Elena Bortă

The University of Bucharest, Romania

 

 

Borges, the Romanian Mythical Fiction and the Saga

 

 

Abstract: The author points out some of Borges’ paradoxes and notices resem­blances between his narratives, Bănulescu’s novel and the Nordic saga, consisting in the branching story-telling, in a mixture of verisimilitude, fantasy and myth, and in the use of themes and motives related to a mythical time framework. Borges is obviously and overtly inspired from the saga, as well as from other Nordic types of narratives and court medieval poetry in several of his stories, particularly, among others, in Undr. He and the Romanian writer Bănulescu blend ideas and feelings about the veridical/ the nonveridical, the fantastic/ the nonfantastic, or fantasy/ nonfantasy in their narratives, which, despite their differences, are at times mythical, as their plots and events may include an illud tempus dimension. The texts intermingle Christian and pre-Christian elements.

Keywords: Fantastic; Magic; Initiation; Narrative; Poetics; Myth.

 

 

Background

 

In one of his first stories (‘The Metaphor’, from the volume The History of Eternity[1], 1936), Borges brings to notice an Icelandic book, a kind of poetics containing phrases from old-time (thirteenth-century) Icelandic poetry, by Snorri Sturluson. After saying they are amazing, he criticises them sharply because they are mere associations of words. He concludes, however, that they are the very essence of poetry, after also having said that the modern Baudelaire and Lugones did not manage better than the medieval Icelandic poets. He also contends that poetical phrases could be more or less the same worldwide, while some of them, including those from the greatest poetry could be too banal. Is Borges serious?

He pretends to lay emphasis on meaning, which sometimes can hardly be grasped out of mere phrases taken out of a poem, whereas he will later assert (in his conferences from the Coliseo Theater in Buenos Aires[2]) his agreement with Croce that poetry is expression. And also that we are as different all the time as water is, in a Heraclitean sense He is subjective, he wouldn’t have written like that at that moment.

The same Borges starts one of his novellas, The Sand Book, published in 1975, by saying that a line is formed of an infinite number of points, the plane of an infinite number of lines, the volume – an infinite number of planes. After this, he underlines that he has thus paraphrased the most “conventional” beginning of a “fantastic” story. He goes on to say that his own story is, on the contrary, going to be entirely veridical, although it finally proves to be fantastic. In Evlampia[3], the Romanian writer Bănulescu says that, regarding litera­ture, the mere detail, in its simplest quality, seems fantastic, and so may seem the persons who avoid being by all means original, like the ones who do not do bizarre things such as, for instance, separating the subject and the predicate through a comma. His favourite writer is Liviu Rebreanu, a realistic writer. Like Borges, he also points out the fact that he means to be veridical, although he is an author of fantastic, more exactly of mythical[4] fiction with fantastic elements. His works include novellas[5] (1965, the definitive edition 1979) and a novel, The Book of Metopolis[6]. Regar­ding Borges, while he usually intro­duces himself as an author of “fantastic stories”, he pretends to be realistic in The Book of Sand, an otherwise symbolical narrative, too. Whether Bănulescu’s fiction is more or less fantastic or more or less realistic is a question to be debated. Both Borges’ and Bănulescu’s narratives intermingle the realistic with the mythical, the fantastic, the oneiric and the magic. Their narratives are dense, often full of details, dense details, although they may seem parsimonious with words, at times.

Borges also writes about the European North, particularly about the old times. He is as paradoxical as that. What we have noticed is a structural resemblance between his narratives and the Nordic saga. He writes about Nordic places and people, about the Icelandic couplet of verses called kenningar, and insists on presenting the atmosphere of the early medieval chivalric poetry in the European North. Working on an old manuscript, he develops the theme of an initiation ritual in the art of a poet at the court of king Grunnlaug and his successor, in the story Undr. He is obviously romantically attracted by that atmosphere. In Kenningar he speaks about couplets of Icelandic verses and he seems interested in that poetical art. The atmosphere of story-telling and of the heroic poem (saga) characterises some of Borges’s fiction and even some of his poetical texts. In Bănulescu’s mythical fiction – which is at times a saga of fighting against the elements – the characters heroically struggle against the hardships of the natural environment in order to keep and establish their cultural identity in their polis.

