Just Fucking with You: Play, Writing, and the Intellectual Tradition

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

 In my sophomore year of college, I took my first philosophy class.   This class was not, contrary to a typical academic trajectory, philosophy 101, nor was it 201, or 301.  My first philosophy class was Philosophy 426W: David Foster Wallace and Metaphilosophy, a senior seminar.  

Now, I wasn’t in it because I excelled at philosophy; in fact––unless you’re wont to count my high school’s dreaded theory of knowledge class––I had never taken a proper philosophy class.  Nor had I learned the poetics of philosophical argument, or had a formal background in what students in a senior seminar should have: Plato, Descartes, Arendt.  

No, what I had was an obsession with the registrar’s website over the summer and enough literature credits to get me in.  Waking up one July morning only to open my laptop and once more hit the refresh button on the eternally open ‘Student Planning’ tab of the registrar’s office, there it was: lucky number 13/14––one seat available in the class.  I took it immediately, fixing into place the fourth and final class of my sophomore fall semester, and my first philosophy class. 

 Now: what does this all have to do with Borges?  Besides the fact that we actually did read some Borges and that I was simultaneously working on an essay about how, in Ficciones, he uses genre and space to overthrow what are typically conceived as the boundaries between truth and fiction––which I reread in the process of writing this newsletter and was rather happy with its quality for having written it at 19––I remember very clearly a moment that I think pertains to how I sometimes think of Borges’ corpus.  

 Marianne Janack––my fellow newsletter contributor, beloved editor, bookclub leader, and favorite former professor––at one point amidst what would conventionally be conceived as a serious discussion of David Foster Wallace’s literary intentions and purposes in his novel, Broom of the System, looked up from her well-thumbed copy and said to the class: “You know, I often find myself thinking that… that he’s just fucking with us.”

 After some warm communal laughter at her characteristic bluntness, we recommenced our serious discussion, which now pivoted to the question of whether David Foster Wallace was, indeed, just fucking with us.  I remember feeling not only challenged but somewhat slighted.  Writers were serious folk, writing was serious business.  To write something just for fuckery, as it were, was pointless, wasn’t it?

 But as I revisit Ficciones and other Borges texts, I, not infrequently, find myself struck by the same thought.  The first time I read Ficciones in particular, I remember spending a lot of time with the dictionary––to be fair, I was a mere 15 years-old.  As I went through it, I remember really liking the stories and the ideas and the magic of it all while simultaneously coming to the conclusion that Borges was way over my head, which he was.  He was mystical, mysterious, intelligent––in other words, beyond my means.   

Now, after four years of formal philosophical study, if you would, and two more Ficciones read-throughs, I realize that, in the best way possible, perhaps Borges, like DFW, is fucking with us readers.  And, now, I love it, and him, for it.  

 In Winter Hours, Mary Oliver opens with an essay about building her house, a small, crooked house she constructed through trial and error using her grandfather’s box of tools, which he got from his father.  She writes, “building my house, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play.”  Although she says that “play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery,” she contrasts the constant movement of this type of creation from the requisite stillness and inertia of poetic creation, writing.  In that moment of her life, she claims, “I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and language; I was playing.”

I think her writ large implementation of the condition of inactivity, physically at least, would resonate with Borges.  He wrote Ficciones only after a period of unexpected but elongated stasis; after cutting his head open on an exposed shard of window in his apartment building and subsequently contracting sepsis, he fell into a comatose state where he described his conscious state as one not quite living, and not exactly dead.  A state he remained in for months.

Perhaps it’s the case that the time Borges spent floating in that existentially liminal space—a space away from the loom of thought and language, or, at least, conscious thought and language—he, too, was at play.  Existential play, that is, which then inspired him to start building the always-intricate, at-times paradoxical, often-comic, and beautifully-philosophically-involved worlds of Ficciones.  

 And perhaps, just as Mary Oliver built her house in a state of play, so Borges built the absurdist “Library of Babel,” a place where no one, not even the librarians, know to what extent the nature of their space and its contents are illusion or fact.  Just as Mary Oliver finds her power drill an “angry weasel” when she holds it incorrectly, so does Borges’ narrator of “Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius,” feel tremulous when the idealistic—or wholly imagined—worlds encroach upon material reality. 

Mary Oliver admits that even though she wrote one poem, “and a few more,” in her little house, “its purpose never was to be shelter for thought.”  She writes, “I built it to build it, stepped over the threshold, and was gone.”  Yet now, that same house exists in this essay, concretized into an immortal place in this book, as a shelter for an idea of play.  It is a place that fostered her understanding and experience of the nature of play.  Similarly, Ficciones bears a title that proclaims its fictional nature from the get-go, yet it subverts this ontological claim with each story, revealing a new facet of shortcoming in how we delineate true from false, real from illusion.  Both structures scaffold and overlay a certain expectation of a contained universe with its own laws.  They also both hold up the truth of those laws while simultaneously bending their boundaries.  And what is play if not amusing oneself by engaging in imaginative pretense? 

The two authors present a fundamental reproach to seriousness, to the de-collagenized lines carved between eyebrows of sober thinkers and weighty pontificators.  And, here another question, what is life if not an individual’s understanding of the instantiated result of a play between known and unknown forces––an interpretation of occurrences, or, in other words, an imaginative pretense? 

 But the issue is that we are––or, at least, I was, and in many ways, I feel I am a representative of a typical result of ‘successful’ western education––taught that truth lies in seriousness.  That productive investigation comes from a space of profundity where that depth is antagonistic to play, to laughing deprecation of the existant thought systems. 

 So, when David Foster Wallace writes an 1,100-page novel that ends in a nowhere place, with the tide going way out, and Borges writes a story called ‘the End’ that’s actually the penultimate story in his collection, and Mary Oliver claims that her little house was not a shelter for ideas, maybe they are all just fucking with us.  And maybe that’s the best part. 

 Being unsure where the line is to toe, having to feel with the foot of your mind to see whether there’s even a ground below, maybe that’s the most exciting part of intellectual work, to use Arendt’s terms––you see, maybe I have learned something in my four years of philosophical training and study. 

 And maybe it is all time we build our own little houses, crooked and inexact, and joyous all the way through.