Hotel Irrealismo discussion

Next up for discussion is Borges's timeless classic, The Immortal.

Thanks, Paul. It does make sense to do this story by story.

Felt like I had to dust off all this desert sand after reading this story.

Since it is a classic we have to accept that only an endless discussion can do it justice. In other words, we would have to be immortal to accomplish a complete discussion. But . . . in the story, the immortals lost themselves to silence, an extinction of culture. Do we have to die to maintain a literary tradition?

Well, I've re-read The Immortal now. Here are a few initial impressions:

I enjoyed this more than last time I read it. Does the fact I enjoyed it less than many other stories of his have anything to do with the translation? This one is by a group of translators, headed by Irby and Yates. I prefer the team under Kerrigan's editorship. The 1962 translation dichotomy is an interesting issue we could talk about at a later date...

On a simple level, it's a morality tale - be careful what you wish for... Immortality would be no fun, of course. It seems to me, the vision is essentially existentialist. The immortals have infinite time to contemplate the meaningless of existence and consequently hanker after mortality.

Commonality with Calvino is clear to see. There's the humour - the immortals are little grey men who lie about all day doing nothing. I also found amusing the mention of Harald Hardrada who "conquered six feet of English soil, or a bit more". There's the undermining of the veracity of the text - the obsession with falsehood. There are lots of mind bending ideas - e.g., by having all of time to yourself, you become everyone else and hence nothing. The city of the immortals could have come straight out of Invisible Cities.

There's a reference to the infinite monkey theorem in relation to the works of Homer. Rufus notes that he would eventually compose The Iliad if he had forever to do so. Borges was interested in this idea and wrote an essay called The Total Library.

There are numerous other references that one could contemplate for all eternity. Why do the immortals eat serpents? Why do they raze the original city? Is there any significance to the particular events chosen from 1066, 1638 and 1714? Does the Giambattista referred to exist, etc., etc.? There's that long list of references in the postscript. A lovely detail is that it's Joseph Cartaphilus, the immortal Wandering Jew, who gives the text to the Princess of Lucinge. He is a little grey man who perishes at sea and so brings us full circle. The latter was apparently one of Cecil Beaton's muses!

Good to see labyrinths making their customary appearance. I found this section generating many mental images. Much of the piece is evocative in this way. The sketch of the city had a similar effect for me.

As ever, it's all pretty much written in shorthand. The ideas hinted at here could easily be turned into a novel, an exercise that was apparently of no interest to Borges. Again, there's that similarity to Calvino, a writer whose longer works actually comprised shorter pieces fused together.

Good summary.

I don't know why they're eating serpents, either, but it's a very potent image. Serpents are associated with numerous ideas and images; I wonder about the image of the serpent eating its tail.

I interpret the razing and rebuilding of the city in a semiotic way (well, I think I can call what I'm thinking semiotic; I'm not really that interested in semiotics). Cities are complicated creatures, only partially functional. Of course, there is commerce, industry, administration, etc. But they are also sites of display. Displays of political power, cultural dominance (esp for capital cities), and just plain fun. Cities (among other things) represent political and cultural identity. It's a powerful image not just to raze an embodiment of a certain order but to replace it with a sign of nothingness and chaos. That's really killing it and burying it.

And then you can lie around all day and let a bird build a nest on your chest.

The descent and wandering in the underground labyrinth made me think of an initiation ritual. We are being initiated into: what?

Borges has revisited the themes of (im)mortality and time in other stories and essays. He has given us much to think about. Although, the form may be 'irreal' the issues he raises are very, very real.

As you say, Steve, serpents stand for many things. I guess the most obvious interpretation is the serpent tempting Adam in the garden and losing his immortality as a result. It's a reversal of sorts, and now the immortals are symbolically eating the fallen angel but they're still damned to eternal life. Or maybe it was just meant to be a revolting idea!

