A kind of maze

INTERVIEWER

Readers very often call your stories parables. Do you like that description?

BORGES

No, no. They're not meant to be parables. I mean if they are parables . . . [long pause] . . . that is, if they are parables, they have happened to be parables, but my intention has never been to write parables.

INTERVIEWER

Not like Kafka's parables, then?

BORGES

In the case of Kafka, we know very little. We only know that he was very dissatisfied with his own work. Of course, when he told his friend Max Brod that he wanted his manuscripts to be burned, as Virgil did, I suppose he knew that his friend wouldn't do that. If a man wants to destroy his own work, he throws it into a fire, and there it goes. When he tells a close friend of his, “I want all the manuscripts to be destroyed,” he knows that the friend will never do that, and the friend knows that he knows and that he knows that the other knows that he knows and so on and so forth.

INTERVIEWER

It's all very Jamesian.

BORGES

Yes, of course. I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James. I think that they both thought of the world as being at the same time complex and meaningless.

INTERVIEWER

Meaningless?

BORGES

Don't you think so?

INTERVIEWER

No, I don't really think so. In the case of James . . .

BORGES

But in the case of James, yes. In the case of James, yes. I don't think he thought the world had any moral purpose. I think he disbelieved in God. In fact, I think there's a letter written to his brother, the psychologist William James, wherein he says that the world is a diamond museum, let's say a collection of oddities, no? I suppose he meant that. Now in the case of Kafka, I think Kafka was looking for something.

INTERVIEWER

For some meaning?

BORGES

For some meaning, yes; and not finding it, perhaps. But I think that they both lived in a kind of maze, no?

(o resto aqui)

Aconselha-se a entrevista de Huxley, também - e as outras todinhas, que isto é uma perdição.

Lenços e mais lenços.