Jorge Luis Borges: Thought and Knowledge in the XXth Century 9783964563651

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Preface
Jorge Luis Borges, Religions and the Mystical Experience
Borges, or the Mystique of Silence: What was on the other Side of the Zahir
Textual Space and the Art of Chinese Gardening in Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"
De-Narrativizing the Populist State Apparatus: Borges' "La lotería en Babilonia"
Borges/Derrida and Writing
Borges/Derrida/Foucault: Pharmakeus!Heterotopia or Beyond Literature ('hors-littératuré) : Writing, Phantoms, Simulacra, Masks, the Carnival and ... Atlön/Tlön, Ykva/Uqbar, Hlaer, Jangr, Hrön(n)/Hrönir, Ur and Other Figures
Borges and Mauthner: From Philosophy to Critique of Language
The Most Consistent Idealism According to Borges: The Negation of Time
Borges and Calvino: Chaosmos Unleashed?
Some Aspects of the Problem of Time in the Works of Jorge Luis Borges: An Eclectic between Plato and the Theory of Relativity
Borges: Cultural Theory and Criticism
"Nazism is Uninhabitable": Borges, the Holocaust, and the Expansion of Knowledge
The Superstitious and the Truthful Ethics of the Reader
Circling the Cross, Crossing the Circle: On Borges and Chesterton
Borges' 'Baroquism'
Borges between the Printing Press and the Hypertext
Authors of this Volume

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Alfonso de Toro, Fernando de Toro (Eds.) Jorge Luis Borges: Thought and Knowledge in the XXth Century

TCCL - TEORIA Y CRITICA DE LA CULTURA Y LITERATURA INVESTIGACIONES DE LOS SIGNOS CULTURALES (SEMIOTICA-EPISTEMOLOGIA-INTERP RET ACION) TKKL - THEORIE UND KRITIK DER KULTUR UND LITERATUR UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZU DEN KULTURELLEN ZEICHEN (SEMIOTIK-EPISTEMOLOGIE-INTERPRETATION) TCCL - THEORY AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE INVESTIGATIONS ON CULTURAL SIGNS (SEMIOTICS-EPISTEMOLOGY-INTERPRETATION)

Vol. 17

DIRECTORES:

Alfonso de Toro Centro de Investigación Iberoamericana Universidad de Leipzig Fernando de Toro The University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Canada

CONSEJO ASESOR: W. C. Booth (Chicago); E. Cros (Montpellier); L. Dällenbach (Ginebra); M. De Marinis (Macerata); U. Eco (Boloña); E. FischerLichte (Maguncia); G. Genette (París); D. Janik (Maguncia); D. Kadir (University Park); W. Krysinski (Montreal); K. Meyer-Minnemann (Hamburgo); P. Pavis (Paris); R. Posner (Berlín); R. Prada Oropeza (Veracruz); M. Riffaterre (Nueva York); Fco. Ruiz Ramón (Nashville); Th. A. Sebeok (Bloomington); C. Segre (Pavía); Tz. Todorov (París); J. Trabant (Berlín); M. Valdés (Toronto). CONSEJO EDITORIAL: J. Alazraki (Nueva York); F. Andacht (Montevideo); S. Anspach (Sâo Paulo); G. Bellini (Milán); A. Echavarría (San Juan de Puerto Rico); E. Forastieri-Braschi (San Juan de Puerto Rico); E. Guerrero (Santiago); R. Ivelic (Santiago); A. Letelier (Venecia); W. D. Mignolo (Durham); D. Oelker (Concepción); E. D. Pittarello (Venecia); R. M. Ravera (Buenos Aires); N. Richard (Santiago); J. Romera Castillo (Madrid); N. Rosa (Rosario); J. Ruffinelli (Stanford); C. Ruta (Palermo); J. Villegas (Irvine). REDACCION: R. Ceballos, K. Peuschel, C. Windesheim

Alfonso de Toro Fernando de Toro (Eds.)

Jorge Luis Borges: Thought and Knowledge in the XXth Century

Vervuert • Iberoamericana • 1999

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Jorge Luis Borges : thought and knowledge in the XXth Century / Alfonso de Toro ; Fernando de Toro (ed.). - Madrid : Iberoamericana ; Frankfurt am Main : Vervuert, 1999 (Teoría y crítica de la cultura y literatura ; Vol. 17) Span. Ausg. u.d.T.: Jorge Luis Borges ISBN 84-95107-40-6 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 3-89354-217-5 (Vervuert)

© Iberoamericana, Madrid 1999 © Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999 Reservados todos los derechos Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico blanqueado sin cloro. Impreso en Alemania

CONTENTS

Preface

7

Maria Kodama de Borges Jorge Luis Borges, Religions and the Mystical Experience

15

Luce López-Baralt Borges, or the Mystique of Silence: What was on the other Side of the Zahir

29

Arturo Echavarría Textual Space and the Art of Chinese Gardening in Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"

71

Alberto Moreiras De-Narrativizing the Populist State Apparatus: Borges' "La lotería en Babilonia"

107

Fernando de Toro Borges/Derrida and Writing

115

Alfonso de Toro Borges/Derrida/Foucault: Pharmakeus!Heterotopia or Beyond Literature ('hors-littératuré) : Writing, Phantoms, Simulacra, Masks, the Carnival and ... Atlön/Tlön, Ykva/Uqbar, Hlaer, Jangr, Hrön(n)/Hrönir, Ur and Other Figures

129

Silvia G. Dapia Borges and Mauthner: From Philosophy to Critique of Language

155

C. Ulises Moulines The Most Consistent Idealism According to Borges: The Negation of Time

167

Floyd Merrell Borges and Calvino: Chaosmos Unleashed?

175

Eckhard Hofner Some Aspects of the Problem of Time in the Works of Jorge Luis Borges: An Eclectic between Plato and the Theory of Relativity

207

Beatriz Sarlo Borges: Cultural Theory and Criticism

241

Edna Aizenberg "Nazism is Uninhabitable": Borges, the Holocaust, and the Expansion of Knowledge 255 Rolf Kloepfer The Superstitious and the Truthful Ethics of the Reader

263

Elmar Schenkel Circling the Cross, Crossing the Circle: On Borges and Chesterton .... 289 Laura Milano and Rosa Maria Ravera Borges' 'Baroquism'

303

Ema Lapidot Borges between the Printing Press and the Hypertext

327

Authors of this Volume

353

PREFACE JORGE LUIS BORGES "A TRUE PHILOSOPHER OF THE XXTH CENTURY", A MASTER OF "SIMULATION AND RHIZOMATIC THINKING": BORGES AND THE "EDGES" The current volume is the result of an International Colloquium held by the IberoAmerican Research Centre at Leipzig University in conjunction with the Centre for Research on Comparative Literary Studies from Carleton University in March 13-17, 1996. This Colloquium was made possible thanks to Prof. Dr. Hans Meyer, Minister of Science and Art of Saxony; the Embassy of Argentina; the Savings Bank of Leipzig, and particularly to the generous contribution of the German National Research Council (DFG). The central endeavour of the colloquium was the study of Jorge Luis Borges as a writer, thinker and philosopher from a literary, scientific and philosophical perspective within the theory of culture. Having Borges as a pivotal object of study of a colloquium, it is not an accident or the mere result of a literary preference of the colloquium's organizers. Rather, it is due to the very fact that Borges represents one of the pillars of contemporary thinking in all its dimensions. This thinking was formulated by Borges fifty years ago, making Borges not only a 'pioneer' of contemporary debates but the one who introduced them in the first place as paradigmatic issues in the XXth century. Thus, Borges entails a point of departure about how to think culture. He reformulates the theory of signs, philosophy, the concept of literature and theory of culture, particularly Latin American, which currently is being developed in cultural studies. These formulations are also finding their place in Germany in publications such as those by Birgit Scharlau (Latinamerika Denken. Kulturtheoretische Grenzgange zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, 1995), Herman Herlinghaus and Monika Walter (Postmodernidad en la periferia. Enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoría cultural, 1994) and Fernando de Toro and Alfonso de Toro (Borders and Margins: Post-Colonialism andPost-Modemism, 1995), just to provide some examples of the vast critical and theoretical production in this field elaborated in Latin America, Canada, and the U.S.A. One of the aims of the colloquium, and the publications presented in this volume, is to place Borges' work in a context of inquiry which is not often considered in its

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study due to professional idiosyncrasies. However, some notable exceptions to this context are the work by Jaime Alazraki, who, in 1976, edited in the Editorial Taurus a fundamental work: Jorge Luis Borges. Also works such as those by Edna Aizenberg, Borges and His Successors (1990), Alfonso de Toro and Karl Alfred Blüher, Jorge Luis Borges. Variaciones interpretativas sobre sus procedimientos literarios y bases epistemológicas (1992). Thus the topic of this volume reveals itself as crucial as Borges' introduction to a future thinking which we will attempt to continue and develop following Edna Aizenberg's insightful words: [...] a redifmer of national literatures; as a forerunner of a new critical idiom; as a dialogist with other writers; [...]. The intent [...] to work toward a global idea of Borges's impact on the arts of our time, global being understood in its dual sense of "whole-earth" and "comprehensive". (1990: 2)

In the development of this 'idea' we would have welcomed Gianni Vattimo, Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, Josefina Ludmer and Jaime Alazraki who, due to unexpected last minute circumstances, could not join us. However, Jaime Alazraki offered us a challenge and a duty: make this colloquium "a promising event whose aim is to leave an imprint regarding the understanding of Borges' work". The opening of Borges' field of study is accredited by the articles presented in this volume, and in particular by those who deal with philosophical, mathematical, and cultural issues; documenting and establishing a great intellectual plurality which attempts to go beyond any scientific essentialism or reductionist thinking. We hope that this volume will indeed leave an imprint regarding our understanding of Borges' work so that his signature and re-impression in the system of thought which has characterized this century, now near its closure, will make transparently clear the kind of thinking that Borges formulated in a visionary manner long before the establishment of the postmodern paradigm. The issues confronted by Borges during the 30s and 40s are fundamental for Modernity and Post-Modernity, since the world began to be represented as a product of signs as in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Thus it seems that his formula seemed no longer to be: 'the world as sign' but rather 'the sign as world'. From this leipzigan dialogue we also expected results which would question the complex context of discursive systems, of cultural politics, of discursive battles, of relationships and positionalities of the so called 'periphery' and 'centre' within the postcolonial and postmodern discursivity. The volume begins with María Kodama de Borges" article "Jorge Luis Borges, Religions, and the Mystical Experience" where she underlines that divinity for Borges was inscribed in ancient writing and the Bible. For Borges literature is not longer only a medium of divinity, but mysticism itself. Borges brings his perception and experience of religions to writing, and in this manner, according to Kodama, religions are transformed into a system of writing. The article by Luce López-Baralt, "Borges, or the Mystique of Silence: What was on the other Side of the Zahir " focuses on the threat that the reader of the zahir may

PREFACE

9

become 'mad' through its reading. The story is then located in a Islamic context, due to its fundamental importance. On the one hand, the story's background resides, according to López-Baralt, in an Islamic school which only accepts what is external to the words of Islamic writing, where only a handful of experts had access to esoteric representations. Having this context as a point of departure, the critical activity engages in comparing this Islamic-cultural context to Borges' story inasmuch as this story can often be only understood by experts. On the other hand, it is pointed out that the relationship between 'aleph' and 'zahir' corresponds to the first and last words of the alphabet, and then an analogy emerges between the observer and the observed. The coins become words or words whose forms are dependent on the reader's activity since the word 'zahir' must be apprehended in its total 'extension', in the same manner in which Borges establishes an homology in his own story: Zahir : Coin : Word : Identity. Arturo Echavarría understands Borges' literature, in "Textual Space and the Art of Chinese Gardening in Borges' 'The Garden of Forking Paths'" as multum in parvo relation in as much as the world is simultaneously perceived but always battling the linearity of language, where there exists a tension between the successive and the simultaneous, the labyrinth (the topic garden) and the graphie (the narrativity of the story). This tension springs from the historical and theoretical context where the story is inscribed and where it is considered as a manifestation of how the Chinese literature and cultural gardens conceives the story. Alberto Moreiras thematizes, in "De-Narrativizing the Populist State Apparatus: Borges' 'La Lotería en Babilonia'", the problem presented by an ontological and historical reading of Borges. However, in spite of any other consideration, Borges' literature can be considered as pioneering social critique and "La Lotería en Babilonia " can be read from this perspective. This text also deals with the epistemological rupture of ellipsis. Thus the Lottery becomes a metonymy, an incorporation that represents the end of a totalizing ontology of history. The historical freedom is put in check, but at the end one continues to be a prisoner of the system. "La Lotería en Babilonia " is considered here as an equivalent of life, and as such it proposes an opening to a history without subject and without a significant subordination. In such a manner life is heternomizied, desnarrativized exposing a paradoxon between the individual and its subjection to history. Fernando de Toro's article, "Borges/Derrida and Writing" explores a series of fundamental affinities in Borges' and Derrida's thinking. Both authors refuse to reduce writing to a mere exchange of information where intertextuality is established as a fundamental operation which points toward a transformation of perceptive and reading acts that can no longer be defined by traditional criteria of production and reception. Reading is also writing. Derrida and Paul de Man defined how Borges stages deconstruction in Ficciones and in the Aleph between 1938-1942, and how he introduces the notion of différance, always present in deconstruction. For them, Borges introduces a new art of reading which constitute a new point of departure in the construction of

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the signified, decentring the Logos of an auctorproducer of meaning: writing refers no longer to the already written, thus writing becomes a pharmakon. The repetition is not identical, but it differs from its model leaving behind a text that opens up to other texts indefinitely, and losing the trace of an origin which allows for an eternal dissemination. Alfonso de Toro in "Borges/Derrida/Foucault: Pharmakeus/Heterotopia or Beyond Literature fhors-littérature'/' Writing, Phantoms, Simulacra, Masks, the Carnival and ... Atlon/Tlon, Ykva/Uqbar, Hlaer, Jangr, Hrdn(n)/Hrdnir, Ur and Other Figures ", continues a path set in his previous work on Borges where he dealt with questions of perception, writing, simulation and rhizome. In the current article he starts from Derrida's assertion that Borges' literature places itself "beyond literature", "beyond writing itself. Such paradox can be resolved by effecting a palimpsestic reading of Borges, that is, in relation to Mallermé's, Foucault's and Derrida's writing. Stating that Borges' writing is located at the limit of what is thinkable, De Toro describes how Borges thematizes the category of 'absence' and deconstructs the notion of origin, of dualism in crisis, of the 'versus', of the construction of meaning shown in the linguistic destruction of solidarities which lead to the end of mimesis faced with the unrelenting expansion of the rhizomatic and simulative thinking. This form of writing is no longer a representation of reality, or of an intertextual relation (which implies mimesis), but its simulation, a nomadic trace, concretized in self referential symbols. The perceived symbols 'are not already something else, of what they were', thus making perceptible the 'absence' on an empty mirror which lacks the notions of time and space and the signifiers are unmasked as copies which at the end are not. Silvia G. Dapia starts her article, "Borges and Mauthner: From Philosophy to Critique of Language", stating that during the last few decades both science of philosophy and philosophy of language have underlined the fact that human beings have access to the world only through concepts. Dapia agrees with Quine, who considers reality as a dimension articulated in theories and terms, and also with Paul Feyerabend who considers human beings as "an ocean always growing incompatible alternatives between themselves". He underlines that the knowledge of reality is something subjective, and moreover, that the world exists through diverse categories, and emphasizes that what really exists are diverse forms of inscription (Rorty) or versions (Nelson Goodman) of the world. This philosophy already postulated by Mauthner (1849-1923), is studied by Dapia, with her notions of 'monisms', 'world catalog' and the 'superstition of words' which in turn determine the representational debate. Later, Borges not only will follow Mauthner regarding this fundamental form of knowledge, but will also replace and expand a whole array of Mauthner's theorems. The Philosopher of Theory of Sciences, C. U. Moulines in his article, "The Most Consistent Idealism According to Borges: The Negation of Time", focus his attention on Borges' essay, "Nueva refutación del tiempo ("New Refutation of Time") and on "Observaciones preliminares" and the "Epilogue" ("Preliminary Observations" and "Epilogue") with the goal to inquire about the disintegration of reality due to the fact

PREFACE

11

that the universe does not present itself as perceptible. For this reason, according to Moulines, the universe becomes a phenomenon of idealism, comparable to dreams since in both there is no temporal dimensionality. This is the reason why, according to Moulines, Borges uses time to provide explanations. The reference does not represent physical time, but the phenomenological time. However, in spite of all of this, the deduction that ensues is not the same. He also questions asymmetry and the unidimentionality of time. Thus, in this story, Moulines says, Borges breaks away from the "logical qualities" of time, and this is why Moulines proposes, at the metaphilosophical level, a conflict between an idealist and an existentialist Borges. He ends his article stating that Borges is, contrary to the generalized current critical opinions, a "great philosopher and one of the most genuine Latin American philosophers of this century". FloydMerrell, in "Borges and Calvino: Chaosmos Unleashed?" starts his article with the apodictic sentence: "El todo es la nada" (Totality is nothingness). This sentence counters the Western history of salvation and triumph. In spite of all this, just a few geometrical lines prove the truth of this sentence. Merrell wants to demonstrate that the Western dualism of representation and what is represented has, for a very long time, been linked to the idea that reality can be fully perceived or that it can be represented through art and literature. This idea, according to Merrell is grounded on the Platonic assumption that everything can be symbolized by a part and that what is visible is a representation of the invisible. This type of thinking may crumble through a logical subversion: when the line of thought represents a geometrical thinkable but invisible, object, then this thought represents Nothingness. That is, since the representation has nothing to think, then it only represents Nothingness. It is precisely this idea that the world is Nothingness, is a knowledge not at all foreign to Borges. Eckhard Hofiner, in "Some Aspects of the Problem of Time in the Works ofJorge Luis Borges: An Eclectic between Plato and the Theory of Relativity" states that the real is not only the rational since matter must be defined through the coordinates of time-space, then the physical transformation is unreal. Hofner states that the term fantastic is not dependent on reality itself, but on concepts of reality from various historical periods, and the analysis of these concepts can be useful to the interpretation of Borges' work. Borges' speculations related to the negation of time also have a historical-scientific reference, as well as his affirmations pertaining to the compatibility of Plato's theorems in regard of the discussion of the relativity theory. Hofner demonstrates his thesis in his analysis of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". The problem of defining Borges' conception of time resides in his eclecticism similar to the meaning that Diderot attributes to this term. Borges uses the theory of the infinite convergent series which originates in the ancient paradox: time/return/causality. In "The secret miracle" Hofner shows a known historical time at work, but in spite of this, there exists a poetic universe whose measure is not the clock but the Parmedian hexameter. Beatriz Sarlo, in her article "Borges: Cultural Theory and Criticism ", attempts to show that Borges indeed represents the major canon of literature as this is reflected in analysis concerning deep structure or in terms such as hypertext or intertextuality,

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at the same time underlining that Borges also dealt with "minor" literature. Sarlo demonstrates that Borges also belongs to another tradition, that of the 'edges', of the minor genre, and thus Borges can be read from this other tradition. Generally speaking, Sarlo states: all literature tends to constitute an anthology and a canon, a reading like a machine that reactivates quotations, taking into account biographical aspects such as was the case in the XIX century literature pertaining to the relation rhomme etl'oeuvre. Against the tradition of the "literary pantheon" we find the minor literature, but placed in the very center of the "major" literature. The division between popular and high literature is not, from this perspective, very convincing since very different questions emerge from it, such as the functioning of the construction of literary canons, or the definition regarding the category "high" or why some literatures have remained as minor. The answer, according to Sarlo, cannot be sought in "static identities" as it is shown in the debate that took place at that time regarding Borges observations on literatura gauchesca. Borges says that the type of gaucho (prairie cowboy) as a representative of the canon is only an illusion. Thus, it is revealed that each tradition is an invented one, a construction and it is not reducible to a "secret source". Edna Aizenberg attempts to open a new field of critical research pertaining to Borges work in '"Nazism is Uninhabitable': Borges, the Holocaust, and the Expansion of Knowledge". She starts from the assumption that the Holocaust challenges all fields of knowledge, including the studies of Latin American literature and culture in general and Borges work in particular. Aizenberg underlines that the critique on Borges work has paid particular attention to the "unreal" component of his writings, ignoring by and large the obvious politico-historical context in which Borges work it is also inscribed. Criticism has not considered those writings where Borges clearly attacks Hitler's regime, as shown in "South", "Deutsches Requiem" or the "Notes about the 23rd of August of 1944", stories which speak of the uninhabitability of Nazism. Furthermore, says Aizenberg, criticism forgets that Borges himself was victim of anti-Semitic campaigns and he was much aware of what was taking place in Europe and in the profascist Argentinean government. According to Aizenberg, the silence with respect to this issue characterizes Latin American academic studies in general. RolfKloepfer states in "The Superstitious and the Truthful Ethics of the Reader" that Borges' work deals with the central problem of the signification of meaning, of the 'traction' since all movement is dependent on its treatment of time and in relation to a "deep meaning". According to Kloepfer, books are for Borges the place where such movement is magically preserved. When Borges speaks of the "healthy theory", he is stating that he considers the lively contemplation of the whole as a system of thought ruled by an aesthetic interest. Borges describes individual perceptions in a dynamic framework of ideas which deploy themselves "bodily and physically". That is, grounding mental actions and mental movements such as the vertigo which is interpreted as an answer related to physical constitution, as profound disorientation from the part of Borges. Thus literature becomes a vertiginous and euphoric drug.

PREFACE

13

Elmar Schenkel, in "Circling the Cross, Crossing the Circle: On Borges and Chesterton", deals with Borges' close relationship to English literature, as is exemplified by his interest in Chesterton humor and erudition. During the conflict of the Falkland Islands between Great Britain and Argentina, the ascetic politician Borges entered the debate with a non political story about an Argentinean and a British who work in the language of each other countries, and they cannot escape death as a consequence of fate. Borges has a keen interest in G. K. Chesterton (1872-1936) who was less known for his theological work than for his detective stories around Father Brown. Chesterton places himself as catholic and literary outsider, outside the canon and the anti-canon. Each writer creates his/her own models and Chesterton is present in Borges detective stories. This presence should not surprise anyone, says Schenkel, since Borges' interest is particularly legitimate for those texts that invite to a sensual reading and not necessarily for those texts which are the product of the literary modernity. At the same time, Schenkel shows various affinities inasmuch as both authors become close to modernity: the books' magic, the sign of the blank pages, Mallarme's symbolism.

Laura Milano and Rosa Maria Ravera focus on "Borges' 'Baroquism "' starting from "History of Infamy" in order to show that in Borges exists an immanent baroque parameter that is generated in the deep structure defined in the surface structure. Within this baroquism objects, concepts, reason and rationality are deconstructed. Borges' logic proposes, and so do Milano and Ravera, that thought is motivated through the verbal act. For Borges literature is the privilege site of this operation (the verbal act) since it has the capacity to formulate its own rules and structure. Borges performs a series of inversions which are expressed as "finite infinite". Then, it is about the homogeneity's fragmentation, since no homogeneity exists, for instance, in the "Aleph" whose double codified reading, attempts the impossibility to express experiences through language. For Borges the Latin American Baroque is expressed through Nothingness, and the Baroque period is overcome by the death of mimesis. The Baroque in Borges is also the labyrinth where reality is transformed into literature. In every period literature repeats itself, but according to Derrida, these repetitions allow for differences and from them, paradoxes and the negation of the Subject emerge. In Borges' work life becomes a dream, a "directed dream" which constitutes a primary aesthetic, where literature and philosophy are demystified. At the same time literature and philosophy culminate in the skepticism of reference although necessary to understand the 'real' and the 'semiotic'. Ema Lapidot inquires, in her article "Borges between the Printing Press and the Hypertext", the relation between new writing techniques and its effect on literature, on the literary genres. Her starting point are those works written by Borges where he states such writing techniques. In spite of the fact that Borges is a representative of the litera, of the book, according to Lapidot's thesis, he forecasts, for instance, the idea of a simultaneous writing that opposes a linear writing inscribed in the printed book.

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ALFONSO DE TORO/FERNANDO DE TORO

He thus transforms writing in simultaneous space and produces a 'hypertext'. The hypertext must be understood as writing which superimposes various points of entry and exits, opening new paths to the "lexias" of the text and thus fusing the producer and the reader of texts. The articles gathered here show, on the one hand, the interpretative differences, at times substantial, but also converging and common epistemological ground. They show, then, the transdisciplinary concentration in the semiotic object which characterizes the "borgesian discursivity". On the other hand, they reveal a great diversity and differance of Borges' discourse always in an infinite nomadic movement.

Alfonso de Toro, Leipzig July 1998

Fernando de Toro, Winnipeg July 1998

15

Maria Kodama de Borges

Buenos Aires

JORGE LUIS BORGES, RELIGIONS AND THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, "la religión es el conjunto de creencias o dogmas acerca de la divinidad, de sentimientos de veneración y temor hacia ella, de normas morales para la conducta individual y social, y de prácticas rituales, principalmente la oración y el sacrificio para darle culto." Thus, the very definition of this concept reveals the sets that constitute what we called religion. Following this thinking, we may ask: what is the relation between Borges and religion? In order to understand this relation, one must return to the image of a child in an endless library, looking, through a magnifying glass, at the engraving of a labyrinth, in order to discover, in its center, the Miniature. That child, endowed with a remarkable intelligence, sensitivity and shyness, received in his home the guiding threads which will lead him through the path of a labyrinth of languages and beliefs. We know that his mother's side conducted itself following the social mores of the times, which could only be Catholic as she was of Spanish extraction. His beloved English grandmother filled his soul by reciting verses from the Bible. This knowledge of the sacred Scriptures, which would later greatly influence Borges' work, would not haven been possible without her, since the reading of the Bible, at that time, was forbidden to a Catholic. To this duality, in itself and for that time quite complex, we should add the figure of the father. He was, as were most men at that time, a free thinker, and considered religion a woman's affair. The image of the child with the magnifying glass is projected throughout Borges' work. When this child becomes a man he will continue to search, through his writing, for the center where the Miniature was replaced by God, for the order, for the key that may bring him access to the secrets of the universe. Borges felt that religions were closer to dogmas, to norms, to mores and to ritual practices than to the essential mystery of the Divinity. Borges, the freest of men, always abhorred religious or political fanaticism. The very fact that he grew up in an environment of very diverse and different ideas made him realize that this diversity made ambiguous and vulnerable the monolithic religious constructions, locked up in words, sermons, doctrines, used to wage war, to condemn sinners and to recruit adepts. He understood that religions were neither true nor false,

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but only means to reach the center being sought. In order to break with the dogmatism of religions, he travelled many different roads. He felt attracted by marginal and heterodoxical speculations; he felt seduced by the subtleness and formal beauty of those constructions. But above all, his affinity led him to be an adept of the constructions of fantastic literature. This is why he devoted many of his constructions and lectures to esoteric subjects. At the same time, he was fascinated by the Cabala, which, by mixing numbers and letters, attempts to decipher the true meaning of sacred literature, thus delivering humanity to the Divine. The most curious legend of the Cabala, the Golem, inspired several of his poems and narrations. He was fascinated by the possibility of finding God's secret name, which, if pronounced correctly, would make possible the creation of a Golem and also of a man: Adam. For the Cabalist, Adam was the first Golem created by the Divine Word. We should also keep in mind his preference for Swedenborg, who also believed in correlations: creation is in itself a secret writing that must be deciphered. Following this theory, León Bloy writes "Cada hombre está sobre la tierra para significar alguna cosa que él ignora y realizar de este modo, una parcela o una montaña de materiales invisibles con los que será batida la Ciudad de Dios. No hay un ser humano capaz de decir lo que es con certeza [...]. Todo no es más que símbolo". Borges discovers that Bloy's concepts are best suited to the divinity of the intellectual God of the theologists. The Gnostic were another of Borges' interests. In his text, Discusión, of 1932, he includes an essay entitled "Una vindicación del falso Basílides" (1989: 213-216), in which he states that, according to Basílides, there are a series of divinities and heavens, each one less perfect, which mediate between the true God, distant an anonymous, and the imperfect God of writing. Borges is interested and committed to the rescue of the merits of positive philosophers, for instance, the resolution of the problem of evil. Basílides' conception distances the Divinity from the material and impure world, where the chaotic character is extensivly recognized. "[...] esas derivaciones de Dios decrecen y se abaten, a medida que se van alejando hasta fondar en los abominables poderes que borrajearon con adverso material a los hombres." (1989: 215) And Borges adds: Falta considerar el otro sentido de esas invenciones oscuras. La vertiginosa torre de cielos de la herejía basiliana, la proliferación de sus ángeles, la sombra planetaria de los demiurgos trastornando la tierra, la maquinación de los círculos inferiores contra el pléroma, la densa población, siquiera inconcebible o nominal, de esa vasta mitología, miran también a la disminución de este mundo. No nuestro mal, sino nuestra central insignificancia es predicada en ellas [...]. (ibid)

At the same time, in the so called "cosmogonía melodramática de Valentino" (ibid: 215), Borges found the "admirable idea: el mundo imaginado como un proceso esencialmente fútil, como un reflejo lateral y perdido de viejos episodios celestes. La creación como hecho casual" (ibid: 215).

