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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 429-437 Philosophical Divorce, Literary Wedding Mirko Lauer: Jorge Luis Borges has said somewhere that William Shakespeare can be at times "too philosophical" and not literary enough. What do you think he meant? Agnes Heller: I do not know exactly what he meant, but his statement is rather unreasonable. You can never enter another person's brain and figure out what they mean, which is a kind of scandal. Provocative pronouncements sometimes mean only that someone wants to provoke contrary arguments and uneasiness in their listener. But what could it mean that Shakespeare was too philosophical and not literary enough? It has no meaning. You can not make heads or tails of this. Because what is philosophical in Shakespeare comes through his tragedies, comes through characters, through the plot, through the conversations and discussions and conflicts among the characters. This is how his philosophy comes out. There are only a few explicitly philosophical Shakespearean characters. Hamlet for one. Perhaps Henry VI. These are the characters one can describe as reflective, as contemplative. Perhaps, precisely because of this, none of the three Henry VI tragedies, or dramas, are really dramas. They are, rather, epic in character, and the heroes are very didactic, very philosophical. But in all the other dramas and tragedies of Shakespeare you very rarely come across a philosophical character. The philosophy comes through the conflict; the philosophical interpretation of the story, the situation, is created by the author. In my opinion, Shakespeare simply throws characters into situations, hoping to find out what they will do. And he, himself, is very curious about this. Mind you, there is philosophy in Shakespeare. But it comes through the plot, through the story, through the drama and even through the comedy. ML: But you have been studying Borges as well. AH: Yes. [end page 429] ML: Why would he go into that kind of provocation? He is a provocateur, definitely, and that is how we know him in Latin America. AH: Borges is interesting for us because he is a very philosophical author. What he says about Shakespeare is not true of Shakespeare, but is certainly true of Borges. He often offers a puzzle, and then offers the reader to solve the puzzle, which is in fact not a puzzle and can not be solved. Thus his stories are stories of unsolvable puzzles. Any solution provided is not a real solution. Philosophy also occasionally deals with labyrinths, one of Borges' most famous metaphors . It — philosophy — also deals with identity reversal and the insecurity of identity. These topics are very frequently encountered in Borges' short stories. I think his short stories are philosophy. ML: Would you agree with those who say that Borges the philosopher is a solipsist, a denier of the possibility of knowledge itself? AH: Solipsists do not deny the possibility of knowledge. But still, I do not think that Borges is a solipsist. What could be described as the impossibility of knowledge is, for him, really the impossibility of certainty. Not the same thing. In contemporary times all knowledge lacks certainty. This is a result of science's position as the dominant means to explain the world. Every scientific proof is falsifiable. Falsifiability is the condition for something being scientific. There is no certainty. And this is exemplified in Borges´ short stories, in which there are no certainties. Fiction and reality can not be entirely divided from one another. And from Karl Popper we have learned that every fact is an interpreted fact, that there are no uninterpreted facts. Hence the infinite interpretability of every possible text. So, concerning Borges we can say that, yes, for him there is knowledge, there is the infinite possibility of interpretation; but there is no way to tell fiction from reality. So reality is composed of different levels of fiction. This Borgesian procedure is well fitted to modern ways of thinking. ML: Is Borges unique in this aspect? Why did you go as far as Borges? AH: Every writer is unique, if he is a great writer. Every work of art is unique, every short story is unique. But I can give a good Spanish example of another case which deals with the problem of certainty: Don Quixote. One does not discover the author of Don Quixote from reading the text itself ; Cervantes plays cat and mouse with us when he writes that he is not the author, that the book was translated from Arabic into Spanish, that a new Christian wrote it, that none of this is [end page 430] sure, and so on. He is playing around with identity, with the fiction-reality relation. So while in one aspect Borges is unique, in another he is not. ML: Coming back to Shakespeare and his way of thinking, we have Jan Kott's famous title for his book Shakespeare, our contemporary. A title now several decades old. Is it still relevant? AH: Sure it is, because Shakespeare is always our contemporary. Kott