Conclusion: Renunciation Stories and Wandering Kings

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Conclusion: Renunciation Stories and Wandering Kings CONCLUSION: RENUNCIATION STORIES AND WANDERING KINGS In that way one can live. (Life and Times of Michael K)1 Ahora, la busca está condenada al fracaso. (El oro de los tigres)2 This book arose from a decision to follow an idea in movement. There was something intriguing about the Renunciation story that kept return- ing in various guises, in Borges’s essays, poems, and stories. The story was simple enough—a king leaving his palace after an encounter with an ascetic—yet as Borges speculated that its various transformations revealed a foundational narrative principle, it seemed to lead down so many forking paths. It was identifed with Buddhism, one of Borges’s many intellectual interests: yet he appeared especially interested in the ways in which the story traveled beyond Buddhism, to the point where no one religion or culture could claim ownership to it. It circulated ubiquitously, and transformed itself almost beyond recognition. Politically, it set up a basic confrontation between power and powerlessness, but then fipped 1Coetzee 184. 2Today, the quest is doomed to failure. Translation mine. “Los cuatro ciclos”, OC 2: 506. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 99 under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 D. Jullien, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04717-7 100 CONCLUSION: RENUnciatiON STORIES AND WANDERING KINGS the outcome because the powerless fgure had the last word. Again this basic confrontation led down a multiplicity of possible political paths: reform, abdication or withdrawal being the main branches. The very plasticity of the Renunciation story and its metamorphic nature came at the expense of its outcome’s political effciency. As the king-and-as- cetic pair morphed into a king-and-poet (or artist) pair, the story led down another path, the path of sacrifcial aesthetics, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process. Yet as portrayals of artists as renouncers—hermits, ascetics, cynics, or beggars—proliferated in narra- tive, the wisdom gained from their acts of abandonment lost its straight- forwardness, either by self-sublimation into nothingness, a condition that affected so many modern artists real and fctional, or by casting doubt on the beneft to the renunciant. In this way, the Renunciation story showed a kinship with the parabolic predicament of modern literature: the sto- ryteller still knew (and could retell) the story, but had lost confdence in the wisdom the story was meant to transmit. This of course is not only Borgesian territory, and it makes the Renunciation story, so attractive to Borges, equally powerful beyond Borges. The “morphological” paradigm, which Borges borrowed from Goethe, is relevant initially as a Borgesian reading ethics and writing practice: but it can also be used productively as a strategy for reading other texts (attached to Borges either by traditional infuence or the retrospective reading protocol described in “Kafka’s Precursors”) in a Borgesian web of interconnected narratives. Expanding on Christ’s con- cluding image of Borges as “the hand that points” away from his own work and “through it to other writings”,3 the gamble of this book, therefore, was to take Borges at his word, so to speak, and attempt a reading of texts both by Borges and others, weaving in and out of Borges in pursuit of the protean Renunciation story. * * * One of the reading paths led from the Renunciation story to the parable, in particular the indecisive parables of modern literature. Post- transcendence, Benjamin felt, parables are bereft of any clear wisdom; they leave us stranded and groping in the dark. Still we seek the wisdom they seem to promise, even though we can no longer believe in it, even 3Christ 244. CONCLUSION: RENUnciatiON STORIES AND WANDERING KINGS 101 though, in Benjamin’s words, “only the products of its decay remain”.4 The Renunciation story, so compelling to modern storytellers, car- ries only “the imminence of a revelation”, but one that never happens. Borgesian epiphanies fall short: “equivocal, ambivalent, and ultimately elusory, they both retain an element of the core meaning of the term, a vision of a transcendental, spiritual truth, while at the same time chal- lenging its assumptions and undermining its signifcance”.5 There is no grand narrative in Borges’s stories, where renunciation is viewed in the same dim light of skepticism—“insuffcient… unceasing” like the light in the Library of Babel (CF 112)—that bathes all other creeds. If Buddhism appeals, it is largely because it is uniquely compatible with Borges’s skep- tical, agnostic worldview. Intellectual pursuits—the substance of so many of Borges’s iconic stories—are similarly irresolute. “Pierre Menard”, the frst story of Borges’s maturity, already suggested this quietly devastat- ing denial of revelation: “There is no intellectual exercise that