Part 33 (1/2)

I sat thinking. Had I not spent a lifetime, colorless yet strange, in pur- suit of Shakespeare? Was it not fairthat at the end of my labors I find him?

I said, carefully p.r.o.nouncing each word: ”I accept Shakespeare's memory.”

Something happened; there is no doubt of that. But I did not feel it happen.

Perhaps just a slight sense of fatigue, perhaps imaginary.

I clearly recall that Thorpe did tell me: ”The memory has entered your mind, but it must be 'discovered.' It will emerge in dreams or when you are awake, when you turn the pages of a book or turn a corner. Don't be impatient; don'tinvent recollections. Chance in its mysterious workings may help it along, or it may hold it back. As I gradually forget, you will remember. I can't tell you how long the process will take.”

We dedicated what remained of the night to a discussion of the charac- ter of Shylock. I refrained from trying to discover whether Shakespeare had had personal dealings with Jews. I did not want Thorpe to imagine that I was putting him to some sort of test. I did discover (whether with relief or uneasiness, I cannot say) that his opinions were as academic and conven- tional as my own.

In spite of that long night without sleep, I hardly slept at all the follow- ing night. I found, as I had so many times before, that I was a coward. Out of fear of disappointment, I could not deliver myself up to openhanded hope. I preferred to think that Thorpe's gift was illusory. But hope did, irre- sistibly, come to prevail. I would possess Shakespeare, and possess him as no one had ever possessed anyone before- not in love, or friends.h.i.+p, or even hatred. I, in some way, wouldbe Shakespeare. Not that I would write the tragedies or the intricate sonnets-but I would recall the instant at which the witches (who are also the Fates) had been revealed to me, the other in- stant at which I had been given the vast lines:

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-weary flesh.

I would remember Anne Hathaway as I remembered that mature woman who taught me the ways of love in an apartment inLubeck somany years ago. (I tried to recall that woman, but I could only recover the wall- paper, which was yellow, and the light that streamed in through the win- dow. This first failure might have foreshadowed those to come.) I had hypothesized that the images of that wondrous memory would be primarily visual. Such was not the case. Days later, as I was shaving, I spoke into the mirror a string of words that puzzled me; a colleague informed methat they were from Chaucer's”A. B. C.”One afternoon, as I was leaving the British Museum, I began whistling a very simple melody that I had never heard before.

The reader will surely have noted the common thread that links these first revelations of the memory: it was, in spite of the splendor of some metaphors, a good deal more auditory than visual.

De Quinceysays that man's brain is a palimpsest. Every new text covers the previous one, and is in turn covered by the text that follows-but all-powerful Memory is able to exhume any impression, no matter how mo- mentary it might have been, if given sufficient stimulus. To judge by the will he left, there had been not a single book in Shakespeare's house, not even the Bible, and yet everyone is familiar with the books he so often repaired to: Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Holinshed'sChronicle, Florio's Montaigne, North's Plutarch. I possessed, at least potentially, the memory that had been Shakespeare's; the reading (which is to say the rereading) of those old volumes would, then, be the stimulus I sought. I also reread the sonnets, which are his work of greatest immediacy. Once in a while I came up with the explication, or with many explications. Good lines demand to be read aloud; after a few days I effortlessly recovered the harshf's and open vowels of the sixteenth century.

In an article I published in theZeitschrift fur germanische Philologie,I wrote that Sonnet 127 referred to the memorable defeat of the Spanish Armada. I had forgotten that Samuel Butler had advanced that same thesis in 1899.

A visit to Stratford-on-Avon was, predictably enough, sterile.

Then came the gradual transformation of my dreams. I was to be granted neither splendid nightmaresa la deQuincey nor pious allegorical visions in the manner of his master Jean Paul*; it was unknown roomsand faces that entered my nights. The first face I identified was Chapman's; later there was Ben Jonson's, and the face of one of the poet's neighbors, a person who does not figure in the biographies but whom Shakespeare often saw.

The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every ill.u.s.tration; he acquires thepossibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. If that is the case with a concrete, and relatively simple, ent.i.ty (given, I mean, the alphabetical order of its parts, etc.), then what must happen with a thing which is abstract and variable- ondoyant etdivers?A dead man's magical memory, for example?

No one may capture in a single instant the fullness of his entire past.

That gift was never granted even to Shakespeare, so far as I know, much less to me, who was but his partial heir. A man's memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities. St. Augustine speaks, if I am not mistaken, of the palaces and the caverns of memory. That second metaphor is the more fitting one. It was into those caverns that I descended.

Like our own, Shakespeare's memory included regions, broad regions, of shadow-regions that he willfully rejected. It was not without shock that I remembered how Ben Jonson had made him recite Latin and Greek hexameters, and how his ear-the incomparable ear of Shakespeare- would go astray in many of them, to the hilarity of his fellows.

I knew states of happiness and darkness that transcend common hu- man experience.

Without my realizing it, long and studious solitude had prepared me for the docile reception of the miracle. After some thirty days, the dead man's memory had come to animate me fully. For one curiously happy week, I almost believed myself Shakespeare. His work renewed itself for me. I know that for Shakespeare the moon was less the moon than it was Diana, and less Diana than that dark drawn-out wordmoon. I noted another dis- covery: Shakespeare's apparent instances of inadvertence-those absencesdans l'infiniof which Hugo apologetically speaks-were deliberate. Shake- speare tolerated them-or actually interpolated them-so that his dis- course, destined for the stage, might appear to be spontaneous, and not overly polished and artificial(nicht allzu glatt und gekunstelt).That same goal inspired him to mix his metaphors:

my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf.

