Borges, Desire, and Sex

Front matter

Borges, Desire, and Sex

Ariel de la Fuente

Liverpool Latin American Studies

Introduction

I

ÉS oN A U

Biography in Literature and the Reading of Desire and Sex in Borges

Borges’s Erotic Library: The Poetry Shelf

Sir Richard Burton’s Orientalist Erotica: The Thousand Nights and a Night and The Perfumed Garden

Desire and Sex in Buenos Aires: Borges’s Poetry on the Arrabal Stoicism and Borges’s Writing of Women

“Emma Zunz”: Sex, Virtue, and Punishment

Conclusions Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgements

The Department of History and the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University have supported the research and writing of this book, for which I am sincerely appreciative. I have also fundamentally benefitted from the expertise and professionalism of the staff at the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library, in particular the staff in the Interlibrary Loan Department, whose unfailing dedication made possible for me to consult all necessary materials. I equally thank the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas (Austin), for giving me access to their Jorge Luis Borges’s Collection. I am also appreciative of Carmen Vasco, Inés, Silvia, and Sonia Fernandez Moreno and the journal Variaciones Borges for their copyright permissions and of Donna Ferullo for her gracious advice regarding these matters. I am deeply grateful to Chloe Johnson, Commissioning Editor at Liverpool University Press, for her commitment to this project.

Many colleagues generously offered their knowledge and support and I am certainly indebted to them for any virtue this book may have: I thank Jeremy Adelman, Victor Aizenman, German Alvarez, Daniel Balderston, Mariela Blanco, Pablo Brescia, Barbara Brown, Susan Clawson, Susan Curtis, Chuck Cutter, Paul Dixon, Nils Jacobsen, Guillermo Martinez, Alberto Rojo, Laura Rosato, Marcia Stephenson, and Dawn Stinchcomb.

It would have been impossible to bring this book to completion without the kindness of my cousins Alma Saravia and Eli Eitan, and the friendship of Gustavo Paz, Luis Alberto Lozano, Fernando Boro, Ananth and Vidhya Iyer, Claudio and Claudia Aguilar, Stacey Smythe and Avi Kak, Marcelo Carignano and Claudia Guerin, Carlos Gambirazio, Ruth Abramovitz, Esteban Fernandez Juricic and Gabriela Sincich, John and Kim Reisman, Dave and Char Warner and the “Grill Nighters”.

This book is dedicated to the people to whom I owe everything in my life: to my parents, for their love and generosity; to Marcela Duprat, who gave me the opportunity to discover beauty in the world and “bonté” in human beings; to Malena and Agustina, for their endless love; and to Cecilia, whose literary insights and unfailing patience made the writing of the book (as of the rest of our life) a shared adventure.

“Auto”

BES

BH

BLL

BOW

BP

Cartas del Fervor

CS

CSM

CV

ET

FBA

Abbreviations

Jorge Luis Borges. “An Autobiographical Essay,” in Critical Essays on Forge Luis Borges. Jaime Alazraki (ed.). Boston: Hall and Co., 1987, 21-55.

Jorge Luis Borges. Forge Luis Borges en Sur, 1931—1980. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1999.

Jorge Luis Borges. Borges en El Hogar, 1935-1958. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2000.

Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, libros y lecturas. Laura Rosato and German Alvarez (eds.). Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2010.

Jorge Luis Borges. Borges on Writing. N. T. Di Giovanni, D. Halpern, and Frank MacShane (eds.). New York: Allen Lane, 1973.

Jorge Luis Borges. Borges Profesor: Curso de literatura inglesa en la universidad de Buenos Aires. Martin Arias and Martin Hadis (eds.). Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2000.

Jorge Luis Borges. Cartas del fervor: correspondencia con Maurice Abramowicz y Jacobo Sureda (1919-1928).

Edited with prologue and notes by Joaquin Marco, Carlos Garcia, and Cristóbal Pera. Barcelona: Emecé, 1999.

Jorge Luis Borges. El círculo secreto. Prólogos y notas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2003.

Jorge Luis Borges. Cuaderno San Martín. Buenos Aires: Cuadernos del Plata, 1929.

Jorge Luis Borges. This Craft of Verse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Jorge Luis Borges. El tango: cuatro conferencias. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2016.

Jorge Luis Borges. Fervor de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Serantes, 1923. Edicion de autor, sin foliación].

X BORGES, DESIRE, AND SEX

IA ILN

Inq.

