jorge luis borges

Interview

J
EAN-LUC GODARD’S Les Carabiniers (1963) opens on a card,
handwritten by the director, which reads: ‘The more I write,
the more I tend to simplicity. I use the most worn-out met-
aphors. In the end, that is what is eternal: the stars resemble the
eyes, for example, or death is like sleep. (Borges)’. There follows a
title card before the action begins, onto which Godard has squeezed
every credit for the film. The initial card’s connection to the film
is difficult to discern, unless Godard is simply pointing up his fa-
ble’s status as metaphor, something he signals again with his open-
ing shots of the Paris ring road, taken from the jeep we see in the
following shot, now in the film’s imaginary kingdom. The card has
the air of being a sudden whim, as indeed it surely was: Jorge Luis
Borges’ remark appears in a book of interviews with literary figures
printed just four weeks before Godard’s film was released, Madeleine
Chapsal’s Quinze écrivains (p. 25), although he may also have seen it
in the Paris newspaper L’Express six weeks before that.
What is peculiar about this seemingly banal comment by Borges
is that he was recycling a remark made in an essay dating from 1948,
reprinted in his 1952 collection OTHER INQUISITIONS, translated
into French that year. This earlier remark has a startling connec-
tion to Godard’s work. After making a similar point about worn-out
metaphors in that text, concerning the seventeenth-century Spanish
poet Francisco de Quevedo, Borges opines that with his rejection
of metaphor Quevedo ‘forgot that the metaphor is the momentary
contact of two images, not the methodical likening of two things’
(1964, p. 39). By 1965, Godard was quoting from another text in
Borges’ book in Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution.
Perhaps his encounter with the 1963 interview prompted him to pick
up the volume, or perhaps he recalled its use as a prop in Jacques
Rivette’s film Paris Belongs to Us (1957–61), itself curiously ‘Borge-
sian’ (a popular term for the author’s labyrinthine narratives of re-
condite causality). Rivette, however, was unfamiliar with the book
Suzanne Schiffman placed in his film. Thus while Borges was quite
in vogue in French literary circles by the late 1950s—earlier than in
Entretien: Jorge Luis Borges. Madeleine Chapsal, L’Express, 21
February 1963.
aaa Reading with Jean-Luc Godard

the English-speaking world—he was slow coming to the attention of

Godard and his circle. And as Edgardo Cozarinsky remarks, little did
the Nouvelle Vague directors realise when they discovered him that
Borges, in the 1930s, had been an occasional film critic in Argentina,
like them attracted to and defending Hollywood genre films such as
Josef von Sternberg’s early work (p. 88). More than that, Cozarinsky
argues, Borges’ very conception of literary narrative was greatly in-
fluenced by classical film narrative (pp. 9ff)—as the Nouvelle Vague’s
own experimental film narratives would be.
‘Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors’
(1964, p. 6), Borges wrote in 1951, and this rhetorical device com-
manded his attention all his life. Living in Europe in the 1910s and
20s, Borges was involved in Spanish Ultraism, for which metaphor
was the central poetic technique. Since Cubist collage, one of the
cornerstones of early twentieth-century modernism, metaphor had
been very much present in the artistic avant-garde of the day, also
taken up in literature by Surrealists such as ARAGON. Ronald Christ
connects Borges to Cubism in the way his work interleaves the fac-
tual or historical with the fictional or fantastic; Cubism, for Christ,
‘exhibits simultaneously the fact of the object perceived and the fic-
tion of its unseen extension’ (p. 106).
As a counterpoint to Borges’ formulation ‘metaphor is the mo-
mentary contact of two [unlike] images’, consider the definition of
the image from 1918 by PIERRE REVERDY, who Godard also quotes
and with whom Borges was familiar, as ‘bringing together two rela-
tively distant realities’ (p. 495). Is metaphor, in which we employ
Aristotle’s ‘eye for resemblances’, thus not exclusively a speech act,
but also the province of sight? We might think that Godard not only
juxtaposes images to create metaphors—a technique that reaches
its zenith in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), where metaphor runs
amok—but that he also views the image itself as a metaphor.
For while Godard subscribes entirely to the view that the cin-
ematic image is a transcription of reality with immutable truth value,
a credo of ANDRÉ BAZIN, who rejected montage as tied up with meta-
phor, he also believes that this image has a metaphorical relation to
reality. Unlike literary description, the image’s status as an impression
of reality means that ‘[when cinema was invented] there was always
something that was at least double—and when someone watched
it became triple’ (p. 217). An image itself is metaphorical, and the
JORGE LUIS BORGES aaa

viewer inevitably adds another layer of metaphor by looking for re-

semblances between this impression of reality and his or her own
experience of it. Godard would work this process, and complicate it,
by loading his images with extraneous matter such as consumer de-
tritus and other art forms (painting, music, books) to create collage
and thus metaphor within the frame. This staged impression-image
could then be juxtaposed with one of Reverdy’s ‘distant realities’ to
create another degree of metaphorical meaning. Godard’s supreme
stylistic device, montage—or rather Aragon’s collage—may thus not
be an end in itself but rather a way to create metaphor: ‘[to see] not
things, but the connection between things’ (p. 218).
In his 2014 film Adieu au langage, structured by alternating sec-
tions entitled ‘Nature’ and ‘Metaphor’, Godard asks: what is the dif-
ference between a metaphor and an idea? None, it would seem, for
Godard, who has also said of an idea that ‘there is no opposite of an
idea. So an idea goes everywhere’ (p. 51). One of the appeals of meta-
phor as a rhetorical figure is the way it can go anywhere and open
onto unlimited interpretive possibilities. In a lecture on metaphor in
1967, Borges noted that most metaphors ‘can be traced back to a few
simple patterns’, but that ‘every time the pattern is used, the varia-
tion is different’. He then held out the possibility that ‘it may also be
given to us to invent metaphors that do not belong . . . to accepted
patterns’ (2000, pp. 40–41). When Godard remarks about Adolf Hit-
ler that you can ‘take anyone, even an old lady, even a baby, and put
a little moustache here and a little hairpiece there, right away people
will say: “It’s him!”’, and then adds ‘so the conclusion is . . . we must
all be like him a little’ (p. 309), he is enacting the infinite variability
of metaphor and the ability to create new ones, with all their power
to unsettle, which Borges describes.
Timothy Barnard
Jorge Luis Borges. Other Inquisitions 1937–1952 <1952>, 1964.
———. Oeuvres complètes, 2016.
———. This Craft of Verse, 2000.
Madeleine Chapsal. Quinze écrivains, 1963.
Ronald J. Christ. The Narrow Act, 1969.
Edgardo Cozarinsky. Borges in/and/on Film <1974/1981>, 1988.
Jean-Luc Godard. Introduction to a True History of Cinema <1980>, 2014.
Pierre Reverdy. L’Image <1918>, 2010.