is not ulti- mately pointless” (CF 94). The “exceedingly complex” machine of the world (CF 323) ensures that stories that narrate quests for understanding will never cease, and also never succeed. In laying out the archetypal stories that subsequent writers endlessly rewrite, transforming them, Borges’s prose poem “Los cuatro ciclos” also points to the failure that attaches to modern quest narratives: today, the search fails. Intellectual revelations are foreclosed, a horizon always to be sought, never reached. The same uncertainty attaches to political action. The parable is an apposite vehicle for the failures of intellect, and also agency. A current of nihilism runs through modern renunciation stories: their austerity and minimalism signal a dis- satisfaction with both philosophical and political certainties. For Borges, the act of abandonment that he found at the core of the Buddha leg- end, and that informed much of his writing, allowed a way of withdraw- ing into apolitical writing while also highlighting the perennial political conundrum. Beyond Borges, stories about renouncers, and more broadly the persistent dream of withdrawal from the polis that they convey, ulti- mately bring into sharper focus our current disaffection for the political. * * * 4Benjamin 144. 5Fishburn (2015: 173). 102 CONCLUSION: RENUnciatiON STORIES AND WANDERING KINGS Today the longing for an apolitical removal from the violence of power is perhaps as acute as ever. The political path branches off toward the pastoral mode,6 a solution desired, but negated and thwarted: as par- ables fail us, as renunciation brings no wisdom, so pastoral is an option foreclosed to modern stories. Blixen’s “Consolatory Tale” of a Persian prince leaving his palace remained politically inconclusive, with engage- ment and disengagement equally problematic. Looking to a more recent case, J. M. Coetzee’s parables of renunciation in the face of anarchy exemplify this precarious, ambiguous “discourse of retreat”.7 It is tempt- ing to cross-read Coetzee’s mournful stories of abandonment against Borges’s speculations on renunciation stories, not to engage in-depth with the already substantial scholarship on Coetzee, but simply to point to a harsher redrawing of the terms of the equation in the South African writer’s fctions. Both Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace prob- lematize the recurrent dream of natural withdrawal, which is both dis- missed as illusory and yet stubbornly clung to, as a fundamental, as perhaps the only consolation. Michael K, an innocent victim of a war in which he refuses to take sides, ascetic to the point of self-annihilation, plans to survive with a packet of seeds and a few spoonfuls of water after his farm is destroyed by soldiers. The book ends on this utterance of extreme dispossession: “In that way (he refects), one can live”.8 On the other hand, David Lurie, the hapless anti-hero of the dark “anti-pas- toral”9 Disgrace, renounces his privileges as an educated white man in post-Apartheid South Africa, to take on the apparently meaningless task of incinerating dead dogs. These acts of abandonment tie the characters’ fates to the canine etymology of the word “Cynic”,10 albeit without the authority that ancient stories granted Cynics over emperors, or ascetics over kings. David Lurie’s sacrifcial gestures (letting go of his favorite dog, renouncing to seek justice for the assault on his daughter, acquiesc- ing to an animal-like existence), paradoxically align him with the vagrant Michael K, who is surely no kingly fgure but always a “dumb dog”, who begins life at the bottom and burrows even deeper by the end, holding fast to the barest form of survival and defning the good (enough) life 6On the pastoral mode, see Lavocat 12 and Alpers 6. 7Gifford 45. 8Coetzee (1985: 184). 9Lowry 12; also Barnard 386, 388–390. 10Rose 183–187; Wiegandt 130–134. CONCLUSION: RENUnciatiON STORIES AND WANDERING KINGS 103 as merely being “out of all the camps at the same time”.11 Michael K’s survival equipped with only a spoon, Lucy’s grim determination to “start at ground level (…) like a dog”,12 yielding to her dispossession and deg- radation, Lurie’s downward trajectory of “privilege eviscerating itself”,13 can be read in the context of modern renunciation stories, which afford their ascetic characters a correspondingly minimal, impoverished degree of wisdom. * * * The Renunciation story brings together the spiritual, political, and aesthetic aspects of asceticism, opening up a space of creative give-and- take. In doing so, it may well provide the only satisfying answer to the perplexities of metaphysics: in non-dogmatic story form. It is not that Borges turned to writing fctions because he reached an impasse in his mystical quest, because “essayistic truths” fell short of his “serious metaphysical anxieties”.14 This fundamentally fawed reading fails to acknowledge that the aesthetic purpose is no less “serious” for a writer of fctions.
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