LE

LDS

NRSVA

OC [2010] OCC TME

TRr

TR2

TR3

WWR

Jorge Luis Borges. El idioma de los argentinos. Madrid: Alianza, 1999.

Jorge Luis Borges. Introducción a la literatura norteamericana. Buenos Aires: Editorial Columba, 1967.

Jorge Luis Borges. Inquisiciones. Madrid: Alianza, 1998.

Jorge Luis Borges. Luna de enfrente. Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1925.

Jorge Luis Borges. Libro de sueños. Buenos Aires: Random House Mondadori, 2013.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. The New Revised Standard Version (third edition). Michael Coogan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Jorge Luis Borges. Obras completas. 4 vols. Buenos Aires and Barcelona: Emecé. 1974-96.

Jorge Luis Borges. Obras completas. 3 vols. Critical edition annotated by Rolando Costa Picazo and Irma Zángara. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2009-11.

Jorge Luis Borges. Oeuvres Completes. Jean-Pierre Bernes, editor. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

Jorge Luis Borges. Obras completas en colaboración. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1979.

Jorge Luis Borges. El tamaño de mi esperanza. Madrid: Alianza, 1998.

Jorge Luis Borges. Textos recobrados (1919-1929). Barcelona: Emecé, 1997.

Jorge Luis Borges. Textos recobrados (1931-1955). Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001.

Jorge Luis Borges. Textos recobrados (1956-1986). Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2003.

Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. E. F. J. Payne trans. New York: Dover,

Introduction

One of the personal traits that defined Jorge Luis Borges in the eyes of his friends and other contemporaries was his troubled sexuality. Estela Canto, who maintained a close romantic relationship with Borges in the 1940s, said that “la realización sexual era aterradora para él.”* Dr Miguel Kohan Miller, the psychoanalyst who about the same time treated him for his “impotencia sexual,” also observed that Borges, “como toda persona que tiene una disminución de su potencia sexual, [vivia] acosado por el problema de la sexualidad.”?

This emotionally overwhelming condition significantly shaped Borges's literary experience: he often read, thought, and wrote about desire and sex. Yet, in a modest and reticent writer like Borges, this aspect of his work is not usually apparent. This is the case, for example, in the essay “Edgar Allan Poe,” published in the newspaper La Nación in 1949, in which Borges offered a critique of the American author. The title of the article does not allude to sex, and the text does not seem to be concerned with it. Borges begins the essay in this way:

Detras de Poe (como detras de [Jonathan] Swift, de [Thomas] Carlyle, de Almafuerte) hay una neurosis. Interpretar su obra en función de esa anomalia puede ser abusivo o legitimo. Es abusivo cuando se alega la neurosis para invalidar o negar la obra; es legitimo cuando se busca en la neurosis un medio para entender su génesis.?

At first glance we may think that here Borges proposes that Poe’s personality and emotional troubles may help explain his work (as well as those of the other authors). But that would be barely an elemental approximation that still leaves us essentially clueless about the rationale that guided his interpretation of the American author. To comprehend all that is implied

1 Canto, A contraluz, 98. 2 Goldaracena, “Las inhibiciones del joven Borges.” 3 Borges, TR2, 263.

in the opening of the essay, we first need to ask what was the “neurosis” common to Poe and the other writers? The answer, which requires us to investigate well beyond Borges’s literature, allows us to learn a fundamental fact: all four authors suffered from sexual impotence. This alone opens a whole new window into the text of the essay and tells us that we need to read it in relation to Borges’s own sexuality. To comprehend the essay we also have to dispel the fog of vocabulary that stands between the thinking of the writer and the reader: the author speaks of “anomaly” and “neurosis,” general terms that point toward the psychological dimensions of the problem but that allow Borges to dodge the word “impotence,” too explicit and embarrassing for a newspaper in the modest Argentina of the 1940s. Thus, when an elusive poet who suffered a socially stigmatizing condition surrounds “anomaly” and “neurosis” with the figures of Poe, Swift, Carlyle, and Almafuerte, those two words take on a different meaning. That is, Borges does not fully reveal the key sexual fact that guides his interpretation of Poe (and other writers) and, instead, gives us a riddle to solve. To get to the bottom of what Borges meant in this essay we must also be aware of the hostile reception of his early work and how his impotence was a factor in it. In the 1930s some Argentine writers, who believed in the old prejudice that assumed that there was a direct proportional relation between the sexual potency of an author and his creativity, had used Borges’s impotence to “invalidate or deny” his literature.> Here, then, Borges responded to his literary enemies by inverting the false premise: he proposed that, on the contrary, the “neurosis” from which some authors suffered could be very productive and at the origin of their literature. Finally, and to fully understand the implications of Borges’s paragraph, we also have to keep in mind one of his enunciative strategies: he often used the life of other authors to speak about himself. In other sections of this essay, for example, he presents Poe’s trajectory from failed poet to innovative short story writer in a form that obviously paralleled his own. In the same vein, then, while proposing impotence (and sexuality more generally) as a “legitimate” interpretive key for Poe’s literature, Borges was also talking about the relationship between his own life and work.

