BORGES: A novel needs more than storytelling. You need character; you must give appearance of being slower. I feel the same way Poe felt when he said that there is no such thing as a long poem. A long poem is merely a succession of short poems. When Poe was writing a story he meant it to be packed. I think the last stories that Kipling wrote are quite as fully packed as any novel. For example, I think that "Children of Antioch" is one of the latest stories he wrote. It is as packed as any novel, but it is not more than twenty or thirty pages long. Conrad, of course, wrote what anyone would think is a short story, but what we're reading these days falls under the spell of Heart of Darkness - a very fine novel, no? And then in the beginning of Heart of Darkness, I found that Kafka had been anticipated. I found all the virtues of Kafka in those first ten or fifteen pages. The idea of making things awful, not for example, by trying to make them real, but by insisting that they were real. For the man of the novel fights his way into Africa. Remember? He goes up the river, then he sees that French gunboat, or Belgian gunboat, firing into the continent. He insists all the time that those things were unreal; that people there seem to him to be made, let's say, of thin paper, that he can poke his finger through them. Well, that's very uncanny, because Kafka was to do so twenty years afterwards.
[...]
QUESTION: It seems you are dealing with Plato's notion of the universe and man's attempt to deal with the instability of appearances.
BORGES: I'm quite unaware of it. I mean, I'm doing it instinctively.
QUESTION: Is there any part of Plato you're particularly interested in?
BORGES: With Plato, you feel that he would reason in an abstract way and would also use myth. He would do those two things at the same time. But now we seem to have lost that gift. I mean, you have gone from the myth to abstract thinking. But Plato could do both at the same time. I think we are made to feel that very keenly in "The Last Day of Socrates". When Socrates still wants something very near to him - the immortality of the soul - he's just about to drink the hemlock - he talks about it sometimes; he discusses the probabilities; he uses arguments in his belief in the soul being deathless, and sometimes he falls back on myth, and he seem peculiarly unaware of the difference between the two things. I suppose at that time it could be done. But nowadays thoses things seem to be in watertight compartments. Either we are thinking or we are dreaming. But Plato and Socrates could do both; or perhaps Shakespeare also. Shakespeare, for example, would make a statement - he would be using metaphors and symbols - and at the same time, he might say, for example, "Ripeness is all". Here, I do not know wheter this is abstract or whether this is symbol. It seems abstract rather, but he can do both things at the same time. But we are either abstract thinkers, we're either Kant, or we are dreamers. But, of course, Poe wanted to be a thinker, but I think that he was really a dreamer, at least in his best stories.
"A Colloquy with Jorge Luis Borges", Donald Yates, 1976
in Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations (ed. Richard Burgin).
University Press of Mississipi, 1998.
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