An intriguing digression: JORGE LUIS BORGES, Professor Borges (c1966)

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.

If I hadn’t picked up this book, I would likely never have known that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a nephew of John Polidori, made famous as Lord Byron’s doctor and as the author of the Gothic novella The Vampyre (1819). Could I have lived without that kernel of knowledge? Most certainly, though it is a rather fun fact. But could I have so happily lived without Borges’ mention of Jane Carlyle as perhaps the real writer of the Carlyle household, for her voluminous correspondence? Perhaps not—at any rate, I’ve now got three volumes of her letters on my Kindle. Have any of you read these? Amazing how there's always new things to discover...