This essay is a good example of the difficulties that reading sex in Borges’s literature poses. Perhaps the main obstacle for the comprehension of this text is that he does not use the word “impotence,” which renders his sexuality invisible to most readers—invisibility that in the case of this essay (as happened with many of his other texts) has been compounded by a problematic publication history: the essay first came out in a newspaper in 1949 but it was only included in a book in 2001, and therefore remained

4 On Swift's, Carlyle’s, and Poe’s sexual impotence, McLaren, Impotence, 102, 121, 133; on Almafuerte’s, Borges, TR2, 195.

5 I explain this problematic side of his early critical reception in chapter I.

6 I explore this aspect of his writing in chapter 2.

largely unknown to previous generations of specialists and still occupies a very marginal position in Borges’s canon today.

The largely invisible presence of sex in Borges’s texts has led critics to assume that he could not read, reflect, or write about his troubled condition or about sex more generally. In a 2011 review essay in the Times Literary Supplement, a critic pointed out Borges’s “striking ... avoidance of the erotic” in his sonnets;” in a recent study on literature and urban culture in Buenos Aires the author assures us that Borges could not speak about himself, particularly on sexual matters;® similarly, a 2006 biography underscores “the infrequency of references to women or sex” in his literature;? and other students of his work define him as a “mojigato” (“prude”), who could not accept sex and avoided speaking about it.'°

The assumption that Borges would not read, think, or write about sex is pervasive and materializes in forms that are not always as explicit as the comments quoted above. For example, in Beatriz Sarlo’s Borges, un escritor en las orillas (1995) and Alan Pauls’s El factor Borges (2004), two insightful and influential critical readings, the asexuality of Borges’s literature is taken for granted and, therefore, the two critics do not even consider the possibility of eroticism in his work and literary experience.'! The same preconception guided the annotation of the critical edition of his Obras completas (2009-2011). In the substantive notes prepared by the editor to inform readers about the authors cited by Borges, it is virtually impossible to find anything that may allow us to learn that Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paul Verlaine, Richard Burton, Marcelino Del Mazo, and others wrote erotic literature. As an example, in a very long and detailed explanatory note on Swinburne,’ the editor omitted Borges’s characterization of the English writer as a “gran poeta erótico,”** which clearly shows how and why he read him. Thus the unquestioned assumption that Borges is an asexual writer prevented the editor from, literally, reading Borges’s interest in sex, even when he was explicit about it.

This is not limited to the “academic” or “official” Borges. The blog Oye Borges, which publishes a lot of criticism and information about the author and attracts thousands of fans on the internet, has organized the repertoire of the topics 1t covers into more than 200 categories: some of them are obviously

Schifino, “Slow Nightfall,” 4.

Bergero, Intersecting Tango, 397.

Wilson, forge Luis Borges, 40.

to Aguilar and Jelicié, Borges va al cine, 126.

11 One of Pauls's chapters investigates Borges's “Política del pudor” but, as the title

NO on suggests, he treats it as a general aesthetic choice and discursive strategy (he contrasts it, for example, with Borges’s denunciation of “color local”) but, somewhat paradoxically, he does not consider it in relation to sexuality or eroticism in Borges’s literature. 12 Borges, OC [2009], I, 459-60. 13 Borges, OCC, 844.

important (“Borges and English Literature,” “Borges and Mathematics,” etc.), others not so much (“Borges and the Astrological Map,” “Borges and the City of Parana,” etc.). Yet, among those 200 categories there is not even one on, say, “Borges and Erotic Literature” or “Borges and Sex.”**

Borges’s reputation in this respect goes back to at least the early 1930s, when he was not yet a narrator and had not published most of his work, including the “metaphysical fantasies” that would make him famous. Back then, hostile critics referred to him and his poetry and essays using expressions such as “prefiere helarse,” “emoción anestesiada,” or “expresión frigida,”** all of which hinted at an absence of sex in his life and work; a reading of his early poetry and criticism that, as I said before, was based on an unjustified assumption about the relationship between male sexual potency and literary creation.