One morning I perceived a sense of guilt deep within his memory. I did not try to define it; Shakespeare himself has done so for all time. Suffice it to say that the offense had nothing in common with perversion.

I realized that the three faculties of the human soul-memory, under- standing, and will-are not some mere Scholastic fiction. Shakespeare's memory was able to reveal to me only the circ.u.mstances ofthe man Shake- speare. Clearly, these circ.u.mstances do not const.i.tute the uniqueness ofthe poet; what matters is the literature the poet produced with that frail material.

I was naive enough to have contemplated a biography, just as Thorpe had. I soon discovered, however, that that literary genre requires a talent for writing that I do not possess. I do not know how to tell a story. I do notknow how to tellmy own story, which is a great deal more extraordinary than Shakespeare's. Besides, such a book would be pointless. Chance, or fate, dealt Shakespeare those trivial terrible things that all men know; it was his gift to be able to trans.m.u.te them into fables, into characters that were much more alive than the gray man who dreamed them, into verses which will never be abandoned, into verbal music. What purpose would it serve to unravel that wondrous fabric, besiege and mine the tower, reduce to the modest proportions of a doc.u.mentary biography or a realistic novel the sound and fury ofMacbeth?

Goethe, as we all know, is Germany's official religion; the wors.h.i.+p of Shakespeare, which we profess not without nostalgia, is more private. (In England, the official religion is Shakespeare, who is so unlike the English; England's sacred book, however, is the Bible.) Throughout the first stage of this adventure I felt the joy of being Shake- speare; throughout the last, terror and oppression. At first the waters of the two memories did not mix; in time, the great torrent ofShakespeare threat- ened to flood my own modest stream-and very nearly did so. I noted with some nervousness that I was gradually forgetting the language of my par- ents. Since personal ident.i.ty is based on memory, I feared for my sanity.

My friends would visit me; I was astonished that they could not see that I was in h.e.l.l.

I began not to understand the everyday world around me(diealltag- liche Umwelt).One morning I became lost in a welter of great shapes forged in iron, wood, and gla.s.s. Shrieks and deafening noises a.s.sailed and confused me. It took me some time (it seemed an infinity) to recognize the engines and cars of the Bremen railway station.

As the years pa.s.s, every man is forced to bear the growing burden of his memory. I staggered beneath two (which sometimes mingled)-my own and the incommunicable other's.

The wish of all things, Spinoza says, is to continue to be what they are. The stone wishes to be stone, the tiger, tiger-and I wanted to be HermannSorgelagain.

I have forgotten the date on which I decided to free myself. I hit upon the easiest way: I dialed telephone numbers at random. The voice of a child or a woman would answer; I believed it was my duty to respect their vul- nerable estates. At last a man's refined voice answered.

”Do you,” I asked, ”want Shakespeare's memory? Consider well: it is a solemn thing I offer, as I can attest.”

An incredulous voice replied: ”I will take that risk. I accept Shakespeare's memory.” I explained the conditions of the gift.

Paradoxically, I felt bothanostal- giefor the book I should have written, and now never would, and a fear that the guest, the specter, would never abandon me.

I hung up the receiver and repeated, like a wish, these resigned words: Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

I had invented exercises to awaken the antique memory; I had now to seek others to erase it. One of many was the study of the mythology of William Blake, that rebellious disciple ofSwedenborg.I found it to be less complex than merely complicated.

That and other paths were futile; all led me to Shakespeare.

I hit at last upon the only solution that gave hope courage: strict, vast music-Bach.

P.S. (1924)-I am now a man among men. In my waking hours I am Professor Emeritus HermannSorgel;I putter about the card catalog and compose eru- dite trivialities, but at dawn I sometimes know that the person dreaming is that other man. Every so often in the evening I am unsettled by small, fleeting memories that are perhaps authentic.

A Note on the Translation

The first known English translation of a work of fiction by the Argentine Jorge LuisBorgesappeared in the August 1948 issue ofEllery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but although seven or eight more translations appeared in ”little magazines” and anthologies during the fifties, and althoughBorgesclearly had his champions in the literary establishment, it was not until 1962, four- teen years after that first appearance, that a book-length collection of fiction appeared in English.

The two volumes of stories that appeared in theannusmirabilis-one from Grove Press, edited by Anthony Kerrigan, and the other from New Di- rections, edited by DonaldA. Yatesand James E. Irby- caused an impact that was immediate and overwhelming. John Updike, John Barth, Anthony Burgess, and countless other writers and critics have eloquently and emphati- cally attested to the unsettling yet liberating effect that Jorge LuisBorges'work had on their vision of the way literature was thenceforth to be done. Reading those stories, writers and critics encountered a disturbinglyother writer(Borgesseemed, sometimes, to come from a place even more distant than Ar- gentina, another literary planet), transported into their ken by translations, who took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics, who took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction. Even as early as 1933, PierreDrieu La Roch.e.l.le,editor of the influentialNouvelleRevueFrancaise,returning to France after visiting Argentina, is famously reported to have said,”Borges vaut levoyage”;now, thirty years later, readers didn't have to make the long, hard(though deliciously exotic) journey into Spanish-Borgeshad been brought to them, and indeed he soon was being paraded through England and the United States like one of those New World indigenes taken back, captives, by Colum- bus or Sir Walter Raleigh, to captivate the Old World's imagination.