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However, his research will cover diverse aspects of the metaphysical/religious problem that concerns him: in "Otras inquisiciones" of 1952, there is one page - "De alguien a nadie" (1989: 737-739) - where we are reminded about the process that moves from a corporeal and concrete God to a God "que los siglos irán agigantando y desdibujando" (ibid: 737), making out of him "un respetuoso caos de superlativos no imaginables" (ibid). For Borges, all of the respectful superlatives, "omnipotent", "omnipresent", "omniscient", etc., seem to limit the Divinity. And he states: "[...] a fines del siglo V el escondido autor del Corpus Dionysiacum declara que ningún predicado afirmativo conviene a Dios. Nada se debe afirmar de Él, todo puede negarse" (ibid). When Escoto Erígena adopts this theory in the 19th century, he will use it to arrive to the primordial nothingness of the divinity: Dios es la nada primordial de la creado ex nihilo, el abismo en que se engendraron los arquetipos y luego los seres concretos. Es Nada y Nada; quienes lo concibieron así obraron con el sentimiento de que ello es más que ser un Quién o un Qué. Análogamente Samkara enseña que los hombres, en el sueño profundo, son el universo, son Dios, (ibid:

738)

The realization of the limits of language, its dangers, and deceitful traps in which it creates non-existent realities, could, for a writer like Borges, who had a particular interest in language, arouse a passionate interest. It is in Geneva, during his adolescence, that Borges taught himself German in order to read Schopenhauer, and through him discovers Buddhism. The Buddhist doctrine as a dream of Someone or No One, is one of the central topics in Jorge Luis Borges' narratives. Buddhism and idealism merge and find expression in Schopenhauer's theory of will, since he succeeds in adapting the Buddhist Nirvana to Western philosophy, purporting the abolition of will as a way to achieve the liberating nothingness. In "Las ruinas circulares" (Ficciones, 1989: 451-455), when we read the epigraph, "An if he left off dreaming about you [...]" (ibid: 451), a quotation from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, Borges poetically transmutes the Buddhist idea of the world as a dream, and idea which will lead the idealist philosophers to believe in the illusory and hallucinatory character of the world. In the universe it is God's dream, but it is also God's book as it appears in many of Borges' essays. In "Otras inquisiciones", in the essay "Del culto de los libros" (1989: 713716), Borges expresses his idea by analyzing Bacon's thinking, according to which God offers us two books, "el primero, el volumen de las Escrituras, que revela Su voluntad; el segundo, el volumen de las criaturas, que revela Su poderío [...]" (ibid: 715). In the same essay, and in several of his lectures, we encounter Carlyle's thinking, for whom "la historia universal es una Escritura sagrada que desciframos y escribimos inciertamente, y en la que también nos escriben." (ibid: 716). He quotes León Bloy, another of his favorite authors, who, according to Borges, wrote that we

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are "versículos o palabras o letras de un libro mágico, y ese libro incesante es la única cosa que hay en el mundo: es, mejor dicho, el mundo." (ibid). Jaime Alazraki shows in La prosa narrativa de Borges that in texts such as "El muerto", "La muerte y la brújula" or "Las ruinas circulares", the projection of an unyielding will which has already written or dreamed is present (the Dreamer in "Las ruinas circulares", the unruly divinity in "El muerto", and Scharlath the criminal in "La muerte y la brújula"). In contradistinction, the magician dreams of a man and understands at the end that he is also in someone else's dream, a dream in which a plan was already laid out, and Lonrot, the persecuted pursuer, are manifestations of human will. All his efforts to understand human will are condemned to failure. Borges recognizes a particular aesthetic value in all religious doctrines and he is attracted, at the same time, by pantheism. This will become another of the central topics in his work. He will often quote Plotinus, from the Aeneid, V, 8, 4: "Todo, en el cielo inteligible, está en todas partes. Cualquier cosa es todas las cosas". All through Borges' work we find the idea that everything is everywhere. For instance, in "El sueño de Coleridge" and "Otras inquisiciones", Borges sees in the palace dreamed by Kublai Khan and in the poem by Coleridge where only fifty lines remain, fragments of the work of superhuman being. He believes that this may be possible if one keeps in mind the Platonic doctrine of the transmigration of the soul, or if one follows the pantheist thinking, since both human deeds, the palace and the verses, were, essentially, God or the transitory faces of God. This pantheism is also found in "El acercamiento a Almotasim". But let us return to Catholic religion that, as we indicated above, came to Borges from his mother's side of the family and from the Biblical readings with Fanny Haslam, his English grandmother. In Borges' library there is a collection of Bibles and in many of his writings we find the traces of its verses. Throughout the years, the admiration for the figure of Christ, for his very real martyrdom, for his impossible miracle will stay in Borges' imagination. In the last issue of the journal Grecia (No. 50, November 1, 1920), Borges published "Lírica expresionista", with a translation of two poems by Wilhem Klemm, prefaced by a note in which Borges refers to the development of this author. One of the poems presents the miracle that brings to an end the torture of the man/son of God: La ascensión Él se apretó el cinturón hasta que le ciñó nuevamente. Su armazón desnuda de huesos crujió. En el costado la herida. Tosió baba sangrienta. Flameó, sobre su martirizado cabello Una corona de espinas de luz. Y los perros siempre curiosos Los discípulos husmeaban en torno. Golpeó como un gong su pecho. Gesticuló con los brazos, hasta que sus agujereadas aletas

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Por segunda vez largamente dispararon gotas de sangre, Y entonces vino el milagro. El cielo raso del cielo Se abrió color limón. Un vendaval aulló en las altas trompetas. Él, sin embargo, ascendió. Metro tras metro en el hueco Espacio. Las getas palidecieron en profundísimo asombro. De abajo sólo veían las plantas de sus pies sudorosos. (1997: 73)

The poet from Mallorca, Jacobo Sureda, wrote a letter to Borges referring to his relationship with this poem: "Me gusta esa visión de Jesucristo subiendo al cielo como un prestidigitador y dejando a los judíos atónitos [...]." Naturally, the religious association of the image with the prestidigitator takes away the solemnity and truthfulness of the miracle since, as we know full well, a prestidigitator is an entertainer and deceives by trickery. The sceptic Montaingne leads him, but does not persuade him, to accept as the final truth the suffering of the historical man in the cross. The rest is, perhaps, questioning, possibility, legend: a good pretext for fantastic literature. However, the topic of the crucifixion of the man, supposedly the son of God, will linger until "Los conjurados", his last book in 1985. In "Paradiso, XXXI, 108" {ElHacedor, 1960), we read: Una cara de piedra hay en un camino y una inscripción que dice "El verdadero retrato de la Santa Cara del Dios de Jaén"; si realmente supiéramos cómo fue, sería nuestra clave de las parábolas y sabríamos si el hijo del carpintero fue el Hijo de Dios. (1989: 800)

And, further: Tal vez un rasgo de la cara cruziñcada acecha en cada espejo; tal vez la cara se murió, se borró, para que Dios sea todos, (ibid)

In El otro, el mismo (1964) and in Elogio de la sombra (1969), Borges gives the same title to two different poems: "Juan, 1,14" (1989: 893 y 977). In the first of these two books (1989: 893) he compares God to Harun, who went about his kingdom totally unrecognized: God also wants to wander among us as though he were one of us: Y le será entregado el orbe entero, Aire, agua, pan, mañanas, piedra y lirio, Pero después la del martirio, El escarnio, los clavos y el madero.

The poem in El elogio de 1a sombra (1989: 977-978) presents, again, God playing with his children, becoming flesh, knowing all, but subjected to a limitation pointed out by Saint Thomas Aquinas: A veces pienso con nostalgia en el olor de esa carpintería.

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In La Cifra (1981), on the contrary, there are two poems that present man in his total loneliness, a being inescapably finite. The verses "La prueba" (1989a: 306) are addressed to the man that is everyman, to the brother, only corrupted, a sitting animal. In "El hacedor" (1989a: 311), there is also man, an I that merges with us, but that is alone and can only count on himself, and his own creative faculties; a god that orders his own images, no more nor less than a prestidigitator in that illusory world. But are not all universes and the universe itself illusory? Otra cosa no soy que esas imágenes que baraja el azar y nombra el tedio Con ellas, aunque ciego y quebrantado, He de salvar el verso incorruptible Y (es mi deber) salvarme.

In his last book, in the last moments of his work, he writes the most beautiful poem at last, "Cristo en la Cruz" (1989a: 457): El rostro no es el rostro de las láminas, Es áspero y judío. No lo veo y seguiré buscándolo hasta el día último de mis pasos por la tierra [...] ¿De qué puede servirme que aquel hombre haya sufrido, si yo sufro ahora?

The life and work of this man, Christ, the preacher of a truth or lie, will intrigue Borges forever: Nos ha dejado espléndidas metáforas y una doctrina del perdón que puede anular el pasado, (ibid)

Is this a critical judgement of a 'dead ultraism'? The fact is that Christ impressed him in a very deep manner as a man that changed the destiny of the West and, who could know it to be predestined?, an instrument of the numinous. But the man, each man, is present, unable to communicate at all with the absolute, with a God, even if there was a God. This is why Borges' verses will not see Christ ascending. However, in spite of his consequent agnosticism, perhaps with the same nostalgia of the carpenter's son, in "Una oración" (Elogio de la sombra, 1989: 1014), the maker desires: [...] Quiero ser recordado menos como poeta que como amigo; que alguien repita una cadencia de Dunbar o de Frost o del hombre que vio en la medianoche el árbol que sangra, la Cruz, y piense que por primera vez la oyó de mis labios.

So far we have seen the man and the maker in their relationship to religion; we have seen the sceptic thinker in a passionate and pathetic search for truth, which, a priori,

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he has considered something impossible to reach, because language is constituted by concepts and the concepts schematize the inaccessible richness of reality. If there is something beyond our dream, that something, even if it could be perceived somehow, is not accessible or communicable. It will be impossible to utilize an instrument made out of time, of a succession of words, in order to communicate that which is out of time. The maker knows that this work will remain imperfect, but there nothing can guarantee him that it is not, including the "Hacedor". Perhaps the gnostics were right when they spoke of clumsy gods, demiurges, creators of worlds as limited as themselves. Abstractions followed by abstractions of the reader of philosophy, enclosed in the net of his reason and condemned to use it in his attempt to reach the horizon, the ideal and deceitful line which will never be his. The reason of the word will never be able to access the Word, that of the beginning before the separation, when there was not a below and an above. However, from time immemorial, man was daring, and perhaps for this reason he lost the paradise, although this was not enough to prevent him to search for it. If the road of reason does not allow him to glimpse the center of the labyrinth, then he will find other means to access it. The mystics knew this full well, united as they were in a shared and unutterable experience: San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de Jesús, Meister Eckhart, Suso, William Blake and so many others searched in the dark night of the soul. When did man begin to reach another reality, a different one than the one framed in time and space? Perhaps from the very beginning. Westerners inherited the esoteric tradition from the Greeks; their mysteries led the initiated to search for the truth of the absolute; it was death of the old self and the birth of the new being, knowledgable of a secret that would remain so forever, since only those who had participated of the same rites could know about it. Perhaps all the charm of the troubadour - " Y o no digo mi canción/sino a quien conmigo va"- resides in the mystery whose knowledge demands the commitment of every being. The word 'mystery' in Greek - juuçrqpiov - refers to what every religion protects as the most hidden and secret. In Icelandic, the noun 'rune' means both 'word' and 'mystery'. In Literaturas germánicas medievales, Borges ("Literatura escandinava" 1983: 923-975), speaks about the Havamal of the Edda Major, a series of maxims from Odin. Of very different character are the lines (138-141) in which the god refers to how he was sacrified to himself in order to discover the runes and the wisdom hidden in them: Sé que pendí del árbol que movía el viento, durante nueve noches: herido de lanza, sacrificado a Odín, yo mismo a mí mismo: sobre el árbol de raíces desconocidas. N o me dieron un cuerno para beber, no me dieron pan. Miré hacia abajo, recogí las runas, gimiendo las recogí, caí al suelo. Nueve canciones mágicas aprendí del famoso hijo de Bolthorn, padre de Bezla, y bebí la hidromiel. En mí crecieron la sabiduría y el conocimiento; medré y me sentí bien; una palabra y la siguiente me dieron la tercera; un acto y el siguiente, el tercero. (1983: 927-928)

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Borges states that "quizá el poema refleja de algún modo una ceremonia de iniciación; quienes morían, verdadera o figurativamente, como Odin, se convertían en Odin" (1983: 928).

The ascetic, first verse of the mystic, consists of a necessary sacrifice in order to recover the understanding of the sacred signs, of the Word before becoming flesh, the point at which it came to inhabit with us, according to the New Testament. The poet will also seek to match the word up with the essence of reality, not as bridge but as the thing in itself. In this sense, one may speak, perhaps, of a mysticism of creation. The artist's intense vigilance and alertness will lead him to glimpse the perfection sought, the state of illumination which, in the religious spirits, culminates in a union with the Divinity. In the works of a number of experts on this subject, we find similar descriptions of this particular state that only some human beings can experience. From them, we know that the mystical experiences cannot be communicated, that they do not last for a long time, although those devoted to an ascetic life are able to repeat such experiences with a certain frequency. When experiencing a mystical state, the subject passively receives something, an awareness of being endowed with a different power, something that is different to everything that is known or felt in that moment: the being fuses himself with a different universe, out of time and space, where everything falls into place. This pure consciousness, incorporated to the whole, has little to do with the everyday Subject, which is subjected to changes and deterioration. For the Hindus, this I of which we are aware is not real: there is another one which is the real one: the Atmán, which for some is not the real, but for other is such that it is: the Atmán is totally independent from the coordinates of time and space. All this reminds us of Schopenhauer's characterization of the Pure Subject of knowledge, for whom the creation or contemplation of works of arts constitutes a mode of salvation, the access to Nirvana, where will-power vanishes while the aesthetic emotion that fuses the Subject and Object lasts. We only have to think about "El Simurgh y el Águila", a story in Nueve ensayos dantescos, where Borges narrates a passage that was read to him in his childhood. Farid the Din Attar was the author of the strange Simurgh (Thirty birds). He was a Persian who belonged to the Sufi sect; he had a drugstore, and one afternoon he was visited by a Muslim Monk who told him that it will be most difficult for him to abandon his riches. Attar abandoned his store and became a pilgrim. He traveled to strange places and then he arrived at Meca. In his return to his motherland, he wrote poems and devoted himself to contemplation. Among his works we find El coloquio de los pájaros (Mantiq-al-Tayi). Near his death, he stopped writing. In the Mantiq-al-Tayr, the king of the birds, the Simurgh drops a feather in China. All the birds decide to find their king. They know that his name means "Thirty birds" and that his dwelling is in a circular mountain which surrounds the Earth. After overcoming a series of obstacles they arrived at their king's home and they discover that the Semurgh is each one and all of them. Here, again, we have the pantheistic idea

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of the One as the only reality.1 The Sufi counted among their people great mystic poets, and this is why Borges, an ardent reader of oriental philosophies and religions, could not but be most interested. In El Aleph, from 1949, we once again find this anxiety created by access to a different universe. For instance in "El zahir" (1989: 589-595) we read: Para perderse en Dios, los sufíes repiten su propio nombre o los noventa y nueve nombres divinos hasta que estos ya nada quieren decir. Yo anhelo recorrer esa senda. Quizá yo acabe por gastar el Zahir a fuerza de pensarlo y de repensarlo; quizá detrás de la moneda esté Dios.

We find another example in "La escritura del Dios" {El Aleph, 1989: 596-599), where the magician Tzinacán, while awaiting his death in prison, practices exhausting exercises in order to recall his art, and to extract the truth from the universe: one day, after terrible nightmares that returned him to his prison reality, he completely accepted his misfortune: Entonces ocurrió lo que no puedo olvidar ni comunicar. Ocurrió la unión con la divinidad, con el universo (no sé si estas palabras difieren )[...] Vi el universo y vi los íntimos designios del universo. Vi los orígenes que narra el Libro del Común. [...] Vi el dios sin cara que hay detrás de los dioses, (ibid: 598-599)

And the magician, after having glimpsed at the universe, knows that: Quien ha entrevisto el universo, quien ha entrevisto los ardientes designios del universo, no puede pensar en un hombre, en sus triviales dichas o desventuras, aunque ese hombre sea él. Ese hombre ha sido él y ahora no le importa. Qué le importa la suerte de aquel otro, qué le importa la nación de aquel otro, si él, ahora es nadie, (ibid: 599)

Again, in "El Aleph" (1989: 617-628), the narrator will go through the experience where the writer becomes desperate in his attempt to capture words, knowing beforehand that his attempt is futile, since nothing will give him or communicate to him, to that instrument of fables, the writer of chains and signs, the vision of the infinite, of the simultaneity that escapes the imposed succession,: [...] vi en el Aleph la tierra y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis visceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo, (ibid: 626)

1

Another version of this can also be found in the eagle that Dante describes en the Canto XVIII of the Paradiso, although this eagle is constituted by millions of just kings, these are not lost in the whole, in the eagle, but they retain individual features. This is why Borges sees, in the God of Israel and Rome, a personal God.

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Typically, the mystical experience also bursts in here in an unexpected manner, in a place discovered by a mediocre writer (the basement where the narrator goes), and it is experienced by a sceptic who has only agreed to contemplate the Aleph in order to please the host. But the moment of illumination lived does change the narrator, who will return stripped of his individuality, to the petty and small world which he confronts with Carlos Argentino Daneri. Perhaps because a deliberate practice of an aesthetic period or a total surrendering to his art did not take place, the narrator does not suffer changes which could mark him in a definite way. Of this experience he only keeps an intellectual knowledge, but not the indescribable emotion which totally changes the I of Tzinacán. The narrator of "El Aleph" is a witness, an incredible observer of the unknowable university; Tzinacán achieves the union with the divinity; Borges, the great reader, often imagined the Paradise as being an infinite library. In "La Biblioteca de Babel" (.Ficciones, 1989: 465-471), of 1941, he wrote: Los místicos pretenden que el éxtasis les revela una cámara circular con un gran libro circular de lomo continuo, que da toda la vuelta de las paredes; pero su testimonio es sospechoso; sus palabras, oscuras. Ese libro cíclico es Dios, (ibid: 465-466)

According to the narrator, the librarians believe that there "debe existir un libro que sea la cifra y el compendio perfecto de todos los demás; algún bibliotecario lo ha recorrido y es análogo a un dios" (ibid: 469). This book of God or of nature will be always inaccessible for mere mortals, condemned as they are to the succession of instants, to the finite number of experiences. The character in "Funes el memorioso" dies without achieving the mystical experience of simultaneity, the perfect harmony of the universe, because his monstrous memory will not save him from the prison of time which leads to the eternity of the divinity, to the atemporality that suspends the flow of time in "El milagro secreto". I cannot but reiterate that Borges, introduced at an early age to the labyrinthine world of meditation by his father, never stopped to feel a special and profound attraction for the great problems whose solution seems to reside beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. His acute poetic sensitivity predisposed him to relate to nature. On April 24, 1930, the poem "Motivos del espacio y del tiempo" (1916-19), signed by Borges, was published by the Sevillian journal, Gran Guignol(No. 3, p. 10). In the last verse of the poem I see a referent to an experience that Borges often repeated: Anoche cuando salí con esos dos amigos a la calleja desigual e indecisa que salpica jirones de luz azulada o amarillenta sentí en mí una gran calma y un gran goce y una verdad que era harto alta para encerrarla en cárcel de palabras. Y durmió esa noche a mi lado, y al despertarme la encontré conmigo y me acompaña desde entonces.

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(hoy no he sentido envidia alguna ante una carta que es clarín de una felicidad vedada y ajena) Está tan grande en mi alma tal el instante en que brilló como un fastuoso y estival mediodía en la noche humilde y desnuda. E ignoro aún si es el licor de mi victoria o de mi definitiva derrota. Many years later, in some newspaper interviews, Borges is said to have had what he considered a mystical experience. It lasted only a brief moment, and he confessed he was unable to describe it, since this experience took place outside time. He must have been very shaken by this event since he incorporated it in three works: "El idioma de los argentinos" of 1928; "Historia de la eternidad" of 1936; and "Otras inquisiciones" of 1952. In one of the stories, entitled "Sentirse en muerte", he states: Deseo registrar aquí una experiencia que tuve hace unas noches: fruslería demasiado evanescente y extática paia que la llame aventura; demasiado irrazonable y sentimental para pensamiento. Se trata de una escena y de su palabra: palabra ya antedicha por mí, pero no vivida hasta entonces con entera dedicación. [...] Lo rememoro así. La tarde que precedió a esa noche, estuve en Barracas: localidad no visitada por mi costumbre, y cuya distancia de las que después recorrí, ya dio un sabor extraño a ese día. Su noche no tenía destino alguno; como era serena, salí a caminar y recordar, después de comer. No quise determinarle rumbo a esa caminata; procuré una máxima lentitud de probabilidades para no cansar la expectativa con la obligatoria antevisión de una sola de ellas. Realicé en la mala medida de lo posible eso que llaman caminar al azar; acepté, sin otro consciente prejuicio que el de soslayar las avenidas o calles anchas, las más oscuras invitaciones de la casualidad. Con todo, una suerte de gravitación familiar me alejó hacia unos barrios, de cuyo nombre quiero siempre acordarme y que dictan reverencia a mi pecho. No quiero significar así el barrio mío, el preciso ámbito de la infancia, sino sus todavía misteriosas inmediaciones, confín que he poseído entero en palabras y poco en realidad, vecino y mitológico a un tiempo. El revés de lo conocido, su espalda, son para mí esas calles penúltimas, casi tan efectivamente ignoradas como el soterrado cimiento de nuestra casa o nuestro invisible esqueleto. La marcha me dejó en una esquina. Aspiré noche, en asueto serenísimo de pensar. La visión, nada complicada por cierto, parecía simplificada por mi cansancio. La irrealizaba su misma tipicidad. La calle era de casas bajas y aunque su primera significación fuera de pobreza, la segunda era ciertamente de dicha. Era de lo más pobre y de lo más lindo. Ninguna casa se animaba a la calle; la higuera oscurecía sobre la ochava; los portoncitos -más altos que las líneas estiradas de la noche. La vereda era escarpada sobre la calle, la calle era de barro elemental, barro de América no conquistado aún. [...] Me quedé mirando esa sencillez. Pensé con seguridad en voz alta: Esto es lo mismo de hace treinta años ... Conjeturé esa fecha: época reciente en otros países, pero ya remota en este cambiadizo lado del mundo. Tal vez cantaba un pájaro y sentí por él un cariño chico, de tamaño de pájaro; pero lo más seguro es que en ese ya vertiginoso silencio no hubo más ruido que el también intemporal de los grillos. El fácil pensamiento. Estoy en mil ochocientos y tantos dejó de ser unas aproximativas palabras y se profundizó a realidad. Me sentí muerto, me sentí percibidor abstracto del mundo; indefinido temor imbuido

26

MARÍA KODAMA DE BORGES de ciencia que es la mejor claridad de la metafísica. No creí, no, haber remontado las presuntivas aguas del Tiempo; más bien me sospeché poseedor del sentido reticente o ausente de la inconcebible palabra eternidad. Solo después alcancé a definir esa imaginación. ("Nueva refutación del tiempo", in: Otras Inquisiciones, 1989: 764-765)

This experience shook him deeply, as I pointed out earlier, and perhaps led him to abandon his agnosticism regarding the magic of the poetic creation which, through the years, will bring back this unutterable experience that he once felt. This thirst for the absolute is already present in "Fervor de Buenos Aires", a book that, as Borges himself indicated, forecasts everything that he wrote afterwards. Some verses of "Un patio" (1989: 23) invite to the meditation which leads to other dimensions: Patio, cielo encauzado. El patio es el declive por el cual se derrama el cielo en la casa. Serena, la eternidad espera en la encrucijada de estrellas. Grato es vivir en la amistad oscura de un zaguán, de una parra y de un aljibe.

These verses reveal the presence of this very admired author, Fray Luis de León, who achieved only one notable expression of mystic poetry in his "Oda a Salinas". Later, in 1964, Borges will write about another experience, perhaps one that speaks of what is not transmittable, where the numinous appears as something terrible, as the suppression of the fear about which the mystics speak. His "Mateo, XXV, 30" (El otro, el mismo, 1989: 874) leads us to the Biblical verse: "Y al siervo inútil libradle en las tinieblas de afuera: allí será el lloro y el rechinar de dientes." "una voz infinita/dijo estas cosas (estas cosas, no estas palabras,/ Que son mi pobre traducción temporal de una sola palabra)" (1989: 874). And, facing the mysterious reproach, he states: "Has gastado los años y te han gastado, y todavía no has escrito el poema." (ibid) Borges knows that he will never write the poem: to write it will amount to writing the inconceivable central page, without reverse, of the Library of Babel, to possess forever Odin's golden disk. No poet can seize it, no man can transcend the limits of his own finitude with the poor instrument of his art. In spite of the nostalgia generated by having glimpsed Paradise, Borges also knows that the only thing that redeem him of the earthly, of his humanity, is to transform the earthly road into poetry. This is why in "De la salvación por las obras" he says that, thanks to the haiku, humanity was forgiven by the gods. This is why he rendered (1989a: 266) into Castillian the couplet by Angelus Silesius, the mystical pantheistic poet: La rosa es sin porqué florece porque florece.

RELIGIONS AND MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS Borges, Jorge Luis. (1983). Obras completas en colaboración. Buenos Aires. — . (1989). Obras Completas 1923-1972. Vol. I. Buenos Aires. — . (1989a). Obras Completas 1975-1985. Vol. II. Buenos Aires. — . (1997). Textos recuperados. Buenos Aires.

CRITICAL WORKS Alazraki, Jaime. (21974). La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges. Madrid.

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29

Luce Lopez-Baralt

University of Puerto Rico

BORGES, OR THE MYSTIQUE OF SILENCE: WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ZAHIR To Arturo, for all that brings us together. To Antonio Fernández Ferrer, La voz a ti debida. Sé la Verdad pero no puedo razonar la Verdad. El inapreciable don de comunicarla no me ha sido otorgado. Jorge Luis Borges "El libro de arena"

"Behind the name there is something that cannot be named." 1 No one knew this better than Jorge Luis Borges - and nevertheless his incomparable literary pen succumbed time and time again to the compelling temptation to pursue the ineffable. He often expressed a "writer's desperation" when faced with the impossible task of putting into words an infinite and simultaneous experience in a conceptual and consecutive language. Yet Borges tried, time and time again, to at least partially disclose to us his encounter with the Absolute. Borges, willingly seeking what he believed to be inevitable literary defeat - "algo, sin embargo, recogeré", - valiantly creates pages overflowing with verbal images that tumble into a whirling kaleidoscope, creating for us the illusion that the visionary outburst which attempts to translate an infinite experience has no end. From these fluid verbal outpourings arise some of the most inspired passages of his work: the unforgettable protean Aleph, in whom we see tigers, pistons, ferns, horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn; or yet the ecstatic vision of the poetical protagonist of "Matthew XXV: 30", lavished with cluttered mirrors, algebra and fire, memory, the familiar fragrance of honeysuckle. In "The God's Script", within this same febrile rhythm, Tzinacán mutters with anguishing desire: he saw an ubiquitous Wheel that was made of water, but also of fire. It included, beyond space-time, the intimate designs of the universe, and in one of the fibers of that fabric the priest of the pyramid of Qaholom found

1

The verse by Borges (1964) is from "The Compass", in The Self, the Other (1964).

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himself. In spite of the splendor of these wildly populated verbal extravagances2, Borges knew that he was not able to grant the reader the "secret miracle" of his incommunicable vision of the universe, and he admits in "El Aleph": "lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porque el lenguaje lo es". It would seem that Borges, that ironic "Argentine lost in metaphysics", could not find his way out of his own labyrinth, the labyrinth into which he had cast his ambitious literary discourse, so thirsty for the infinite. The only way out would be to silence these hallucinating verbal discs in perpetual motion and to remain, as the Persian mystic Yalaloddin Rümí had wanted to do, "in a harbor safe from gross human language". By choosing silence, the writer would not have to betray the opportunity of experiencing the universe in its totality by falsifying it with language. Borges, in his infinite wisdom, knew how to sidetrack the trap of insufficient language: just as he sought the Whole with his brilliant verbal extravagance, he also knew how to seek the Nothing, absence, the most absolute of all silences.3 It is exactly this unexpected place of the indescribable which we find in "The Zahir", that enigmatic coin the other ineffable side of which will, by necessity, remain outside the scope of language. It is Borges himself who tells us what was on the other side of the Zahir: "quizá detrás de la moneda esté Dios"4. But the affirmation with which Borges' alter ego completes the tale - without a doubt, one of the strangest written by Borges - only enhances the inscrutable mystery of his symbol, and forces the reader to ask himself the unanswered question: what is really represented by the radiant Zahir, the obsessive memory of which threatens to drive the solitary protagonist into madness? I pronounce "zahir" and at once I am off to a bad start. I know that Borges, who, every time he saw me, made me say the melodious name of the Thousand and One Nights in hTztoic-Alf layla wa layla - knew perfectly well that it was not a question of the "zahir" but rather of the zâhir ( Lt ). The Arabic term comes from the threeletter root z-h-r{ ^ ), the principal meaning of which is "visible or manifest", just as the narrator in the story explains. Nevertheless, with its corresponding diacritical and contextual alterations, the root of the word, like all Arabic words, admits numerous other simultaneous meanings. I suspect that Borges had several of them in 2

These febrile enumerations of Borges' images are undoubtedly related to the verbal outpourings of aphasic writers such as St. John of the Cross, who lavishes the central verses of his "Spiritual Canticle" with an overwhelming succession of images: "My Beloved, the mountains /the bosky solitary valleys,/the strange isles,/the sounding rivers,/the whisper of the loving breezes [...]". It also reminds us of Pablo Neruda, who pursued Machu Picchu with a chaotic proliferation of images knowing perfectly well that he could never truly sing the ancient city: "Interstellar eagle, vine-in-a-mist / Forsaken bastion, blind cimitar, / Orion belt, ceremonial bread [...]". (Neruda 1966)

3

James Rest and particularly Gabriela Massuh have been concerned with the meaning of this "privileged silence" of Borges' language. More will be said about this later.

4

See "El Zahir", Obras completes (1989) /"The Zahir", Borges (1997); further quotations are from this version.

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mind: "back, rear, side, rear part, rear side, reverse"; "memory", "eye", "mirador, vantage point", "esoteric or literal meaning" and, particularly, "followers of the sect of the zahiriyya [dahriyya ], who profess the esoteric or literal interpretation of the Koran and tradition"5. Arnald Steiger explores the inexorable multiplicity of concurrent endings ever present in the Arabic language: [in Arabic] the word always evokes [...] all preceding roots, and even the deep meaning of the root takes precedence over the meaning of the word. The root of an Arabic word is, thus, like a lyre whose every string vibrates whenever one string is plucked. And every word, in addition to its own resonance, awakens the harmonious secrets of the related concepts. 6

This constellation of simultaneous meanings (and what may even be called antinomical meanings), which is so characteristic of three-letter roots in Arabic, is what gives rise to an ironic comment that, nevertheless, betrays a profound linguistic amazement: "each word in Arabic is itself and its opposite, and a type of camel". In spite of the fact that I know perfectly well that the excesses of this apparent polarization of Arabic words are only apparent, I cannot resist the temptation to recall - 1 know that Borges would have enjoyed it - that the root z-h-r, in its variants zahri and zaharí, can also mean "riding camel". There is, nevertheless, nothing ludicrous in what I am saying. This flexibility and multivalent nature of the Arabic language, regardless of how absurd it may seem to our western minds, will give us some of the innermost clues to the story that Borges gives name to in the language of Koranic revelation. Borges leaves nothing to chance, and he was fully aware of the multivalent and opalescent character of the three-letter z-h-r root, judging from the masterly way with which he plays upon this device throughout his narration. Let there be no doubt: Borges will pluck all the strings of the three-letter lyre from which, linguistically speaking, gives rise to his ever evasive Zahir. Also, as we shall see, Borges intentionally relegates to absolute silence another Arabic term that anyone familiar with Islamic religious culture would expect to immediately come upon in the story. And one would expect to find it exactly on the other side of the enigmatic coin. It is a term that constitutes the linguistic and philosophical opposite of the zahir. the bátin. Borges would know perfectly well that the bátin would have to be on the reverse of the luminous disc of the Zahir. Bátin ( ¿Jo L. ) means occult and mysterious; and, above all, it refers to the batiniyya or esoteric school of thought, which advocates hidden, incomprehensible and infinite meaning for the exterior word of the revealed Truth. In other words: this Islamic esoteric school, 5

See Corriente (1977), and Cowan (1976).

6

See Steiger (1958: 42-43). Many other theorists agree with these comments on the extremely rich multivalency of the Arabic language: Richard Kinkade, Annemarie Schimmel, Raphael Patai. For a more in-depth analysis of this topic, see López-Baralt (1985/1990: 220 f.).

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which was the rival of the dahriyya or zahiri sect, placed greater value not on the exterior word of the religious revelation, but rather on what lay beneath it: the unknowable, the unnameable; what we call, in our limited human language, God. Or, to use Borges' own words, the inconceivable Universe. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There will be plenty to say about these Muslim theological terms and of the way in which they intertwine in the mysterious tale of which the symbolic coin is the center. What must be kept in mind for the moment is that Borges has already triggered some of the occult meanings of the z-h-r root: the one which establishes the verso and reverso, and the one that signifies an Islamic theological school, the counterpart of which was the esoteric school of the batiniyya. Before going any further, however, I would like to insist on the fact that we should not be surprised that Borges handles these Islamic technical terms with such ease. Little by little, we, his readers, will become aware of his deep knowledge of Muslim culture, so deftly displayed by the scholarly Hispanic narrator. Already as a young man in Buenos Aires, he gave lectures on Sufism and, if we are to believe Erika Spivakovsky, he could even write in Arabic script.7 His widow Maria Kodama told me that a few months before dying in Geneva, Borges - already melancholy and in the twilight of his days, no doubt - dedicated himself to the task of formally learning Arabic and to this end he called a tutor in Arabic to his home.8 We can imagine just how important this language was to him, given the fact that he spent his final days learning it. Or relearning it, since scholars have been unanimous in admitting that Borges knew somewhat more Arabic than what he might have picked up from the translations of the Thousand and One Nights by Mardrus, Lane, Galland, Burton and Cansinos Assens, which he passionately commented on during his life. He was obsessed with talking to me about them, every time he saw me. Professor Spivakovsky insists that Borges' apparent contradictory thought strongly recalls certain aspects of Arabic philosophical thought - particularly in his much sought Averroes - and it even responds to certain specific peculiarities of the grammar of the language itself. (In concrete terms, the multivalent structure of the three-letter roots we have been describing). George Wingerter wrote a very persuasive essay on "Arabismo and criptoarabismo de Borges", in which he concluded that Borges somehow had to be familiar with the Arabic three-letter roots, since he shows his ability to

7

"[...] he can write Arabic script", she tells us, referring to the facsimile of this script. See Spivakovsky (1968: 230).

8

Curiously enough, Borges admitted that he knew no Hebrew, that other Semitic language that he so celebrated in his writings. Jaime Alazraki (1988: 14) provides us with this information: When asked a few years ago about his interest in the Kabbalah, Borges replied, "I read a book called Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Scholem and another book by Trachtenberg on Jewish superstitions. Then I have read all the books on the Kabbalah I have found and all the articles in the encyclopedias and so on. But I have no Hebrew whatever."

