🦋 Borges' Opinion of Poe: more nuance
I'm trying to understand what Borges thought of Poe -- there are different, and conflicting, levels of his opinion to take into account. As I said yesterday, he is pretty dismissive of the poems and stories themselves -- he spends a few pages addressing Poe's detective stories one by one, and none of them comes off very well. But he still believes Poe to be a genius, and one of the most important authors influencing modern literature.
I have said, Poe was the creator of an intellectual temperament in literature. What happened after Poe's death? He died, I believe in 1849. Whitman, his other great contemporary, penned an obituary* of him, saying that Poe was a performer who only knew how to play the low notes of the piano, who did not represent American democracy -- a claim which Poe had never made for himself. Whitman did him an injustice, and so did Emerson.There are critics, today, who underestimate him. But I believe that Poe, if we take his works in aggregate, has the œuvre of a genius, even if his stories (excepting the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) are defective. Nonetheless, taken together they construct a character, a character more vividly present than the characters he created, more vividly present than Charles Auguste Dupin, than the crimes, than the mysteries which fail to scare us.
This seems to be his final judgement of Poe -- the rest of the lecture he spends discussing the flourishing of the detective story in Britain and its abasement in the US. So he gives Poe credit for inventing a genre, for inventing a style of reading, for inventing Borges himself -- at one point he says "we ourselves" read differently by virtue of having Poe's invention as part of our heritage. I guess he believes Poe to be a literary genius but not a great author.
 * I haven't been able to find the source for this obituary on the web. Update -- found it!
posted afternoon of Saturday, February 28th, 2009
➳ More posts about Borges oral
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Detective, not defective.
I'm shocked that Borges's points are so snippy. Particularly since he owes something to Poe---hard to quantify how much, but certainly there is more than homage.
Also, re an earlier comment, Transcendentalism is a valid, sensible and contemporary worldview. To bash it is like bashing Buddhism.
posted evening of February 28th, 2009 by paledave
detective, not defective
(grin) No, that's not a typo -- Borges' opinion of Poe is that his stories are flawed. I agree, I was pretty surprised to see him being so critical of Poe's writing, especially when the context is him talking about Poe as the major genius of modern literature.
posted evening of February 28th, 2009 by Jeremy
(And don't even get John started on Buddhism...)
posted evening of February 28th, 2009 by Jeremy
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