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Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Guess what I got for my birthday.  All 4 volumes of The Paris Review Interviews.  Guess what I'm reading.  

Jorge Luis Borges

So here's a few words from Borges on writing.  The interview took place in 1967, but the writing advice is as helpful today as it would have been forty years ago.

On saying it direct:

Interviewer: You have said that your own work has moved from, in the early times, expression, to, in the later times, allusion.

Borges: Yes.

Interviewer: What do you mean by allusion?

Borges: Look, I mean to say this: when I began writing, I thought that everything should be defined by the writer.  For example, to say "the moon" was strictly forbidden; that one had to find an adjective, an epithet for the moon.  (Of course, I'm simplifying things.  I know it because many time I have written la luna, but this is a kind of symbol of what I was doing.)  Well, I thought everything had to be defined and that no common turns of phrase should be used.  I would never have said, So-and-so came in and sat down, because that was far too simple and far too easy.  I thought I had to find out some fancy way of saying it.  Now I find out that those things are generally annoyances to the reader.  But I think the whole root of the matter lies in the fact that when a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament, under words taken from the seventeenth-century writers: he's inventing words all the time, or alluding to airplanes, railway trains, or the telegraph and telephone because he's doing his best to be modern.  Then as time goes on, one feels that one's ideas, good or bad, should be plainly expressed, because if you have an idea you must try to get that idea or that feeling or that mood into the mind of the reader.

On diction:

Borges: I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all the words should look the same way.  If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word.  One should be able to read smoothly in it even if you're writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.

On the fantastic:

Borges: I wonder if you can define it.  I think it's rather an intention in a writer.  I remember a very deep remark of Joseph Conrad -- he is one of my favorite authors -- I think it is in the foreword to something like The Dark Line, but it's not that ....

Interview: The Shadow Line?

Borges: The Shadow Line. In that foreword he said that some people have thought that the story was a fantastic story because of the captain's ghost stopping the ship.  He wrote -- and that struck me because I write fantastic stories myself -- that to deliberately write a fantastic story was not to feel that the whole universe is fantastic and mysterious; nor that it meant a lack of sensibility for a person to sit down and write something deliberately fantastic.  Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.

Interviewer: You share this belief?

Borges: Yes.  I found that he was right.  I talked to Bioy Casares, who also writes fantastic stories -- very, very fine stories -- and he said, I think Conrad is right; really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.