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deal with, among others, the endings of the q-b-r root (to bury), which the critic relates to the false country Uqbar, actually "'buried' in the pages of a volume of piratical encyclopedia" (Wingerter 1983: 36). My close reading of Borges tends to confirm these intuitions: Borges knew quite a lot about this multivalent structure of Arabic words, even though he may have had but a rudimentary knowledge of the language.9 Giovanna de Garayalde also points out Borges' deep relationship with Sufi thought. He was not only familiar with the content of numerous mystic Muslim legends,10 but also seemed to control the narrative techniques of Islamic storytellers. In order to enable the listener to develop a keen perception, Sufi masters used symbolic language they knew would awaken a kaleidoscope of simultaneous meanings, meanings which would change according to each listener. They did not want the listener to remain on the literal plane of the words of the tale, "because they deny that words - which are merely a reflection of a rational and abstract concept - can convey the whole multifaceted range of vital reality" (1978: 15). Thus, every visible or exterior word of the esoteric legend in question awakens different levels of deep understanding in different listeners, and will depend on their vital and spiritual situation at the time of the reading. Today, we would say it depended on their literary sensitivity and culture. Now we shall see that that is precisely why the reader should read "The Zahir", written in the Arab style, keeping in mind its different layers of profound and simultaneous meanings. We are, once again, faced with the notion of the antinomical multivalence of the Arabic language, which Borges most certainly was aware of, and with which he more than likely felt a close kinship.11 But it would seem that the sophisticated Islamic knowledge revealed in the story we have been exploring has escaped Borges' critics. Erika Spivakovsky points out that, contrary to stories such as "Averroes' Search", '"The Zahir', another Arab-inspired short story, is invented throughout: subject matter, pseudo-historical introduction, names, and even the sources" (1968: 237). In a recent study, Floyd Merrell (1991: 6) is equally disillusioned with the enigmatic coin: "the Zahir is ultimately a helpless symbol". I do not agree. As usual, although Borges laces this story - one of his favorites, to be sure12 - with false quotations to confuse the reader, he is totally familiar with the details of the Islamic religious culture in which he frames it. When he

9

I asked Ana Maria Barenechea (Birmingham, August 1995) whether as a young man in Buenos Aires Borges had studied Arabic with a professor, but she said she did not know if he had done so formally. I suspect that he must have at least had one friend who was knowledgeable in Arabic whom he could consult as to the meaning of certain Arabic roots, or he at least must have known how to consult an Arabic dictionary.

10

Erika Spivakovsky lists the numerous tales by Borges influenced by Islamic topics (1968: 230).

11

See also, among so many critics who have concerned themselves with Borges' debt to the Orient, the studies of Julia Kushigian (1991) and Maria Kodama (1986: 170-184).

12

Ibid: 229.

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conceals or twists certain information, he does so knowingly, otherwise he would have left his fundamental literary clues too much in the open. But let us continue to follow more closely the trail of the elusive coin that would seem to threaten with madness not only the narrator-protagonist, but even more so, the reader of the story, who has become submerged in a sea of perplexities. The fictionalized Borges who is the protagonist in this narrative story, begins by describing the coin, which he laconically declares to be Argentine, in spite of its Arabic name. It is a coin worth 20 centavos, on the reverse side of which a blade or penknife has scratched the letters NT and the number two. Curiously enough, he tells us nothing about the reverse of the coin. The other side of the coin remains invisible. Borges has just given us the first clue of his narration: his language comes to a halt, respectfully, vis-a-vis the reverse side of the coin, and he dares not tread further with his incomparable literary prose. He does not wait long to give us our second clue: in other times, the Zahir has been many other things, all extremely strange: in Guzerat, it was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque; in Persia, an astrolabe, in Mahdi, a compass; in the synagogue of Córdoba, a vein in the marble; in the ghetto in Tetuán, the bottom of a well. The kaleidoscopic succession of images the Zahir formerly assumed is abruptly interrupted when the narrator tells us the date on which he acquired the coin June seventh. He immediately shares an extremely curious confidence with the reader: although it is still possible for him to remember what happened, he is no longer the man he was: "Aún, parcialmente, soy Borges".13 The protagonist has unfolded before us and has two facets or aspects, like the coin that coincidentally exhibits the number two on the face. It is here that the arcane story merges with another, a more prosaic, but equally complex, one. We are in the presence of a binary narration, one which has a dual nature, once again, like the paradigmatic coin that serves as its protagonist. The night before the Zahir came into the protagonist's possession he had attended the wake of a woman whom he had loved in his youth: Teodelina Villar.14 Now the name Teodelina points again at the Zahir, for it is a cryptic name that is linguistically equivalent to the nickel disk that concerns us. Although Teo refers to God, delina (from the Greek délo, "to clarify", "to make visible or evident") takes us back to the principal meaning of the Arabic root z-h-r, "visible" or "manifest". Like the Zahir, Teo-delina the exterior or visible God - also has her reverse - a-déló - the occult and mysterious,

13

Edmundo Gomez Mango (1986: 77) insists, and rightfully so, on the "threatened identity of the character".

14

In earlier editions of the story, Borges called this character "Clementina Villar". The substitution of this name with "Teodelina", as we soon see, responds to well-thought out clues provided by the author.

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35

since the model remains unattainable throughout the story (Adela must then be the "secret" or "mystic" name of Borges' beloved).15 The dual structure of Borges' narration is, without a doubt, one of rare perfection. Teodelina was a model whose photographs ("attributes" as Borges called them, using another theological term) had littered the pages of worldly magazines in 1930 and then, reduced to poverty, saw her image grace advertisements for face creams and automobiles. She passed through endless metamorphoses, changing the color of her hair and her coiffure. Like the coin of the Zahir, the multiple faces of Teodelina appear in the most varied circumstances and she too becomes "common currency" of all those who ephemerally and superficially "possess" her in the commercial advertisements.16 (Similarly, in the story "Aleph" Borges is faced with a multitude of pictures of his beloved Beatriz Viterbo, whose traits finally begin to fade from his memory.) It is evident that the inner being of Teodelina, who curiously "seeks the absolute" in the ephemeral, does not reside in her superficial, and even tasteless advertisements: they would escape forever her humble admirers. Exactly what would happen with the "true face" of the Zahir. Something curious happens, however, when the man who formerly loved the model looks at her rigid body in the coffin. Teodelina gradually recovered the features she had possessed in life, especially when she was twenty and Borges had loved her. Twenty years and twenty centavosr. Teodelina is frozen in the same number as the value of the Zahir. But for Borges none of the innumerable faces of Teodelina that he recalls are as memorable - the reader must watch the concept of memory, which is also one of the variants of the meaning of the three-letter z-h-r root - as the last one, in spite of its frozen rigidity, which seems to bring together all the variants. The coin also, in its cold metallic surface, tends to freeze the memorable face of an illustrious citizen or patriot. The only thing is, we have not yet seen what is on the reverse side of the Zahir. Once again the model is joined with the coin, and it should not surprise us that it is two o'clock in the morning - again the dual number - when Borges leaves the wake. Upon leaving, he wanders into an open-air bar and general store, where he drinks a harsh brandy while meditating back on how the vulgarity of this act compared to the

15

I would like to express my thanks to my colleagues Antonio Fernández Ferrer and Segundo Cardona for their help with the Greek terms.

16

Andrew Feenberg (1985: 204) notes that: Dans sa fonction sociale Teodelina est comme un pièce de monnaie dans les transactions du désir et non pas une participante active dans les rivalités et les amours hantés par son image. Teodelina est un moyen de circulation érotique et en tant que tel n'a pas de 'valeur d'usage' dans le marché sexuel. A cette fonction sociale correspond une conscience de soi qui représente la vie intérieure secrète des signes. Est-ce fascination pour l'extériorité des signes qui prépare le narrateur pour la catastrophe du zahir?

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pain of bidding his final farewell to his rigid beloved is a kind of oxymoron. A prosaic event is thus the inevitable counterpart of something tragically sublime: once again we must evoke the Zahir, which will hide something sacred beneath its banal face. Since the author has repeatedly pointed out in his story this continual front and back of the coin and of life, it should be noted that once again it is precisely these concepts of the reverse and obverse that are also contained, as we have already seen, in the three-letter root z-h-r. And it should be no great surprise to us that Borges intertwines mystical quotes - the dark light of the gnostics, the black sun of the alchemists - when he speaks of the oxymoron that consists of the pedestrian behavior contrasted to that of externalizing the loss just felt. It is here that the grieving Borges is given the Zahir as part of his change for the brandy. It is curious that the writer has decided to frame his story within the Sufi ambience: drunkenness and alcohol are decoded in the trovar clus of Islamic mystical poetry, in terms of the transforming ecstasy. The Zahir will be closely linked to all of this. In the bar, the men are playing truco: chance also comes into play when the narrator acquires the portentous coin, because it too is associated with the ecstatic experience, which is always freely given by God's grace. Our protagonist goes out into the street and his febrile state, which necessarily clouds understanding and rational discourse, will be the first of many other altered states of awareness that will be associated with the coin: madness, sleep, drunkenness. We will soon see why this obliteration of human reasoning will necessarily be associated with the possession of the Zahir. Meditating on all the symbolic coins that have endlessly shone down through history and fable, from Charon's obolus to the gold louis whose effigy betrayed the fleeing Louis XVI in Varennes, Borges, the character, describes a circular journey that takes him back again to the bar where he had drunk his brandy. Once again, the coins emit multiple images, like Teodelina's face, while the circle Borges describes as he walks about evokes the circular sphere of the coin. All of this will become important in decoding the story. Sleepless, possessed and almost happy - the words are those of the narrator Borges reflects that the coin, even this twenty-ce/7£3ro coin, is a panoply of possible futures: it can buy an evening outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or a game of chess. The message is hammered in again and again: the images emitted by the coin, like the face of the dead beloved, are unfailingly numerous. But now the Zahir begins to exert its obsessive influence over the character, who dreams - once again an altered state of consciousness - that he himself was a pile of coins guarded by a gryphon. This provides us an ominous clue that takes us back to the initial meditation on quiddity that tormented the protagonist, who did not know exactly who he was. Now, all of a sudden, we learn that in some way he shares his being with the delirious coin. It is, as we shall see, a very revealing fact. The next day the character Borges decides that he had been drunk - the mystic's symbolic loss of reason - and decides to free himself from that disturbing coin that constantly plunges him into these states in which he feels that he is not in his right mind. He thinks of burying it in the garden - Teodelina was also buried - or in a corner

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of the library. The hiding places Borges toys with will also be, as we shall see, extremely eloquent. But for the moment he prefers to lose the coin, and off he goes to Constitution - his route is also significant, since it is the same Constitution street where Borges found himself after having the feverish vision of the Aleph, and it is also on the Constitution bridge where the mystical vision of the universe was granted to him, a vision eloquently described in the poem "Matthew XXV;30". Everything continues to point to a mystical experience. Unabashedly, the character now goes into the first tavern he comes upon and pays for a brandy with the Zahir; that night he sleeps soundly... but with the help of sleeping draught: a drug helps him replace his drunken state and feverish sleep. Unexpectedly, he becomes distracted with the idea of composing a tale of fantasy in the first person, full of enigmatic paraphrases - just like the one we have before us-. This story within the story is related to the Nibelungen and the custody of an untold treasure. (Once again, the treasure of coins must be protected and hidden). None of this should surprise us, since the treasure of one coin - or several coins - that guard the inconceivable figure of the infinite is clearly the axis on which this story turns; the tale is an inscription of what the character Borges wants to write in the story in which he himself is the protagonist. The double Chinese box in which the narration unfolds reminds us once again of the two sides of the coin and the obsessive binary nature so often pointed out by the story. Yet again, the front and the back are, as we may recall, terms contained in the Arabic root z-h-r. Composing this story within a story - "trivial" in the words of the narrator enabled him to put the coin out of his mind for a while. But the "abominable nickel disk" returns to haunt his memory once again. It is not surprising to find that the threeletter root contained the concept of "memory" as one of its simultaneous meanings. It is curious to see that Borges forgets Teodelina for the Zahir, but he is incapable of forgetting the Zahir. Just as in the "Aleph", the dead beloved is replaced with a magical object with mystical overtones. Not even the psychiatrist to whom the protagonist turns could cure him of his obsession; only a book he exhumed - once again necrological language - from a book shop on Sarmiento Street was able to shed some light upon his obsession. The book was a copy of Julius Barlach's Urkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage (Breslau, 1899). This is the same year in which Borges was born, thus linking him with the text that will provide us with the clues to the obsessive Zahir. (In some way, he tells us, he and the fabricated text belong to the world of fiction. We already know that the character identified himself in his dream with the coins guarded by the gryphon, another product of literary imagination. We will soon learn what the writer wants us to see with all of this). In Barlach's book - which I am sorry to say does not exist outside literary reality17 he finds "a description of his

17

Borges himself has often reflected on his invention of books and of authors that do not exist, but who well could have. In the words of Jaime Alazraki (1988: 26):

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illness". Borges astutely avoids commenting on "real" books on the subject, such as the celebrated Die Zahiriten, ihr Ehrsystem und ihre Geschichte (Leipzig, 1884), in which Ignaz Goldziher studies the illustrious zahir scholar Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, one of the staunchest defenders of the Islamic literary doctrine. However, in the hands of our character, the fictitious study brings together everything that bears upon the Islamic belief of the Zahir, conveniently domesticated by Jorge Luis Borges. It also includes spurious reports by Phillip Meadows Taylor, together with four articles held in the Habicht archives. The only thing that can be corroborated, beyond literary fiction, is the name of one of the scholars mentioned by the narrator, Zotenberg, whose full name was Hermann Zotemberg, the editor of oriental manuscripts at the Imperial Library of Paris in the nineteenth century.18 But it is also true that the Zahir belongs to Muslim culture, although it is not a "belief' or a legend, as pointed out by Barlack, but rather, as I have been pointing out, it belongs to an Islamic theological school. Further on we will have the opportunity to learn more about this. For the time being, the author continues to throw up a smokescreen of pseudoerudite information: the myth of the Zahir dates back "apparently, to the eighteenth century". Nothing could be further from the truth, since the founder of the Dahriyya or Zahirites, Dawud ibn Jalaf al-Isbahani, known as Al-Zahiri because he defended the literal sense of the Koran and prophetic tradition, lived in the middle of the ninth century. It is true, however, that the term zahir'm Arabic means "manifest or visible", as we are told in Barlach's text, but the fact that the masses believe that its image is unforgettable and that it can drive people to madness, is a false statement that falls more within the purview of mysticism than the occult symbolic coin, and about which Borges has still not told us anything directly. (But it should be noted how the Zahir again becomes united with its double Teodelina Villar, who was also "Manifest and visible" and equally difficult to forget). Once again and, like Teodelina, the fictitious study by Barlach tells us that the Islamic Zahir has had many faces and versions and that obsession with it could lead to madness: in other times it was a copper astrolabe; a magic, infinite tiger (impossible not to recall "The God's Script"); the idol called Yahuk; a prophet from Khorasan. Muhammad al-Yemeni believes that there was no creature in the world that did not tend toward becoming a Zahir, and this contains a grain of symbolic truth since

Borges has explained that 'It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related, orally, in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.' (Fictions: 71) This effort to abbreviate is not only a demonstration of an ideal of verbal economy and density of style, but is also one of the many ways Borges chooses to efface the bounds between what we call real and the unreal. 18

In 1881, he edited the Arabic text "Aladino y la lámpara maravillosa". I owe this information to Jean-Pierre Bernés (Oeuvres completes: 1673).

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throughout his narration Borges reflects on the search for the Absolute which lies beyond all language. I will expand upon this later. The narrator also announces that there is always a Zahir, although it presents itself under different guises. The book quoted concludes with a lapidary phrase: God is inscrutable. I suspect that Borges is imitating here the final phrase that many Islamic authors use to respectfully conclude their texts on metaphysical or religious speculation: wa Alahu 'alamu (¡On ¡ i í j ), which literally means, "Only God is wise". His wisdom is, in effect, inscrutable, just as the occult side of the Zahir for which we have been searching. Barlach's book consoles our character, who finds solace in knowing that others like him have also come under the spell of the Zahir. They knew it, as we have seen, in other guises: instead of a prosaic coin, it was, for them, a tiger or a slab of marble. Another passage of the monograph also calls attention to the Borges of fiction: a quote from a line of poetry interpolated into 'Attar's AsrarNama\ "The Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil". The Persian Fariduddin 'Attar actually existed in real life: he died in 1220 and wrote numerous mystical texts, such as the Mantiq-ut-tayror Colloquium of the Birds, the Illahiname or History of the King and His Six Sons and the Musibatname or Book of the Affíiction, which is the history of a Sufi in search of the Absolute. But his verses never adorned the AsrarNama or the Book of Things Unknown: the book does not exist, regardless of how the title misleads us by evoking the above mentioned texts of 'Attar, and even the famous epic of the Persian kings, the Sha Nama. Although 'Attar never spoke of the Zahir, he went on at great length about the mystical rose, symbol of the infinite God, from which the joyful, ecstatic nightingale drinks, and of the rending of the veil or kashf, which, in his poetry, signifies the adjusting of awareness by the contemplative at the supreme moment of transforming ecstacy.19 The Borgean Zahir is, in fact, the shadow or intimation of the Rose, and the rending of the veil, of the unknowable: the Islamic story does not tarry in providing us with the final clues that enable us to legitimatize this affirmation. The protagonist, deep in thought, closes his erudite text and continues to recount his incessant obsession with the glimmering coin. At times, he fancies it as a crystal sphere, like the translucent sphere of the "Aleph", which, by the way, owes much to the "Crystal Egg" of H. G. Wells.20 In his memory, Borges the protagonist wants to see the face and the reverse of the coin at once, and he tells us that "más bien ocurre como si la visión fuera esférica y el Zahir campeara en el centro". He comes to sus-

19

In the Hindu Vedas, the rending of the veil also signifies access to Transcendence.

20

In his epilogue to the book "El Aleph" Borges says: "En El Zahir y El Aleph creo notar algún influjo del cuento The Crystal Egg (1899) de Wells" (1989: 629). In fact, Borges admits a major truth: the enigmatic crystal egg that an antique dealer hides in his store to avoid selling it, emits a light in the darkness and reflects curious landscapes and penetrating eyes that scrutinize those that gaze upon it. But it must be said that Borges deftly rewrote the inherited symbol, which in his hands is truly unforgettable.

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pect, together with the Kabbalists, that everything, even the unbearable Zahir, is a symbolic mirror of the universe. And with this, we approach the final epiphany of the narration. Tortured still by the fear of losing his quiddity - "[pronto] no sabré quién fue Borges" - our character, lost in thought like a contemplative Muslim, sitting on a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinks about the mystical passages which he says are found in the pages of the Asrar Nama, where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil. (It is curious to note that the house of the emblematic Beatriz Viterbo, where Borges had the vision of the Aleph, was also on Garay Street.). It is within this environment, which becomes increasingly more Sufi-like, that the narration offers us another enigmatic piece of information: in order to lose oneself in God, muslim dervishes repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names lose their meaning. Borges clearly describes the technique of the dikrox by which, the Sufis rhythmically repeat sacred formulas until they become transposed. This mystical passing away of the individual self, or obliteration of the ego, known as fana'm Arabic, then hastens them to their encounter with the Ineffable. But it is not exactly true to say that Islamic contemplatives repeated their own name in the dikr. What they usually used as a mantric formula were the ninety-nine names of God, which, of course, include the names of the Zahir (the Visible or Exterior) and of Batin (the Invisible or Interior), alluded to in Chapter 57:3 of the Koran.21 Sufis also use the formulas la illaha ila Allah (there is no God but Allah), Allah (God) or simply Huwa (He) in their litanies. It is curious that Borges will lend his own name the same charge as the ninety-nine names of God: the idea is his own, and he uses it to circuitously call our attention to the transformation in One, which is the mystical experience - and, we shall see, also in his case a literary experience as well. We soon suspect that the manifestations of the Zahir, the myriad faces of Teodelina and the pile of coins guarded by the gryphon that were Borges himself, all mysteriously blend and merge together. But the ejaculation of the ninety-nine names of God, which Borges heavily underscores, is particularly interesting. The fact that the Koran alludes time and time again to the most beautiful names of the Divinity, has given rise to a whole new theology of divine names - al-asma'al-husna -. The usual collection of these names of praise

21

Victor Danner (1973: 44) delved into the meaning of these divine complementary names:

The words "the Interior" (al-Batin) and "the Exterior" (az-Zahir) are two of the Names of God and are drawn from the Quran: "He is the First and the Last and the Exterior and the Interior" (57: 3). This is one of the richest Quranic formulas, much used by the Sufis. The terms are complementary: when one says "the interior" one implies "the exterior". The Creation is manifested because He is the Interior, the hidden source from which all manifestation proceeds. On the other hand, the Creation is hidden because He is the Exterior, more manifest or more real than the symbolic nature of the world that points to Him.

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consists of ninety-nine names, since the Highest - which would complement the symbolic number one hundred - remains hidden. (Once again, the hidden batin underlies the visible zahir.) Some mystics attest to have unveiled this ultimate name, while others understand that experiencing this "unnameable" name depends on the spiritual degree reached by each contemplative. It is clear that what the ancient Islamic tradition symbolically suggests is that to attain the hundredth attribute of the Divinity is to attain ecstasy. To refute his enemies' belief in the faith was precisely why the Islamized Christian Raimundo Lulio wrote his rebellious Cent noms de Deu. I am tempted to believe that Borges is giving us a glimpse of an allusion as bold as the one proffered by his much-admired Lulio: perchance his own name, Borges, which he repeats like an incongruent mantra to grasp the hidden side of the Zahir, is the occult name needed to complete the famous ninety-nine divine attributes. Other literary passages from Borges strengthen my suspicion: in "La moneda de hierro", the poet explains that this coin "es también un espejo mágico. Su reverso / Es nadie y nada y sombra y ceguera. Eso eres". On the other side of the Borgean obolos we find - simultaneously - he himself and God, which we know is the unnameable reality that lies beneath the Zahir. The discrete self-glorification of the narrator-protagonist, equaled to God, is less ludicrous than it seems at first sight: all mystics invariably discover that they themselves are the divine essence that they have so painstakingly sought. The Persian Hallaj cried out in ecstacy ana-l-haqq ("I am the Truth! [God]"), in a daring formula that, nonetheless, confirms, in his passionate spiritual inebriation, the Augustinian lapidary dictum, in interior hominis habitat Veritas. But there's more: the hidden but seemingly irrefutable allusion to the dikr leads us immediately back to the sama', or ritual dance of the Sufi dervishes, who repeat a rosary of mantras as they whirl in concentric circles. The dervishes usually wear long, white flared shirts and tall felt fezzes, that symbolize the ego's shroud and tombstone, annihilated by the ecstatic experience: again we are presented with the loss of the ego, an idea that obsesses Borges in his story. The dervishes spin around and form yet another circle around their spiritual guide, while they dance like the planets or atoms in orbit around the sun. The concentric circles formed in the ritual dance can but only bring us back to the sphere in the center of the Zahir, as recalled by Borges and also in the story told by the character, written within the story whose namesake Borges entitled the "Zahir". The dizzying round of the inebriating dance, which is evoked by Juan Goytisolo in a passionate essay,22 traces Saturn-like rings as the white whirlwind of the skirts flare out in the rapid turns of the dervishes. The dervishes become ecstatic, dancing white circles. Dancing coins: it is not difficult to believe that each one of these contemplatives is a Zahir, which, in its mystical dance obliterates reason and language - the superficial or "literal" "Zahirites" that are within them - in order to arrive at the very depth of their psyches: the batin or God.

22

"Los dervishes giróvagos" (1990). Cfr. Also Ira Friedlander (1975) and Luce López-Baralt and Lorenzo Piera (1996).

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As strange as it may seem to us, Borges was well versed in this Islamic contemplative technique that obliterates reason and speech, since at this point in the narration he avers: "Yo anhelo recorrer esa senda". And he hints that he will finally wear the Zahir away - transformed into a symbolic rosary of mantras - by thinking about it unceasingly. To a tantric word for coin, we suspect, and rightfully so. Thanks to the dikroi the Sufis, which plunges us onto a suprarational and metalinguistic plane (and hence madness, inebriation and the dream so often alluded to in the story), Borges, the character, makes his final declaration: "quizá detrás del Zahir esté Dios". In order to gain a better understanding of the enigmatic ending of the story, which nevertheless provides us with the key to its ultimate meaning, we should further examine the Islamic context of the Zahir. I shall explore - and I would like to insist on it the real historical contextuality of the Zahir, which Borges must have been well acquainted with, and not the fictional recreation that we just witnessed in his short story. Curiously enough, the zahir, or zahir oí extraliterary reality is what will help us properly decipher the prolific symbol of the coin, the reverse side of which we never see - perhaps, precisely because it is God -. Borges may have obtained this information from his much admired Asín Palacios, or perhaps from Duncan MacDonald, or some other Arabic scholar from the early twentieth century: Ibn Dawud o Daud (m. 270-883), called the Zahiri (Dahiri or literalist), founded the orthodox school of dahiri or zahirite law, "which accepts only the letter of the Koran and tradition as the source of law, and repudiates analogy".23 In the nineteenth century, Muslim jurisprudence, which has always been inextricably linked to theology, included factions that promulgated a closed traditionalistic attitude when explaining the revealed word. Only the literal letter of God and his Prophet would satisfy these strict theologians who rejected any form of ambiguity that could make them feel insecure regarding the possible meaning of the divine revelation. MacDonald (1965: 109) insists: "Everything, Qur'an and tradition, must be taken in the exact sense, however absurd it might be." Given its extreme position,24 the literalist school

23

Miguel Asín Palacios (1984: 119). Throughout this extensive study, which fills several volumes, Asín transliterates the z ( Ji ) as "d", thus writing "dahir" and "dahiri" in place of "zahir".

24

I present here a summary, knowing full well the ideological complexities of these Muslim juridical schools that existed throughout the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to qualify the zahiri or dahriyya thought with the words of Asín Palacios (1984: 129): [...] the dahriyya [zahiri] school had become [...] a protest movement against human authority in theological-juridical matters. So, Daud [...] proclaimed the autonomy of every faithful muslim to search on his own in the texts revealed by God for what they should believe and practice, doing so by using their reasoning, totally independent of the authority exercised by all the juridical schools. Of course, this free examination of the revealed texts represented the danger of anarchy for Islam [...] but Daud believed he was able to exorcise all of them, by unifying the interpretation of the revealed

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was never recognized as an authentic school of Islamic law, and today its importance is purely historical. In spite of its limited success, Zahirite or Dahriyya philosophy found one of its most ardent defenders in the illustrious Ibn Hazm of Córdoba. Better known as the author of the risqué love treatise known as the Tauq-al-hammam, or The necklace of the dove, Ibn Hazm was able to infuse in his native Al-Andalus a new breath of life into the rigid Zahirite school that Ibn Daud had established in the Orient. The Cordovan philosopher systematized his doctrines and, in his hands, the literal meaning of the revealed word (zahir) is submitted to an exegesis that, although it is not as blind and implacable as it might seem at first sight,25 continues to be punctiliously traditionalist. Let us turn directly to Ibn Hazm, who was to suffer persecution in the Andalucía of the Moors, for his extreme religious ideas: Praise be to God who granted us the grace of the Islamic religion [...] and who led us on the straight path of faith and practice, as dictated by the literal meaning of the Koran and the Sunna of the Prophet, authentically handed down as the inspired doctrine by God [...] Oh, servants of God! Do not let thyselves be led astray by the heathen and atheists who alter the divine word with their sophisms [...] endowing his Book and the doctrine of his Prophet with a meaning other than what they have [...] Know ye that the religion of God, its dogma, is manifest, not occult; literal, not esoteric, public, not secret [...]. (ibid: 183184)

Miguel Asín (1984, II: 49) describes Ibn Hazm, who appears so passionate in his erotic treatise on The necklace of the dove, "as harsh, dull, cold, innately hostile to anything that is not geometrical thinking". Cold, harsh and emotionless: like Teodelina's final face, and like the Borgean coin that bears the name of the intransigent literalist school. This theological school would, however, outlive the Cordovan theologian by several centuries, until it died out in the sixteenth century of the Christian era, victim of the political-religious fanaticism of the Saadi sultans. But the literalists or Zahirists found their theological counterpart in the history of Islam: the Isma'ili or ismaelisect of the batiniyya, who were - and let us once again texts, availing himself of the literal meaning that the grammar and lexicon of the classical language assign to the words; that meaning must be strictly adhered to, regardless of the consequences. And this, although in principle it rejected the argument of analogy as a source of law, gave in with its use as long as the literal meaning of the other revealed text were authorized to do so. In using this clever subterfuge, Daud allowed himself the same freedom, or slightly less, than the xafeies in order to generalize the text of the law. 25

For more details, cfr. Asin (ibid: 174 f.). Asin also reminds us that for Ibn Hazm, almost all Islamic heretics were a product of the nationalistic nature of the Persians who, politically subjugated, reacted against Islam, pretending to convert to it in order to better corrupt it. They incorporated into their credos Zoroastrian ideas and practices through the allegorical exegesis of the Koran. "Thus the need for a literal or dahiriyya interpretation with which to unmask its errors".

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turn to MacDonald (1965: 196-197) - "those who found under the letter of the Qur'an a hidden, esoteric meaning". The root of the preceding word - b-t-n - has, as we can once again see, various meanings. The principal meaning is "to hide oneself, be hidden or within" ( ô IJ^ ) specifically, "to be in or within the circle". Here we would do well to recall the tale written by Borges the character, within the story, and the Zahir, rampant in the center of a crystalline sphere, in the mind of the protagonist. Another meaning of the root b-t-n is "to examine in depth" and "to scrutinize", and there is no better technique than this one to decode any of Borges' stories, particularly the one in question. Also - and above all - the Arabic word designates the al-batiniyya school of theology, which claimed that the letter of the Koran and of the shari'a, or Islamic law "was like the shell of a fruit, under which the internal meaning is hidden".26 This esoteric teaching was essentially aimed at an intellectually select group. "The others - and I am quoting Félix Pareja (1975: 239) - "are given the zahir, external, doctrine [...]. The Isma'ilis believed that the masses should not be given notions that surpass their capabilities and that could perturb the simplicity of their faith. Thus, they adapted their doctrine to the aptitude of the recipient, and they refined their ideas when they wanted to attract highly cultured people". It would seem that we are talking about the highly intellectual literature of Jorge Luis Borges, which is inaccessible to the reader upon a first superficial reading. The zahir - the literal, or the exterior - is the common coin of the masses, and only the initiated mystics - or forewarned readers - will gain access to the hidden batin?1 But parallels with Borges' story are even more precise since for the Batiniyya, the religious truth can only be understood "by the discovery of an inner meaning of which the outer form (zahir) was but a veil intended to keep that truth from the eyes of the 26

See Félix Pareja (1975: 238).

27

Algazel uses the same attitude aimed at the aristocrats in applying the dialectic method to theology. This method was known as the science of the kalam, which means word, language or logos. The Muslim scholar wrote his Ilyam al-'awwam 'an 'ilm al-kalam to dissuade the masses from studying theology, since the kalam can serve only to dissipate doubts of wise and penetrating understanding. It is not surprising that Djelel Kadir (1977: 461-468), who was so well-versed in these Islamic texts, calls Borges "el heresiarca mutakallimun". Mutakallimun is a term derived from kalam, or system of thought, and it is applied to exponents of any school of thought and, by extension, to the persons prone to theological or intellectual disputes. There is no doubt that Borges would have been pleased with the Arabizing epithet. Borges undoubtedly had direct knowledge of the term kalam, particularly the meaning of kalam Allah, or the word of God. This kalam Allah was put forward by a group of Muslim theologians who believed that the Koran was the literal word of God, and that, therefore, it had to be uncreated, including the written or oral version that the faithful utter daily. It is the traditionist Al-Bojari (m. In 2257 of the hegira) who tells us of the heated theological and linguistic dispute that followed. Borges pays tribute to the name of the author of Islam's most important canonical collection of traditions or hadith in his "Abenacân el Bojari, lost in his labyrinth", and reflects on the theological curiosity if an "uncreated" book that constitutes one of the attributes of God in his essay "Del culto de los libros" from Other inquisitions. (On the kalam, cfr. Harry Austryn Wolfson (1976).