 

Story-telling and Palimpsest

 

The dense, digressive, often concise realistic epic of the Icelandic saga, in which the miraculous, the unexpected, the outstanding sometimes intervene, characterises both the Roma­nian writer’s and Borges’ narratives. Sagas were written between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries in Iceland, a span of time including the period of Christianisation, at its beginning, so they contain both Christian and pre-Christian elements. They circulated in other Nordic areas, and so did Edda and other Nordic epics and poetry. Their digressions often include genealogies, which are developed on whole pages. Borges’ novellas include family chro­nicles, or at least references to them. In Bănulescu’s mythical novel the neam (or ‘clan’ appears), for instance, in The Bustard, where its members have nick­names and their own particular customs.

Related to genealogy, cultural heritage and magic, these narratives include the theme of inscriptions (on weapons and trees, by gods or people) and manuscripts.

The difficulty of interpretation lies in the man-culture, man-nature re­lationship regarding, roughly speaking, three kinds of texts. That is: a palimpsestic, partly ano­nymous epic, which became (and was probably meant to be) legendary (the saga); the fiction written by the Romanian writer, inspired from folklore and myth; Borges’ fiction, an author of fantastic stories par excellence and a writer who taught Anglo-Saxon literature and wrote about suburbs, towns, villages, and nature alike, approach­ing social, psychological, or mythical topics. These texts are meditations upon the indivi­dual and his/ her relationship with the community (The Saga of Hrafnkell[7], The Saga of Njal[8] and the others), meditations upon the universe, and they often focus, first, on the characters’ feelings.

The blending of fantasy and reality in the Romanian mythical novel is similar to that in the South American writer’s work. In Revista de istorie şi teorie literară[9], I have already pointed out a similitude between Bănulescu’s mythical novellas and the Latin American fiction: ”through the bewil­dering interweaving of the fabulous and the real, Bănulescu’s mythical-magic fantasy is close to… the modern Latin American fiction, in which an insidious reality also pervades the space of the plausible”. As regards nature, Borges approaches small details, like a flower, and not only fantastic animals like in The Book of the Imaginary Beings[10]; the settings of his fictional universe include suburbs, towns and villages, and this universe focuses on the life of ordinary and extraordinary people alike, and on their encounters. Nature is part of the cosmic mystery and its wonders (The Rose of Paracel­sus). His fiction is full of myths. The saga sets forth the nature of the Nordic mountains, valleys and plateaus. Man lives as close to nature as in the saga in the Romanian novellas from the volume entitled Men’s Winter and in The Book of Metopolis, both by Bănulescu. In these works, the Danubian Plain is presented as part of the life of people and the life of people is part of the life of this nature. The mysteries of the universe and a mystical man-nature relationship, underlying the cosmic mystery from Bănulescu’s novellas are underlined by the volume of poetry preceding this prose, Field Songs, which is closely connected to these novellas. Borges also wrote poetry. The latter seems scared of large fields like the one in Brazil, as he says in a novel from The Book of Sand. He rummages about suburbs, cities, and interiors. In this field, which however suggests a mystical man-nature relation­ship to him, he can find a man with whom he talks about wonders and strange things. He is looking for this kind of mysticism, obviously also as regards the elemental universe, which can particularly be seen in his poetry.

The first-person narration is employed alternately with the third-person narration. The former is used in the greatest part of Borges’ texts – those from Aleph, Other Investigations, The Maker, Brodie’s Account, or The Book of Sand, including epilogues and pro­logues – and in Bănulescu’s The Bust­ard, The Clay Village, or Gaudeamus. In the saga, the epic in verse is in the first person, the rest of the texts – which may consist of later interpolations, added to the texts that remained[11] – being mainly third-person narrations. Narratives make use of monologue, which is part of story-telling. In Borges’ fiction, the characters or Borges himself are involved in this kind of story-telling. So are the characters in sagas (The Saga of Gisli[12] a.s.o.) and in Bănulescu’s narratives, like the one in Polidor’s Bell.

The narrative of these works is dense, concise, and factual. Insofar as sagas are concerned, style is more ceremonious in verse form, but so is often the style in Bănulescu’s novellas. The authors write accounts of events and debates, but they often express emotional matters. At times the texts are digressive, at other times they resort to anticipations or retrospectives. This happens in The Saga of Gisli, in which a series of events that come close to the end are foretold by dreams.

Smaller pieces of texts form a unity (a saga; a volume or a mosaic of short stories or novellas; a unity formed of several volumes – poetry, short stories/ novellas and other writings, connected between them, in Bănulescu’s and Borges’ works – and are ultimately part of Borges’ metaphor of the infinite book. A saga is a ramified story (following genealogy and its intertwinings).

