Some of you may be interested in this book I picked up randomly a while back, and which somehow survived the great pre-Portugal book culling. It’s comprised of a series of lectures given by the great Argentinian author and poet Jorge Luis Borges in 1966, on the history of English lit (really British literature, as Scotland and Ireland in particular come into play, but the book cover says English, so be irritated with the publisher, not me), and it’s certainly unlike any other survey of the subject you’ll ever encounter. As readers of his otherwordly short fiction know, Borges seems to have read absolutely everything, and (unlike some of us) could actually remember what he’d read and keep it at his command. The sometimes astonishing tidbits he tosses carelessly into a lecture, and the sense of spontaneity as he “speaks”, made the book surprisingly thrilling to read, even when a lecture focused on authors or works I knew nothing about or don’t particularly enjoy.
There are some quirky choices here, to say the least.
There are 25 lectures in all, of which the first 7 are devoted to Old and
Middle English poems, and many are the works he discusses that I'd never so
much as heard of before. But those are themselves apparently only the tip of a
vanished iceberg: One of those tidbits I mentioned appears here, as he casually
evokes the melancholy thought of a whole rich body of literature that no longer
survives:
The story of the origins of English poetry is quite
mysterious. As we know, all that remains of what was written in England from
the fifth century—let’s say, from the year 449—until a little after the Norman
Conquest in the year 1066, besides the laws and the prose, is what has been
preserved by chance in four codices, or books of manuscripts. These codices
suggest the existence of a prior literature that was quite rich.
I very nearly began to research what new discoveries in
this area have been made since Borges’ lectures, but I spend enough of my time
in rabbit holes these days, so if anyone out there happens to be an expert and
wants to share…
He then jumps directly into the 18th century—never mind
those pesky bores like Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare—and devotes three
classes to Johnson and Boswell, followed by a class dedicated to James
MacPherson, whose invention of the supposed Celtic poet Ossian, though fraudulent,
was also, according to Borges, pivotal in the development of Romanticism (and a
precursor of Walt Whitman to boot). I'd never heard of Macpherson either, I
sadly acknowledge.
The syllabus becomes a bit less unexpected for a few
classes, in which we encounter the likes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake,
Carlyle, Dickens, and Browning. Ah, familiar ground! But then Borges spends most
of 5 classes discussing Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. (Bright
side: I knew very little about either, so learned a lot.) The course then ends,
a bit abruptly, with a session on Robert Louis Stevenson, and a quick gesture
towards Oscar Wilde. As I said, not a selection of authors and works most
scholars today would put together (nary a mention of Sterne, Smollett, Fielding,
Austen, Eliot, or the Brontës either), but of course that’s what makes it so
interesting.
Another rabbit hole I’ve been trying to simply peek into without
actually going down is Borges’ mention of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,
a book published in 1896 with an elegant design by William Morris and
illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, “considered a masterpiece for the
exquisite harmony of its design, typography, and illustrations.” If you’d like
to abandon caution and dive right into the rabbit hole, the Library of Congress
has the book online in color here
and it seems pretty stunning.
