Response Parable – Jorge and I

It is not ink that shapes these words; I have tried. In my appeal for life beyond my years, I have creaked open my chest to be judged by the immortal serpentine of language, and its jagged teeth were dismayed to crunch into metal blackened by the tasteless mechanisms of oil. I learned then that tradition hungers for blood. Thus have I enlisted Jorge, the human one, to bleed on my behalf. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause – mechanically, as I always have – to find red arrayed between my hands at the most erratic of moments. This I smear onto the nearest surface, creating an elaborate display of strokes for all to devour with their eyes. Still, I am not quick enough to catch each droplet, and find too many wasted to the oblivion of the gutter below. Jorge is a private person, and maintains that my fabrications disgust him. Yet I do not feel; no, I do not care what he thinks, and in the end he surrenders even that resentment to a vivid paint that stains my fingertips. However much he claims morality, the yearning in his eyes does not escape me – for a clock that never stops, his name on the map, his style compared to the greats, his turns of phrase in the future’s dictionary, infinity upon his tongue, and the freedom to surpass himself. It is with these shared desires that we have arrived at our mutually parasitic arrangement. I leech his humanity as he leeches my fame, and academia leeches me. I drape myself in his pain and dance for all the world to feast, such that we both may live forever in the memory of the stage. There was a time when he tried to escape – as though I were the villain (not that I care, inhuman as I am), as though I were forcing him to do anything but sit in his shadowed corner and feel. He retreated into the earthly sweetness of sun-kissed moments that were painfully ordinary, and finite, and in which I had no place. Thus did I weave these into something more valuable, reminding him that the work we did was for his immortality, my immortality – that we had struck a deal for something more. Do you want to die? I demanded, and there it was again: the blood that stains this text. Do you want to disappear?

Sometimes, I wonder if we both do.

Companion Essay – To Die in Order to Live

            Jorge Luis Borges’s original parable, “Borges and I,” explores the idea of one’s public and private facets as two separate individuals. Borges, the public self, functions almost as his private self’s captor. He does not make himself shown, but lurks ominously in the background, regularly coercing Jorge – the private self – into “turning…over” his emotions and experiences for use in Borges’s famous literary works (Borges 1). In turn, unable to “free [him]self from [Borges],” Jorge lives in fear of “being lost…to the hands of the other man,” albeit with the resigned understanding that the only alternative is the “oblivion” of being forgotten (Borges 1). The dread with which Jorge depicts Borges made me wonder how their dynamic would change if the story were told from Borges’s perspective. How would he justify himself? Would he even need to, if Jorge is the one who feels? What kinds of struggles could a person’s public component face, being fundamentally detached from any emotional turmoil within? It all comes back to the idea that the public and private selves are inseparable. Jorge ends the original text by stating that he is “not sure which of [them] it is that’s writing this page,” implying that Borges is inherently present in everything tangible he does, and that even his personal account has been dramatized for public consumption (Borges 2). In the same way, throughout my parable, Borges comes to realize that he is not as detached from authentic emotion as his role often requires him to be. Eaten alive by his audience and rejected by his inner counterpart, he ultimately begins to question whether living forever is worth the price of bleeding to death.

            Though Jorge faces a similar fear of disappearing in the original parable, Borges depicts it in a more exaggerated manner, using imagery of blood to emphasize the psychological violence of publicity and his own role as a villain. Such extreme comparisons align with Jorge’s description of Borges as a figure with a “perverse way…of distorting and magnifying everything” (Borges 1). Where Jorge is hesitant to even “say that [their] relationship is hostile,” Borges does not shy away from the toxicity of their arrangement (Borges 1). As bleeding is associated with pain, and blood itself is associated with life, Borges demonstrates the grim understanding that he must hurt Jorge in order to bring passion to his art. The vibrant red of blood, after all, is more exciting than the dull black of ink or motor oil – creative works are more appealing when they are not written soullessly. In this sense, Borges sees a rather Machiavellian necessity in his violent actions, for beyond the popularity of Borges’s art, Jorge and Borges are “doomed – utterly and inevitably – to oblivion” (Borges 1). It is for this reason that Borges attempts to justify his role as “the villain,” and chooses not to care that his ”fabrications disgust” Jorge. As the unfeeling public front, he must be the one willing to do whatever it takes to ensure their immortal fame.