Borges’ work is bulky, having as one of its favourite characters Borges himself, his readings, his encounters, debates, myths. His favourite myths include the one of the poet/creator and the myth of initiation. Bănulescu’s fiction is mythical, as long as things seem to happen in illo tempore. The writer states, in the postfaces to his volumes that the universe of his poetry, novellas and novel is meant to form a whole, expressing the same ”soil and spiritual unity” (the postface to the novellas). The world of this fiction is mythical, inspired from the area of Călăraşi (Metopolis), where they dig in search of some vestiges of the past called “metope”. Borges searches for written vestiges of the past and he is concerned with the role of the poet, who is most often depicted in old-time Northern European hypostases – The Mirror and the Mask, Undr, The Metaphor, Kenningar. The Germanic mythology of Ragnarök is employed by Borges with the meaning of eschatology and heroic action taken against hallu­cination, in the text thus entitled from The Maker. The action is both heroic proper and Quixotic, and is directed against phantasms showing people that embodied cruelty coming up near the local Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.

Their modes of turning facts and events into fiction, that is their ways of fictionalisation may be therefore similar, and there is sometimes a resem­blance of atmosphere, consisting in the ineffable and the mysterious (cf. the mirage of ”the golden aerosphere of the field” in Bănulescu’s The Table with Mirrors). The fantastic is noncanonic.

 

The Mythical Time and the Theme of the Initiation

 

An important theme in Borges’ fiction is initiation, which is also encountered in Bănulescu’s work and in the saga, too, where there is a continual initiation in sword handling. Bănu­lescu’s mythical novel, The Book of Metopolis, presents mixed Christian and pagan bridal ceremonies or elements of initiation into the goldsmith crafts­manship.

In “Paracelsus’ Rose” from A Rose and the Azure[13] Borges depicts a demonstration of one’s initiation and faith in alchemy, while presenting the failed initiation of a would-be appren­tice. The interest in alchemy and magic is pre-Christian and the time of any initiation is mythical. But the mixture of pre-Christian and Christian elements is alluded to or is obvious in sagas and in the other writings referred to here. Borges’ characters express religious points of view, in sagas there are both beliefs in old Nordic gods and Christian beliefs, the marital rites in Bănulescu’s novel take place during the Christian celebration of the Epiphany. Topics related to those of these narratives are found in other Romanian works, too. The multiple reflections (similar to those in Borges’ writings) are a topic in Tudor Dumitru Savu’s The Fort, 1988. The theme of the initiation is en­countered in some of Mihail Sado­veanu’s novels, like The Golden Bough (1933), a novel about a priest of the (half)god Zamolxis involved in the spreading of Christianity from Egypt to Byzantium.

Borges’ paradoxical nature is obvious when he speaks about himself in interviews[14], conferences, essays and novellas. As a consequence, in his writings the boundaries of genre – like essays and novellas[15] – are blurred.

Like an ancient bard/ skald/ troubadour, he read his own poems to an audience in 1980, among them The Sea, The Moon, A Fragment, Endimion in Latmos[16]. They are mixtures of mythical and cultural motives. In A Fragment he calls for a spear with runic letters inscribed on it for Beowulf’s heroic hand, like the one sung by Gisli. Bănulescu also presented his readers with a group of poems, the motives of which circulated in his novel and novellas. So in all these texts there is a certain closeness to poetry.

The mixture of Christian and pre-Christian elements is particularly obvious, in Borges, in the palimpsestic text Undr from The Book of Sand. A saga is, anyway, a palimpsest, an interpolation of accounts from various times that also underwent Christian influences. Bănulescu’s fiction is, too, a rewriting of motives from previous writings.

In this saga-like atmosphere of Borges’ fiction, Undr, the heroic is closely related to the poetical. In a society in which they write like Odin, who inscribed his text on the bark of the ash-tree, says the account, and where there are mostly warriors and boatmen, the narrator seeks for the only word out of which they made all their poetry in their Nordic kingdom. So together with the former poet and ironsmith Orm, he rumbles and he meets ”the word of God” as a fish, then as a disk, then as a circular wall partially surrounding the place of king Grunnlaug; after which he wanders and sings from the ultimate Thule through Asia and, when back with the former poet, he finally finds the word[17].