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uninitiated" (Hitti 1968: 443). We can now understand why the Borgean coin was the "rending of the veil", or kashf. the intermediate cloth, or zahirhad to be torn away in order to gain access to the deep truths - religious, no doubt, in both cases-hidden by the literal word of language. There is no doubt that we must also rend many veils, or levels of meaning in order to thoroughly understand the story. The Isma'ili sect of the Batiniyya was also known by the name "septimams" (,sab'iyah) because they advocated the existence of seven imams, or spiritual leaders. The sixth imam was Ya'afar Sadiq, but he abdicated in favor of his son Isma'il. One day he was found drunk and his father, as punishment, passed the title of imam to his brother Musa al-Qazam. (We should recall that Borges, the character, gets drunk the night he is given the Zahir.) Isma'il was venerated as the seventh imam by the duodecimams, as the subsequent defenders of the twelve imams were come to be known. A faction, however, refused to recognize the transfer of the title and interpreted Isma'il's inebriation as an expression of his high level of spirituality: "he did not follow the face-value (zahr) of the law, but its hidden meaning (batn)" (MacDonald 1965: 42). Isma'il was considered by his followers to be the hidden imam, or Mahdi, who would return at the end of time, which constituted, like the sefirot of the Hebrew Kabbalists, an emanation of the divine essence. It is curious to note, in the context of the Borgean story under discussion, that the number seven took on sacred relevance within the Isma'ili system. The Isma«ilis or Ismaelites not only worshiped seven imams, but they also worshiped seven prophets who, in turn, presided over seven specific times. For them, however, Allah was the gayb ta 'ala, or hidden sublimeness, hidden and without attributes, who manifested Himself in the universe in seven consecutive emanations. Once again, Muslim theory leads us back to the Borgean Zahir, the other side of which hides the everlasting God. Now we know why the mystical coin fell into Borges' hands precisely on the symbolic seventh of June. It is evident that Borges has hidden not only the other side of his strange metal disk, but, just as I pointed out at the beginning, also the Arabic term that serves as the linguistic and theological counterpart of the zahir. the batin. We find ourselves faced with the two sides of the coin - a theological-mystical coin, at that: the zahir of the literalists who follows the strict and superficial meaning of the revealed word, and the batin of Islamic esoterism, which, on the other hand, defends the incomprehensible meanings underlying sacred language. But Borges takes the Arabic occultist term of the batin to its extreme when he equates it to no less than God. We have already had clear signs that, just as he has done so many times in his vast body of literature, he is reflecting on the mystical experience and the language that is incapable of giving it word. We will come back to this later, since this new mystical and literary binarity is crucial to the story. For the moment, however, we must focus on the coin whose two sides are made up of a pair of theological terms in Arabic. The first thing that should be mentioned is that the numismatic disk of the Zahir is not found solely in the corpus of Borges works. The Argentine writer lavishes his narratives and even his poetry with coins -

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"La moneda de hierro"; the "Quince monedas"; the verses "To a Coin". It is evident that Borges identifies the coins with words, since the aforementioned coins are just that, poems.28 Our author once again insists on this association of the verbal act with the coin in dedicating the book La cifra to Maria Kodama, under the title of "Inscripción". His whole text, thus, is a coin of legal tender: "coined" in Buenos Aires "May 17, 1981".29 Borges must have had some knowledge of numismatics and, in particular, Muslim numismatics. This knowledge will also be useful for us as we continue to decode the highly complicated story of the "Zahir". Although it may sound strange, there are Islamic coins with the Zahir on the reverse and God on the obverse. Borges must have known this and he alludes to this in his story. Here the adept Borges was no longer playing with the theological-mystical terms - the zahir in the "literalist" sense, and the batin in the occultist sense, but rather he refers to a type of coin that actually existed, outside of literature; a coin that was minted during the time of the mameluke sultans, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian era. The Islamic symbol of the Zahir becomes even more rich before our very eyes. It once again becomes binary, not only because the Islamic terms zahir/batin admit two primordial levels - theological schools and mameluke coins - but also because they implicitly divide into two contradictory levels of meaning. The character of Borges also splits - as we may recall - when he was no longer certain who he was once the fateful metal disk had come into his hands. Let us take a look at history before exhuming our mameluke coin from a particularly tumultuous era of Islamic history. It is well known that there were two Mameluke dynasties: the Bahri dynasty (1250-1390) and the Burji dynasty (1382-1517). Al-Malik al-Zahir (the victorious) Rukn al-Din (pillar of faith) Baybars al-Bunduqdari (658/ 676A/1260-77AD) was the first and most famous Bahri sultan of a dynasty that at one time consisted of 24 sovereigns. This famous Mameluke began his days as a slave and, curiously enough, we know that at that time the price for slaves was 800 dirhams and together with this, his name - Al Zahir - becomes ironically associated with a fistful of coins. Although he was returned to his first master because of a defect found in one of his blue eyes, he is finally bought by Ayyubid al-Salih, who made him commander of his body guards. The rest is history. Baybars ended up usurping power and founding the bases for the Mameluke dynasty, which proved to be so important in the history

28

Borges himself says, in his essay "Quevedo", in Otras inquisicionesr. "No hay escritor de fama universal que no haya amonedadoun simbolo [...]" (1989: 660; emphasis added). Eduardo Gomez Mango (1986: 79), in his previously cited essay, makes a brief allusion to the equivalency: "that [...] imaginary treasure, of symbolic coins, of words [...]". Arturo Echavarria (1983) also studied the coded language that Borges has created within his works: words such as "gold", "tiger", "shadow" - among others - have coded meaning that will not escape the wary reader. The same occurs, as we have seen, with the key word "coin", invariably associated with the literary word.

29

See (1989a: 289).

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of Islam. The former slave fought the Mongols and the Crusaders, in particular. But he was not just a simple undefeated warrior. In addition to reorganizing the army and navy, he ordered canals to be built, he connected Cairo to Damascus with a swift three-day postal service, he perfected carrier pigeon services; established exquisite mosques and carried out important acts of charity .This diligent Mameluke, a strict muslim who zealously defended orthodox religion, also gave the world architectural works of great importance, including a library named Al-Zahiriyah, under the dome of which the famous warrior was buried.30 How could we think that Borges did not have access to this fact when at one moment he tells us in the story under discussion that he wanted to "bury" the Zahir in a library? We will soon come back to this point which, as always in Borges, has more than one hidden meaning. In order to immortalize his glory, Baybars also ordered coins minted with his name.31 On one side of a thirteenth century gold dinar we find the name and official tide of the sultan: "Bibars al-Salih/al-Malik al Zahir/rukn al-duniya wa al-din". And written on the other side - can the reader guess? - is written the name of God: "Alhaq/la ilah ilia Allah/Mohammad rasul Allah/ arsalahu bi-l-huda wa-din". It is not surprising to find such piety on a commercial gold coin. According to numismatist Antonio Medina Gomez (1992: 30), Muslim coins, "for religious reason, are characterized by not bearing engraved figures (iconography)". It is a known fact that Islam prohibits the artistic execution of human figures and, as a result, Muslim coins are verbal disks without a "face" on either side. How Borges would appreciate these ancient Muslim pieces whose inscriptions substitute images: they would be perfect to coin his hallucinatory literary symbol. As a side note to the dinar mentioned above, we must say that there are many other Islamic coins that have the "Zahir" on one side: for example, the one reproduced by Maria Kodama on the calling cards for the International Jorge Luis Borges Foundation, which belongs to the Jean-Pierre Bernes collection. Although the writing is cruder and less ceremonious, the inscription, once again, celebrates the title of Sultan "Al-Malik al-Zahir" (See engraving). Another gold piece minted under Sultan Barquq (the first Burji Mameluke, 784-801A/1382-1399AD), bears the inscription: "Duriba bi Halab al-sultan al-Malik al-za/hir saif al-dunya wa al-din Abu-Sa'id Barquq jallad Allah".32 We could provide numerous examples of these "zahirite" coins since there are a total of seven mameluke sultans named Al-Malik Al-Zahir. And, once again we might ask whether Borges, who charged the number seven with occult meaning by acquiring the symbolic coin on June seventh - thus making a possible allusion, as I mentioned before, to the seven imams of batiniyya tradition - was not

30

Cfr. Hitti (1968: 665-666).

31

I owe a debt of gratitude my colleagues Almudena Ariza-Armada and Pablo Beneito, of Madrid, and Maria Teresa Narvâez, of the University of Puerto Rico for this information.

32

Once again, this information is from Almudena Ariza-Armada.

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also surreptitiously alluding to the seven Mamelukes named "zahirites".33 Again we see how the coin takes on a binary nature in the extremely intricate network of secret meanings involved in the symbol. (We might say that, in this case, it is more of a trinity since it can also be noted that seven is the number associated with mysticism in the esoteric traditions of the East and West. Also, in this sense, there is no doubt that it secretly involves the multifaceted Zahir.) But the parallels between the Mameluke coin and the Borgean Zahir do not stop here. As mentioned before, when we turn one of these ancient coins of the "zahirite" or Dahriyya sultans around, what we find on the other side is the name of God.34 The fact that God or Allah is shown on one of the verbal faces of the Muslim coins is not unique to these Mameluke numismatic pieces. Generally speaking, ancient Arab coins usually exhibited the shahada ( ¡ J L ^ ) or the Muslim profession of faith (¿1T V 1 J V ) on one side of the coin: La illah ila Allah, which means " There is no god but Allah". This affirmation of Koranic dogma of unity is frequently complemented with the words t j^. j wahdahu ("Only He") and the la sarika lahu ("there is no companion for Him"), which reaffirms the absolute unity of God (Medina Gomez 1992: 30, See illustration). Once again, the "real" coin of the Islamic numismatist takes us back to the fictional Borgean coin: behind the Zahir is God, and in the protagonist's laconic affirmation we understand: God and only God. Behind the apparent and manifest, but historically perishable - the Mameluke Al-Zahir and his distinguished reigning namesakes - is the timeless and unknowable God.35 Stated as a Christian monetary symbol: "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's". For the moment, let us render unto God what is God's. That is exactly what Borges does in his story which seems increasingly overwhelming to us because of its cultural complexity and even more so because, as we shall see, because of the depth of its spiritual reflection. As we know, Borges associated God with the circular coin. The idea symbolizing the Divinity, whose infinite essence knows no beginning nor end, with the figure of a circle is very old indeed. Borges himself ponders this in his impassioned essay, "The Sphere of Pascal", in which he catalogues for us the contemplatives who used the circumference and the circle to communicate, albeit in 33

There also existed a Fatimid Al-Zahir (411/1021) and an Abassid Al-Zahir (622-1255 at this time, but Almudena Ariza Armada - to whom once again I owe this information - does not believe that these last two appear with this name on the coins of that time.

34

I must warn you that Borges takes certain liberty with these Islamic coins, since they exhibit the name of God, as was to be expected given the religious respect, on the obverse, and not on the reverse, as suggested in the story the "Zahir".

35

My much admired colleague Seyyed Hossein Nasr vaguely recalls that in Islamic literature or literature the dual word zahir/batin are already associated with both sides of a coin, but he cannot document the fact. Neither could Annemarie Schimmel, whom I consulted concerning this information, tell me whether it was a numismatic-mystical symbol that Muslims had already coined on their own. I do not dismiss the possibility that the metaphor was a product of Borges' own invention, although at this point I cannot state this as a fact.

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a modestly oblique manner, the unimaginable Transcendency. Together with Pascal, Plato, Parmenides, Hermes Trismegistus, Dante and, particularly Alanus of Insulis, among others, rewrite the image. Borges credits this last one with having formulated one of the best versions of the metaphori: "Dios es una esfera inteligible, cuyo centro esta en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna".36 We can see that Borges lends his voice to these spiritual efforts because he will also provide his own versions of the fortuitous metaphor handed down to him. 37 1 am sure that we all agree that describing circles - particularly infinite circles - is one of his frequent obsessions: here is the linear labyrinth whose extended walls described the curve of a circle (conceived by an Arab, Abenjacan el Bojari, in whose name Borges paid tribute to the great Islamic tradition38). Our imaginative author also coined the disturbing disk of Odin, which the protagonist in his story wanted to exchange for a few prosaic coins before the magic object disappeared forever. Circular ruins that contained dreams within dreams also come to mind; the lofty Wheel that the ecstatic Tzinacan saw everywhere and at once: just like in the poem "La cifra", a metaphor for the circular moon, "the zero to which we aspire", in the words of Willis Barnstone.39 (We now have a better understanding of Borges' occult celebration of the dhikroi the Sufi dervishes, whose ecstatic circular dance is surreptitiously invoked just before setting out on the path that leads them to the hidden side of the Zahir). Gabriela Massuh rightfully claims that: "in Borges, circularity almost always carries out the function of a revealing space" (1980: 142). Borges' most famous circular figures are, without a doubt, the Aleph and the Zahir. The two spheres whose initial letters are found at both ends of the alphabet A and Z40 meet once again because they both irradiate light: one is iridescent and the other metallic. This is what might be an allusion to the uncreated light found in the

36

Cfr. "La esfera de Pascal", Otras inquisiciones (1989: 636).

37

As we may recall, Borges concludes his essay with the thought "Quizá la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonación de algunas metáforas" (ibid: 638).

38

Al-Bukhari or Al-Bojarí, who died in the year 257 of the Hijra, was the most respected of all the compilers of hadith (traditions or sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammed), and his collection, entitled Salih, is still conserved. Al-Bojari meticulously verified his sources and rejected the hadiths that he could not substantiate and which, therefore, seemed to him to be apocryphal. The linguistic labyrinth of these ancient hadiths, or prophetic traditions, describe a verbal circle that is perfect because it comes from Muhammad (it is an account attributed to the Prophet) and returns to him through the long chain of the ishnad. Eye witnesses to the word of Muhammad attest to this and hence following generations repeat it, always taking care to support their information with the names of the witnesses who preceded them: "I received this account from so-and-so, who in turn got itfromso-and-so, who in turn heard it from so-and-so", and so on and so forth.

39

"Borges, Poet of Ecstasy", in Borges, the Poet{1986: 140).

40

Cfr. Gómez Mango (1986: 71).

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mystical state. But there is more, since both types of lights are approximately the same size: the two or three centimeter light of the Aleph is equivalent to the twenty centavo coin. The narrator provides us with another amazing clue in the reduced size of the spheres: its magical orbs are the size of a human eye. Of a shining human eye. It should be noted here, however, that "eye", "mirador" and "vantage point" were actually some of the multiple meanings of the three-letter root z-h-r. It seems that Borges left nothing to chance. Not only did Borges take advantage of all the legitimate meanings of the Arab word, but he also knew how to exploit to the fullest these new ocular implications provided by his Arabizing Zahir. This "eye" immediately takes on mystical symbolic connotations given the spiritual context in which the figures of the Zahir and the Aleph are inscribed - remember that one represents the infinite universe and the other, God. Borges must have known that he was intoning, once again, the age-old metaphor of the soul's eye, mentioned before by Plato, St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross and even some Muslims mystics. Neoplatonists used the symbol "from a secular point of view", since they believed that when two lovers gaze into each others eyes they were, in fact, interchanging souls, since the neoplatonists considered the eyes to be the portals of the soul. This matter was even more important for the mystics. The symbolic eye - just one - was the organ for mystic perception, which, in the inconceivable act of seeing God, became God. In the words of Ibn 'Arabi of Murcia: "When my Beloved appears, which eye shall I use to behold him? With his, not with mine, because no one sees him but He himself' (Nicholson 1945: 198). This metaphoric, self-referential eye is always a mirror of selfness. It goes without saying that mirrors were especially dear to Borges - because, in the end, the mystic who tries to contemplate God, contemplates himself in God. This is best said by Michael Sells: "Vision (the viewing by subject of an outside object) has become self-vision".41 In other words: the observer and the observed become one and the same. The experience of passing away from self in the transforming union implies a self-contemplative trance - St. John of the Cross called it "being outside oneself', and Ibn 'Arabi called it fana'. So familiar was Borges with this that in one of the stories he borrowed from a mystic text in which the Persian Fariduddin 'Attar (d. 1220) lectures us on this topic. The text tells of a legend in which thirty birds tirelessly seek their Bird-King (Simurg) only to discover that once they find themselves before the pellucid mirrors at the threshold of its palace, they themselves are the Simurg they had so long sought. (In Persian, Si-murg also means "thirty birds"). I wonder if Borges knew the meanings of the Arabic root 'ayn which means eye, fountain (which serves as a mirror) and identity. Selfness, reflected in innumerable mirrors throughout Borges' work, is treated in a special way in these symbolic ocular orbs, which Borges favored so greatly. Abenjacan el Bojari, the slave and even the lion that accompanied them lose their faces and identity inside a circular labyrinth; the dreamer-dreamed in 41

Cfr. Sells (1988: 121). Sells republished his essay as part of his book, an extremely scholarly work, entitled Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994).

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"The Circular Ruins" no longer knows who he is with any certainty; in the vertiginous "Aleph" Borges sees his own face, which, undoubtedly, returns his frightened look. As we may recall, in possessing the circular coin of the Zahir the protagonist of the story also doubts his identity: "I am not the one I was then". Now we know, and with all the ontological consequences: to posses the Zahir, with its occult batin and with its theological numismatic epigraph - la illah ila Allah - is to possess God. It is to look at oneself in God, with the soul's eye, symbolized in the small coin, in the minuscule aleph and in the numerous orbs that populate Borges' works. With his amazing intelligence, Borges, although he does not say so explicitly, is able to make yet another opportune literary association: in the circular ceremonial dance of the dhikr, the dervishes repeat precisely the rhythmic phrase inscribed on the Arabic coins: "There is no god but Allah". - la illah ila Allah -. In doing so, they achieve ecstacy and annihilate selfhood in experimenting a sense of transcendent presence within. Both the contemplative interior gaze and the mesmerizing mantra leads them to God. This drunken, ecstatic dance with which Borges closes his story is clearly associated with inebriation, which is one of the most accessible symbols in Sufi literature. The mystic annihilates his reason and senses and achieves ecstasy: we can easily see the relevance of Borges' allusions to madness, to sleep and to inebriation, which he associates with acquiring the Zahir. All of these are symbolic states that represent the loss of conscience and self. We continue to tread mystical territory and, particularly, Islamic mystical territory. No one is able to possess God without dissolving into Him; that is, without losing his selfhess in this transforming union. Borges' The Zahir carefully records this authentic state of ecstasy. In the end, Borges the character, who after receiving the nickel disk no longer knows who he is, dreams that he himself was the pile of coins guarded by a gryphon. In spite of their different appearances, they were ontologically the same because they shared the same essence, like ecstasy and God. Monstrously hybrid symbols - again the loss of the fixed identity - were the custodians of the infinite secret. Infinite, once again, like the guarded treasure of gold in the Nibelungen. All true mystics know this: the ineffable experience of becoming one with the Transcendence is not for the profane. As we may recall, in Islamic theology, the literal level of the zahir was for the masses, while the occult level of the batin was reserved for only the initiated. Only they could turn over the symbolic coin and see the hidden face of God. For the others, the Zahir is a one-sided coin, the literal or exterior. And it is worthy to note another of Borges' literary obsessions: one-sided objects. Among the many examples we might mention are the fugitive hind of the Persian miniature, one of his most moving poems ("La cierva blanca" in La rosaprofunda), which was "a one-sided hind" or the disk of Odin which, like the Euclidian circle, has only one side. A sura of the Koran (XXVIII, 88) says ^ J ^ ! L* J*. "Everything (that existes) shall

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persish except His own Face."42 Borges had this in mind as well as other suras, such as The Spider (XXIX, 40) in his story "Abenjacá el Bojari, murdered in his labyrinth", in which the faces of the characters are erased when they die in the circular labyrinth. Luis Fernández Sosa (1976: 139-148) suggests that God applied the lex talionis and obliterated their faces because they had obliterated Him with their religious infidelity. The message is clear: everything perishable and exterior (again, the zahir) passes and disappears, except the inscrutable face of the Maker43 (the batiri). Only one face - or the occult side of a face - can save itself from the vicissitudes of this ephemeral plane of existence.We shall return to this because this contains some of Borges' richest veiled allusions. Although the extraordinary experience of viewing the symbolic countenance of God lasts but a few fleeting human seconds in timeless eternity, for those who have experienced it, it is unforgettable. The memory of a theopathic experience obsessed mystics such as Pascal, Rumi, Meister Ekhart, St. John of the Cross, Silesius, among many others, who pondered about it time and time again in feverish and impassioned pages. Therese of Avila strongly advises the repeated recollection of these privileged experiences, such as rapture and mystical flight. Borges the character joins all these visionaries because he too has not been able to forget what it was like to possess the mystical coin, albeit briefly. And, most importantly, he possessed it purely by chance. The cards played by the anonymous men in the bar where Borges acquired the coin allude to the gratuitous nature of the event. All mystics insist on this: the gift of ecstatic grace is gratis, passive, instilled by the grace of God. No one really deserves it and God can give it

42

The quotation is taken from the bilingual Arabic-English version of The Holy Qur'an by A. Yusuf 'Ali (1027). In the Spanish version of Juan Vernet (1963: 409) the chapter reads, "Toda cosa es perecedera, menos su Faz".

43

In the "Afterword" to "El Hacedor", man and the universe join in a symbolic face delineated by mountains and says: Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años, puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara. (1989: 854) But the human faces fade into God: Tal vez un rasgo de la cara crucificada acecha en cada espejo; tal vez la cara se murió, se borró, para que Dios sea todos. ("Paradiso, XXXI, 108", El Hacedor, ibid: 800)

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to whomever He pleases. Just as in the random game of cards. Borges knew this well when he lovingly translated a distich of his favorite, Angelus Silesius: "The rose exists without reason/it blooms because it blooms".44 But apart from this gratuitous random theopathic experience, granted freely by the grace of God, certain contemplatives have felt that they were succored by a donna angelicata as they travelled on their mystical path. We all remember how neoplatonic poets felt they could approach God through their chaste, untouched beloved. In Dante, the first of these poets, meditation of Beatrice precedes and fosters the contemplation of the inconceivable point of light, which leads the poet to exclaim, speechless, at the end of Paradise (xxxiii-121): "Oh quánto é corto il dire!" And he rapidly closes the Comedia because he feels that language would fail him should he continue to tread upon the disquieting vision of the Universe with his coarse human words. In the "Aleph" and the "Zahir"45 Borges pays a secret tribute to the neoplatonism of Petrarch and Dante, although, because of his ironic coldness, his update would seem to be far from the ardent passion of his literary sources. His "platonic" beloveds who are not only untouched, but dead - Beatriz Viterbo in one case, and Teodelina Villar in the other - symbolically lead him to God. It is only after losing them, that the character - called Borges in both stories - attains the mystical objects of the Aleph and the Zahir, which allow him the drunken "madness" of perceiving the inconceivable universe. In another carefully constructed parallel between the two contemplative stories, Borges the character - as I mentioned before - walks along Constitution Street. Nor is the place a mere chance, since in the poem "Mateo XXV: 30" the emissary of the verses enters, amazed, the sudden trance that overtook him precisely on the bridge at Constitution Station in Buenos Aires, when he was allowed to contemplate, safe from the limiting coordinates of space-time, the unimaginable totality of the universe. His writer's desperation precedes what he would feel again faced with the sphere of the Aleph: he cannot tell the transcendent experience, because he knows that it surpasses limited conceptual language: "Y desde el centro de mi ser, una voz infinita/dijo estas cosas (estas cosas, no estas palabras),/Que son mi pobre traducción temporal de una sola palabra [...]" ("El otro, el mismo", 1989: 874). To a great extent, all of Borges' work is a meditation on the radical impossibility of translating the infinite theopathic experience. Herein lie the simultaneous ecstasies and for this very reason they are inappropriate for successive human language - of "The Secret Miracle", of "Funes the Memorious" and "The God's Script" which leads the Aztec priest Tzinacán to exclaim: "¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la de sentir!" (Borges 1989: 599). Borges, who densely populates his literary corpus with Kabbalists, Sufis, heresiarchs and theologians, surely must have

44

See Maria Kodama (1996: 84) in the previously cited Lopez-Baralt/Lorenzo Piera (1996).

45

For a study on the visionary experience of the Aleph, cfr. the essay by Gene Bell-Villada (1981: 202-237).

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felt a strong affinity with Tzinacan's sudden speechlessness. I must make it clear that here, for the first time, I am speaking of Borges the real person who can be found behind the character and the writer, who obsessed himself with unraveling the vivid experience of the Absolute. As rightly pointed out by James Hugues and Carlos Cortinez (1986: 238): "the writer cannot totally distance himself from the subject that his literature treats. One really has to wonder if it isn't a bit suspicious that God strolls around so ubiquitously through the fictional works of an author who is a professed atheist". It is, indeed, suspicious. So much so that we should not be surprised that Borges confessed to Willis Barnstone, during an interview in 1982, that he had twice experienced these mystical experiences that repeatedly interspersed in his works: In my life I [...] had two mystical experiences and I can't tell them because what happened is not to be put into words [...] It was astonishing, outstanding. I was overwhelmed, taken aback.461 had the feeling of living not in time but outside time [...] I wrote poems about it, but they are normal poems and do not tell the experience. I cannot tell it to you, since I cannot retell it to myself, but I had the experience, and I had it twice over, and maybe it will be granted me to have it once more before I die.47

I must admit that, strange as it may seem, Borges also confessed this same moving personal experience to me on more than one occasion. He did so with the same respectful fervor of someone speaking about something they do not fully understand. I did not want his testimony, private at that time, to fade into oblivion. I suspect that the invaluable gift of this experience, which can never give way to the pathetic onslaught of human language, but which Borges incessantly courted time and time again in some of his most brilliant pages, is precisely what is found behind the coin of the Zahir. And so, with his intuitive respect, Borges decided to ignore the descrip-

46

We note the words Borges' choice of words in his attempt to tell about his own cosmic experience: "Astonishing;" "overwhelming." Gabriela Massuh, with her usual acuity, noted the symbolic importance that Borges accords to this sense of "marvel", which opens his literary language to more profound meanings. The title of his story "Undr" means precisely just that: "marvel"; "miracle": It is not just a question of finding this dimension of the marvelous in reality [...] the maximum force of the word lies exactly in the fact that the receiver perceives in the term a revelation and completes it with his own meanings. Thus making relevant the content of the revelation, which never remains the same. But this does not annul the revelation; on the contrary, it creates the necessary conditions so that language may transcend its own limits. (1980: 183) Borges did not tell us about his suprarational experience in this interview, but he did tell us about the amazing speechlessness came over him during the experience.

47

"The Secret Islands", in: Borges at Eighty (1982: 11).

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tion of this occult and unnamed side of the mystical disk. He knew better than anyone else that the best alternative to the intense experience of the Absolute is silence. When speaking to me, Borges used basically the same words he had used when speaking to Barnstone. The first time was in 1983, in Dickinson College (Carlyle, Pennsylvania)48 during a congress dedicated to his works, which I attended together with my husband and colleague Arturo Echavarria. He told me he had had two experiences during his youth, which occurred during a period of deep emotional depression. He admitted, with candor, that they were the result of disappointment in love.49 One of these mystical trances - which happened on bridge at the Constitution train station in Buenos Aires. (This curious autobiographical fact confirms for us that the character Borges' walks along Constitution after losing Beatriz Viterbo and Teodelina Villar have a deep personal significance). It is here, on Constitution, he continued to tell me, that he suddenly felt himself out of time and space, living at two levels of consciousness stretched to infinity. He tried to convey this in his poem "Matthew XXV:30" - the confession also belongs to Borges - but he insisted to me that it was useless to try to speak of the experience, that it was not verbal but suprarational. I asked Borges about these ecstatic experiences during the question and answer periods of the abovementioned Congress, to see if he would deny what he had told me in private. The answer was exactly the same. We met again in 1983, at die University of Chicago, during another seminar on his works, and I talked to Borges once again about these altered states of awareness, which he insisted on calling "mystical". Once again, we spoke both in private and public, and his words were again, unequivocal: he had had two indescribable experiences. When I asked him to explain his two experiences in detail, during the question and answer period, he replied: "If you write about St. John of the Cross, you know that I simply cannot reply. The experiences cannot be shared". On a total of four occasions I heard Borges say that the encounter with the Ineffable had left him speechless and in a state of awe. His words were repeatedly spoken with the non chalance that so characterized Borges' speech, but, at the same time, they were surrounded by the sincere surprise of someone who is speaking of circumstances he has not fully understood, but, nevertheless, which he respects with an intuitive sense of veneration. I do not think he was joking nor that he was fabricating the playful riddles that - it should be said - usually characterized his personal interviews. I have always sensed that the unique confession this agnostic writer shared with me betrayed an authentic experience. In some odd way, it rang true. It was later that I learned from Maria Kodama, by then Borges' widow, that he had also shared his mystical experiences with her on several occasions, with genuine sincerity and outside

48

I have quotes the Proceedings of this Congress, published by Carlos Cortinez (1986) under the title Borges, the Poet.

49

This possibly refers to Estela Canto (1989), with whom Borges maintained a bittersweet sentimental relationship, about which she provides details in Borges a contraluz.

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of the public light. At different meetings (Alcalá de Henares, El Escorial, San Juan) María Kodoma and I had the opportunity to talk at length about this unexpected dimension of Borges' psychic life, which Borges decided to share in the latter years of his life.50 What Borges had told us personally fitted in with the brief glimpse of an ecstatic experience he had described in "Sentirse en muerte" (included in "El idioma de los Argentinos", 1928), a text that he later revised in "Historia de la eternidad" (1936). But I must admit that the urgent, terse and rather naive words that Borges used when speaking to Barnstone and me about this on different occasions convince me more about the truth of this experience than this somewhat soulless piece, although it is certainly closer in time to Borges experience on Constitution Bridge.51 Maria Kodama offered me another piece of invaluable information, which I have included in an interview I conducted with Emilio Báez in Puerto Rico in 1991. Borges spoke in private of these altered states of awareness as something real, and they intrigued him to such an extent that he discussed them with a Buddhist monk in a Zen temple in Kioto. According to Maria: "They explained, each in his own way, that they had had just this type of mystical experience which, in Japanese, is called satori. But it was something that they could literally not talk about [Borges and the Zen master] they could only talk about it with someone who had experienced something similar -,52 Given the fact that he was an agnostic53 and that he had a well-known penchant for the 50

Emilio Báez, a student of mine at the University of Puerto Rico, and I interviewed Maria Kodama twice concerning this subject (February and April, 1991). The interview is included in the abovementioned Sol a medianoche. A preliminary version of the interview was included as an appendix to Báez's Honor Program thesis on La inserción de Jorge Luis Borges en el discurso místico literario. Nuevas aproximaciones a sus textos "místicos." University of Puerto Rico, 1991).

51

I asked my dear friend Ana María Barrenechea if Borges had also conñded his disconcerting spiritual private life to her. She said no, that they had talked about literature and other things: about everything but that. But she also told me that she thought that it was easier for Borges to talk about these very private spiritual matters with someone who was not very close, emotionally speaking, to him (which was my case) rather than with a longtime Mend, like her. I believe that at times it is indeed easier to share confidences with someone who is emotionally removed from you. Ana María Barrenechea, on the other hand, was surprised that I was able to corroborate what Maria Kodama had always said: behind Borges' works lay an authentic mystical experience. (Conversation with A.M. Barrenechea in Birmingham, England, August, 1995).

52

"Entrevista a Maria Kodama", see López-Baralt/Piera (1996: 7).

53

In an important essay, "Dios en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges: su teología y su teodicea", Osvaldo Romero (1977: 465-501) explores Borges' testimonies about spirituality and religious belief. The ambivalence that Borges felt, with all due respect of course, concerning these topics is patently clear: "Yo no tengo certidumbre, más bien tengo dudas" (ibid: 489); "En trance de Dios y de la inmortalidad, soy de los que creen" (ibid: 466); "Yo no profeso ninguna religión" (ibid: 490); "Yo no soy misionero cristiano ni del agnosticismo [...] Todo es posible, hasta Dios. Fíjese que ni siquiera estamos seguros de que Dios no exista" (ibid: 487).

