Borges, Brown, and ingenuity.

Fredric Brown is unknown, at least, to the vast NUS library, which contains nineteenth century editions of Walt Whitman, and other American writers. He remarked once that its easy to write without plot, conflict, and resolution, without anything specific, so long as the world is persuaded that you are a genius. Jorge Luis Borges would be an eminent example. It is almost passe to cite affinities between Borges and Brown, in their masterful ingenuity, brevity and ironic wit. Let us also observe that while Borges wandered through medieval philosophers, logic, and ancient epics, Brown's life and career restricted him to toying with the SF , fantasy and journalistic tropes of his time. His varied tastes, however, hearkened back to the best of literature, to Lewis Carroll and even Spinoza. However, his work reveals a mere familiarity, rather than an erudition.
Brevity seems to have been an obsession with both, one compressing a vast, tunnelling erudition into three page parables, the other often disguising a single idea in a single paragraph as a story. A formal affinity exists between Borges' Circular Ruins, and Brown's brilliant Solipsist. The former sketches a mystic's successful attempt to dream a human being into existence, his subsequent fear that his dreamed son would realise that he is illusion, and his relief at discovering that he is also but the dream of another. The action - or symbolic inaction takes place amidst the ruins of a murky fire god, within four pages dense with allusions and symbols. The Solipsist races through a man's eponymous belief. He imagines everything away - only to discover that God is waiting for a man such as he, so that he might lapse back into a divine oblivion. Now it is his, not His, task to create everything back again. In Brown's magnificiently ironic ending: it takes him seven days. 'Solipsist' clearly conforms to the idea < paragraph =""> story structure, and reveals an astonishing, though in retrospect, obvious symbol : God is the only solipsist, and if so, all of us are.
While Brown's output is uneven, Borges is too learned to ever create something inferior, though several of his later works are plain and too obviously inspired by his precursors, lacking the ingenuity consistent in Ficciones and The Garden of Forking Paths - collections that sprung confusions like "The Aleph", "The Circular Ruins" and the brief, but epochal Lottery in Babylon at an unsuspecting audience.
Which erects a juvenile concern still unresolved - the value of ingenuity and intelligence in literature. To discount Brown as immature and 'pop culture' is puerile, to reject Chekhov is unacceptable. Hamsun's crepuscular protagonists are not limited by Borges' meta-fictional, antiquarian logic, but neither do they achieve any significant resolution. Walt Whitman's poetry is inimical to intelligence, but nourished by a spontaneous genius.
An artists choices are myriad - but perhaps a Borges' drily assessing his works in forewords and afterwords suffers less torment than Hamsun, or, more significantly, yields less to it. And for me, a frog by compulsion (Singapore.)and a dreamer by impulse, it is better to let the water seep in, and dream of sleep, and serenity.