This perception of Borges's literature somehow took hold, to the extent that in 1949 Estela Canto felt compelled to address this aspect of what she called Borges's “mito.” In her review of El Aleph, published barely three months after the book came out, she rejected the dominant view of Borges as an “escritor frío, deshumanizado, analítico” and hoped that the new volume of short stories would refute the “mito” of Borges's “presunta frialdad.”** (Borges himself eventually endorsed—not without a venomous qualification of his former lover—Canto's reading of his work. He told his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares: “A veces Estela es muy inteligente. Fue la única persona que advirtió que en mis cuentos hay emoción. No puede escribirse sin emoción”).

But in spite of Canto's efforts the “myth” about Borges's “coldness” did not disappear. In the following decades other factors contributed to this generalized reading of his work. The second half of the twentieth century, the period when Borges rose to global recognition, was a time of liberalization of sexual mores, which implied a significantly higher tolerance for more explicit expressions of desire and sex, including pornography. This shift of cultural expectations and change of sensibilities regarding public and artistic expressions of eroticism left readers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries ill equipped to read the literature of a reticent man who thought that “la mejor poesia erotica no es obscena.”*3

Borges’s canonization has arguably created another impediment to read desire and sex in his work. It is what some have called “the purity of the eminent”;'” that is, the assumption that “great figures” are different from the rest of us and that, among other things, they could have never stooped to sex. In the case of Borges, this assumption has probably been compounded

15 Doll, “Discusiones con Borges,” 34.

16 Canto, “Jorge Luis Borges,” 94.

19 Williams, Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 9.

by the image of a frail octogenarian interested in metaphysics, since that is how most of us remember him today.

Of course, there have been a few exceptions to this dominant perception of a divorce between Borges’s literature and sex and eroticism. Almost three decades ago, Julio Woscoboinik’s insightful El secreto de Borges: Indagacion psicoanalitica de su obra (1988) was perhaps the first major effort to explore some sections of Borges’s literature in relation to his family and sexuality. More recently, Edwin Williamson’s biography Borges: A Life (2004) has given Borges’s amorous failure with poet Norah Lange a pivotal role in the creation of his literature. Also, in articles and book chapters, Daniel Balderston, Blas Matamoros, and Humberto Nufiez-Faraco have explored questions such as homoeroticism, homosexual panic, and desire in Borges’s work.?°

It is the contention of this book that, contrary to what criticism has generally assumed, desire and sex have occupied a significant place in Borges’s oeuvre and literary experience. As we have seen, Borges himself thought that the production of his literature was intimately linked to his well-documented impotence that, along with other sexual preoccupations, became the point of departure or provided material for the more or less explicit reflections, insights, and references to sex in his literature. In his writings he re-created and addressed, with different degrees of interest and extension, questions such as desire and the sex act, casual and venal sex, incest and homosexuality, and his relationships with women, and he reflected, more or less explicitly, on the written expression of eroticism. Also, as we will see, he was an ardent reader of erotic literature, a fundamental dimension of his literary experience that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been systematically explored before. This project has demanded the rereading of some of his classic short stories, such as “Emma Zunz,” “La secta del Fénix,” or “La intrusa,” but it has also asked for the investigation of some “rincones secretos” in Borges’s “vasta obra”;* that is, it has required the interrogation of less visible stories, poems, and essays like “Pedro Salvadores,” “Endimión en Latmos,” or “Edgar Allan Poe.” This study, I claim, adds another, largely unnoticed, layer to our comprehension of Borges’s literature and figure.

This book is deeply indebted to the insights and the research contributed by Woscoboinik, Williamson, Balderston, and others in the works mentioned but it has also been made possible by the important changes that have occurred in the field of Borges criticism in the last 15 years or so. Referring to the study of Borges more generally, Daniel Balderston said in 2009 that “Tengo la extrafia sensacion de que, a pesar de los miles de estudios que hay sobre la obra de Borges, apenas ahora lo estamos comenzando a leer

20 Balderston, “Dialéctica,” “Pudor”; Matamoros, “Yo y el otro”; Núñez-Faraco, “Lovesickness.” 21 Borges, OC [1974], IV, 514.