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Orient, it is easy to understand why Borges would be more comfortable talking to a Zen Buddhist monk than a Catholic priest. The fact that Borges decided to spend a year in the Kioto monastery with María Kodama gives us an idea of just how seriously he took his conversation with the Japanese contemplative. But this time fate was not on his side and he fell gravely ill before being able to take his planned trip. Borges' confessions about his ecstatic experiences, which seem to have puzzled him until the day he died, should not really surprise us. Today it is easier to admit that the gratuitous gift of mystical grace is not the exclusive property of saints nor of cloistered monks. A few years ago, Ernesto Cardenal made this very clear to me: "Luce, at times God grants a mystical experience to the weakest of us, who are the ones who need it most. " 54 1 do not know for certain if Borges the agnostic would have agreed with the novel words of Cardenal, but somehow I think he would have. What we do know is that he usually agreed with William James, whom he greatly admired and who had so much to say about mystical experiences, outside of theology and the organized church. In his famous study The Varieties of Religious Experience he admits, to the delight of agnostic readers such as Borges, that he will limit himself to exploring "personal religion pure and simple".55 His Emersonian simplicity undoubtedly attracted Borges: There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet, which do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case [...]. Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. (1929: 32)

Borges indicates that he favors a type of religious pantheism, which is exactly what becomes evident from the reading of his works, which celebrate the primacy of a spirit "que no es, como el Dios de la tradición y la escolástica, una persona, sino todas las personas y, en diverso grado, todos los seres" (ibid: 478). On the other hand, and on a more personal level, Borges expresses his preference for Protestant theology which gave birth to mystics of the stature of Swedenborg. But perhaps one of Borges' strangest confessions is the one about his curious prayer in a small English church in Lichfield: I entered and in the shadows of the temple I fulfilled a promise I had made many years before in Buenos Aires, without ever expecting to really do so: I recited the Lord's Prayer in Old English, in that old English church and, after ten centuries, I was able to hear these words resonate throughout the little church: 'Faether ure, thu eart on heovenum, sie thin namá gehalgot [...]': I think I did it to give God a little surprise. (Ibid: 490) 54

Letter from Managua, dated March 2, 1984.

55

And he adds, with impeccable common sense: "[...] the founders of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine". See William James (1929: 30-31).

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It goes without saying that these are theological affirmations that Borges seemed to endorse time and time again in his spiritual texts. But neither James nor Borges limit themselves to mystical speculation; they move into real experience. I am not exaggerating when I say that the theopathetic experiences documented by William James to demonstrate his theory of natural religion could well have been set forth by Borges. It is easy to imagine Borges' close identification with these testimonies, many of which are anonymous, which James collected for posterity: we could even say that when he spoke to Barnstone in the abovementioned interview, he was simply talking retrospectively and desideratively with William James. The testimonies documented by James, as erudite as he was open-minded, speak of first-hand experiences that happened to normal people, outside the cloister and organized religion. As expressed by J.A. Symons, among many others: "One reason why I dislike this kind of trance was that I cannot describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted of a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self' (ibid: 376). James adds that this is by no means an isolated case: "probably more persons could draw parallels to it from their own experience" (ibid). There is no doubt that he is right since there are many other examples, such as the one described by Lord Tennyson in a letter to B.P. Blood. I ask myself if Borges realized that Tennyson, in order to somehow induce his ecstatic trances, had used the same meditation technique based on the mantra of repeating his own name, as the one used by the protagonist of "The Zahir". [I have frequently had] [...] a kind of waking trance - this for lack of a better word when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not in a confused state, but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words [...] the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? (ibid: 374-375)

It is curious to note that many contemplatives admit that the memory of the details of this ineffable experience had driven them mad because it far exceeded their feeble rational faculties. Here again the testimonies lead us back to the story of "The Zahir", where the character Borges cannot remember without fearing that he will lose his mind. In the words of William James' extra-literary contemplatives: "I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity"; "I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate" (ibid: 383-384). It would seem that these are the words of Funes the Memorius, tormented by his never ending and simultaneous memory of all things. Did Borges actually undergo a mystical experience, or did he simply imitate borrowed mystical literary discourse? Each reader will, of course, reach his or her

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own conclusion, although it should be noted that the problem has not escaped the careful attention of the critics, who at times denied56 it and at other times have suggested the possibility of a transcendent level in Borges works. Howard Giskin, in a perceptive essay in which he explores the mystical level of Borges' work, using the theories of William James, finally admits that "Borges himself is a mystical thinker, and had acknowledged that he had several mystical experiences in his life" (1990: 83). José Isaacson suspects that a latent spirituality shines through the pages of Borges' writings: "perhaps a large part of Borges' works is simply that prayer he utters in his own way, without knowing that he is pronouncing it" (1969: 141). But the levels of meaning in the story we have been discussing have still not been exhausted: there are still more complexities to come. The mystical substratum of Borges' works - and, therefore, of "The Zahir" - co-exists with, feeds upon, and even dialogues with the prolonged meditation on literature which, in turn, constitutes all of Borges' work. As Gabriela Massuh noted in her brilliant essay Borges: Una estética del silencio, based on a pioneering study by Maurice Blanchot57, critics have begun to analyze Borges from an essentially verbal perspective. Thus, Gérard Genette, Michel Foucault, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Jaime Rest and, particularly, Massuh herself, have rethought the work of Borges in terms of self-reflection on the linguistic material of which it is made. Arturo Echavarría in particular has called attention to this, and the hypotheses he sets forth in his study Lengua y literatura en Borgesi8 can also be applied to our story. Like the hronir of "Tlôn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and like the Aleph, the Zahir is, in the final analysis, a verbal object. Perhaps it is the most clearly verbal of them all, if we recall that Islamic coins, prohibited by religion from representing images, are inscribed with Arabic writing on both sides of the metal disk. The coin - the many coins invoked in the story - are literally, words. Words: that is, coins that are common to all, that circulate democratically from hand to hand, just as the Borgean story that has received such close readings down through the years. However, the verbal object that is the magical coin, invoked by the writer through his language, awakens a particular image in the mind of each reader. Echavarría has also addressed this issue in other Borgean stories: "to read - and remember what was read - is the same as registering images, the same as dreaming" (Echavarría 1983: 138). In our case, it is not difficult to assume that all of us will have our own mental image of the Zahir each time we dream it as we leaf through the narrative fiction. We should remember how much the fictitious Borges of the story dreams, albeit only after taking a sleeping draught. Following the path of this "array of images" that, as seen by Echavarría, is for Borges, literature itself (ibid: 138), we better understand why the magical object of the 56

We will go into further detail on these studies which oppose a critical interpretation that takes into account the possible mystical level of Borges' works.

57

Le livre a venir(1959).

58

See Echavarría ( 1983).

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Zahir was, in the possession of others, at times a tiger; at other times, an astrolabe, or yet at other times, the bottom of a well, or a compass. (It would seem that all of these fortuitous images are also related to the haphazard card game in the bar where Borges was given the Zahir: it is patently obvious that Borges has at his fingertips a kaleidoscopic language that does not seem to follow any strict logic.) Once again, the parameters of this possible literary and linguistic decoding indicate that the Zahir, at different times in history, represented verbal images or particular symbols with which the ancient contemplatives of the story tried, always to no avail, to translate the Divinity. Each one, as could be expected, tried to solve the problem of his verbal aphasia with a different image or literary symbol. All were - and this should be no surprise to us - as amazing as they were lacking. All of this leads us to the disconcerting fact that the Zahir, like the fugitive hind and the disk of Odin, had only one side. Once again, it was Arturo Echavarría who noted that the images of our dreams are one dimensional.59 The mental and vicarious reality that literary symbols provoke in the reader's imagination have "only one side". Also - referring to the same study - they are "shadows;" that is, pure mental imagination, with no mass or bodily consistency, like the venerable Virgilian shadows of the Aeneid (VI) that Borges intentionally invokes in "El tamaño de mi esperanza", because he knows that they incessantly project themselves into the minds of each new reader. Borges himself insists on this in "El idioma de los argentinos;" "language is like the moon, which is half in darkness". We can now understand the new level of meaning beneath the curious comment made by the character Borges, when he enigmatically announces that the Zahir was the "shadow of the Rose". It was the image or shadow that the ancient Sufi verbal symbol of the mystical rose, rewritten by Borges, would awaken in the memory of modern readers. The mysterious "rending of the veil" is simply another Islamic literary topic that is revived in the imagination of those who peruse Borges' story. That is why the fictitious Borges, in a moment of despair, is tempted to bury the coin of the Zahir "in the garden or in a corner of the library". If we follow the trail of Echavarria's decoding of Borges' encoded words we are able to understand the impeccable logic of this apparently gratuitous action. However, it was a literary logic: the "garden" in the coded lexicon of Borges is luxuriant literature,60 and the library, once again, that beloved verbal world that he identified with Paradise. Borges knew what he was doing when burying his symbols: it no longer surprises us that the imaginary country Uqbar was also buried in a certain pirated volume. For Borges, burying is simply writing, entombing in the fecund tomb of the written word. But the Zahir of our story was not only a tiger, astrolabe or a rose: it was also a human being: "a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, stoned by the faithful". It is about a theologian - Borges' theologians are usually heresiarchs - or perhaps an orien-

59

He explored this at length in a course taught at the University of Salamanca (summer, 1988).

60

Cfr. His article in this volume.

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tal mystic such as 'Attar or Rumi, who celebrated his own ecstatic experience by exposing his life to the rigid judjement of the orthodox. Borges himself reminds us in the story "The Theologians", whose texts pass from hand to hand and which are often read out of context, to the point where the name of the writer vanishes and many times survives only because the text has been cited by his current theological enemy. Identity vanishes into the written language. This idea bestows a new level of meaning on the many obliterated faces in Borges' works, to which we have already alluded. Arturo Echavarría (1983: 195-206) addresses this problem in the case on "The Theologians": upon dying and reaching timeless paradise, the theologian Aureliano realizes that for God, he and John of Pannonia, the heretic whom he had so often attacked, formed one single person. That is why Borges states in the epilogue to The Aleph that the story "is a rather melancholic dream of personal identity". Literature and the language of which it is made61 erase the personal identity of the author and make it the common coin of successive readers. But they also upset the identity of the author because they unfold it, something which was explored at length by Unamuno in Niebla. Although quite famous, Unamuno is only one of the many authors who succumbed to the vertiginous temptation to fictionalize themselves, to wit, Cervantes, Francisco Delicado; Pirandello, Pedro Salinas; and, naturally, Borges, whose lapidary poem "Borges and I" immediately comes to mind. Like his predecessors, Borges knows that as soon as he inscribes himself as a character in the story, he suffers from an inevitable literary "schizophrenia" that has a direct impact on his ontological essence. He can but doubt whether he is of flesh and blood or the written word. But, more than just sharing the same name and even the same personal characteristics, the historical writer Jorge Luis Borges is not the same person as the fictional being of the story. The latter will live on even after the flesh and blood author who breathed life into the character's paper life has died, since it is the word, a one-sided ethereal shadow, common coin of all readers who usurp the text and imagine it, each in his or her own way, investing it with new and successive identities, always at random, like the playing cards. All of this helps us explain why the melancholic and tortured protagonist of "The Zahir" fears he is losing his mind upon receiving the protean coin - that is, literature. He no longer knows what the true ontological key to his persona is: the intimate splitting of his personal identity - that now becomes verbal - is clearly distressing. Unamuno was also at the breaking point in Niebla: tortured and terrified to the point of madness upon learning that his new identity was as fictitious as the child of his imagination, the loquacious and autonomous character Augusto Pérez. This is nothing compared to the vertigo that gripped Don Quixote upon learning - horror of all horrors - that he himself was literature. And worst of all, literature invented by a despicable Arab historian, which had just been published in a doubtful book of adventures.

61

On the topic of language, cfr. the first chapter of the abovementioned study: "Lenguaje y literatura: una teoria".

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This leads us to the new level of meaning of the protagonist's strange dream in "The Zahir", in which he discovers that he was the pile of coins guarded by a gryphon. He himself was the coin of the Zahir, which is nothing more than a verbal object - pure word. "Borges" had lost his being upon becoming part of the literary text and was the same as the strange coin that he possessed for a brief, but disturbing, period of time. But, by being inscribed in the pages of the text of the Zahir, and identified with the symbolic coin, Borges has taken on a new identity, no longer doomed to the fate of human flesh and limiting reality. He will continue to exist as long as the story is read and Borges the character is returned to life in possession of his random Zahir. The "partial magic" of the symbolic coin has granted him eternity and saved him from time. He no longer lives on our plane; he has undergone an extraordinary ontological transformation, conferred by literature. Here it should be noted that this is similar to what a mystic experience when he enters the timeless celestial Jerusalem of his soul transformed into God, safe from the tragic constraints of space-time. As we can see, mystic experience and literature converge perfectly as legitimate levels of meaning in the story. No real mystical writer has been able to ignore the inherent overlapping of ecstacy and human word, almost totally incapable of describing the theopathic trance. We have insisted on the fact that ecstasy is suprarational and metalinguistical. St. John of the Cross reminds us about it time and time again: if the experience did not pass through the senses or reason, it is impossible for the senses and reason to communicate it. Language, as an instrument, simply cannot be used to explain these levels of experience. Yet, it is the only thing available to the mystical writers who have shunned the ominous alternative of silence. In "The Zahir", Borges ironically escapes falling into barren silence, thanks to the calculated willful and gradual silencing to which he submits his artistic language. Behind he has left the blinding verbal mantras of the "Aleph" and of "The God's Script", whose kaleidoscopic images frustrated him because they were successive and not instantaneous, like the supra-linguistic and ineffable experience of ecstasy. Before contemplating the other side of the symbolic coin, the fictionalized Borges of "The Zahir" tells us that, like the Sufis, in order to prepare himself for the unsettling meeting with the All, he wants to repeat the mantra of his own name or the ninety-nine names of God. In so doing, he will erase the words and their natural capacity for allusion shall finally be silenced. He has managed to place himself at the threshold of an experience that totally transcends language. Gabriela Massuh (1980: 160) pointed this out in other works by Borges: "the word can approach the final threshold. But what cannot be verbalized is the transcendence itself, not only because language does not rise to the same height, but because the mere fact of naming it, would limit it".62

62

Curiously enough, Gabriela Massuh puts these very pertinent arguments forward with regard to other stories by Borges, such as "El acercamiento a Almotásim" and "The God's Script", but not in "The Zahir". She believes that these stories have "the transcendent dimension that did not exist in "The Zahir" (1980: 158). In my case, however, I believe that, in fact, "The

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We are now able to understand why Borges could never ensure the reader that what lay behind the Zahir was, in fact, "God" - that is, the word: "God" -. Cautiously, he only tells us that "perhaps behind the coin is God" (emphasis added). In "Undr", it is reaffirmed with identical caution, refusing, at the same time, to identify an ominous Word, diligently sought by the protagonist, with the term "God": "A missionary proposed the word God to me, which I rejected". How could he not reject it, if the word "God" is perchance the most "heretical" word in the language, the one that most distorts reality (and particularly, transcendent reality), since it pretends to denote the unimaginable infinite with a pathetically limited linguistic sign. That is why St. Augustine warned us to speak of God non ut illud diceretur sed ne taceretur De Trin. V, 6): "[We speak about God] not in order to say it, but so as to avoid silence". The respectful abstraction of the name of God found in later Judaism also comes to mind. Borges is undoubtedly in good company.63 It is impossible, then, that the erudite writer would believe that God could perhaps be behind the "Zahir". No: the shadow of that perfect hollow is intimated by a word that remained in the most awe-inspiring silences of all: the batin. Borges never pronounced it in his story, avoiding the temptation to misrepresent the Ineffable with a word. It is the eloquent, loaded silence of the writer that should awaken the wary reader to the evocation of that interior, intransferable and absolute mystery which the elusive Arab word - never said - intimates. I have reached the conclusion that the Zahir is the most sincere mystical symbol of all those coined by Borges. The best tribute we can pay to the empirical experience of the infinite is to shroud it in silence. This time, as I mentioned before, Borges decided to silence his language and abruptly detain it, in order not to profane the secret - the batin - of what lies on the other side of the mystical coin. The other side of the nickel disk - as we already know - is not verbal. Once again, the words of Gabriela Massuh are germane: "[...] at the precise moment, the limits of the text are transcended. It is here, at this extratextual point, where the solution to the mystery proposed by Borges is found. The meaning and scope of ecstacy [...] transcend the limits of the

Zahir" is one of the literary works that could be best fitted to Gabriela Massuh's profound reflections on Borges' literary silence that is so charged with meaning. 63

Borges (1989: 874) insists on this in the oft quoted Matthew XXV:30, one of the poems that persuaded me most to be authentically confessional: "Y desde el centro de mi ser, una voz infinita/ Dijo estas cosas (estas cosas, no estas palabras)/ Que son mi pobre traducción temporal de una sola palabra". "Una sola palabra": the word that contains the experience of the All is not pronounced. The poetic protagonist did not undergo a linguistic experience, but something different that is best described as "these things", in order to ensure the reader that what he experiences went beyond the boundaries of language. And, therefore, must not "be pronounced". Gabriela Massuh (1980: 169) dwells on this sole, enigmatic word that invariably goes unspoken in some of Borges' stories, such as "The mirror and the mask" and "Undr": the Word is never pronounced: "Paradoxically, this silence is not a form of not saying, but rather the construction of a space with an infinite capacity for expression."

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story and occupy a space that exceeds the story itself'. 64 The silent void that lies behind the symbolic coin of the Zahir is one of Borges' most successful verbal rather, nonverbal constructs. I hinted at this before: "Behind the name there is something that cannot be named". Borges insists elsewhere: "if a mystic has had an immediate experience of God, or, what is the same, of truth, it cannot be communicated to others".65 "Only silence is not misleading",66 said the language philosopher Fritz Mauthner, whom Borges greatly admired, sharing the beliefs - 1 do not know how aware he was of this - of mystics of all persuasions. All remained speechless when faced with the magnitude of their experience. With great wisdom, mystical as well as literary, Borges places his reversible Zahir at the margin of limited human language. It is only in this way that he is able to give the reader something of his ominous message, both metaphysical and literary. That is why Borges is able to make his symbols extraordinarily multi-faceted. To name, as we all know, is to limit, since being one thing automatically implies not being the others. The perfect void that lies beyond the externalizing word of the Zahir - the unspeakable batin - does become a slave to limitation, which is always imposed by language. According to Massuh (1980: 239): "Silence adds to the possibilities of the word: it goes beyond and contains it at the same time. Silence is not annihilation, but rather the scope of the meaning". There is no doubt: the Zahir will cast many shadows, as diverse and indefinite as the readers who imagine it over time. It will be potentially infinite, like the incogitable reality it tries to suggest. The brilliant Borges has been able to marry the respectful silence of the speechless ecstasies with the wise, but necessarily oblique verbal allusion of authentic literary artists.67 It should be noted, on the other hand, that the "Zahir" has as many possible levels of meaning as does the multiple variants of the root z-h-r, from which its enigmatic name is derived. And with this, we come to our final conclusion, which is the surreptitious advice that Borges seems to give to the readers of this tale. We should

64

Once again, Massuh alludes to other stories by Borges, but not to "The Zahir".

65

See Oswald Romero (1977: 491). Borges is fully aware that, despite his respectful caution, in trying to give word to the experience in "Mateo XXV: 30" he actually defiled it: "Has gastado los años y te han gastado,/ Y todavía no has escrito el poema".

66

ApudGershon Weiler (1970: 294). Gabriela Massuh and Arturo Echavarría, in their books mentioned here, explore Mauthner's influence on the thought of Borges, in terms of language.

67

Gabriela Massuh (1980: 115 and 135) limits her interpretation of these texts in which Borges deals with mystical topics to the strict level of language: "it is a linguistic rather than religious problem"; "mystical experience for Borges is the means rather than the end". In my case, and in light of all that has been said, I believe, however, that the two interpretations can indeed coexist. One does not necessarily negate the other; quite to the contrary, they enrich each other.

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not read his text as Zahirists, attent only to the literal or exterior meaning of the text. 68 We should first read it as Batinists or true members of the batiniyya sect, paying close attention to the many hidden levels of meaning beneath the visible word, represented by the exterior side of the Zahir. I must admit that in my own process of reading and research, I became contaminated with the symbolic madness which the Zahir produced in Borges the character: its impenetrable enigma pursued me day and night until, little by little, it granted me some of its multiple, hallucinating secrets. I know that I have only touched the surface. The silent and invisible coin that Borges forged with prodigious literary talent and with such keen mystical sensibility, is a coin, that is certain, that will continue to be pursued in the future by assiduous, initiated readers.

68

In an evident effort to avoid giving important clues to his story, Borges superficially explains his principal themes and motivations, underscoring the fact that he simply wanted to write about an unforgettable object. He is, of course, talking like a "Zahirist", since all he does is paraphrase the literal level of his own story, without shedding any special light on it. With full intent of malice Borges has left the profound interpretation of the text - worthy of the introspective batiniyya sect - to his readers. Cfr. his testimony to R. Burgin, cited by JeanPierre Bernes (1993: 1635-1666). It should also be noted that one of the dimensions of the Kabbala that interested Borges most was its use as a precise and analytical instrument for textual decoding, which left nothing to chance. In this sense, a "Kabbalistic" reading and a "batiniyya" reading of a literary text would be similar in their hermeneutic rigor.

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Silver Dirham. Caliphate Omeya. The inscription says: "There is no God but God. Only He. There is no companion for Him." (Collection L. Lopez-Baralt)

Silver Dirham. Caliphate of Cordoba. The inscription says: "There is no God but God. Only He. There is no companion for Him." (Collection L. Lopez-Baralt)

Coin of the collection of Jean-Pierre Bernès. The inscription says: "AlMalik Al-Zahir".

Golden Dinar from the Caliphate Omeya (Xth century). The inscription says: "There is no God but God. Only He. There is no companion for Him." (Collection L. Lopez-Baralt)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. — . (1976). Borges. Explication de textos literarios V. — . (1989). Obras complétas 1923-1972. Vol. I. Buenos Aires. — . (1989a). Obras complétas 1975-1985. Vol. II. Buenos Aires. — . (1993). Oeuvres complètes. Jean-Pierre Bernés, (ed.). Paris. — . (1997). The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. New York. Cruz, San Juan de la. (1991). Obras complétas. Luce López-Baralt/E. Pacho. (eds.). Madrid. Goytisolo, Juan. (1990). "Los derviches giróvagos", in: idem. Aproximación a Gaudi en Capadocia. Madrid. Neruda, Pablo. (1966). The Heights ofMacchu Picchu. trans. Nathaniel Tarn. New York. Vergilius Maro, Publius. (1969). "Aeneid", in: Opera Omnia. Edition of RAB My nors. Oxford. Unamuno, Miguel. (1914/1969). Niebla. Mario J. Valdés. (ed.). Englewood Cliffs.

CRITICAL WORKS Alazraki, Jaime. (1988). Borges and the Kabbalah and other Essays on his Fiction and Poetry. New York. Asín Palacios, Miguel. (1984). Abenhizm de Cordoba y su historia crítica délas ideas religiosas. Vol. I/II. Madrid. Austryn Wolfson, Harry. (1976). The Philosophy of the Kalam. Cambridge. Barastone, Willis, (ed.). (1982). Borges at Eighty. Indiana. — . (1986). "Borges, Poet of Ecstasy", in: Carlos Cortinez (ed.). Borges, the Poet. Fayetteville. Bell-Villada, Gene. (1981). "El Aleph III: The Visionnary Experience", in: idem. Borges and his Fiction. A Guide to his Mind and Art. Chapell Hill. pp. 202-237. Blanchot, Maurice. (1959). Le livre à venir. Paris. Canto, Estela. (1989). Borges a contraluz. Madrid. Corriente, Federico. (1977). Diccionario árabe-español. Madrid. Cortínez, Carlos, (ed.). (1986). Borges, the Poet. Fayeteville. Cowan, J. Milton. (1976). Arabic-English Dictionnary. New York. Danner, Victor. (1973). Ibn 'Ata'Illah's SufíAphorisms (Kitab al-Hikam). Leiden. Echavarría, Arturo. (1983). Lengua y literatura en Borges. Barcelona.

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Feenberg, Andrew. (1985). "Le désordre économique et érotique", in: Paul Dumouchel/Bernard Grasset (eds.). Violence et vérité autour de René Girard. Paris. Fernández Sosa, Luis. (1976). "La polisemia en 'Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto' de Borges", in: Explicación de textos literarios V. pp. 139-148. Friedlander, Ira. (1975). The Whirling Derviches. New York. Garayalde, Giovanna de. (1978). Jorge Luis Borges: Sources and Illumination. New York. Giskin, Howard. (1990). "The Mystical Experience in Borges: A Problem of Perception", in: Hispanófila 33, 2: 71-85. Gómez Mango, Edmundo. (1986). "Duelo, oximorón y objetos mágicos en la narrativa de Borges", in: Río de la Plata-. Culturas. Vol. II. Paris. Hitti, Philip. (1968). History of the Arabs: From the Earliest Times to the Present. New York. Hugues, James/Cortínez, Carlos. (1986). "Where Do You Stand with God, Ms. Dickinson, Mr. Borges?", in: Carlos Cortinez (ed.). (1986). Borges, the Poet. Fayeteville. Isaacson, José. (1969). "Jorge Luis Borges y la cábala o el escritor frente a la palabra", in: idem. El poeta en la sociedad de masas. Buenos Aires. James, William. (1929). The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902. New York. Kadir, Djedal. (1973). "Borges the Heresiarch mutakallimun", in: Modem Fiction Studies, 19: 461-468. Kodama, Maria. (1986). "Oriental Influences in Borges' Poetry: the Nature of the Haiqus and Western Literature", in: Carlos Cortinez (ed.). Borges the Poet. Fayetteville. pp. 170-184. -—. (1996). "Jorge Luis Borges y la experiencia mística", in: Luce López-Baralt/ Lorenzo Piera (eds.). (1996). El sola medianoche. La experiencia mística, tradición y actualidad. Madrid, pp. 77-84. Kushigian, Julia. (1991). Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue With Borges, Paz and Sarduy. Alburquerque. López-Baralt, Luce. (1985/1990). San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam. Universidad de Puerto Rico/Madrid. López-Baralt, Luce/Piera, Lorenzo. (1996). "La sama' o baile ritual de los los derviches giróvagos", in: idem, (eds.) El sol a medianoche. La experiencia mística, tradición y actualidad. Madrid, pp. 215-226. MacDonald, Duncan B. (1965). Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Theory. Beirut. Massuh, Gabriela. (1980). Borges-, una estética del silencio. Buenos Aires. Medina Gómez, Antonio. (1992). Monedas hispano-musulmanas. Toledo. Merrell, Floyd. (1991). Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics and the New Physics. West Lafayette, Indiana.

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Nicholson, Reynold A. (1945). Poetas y místicos del Islam. México. Pareja, Félix. (1975). La religiosidad musulmana. Madrid. Rest, James. (1976). El laberinto del universo. Borges y el pensamiento nominalista. Buenos Aires. Romero, Oswaldo. (1977). "Dios en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges: su teología y su teodicea", in: Revista Iberoamericana, 43: 465-501. Sells, Michael. (1988). "Ibn 'Arabi's Polished Mirror: Perspective Shift and Meaning Event", in Studia Islamica: 67. Reedited in: Michael Sells. (1994). Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago. Spivakovsky, Erika. (1968). "In Search of Arabic Influences on Borges", in: Hispania, 51: 223-230. Steiger, Arnald. (1958). "Función espiritual del Islam en la España medieval", in: Revista del Instituto de Estudios Islámicos en Madrid\ VI: 42-43. Vergilius Mario, Publius. (1969). "Aeneid", in: RAB Mynors. (ed.). Opera Omnia. Oxford. Vernet, Juan. (ed.). (1963). El Corán. Barcelona. Weiler, Gershon. (1970). Mauthner's Critique of Language. London. Wingerter, George. (1983). "Arabismo y criptoarabismo de Borges", in: Sin Nombre, V: 36. Yusuf'Ali, A. (ed.). The Holy Qur'an. Text, Translation and Commentary.

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Arturo Echavarria

University of Puerto Rico

TEXTUAL SPACE AND THE ART OF CHINESE GARDENING IN BORGES' "THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS" To José R. Echeverría, in memoriam Tal es mi Oriente. Es el jardín que tengo, para que tu memoria no me ahogue. Jorge Luis Borges, El Oriente It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth [...] Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

"Borges' work", as noted by Aburiwi A. Elmajdoub and Mary K. Miller, "often focuses upon human concoctions as potions against powerlessness" (Elmajdoub/Miller 1991: 249). These comments pertain to that critical trend which views the "correct" use of reason - classification schemes and philosophical systems, for example - as a little more than a "secret consolation"; that is, as an ordering tool which turns out to be eminently inefficient, if not fallacious, in face of the haphazard variety of the world. Throughout Borges' narrative, this sort of "powerlessness" is often linked to other types of limitations that depend on power structures in whose context his characters are forced to move. This lack has a historical dimension that may manifest itself in both the cultural and the political spheres. The impotence I speak of can issue from deficiencies due to unfamiliarity with the totality of a foreign cultural code, a stumbling block which prevents the completion of a quest ("La busca de Averroes") or to insufficient knowledge of a cultural code recently learned ("La muerte y la brújula", "El muerto"). It can also be the effect of orders issued by foreign occupation forces relating to imprisonment and extermination ("El milagro secreto", "La escritura del dios"), or finally, as is the case in "Tema del traidor y del héroe", of circumstances spawning from a political moment which, upon forcing the main characters to act through subterfuges and detours, prevent the fulfillment of a collective act of justice: the public execution of a traitor. It might be useful to say, in passing, that in both "El milagro secreto" and "La escritura del dios", as well as in "Tema del traidor y del héroe", the powerless protagonists have access to "power", but only under two circumstances: this kind of power is attainable only through the acts of reading and writing, that is, an act that sends us back, in the first instance, to the field of culture

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and not to the field of politics proper1; moreover, it is a "secret act". Secret is the process by which Jaromir Hladik, standing before a firing squad, composes the final version of "Los enemigos"; secret is also the process carried out by Tzinacán which will restore the divine message - in "La escritura del dios" -; finally, secret is Nolan's work, "written" about Fergus Kilpatrick in "Tema del traidor y del héroe". The elaboration or reconfiguration of these "secret works" seem to be one of the few acts still available to those who have no access to the sources or instruments of a type of power that restricts, debases, and often oppresses them.2 Somehow, that act of restoration and restitution gives them back a degree of dignity and self-esteem, "justifies" their existence, as Borges often reiterates. Likewise, each of these works carries with it whether implicitly or explicitly - a decoder, a privileged "reader" who, in turn, will restore or recreate the message that was apparently lost. In "El milagro secreto", the final draft of "Los enemigos" remains in a sort of limbo, maybe waiting for a reader or spectator who in the future will go over it and reconstruct it from beginning to end. In "La escritura del dios", the privilege of decoding falls on Tzinacán;3 the reader of the story is merely notified of the fact that the magic formula is made up of fourteen casual words. On the other hand, in "Tema del traidor y del héroe", Nolan's work is written with secret anticipation, waiting also for a future reader who will retrieve the true meaning of what ensued (in this case, Ryan Kilpatrick's great-grandson will be

1

I shall not dwell here upon the evident relationship between culture and politics. From a general point of view, however, we know that, sometimes, the fulfillment of a cultural enterprise manifestly coincides with a political agenda, whereas, at other times, the link between the two is, at least, prima facie, harder to detect. In the three stories mentioned, only in "Tema del traidor y del héroe", we can say without hesitation that Nolan's act encompasses both the cultural and the political spheres.

2

In several of his stories, Borges seems to be aware of the mechanisms of oppression in modern history. The second paragraph of "Tema del traidor y del héroe", for example, states: "La historia transcurre en un país oprimido y tenaz: Polonia, Irlanda, la república de Venecia, algún estado latinoamericano o balcánico [...]" (1989: 496). All Spanish quotations will be from that edition. / "The action takes place in an oppressed yet stubborn country - Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state [...]" I quote from "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" (Borges 1997).

3

With regard to the writing of the god, Tzinacán comments: Nadie sabe hasta qué punto la escribió ni en qué caracteres, pero nos consta que perdura, secreta, y que la leerá un elegido. Consideré que estábamos, como siempre, en el fin de los tiempos y que mi destino de último sacerdote del dios me daría acceso al privilegio de intuir esa escritura (1989: 597, underscore is mine). / No one knows when he wrote it, or whith what letters, but we know that it endures, a secret text, and that one of the elect shall read it. I reflected that we were as always, at the end of times, and that it would be my fate, as the last priest of the god, to be afforded the privilege of inuiting those words.