said that he interpreted the tragedies, particularly the history plays, in the spirit of Samuel Beckett because he lived in a totalitarian society and wanted to understand the tragedies of kings as an eternal recurrence in which everyone becomes a tyrant. Even one who starts as a redeemer or a liberator will sooner or later become a tyrant, and so the whole story begins again and again and again. This kind of interpretation was very important at the time. Shakespeare is still our contemporary, and was so 200 years ago. ML: But where would you place Shakespeare in today's philosophical spectrum? Is he an irrationalist? Is he someone whose questioning of history, for instance, would place him within a postmodern perspective? Or is he simply a modernist? AH: I cannot answer whether a writer is an irrationalist or not. Only as a poet did Shakespeare have a kind of rationalist outlook, if and when he presented rationalism. In such a case you do not, as a poet, argue for or against something; you present something. Some of Shakespeare's heroes are rationalists, but there are different kinds of rationalism. Take Hamlet, the most intelligent of Shakespeare's characters. He is subject of fits of anger in which he has thoughts he never imagined he would have. For instance, fits of anger towards Ophelia when she is carried to her grave. There are evil rationalists, like Edmont; Iago is also a rationalist, who argues on behalf of evil. Juliette is also a rationalist, who rationally argues on behalf of love and the good. Whether Shakespeare is a rationalist or not is not a moral issue. We have characters who argue rationally for the good, those who do it for the bad, and those who do not argue at all, like the evil Macbeth. ML: But a synthetic phrase like "history is a tale/ told by an idiot..."? Where would we place this? AH: But this is not Shakespeare. There Shakespeare does not speak as Shakespeare; it is Macbeth who speaks. It is pronounced by a person who [end page 431] has murdered, without thinking about it, twice; who at the very moment of murdering realizes he has lost his life. Every person says something philosophically different, because the words illustrate each person's particular character. ML: And from that very same angle, how should we measure Borges? You make the point that Borges does not postulate the impossibility of knowledge, but its uncertainty. Yet one of his trademarks vis-à-vis the public is to deny the very existence of literature. He is on record for repeating — to the extent that it has become a Borgesian commonplace — that all stories are really one and the same, that there is no possibility of producing novelty, or even variations, and so on. At the beginning of "El immortal," he quotes a radically Platonist epigraph by Francis Bacon: all novelty is but oblivion. In one of the interviews by Norman Thomas di Giovanni for The New Yorker, Borges, then very old, jokingly asked if, at such an advanced age, he could still experience a novelty as radical as death. And so he goes, on and on, creating the kind of false puzzle you mentioned earlier on. In all these cases, is it Borges who is speaking? AH: It is a very interesting question. Sometimes it is Borges speaking, yes. But the most important thing is that we really never know who is speaking. This is the problem of identity. This is why I gave the example of Don Quixote; we never know who is speaking, and, on top of that, we do not know who is writing. Borges stands in this tradition, in which one cannot identify the speaker. The hero can be identified, but not the speaker. This happens frequently in literature. ML: But doesn't there have to be a moment in which knowledge is put on the table alongside certainty? You have referred to Cide Hamete Benengeli, Quixote´s supposed "author". But there is nonetheless a moment in Don Quixote's famous visit to the dukes and the Montesinos cave, where he feels that the identity-based joke on him has gone too far, that he is being treated not just as a madman, but also as a non-person. This is the moment in which is says "Yo sé quién soy" (I know who I am). This is the moment in which Don Quixote — the character, the book, the man — tells us that there is a final level of evidence, something we can relate to that is not relative. That relativism stops somewhere. My feeling is that Borges does not present such a moment, or does he? AH: But why should he? [end page 432] ML: Because that would be a dividing line between accepting the existence of an irrational world and rejecting it. AH: But you accept the world. You do not ask, in literature, whether this world is rational or not. One lives in this world, accepts it, and does not ask those questions. I think that what you said about Don Quixote is absolutely right and true. But this moment of finding an identity is not necessary. For instance you will not find it in Jacques le fataliste It is not important. What is important is that you can enter the story, that we can enjoy living in the world of the