
character of Whitman's poetry and the universalized

reader-narrator of Borges fiction do not function
without an infusion of self and an invitation by example
and by design to the reader to also add his or her part
to the composite. Borges and Whitman did not produce
all of their best work while utilizing the trinity
concept, nor is all of their work after they abandoned
it of inferior quality, but for both writers it was

an extremely important guiding principle in much of
their approach to art during the years in which they
produced the bulk of their finest work. No matter

what they later did to mask the real self behind a

shallower version of persona, their works during their

most productive periods still stand as examples of the

202

theory of the trinity elaborated perhaps to its fullest
potential. Both men have acted out the role of literary
guru in later life, but in their earlier works they had
already left much of their impact as human writers in
search of an equally human audience.

It remains for us as readers today to rescue these
human writers from ”both parody and apotheosis,” and to
create simultaneously with them the unlimited vision and
insight that is only possible on the open road, or in
the garden of forking paths. Even now these roads can
lead to the dialogue of equals, and to the power and
vision promised from both life and art within the

uncertain and risk-filled venture of the search for the

perfect communication.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

1 William Carlos Williams, "An Essay on Leaves of

Gpass in Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essays,
p. l47.

2 Allen, The Solitary Singer, p. 385.
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (V.l), p. 55.

Ibid, p. 392.

 

3
4
5 Traubel, (V2) p. 236.
6

See Richard Chase, ”Go Befores and Embryons," in
Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years Later.

7 Traubel, (v2) p. 52.

8 Kaplan, pp. 39—40.

9 Traubel, (V1) p. 339.

10 From Harold Jaffe's introduction to Bucke's
Walt Whitman, p. 5.

11 Edward H. Miller, A Century of Whitman Criticism,
p. xxv.
12

Fieldler, ”Images of Walt Whitman," in Leaves of
Grass One Hundred Years Later, p. 57.

13 See Harvey O'Higgins, ”Alias Walt Whitman,"

Har ers (May, 1929) 698-707, for an especially virulent
attack on Whitman as poseur. Higgins attempts to unearth

the real Walt Whitman, who was, "neither sensual nor
rough and rugged or truly health or lusty or even very
masculine. He was in love with himself..." p. 704.

14 Esther Shepard, Walt Whitman's Pose, as quoted
in Whitman The Poet Materials For Study, p. 160.

203

 

 

 

 

204

 

15 Fieldler, ”Images of Walt Whitman,” p. 72.
16 Ibid, p. 64.
17

Borges, "Simply a Man of Letters," p. 12.
w /
18 "La ya avanzada edad me ha ensenado la resignacion
de ser Borges.” ("My now advanced years have taught me the
resignation of being Borges."), from the prologue to E1
informe de Brodie, p. 12.

19 Rodriguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary
Biography. p. 440.

I

20 Rodriguez Monegal notes that many of the essays
in Otras In uisiciones (Other In uisitions) are about
authors such as Quevedo, Hawt orne, Whitman, and
Chesterton, and these essays, “all attempt to discover
the actual writer under the mask or persona each of
these writers created." Yet what truly mattered,
"what truly concerned Borges, was the creation of
the persona,” p. 422.

21 Ong, The Barbarian Within, p. 56.

22 Allen, The Solitar Sin er, p. 402, "Whitman him-
self was never to realize that when he was truly inspired
as in his great elegy he was impersonal, timeless,
universal."

23 As quoted in Fernando Sorrentino, Seven Conversa—
tions With Jor e Luis Bor es, (translated 5y Clark M.
Zlotchew), (Troy, New YorE: The Whitston Publishing Co.,
1982) p. 124.

24

Gusdorf, Speaking, p. 75.

25 See Sorrentino, p. 13, and see the Wallace Stevens

letter that appears in A Century of Whitman Criticism.

26 It has already been noted that Malcolm Cowley

prefers the 1855 Leaves of Grass and that Roy Harvey
Pearce prefers the I860 edition. However, Howard J.

Waskow in his book, Whitman, Ex lorations in Form
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I966) claims

that even "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," is
still a poem of "indirection” which requires ”intellectual

alertness and imaginative faith on the part of its
readers,” p. 222.

205

27 Pearce, "Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860,"
in Whitman A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 39.

 

28 Carlisle, p. 173.

29 James Miller Jr., Word, Self, Realit : The
Rhetoric of Ima ination (New York: Harper and Row,

p. .