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the reader-writer). 4 1 believe that "The Garden of Forking Paths" (hereinafter, "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan") should be placed alongside the three stories mentioned above. Not only do they share the same narrative strategies which are, in some way, central to the outcome of the stories, but it should be noted that, in "Tema del traidor y del heroe", as in "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan", the character who deals with the text is also happens to be the great-grandson of its author. These considerations lead me to incorporate in my analysis a series of historical and cultural data which, in some way, account for the relations of power and submission I have outlined above. 5 But the glaring complexity of "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" forces me to consider other aspects that go well beyond particular power structures. For example, the idea of garden, within the general framework of Chinese culture, and, especially, in the context of its literary tradition, is a necessary referent because it happens to be, I believe, a key to my reading of this story. Inscribed in that notion, we find the simultaneous existence of the concepts of art and history, chaos and order, as well as a figure we might call "synthetic" and that Borges invokes time and time again throughout his work: the multum in parvo. The evocation of the multiple in the unique, of that which flows into that which is immutable, as we all know, can be found at the very heart of stories such as "La escritura del dios", "El zahir", and "El aleph", and poses questions that go directly to Borges' textual strategies. "The desperation of the writer" proclaimed by Borges as narrator in "El aleph" refers to the dilemma of how to create a textual space in such a way that this limited space - which must be appreciated consecutively - may be capable of containing the simultaneous image of the cosmos and the infinite. The dilemma leads me into considering spatial aspects of the text and their possible relation to "El jardin de senderos que se

En la obra de Nolan [una vasta conspiración ideada por él con la ayuda de textos de Shakespeare, para hacer parecer la ejecución de Kilpatrick, un traidor a la causa de Irlanda, como una página del martirologio independentista irlandés], los pasajes imitados de Shakespeare son los menos dramáticos. Ryan sospecha que el autor los intercaló para que una persona, en el porvenir, diera con la verdad. Comprende que él también forma parte de la trama de Nolan [...] [sic] (1989: 498). / In Nolan's play [a vast conspiracy thought up by him, with the help of Shakespearean texts, in order to make believe that the execution of Kilpatrick, a traitor to the cause of Irleand, is but another page of the martyrdoom of Irish independence], the passages taken from Shakespeare are the least dramatic ones. Ryan suspected that the author interpolated them so that someone, in the future, would be able to stumble upon the truth. He understands that he too is part of Nolan's plot. As to the way in which the historical backdrop generates new readings of many of Borges' stories, Daniel Balderston (1993: 6) points out that: "the real beginning [in a reading of this kind] occurs when these referents are woven together into webs or constellations. In this way, a new text (a parallel fiction, perhaps) is proposed, one in which the explicit referents are made explicit."

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bifurcan". Thus, before reading the text as an "intricate Chinese garden", it may be convenient to dwell on some theoretical considerations regarding textual space.

1. TEXTUAL SPACE Before examining, even briefly, these theoretical issues, it might be wise to make a few clarifications. I must go over the notion of textual spatiality mainly based on the theories developed in the United States by Joseph Frank and his followers. On the other side of the Atlantic, Barthes, Kristeva, and Genette have also dealt with these issues, though not always from the same standpoint.61 believe that, of all the critics mentioned, Frank offers the theoretical schema that best suit the principles of composition deployed by Borges in his "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan". That is the reason why, in the course of my analysis, I will mainly use Frank's proposition as a theoretical framework. In referring to Joseph Frank's writings, I should perhaps start by pointing out the following: the American critic elaborates a notion of narrative space that has nothing to do with description, but instead, refers to with the text's very layout on the printed page. Strictly speaking, he is not interested in the linguistic means through which the author generates the environments described in the story, but in the means by which the reader spatially perceives the articulation of the narrative. Thus, Frank brings together, as a few of his critics have pointed out, "three fundamental aspects of narrative: language, structure, and reader perception".7 The starting point of Frank's speculations is linked to the fact that a large part of modern poetry, used here as a paradigm of narrative, undermines the "consecutiveness" of language. In Smitten's words: He [Frank] finds that much modern poetry [...] undermines the inherent consecutiveness of language, forcing the reader to perceive the elements of the poem not as unrolling in time but as juxtaposed in space. (1981: 17)

These "aberrations" - so to say - of discourse that force the reader to perceive the text spatially and not consecutively have to do with a fact that is characteristic, according

6

For example, regarding some reflections on the spatialization of the text (and, as we shall see below, of the breaking up of the linearity of literary discourse), Gérard Genette (1969: 46-47) takes as point of departure some concepts of linguistic formalism, whereas Frank bases his theories on concepts of the "New Criticism". Julia Kristeva (1981), on the other hand, examines the phenomenon from the point of view of Bakhtin's theories. For a contrasting view of Frank's and Bakhtin's theoretical positions as formulated by Kristeva, see Jola Skulj (1990, vol. 5: 43-50)

7

Jeffrey Smitten (1981: 15). Frank's attempt to include these three aspects of narrative into a single critical concept has prompted a long-standing polemic. See, for example, Skulj. (ibid: 45)

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to Frank, of a large part of modern poetry: the absence of causal/temporal connectives that link the literary work with external reality and with the tradition of mimesis (ibid: 17). As a consequence of this splintering of the text that may make it incomprehensible, the reader feels compelled to elaborate his/her own syntax of the narrative discourse. This "syntax" will be grounded on the links established within the text between words and word groups that originally seemed to lack any connection. In that way, the reader may understand what the individual words symbolize, and how they relate to each other and to the text as a whole. However, Smitten is quick to say that the meaning of the text is retrieved only after the reader has finished reading: But the meaning of the text emerges only after the reader has discovered its internal relationships, its syntax (ibid: 18). The reader's role in these circumstances is vitally important because it is only the reader who may carry out the procedure Frank calls "reflexive reference": The reader plays a crucial role throughout Frank's discussion because Frank attributes to him the key to spatial form- reflexive reference. This term designates the reference of one part of the work to another; it is by means of reflexive reference that the syntax of a narrative is worked out. (ibid: 20)

Frank's ideas as to the reader's role are also in agreement with some of the theoretical considerations elaborated later on the other side of the Atlantic by Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, both of whom argue, as we all know, that words, sentences, and some longer units of narrative discourse attain their "full meaning" only when they are linked to their immediate context. Thus, no element of written discourse may be understood by itself (ibid: 21). As I have already mentioned, the textual strategies employed by Borges in "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", as well as in some other stories, closely follow, in a most unexpected manner, the analytical scheme I have outlined above. It should not surprise us, then, that -regarding the critical notion of "reflexive reference"- several critics have pointed out that the writing of the Argentinean author constitutes a sort of paradigm of this type of analysis. Upon alluding to the existence of a possible ideal spatial fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz comments: Such a work would be absolved of the responsability of representing some action in the world; even more so, it should not have to represent some other, second-hand reality at all, but rather be its own reality, where the pleasure of the reader is not to recognize the artful depiction of a familiar world, but to appreciate its elements of composition, which just as in a painting would be a spatial affair. The work as self-conscious artifact becomes fully self-reflexive, which is the key Frank saw to making spatial form possible in literature. As Cary Nelson notes about Jorge Luis Borges, which writes fiction of this type, "the reader is made aware that a work creates itself before his eyes".8

8

Jerome Klinkowitz (1981: 39). Cary Nelson's quotation (1973: 3) comes from The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space.

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It might be worthwhile to point out, in passing, that the very fact that Borges' fictions frequently give the reader the impression that these texts are in the process of "creating themselves before his [the reader's] eyes" and of becoming "self-conscious and selfreflective artifacts", does not prevent them from pointing to the world beyond the text. Strictly speaking, many of these stories are not exempt from the "responsibility of representing some action in the world". This intra- and extratextual cross-referencing is what, in our case, will facilitate a fuller and more meaningful reading of Borges' story. That is why, before examining the story's layout and the possible meanings generated by the joining and juxtaposition of the narrative units, it would be useful to approach what I have pointed out as another context for the story, one which coincides with some determinations of the concept of spatialization of narrative discourse. I am referring here to the historical-cultural context. Thus, I will now examine the notion of garden in Chinese cultural history and some of its literary connotations which in some way necessarily constitute the contextual matter of "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan".

2. THE CHINESE GARDEN In the framework of a general cultural history of China, the garden holds a very special place. This restricted space not only acts as a "cosmic diagram" - as a well known historian of the genre has noted -, but also as the backdrop of an entire civilization. According to Maggie Keswick's The Chinese Garden-. Like the plans of Gothic cathedrals, Chinese gardens are cosmic diagrams revealing a profound and ancient view of the world, and of man's place in it. But in their long history they have also been, in quite a real way, a background for a civilization, for in them Chinese great poets and painters have met and worked. (1978: 7)

Charles Jencks, in The Meanings of the Chinese Garden, delves further into that notion and comments on its relationship with literature. The garden is not only, from a sweeping point of view, a structure-giving factor in Chinese culture, it also holds an eminent place in narrative. In the Hung Lu Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) mentioned by Borges in "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan",9 for example, the chapter that is set in the garden constitutes one of the points that support the whole structure of the story. It is there that the protagonist Pau Yu and his father hold a long conversation as to what is "natural" vis ä vis what is "artificial" in the art of gardening. Jencks comments:

9

Balderston, as well as John Irwin, stress the fact that the name of Borges' protagonist, Yu Tsun, belongs to one of the characters of Tsao Hsueh-Chin's novel. See Balderston (ibid: 42), and John T. Irwin (1994: 88).

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It is not at all surprising that the dispute should take place in a garden, for after all a garden was that microcosm of the universe where all forces would be present or at least represented [...]. (1978: 195)

Referring to the same matter, Andrew Plaks, in an extensive study on the Dream of the Red Chamber (1976: 162-163), comments: The Chinese literary garden, then, is a mixed composition of elements that, taken together, comprise a synecdochical sampling of the infinte phenomena of the world beyond its gates.

Further on, he adds: Without making too much of the enclosure-radical present in the Chinese characters used to express the garden [...] we may still say that the enclosed landscape is intended to be aprehended as an entire world in miniature, (ibid)

The relationship with the world, as Plaks points out - and as Jencks, as we shall see, further comments on - is synecdochical. The garden symbolizes the universe in the sense that the part has been taken for the whole. According to Plaks, the projection of the particular in the general is achieved - as to the garden layout - as a "synchronic spatialization". In Plaks' words: That is, while the enclosed space of all literary gardens clearly "stands for" the sum total of finite creation, here the implied projection from a limited field of perception to some more total form of vision takes the form of synchronic spatialization, as opposed to the diachronic process of revelation seen to be the ground of Western allegory, (ibid: 146)

That is why - Jencks (1978: 196) writes - the Chinese garden seems, in the eyes of a foreigner, particularly strange and, oftentimes, even incomprehensible. This partially explains what is so characteristically strange to us about the Chinese garden: its cramming of a density of meanings into a very small space, its tight packing, and its restless changing aspect.

Even though the predominant traits of the Chinese garden highlighted by Charles Jencks - cramming of a density of meaning in a very small place; the tight packing of its constitutive elements; its surprising and restless changing aspect - become evident, one way or another, in Borges' story, it would be useful to dwell on the last of the three because of its importance in "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan". In the Chinese tradition, the garden frequently harbors numerous contradictions within its framework. Apart from constantly appealing to what its critics and historians call multiple bipolarities (the oscillation between ying and yang, the fact that any void, any absence, instantly evokes a presence), there is one "contradiction" that seems to me important in the context of Borges' story: the fact that, in its very conception, the

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Chinese garden is subject to strict aesthetic rules, although its structure aspires to be perceived as chaos, as a labyrinth. Commenting on a travel letter about gardens published in Paris in 1749, written by Pére Attiret, a French Jesuit employed by the Emperor Chi'en Lung as painter for the Peking court, Maggie Keswick points out: His letter describes how clear streams wound - seemingly as they willed - through gentle valleys hidden from each other by charming hills. On the slopes, as if by chance, plum and willow trees grew in profussion and through them paths meandered with the lie of the land ornamented all along with little pavilions and grottoes. The streams themselves were edged with different pieces of rock, some jutting out, some receding, but "placid with some much Art that you would take it to be the work of Nature". For what was so intriguing was that the whole exquisite park was every bit as man-made as the landscapes of Le Nótre; only in this case the Art of the whole endeavor lay in concealing, completely any sign of the artificial. (1978: 10, underscore is mine)10 Andrew Plaks stresses this condition of the Chinese garden: "[...] we must bear in mind that [in the Chinese tradition of literary gardens] we are dealing [...] with the specific problem of the garden as an arbitrarily delimited space under more or less strict aesthetic control, and not with the broader concept of natural landscape". (1976: 146-47) Likewise, Plaks points to the fact that the very structural layout of these small private parks - which, starting from the limited and finite, pretend to project an image of the infinite - determines the way they should be perceived: It is perhaps significant, therefore, that the Chinese garden tradition does not emphasize the presentation of panoramic views as a necessary element in its spatial extension from the finite to the infinite. Instead, it is sooner the idea of divided space: smaller prospects broken up by artificial hills, winding streams, and overhanging folliage, or framed by carefully designed windows, doorways and railings, that characterize the Chinese garden, (ibid: 165-6) The synchronic perception sought, the one which transforms the garden into an image or diagram of the cosmos, is predicated, apparently and in a contradictory manner, upon a diachronic perception of the space in question. The Chinese garden must be 10

The quotation of Pére Attiret's account comes from "A Particular account of the Emperor of China's gardens near Peking in a letter from Pére Attiret [...] to his friend in Paris, translated from the French by Sir Harry Beaumont" (1749). Later on, Maggie Keswick, upon contrasting Chinese houses with the gardens, points out (1978: 10): Above all house buildings are always sited in an orderly rectangular plan, and in large households are arranged as regular progressions of courtyards. A garden, on the other hand, is instantly recognisable because everything in it is irregular and confusing; it is a place where the ordinary is transformed into something new and delightful.

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taken in little by little. In the process, it invites the stroller to explore the sudden windings of its paths, to stumble against unexpected walls, pavilions whose location could not be foreseen, and streams that follow a fortuitous course. In The Gardens of China, Osvald Siren (1949: 4) writes that a typical Chinese garden consists of "[...] more or less isolated sections which, though they succeed one another as parts of a homogenous composition, must nevertheless be discovered gradually and enjoyed as the beholder continues his stroll". 11 But strolling along linearily-sequenced winding paths does not lead to a delimited and precise end, but to the discovery of something that is inconclusive because this space points to infinity. "There is no overwhelming sense of an ending as there is at the Palace of Versailles", writes Jencks (1978: 200). Thus, the experience a Chinese garden usually conveys is that of partiality, and also of inconclusiveness. This circumstance, in turn, reflects the character of its builder, of its "author". Once more, Jencks observes: "The job of garden building, like the builder's character, is never completed, but always undergoing growth, decay, transformation", (ibid: 197). This remark - which points to inconclusiveness, to constant and unpremeditated transformations, even to chaos - likewise leads us to another consideration related to the spatial layout: to the labyrinth.

3. THE GARDEN-LABYRINTH Despite the fact that, as several critics have said, the Western labyrinth - in the sense of "symmetrical maze" - is actually foreign to Chinese culture,12 the "chaotic" layout of the garden - let us not forget that this chaos is governed, as Plaks pointed out, by rather stringent aesthetics - must give the impression of something disorderly, labyrinthine, of something that cannot be easily reduced to rational schema. In the course of an extensive commentary about the Wang Shih Yuan of Suchou, one of the most beautiful gardens of China, Maggie Keswick says: The whole garden is in a sense a composition of courtyards. Some wind around corners out of sight. Others are half open-ended. Some are cut off like cul-de-sacs, or fit into each other like pieces of a puzzle. The total effect is of a labyrinth, with spaces layered round each other, again unlike, say, a French garden where space is as clear and distinct as French logic. (1978: 18)

11

Osvald Siren quoted by Keswick (1978: 15).

12

See, for example, Murillo ( 1969: 259).

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On the other hand, as I have already indicated, the garden-labyrinth must be free from all the attributes of a symmetrical Western labyrinth.13 Moreover, the Chinese garden, in fact, should never look like a labyrinth. Keswick writes: Although a [Chinese] garden should ultimately be a labyrinth, it should not obviously look like one. When the Jesuit fathers of Peking devised a Western maze for the Chiienlung Emperor, it was regarded as a barbarian novelty, and soon fell into disrepair after the Emperor's death. The maze, of course, was too regular, too false, whereas a true Chinese labyrinth garden should always seem spontaneous and uncontrived. (ibid: 124)

13

In this context, I must clarify Yu Tsun's mysteriuos allusion in "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan", concerning a garden he knew as a child: "A pesar de mi padre muerto, a pesar de haber sido un niño en un simétrico jardín de Hai Feng ¿yo, ahora, iba a morir?"(Borges 1989: 472) / "Despite my deceased father, despite my having been a child in a symmetrical garden in Hai Feng - was I, now, about to die?" According to the opinion of well-known sinologists I quote in my essay, the notion of the Chinese garden is linked to the confession of an appaerently chaotic, and not a symmetric, labyrinth. According to Stephen Albert's own confesion, Ts'ui Pen's "garden" (the novel in "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is a labyrinth that is also chaotic. That is, a chaotic labyrinth. "A su muerte [de Ts'ui Pên] los herederos no encontraron sino manscritos chaoticos [...]." (ibid: 476) /"Upon his death [Ts'ui Pên's], his heirs found nothing but chaotic manuscripts." How can we explain Hai Feng's "symmetrical garden" in the context a traditional chaotic Chinese labyrinth? We have at hand only a few facts which could help us surmise the following. In the first instance, Yu Tsun seems to be aware of the fact that there are different types of labyrinths and that, therefore, not all are alike. When the Ashgrove kids explain to Yu Tsun that he can reach Albert's house if he keeps turning left, he remembers the fact that these instructions "eran el procedimiento común para decubrir el patio central de ciertos laberintos" (1989: 475, underscore is mine). / "was the common way of discovering the central lawn of a certain type of maze". Further on, upon remembering his great-grandfather's labyrinth -but, and this is very important, before learning that novel and labyrinth are one and the same thing- he identifies this space with, among other things, the irregular layout of a Chinese garden: "lo imaginé borrado por los arrozales o debajo del agua, lo imaginé infinito, no ya de quioscos ochavados y de sendas que vuelven, sino de ríos y provincias y reinos [...]" (1989: 475, underscore is mine). / "I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or under water; I pictured it as infinite - a labyrinth not of octagonal pavilions and paths that turned back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms". In this context, the asymmetrical layout of Hai Feng's garden has a possible explanation if we appeal, as I am doing, to the historical setting implied in the story. The atlases I have consulted locate the town of Haifeng in the Guangdong province, very near the coast at some 100 kms from Hong Kong. Canton (Guangzhou) is the main city of Guangdong and, as it is well known, it was through that province that the European (mostly British) penetration into the Chinese Empire first took place. The fact that Borges' character Yu Tsun is an English Professor at a German school in Tsingtao (thousands of kilometers away in the north of China), necessarily implies that he masters both languages - a fact that is corroborated in the story itself - and, thus, has an excellent as well as hybrid education, and, probably, a home firmly grounded on Western traditions. Maybe these circumstances could clarify the Western - and "barbarous" - "symmetrical garden", as the following quotation shows, in a Chinese context.

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Lastly, an integral part of the Chinese garden-labyrinth is the inclusion of verses and literary allusions, inscribed in stone tablets at different points of its topography. Thus, the garden becomes - and this is of paramount importance to my study - a mental space where one can find diverse metaphors and a myriad of scholarly interpretations. Keswick concludes: "[...] the proper way to tend a garden was to increase its historical richness until finally it became another kind of labyrinth - a mental maze of scholarly interpretations and well-chosen metaphors" (ibid: 150). The Chinese garden ends up amassing an impressive series of contradictions. It is a space that denies the very fact of space, a space that is inscribed in time, a time which, in tuen, aspires to deny time. Following the guidelines derived from Taoist beliefs, the garden easily accommodates in its topography, these and other contradictions. According to Keswick: The art of gardening [...] cannot be specified and prescribed any more exactly than the true Way. The Tao is suggested through aphorism and contradiction: to gain you must yield; to grasp, let go; to win, lose. [...] Chinese gardens are designed with the aid of a similar set of contrasts: the method for teaching garden-building equally involves evocation and suggestion rather than a precise formula, (ibid: 76)14

Before delving into the textual analysis of Borges' story, it might be worth mentioning yet another context for the Chinese garden, a sine qua non, that actually does not come from the cultural or theoretical sphere. This context is an historical referent and has to do with the Western imperialist intervention in China. As it is well known, during the 19th century, the British, French, and German intervened, forcefully and brutally, in the Chinese Empire in order to obtain concessions, most of them humiliating, and commercial privileges from the Chinese authorities. One of the most notorious acts has to do with the destruction of one of the most famous imperial gardens, the Yuan Ming Yuan, on the outskirts of Peking, carried out by British troops under the command of Lord Elgin. The almost total burning and destruction of the more than 60 acres of garden land took place on October 12, 1860, barely ten days after French and British troops had unmercifully sacked the buildings and pavilions that formed an integral part of the Yuan Ming Yuan. The military operative was carried out, according to Lord Elgin, in order to punish the Emperor for the tortures inflicted by his subordinates upon several British prisoners of war. But the ultimate end apparently sought in this wanton destruction of the garden was the humiliation of the Emperor precisely in that which was of paramount importance, both from a historical and a cultural point of view (Keswick 1978: 45). As a result of these confrontations, treaties were drawn up and signed in Peking between China, England, and France, whereby, among other 14

We must remember that Yu Tsun describes as "execrable" the "Taoist or Buddhist" monk who decided to publish - against the express wishes of Ts'ui Pen's family - that "acervo indeciso de manuscritos contradictorios" (1989: 476, underscore is mine). / "contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts", that, later on, we identify as Ts'ui Pén's El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.

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things, the city of Tientsin would be declared open to foreigners. Ten years later, in 1870, Tientsin witnessed a famous massacre of Chinese nationals by French troops. It was largely due to the climate of suspicion and bad faith created by several European religious communities, among which there were both French and British missionaries who had settled there, whose low regard and, indeed, intolerance for Chinese culture is very well known. The contemptuous attitude of these agents of the European imperialist expansion, as Jacques Gernet indicates, prompted, among other things, a crisis in the self-esteem of the Chinese: [...] the behaviour of the foreigners in China and the constant recourse to demonstrations of force or the actual use of it, were to have serious psychological consequences. They were at the root of an atmosphere of incomprehension, distrust, or hatred which affected all relations between China and her foreign occupiers. They created in the Chinese a sort of inferiority complex which was to harm gravely the process of adaptation to the great changes of the contemporary age. (Gernet 1996: 585)

It would be helpful to remember here that Borges' story establishes a three-way relationship between Germany/England/France vis â vis China, that is, among the oppressors on one side and the oppressed country on the other. We should bear in mind also the fact that Stephen Albert, who happens to be a sinologist with a sort of Chinesestyle garden in the midst of the other empire (the "Western island" mentioned by Yu Tsun), indeed was, "before aspiring to become a sinologist", a missionary in Tientsin. Neither should we forget that his country, England, had razed the beautiful garden of the Summer Palace, the Yuan Ming Yuan, and burned it to ashes. It might not be altogether inappropriate in this context, to point out the fact that Albert lives and has built a garden in a place called Ashgrove, a Sino-English garden, then, that like a phoenix, rises from its ashes. I believe that this network of enmities that finds its expression in the merciless hatred hurled at a national architecture and, especially, at a national horticulture held in high esteem in the tradition of Chinese culture, are included in the mysterious words of Yu Tsun on his way to meet Stephen Albert. Having reached the environs of Albert's house, Yu Tsun contemplates the surrounding English landscape and says: El camino bajaba y se bifurcaba, entre las ya confusas praderas. Una música aguda y como silábica se aproximaba y se alejaba en el vaivén del viento, empañada de hojas y de distancia. Pensé que un hombre puede ser enemigo de otros hombres, de otros momentos de otros hombres, pero no de un país: no de luciérnagas, palabras, jardines, cursos de agua, ponientes. (1989: 475) 16

15

16

For an account of the long list of humiliations and ravages sustained by China at the hands of European nations, especially of France and England, during the 19th century, see Part IX of the work quoted. The road dropped and forked as if cut through the now formless meadows. A keen and vaguely syllabic song, blurred by leaves and distance, came and

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Based on the theoretical scheme I have outlined above -and to which I will be insistently referring- it is about time to turn to a close reading of Borges' complex tale.

4. THE GARDEN-LABYRINTH OF FORKING PATHS A first consideration is in order. It has to do with the fact that "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" generally fits, almost admirably, into three of the rhetorical, theoretical, and cultural patterns I have mentioned above: the multum in parvo, a concept related to the principle of textual analysis called "reflexive reference", and the historicalcultural notion of the "Chinese garden". Ts'ui Pen's text, which, of course, is nothing but writing - a garden that is writing itself - is also, like the actual Chinese garden, a diagram of the cosmos. With regard to the importance of time in Ts'ui Pén's novel, Stephen Albert tells Yu Tsun: He confrontado centenares de manuscritos, he corregido los errores que la negligencia de los copistas ha introducido, he conjeturado el plan de ese caos, he restablecido, he creído restablecer, el orden primordial, he traducido la obra entera: me consta que no emplea una sola vez la palabra tiempo. La explicación es obvia: Eljardín de senderos que se bifurcan es una imagen incompleta, pero no falsa, del universo tal y como lo concebía Ts'ui Pén. (1989: 479, underscore is mine)17

Apart from the commentary which ascribes to the text the property of being an emblem ("image", says the British sinologist) of the universe, Albeit alludes to the condition of "planned chaos" ("I have reached a hypothesis for the plan of this chaos") which is Ts'ui Pen's novel. The limited textual space of Eljardín de senderos que se bifurcan written by Yu Tsun's ancestor is, in turn, like the actual Chinese garden, a diagram of the cosmos (the multum in parvo), it is also a chaos subject by a previous established order, a labyrinth, an unfinished work that aspires to infinity and one that, likewise, betrays the traits of its author. But there is more: Ts'ui Pen's novel is, in the first instance, incomprehensible. Its chaotic and incoherent structure leads Ts'ui Pen's

went on the gentle gusts of breeze. I was struck by the thought that a man may be the enemy of other men, the enemy of other men's other moments, yet not the enemy of a country -of fireflies, words, gardens, watercourses, zephyrs. 17

I have compared hundreds of manuscripts. I have corrected the errors introduced through the negligence of copyists, I have reached a hypothesis for the plan of that chaos, I have re-established, or believe I've re-established, its fundamental order -1 have translated the entire work; and I know that not once does the word time appear. The explanation is obvious: The Garden of forking paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen.

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heirs - who only found "contradictory drafts" and "chaotic manuscripts" (1989: 476) to decide, as already mentioned, to deliver them to the fire. The apparent disorder that points in the direction of chaos in Ts'ui Pen's novel is grounded on the absolute absence of casual/temporal connectives. This absence is, as I have already said, precisely what Joseph Frank uses as a starting point for elaborating his theory on textual spatialization.18 As is well known, each chapter of the novel El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan elaborates, based on a unique action, alternate situations that, if developed in a consecutive or linear sequence, would have been mutually exclusive. In a conversation with Yu Tsun, Stephen Albert comments on the strange structure of the novel: En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras, en la del casi inextricable Ts'ui Pén, opta - simultáneamente por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifiircan. De ahí las contradicciones de la novela. (1989: 478)19 Albert opts for two hermeneutic strategies that enable the production of meaning in the text, that is, that free the text from its chaotic condition while allowing, once the plan of this apparent disorder has been inferred, a coherent conceptualization. One of them is "the overall re-reading of the work". It is a well-known fact that re-reading a work necessarily imposes, although often in an implied manner, the establishment of a series of spatial relations in the text. Once the first reading has been completed, a second as well as successive readings will reveal figurative meanings for words that had nothing

18

In a study that correctly identifies the Argentinean narrator as a precursor of narrative strategies later employed by the "nouveau roman" and Tel Quel, and that opens up new possibilities of interpretation, Alfonso de Toro applies the notion of "rhizome", elaborated by Deleuze/ Guattari, to the results of the main literary procedures of Borges' work. According to de Toro (1992: 164) "definen el rizoma a través de seis principios: por el de la conexión, heterogeneidad, multiplicidad, asignifícante ruptura, de la cartografía y de la decalcomanía. From among these principles, those that highlight heterogeneity in the series, and the lack of connections between them, that is, the lack of elements that may link them to a "causal meaning", as de Toro points out, are those which seem to provide better ground to the application of the concept of rhizome. Among the stories that interest de Toro is "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", with its well known ramifications not subject, as I have said, to causal concatenations. It is true that the concept of rhizome could well identify, initially, the unconnected series designed by Borges throughout his narrative. But I believe that, further on, the text itself furnishes points of support from which we may establish connections that buttress and support patterns of coherence almost at all points in the narrative. Of course, this does not prevent us from performing other readings using other coordinates and thus attaining divergent results, as it often happens with Borges' work.

19

In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses simultaneously - all of them. He creates, thereby, "several futures", several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation of the novel's contradictions.

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to tell us on the first reading, and which now acquire an unexpected meaning precisely because we are juxtaposing them to the information obtained from the first reading (cfr., my comments on Ingarden and Iser). Likewise, the second reading forces the reader to look for connectives that, as Frank has said, enable the generation of a textual syntax. The second strategy remits us here to the incorporation of a co-text: the letter or fragment of a letter - this is never made clear - drafted by Ts'ui Pén and sent by an Orientalist from Oxford to Stephen Albert. The first strategy reveals to Albert that the contradictory chapters where, for example, "en el tercer capítulo muere el héroe, en el cuarto está vivo" (1989: 476) ("in the third chapter the hero dies, yet in the fourth he is alive again"), correspond to an underlying structure: that of a bifurcation of time. Time is the organizing entity of the novel and the corresponding structure is that of parallel and divergent times. The second strategy - that which introduces the co-text of the letter in the reading of the novel - conveys to Albert, the British sinologist, that time is articulated in the reader, not in the text. Borges has obliquely sidestepped the decoding operation carried out by the sinologist (Albert informs us of his results, not of the decoding process itself) and, just like in Ts'ui Pén's novel El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, he omits or suppresses the word that constitutes the key to the puzzle: the word "reader". As to the concept of time in the context of Ts'ui Pén's novel, Albert comments: EIjardín de senderos que se bifurcan es una enorme adivinanza o parábola, cuyo tema es el tiempo; esa causa recóndita le prohibe la mención de su nombre. Omitir siempre una palabra, recurrir a metáforas ineptas y a perífrasis evidentes, es quizá el modo más enfático de indicarla. Es el modo tortuoso que prefirió, en cada uno de los meandros de su infatigable novela, el oblicuo Ts'ui Pén. (1989: 479)20

The same thing happens with the word "reader". Stephen Albert manages to corroborate his original intuition as to the fact that the organization principle of the novel is, in fact, time, when he integrates the letter to his conceptual scheme. Ts'ui Pén had written: Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. (1989: 477)21

The word "porvenires" ("futures") is here conditioned by the parenthetical phrase "not to all". To begin with, we are surprised by this segmentation of the future whereby 20

The Garden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts'ui Pen the merest mention of its name. To always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. It is, at any rate, the tortuous path chosen by the devious Ts'ui Pen at each and every one of the turnings of his inexhaustible novel.