story. As long as you can live in it, it is rational. ML: Which story do we enter when we read Borges? AH: You have mentioned that, according to Borges, there is only one single story. That is a metaphor. Hegel would tell you that we all read the book of nature, we all read the riddle of god, and there is only one riddle of god. But things can be approached from different angles. We write different stories although we always read or write the same story. The story of the world can be written from different angles. ML: Is that what attracted you to the study of Borges? AH: No. What attracted me to Borges were the short stories themselves, the problem of identity, the issue of problem solving, the humor, and the presence of this Russian puppet effect: a story within a story within a story… ML: Why move philosophical exploration towards literature? The trend is new, no more than a few decades old. Part of this has already been answered in your comments on identity within literary worlds. But what can philosophy learn from literary worlds, which seem so self-sufficient — worlds unto themselves, that if I have understood you, have no relation to philosophical necessity? AH: I think here we can differentiate between two periods. Modern philosophy has been always passionately interested in literature, as well as in painting, sculpture, and the like. These arts exemplified philosophical problems, in, for instance, philosophical history and aesthetics. This was the first period, in which we could include even the Romantics. But then something else happened: metaphysics collapsed and philosophers became afraid of system building. Not because they were unable to do so, but because they became aware that they were going to have to lie whenever they built a system. So this is why literature is now a kind of [end page 433] trampoline, and not just a kind of exemplification. Literature, painting, music, have turned into so many starting points for philosophical reflection. This creates a more reflective, more interpretative, more hermeneutic philosophy. Such as when Theodor Adorno discusses music or fine arts. ML: Art works as a starting point towards where? AH: As I said, towards philosophical reflection. ML: Hegel, you said, used literature as an illustration, or as an exemplification. And you added that nowadays literature is not used merely as an example. Perhaps Sartre and the other existentialists did that for a moment after the war. But since then the approach to literature has privileged the text itself — as text. Decipherment has become, once again, a final goal, far beyond the search for meaning within the text. This has required a method with a strong interest in linguistic and other forms of structural analysis. So, when you say reflection, is it a reflection to be used for the structuralist construction of meaning? Or is it the quest for life-lessons to be learned from literature, in the Great Books tradition? AH: There are different kinds of philosophers and they think about literature in different ways. I do not speak in the name of all of them. But I can mention, from my point of view, the main philosophers in the twentieth century. You mentioned Sartre, a great writer and also a great interpreter of the writing of others. His works on Magritte´s painting, for instance, show him as a thinker of representation. He demonstrated that representation is no longer the issue. The issue is the painting itself. Then we have Jacques Derrida, who discusses the sacrifice of Abraham, a biblical text, and arrives at the sacredness of literary texts, etc. ML: Would you say we are faced with a new strand of literary criticism — literary criticism with philosophical instruments? AH: Literary criticism can take different forms. There was a time when people attacked literary criticism with the claim that, because every work is subjective, and since there is no yardstick, there can be no serious approach to works of art anymore. This implied that literary criticism was a dying genre. This is not true. Today literary criticism is very much alive. But it does not provide yardsticks, or a cannon, or instructions on how to write, or how to think. A concrete work of art is well done or badly done; it can have or not have a kind of perfection that gives pleasure, that it [end page 434] addresses you sensually or conceptually. These things can be decided by literary criticism. Literary criticism has changed. ML: What is the state of your work on Borges and Shakespeare? AH: I have written a book on Shakespeare: Time Is Out of Joint, Shakespeare's philosophy of history. Its first sentence is precisely, "Shakespeare was not a philosopher of history." ML: Would you accept that that is a very Borgesian sentence? AH: Well, yes. Sure. But I could never write a book on Borges, because I cannot speak Spanish. We have a wonderful seminar on Borges at the New School. There I work with English and Hungarian versions, but sometimes the students tell me that a given translation is not correct, not refined