30 Buber, p. 114.

31 Sorrentino, p. xiii.

32 Ibid, p. 39.

33

See, Bor es on Writin , edited by Norman Thomas
di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern and Frank McShane (New York:
E. P. Dutton and Co., 1973).

34 Ibid, p. 164.

 

35 Rodriguez Monegal, p. 19. Later on Rodriguez
Monegal says of "Funes e1 memorioso,” (”Funes the Mem-
orious") ”as a person Ireneo Funes is another of those
characters through which Borges reveals tantalizing
fragments of himself” p. 383.

 

 

36 Ibid, p. 45.
37 Ibid, p. 47.
38

/ /
See ”Valer como Simbolo,"
Y

in Otras In uisiciones
or "Walt Whitman, Man and Myth," in Critical Inquiry 4
(June 1975) 707-717.

39 A brief look at any of the stories of either book
will demonstrate that this is the case. For example, in
E1 informe de Brodie, "El encuentro" ("The Encounter”) is
told By an adult from his recollections of something that
occurred when he was a child of ten. "El otro duelo” and
"La intrusa” are both stories which were transmitted
orally to the present narrator by other sources. "Juan
Murana" is supposedly told to Borges even as it is relayed
to us by an old acquaintance of Borges who is telling the
story to Borges to show him how real street toughs and
gauchos acted. "E1 informe de Brodie" reverts back to
the device of an uncovered manuscript which is missing
its first page.

Most of the stories in El libro de arena follow a
similar pattern. "La secta de los treinta” ("The Sect

206

of the Thirty") is supposedly based on a fourth century

manuscript recently recovered. "Avelino Arredondo" is
told in a fairly straightforward third person narrative
style only to end with the line: "That's how it will

have happened, although in a more complex fashion; that's
how I can imagine it to have happened.") So again, most
of the stories of these two books resemble, in their
basic narrative set-up, the earlier stories of Ficciones

and El Aleph.

4O Sorrentino, p. 39.

41 Ibid, p. 5.

 

Conclusion

Part of the ultimate fascination of making the
connection between Walt Whitman and Jorge Luis Borges
is in overcoming the ostensible differences between the
two authors, differences that only serve to make the
connection all the more intriguing. Borges' relation
to Whitman seems taken from right out of a Borges short
story. The two characters who seem so distinct turn
out to be two sides of the same coin, or as Borges

/
phrases it in ”Los teologos, ”They formed but one

person."

Borges' adaptations of Whitman's trinity
concept serve not only to enrich his own art, but also
to help us see with much greater clarity how that
concept informed much of Whitman's finest work. Whether
or not Borges was ever consciously imitating Whitman is

fairly unimportant; Borges frequently stated admiration
for Whitman's great experiment and his subsequent
utilization of the same general format in his own fiction
are reasons enough to conclude that Borges' debts to
Whitman extend well beyond a few of his early poems.
Borges' typical modesty, more genuine than we can

perhaps believe, may have prevented him from even admit—

ting to himself that so much of his work is in the

207

 

208

Whitmanic tradition, for he may believe himself unworthy
of such a connection. However, Borges' masterful stories
and their subsequent influence on much of contemporary
fiction are proof enough that he has in fact merited his
role as disseminator of the trinity concept that he
inherited from Whitman. As he himself explained during
his talk at Michigan State in 1976, what he has done with
the trinity has been "quite different, maybe as good

but quite different." Ultimately, the quality of the
work that Borges has produced with Whitman's trinity

at work stands out far more than the philosophical
differences between the two men. Borges' work, like
Whitman's, allows for a universality that makes both
men's work live beyond their respective settings of
place and time. Every careful reader of Whitman or
Borges is potentially as native to their works as they
are, since each reader is invited to be an active
participant and bring his or her own perspective to the
work.

The long range effects of both men's work bring to
mind an interesting point about the democratization of
literature. A lack of complexity does not necessarily
lead to a literature that is more truly accessible.

