J.L. Borges arrived to his 1967 lecture at Harvard armed with only “perplexities” and “doubts.” This is reassuring. At this point, completely blind, extemporaneously riffing on a lifetime of reading, poems rumbling out of his memory, Borges knows only that he does not know what it is poetry is, what it does, how it does this, how best to go about it, or why it was the compulsion of his life. Again, reassuring.
Reading someone posessing certainty borders on satire (in this case I think it may not border at all). Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” details the structured methodology behind the creation of “The Raven.” He says the poem began with a length in mind, optimized for form and function at 100 lines, then a refrain form chosen for the value implied by its long tradition. The word “Nevermore” was chosen because of the “sonorous” tone to its long O vowel, and R because it is the most “producible.” The whole poem was supposedly constructed like this: “the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”
He follows this with the punchline: “Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstance- or say the necessity- which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.” Poe was setting out to make a popular work because he was broke. The essay is a joke, a pretend set of instructions to go about making an instant success. His poetic theory — that art is created without intuition but by determined logics rigorously followed by the artist — would, by consequence, imply that any individual working with the same set of goals should be able to compose an identical poem by this method.
I’m reminded of Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In it, our Menard (a great fan of Poe, according to his letters) sets out to write the Don Quixote. Not to copy it, but to write it, identically, originally, again. With vague memories of the book leftover from childhood readings that swim in his mind like (he suggests) a vision of a yet unwritten work, Menard sets about emulating Cervantes to the best of his ability. His goal is to establish the sets of circumstances and goals that would allow him to write the Quixote, again, exactly as it reads in the original.
“The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes.”
Here the logics are deterministic, analogical to the physical sense of the word. By becoming the man, Menard hopes, one can produce the art. The words of Don Quixote are a necessary consequence of the alchemy of the individual that was Miguel de Cervantes. We see a reversal of Poe’s idea. The artist is key, the independent variable, but the works still remain entirely determined. In the reality of “Pierre Menard,” a reductive logic still governs the process.
Borges turns the story toward a thought experiment that destabilizes the artifice of suspicious biographical readings. The narrator marvels at the new meanings of the identical words of the Quixote. He quotes the same passage twice:
“… Truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.”
The first he attributes to Cervantes, with analysis: “this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history.” The second he attributes to Menard, with far more rapt analysis: “History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding.” One of the authors of these identical works wrote the words as philosopher within a context of a range of contemporary thinkers — the other was a “layman” writing in the 16th century. Really what Borges does with the story is mock the unnuanced views exemplified by Poe on one hand and the contextualizers on the other. It’s equally ridiculous to believe in a rigid and wholly determined logic to the production of art, and a meaning to art that is determined entirely by the context and biographies of the artist.
Roland Barthes, whose vast output curiously does not once mention J.L. Borges, killed the author in order to liberate the text. Writing enters into an endless web of signs that does not converge on a single meaning. It’s endlessly generative. The author does not have a final authority on what his own work means — and this, Barthes says, is “countertheological”: “to refuse to halt meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law. We land on the ultimate privileging of the many readers as opposed to the single writer.
So it seems all three have killed the author. Poe’s author is dead by determinist logic, rendered obsolete; Borges’ Cervantes was dead but reborn in Menard whose context in its entirety granted Quixote new meaning; and Barthes’ author is dead by essay title. But I feel the author is very much alive. The author is alive and reaching out for truths beyond the immanent. In the same lecture, Borges recalls Bernard Shaw’s response when he was asked whether the Holy Ghost wrote the Bible: “I think the Holy Ghost has written not only the Bible, but all books.” I, like Borges immediate comment, would qualify this statement a bit: “all books worth reading, I suppose.”
Authors are presented with the raw materials of their world. They find themselves inspired (a word which can only be truly theological) to use these materials to reveal the workings of God in Man, the shiftings of Love among their characters, or what it would be like to be partially or wholly separate from it, revealing the positive by the negative. Barthes calls the critic not to a unity found in the author but a unity found in the reader — but I avoid looking for unity at all. I also avoid finality, as Barthes desires. Instead, I look for harmony. The harmony the author hears around them that slips melodiously through their pen, and the harmony emergent in the reader as their mind joins the arrangement on the page. The author has things to say, the reader has things to see, and both — being human — can hear, taste, smell the truths infinite within and around them.
The second movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major begins with a gently lilting piano prelude that finds its way to a simple rising melody that lodges itself in the hearts of any who hear it. Ravel is said to have been struck with this melody on a train and spent the months after working out the vast arrangement to support it. Where did the melody come from? The Holy Ghost, I’d say (at least, any of the ones worth listening to). Composition — which seems to me inherently more mysterious in its unlimited abstraction than literature — is born of the same fundamental mystery of creativity. In seeking reduction, chiseling away at claims of intuition, burrowing down toward the very heart of poetry in diction or music in melody, one finds not the infintessimally small units of art, not the most finite of finite, but the infinite, the resonance, there as in all things.