enough. So, a seminar yes, but not a book. ML: Borges would have been very sad to hear this. Because he was proud of his Spanish prose, but, I think, always felt, sorry for not being an English-language author. He tried with "Two English poems." Don't you feel that translation can improve a prose text? In my experience, Borges improves Virginia Woolf´s Orlando, C.K Scott Moncrieff improves on some sections of Marcel Proust (this is not the case with Pedro Salinas in Spanish), Julio Cortázar improves Marguerite Yourcenar´s Memoires d´Hadrien. AH: It can happen. But I would never say a translation is better than the original, but rather, different, congenial with the original. We have the case of a Hungarian translation considered congenial with Shakespeare's text. Different languages have different possibilities, different kinds of translations. For instance English is so hard to translate into German. What English expresses with one word, German does in three. That makes a hell of a difference. There is a great translation of Shakespeare by Schiller, who was a great poet himself, but it is not Shakespeare! ML: Is this an aesthetic argument or an identity argument? AH: It is not an identity argument. And I think identity arguments have to deal with idiosyncrasy. Every product of literature is idiosyncratic. There is no better example of this than translation. Here is the thing: for centuries there were copies of the original, and they were accepted. The copy was like the original all over again; but the moment one knows it is a copy, one must ask oneself how could you believe that was an original? [end page 435] ML: For years political philosophy has been your main field of interest, where do you stand in relation to it now? I can imagine that your interest in the philosophy of history has been there all along, but has it now become a vocational alternative? AH: I have abandoned political philosophy and ethics because I arrived to the conclusion that I had done all I could do in that field. Beyond that, I could only repeat myself, do variations, write memories in a diary. It is Borges who said that you cannot remember your own experiences the same way you remember what you wrote in your diary. So I decided to do an entirely different thing. I am now especially interested in art and in religion, because I have a natural access to these subjects and have begun to be theoretically interested in these issues. This has only started in the last few years, so I am, so to speak, virginal with regards to these areas. Nothing prevents me from addressing these things as new things, which was no longer the case with political philosophy and ethics. I still have some activity in the field, because this is what people know about me; yet, I will not write on these areas anymore. ML: So the re-enchantment of your world lies in this new topic. But do you still read works from the fields you have left behind? AH: I confess that I was rarely interested in secondary material, and always preferred the classics. Secondary material is a pain in the neck for me. So I do not read about politics or ethics. I would not say that I do not read anything in ethics and political philosophy, but I prefer what. interests me. ML: And what kind of literature are you reading? AH: I am currently working on a book that concerns the comic, which I hope will soon be ready. So these last two years I have read comedies, comic novels, and have gone to see exhibitions of comic pictures, comic films, and have read a lot of joke books. ML: Has any favorite comic writer appeared, apart from Cervantes? AH: Cervantes, of course. But certainly I love Terentius, absolutely, and Shakespeare's comedies, Molière, and some of Samuel Becket's very important works in existential comedy. Most of his dramas and certain short stories can be described as existential comedy. And then there is also Ionesco, and Voltaire. As you see, it is a broad interest. And then we have G.B. Shaw, and Tirso de Molina, and so on. [end page 436] ML: How was the switch from political philosophy and ethics to the philosophy of history, art, and religion? A deception? A gradual process? It happened one morning? AH: When I was a teenager I was interested in aesthetics and religion. But then came Auschwitz and the Gulag, and I had a duty to understand how these things came about, for which I had to immerse myself in political philosophy. But now I have done my duty, so to speak.. I have told my story to the extent that I can tell my story. Now I can return to the interests of my youth. ML: So you have divorced an earlier political discourse... AH: Yes, yes, that is a good formulation. ML: And now you write literary works... AH: Well, if you are a poet, you never stop writing, but I stopped for a given moment of my life. ML: But now you do write... AH: Of course I write. Not for publication. It is not what I can do best, and I feel it is not good enough. It's for personal pleasure and exercise.
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