I know something about semiotics but I'm not greatly interested either! Your analysis there works for me. We have only to look at the destruction visited on European cities in WW2 (or Belgrade in 1999) for a powerful reminder of that.

I agree that Borges is engaging with big questions. I wouldn't be interested in irreal writing that had nothing to say about the real world. That might be called, dare I say it, genre fantasy fiction.

I've read a little genre fantasy stuff. Sort of fun. Never seemed to stretch my imagination much. There's probably some good stuff in there, somewhere.

Been looking over and reading a few of Borges' essays on Time and such (eg. 'A History of Eternity'). Part 4 of 'the Immortal' turns into an essay, a polemic really. It looks to me that Borges was in a long wrestling match with the Platonic/Neo-Platonic foundations of Christianity and Western Civilization (big influence on Islamic Civilization, too). But I think all 'civilizations' have problems with death and the phantom of immortality. Plotinus just makes the western version weird.

Borges' essays show that he was as much Reader as Writer. I suppose Writers are a subset of Readers. But I don't think anybody read as much and as widely as Borges and with so much fun. He is my reading hero.

I suggest we put 'The Garden of Forking Paths' on the queue to discuss. Calvino mentioned it as an inspiration for IOAWNAT and I see a reference to it in LAUM.

Haven't finished LAUM, yet. Amazing work. If ever there was an 'opus magnum' . . .

I'm not opposed to fantasy as a whole. I love the work of Mervyn Peake and Angela Carter. It's that formulaic stuff that I can't abide, fenced into its little box by Tolkien and Lewis.

Ah, yes, the phantom of immortality...

I'm half way through LAUM at present. It'll take me another week or so, I would think. Yes, absolutely amazing - what a reading experience. And it never dulls.

And then to your comment Paul:

"Does the Giambattista referred to exist, etc., etc.? There's that long list of references in the postscript."

This looks to be true:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/#SH4h

Borges seems to like to play with fact and fiction. Is that because it doesn't really matter in the end (which seems to be one idea in The Immortal).

UPDATE 5/1/21
I just came across the name Giambattista Vico while surfing wikipedia about James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Wow. Vico was a major philosopher.

Google:
"Giambattista Vico" Borges

From:
VICO’S IDEAS IN PHILOSOPHICAL MASTERPIECES: Borges and Vico

"Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce are authors of works that can be considered as literary commentaries on Giambattista Vico’s New Science; the whole of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is based on Vico’s mas- terpiece. Borges’ fiction “The Immortal” is connected to the third book of Vico’s work concerning the “discovery of the true Homer.” "

A couple more thoughts:

Cartaphilus dies at sea while returning to his homeland of Smyrna and is buried on the island of Ios.

Homer is said to have died on the island of Ios and his grave is supposedly located at Plakoto, today considered as a very popular tourist attraction on the island of Ios.

The story says:
"We accept reality so readily—perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.
Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it."

If this is occurring in Ancient times around 400 B.C. or so, wasn't the Odyssey composed near the end of the 8th century B.C. so not 1100 years earlier? I know for a long time it was oral only.
When was it first written down? Does this suggest that Argos has lost all sense of time, or am I missing something?

Any thoughts on this from Part 4 in the story?

"It is odd that Homer, in the thirteenth century, should have copied down the adventures of Sindbad—another Ulysses—and again after many hundreds of years have discovered forms like those of his own Iliad in a northern kingdom and a barbaric tongue."

Klowey:
"Do you think that's why the beginning of the story is so full of obscure (at least for me) names and places? For example, he tosses out lots of ancient names and names in the middle east, north African, minor cities."

For someone with a basic classical education they wouldn't be that obscure. The gray man's narrative starts like a historical novel set during the Roman empire before the Christian conversion and I pretty much followed the itinerary through northern Africa, but after the Atlas mountains (leading to the Atlantic Ocean) the geography is made up. There's also the Thebes issue (there's both a Greek and an Egyptian Thebes) -- do you get the feeling that the writer is having fun with us?

