Unlike Cincinnatus, in Nabokov's "Invitation to
a Beheading" *, Borges' character, Hladik, needs more than
three minutes to complete his unfinished work, "The Enemies". On the eve of his execution he learns that God
had granted him the year he'd asked for and, after a restless night, while he was already facing the
firing squad, at the exact moment when shooting began, the
physical universe stopped.
Was God's respite only one of
Hadlik's fantasies, or a perfect miracle?
Anyway, Hadlik finished his entire oeuvre in
that "mental" year before any shot reached
him.
A previous short-story might have influenced
Borges: Ambrose Bierce's 1890 "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge". It
isn't probable that Borges had been familiar with Nabokov's Russian novel, nor
that VN had been familiar with A.Bierce at that time ( didn't Bierce
mysteriously disappear years later to become a legend, like Sebastian
Knight's loves in the eyes of V.?).
In "Corriente Alterna"
Octavio Paz (quoted by D.Arrigucci Jr) described the Argentinian
author as having created a "unique work, built on the
vertiginous theme concerning the absence of a work." In his stories
Borges often departed from undiscovered manuscripts, mislaid or lost
short-stories, unwritten books - but
O. Paz was probably referring
to borgian self-referential labyrinths and special allegories (
according to VN at least Osberg, if not Borges, was a "Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric
anecdotes", as we've been refering to and fro in the
VN-List)
One of these, the story
of the Simurgh from Persian Farid Ud-Din Attar's, "The
Conference of the Birds", was explicitly mentioned in his "Nine
dantesque essays" when B. wrote about Beatrice and a crown. As
allegories, Dante's and Attar's, are extreme instances of a particular
connection that, in our days, we describe as existing between a writer and
his work: after death his body remains as a corpus of writing, although as
elusive as the person who "took them down" in words. In contrast to Borges, Nabokov's
words tug and strain at author and reader alike, pressioning
for a material, literal birth. They never dissolve and make
place for a fixed image that'll haunt a reader's dreams. I often
enjoy Borges' stories when they act on my dreaming, when his words are
substituted for images and have no real presence. Curiously, VN's
words in "Invitation" also tend to dissolve in my
recollection and, unlike what happens through his other
novels, "Transparent Things" for example, the allegory and its
form=content prevails over the wording.
In Strong Opinions VN stated (1964) that "All I know is that at the very early stage of the novel's
development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles.
Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at
all, the future nest and the eggs in it [...] After the first shock of
recognition [...]the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely
in the mind, not on paper " (p.31)