Second Post -- Borges in some detail

It is with some regret that I start to explain a mystery of this movie. Now I won’t have to churn my mind about something I saw on the screen – won’t be churning it endlessly with no result, because in fact, I couldn’t figure it out. Well, in fact, I couldn’t figure it out. I found the solution in a book. It’s not the same as figuring it out, is it? So my regret at publishing it here is less.

Now, what was the mystery? Well, in one scene Turner is quoting something from a book. Must be important. What’s the book? Who’s the author? Then one of the gangsters, the smiling mild one, is sitting in the back seat of the Rover saloon car reading a book. What’s the book? Who’s the author? When the bullet roars into action, there’s a tunnel with the face of a middle-aged man in it. Who’s the man?

The new DVD version of “Performance” has added features that explain some of what was in these mysteries. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author who was coming into world renown in the 1960s, is identified as the author. His book is in the movie. His face is in the tunnel and on the cover of the book the gangster is reading. The book is “A Personal Anthology” -- by Borges.

Today I went downtown to the main public library and checked out a biography of Borges by Edwin Williamson, an Oxford professor of Spanish. “Performance” appears in the index. I opened to p. 396-7 and read about of the atmosphere surrounding Borges as he traveled in Britain in 1971, the year after the movie came out:

“Borges’s work had reached a peak of popular acclaim by this time. The anthology of his stories and essays that Penguin brought out in Britain in 1970 under the title “Labyrinths” had achieved cult status. Borges’s name, moreover, had already become associated with the New Wave in European cinema after several famous French directors – Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais – had cited his work in a number of films in the 1960s. But in 1970 this association of Borges with the movies had reached unprecedented heights with the release of two films that were to become international box-office hits. “The Spider’s Stratagem,” by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was a version of Borges’s story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” and the film won critical acclaim at the Venice and New York film festivals of that year. Another film, “Performance,” directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell and starring Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, was to turn Borges, rather improbably, into something of an icon for the cultural vanguard of ‘swinging London.’ The film paid homage to Borges in several ways – Mick Jagger is heard quoting from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “The South,” twice Borges’s photograph appears on the jacket of his “Personal Anthology,” and at the very end, when Jagger is shot by the gangster played by James Fox, an image of Borges flashes on screen for a split second. “Performance,” moreover, owed its convoluted plot to some of Borges’s most compelling themes, such as the labyrinth, the double, and the enigma of personal identity, albeit weirdly transposed to a world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The film, it must be said, was not to everyone’s taste; the critic of the New York Times, for one, attacked its ‘mindless pretension’ and complained that ‘even that great writer, Jorge Luis Borges, is dragged into the cesspool.’”

Mystery unraveled. It’s all Borges. Now I must admit I’m not widely read in Borges. A few of his stories crossed my desk over the years and I read them with pleasure, though I couldn’t cite a single title or theme today. When I read now that he was influenced by Kafka (among many others), I suspect that my extensive reading in Kafka may have given me a sated feeling when I encountered a Kafka-like writer, and so I didn’t venture further into Borges’ writing. At any rate, there’s a new author to read, and I’m ordering some of his works. Living in Miami, I’m more interested in Spanish-language writing than I used to be, so I hope I’m open to Borges now.