en serio.”2? One of the reasons for this is that since approximately 1999 (the year of the centennial of Borges’s birth), an enormous amount of previously unpublished, unknown, or out-of-print texts and documents by Borges or related to his literature has been published. This material includes essays, poetry, correspondence, transcripts of classes, conferences, interviews, private diaries, the marginalia in some of his books, postcards, writings by his father, etc. In addition, although a great deal of manuscript materials pertaining to Borges are still in the hands of secretive investors and collectors and generally off-limits for scholars, the last few years have, nonetheless, witnessed the publication of critical editions of some of them. In terms of quantity alone, the number of words written or spoken by Borges published since the turn of the century is probably equivalent to Gf not larger than) the material that was in print at the time of his death (1986). That is, today, the corpus of his writings far exceeds his Obras completas, and the latter are no longer enough to understand and explain Borges. Just as a simple example, my study of Borges’s reading of the erotic poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti could not have been possible in 1999 or even in 2006: the section on the English poet fundamentally relies on the transcripts of Borges’s classes at the University of Buenos Aires published in 2000,” and on Adolfo Bioy Casares's Boswellian diary Borges that came out in 2007.

The availability of previously inaccessible or unknown material has been compounded by the existence of new instruments that allow more thorough investigations (such as the online Borges index at the Borges Center of the University of Pittsburgh) and by the ever-expanding research of scholars and forums such as the journal specializing on his work, Variaciones Borges. The synergy created by the combination of these multiple factors has been enormously productive and therefore allowed us to pose more refined questions and to carry out more informed and deeper readings of his literature. In 2011 Argentine critic Gonzalo Aguilar sensed the changes in the field and the possibilities that they created. He pointed out that there is a side of Borges that so far can only be suspected in some of his “perversas elucubraciones,” but that critics have not yet explored: there is a Borges, he said, “que todavía esta por descubrirse.”?*

“Discovering” the unknown Borges, though, has also demanded the asking of different questions, and I have been helped to imagine them by a scholarly trend that has recognized the shaping energy of desire and sex in the work of artists and writers. Among them, Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (1984) remains a subtle reading of an elusive poet who shares some characteristics with Borges. Recently this trend has become more visible in works such as Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare, Sex, and

22 Balderston, Innumerables relaciones, 13. 23 Borges, BP. 24 Aguilar, “Por qué Borges.”

Love (2010); Laurence Dreyfus’s Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (2010); and Eros Hugo: Entre pudeur et excés (2015).

Because of its specificity and complexity, the problem under study invited a heterodox exploration unconstrained by the expectations of current theoretical and methodological canons. As a historian I have been attentive to the particularities of Borges’s life and literature and as I worked in this project I was persuaded that the questions raised allowed an interdisciplinary approach. For example, recent developments in the fields of speech pathology and psychology as well as studies on male sexual impotence have been very helpful in understanding Borges’s biography and sexuality,’ and opened the possibility of reading desire and sex in his literature in other ways (more on this in chapter 1).

In the same vein, in addition to the extensive Borges scholarship and the studies on desire and sex on other writers that my work relies on, in this literary investigation I have also taken the liberty of listening to creative writers, whose views on the production and explication of literature are, paradoxically, often absent from literary studies. The reading of this less visited corpus of criticism has made apparent the multiple intersections between history and literature and thus alerted me to the contributions that historians can make to literary studies. Because this has been a fundamental aspect of how I, a historian, thought about the project and how I worked, I will spend a few pages on this matter.

To a significant extent my inquiry was guided by the reflections on literature that I found in three critical genres practiced by creative writers. First, and most obviously, I benefitted from essays on a variety of topics by authors from several traditions and different times; in them I found a wide range of modes of reasoning, and, perhaps more important, their styles of exposition, usually clear and mindful of the reader, constituted attractive examples for the communication of criticism.’ Second, I also gained valuable insights from transcripts of classes and lectures taught by, among others, Borges himself and Vladimir Nabokov, whose “spoken essays” provided models of practical explication of texts while highlighting relevant critical questions.?” Finally, the correspondence of writers has been another critical genre in which the writers

25 Iverach et al., “Anxiety and Stuttering”; Iverach and Rapee, “Social Anxiety Disorder”; Eliacheff and Einich, Meéres-filles, “Étendre la notion d'inceste”; McLaren, Impotence.

26 In addition to the essays by creative writers that I note in this section and throughout the book, I would like to highlight A. S. Byatt’s and Paul Valéry’s, whose penetrating analysis and effective prose became for me models in criticism. See for example, the essays in Byatt’s Passions of the Mind and Valéry’s Varieté (I-V).