21

I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

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some of those "futures" will have access to the garden of forking paths, while others will not. Ts'ui Pen's cryptic phrase may achieve its meaning if we think of those futures as time incarnated with access to a text, that is to say, as readers. As is the case with Tzinacán and, especially, with Ryan in "Tema del traidor y del héroe", the secret may not be discovered by all readers, but only by a few: in this case, it happens that, despite the fact that "todos imaginaron que había dos obras; nadie pensó que libro y laberinto eran un solo objeto" (1989: 477) ("Everyone pictured two projects; it ocurred to no one that book and labyrinth were one and the same"). This "nobody" to whom Stephen Albert refers, also overlooked some of the data which, duly brought together, would have helped him or her to establish the equation novel = labyrinth. These data are, I believe, of vital importance to the kind of reading I am performing here, because precisely in Ts'ui Pen's words and in Borges' very text, there are clear indications (Albert would use the word "diaphanous") of the process of textual spatialization. The common interpretation of the goals Ts'ui Pen had set for himself when he retired to the Pavilion of Limpid Solitude, pointed to the performance of two tasks whose end should have naturally been the production of two distinct "things": a novel and a labyrinth. This "reading" was grounded on the very words of Ts'ui Pén who, as his great-grandson Yu Tsun remembers: [...] renunció al poder temporal para escribir Mm. novela que fuera más populosa que el Hung Lu Meng y para edificarwi laberinto donde se perdieran todos los hombres. (1989: 475, underscore is mine)22

This nobody from the remote past alluded to by the sinologist had become, in fact, a man of tomorrow. And that man is now Stephen Albert, the reader: "A mí, bárbaro inglés, me ha sido deparado revelar ese misterio diáfano" (1989: 477) ("I, an English barbarian, have somehow been chosen to unveil the diaphanous mystery"). Albert is quick to clarify: Ts'ui Pén diría una vez: Me retiro a escribir un libro. Y otra: Me retiro a construir un laberinto. Todos imaginaron dos obras; nadie pensó que libro y laberinto eran un solo objeto. (1989: 471, underscore is mine )23

If "nobody" thought that book and labyrinth were one and the same object, it was because, in this specific context, nobody made the connection writing = building. We usually conceive of writing as a linear activity, whereas building is mainly related to architecture, to the disposition of elements in space. In fact, spatial juxtaposition in the 22

23

[...] renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way. (underscore is mine) Ts'ui Pen must at one point have remarked "I shall retire to write a book", and at another point, "I shall retire to constructs labyrinth. Everyone pictured two projects; it occurred to no one that book and labyrinth were one and the same." (underscore is mine.)

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process of reading the words that designated Ts'ui Pên's activity - and which in Borges' story are laid out at a "distance" of two pages - is what, in the end, allows the reader to decipher the fact that the novel and the labyrinth are one and the same thing because writing, on the one hand, and building, on the other, are also one and the same thing. It is certainly remarkable that the process of intratextual juxtapositions allowing the reader to set up polarities that are, in principle, bisemic24 - that is to say, meanings determined by a specific context -, may be performed only by those who have already elaborated a syntax for the text and who master the contexts involved in this operation. Several critics have repeatedly stressed the importance of the reader in Borges' text at hand. 25 But I believe that no one has paid close attention to the importance of this type of multum in parvo that begins with the generation of bisemic units from a single word or from a specific group of words. When examining not Ts'ui Pen's novel but Borges' text, "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", which contains the novel, I can see the proliferation of units, at least bisemic, that the reader - a reader - may generate upon performing "reflexive reference" based on predetermined contexts. These multiple readings comply with the purpose of creating a web of "divergent, convergent, and parallel times", thus configuring the text-labyrinth. Let us now pay attention to the phrase appearing in the first lines of the narrative - which I now believe is the cornerstone of the whole story and whose importance the narrator deviously tries to play down ("Las lluvias torrenciales (anota el capitán Liddell Hart) provocaron esa demora [la de la ofensiva de las trece divisiones británicas], nada significativa, por cierto" [1989: 472]) ("Torrential rains (notes Capt. Hart) were the cause of that delay [the delay of the attack by the thirteen British divisions] - a delay that caused no great consequences, as it turns out"), and to Albert's and Yu Tsun's contradictory remarks at the end of the story [Albert: "Alguna vez los senderos de este laberinto convergen: por ejemplo, usted llega a esta casa, pero en uno de los pasados posibles usted es mi enemigo, en otro mi amigo" (1989: 478) ("Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend"); Yu Tsun: "- En todos [los tiempos] - articulé yo no sin temblor - yo agradezco y venero su recreación del jardín de Ts'ui Pên. - No

24

Milagros Ezquerro (1986: 39) comments on the "bipolar" nature of the structure of this story from the point of view of the "enigma", which is a two-part entity: utterance/meaning. "[L]e conte qui nous occupe", she writes, "est construit sur le double plan de Tintrigue policière et de la signification symbolique [...]". When I qualify my use of "bisemic units" with "in principle", I mean that in Borges' story as in Ts'ui Pên's novel -, these units, in turn, keep generating others that multiply themselves and are disseminated ad infinitum.

25

See, e.g., Murillo (1968: 130-150). Likewise, several critics have stressed the important role of the particularly gifted reader in this story: a "smart reader." Cfr., Milagros Ezquerro (1986: 51), and Maria Esther Martinez (1983). Professor Martinez, however, focuses her interest on a smart reader vis â vis what she calls an "existential labyrinth" in the story.

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en todos - murmuró con una sonrisa. El tiempo se bifurca perpetuamente hacia innumerables futuros. En uno de ellos soy su enemigo [...] - El porvenir ya existe respondí, pero yo soy su amigo", 1989: 479-80), ("In all [times]", I said not without a tremble, "I am grateful for, and I venerate, your recreation of the garden of Ts'ui Pen", "Not in all" he whispered with a smile. "Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy [...]." "The future is with us" I replied, "but I am your friend."). These comments and exchanges are coded with messages that are parallel and divergent, and even contradictory at times, and which depend on a context that is accessible to diverse readers. The pattern is repeated throughout the narrative discourse and is fundamental to the structure of the story. Let us go over a few examples. The most accessible example - maybe because its decoding is performed before the very eyes of the reader - is the unit with double meaning Albert = British sinologist; Albert = a city on French territory. However, if the transformation of the proper name into the toponym is to take place - man/language/topography (which curiously enough, travels in the opposite direction to that of the meaning of Ts'ui Pen's garden, which goes from topography to language, from physical object to narrative discourse) a need for the specific contexts that determine meaning is imperative. For a reader of British newspapers in England, for example, Albert is the last name of one of many English eccentrics. For Yu Tsun's boss in Berlin, who is waiting for a geographical reference, Albert is a specific location on the map of France, whereas the Englishman perse is, for a German soldier, as Stephen Albert himself foretells in one of the series of divergent, convergent, and parallel times, "un error, un fantasma" (1989: 479) ("an error, a ghost"). The procedure is brought to light in an almost burlesque manner by the problematic "editor" of Yu Tsun's story. When, on the basis of having heard the voice of Richard Madden in the apartment of his colleague Runeberg, Yu Tsun speculates that Runeberg has been "arrestado y asesinado" (1989: 472) ("arrested, and murdered"), the "editor" - who is most probably a member of the English officer corps or somebody close to it - resorts in a footnote to a legal paraphrase to justify his own "reading" of the event. The alleged murder of Runeberg,26 according to the "editor", is a "hipótesis odiosa y estrafalaria. El espía prusiano Hans Rabener alias Viktor Runeberg agredió con una pistola automática al portador de la orden de arresto, capi-

26

It bears noting that Runeberg's name carries the possibility of multiple readings. As we all know, runes constitute a sort of cryptography because, among other reasons, no one has been able to altogether crack their code. Andrew Robinson (1995: 178) writes: But even though runic inscriptions can usually be "read" - in the same sense as Etruscan inscriptions - their meaning is frequently cryptic, because of our lack of knowledge of the early Germanic languages. Hence the origin of today's expression 'to read the runes' - meaning to make an educated guess on the basis of scanty and ambiguous evidence. As a scholar of runes has remarked, the First Law of Runodynamics is 'that for every inscription there shall be as many interpretations as there are scholars working on it'.

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tán Richard Madden. Éste, en defensa propia, le causó heridas que determinaron su muerte." (1989: 472) ("a bizarre and despicable supposition. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, had turned out an automatic pistol on his arresting officer, Capt. Richard Madden. Madden, in self defense, inflicted the wounds on Rabener that caused his subsequent death"). But, in Yu Tsun's account, there are also historical-cultural contexts that enable divergent readings. I have already indicated some: Yu Tsun's comments with regard to English vegetation on his way to Stephen Albert's house; the remark that Albert, "antes de aspirar a sinólogo" ("before aspiring to be a sinologist") had been a missionary at Tientsin, for example. I would have to add others that have been mentioned by the critics: the problematic role of the Irish Richard Madden in the context of the British security service after the Easter Rising on 1916,27 and the Chinese spy's assertion at the beginning of the story, that "un pistoletazo puede oirse muy lejos" (1989: 473) ("a pistol-shot can be heard at a considerable distance"). Yu Tsun's ethnic traits within the context of a Caucasian country would also have to be taken into account. Some remarks of the Chinese spy could be read, at first, as motivated by subjective feelings ("La estación no distaba mucho de la casa, pero juzgué preferible tomar un coche. Argüí que así corría menos peligro de ser reconocido; el hecho es que en la calle desierta me sentía visible y vulnerable, infinitamente." [1989: 474]) ("The train station was not far from my flat, but I thought it better to hire a cab. I argued that I ran less a chance of being recognized that way; the fact is, I felt I was visible and vulnerable - infinitely vulnerable."), take a grossly literal sense. He felt "visible y vulnerable, infinitamente" because as an Asiatic man in the England of the times, he became notorious wherever he went. Likewise, that same context clarifies incidents that at first may seem "mysterious". It is a bit startling that when Yu Tsun leaves the train in Ashgrove some kids immediately ask him, for no apparent reason, whether he is looking for Stephen Albert's house. As Murillo (1968: 154) has indicated, this is due to the tacit acknowledgment that he is an Asian in the environs of a sinologist's house. By the same token, the context explains why Madden manages to find out at which train station Yu Tsun must have left the train when, in fact, the German agent had clarified that, in order to lose his pursuer, he had bought a ticket for a station well beyond Ashgrove. It could be said that in order to find out on which station Yu Tsun had left the train, Madden would have just to ask those on the train platform whether they had seen "a Chinese" getting off the train and where he had gone. The fact is that Yu Tsun's ethnic condition deprives him of one of the most necessary conditions for being a spy: the ability to pass unnoticed. Finally - and this is very important for the meaning of the whole story - Yu Tsun's narrative, which, actually, makes up the body of "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", and the revelation made to the readers at the end of his account, operates as a necessary context for the historiographic text of Liddell Hart and alters its meaning. The words demora, las lluvias torrenciales (which caused the demora, delay) 27

See Balderston (1993: 44^5).

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attributed to Liddell Hart, and the phrase nada significativa, por cierto, written either by the British historian or by the unknown "editor", take, once the report of the Chinese spy has been read, a diverse and even contradictory meaning. Once the enigma has been sorted out, once the proper name Albert has been turned into topography, and once the French city has been bombed, the smart reader, resorting once again to "reflexive reference", realizes that the word demora, vaguely tinged with casualness in the text quoted at the beginning of the story (where it is attributed to some "lluvias torrenciales") is far from being casual. Quite the contrary. Likewise, the phrase that refers to that delay, nada significativa, por cierto, takes the opposite meaning. The delay was not casual and, at least in the context of Borges' story, it was in fact very significant because during that time a devastating bombardment took place. The key phrase that takes a completely different meaning and that, upon fitting into its new context, creates a new syntax, is "las lluvias torrenciales [...] provocaron esa demora". The reader must establish connectives that are the product of the spatial juxtaposition of several phrases strewn all over apparently in a haphazard way, that is, laid out spatially throughout the text. The reader who has traversed Yu Tsun's narrative learns, in the end, that the purpose of the Chinese spy was to convey to the German army the name of a town so that they could bomb it. In the last lines of the story, Yu Tsun affirms that the city of Albert was, in fact, bombed. Liddell Hart writes the historical account at a latter date; but he either knowingly keeps silent about what happened or lacks the necessary information for transmitting the news maybe -and here we can only speculate - because the British top brass decided not to disclose the bombardment. It is logical to think that, in this context, the bombardment was the cause of the delay. But Liddell Hart, or the anonymous "editor", affirms that the delay was "nada significativa", and also that it was casual, caused by "lluvias torrenciales" ("torrential rains"). Let us see now how the meaning of the last phrase is transformed. In the process, we must resort to the juxtaposition of three linguistic units, one at the end of the story, one on the first pages, and another on the introductory paragraph. On the last paragraph, Yu Tsun states that the city was bombed; on the second or third page, Yu Tsun himself fantasizes with said bombardment - an event that, at that point, was still in the future ("Un pájaro rayó el cielo gris y ciegamente lo traduje en un aeroplano y a ese aeroplano en muchos (en el cielo francés) aniquilando el parque de artillería [británico] con bombas verticales" [1989: 475]) ("A bird furrowed the gray sky, and I blindly translated it into an aeroplane, and that aeroplane into many (in the French sky), anihilating the [British] artillery park with vertical bombs"). In the first paragraph, Liddell Hart talks about delays caused by "lluvias torrenciales". Here we realize that what surmises from the revelation of the Secret - the bombardment announced on the last lines of the story - was already inscribed under the veil of what seemed "metáforas ineptas y perífrasis evidentes" (these are Stephen Albert's words: "awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions") in the first paragraph of the story: bombardment = vertical bombs that fall from the sky = torrential rains. With this information in hand, the reader refashions a new syntax for the "story/history". The delay was casual only for those who ignored or wished to hide the bombardment

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caused by espionage. And the bombardment was significant because it most probably led to a five-day delay for the attack against the Serre-Montauban lines. Likewise, by resorting to Yu Tsun's account, Borges creates - like Ts'ui Pen before him - "diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifurcan" (1989: 478) ("several times, which themselves proliferate and fork"), that is, readers whose contexts create simultaneous, diverse, and contradictory readings. Maybe the most brilliant example of this are the enigmatic words spoken first by Stephen Albert and then by Yu Tsun at different places of the text. Commenting on the textual procedures of Ts'ui Pén, Albert clarifies: En la obra de Ts'ui Pén, todos los desenlaces ocurren; cada uno es el punto de partida de otras bifurcaciones. Alguna vez, los senderos de ese laberinto convergen: por ejemplo, usted llega a esta casa, pero en uno de los pasados posibles usted es mi enemigo, en otro mi amigo. (1989: 478) i 8

This has to do with the past. With regard to the future, we have this odd exchange between Albert and Yu Tsun: -En todos [los futuros posibles] [...] yo [Yu Tsun] agradezco y venero su recreación del jardín de Ts'ui Pén. -No en todos - mumuró con una sonrisa -. El tiempo se bifurca perpetuamente hacia innumerables futuros. En uno de ellos soy su enemigo. [ "] El porvenir ya existe - respondí -, pero yo [Yu Tsun] soy su amigo. (1989: 479-80)

The dialectical implications entailed by the possibility of being "enemies" at some past or future times, and "Mends" at some other times, are solved if we imagine a reader who has carefully gone over the text of the story "El jardín de senderos Que se bifurcan", has found himself in a position to make some of the spatial juxtapositions I have pointed out (and maybe many more) and has had access to the pertinent historical and cultural contexts. If the said reader opts for one of the paths of the past, he or she will establish that, in fact, insofar as Albert worked as missionary in Tientsin, he was an enemy of Yu Tsun's race. As I have indicated above, the presence of foreign missionaries as agents of the British and French colonial expansion drive in the 28

In Ts'ui Pen's novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting-pint for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.

29

"In all [the possible futures] [...] I [Yu Tsun] am grateful for, and I venerate, your recreation of the garden of Ts'ui Pen." "Not in all", he whispered with a smile. "Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy." [...] "The future is with us" I replied, "but I [Yu Tsun] am your friend."

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19th century were, in general, grossly uneducated and prejudiced men who spread suspicion and scorn against the Chinese people and culture. Jacques Gernet (1991: 585) writes: "In the long list of incidents caused by the presence in China of Christian missionaries, those of June, 1870 [in Tientsin] occupy a special place because of their gravity and consequences [...]." If, on the contrary, the reader opted for another of the paths of the past, Albert would be a friend to Yu Tsun and his countrymen. After having been a missionary, he became a sinologist and venerated the cultural heritage of China up to the point that he assimilated it into his daily life and, among other things, translated Ts'ui Pén's novel into English. The same can be said about the ramifications toward the future. Albert is an enemy if the relationship is framed within the fact that he is English, an enemy of Germany at whose service Yu Tsun works, and that the latter will have to kill him in order to turn him into a toponym that his boss in Berlin will be able to identify. Albert is Yu Tsun's friend because, upon becoming the medium for his message, he allows Yu Tsun to prove to his German officer "que tenía en poco a los de mi raza", that "un amarillo podía salvar a sus ejércitos" (1989: 473) ("who looked down on the people of my race" that "a yellow man could save his armies"). Albert is Yu Tsun's friend also - and maybe this becomes especially important, as we shall see because he allows Yu Tsun to recreate Ts'ui Pén's garden. All these paths, and maybe many more - divergent, convergent, and parallel - are simultaneously constituted and flash like lightning in the mind of only one reader or in that of many and varied readers. To sum up, let us examine now what I believe is the core of the story. From that point it is possible to weave a network that connects many of the issues and textual strategies I have described up to now. This network encourages, on the one hand, the idea of restitution, which points, in the first instance, to the "reproduction" of the pages of the Chinese novel on British soil and -which might be even more importantalso to the fact that Albert has decoded Ts'ui Pen's Secret: novel=garden=labyrinth. Likewise, this network helps ground the concept of recreation I have mentioned in the foregoing paragraph. This fabric is woven, as we have seen elsewhere, with a series of units strewn about the textual space of the story. The words or groups of words I shall now examine point - in some way or another - to the relations of power and restitution I commented upon at the beginning of this essay. Sometime before, I quoted Yu Tsun's words that allude to his condition as an Asian. These remarks - which are, I must say, frequent - insistently lead us to the notion of race and genealogy that identify Yu Tsun - in all but one very significant occasion - as an antagonist vis á vis those who surround him. Let us examine a few examples. When Yu Tsun says that he has been spying for Germany, he explains that he has not done so for the sake of that country. He actually does not care for Germany.

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Lo hice porque yo sentía que el Jefe [en Berlín] temía un poco a los de mi raza - a los innumerables antepasados que fluyen en mí. Yo quería probarle que un amarillo podía salvar a sus ejércitos. (1989: 473) 30

Earlier in this essay, I have stressed the protagonist's acute awareness of the fact that he is Chinese when he affirms that he feels "visible y vulnerable, infinitamente", because his ethnic condition makes him easily recognizable on the street. It would be timely to point out also that the racial and genealogical comments found in the first pages of the story, convey an adversary attitude that places Yu Tsun in a situation of impotence vis á vis nations that he seems to consider culturally inferior to his own. "No lo hice por Alemania, no. Nada me importa un país bárbaro que me ha obligado a la abyección de ser un espía" (1989: 478, underscore is mine) ("I did not do it for Germany. What do I care for a barbaric country that has forced me to the ignominy of spying"). In face of a situation that demeans and denigrates him, Yu Tsun wants to prove to the Germans that, as I have noted, a "yellow man" - whose race caused fear and scorn in the Berlin boss (1989: 478) - is capable of saving the German army. But at the same time, the Chinese spy alludes time and time again to the fact that he is completely powerless. He complains, for example, that he has been forced, for example, to the abject state of being a spy. Another example: when he realizes he must flee from his hideout, the review of the contents of his pockets - an almost desperate act - becomes a "mera ostentación de probar que mis recursos eran nulos" (1989: 478) ("the mere show of proving that my resources were non-existent"). Once smoked out by the British counter-espionage, he becomes the target of an open manhunt. When he is about to reach Stephen Albert's house, he remembers the labyrinth his great-grandfather wished to build: "Absorto en esas ilusorias imágenes, olvidé mi destino de perseguido" (1989: 475) ("Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man").31

30

31

I did it because I sensed that the Leader looked down on the people of my race - the countless ancestors whose blood flows through my veins. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. This "destino de perseguido" is also qualified by hatred. The problematic, anonymous, editor of Yu Tsun's account - presumably an Englishman (or is it the Irish renegade Richard Madden himself trying to justify his role as a henchman at the service of the English?) - describes, as I said earlier - as "hipótesis odiosa y estrafalaria" (1989: 472) ("bizarre and despicable supposition"), Yu Tsun's statement that his partner-in-espionage, Viktor Runeberg, was arrested or murdered. Further on, when Yu Tsun remembers Richard Madden, he comments, "En mitad de mi odio y de mi terror [...] pensé que ese guerrero [...] no sospechaba que yo poseía el Secreto" (ibid: 473). / "In the midst of my hatred and my terror [...] it ocurred to me that that [...] warrior [...] did not suspect that I possessed the Secret". Likewise, when the Chinese spy mentions his Boss in Berlin, he refers to him as a "ese hombre enfermo y osioso. " (ibid) / "that sick and hateful man").

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It is a fact both interesting and, I think, significant, that it is the memory of his great-grandfather and of his cultural achievements -writing a novel and building a labyrinth that now Yu Tsun imagines as being infinite- what makes him forget "su destino de perseguido".32 32

I must comment on the curious way in which Yu Tsun intuits, in this context, that Ts'ui Pên's labyrinth is, in fact, a "garden". That primal intuition will be confirmed later on by Stephen Albert, when the latter adds the fact that the labyrinth is a garden which also is a novel. The first time that Yu Tsun mentions the labyrinth "built" by one of his forebears, he seems to have a rather fuzzy image of it, certainly foreign to the concept of novel. As Yu Tsun remembers on his way to Albert's, Ts'ui Pên has retired from the world in order to write a novel and build a labyrinth. "Trece aftos dedicó a esas heterogéneas fatigas [...]"/ "Ts'ui Pen devoted thirteen years to these disparate labors[...]" but "la novela era insensata y nadie encontró el laberinto" (1989: 475, underscore is mine) / "his novel made no sense and no one ever found the labyrinth". For a convergent reading of the notions of building and writing, see supra. He imagined it first at the top of a mountain, then, effaced byricefieldsand under water; he further imagined it as infinite, in the form of a garden, but a garden that overwhelms its restricted space: "lo imaginé infinito, no ya de quioscos ochavados y de sendas que vuelven, sino de ríos y provincias y reinos" [ibid]). I have already commented on the "synecdochical" nature of the Chinese garden, its status as emblem of the world wherein the part signifies the whole. This blurred vision of the garden-labyrinth begins to acquire, in a manner termed "incomprehensible", a definite contour when Yu Tsun greets Albert for the first time: "Usted sin duda querrá ver el jardín? [preguntó Albert] [...] y repetí desconcertado: -El jardín? -El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan - Algo se agitó en mi recuerdo y pronuncié con incomprensible seguridad: - El jardín de mi antepasado Ts'ui Pên." (1989: 475-76, underscore is mine) / "You will no doubt want to see the garden? [Albert asked] -The garden? -The garden of forking paths. - Something stirred in my memory, and I spoke with incomprehensible assurance. - The garden of my ancestor Ts'ui Pen." We already know that, during the conversation between him and Albert, the link garden-labyrinth-novel will come to light. This, in turn, explains away and thus cancels the notion of "disparate labors" originally imagined by Yu Tsun. I would also like to dwell on something that I find rather important and that, as far as I know, has not been examined by the critics: the ambiguity that surrounds the origin of the title of Ts'ui Pen's novel. The textual proof offered in Borges' story seems to point to the fact that it was Stephen Albert who, in the last instance, gave a title to the novel of Yu Tsun's greatgrandfather: Eljardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Ts'ui Pên left the novel on which he worked for thirteen years untitled. We do not know whether this was intentional or because of the fact that he was murdered before he could write it in. As we know, the family found nothing but "chaotic manuscripts" they regarded as "senseless". It is reasonable to surmise that the notion of total chaos would have been dispelled had the manuscripts borne a title. Years later, on the other side of the planet, a British sinologist rereads the novel and discovers that the organizing element of the work is time. Likewise, he finds Ts'ui Pên's letter stating: "Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" (1989: 477) / "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths"). It should be not (and I must but resort to the typographical layout of the story), that what is going to be the title of the novel appears, in the context of a quotation, with no capital letters and in roman type, not in italics. It is Stephen Albert who, by inference, arrives at the conclusion that the phrase, which is repeated twice over in lower case and in roman type in the context of a quotation, refers to the novel: "Me detuve, como es natural, en la frase: Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Casi en el acto comprendí: el jardín de senderos que se bifurcan era

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From this point on, the allusions to race and genealogy will be inscribed -more and more eloquently- in the sphere of a cultural prestige that steadily becomes ampler and loftier. If we could identify a point of transition, it would be the moment when, almost at the door of Albert's house, Yu Tsun recognizes as "Chinese music" the "syllabic song" streaming from a pavilion in the sinologist's park. This is why he "fully [gave himself] to it". Likewise, when Stephen Albert welcomes Yu Tsun at the gate to the poplar-lined path, the former immediately addresses the latter in Chinese, as could be expected, and when asking Yu Tsun whether he comes to see "the garden", he takes it for granted that Yu Tsun's visit is prompted by a cultural interest. These references immediately place Yu Tsun in a realm where he is acknowledged and respected. He is thus included in a human group whose culture is more ancient and, in many ways, more refined than the European. I will return to this but, for now, it bears noting that the magic circle of self-assessment and mutual respect that encloses the Chinese spy and the British sinologist will grow even larger. A little further on, when Albert mentions the fact that the great-grandfather's novel consisted of a series of "chaotic manuscripts" and that a "Taoist or Buddhist" monk decided to publish them even against the family's wishes, Yu Tsun replies: "Los de la sangre de Ts'ui Pên - expliqué - seguimos execrando a ese monje. Esa publicación fue insensata" (1989: 476) ("To this day", I replied, "we who descend from Ts'ui Pen execxrate that monk. It was senseless to publish those manuscripts"). And, then, after reading Ts'ui Pên's letter sent to Albert from Oxford, he turns his mind again to his race and genealogy: "Leí con incomprensión y fervor estas palabras, que con minucioso pincel redactó un hombre de mi sangre [...]" (1989: 477) ("Eagerly yet uncomprehendinly I read the words that a man of my own lineage had written with painstaking brushstrokes [...]"). Finally, upon listening to Albert read aloud a few pages of his great-grandfather's novel, he thinks: Yo oía con decente veneración esas viejas ficciones, acaso menos admirables que el hecho de que las hubiera ideado mi sangre y de que un hombre de un imperio remoto me las restituyera, en el curso de una desesperada aventura, en una isla occidental. (1989: 478)33

la novela caótica; la frase varios porvenires (no a todos) me sugirió la imagen de la bifurcación en el tiempo, no en el espacio" (ibid: 477) / "I paused, as you may well imagine, at the sentence "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths". Almost instantly, I saw it - the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase "several futures (not all)" suggested to me the image of a forking time, rather tha space". The title of the novel does not reappear in the text until much later at page 479. There it is set in italics and words are capitalized, but, curiously, only noted as the Garden: "Ahora bien, [el tiempo] es el único problema que no figura en las páginas del Jardín." / "That problem [time] should be the only one that does not figure in the pages of his Garden". Afterwards, the complete title is quoted as a book. 33

I listened with honorable veneration to those ancient fictions, which were themselves perhaps not as remarkable as the fact that a man of my blood had

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This trend of what could be called self-affirmation culminates in a proclamation of triumph ("Abominablemente he vencido: he comunicado a Berlín el secreto nombre de la ciudad que deben atacar" [1989: 480, "I have most abhorently triumphed: I have communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked"]), affirmed by a man who, until a while ago, had been working as a scorned subaltern on the fringes of all the mechanisms of power. It is as if this were a supreme feat carried out in compliance with a secret mandate (as Yu Tsun calls it, 1989: 478) found at the end of each one of the draft chapters of Ts'ui Pen's novel. "Así combatieron los héroes, tranquilo el admirable corazón, violenta la espada, resignados a matar y a morir" (1989: 478) ("Thus the heroes fought, their admirable hearts calm, their swords violent, they themselves resigned to killing and to dying"). The effect of this triumph is such that life itself becomes negligible ("[...] ahora mi garganta anhela la cuerda" [1989: 473, "now my neck hungers for the rope"]), and transforms all that happened after Albert's murder - Yu Tsun's arrest, his sentence to death by hanging - into something "irreal, insignificante" (1989: 480) ("unreal, insignificant"). If we submit Yu Tsun's proclamation of triumph to a closer reading, it will reveal several contradictions. There are different ways to read the overwhelming phrase "he vencido" ("I have triumphed"). The first possible reading is determined by the phrase that operates as an explanation: the transmission to Berlin of the name of the French city that must be attacked. It is true that this reading is not groundless. Yu Tsun successfully carried out his espionage mission. But it is fair to ask whether this act actually deserves to be described as a "victory". According to Yu Tsun, he did nothing but "burlar" ("fool") Richard Madden (1989: 475), a man who, like himself, was an employee of a country that had oppressed his own and, thus, who was subject to the scorn of those who had power over him. As the text seems to indicate, Madden inspires in Yu Tsun a kind of negative attitude that borders on contempt. Did Yu Tsun "triumph" over England and, in passing, also over France, as a German spy! We know that he did not care for this "país bárbaro" ("barbarous country") and that, as he had confessed, he found demeaning the fact that he was forced to "la abyección de ser un espía" (1989: 473). In this case, an espionage mission could hardly be

invented them and a man of a distant empire was restoring them to me on an island in the West in the course of a desperate mission. Alluding to the Irish patriot Padraic Pearse who, upon being accused of supporting Germany against England during the Easter Rising of 1916, declares that, for him, Germany is more or less the same as England, and that, what matters is the freedom-fighting traditions of his people, Balderston compares him to Yu Tsun: The celebration of ancestor is connected to for both men with the vindication of a debased and colonized national identity and with the founding or discovery of a tradition that will carry on into the future (or as Yu Tsun would say after his conversation with Albert, into the innumerable futures), (ibid: 45)

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considered "victorious" since, from the start, espionage is seen as a demeaning profession. The espionage mission has been carried out for a nation considered abusive, unworthy of loyalty, and the prize of which is public dishonor - Yu Tsun's arrest, trial, sentencing - and death. On the other hand, it is true that, in the beginning, Yu Tsun wanted to prove to his boss in Berlin, a man who is described as "sick and hateful", that "a yellow man could save his armies". The transmission of the name "Albert" by means of a tremendously complicated ruse could be taken, in the first instance, as a victory of sorts for the Oriental man. But, here, Yu Tsun's "triumph" is tempered my "mitigating" circumstances. The "proof' of how smart and corageous a "yellow man" could be would be addressed here at another man deemed contemptible. The feat would have to remain within a small circle in Germany, since it would in all likelihood be kept a secret by the intelligence service. Neither would there be any guarantee that Yu Tsun's grandiose scheme - saving the German armies (if the word "sus" [his/their] refers only to the Teutonic armies) - could be achieved by bombarding just one artillery park in France. Furthermore, the "victory" is described also by Yu Tsun himself as abominable ("abhorent"). And we do not know whether this circumstance is actually due to the fact that, in order to carry out his plan, he had to murder a man whom he considered - at least for an hour - as important as Goethe, that, for him, "fue Goethe" ("was Goethe") -1 will return to this -, or whether, at the same time, the Oriental spy is pointing to other important circumstances that would also turn this "triumph" into a bitter experience.34 The fact is that the phrase "abhorently I have triumphed" and what it implies - the victory that shall revindicate "los innumerables antepasados que fluyen en mí [Yu Tsun]" ("the countless ancestors whose blood flows through my veins") - has a scope greater than the name of a city temporarily transformed into an arsenal. I will now trace the path that will take us to the scene of the Chinese spy's contradictory triumph, to the strange place (space, topos) from which he will be able to

34

Referring to the fact that an enigma is always taboo, and that those who decipher it transgress the established order and deserve death, Milagros Ezquerro indicates: "C'est exactement le cas de Yu Tsun et de Albert qui sont tour deux voués â la mort parce que détenteurs de la clé d'un enigme." (1986: 39). Immediately after this, she adds a comment that could be of interest in the context of the reflection of my reading of the concept of "victory", because it alludes to the elements of culture and race: Il faut en outre remarquer que l'enigme léguée par Ts'ui Pen a été déchiffrée par Albert alors qu'elle était demeurée impénétrable 'à ceux de sa race': comme dans le mythe, le déchiffreur d'enigmes est un homme venu d'ailleurs. En tuant Albert, Yu Tsun répare l'affront fait à sa race, et par le même geste, lègue à son tour une énigme que la race d'Albert ne saura pas déchiffrer, (ibid) However, I believe that if there is vengeance here, it is not address at the person of Stephen Albert whom, paradoxically, Yu Tsun declares "his friend" almost at the end of the story.

