My Man Borges
The Task of an Artist
I often drop my students into the world of Jorge Luis Borges simply to offer them a new experience in writing. I want them to see the what writing can be beyond the story arc their regular teachers burn into their malleable minds—I emphasize how writing can be a tool for inquiry, a way to think, a way to transform their reality.
I begin our discussion with an Octavio Paz quote:
“[Borges] cultivated three genres: the essay, the poem, and the short story. The division is arbitrary. His essays read like stories; his stories are poems; and his poems make us think, as though they were essays. The bridge connecting them is thought.”
The students have trouble breaking down such arbitrary—and usually prescriptive—boundaries, so we brainstorm definitions for the genres ourselves. Through this exercise they become aware of their assumptions (ie. poems always have rhymes, short stories always have plots, essays are always boring and informational), and then we ask simple questions to generate familiar examples of works that escape these constraints (ie. poems with plots and free verse, flash fiction, or personal narrative essays).
Students quickly realize that they knew intuitively that the lines between genres are arbitrary, and they recognize their own impulse to transcend such barriers—Yet, too often, teachers encourage them to color between the lines.
As Matthew Salesses asserts in his highly accessible and useful book on craft and pedagogy, our ideas of good writing are culturally determined. We think good writing is what we are told is “good writing”, so we strive to create that type of “good writing” and too often look down on good writing that doesn’t do what we’re told “good writing” does. This cycle discourages students from creating what their gut tells them to create, especially students who are consuming art and culture that doesn’t fit into a the “good writing” paradigm of storytelling.
Although students hesitate to create intuitive and rule-breaking work in a classroom setting, they consistently consume art that transcends boundaries. Access to such freedom of expression was why I was so drawn to sub-cultures as a kid. 90s Skate videos told stories on their own terms. Often, they were plotless and atmospheric, yet as narratively coherent as any novel. Their story was that of identity and culture.
Even in my MFA program, I faced pushback when I applied what felt like normal rhetorical strategies, which were apparently not so normal, especially to the students who had taken creative writing classes before (which I hadn’t).
I figured people striving to be professional writers would be hungry to bust out of the boring patterns in so much commercial and upmarket fiction. But I was wrong. They were as confused by work that didn’t follow the recipe of “good writing” as I was confounded by work that followed such a recipe. More than anything, they praised writing that on a surface-level looked just like what they were told was good—probably like their high school teachers had done.
To me, a plot-less story was as natural as a three-act structure or an episodic picaresque. To someone who read Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes as a kid; as adolescent analyzed Wu Tang and Mobb Deep albums as if they were novels; and then studied Latin American and North African literature as an adult, I saw no reason any text couldn’t do whatever it wanted. And my background isn’t that unique.
Young people have always craved stories that do soemthing new. My students are taking in shorts on the internet, web novels, anime, and a whole bunch of stuff I never heard of, the same way I consumed The Simpsons (mostly seasons 5-7), Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
I want my students to feel the same freedom I did when heard Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers album and thought damn, writing can do this? So, to show students what great writing can do, I show them writing that does it.
Unfortunately, ODB is a little risqué for middle-school classrooms, so we enter the labyrinth of the JLB to confront the possibility of writing not providing clear answers, in opposition to what their curriculum suggests. I emphasize that Borges often ends his writing with more questions than answers, and that’s ok. Life isn’t cleanly wrapped up like a lot of fiction.
With Borges, we spend many lessons examining multiple texts from the same author—something they rarely do in traditional secondary school classrooms—and I never know where to stop. We explore a rumination on a Japanese music box, an tight take on toenails that might fit best in the category of flash CNF, phenomenological poems on dreams, and so much more. These works are often so unusual to these students, they don’t know what is supposed to be right or wrong, and this gives them a new freedom of analysis. I often find that young people are stumped when we explore this quote (video below), which is actually two excerpts stitched together:
“La tarea del arte es esa, transformar todo eso que nos ocurre continuamente, transformar todo eso en símbolos, transformarlo en música… transformarlo para que pueda perdurar en la memoria de los hombres, ese es nuestro deber, debemos cumplir con el sino nos sentimos muy desdichados, en el caso del escritor o en el caso de todo artista tiene el deber de transmutar todo eso en símbolos y esos símbolos pueden ser, imagino, pueden ser colores, pueden ser formas, pueden ser sonidos… y en el caso del poeta, son sonidos y también son palabras, fábulas, relatos… poesías. Quiero decir, que la tarea del poeta es continua, porque no se trata de trabajar de tal hora a tal hora, uno continuamente está recibiendo algo del mundo externo y todo eso tiene que ser transmutado y en cualquier momento de puede llegar esa revelación, el poeta no descansa, está trabajando continuamente, hasta cuando sueña, trabaja, además la vida del escritor es una vida solitaria, uno cree estar solo y al cabo de los años, si los astros son propicios, uno descubre que uno está al centro de una especie de vasto círculo de amigos invisibles, de amigos que uno no conocerá nunca físicamente pero que lo quieren a uno y eso es una recompensa más que suficiente. »
For discussion, I isolate “the task of art is to transform what is continually happening to us.” We break this quote into pieces and examine what it means to transform our reality, to use art as a tool to uncover the truth. I can’t see a better way of explaining all the art I was obsessed with as a kid, whether skate videos, rap albums, or graffiti—this art transformed the world that was happening to the artist into something I couldn’t put down.
“La tarea del arte es esa, transformar todo eso que nos ocurre continuamente.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
Borges is a powerful guide for creation. His quote shows that writing is a tool, not a formula, not a set of rigid rules. Writing is a way to depict our individual reality and sometimes that reality doesn’t fit into the formulas we’re told to follow. This is why we have the novel, the poem, the sketch comedy, the concept album, or any other form that broke away from forms. And, usually, I hope that this gives my students the freedom to use writing to transform what is happening to them.