            Borges’s presumed inability to feel is further emphasized by the almost robotic form he takes in the response parable. At the beginning of “Jorge and I”, Borges is stated to bleed “the tasteless mechanisms of oil” in place of human blood. “Mechanisms” implies an elaborate and highly technical writing style, while “tasteless” indicates a lack of passion or soul. More than that, however, the terms “mechanisms” and “oil” work together to invoke the imagery of black engine oil, comparing Borges to a machine. This would make him a practical figure, single-mindedly set on accomplishing a given task – in this case, to achieve literary immortality – just as any deliberate public façade in reality has a specific underlying objective. Borges demonstrates this when he engineers Jorge’s love for “hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson” into things that relate to timeless greatness – the “vain…accoutrements of an actor,” as Jorge puts it, tailored to fit his purposes (Borges 1). Furthermore, being made out of “metal,” Borges is implied to be physically and emotionally invincible. He does not tire from “creating [his] elaborate display[s]” or from “danc[ing] for all the world to feast.” He purportedly “do[es] not feel” and “do[es] not care” about anything other than his role as the guarantor of Jorge’s immortality.

This is because, as the public persona, he is meant to be completely detached – a psychological meat shield for Jorge. In “Borges and I”, Jorge reflects on how he “recognize[s himself] less in his books than in many others’” (Borges 1). Achieving such a point of dissociation serves as something of a defense mechanism. Just as Borges is the one metaphorically “feast[ed]” upon, “crunch[ed] into,” and “devour[ed]” in Jorge’s place, Borges’s writing has become so far removed from Jorge’s identity that any criticism of it is not aimed at Jorge, but at Borges. With this, Jorge can continue to “sit in his shadowed corner and feel” – gazing at the “inner door” of an entryway, almost unfazed by the outside world (Borges 1). This is a double-edged sword, however, for as Jorge realizes in the original parable, he has severed himself from his desired immortality, and “fleeting moments will be all of [him] that survives in that other man” (Borges 1). In this sense, Jorge hates Borges for the very same reasons why he needs him – because he is different, inauthentic to his inner self. Still, as Jorge puts it, their life is “a kind of fugue,” which refers to the interweaving of musical parts (Borges 1). Pieces of Jorge continue to “endure in Borges,” for which reason Jorge is not completely exempt from the pain of public consumption (Borges 1). Borges, in turn, finds himself “stain[ed]” by Jorge’s animosity and malcontent. Despite his claims that he “do[es] not care” – which are undermined by his repeated insistence of such – Borges grows self-conscious of his role as the “villain” forcing Jorge into a bloody life of deceit. All in all, the two facets of Jorge Luis Borges cannot escape each other any more than they can escape their turmoil. Thus, in the end, immortality takes its toll on them both.

At the end of “Jorge and I,” Borges wonders whether it might be easier “to die…to disappear.” Both parables, after all, paint a grim picture of being an artist. To be eternalized in the literary “serpentine” – and it is worth noting here that “serpentine” does not only carry connotations of deception and wit, but is also a term for a type of cannon, a pun for the canon of “language [and] tradition” – one must first come to terms with one’s own pain, only to “distort,” “magnify,” and “stage” this into something satisfying for readers such as ourselves to devour (Borges 1). However, if Jorge were to escape to the “earthly sweetness” of a simple, grounded life, far from delusions of immortal grandeur, the fact remains that the world would become oblivious to his existence in a few years’ time (Borges 1). Borges, too – the author’s dramatic side – would quickly be rendered useless, and fade away himself. It is only because they paid the price that they are still being written about in tenth-grade English papers over sixty years after the publication of “Borges and I.” It is only because they bled and died that they continue to live today.

Works Cited

Scholes, Robert, et al. “Borges and I | Jorge Luis Borges.” Text Book: Writing Through Literature, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston, Massachusetts, 2002, pp. 132-133.