When Whitman and Borges decide in their respective works
to abandon the intricate workings of the trinity, their

respective poetry and fiction becomes less complex, but

209

simultaneously less open to interpretation and creativity
on the reader's part, hence less accessible to genuine
reader participation. Borges may have recognized earlier
than Whitman that opening up one's literature to the
collaboration of all does not necessarily mean that

large numbers of active readers will present themselves.
Cortazar would later more explicitly, if chauvinistically,
define the reader willing to participate as a ”macho”
reader, one willing to work harder and be less certain
than the conventional reader. The democratization of
literature, the conscious attempt to make literature a
truly reciprocal art, counts on a kind of spiritual
democracy and honest reciprocity that may be as uncommon
as any genuine human relationship, no matter how many
opportunities are afforded to the readers. The real
democratization of literature is a democratization of
intent, opening literature up to the potential partici-
pation of all readers; it does not consist of trying

to write down to the lowest common denominator. The
commitment necessary to genuine reciprocity is something
that Whitman and Borges themselves retreated from later
in life. Since this is so, one should hardly expect

mass audience response as a requisite for even the most
legitimately democratic literature. Many may indeed be
called, but few choose to be chosen.

Though the connection between Whitman and Borges

210

should help elucidate the work of both men, ironically
Whitman's status in Latin America, which is already
considerable, may be open to a new branch of thought
entirely. Whitman, as Borges himself notes in his book
on American literature, is viewed as having his greatest
influence on the "so called civic poetry or poetry of
involvement.”1 Names such as Martf, Garcia Lorca and
especially Neruda are thought of when speaking of Whitman
in Hispanic circles, just as the names of Sandburg or
Ginsberg come to mind in this country. Whitman's own
negations of himself as "artist,” his insistence that
his works should never be thought of as mere ”literary
performance," have helped virtually to guarantee that
his influence would fall most on the rugged, political
and "honest” poetry of this century. Whitman's role as
literary theorist or innovator has been pushed to

the background, except for his innovations in verse

form and subject matter, in part by his own rejection
of the role.

However, Borges has understood Whitman's intelli-
gent, daring and often successful experiments and has
found Whitman's theories coherent enough to utilize them
as a basis for some of his own most carefully worked
out theories and practices within his fiction. If we

concur with the many accolades that Borges has received

as an innovator throughout the world, and if we also admit

211

that Whitman was a real and fairly important influence

on much of Borges'

best work, then we can only conclude
that Whitman has been a more important and influential
literary theorist than umst of us may have imagined
before.

Within this country, perhaps many of Whitman's poems,
including masterpieces such as ”Song of Myself” or

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,‘ or neglected poems such as
”Salut Au Monde" or ”A Song for Occupations” should be
reevaluated with the trinity concept in mind. Though
Whitman later backed away from a full commitment of
self in his writing, he never really gave up on the
possibility that future readers might start to ”catch
on" to what he had really been attempting to do. This
hopeful glance at posterity is evident in ”Prayer of

' in his conversations with Traubel, and in

Columbus,’
his wistful wish spokentx>Edward Carpenter that perhaps
in fact he had ”planted the seed.”2 Certainly if Borges
could understand and utilize Whitman's great experimental
construct, it is perhaps time for us also to give serious
consideration to it.

Pablo Neruda and Borges are often viewed as very
distinct writers, in large part because of their politi—
cal differences. Whitman's clear influence on Neruda

would almost seem to exclude him from any important

influence on Borges. However, after all of this

212

V

discussion of Whitman and "Whitman,' a way of seeing
Whitman's just influence on both men is certainly
facilitated. It seems clear that Neruda was more

VV

influenced by "Whitman, the bardic voice, the spiritual
democrat, the poet of unlimited vista and unlimited hope
and sympathy for the downtrodden. Borges has instead
been a disciple of Whitman, the careful artist who
attempted to bring a new sort of democracy to literature
by including the reader actively into the work of art

by means of that larger—than—life composite character,
who in fact needs both author and audience input to be
brought to life. Whitman's influence on two very
different directions in Latin American literature is
therefore no more difficult to understand, no more
complex, than the very complexity of his experiment
itself.

Both Whitman and Borges saw a vital connection
between art and life. Both men wanted us to be confused,
to stop making easy distinctions between the literal
and literary worlds. Ultimately, even their final with-
drawals of self are at least a further definition of
that confusion, a final example of how difficult it is
to tell the man from his creation. To create, to
participate, to venture the self, to grow with and through

others, this is the message both men present, albeit in

such vividly distinct ways. Borges learned from Whitman

 

213

an approach to life as well as to art, or an approach to
art that was an approach, an attempt, a venture into life.
All real living may indeed be meeting, and the artist must
discover a way to open that meeting, to extend that invi—

tation, to as many other potential accomplices as possible.

 

 

 

 

NOTES FOR CONCLUSION

Jorge Luis Borges and Esther Zemborain de Torres,
An Introduction to American Literature, p. 5.

2 Carpenter, Days With Walt Whitman, p. 7.

214

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