Borges on the Couch

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TL;DR

Wallace's New York Times Book Review notice (7 November 2004) of Edwin Williamson's biography Borges: A Life. This is Wallace criticism rather than writing about Infinite Jest, and its value is as a compact statement of Wallace's own theory of how — and how not — to read an author back out of his work. He indicts literary biography for a built-in "design flaw" — the genre must make a writer's private life seem vital to his art — and observes that a writer's admirers come to a biography already "perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy." The essay's live interest for a reader of Infinite Jest is that Wallace articulates, in his own voice, the exact interpretive trap his own encoded, self-referential novel invites, and praises fiction "designed primarily as metaphysical arguments" that are "meant to be impersonal" and folded into "an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding."

Key claims

The paradox of literary biography. Admirers of a writer are the readers most drawn to his biography, yet "the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire", and "the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is."
Williamson's Borges vs. the Borges of the stories. The biography's Borges is "a vain, timid, pompous mama's boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions" — "about as different as one can get" from "the limpid, witty, pansophical, profoundly adult writer we know from his stories."
Williamson's central thesis (reported, not endorsed): the Argentine national conflict between the "sword" of civilizing European liberalism and the "dagger" of romantic gaucho individualism plays out in Borges's childhood, where he "failed" two paternal tests (a dagger given him to use on bullies; a brothel sent to for devirgination), whose scars "show up all over the place in his fiction, Williamson thinks."
The real defect is a genre flaw. "Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges's work"; "his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism." Wallace generalizes: the biography assumes as an axiom that "we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation."
The axiom works on Kafka, fails on Borges. "It works well on Kafka" because "Kafka's fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka's psyche." Borges's stories are the opposite: "They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics", and above all "they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness".
Borges as radical Neoplatonist. Wallace reads Borges as "a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist" for whom human thought and history are "the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding." The consequence he draws: "Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal."
Williamson at his worst on the individual stories. The review's second half turns to Williamson's readings of specific pieces, "just about everything Borges ever wrote", and finds them "shallow, forced and distorted." His governing thesis is the axiom stated bare: "Bereft of a key to their autobiographical context, no one could have grasped the vivid significance these pieces actually had for their author." Wallace's example is "The Wait," whose "distant interrogative ending — a Borges trademark" Williamson flattens into a depressed man who "just rolls over meekly to face the wall" after a girlfriend leaves him.
The Immortal and The Writing of the God — the essay's culminating example. Wallace singles out Williamson's handling of "The Immortal" and "The Writing of the God" — "two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude" — reduced to products of Borges's "many-layered distress" and "indifference to his fate" after breakups. "Stuff like this misses the whole point." What makes a Borges story Borgesian, Wallace argues, "is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it."
The closing verdict. The review ends on the anti-biographical thesis at full strength: "Even if Williamson's claims are true, the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant." A footnote turns the point self-referential: Borges's own "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote'" and "Borges and I" already "anticipate and refute the whole idea of a literary biography."

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: Wallace's own case against reading a novel back out of its author's biography — the "intentional fallacy" trap a reader of Infinite Jest is most tempted into

Crux: none
Early text: The review argues that admiring readers are "perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy", and that a biography's governing axiom — "we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation" — is a "design flaw." The essay's closing statement is the thesis at full pitch: "the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant." [¶1, ¶4, closing ¶]
IJ echo: The reading stance the novel keeps provoking — decoding Hal's collapse, the ending, or the Entertainment's fatality from Wallace's own Boston recovery years and depression. Wallace's insistence that some fiction resists this is a self-description sibling to his design statements elsewhere (the "messing with maps" and piton remarks in the 1996 interviews).
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Continuity of authorial stance, not a plot crux. Cuts against, not toward, biographical readings of the novel — a caution in Wallace's own voice against decoding the book from the life.

CONNECTION: fiction "designed primarily as metaphysical arguments," impersonal, folded into "a cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding" — Borges as the model of self-enclosed, self-decoding design

Crux: none
Early text: Borges's stories "are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics", are "meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness", and belong to "an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding". [¶5, ¶6]
IJ echo: The novel's self-referential, encyclopedic architecture — the book that folds its own reading instructions into its structure (the annular/ Sierpinski design, the samizdat-that-is-the-book family of readings). Wallace praising exactly this quality in Borges is oeuvre-level evidence of the design value he prizes.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Wallace praises in Borges the same self-enclosed, self-decoding quality readers find in the novel's encyclopedic structure.

Themes

Reading and interpretation (the intentional fallacy; author vs. work); self-reference and encoded structure (the "cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding"); the impersonality vs. confession axis that runs through Wallace's aesthetics. Kafka recurs as the counter-model, tying this note to the 1998 "Laughing with Kafka" essay.

Cross-references

dfw-laughing-with-kafka — Wallace's 1998 Kafka essay; Kafka is the writer on whom this review says biographical reading "works well", and the two pieces together map Wallace's expressionist-vs-metaphysical axis of how fiction relates to a psyche.
The 1996 interviews that carry Wallace's own statements about Infinite Jest's construction (the map-fiction and piton remarks) — this review is the same design temperament in critical prose eight years on.

Notable passages

"the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire."
"Williamson is an atrocious reader of Borges's work"; "his interpretations amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism."
"They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics."
"they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness".
"Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal."
"two of the greatest, most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude" (on "The Immortal" and "The Writing of the God").
"the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant." (the review's closing line)