And the reign of Diocletian is 285-305 AD, so the arithmetic is pretty close -- if that conversation occurs within that time frame. In spite of all the real historic references I found the temporal progression of this story confusing and, um, dream-like.

Nineteenth century authors would sometimes preface a story with with some historic incident or found text (for example Poe's "The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade"). Borges really runs with this conceit to marvelous effect in this and other stories.

Klowey wrote: "The translation I read was the Hurley."

His is a more recent translation (though not that recent since he's been retired for a decade). He made his own translations of pretty much all the ficción Borges wrote.

Klowey wrote: "That makes me want to read 'Invisible Cities'."

You really should! See my review here: my link text

Klowey wrote: "This looks to be true."

Good detective work, Klowey!

Klowey wrote: "Borges seems to like to play with fact and fiction."

That's something writers of the irreal have in common, the interplay between the actual and the invented. You'll find it in both Perec and Calvino, constantly referencing people and artefacts to find out if they exist or not. Great fun!

Thank you both for your insightful comments! Very helpful in expanding my understanding of this story that I like so much, and of other Borges' stories. I need to read some of the non-fiction Steve mentioned.

But I still have this coronavirus. The days are good and bad. Today I slept all day. My partner seems to still have some lingering symptoms. But neither of us are seriously ill, just tired, small fever, he has brain fog, sore throat, stuff like that.

So I'm not keeping up with you two so well right now. But I love these discussions.

I'd like to give some medical advice, even stock advice, but I don't know what advice to give for this new disease. Well, at least, stay in touch with your doctor so he or she can give good advice.

While you're mending here's a couple more thoughts about 'The Immortal':

I read the Arabian Nights City of Brass story (actually my translation has 'The Extraordinary Tale of the City of Brass'), mentioned in the text. It has some interesting similarities and significant differences to Borges' story. I think it's worth reading to compare to Borges' story.

And: another theme in this story might be forgetting. It's pretty much a cliche isn't it that some works of Art are 'immortal' including, of course, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (there's also the Homeric Hymns but no one talks about them much, though they are readily available in English translation--so: still alive). And some people are still reading Pope, too. Anyway a forgotten work is a dead work after all.

I believe it's pretty much accepted that the Odyssey was influenced by the Gilgamesh stories. Gilgamesh was 'forgotten' for centuries then 'remembered' when cuneiform was deciphered. Re-born. So I guess they've become 'immortal' again. Sort of stitched back on to the cultural tradition.

Is maintaining a cultural tradition equivalent to maintaining a body of 'Immortal' literature in particular and art in general? Is 'The Immortal' an acknowledgement of the necessary fragility and contingency of not just our lives but our cultures, too?

btw: the Gilgamesh stories are good and the other Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian myths are good, too. If you haven't read them you should. They're definitely "Immortal" for me.

Klowey wrote: "But I still have this coronavirus. The days are good and bad. Today I slept all day. My partner seems to still have some lingering symptoms."

Best wishes, Klowey, for a speedy recovery for you and your partner.

I know that Boyd tried to hoax the media by pretending that Tate was real. Having heard his name touted, I read Boyd's Armadillo and really didn't rate it. As a consequence, I've read nothing by him since. Perhaps I should give him another go, then. One of the most thoroughgoing of such enterprises has to be Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, a whole book full of fictional fascist poetasters and their works.

Klowey wrote: "Wasn't there someone recently who (purposely) wrote a review or analysis of a book that didn't exist?..."

I think I've seen some recent examples, but can't remember for sure.

One book by Stanislaw Lem was already mentioned. But actually he wrote 3 books of reviews of imaginary books: A Perfect Vacuum, One Human Minute, and Imaginary Magnitude.

And the Borges story "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain."

Somewhat similar is The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, which is a biography of an author who doesn't exist, though he certainly resembles someone who did. It talks of his writings.