Collected Fictions

Foreword

Kipling's last stories were no less tortured and labyrinthine than Franz Kafka's or Henry James's, which they unquestionably surpass; in 1885, though, in Lahore, early in his career, Kipling began writing a series of brief tales composed in a plain style, and he published those stories in 1890. Not a few of them—"In the House of Suddhoo,"* "Beyond the Pale," "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows"—are laconic masterpieces; it has occurred to me from time to time that that which a young man of genius is capable of conceiving and bringing to fruition, a man beginning to get along in years and who knows his craft might, without immodesty, himself attempt. The issue of that reflection is contained in this volume; my readers may judge it for themselves.

I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth—for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity. But I do wish to make clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a fabulist or spinner of parables, what these days is called an auteur engagé. I do not aspire to be AEsop. My tales, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, are intended not to persuade readers, but to entertain and touch them. This intention does not mean that I shut myself, as Solomon's image would have it, into an ivory tower. My convictions with respect to political matters are well known; I have joined the Conservative Party (which act is a form of skepticism), and no one has ever called me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-Semite, or a supporter of Hormiga Negra*or of Rosas.* I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government. I have never hidden my opinions, even through the difficult years, but I have never allowed them to intrude upon my literary production, either, save that one time when I praised the Six-Day War. The craft is mysterious; our opinions are ephemeral, and I prefer* Plato's theory of the Muse to that of Poe, who argued, or pretended to argue, that the writing of a poem is an operation of the intelligence. (I never cease to be amazed that the Classics professed a Romantic theory while a Romantic poet espoused a Classical one.) Aside from the text that gives its name to this book (and whose paternity, obviously, can be traced to Lemuel Gulliver's last voyage), my stories are "realistic," to use a term that is fashionable these days. They observe, I believe, all the conventions of the genre (a genre no less convention-ridden than all the others, and one we will soon enough grow tired of, if we are not already). They abound in the circumstantial details that writers are required to invent—details that we can find such splendid examples of in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon ballad of the Battle of Maldon and the Icelandic sagas that came later. Two of the stories (I will not say which ones) can be opened with the same fantastic key. The curious reader will perceive certain secret affinities among the tales. A mere handful of arguments have haunted me all these years; I am decidedly monotonous.

For the general outline of the story called "The Gospel According to Mark," the best story of the volume, I am indebted to a dream that Hugo Ramirez Moroni* had one night; I fear I may have spoiled the dream with the changes that my imagination (or my reason) deemed it needed. But then literature is naught but guided dreaming, anyway.

I have renounced the shocks of a baroque style as well as those afforded by unforeseen or unexpected endings. I have, in short, preferred to prepare my readers for my endings, rather than to astound them. For many years I believed that it would be my fortune to achieve literature through variations and novelties; now that I am seventy years old I think I have found my own voice. A word changed here or there will neither spoil nor improve what I dictate, except when those alterations succeed in leavening a heavy sentence or softening an emphasis. Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol; the changes that an innovator may make are trifling—we should remember the dazzling but often unreadable work of a Mallarmé or a Joyce. These reasonable, rational arguments are quite likely the result of weariness; advanced age has taught me to resign myself to being Borges.

I care little about the Diccionario de la Real Academia ("dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente," as Paul Grossac glumly remarked), and equally little about these tiresome dictionaries of Argentinisms. All of them—on both this side of the Atlantic and the other—tend to stress the differences between our Spanish and theirs, and thereby to disintegrate the language. I recall that when somebody or other scolded Roberto Arlt because he knew so little about Lunfardo, the putative language of the Buenos Aires underworld, he answered his critic in this way: "I was raised in Villa Luro, among thugs and bullies and poor people, and I really had very little time to study the way they talked."Lunfardo is, in fact, a literary put-on, a language invented by composers of tangos and writers of comedies for the stage and screen; the lowlifes and thugs themselves, those who lived in the tough, ragged outskirts of the city and who are supposed to have created it and used it in their daily lives, actually know nothing about it, except what phonograph records may have taught them.

I have set my stories at some distance in both time and space. Imagination has more freedom to work, that way. Today, in 1970, who can recall exactly what those outskirts of Palermo or Lomas were like at the end of the nineteenth century? Incredible as it may seem, there are certain punctilious men and women who act as a sort of "trivia police." They will note, for example, that Martín Fierro would have talked about a bag of bones, not a sack, and they will criticize (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not) the golden-pink coat of a certain horse famous in our literature.*

God save you, reader, from long forewords.—The quotation is from Quevedo, who (not to commit an anachronism that would have been caught sooner or later) never read the prefaces of Shaw.

J. L. B.

Buenos Aires, April 19, 1970