27 I also learned, among others, from Paul Muldoon’s Oxford lectures on poetry and Julio Cortazar’s Clases de literatura: Berkeley, 1980 (see below). The expression “spoken essays” is from V. S. Pritchett’s blurb on the cover of Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature.

have frequently addressed some of their fundamental literary preoccupations and, thus, their letters offer us the opportunity to become better readers (in particular, the letters of Robert Burns and Gustave Flaubert proved very illuminating).?8

In these three critical genres, writers explicate and interpret texts, raising questions that consistently point toward the comprehension and reconstruction of the creative process. For example, Francine Prose has argued in favor of Reading Like a Writer (2006); that is, reading in a way that allows us to understand how the writer arrived at her text. In this respect she is a very good example in a long tradition of authors interested in the question, a tradition that goes back, at least, to Edgar A. Poe's “The Philosophy of Composition,” whose purpose was to show “the modus operandi by which [his own poem “The Raven”] was put together.”?? This was also the overarching critical preoccupation of writers like Flaubert and Nabokov: the French writer advised a friend who wanted to master literature, “lisez les grands maítres en táchant de saisir leur procédé,” and the author of Lolita believed that in the course of an explication of a text “we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.”*% Of course, as Borges lucidly warned in “La génesis de “El Cuervo’ de Poe” (1935)** and “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (1939),*? the mission left to us by the author of “The Raven” can never be carried to precise completion because 1t is impossible to unearth each of the minute choices made by the writer. Yet, we can certainly aspire to a sketch of the creative process that led to a text (which, as Borges said, was what Poe actually did).

As Nabokov’s metaphor suggests, one of the challenges posed by any explication is that a writer’s procedure or the purpose of a text is not readily apparent and is covered by layers of reflection, rewritings, and choices, in which the author has consciously and unconsciously suppressed a significant proportion of the evidence of his own work. Aware of this reality, Henry James said that the “general intention” of a writer was a “buried treasure,” camouflaged and blended in his work “like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.”** Poets too think that the goals of interpretation are difficult to reach because they are hidden and blurred by form and the skills of the author that made it possible. In Who Is Ozymandias? and Other Puzzles in Poetry (2011), John Fuller reminds us about “the crucial habit of riddling” and “concealment” in poetry, which implies that the interpretive “key [is always] behind

28 Other collections of correspondence that helped me become a more attentive reader were those of Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

29 Poe, Poetry, 1374. Italics in the original.

30 Flaubert, Correspondance, 335; Nabokov, Lectures, 6.

33 “The Figure in the Carpet,” in James, Selected Tales, 292, 295.

a poem.”** Poet Jorge Boccanera proposes a similar relation between what is apparent and what may help comprehend a text: the book in which he tries a biographical reading of famous Latin American love poems is titled La pasion de los poetas but subtitled, more precisely, La historia “detras” de los poemas de amor?’

If the intention of an author, a method of composition, or the meaning of a poem, are hidden, camouflaged, or riddled, the task of criticism is to uncover them. Borges, for example, thought that “el gran critico debe descubrir una verdad que estaba oculta, dar una interpretación nueva.”** Propositions like this one highlight the kindred qualities of the historians’ and critics’ thought processes and overall aims and remind us that their main difference is in the subject of their inquiry but not in the nature of the latter. Explication and interpretation of literature, then, call for investigative criticism. It is not a coincidence that he who wanted “to retrace the steps by which his conclusions [in “The Raven’] have been attained”*” was also the author of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the first modern detective short story where the analyst reconstructed the “creative process” of a crime. Of course, the analytical method used by the main character Auguste Dupin in the short story (“retracing the steps by which particular conclusions ... have been attained”)? was identical to the one employed by Poe in his famous essay; moreover, the epigraph he chose for the founding text of the detective genre refers, precisely, to a “puzzle” in literary criticism that was worth investigating and could potentially be solved.*? Nabokov too saw himself as a Dupin of literature: his course was, he said, “a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures,’*° a predisposition shared by Fuller, who recently has called critics “detectives of poetry.”**

Literary criticism is, then, a problem-solving discipline that may “often sound like a law court” where “different views must rely on evidence to settle the matter.”*? But, as in a court case, in criticism or history the “truth” is only an argument, an arrangement of facts or an interpretation whose “veracity” is determined by its ability to persuade the reader.** And the persuasive capacity of an interpretation in the arts or the humanities,