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somehow "save his own", and through which he will gain access to what could be called instruments of power. Firstly, it might be convenient to dwell on a statement made by Yu Tsun which, at first sight, would seem to point to a specific circumstance in the plot of the story. This statement tends to strike the reader as operating, so to say, in an isolated manner. Read otherwise, it establishes a network of far-ranging relationships and becomes central to the process that structures the narrative of the very story we are reading. I am referring to a comment, already quoted, made by Yu Tsun to Stephen Albert shortly before the end of the story. After Stephen Albert advises the Chinese spy that his forebear Ts'ui Pên "creía en infinitas series de tiempos" ("believed in an infinite series of times") and that, in one of those "futures", he, Albert, could be a friend and, in another, his enemy, Yu TsUn answers, "- En todos - articulé no sin temblor - yo agradezco y venero su recreación del jardín de Ts'ui Pên" (1989: 479) ("In all", I said not without a tremble, "I am grateful for, and I venerate, your recreation of the garden of Ts'ui Pen"). The key world here is recreación ("recreation"). The "recreation" of the garden please note that the word "garden" is printed in roman type - could literally mean Albert's reelaboration of Ts'ui Pên's garden on British soil. But at this point in the story, this reading is inoperative. The reader knows that the garden of Yu Tsun's greatgrandfather is not a real garden, but a labyrinth of time, a labyrinth of "symbols", that is, of language. The second reading would have as referent the fact that Albert had translated Ts'ui Pên's novel into English, and every translation is, in fact, a recreation. This is, in principle, a well-grounded reading. The only misgiving is that the Oriental character alludes to the temporal dissemination of this act of "recreation" ("En todos [los tiempos]", which points, primarily, to multiple readers), and there is no indication of whether Albert's English version ever reached the printing press. There might be a third reading. Taking as a necessary context the manuscript of Ts'ui Pên's letter sent to him from Oxford, Albert, as we all know, arrives at the conclusion that the book and the labyrinth were "un mismo objeto" ("one and the same"). I have already indicated (see note no. 27), that it seems that it was Albert who - by a complex operation of reading - gave the novel its title: Eljardín de senderos que se bifurcan. This is also a well-grounded reading, but subject to the same objections pointed out above. There is no evidence that Stephen Albert had put this critical revelation in writing, much less published it.35 There is a possible fourth reading, perhaps even more arcane than the 35

Borges' story alludes time and time again to the printing press, and I believe that, in this context, this insistence becomes relevant. There is mention, for example, of the Lost Encyclopedia, which "nunca se dio a la imprenta" (1989: 476) / was "never printed"; the publication of Ts'ui Pen's chaotic manuscripts is also mentioned; and there is an allusion, in passing, to the telephone directory where the Chinese spy finds the key that will enable him to transmit the Secret to Berlin. Maybe the primary function of printing in this story is, as is rather obvious, the fact that the transmission of the Secret will be done precisely through the press, through newspapers. I would have to point out that the Chinese invented paper on the 2nd century and that paper making, without which printing would not have been possible,

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other three, but one which, I believe, complies with the irradiation principle presupposed by the bifurcation of times, of the simultaneous temporal existence on different levels. I refer to the fact that the recreation remits us here to the previous act of writing, a writing that has been performed slowly, crisscrossed by many paths, one of whose meanings will not come lo light until the end and which will culminate the story "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan". Once more, it is necessary to perform a spatial juxtaposition ("reflexive reference") of several linguistic units that operate as warning flags throughout the text. Before discussing these units in detail, however, it would be convenient to say that the act of recreation mentioned by Yu Tsun has been carefully prepared, that is to say, it is foreshadowed by a series of textual markers that indirectly point in that direction. I am referring, to begin with, to Yu Tsun's first encounter with a cultural manifestation that appeals to his own tradition and, hence, to those of his own blood: the music that reaches him, "empapada en hojas y distancia" ("blurred by leaves and distance"), in the environs of Stephen Albert's house. A gramophone, with its wellknown "reproduction" mechanism, strangely placed next to a statuette of a phoenix, is at the origin of that music recreated on English soil ["El disco del gramófono giraba junto a un fénix de bronce", (1989: 476) "The disk on the gramophone revolved near a bronze phoenix"]. It is unnecessary to dwell on the "recreational" qualities that mythology attributes to this fabulous animal.36 But, what should attract our attention

reached Europe through the Muslims on the 10th and 11th centuries (see Gernet 1991). Likewise, the first movable types that foreshadowed European printing were developed in China in the early 11th century, (idem) 36

Besides, according to Borges (1957: 76), in his Manual de zoologia fantastica the "Chinese phoenix" does not constitute a "fixed species" and, thus, has the ability to take different shapes and forms. It is interesting to note that Borges writes the Chinese word for phoenix as "Feng" and that Stephen Albert includes as his first example of a structure governed by the principle of diversity of bifurcation in Ts'ui Pen's novel, a character named Fang. Fang, digamos, tiene un secreto; un desconocido llama a su puerta; Fang resuelve matarlo. Naturalmente hay varios desenlaces posibles: Fang puede matar al intruso, el intruso puede matar a Fang, ambos pueden salvarse, ambos pueden morir, etc. (1989: 478) / Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally there are various possible outcomes - Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, etc. Almost immediately after this, when he offers a second example, he replaces the name "Fang" with his own name (ibid), and when alluding, further on, to the structure of divergent, convergent, and parallel times once again, the sinologist repeats an identical gesture: Fang is replaced by Stephen Albert (1989: 479). Insofar as "Feng/Fang" is concerned, is Borges making an allusion to the "incorrigible pronunciation" (1989: 478) mentioned by Albert when he refers to the way he speaks Chinese?

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here is the fact that the phoenix and the gramophone are placed in a pavilion described as a library, and it is the "recreational" function of language and of books to which I will now turn my analysis. The first of these units consists of some relatively enigmatic words uttered by Stephen Albeit. Upon meditating on Ts'ui Pên's novel El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, and on the possibility of creating an infinite text, he tells Yu Tsun: Imaginé también una obra platónica, hereditaria, transmitida de padre a hijo, en la que cada nuevo individuo agregara un capítulo o corrigiera con piadoso cuidado la página de los mayores. (1989: 477)

This "reverent" addition or correction will be made by Yu Tsun through his own story, and Stephen Albert - as Kilpatrick through Nolan's "work" in "Tema del traidor y del héroe"- will hold a central place in the structure of the written narrative. Appealing once again to the principle that governs every Chinese garden - the apparent chaos subject to a preestablished aesthetic order - the Oriental spy will weave, before our very eyes, a text that potentially harbors multiple and contradictory interpretations, an act which, in fact, amounts to the rebuilding of the Chinese garden and, in so doing, he is able to, among other, things revindicate, vis â vis Europe, the loftiest tenets of his forefathers, of his race. The keys to this reading - as we shall see forthwith - are to be found in the cryptic comments on the colors black and yellow (as well as an occasional allusion to ivory), and their relation to the phenomenon of writing. Let us go over them quickly. When Yu Tsun arrives at Albert's house, the first thing he does is to examine the library of the English sinologist. A few volumes "encuadernados en seda amarilla", (1989: 476) ("bound in yellow silk"), belonging to the Lost Encyclopedia directed by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty, call his attention. The silk is yellow, and Chinese calligraphy, save special exceptions, happens to be black. The second mention alludes precisely to the existence of a Labyrinth, with capital "L", and establishes a strong link between these colors and writing. Stephen Albert seems to have deciphered the secret of Ts'ui Pen's labyrinth when he tells Yu Tsun: "Aquí está el Laberinto dijo indicándome un alto escritorio laqueado" ("Here is the Labyrinth -Albert said, gesturing toward a tall lacquered writing-cabinet"). Yu Tsun "misreads" this statement and understands that Albert means the writing-cabinet, the object itself: "- Un laberinto de marfil! - exclamé [...]" ("An ivory labyrinth! -1 exclaimed"). The Englishman corrects him and says that the labyrinth is the novel, which is not a mere physical object among others, as Yu Tsun thought at first, but an object, if you will, made of symbols, language (it is "un laberinto de símbolos" ["a labyrinth of symbols"]). But it bears noting that what led Albert into characterizing Ts'ui Pên's novel as a labyrinth was the letter written by the novelist himself: that is Albert's co-text, which I have mentioned already. The labyrinth is writing superimposed on writing. "Here is the Labyrinth", then, may refer to the letter stored in the desk and, also, to the object itself that is used for carrying out the act of writing. Yu Tsun describes the Englishman's movements

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on his way to the writing desk: "Albert se levantó. Me dio, por unos instantes, la espalda; abrió un cajón del áureo y renegrido escritorio" (1989: 477, the underscore is mine) ("Albert stood. His back was turned to me for several moments; he opened a drawer of the black-and-goldcabinet"). Yellow and black are mentioned again in the next to last paragraph of the story. This takes place at the climatic moment of the crime, and that instant is determined, as Yu Tsun has announced from the very first pages, by Richard Madden when he finally catches up with the Oriental spy. Yu Tsun writes: Me pareció que el húmedo jardín que rodeaba la casa estaba saturado hasta lo infinito de invisibles personas. Esas personas eran Albert y yo, secretos, atareados y multiformes en otras dimensiones de tiempo. Alcé los ojos y la tenue pesadilla se disipó. En el amarillo y negro jardín había un solo hombre [...] era el capitán Richard Madden. (1989: 479-80, underscore is mine)37 Yu Tsun is in the process of transforming the "húmedo jardín" ("dew-drenched garden") into writing; he is magically turning it into a "yellow-and-black garden", into the ink and paper on which the story "EI jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" is written, into a labyrinth of symbols whose schema are revealed ad litteram before our eyes on a space where black must contrast with the yellow or ivory of the page itself. 38

37

38

I sensed that the drew-drenched garden that surrounded the house was saturated, infinitely, with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and myself - secret, busily at work, multiform - in other dimensions of time. I raised my eyes and the gossamer nightmare faded. In the yellow-and-black garden there was but a single man - but that man was mighty as a statue, and that man was coming down the path, and he was Capt. Richard Madden. On the other hand, Yu Tsun twice describes Stephen Albert's garden as "húmedo" ("dewdrenched", in Hurley's translation used here). The first time, he resorts to a synecdoche and talks about "un húmedo sendero zigzagueante" [a "dew-drenched path [that] meandered"]. It is probable that here the referent of the phrase is a "real" garden where Albert's pavilion is located, and nothing more. The second mention, however, seems to be imbued in multiple meanings. Yu Tsun refers again to the "húmedo jardín" in the context of the yellow and black garden, to which we alluded in the text. It is down one of the "yellow-and-black" garden paths that Richard Madden moves in the direction of the pavilion. This garden is, simultaneously, the "real" garden and the garden about to be transformed into a text, something that exists in paper and ink. In the context of the history of the printing process in Chinese culture, the humidity of the paper to be stamped or printed is very important, especially in the earliest stages of its historical development. Gernet states it so: Paper, which was to prove indispensable for the reproduction of texts, became the ordinary material for writing on from the end of the Han age onwards [...]. The practice of using stelae bearing texts or drawings as stamps or blocks (with a coat of damp paper, drying, inking, and reproduction on paper with the help of a pad), which made it possible down to our own day in all countries of Chinese civilization to obtain cheap,

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It might no be off the mark to say that at the moment the acts are consummated, the instant of the murder that organizes all the text into a labyrinth garden of parallel, convergent, and divergent paths of reading - the virtual images are already there, in the garden: "Albert y yo, secretos, atareados y multiformes en otras dimensiones del tiempo" ("Albert and myself - secret, busily at work, multiform - in other dimensions of time") - takes place when Yu Tsun asks Albert to show him once more Ts'ui Pen's letter/co-text, and the Englishman walks for a second time towards the "black-andgold" writing cabinet. "Alto, abrió el cajón del alto escritorio; me dio por un momento la espalda [...] Disparé con sumo cuidado: Albert se desplomó sin una queja, inmediatamente" (1989: 480) ("He stood tall as he opened the drawer of the tall writing cabinet; he turned his back to me for a moment [...]. With utmost care, I fired. Albert fell without a groan, without a sound, on the instant"). Stephen Albert is, in fact, the connective, the link that brings together the two levels of the narrative: the tale of espionage as a sort of detective story, and what seems a long aside, a divergent path that leads to time, literature, and the Chinese world. Albert-the-man and the distant Albertthe-city are linked in space by writing, by the ink on the "Garden", by the ink that seems to constitute one and the other, because the name of the French city could be read as Albert sur Ancre/Encre.39 faithful reproductions of engraved pictures or famous pieces of caligraphy, was developed between the Han period and the beginning of wood engraving. (1991: 333, underscore is mine) 39

Critics have commented that the name of the river alludes to the object anchor ("ancre"). It bears noting that anchors, as well as ink, serve, each in its own way, to "fix" something that enjoys freedom of movement. In this context, it should be interesting to note, for example, that when Yu Tsun sees Madden approaching through a space which is in the process of transformation, the path of the yellow and black garden at the end of the story, he uses contradictory characteristics to describe. He ascribes to Madden the immobility of a sculpture: "era un hombre fuerte como una estatua" (1989: 480) / a "man mighty as a statue". Borges deviously has decided to textually disseminate the keys that bring together, on the one hand, Albert and "anchor" and, on the other, Albert and "ink". In the first pages of the story, there is a reference to the city where the British artillery park is located, but, for evident reasons, its name is suppressed because it constitutes the Secret. The passage is as follows: [Richard Madden] no sospechaba que yo poseía el Secreto. El nombre preciso del lugar del nuevo parque de artillería británico sobre el Ancre (ibid: 473). / [Richard Madden] did not suspect that I possessed the Secret -the name of the exact location of the new British artillery park on the Ancre. In the last lines of the story, we are told that the name was Albert: Albert sur Ancre/Encre. I owe this suggestion (the link ancre/encre) to my colleague Lilliana Ramos Collado, of the University of Puerto Rico, who pointed this out to me at the end of a conference based on a short version of this essay. It would also be useful to remember, in passing, that Baudelaire established the rhyme "ancre/encre", and the contrast between black/white (light), precisely when the poet invokes Death in "Le voyage" (VIII): "Ó Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons

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Lastly, it is also Albert who, upon recreating, restoring Ts'ui Pen's infinite novel and his world, affords Yu Tsun the adequate environment - and that is why I referred to a space of respect and equality - that lets him go out in search for the "lost labyrinth" elaborated by his forebears. I believe that this is clearly alluded to in an affirmation by the Chinese spy inscribed in the fourth paragraph of the story, which seems to be obscure and problematic because - as is the case with so many other flags or indicators - it seems unconnected to the body of the narrative. I am talking about Yu Tsun's overwhelming statement that alludes to a character that - just like the city on the Ancre - does not yet have a name: Stephen Albert: "[...] yo sé de un hombre de Inglaterra - un hombre modesto - que para mí no es menos que Goethe. Arriba de una hora no hablé con él, pero durante una hora fue Goethe [...]." (1989: 473)40 The reference seems to be Eckermann's to conversation with Goethe on Wednesday, January 31, 1827.41 The conversation begins with the following words by Goethe: - Since I saw you - said he [Goethe] -, I have read many and various things: among which a Chinese romance has occupied and interested me most of all. - Chinese romance! - said I -, that is indeed some thing quite out of the way. - Not so much as you think - said Goethe -, the Chinamen think, act, and feel almost exactly like us, and we should feel perfect congeniality with them, if all they do were not more clear, more pure and decorous that with us [...]. - I asked whether the Chinese romance of which he spoke were one of their best. - By no means - said Goethe -, the Chinese have thousands of them, and had already, when our forefathers were still living in the woods [...].

Stephen Albert establishes a context analogous to that of Goethe with regard to equality, on the one hand, and, certainly, on the other hand, to his admiration for the superiority of some aspects of Chinese culture vis á vis European culture, which aids Yu Tsun in creating a new space, in composing yet another chapter of Ts'ui Pen's infinite

l'ancre!/Ce pays nous ennuie, Ô Mort! Appareillons!/Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,/Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!" (Baudelaire 1961: 127) 40

41

[...] I know of a man in England - a modest man - who in my view is no less a genious than Goethe. I spoke with him for no more than an hour, but for one hour he was Goethe [...] Without questioning the merits of Murillo's observations (1968: 144), for whom Albert is, at a symbolic level, "an archetype of the Goethean faculties of Western man", or those of Balderston who, within the same general framework, uses Romain Rolnand's idea of Goethe as a "representative [...] of the idea of humanity" (1993: 152) to support his viewpoint, I believe that the quotation I use is better suited to the context of the story because, among other things, Yu Tsun seems to insinuate himself in Eckermanns' place when he says that he spent an hour talking to Albert.

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garden. Thus, Stephen Albert helps in many ways in the recreation of the labyrinth created by Yu Tsun's forebear, and allows Yu Tsun to exercise the only power the circumstances permit: cultural power. But these same circumstances render the consequences of the "victory" fatal (abhorrent,, as Yu Tsun says); maybe this is the reason for his "contrición y cansancio" ("contrition and [...] weariness"). The labyrinth whose threshold, so to say, is marked by the transmission of the name of a strategically important city "a través de los estrépitos de la guerra" ("over the deafening noise of the war"), is irremediably contaminated with violence. Albert, the man, his enemy/friend, cornerstone of the labyrinth of symbols, will die at the hands of Yu Tsun himself, and Albert, the city, will be devastated by the bombardment brought about by the disclosure of the Secret in Berlin. It is as if the recreation of the garden, carried out by Yu Tsun using the textual spaces of the story "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" - which is in itself the result of a "rebuilding" - a labyrinth of writing and reading that creates new dimensions in time and the self - would become the melancholy and sinister replacement of those lush and perfumed gardens such as the Yuan Ming Yuan, which his forebears had caringly traced at the very heart of the Chinese Empire, probably ignorant of the fact that they were doomed to be destroyed by foreign predators, by the British and French troops. Multiple geographic and cultural spaces approach each other over the surface of the blank page (which could likewise seem to have a yellow or ivory hue) to reconfigure a mental space which, as it frequently happens in war, constitutes the scenario where chaos - a chaos grounded on order - is deployed. I believe Andrew Plaks' words on the Chinese literary garden deserve our attention once again: The Chinese literary garden is, then, a mixed composition of elements that, taken together, comprise a synecdochical sampling of the infinite phenomena of the world beyond its gates.

Borges' story, published in the fateful year of 1941, contains, within the narrow confines of its own margins, a version of the dizzying variety of the cosmos. It also becomes a part, moving beyond its boundaries, of that universe, one of whose dimension is the immense conflagration represented by the world war, with its catastrophes and deafening crashes that will just not leave anything or anybody untouched.

BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS Borges, Jorge Luis. (1957). Manual de zoología fantástica. México. — . (1989). Obras completas 1923-1972. Vol. I. Buenos Aires.

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— . (1997). The Collected Works of Jorge Luis Borges, Vol II. trans. Andrew Hurley. New York. Baudelaire, Charles. (1961). Les Fleurs du Mai, in: Œuvres Complètes. Paris.

CRITICAL WORKS Balderston, Daniel. (1993). Out of Context. Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges. Durham. Castle, Edward (ed.). Eckermanns Gespräche mit Goethe, trans. Magdalena de Ferdinandy. Berlin, Leipzig. Elmajdoub, Aburawi A./K. Miller, Mary. (1991) "The 'Eternal Now' in Borges' 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and 'Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quijote'", in: Durham University Journal. 1, 52:2: 249-251. Ezquerro, Milagros. (1986). "Borges, Œdipe et Schéhérézade", in: tes Langues Neo-Latines. 89:2: 35-52. Genette, Gérard. (1969). "La littérature et l'espace", in: idem. Figures II. Paris. Gernet, Jacques. (1991). El mundo chino, trans. Dolors Folch. Barcelona. Irwin, John T. (1994). The Mystery to a Solution. Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore. Jencks, Charles. (1978). "The Meanings of the Chinese Garden", in: Maggie Keswick. (1978). The Chinese Garden. New York. pp. 193-200. Keswick, Maggie. (1978). The Chinese Garden. New York. Klinkowitz, Jerome. (1981). "Spatial Form in Contemporary Fiction", in: Jeffrey Smitten/Ann Daghistany (eds.). Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca. Kristeva, Julia. (1981). Desire and Language. Oxford. Martinez, María Ester. (1983). "Borges: lector e intérprete en 'El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan'", in: Chiricú. 2, Vol. 3: 12-18. Murillo, Louis A. (1968). The Cyclical Night: Irony in James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges. Cambridge. Nelson, Cary. (1973). The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space. Urbana. Plaks, Andrew. (1976). Archetype and Allegory in the "Dream of the Red Chamber". Princeton. Robinson, Andrew. (1995). The Story of Writing. London, New York. Sirén, Osvald. (1949). The Gardens of China. New York. Skulj, Jola. (1990). "The Modern Novel: the Concept of Spatialization (Frank) and the Dialogic Principle (Bakhtin)", in: Proceedings of the Xllth Congress of the ICLA. (5 Vols.), Vol. 5: "Space and Boundaries in Literary Theory and Criticism". Munich, pp. 43-50. Smitten, Jeffrey. (1981). "Introduction: Spatial Form and Narrative Theory", in: Jeffrey Smitten/Ann Daghistany (eds.). Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca. Toro, Alfonso de. (1992). "El productor 'rizomórfico' y el lector como 'detective literario' : la aventura de los signos y la postmodernidad del discurso borgesiano (in-

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tertextualidad-palimpsesto-desconstrucción-rizoma)", in: Karl Alfred Blüher/ Alfonso de Toro (eds.). Jorge Luis Borges. Variaciones interpretativas sobre sus procedimientos literarios y bases epistemológicas. Frankfurt (on the Main), pp. 133-168.

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Alberto Moreiras Duke University

DE-NARRATTVIZING THE POPULIST STATE APPARATUS: BORGES' "LA LOTERÍA EN BABILONIA" The debate concerning Latin American postmodernity and its cultural forms has entered a second stage where what seems important is to understand the practical consequences of previous definitions for intellectual and political work.1 The canonical texts of Latin American postmodernism must be reread, perhaps reinterpreted, searching for the way in which their own understanding of historical positioning would illuminate, rather than obscure, our own. Granted Jorge Luis Borges' central position in the postmodern canon, in trying to understand him from or for our own time one never knows whether the most proper reading is to be historical or ontological. But with Borges, or at the very least with the Borges of Ficciones and El Aleph, any merely ontological reading becomes immediately reductive, and the same obtains for any historical reading. The oscillation between history and ontology is a condition of possibility for a reading of Borges, who should be considered a thinker of situational consciousness for whom a passage into theory is always already determinant; or a theoretical thinker for whom historical knowledge is the ultimate goal. To use the old Lukácsian formulation, in Borges "science" becomes "consciousness" and "consciousness" becomes "science" - understanding "science" ontologically and "consciousness" historically. The interpreters should not reify Borgesian thought into any one of those poles, and they should not understand any of the poles in a reified manner.2 I want to read "La lotería en Babilonia" (1941) as both a reaction to the Stateform that had been developing in the West, and consequently in Argentina, during the 1930's, and as an anticipation of the evolution of the State-form into its present 1

Three recent collections of essays by Latin American theorists have accomplished the pass into that second stage by exhausting the possibilities of the first: Hermann Herlinghaus and Monika Walter (eds.), Posmodemidad en la periferìa, and John Beverley, José Oviedo and Michael Aronna (eds.), The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, Fernando de Toro and Alfonso de Toro (eds.), Borders and Margins.

2

I take the expression "situational consciousness" from Fredric Jameson, (1987: 85). In "Postmodernism and the Market" Jameson refers explicitly to the Sartrian underpinnings of the term, "The Sartrean concept of the situation is a new way of thinking history as such" (ibid: 288). In another passage he refers to situational consciousness as a "demystifying eyeball-toeyeball encounter with daily life, with no distance and no embellishments" (ibid: 286).

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configuration. In other words, I think "La lotería en Babilonia" offers both a symptomatic reading of the constitution of what we can call the Keynesian State, the Planning State, or the Interventionist State, and at the same time a catastrophist anticipation or prognosis of what would historically result from the Interventionist State, namely, what Gilíes Deleuze calls the Society of Control, for which the alternative expression "Neoliberal State" is obviously a misnomer.3 Borges then appears as a precursor thinker of what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call, making use of Marx's political economy, "the real subsumption of society under capital" (1994: 14). A similar reading could be made, for instance, of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and even of "La biblioteca de Babel". But if it is true that Borges anticipates in his textual work the evolution of society, critical analysis should not stop at the point of discovery of his prophetic powers, but should go beyond it to question the particular way in which his work is not only descriptive but also critical, that is, historical in the proper sense. From a perspective that I would then have to call, I imagine, improperly historical I will propose that in "La lotería en Babilonia" Borges interprets the Keynesian State, which in Latin America as elsewhere is a direct result of the 1929 Black Thursday. As Tulio Halperin Donghi puts it, [after 1929] national states were [...] the only economic entities rugged enough to navigate in such high seas [...] and Latin American states began to exercise functions and adopt techniques unimaginable only a few years before [...]. The multiplication of state functions signaled a total abandonment of the laissez-faire principles that had guided neocolonial economic policy. Awareness of the emergency was so widespread that [...] none disputed the expansion of state power per se" (1993: 209-10)

The State that started its new life after 1929 is the Planning State, whose most acute phase was in Argentina the Peronist national-popular State, and which would only find its final collapse during the debt crisis of 1982. From an ontological or theoretical point of view, I'll suggest that Borges, in that short story, radicalizes historical phenomena into a proleptic understanding of what was, for him, the postcontemporary: the passage from the Interventionist State into the State of Control as the teleological truth of the modern State. Its Latin American contemporary manifestation, euphemistically called "neoliberal", has meant, among other things, a drastically accelerated pull toward globalization, whereby the Latin American dependency upon transnational corporations increases exponentially. In late-capitalist times, the Latin American states become subsidiaries of a perhaps inexistent but nevertheless effective transnational State apparatus whose function is merely to ensure the ceaseless reproduction of labor-power through and for "functional integration between internationally dispersed activities" (Gereffi/Hempel 1996: 19). The spectral transnational State of flexible accumulation replaces the national-popular State and its old legitimacies. What obtains is a new social regime "of perpetual metastability" (Deleuze

3

See Carlos Vilas, "Neoliberal Social Policy", for a concise account of the differences between the national-popular or Keynesian-Fordist and the neoliberal Latin American states.

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1992: 4) based upon the market as final mechanism of control. This essay departs from the primary hypothesis that the Borgesian notion of the lottery in its last stage, there where it comes up against the limit of its own nonexistence (when the lottery no longer really matters, for its effects are all-pervasive already), is an allegory of perpetual social metastasis (what neoliberal theoreticians call simply "the market") as a regime of total social control. But my real question goes beyond description into attempting to read, through description, the Borgesian modality of historical critique. "La lotería en Babilonia" is the account given to us by an obscure narrator (who happens to find himself temporarily outside Babilonia) of a very peculiar State institution and its history: the lottery, in its Babilonian form. The narrator tells us early on that in Babilonia "lottery is a principal part of reality" (1989: 442). How it has come to be such a principal part of reality is his topic - a topic, by the way, that the logic of the story leads us to believe has been given to him by the lottery system itself. The lottery develops historically from a game sponsored by a private corporation - the narrator calls it "la Compañía" (ibid) - into the total administration of experience by the so-called "tenebrosa corporación" (ibid: 447). If at the beginning the lottery is an institution of civil society depending upon market mechanisms, by the end the very notion of civil society has become impossible and unsustainable since the lottery has merged with life to the point where they are experientially undistinguishable: the results of the lottery affect or determine every facet of human and even cosmic events. The lottery, at the end of its evolution, has become such a "parte principal de la realidad" that it is in fact the primary mechanism of the real. At the end of the story the narrator hints that it is undecidable whether the lottery should be considered the primary mechanism of the real or, on the contrary, the real as primary mechanism: "es indiferente afirmar o negar la realidad de la tenebrosa corporación, porque Babilonia no es otra cosa que un infinito juego de azares" (ibid). Since the very writing of the story could (or could not) be a result of the lottery itself, the truth of the statement is infinitely suspended. The very statement already suspends historical truth, but that suspension is itself suspended, in double undecidability. The reader is called forth to make a preliminary ideological judgment, faced with at least three options: 1) the lottery exists, and the narrator is its unwitting servant; 2) the lottery no longer exists, but the narrator is unable to decide upon its nonexistence; 3) the lottery exists, and the narrator is willingly mystifying us. The real choice for the reader is not to decide in favor of one of them, or in favor of their negations. The reader must instead enter an alternative order of decision that the first (and false) choice at the same time announces and introduces: if the truth of the narrator's statement is infinitely postponed and can never be ascertained, then it is up to the reader to let herself remain caught in perpetual entanglement or else to break free and refuse the very terms of the question. The latter requires, as it is usually the

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case in Borges, a complicated act of metacritical analysis where the text's general theoretical perspective finds itself at stake. Right at the point in Babilonian history where the pressure of the people clamoring for equality succeeds in imposing "un orden nuevo", "la Compañía" is asked to accept "la suma del poder público" (ibid: 443), and becomes the State: El justo anhelo de que todos, pobres y ricos, participasen por igual en la lotería, inspiró una indignada agitación cuya memoria no han desdibujado los años. Algunos obstinados no comprendieron (o simularon no comprender) que se trataba de un orden nuevo, de una etapa histórica necesaria [...]. Hubo disturbios, hubo efusiones lamentables de sangre; pero la gente babilónica impuso finalmente su voluntad, contra la oposición de los ricos. El pueblo consiguió con plenitud sus fines generosos, (ibid)

"Un orden nuevo", that populist triumph, is then the remote beginning of the Society of Control. The State, which is in principle nothing but the corporation running the lottery, keeps its extraordinary expansion (which is necessary to keep the lottery running ever more smoothly and consistently) until the moment is reached where every human act happens as a function of State power. It is then that the narrator affirms that the total and real subsumption of life into the State-form has been accomplished, perhaps in order further to claim that such an accomplishment also marks the point where the State-form becomes subsumed into the total reality of life. A dialectical inversion has taken place: the Planning State has metamorphosed into its own spectrum in order to better saturate the field of the real, which is now equivalent to the spectral. Proleptic anticipation is thus accomplished in Borges' text: the Society of control, our present, is announced in the 1941 text as a teleological consequence of the development of the State apparatus from its national-popular configuration. A critical objection becomes necessary, but it should be understood that it is a critical objection made possible by the short story itself. Borges' ironic disengagement, or the narrator's stated "indiferencia", do not hide but in fact reveal the all-determinant difference: the passage from an Interventionist Lottery to a Total Lottery is also a passage into total domination of the human; and it is, epistemologically, a passage from history into its reification as ontology. "Afirmar o negar la realidad de la tenebrosa corporación" is precisely not "indiferente", because it makes all the difference. "Afirmar" means to opt for history, and to keep open the difference between knowledge and experiential consciousness; "negar" means to opt for the reification of history, and to collapse knowledge into experience. Granted that "Babilonia no es otra cosa que un infinito juego de azares", everything depends upon deciding that such "juego de azares" is fated to occur through ultimately human determination, because it is orchestrated by the State-form as site of power, or that such human determination is or becomes nature itself, and as such it cannot be alternatively imagined. The very notion of historical freedom is at stake in the metacritical decision that the narrator paradoxically offers to us by claiming there is no decision to be made, or that the decision is "indifferent".

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What is at stake, in other words, is the theoretical possibility of an outside to ideology or, as Louis Althusser (1993: 319) would put it in his autobiography, "how to escape the circle while remaining within it"; in the story's terms, "how to escape the lottery while remaining within it", or if you want, how to escape the State of Control while remaining within it. The text's historical-critical consciousness thus depends upon the possible form or forms of responding to that question it embodies. It is naturally only the theoretical possibility of an escape that will leave open the possibility of a historical change, and a final destruction of what we are perhaps already understanding, through this reading, to be the late-capitalist mode of production under the allegory of total state lottery (only a future possibility for Borges in 1941). If the lottery exists, then to understand it as a contingent and not a necessary historical fact is fundamental. But even if the lottery no longer exists, only realizing that such is the case matters. For Althusser, in his classic formulation, [...] it is this knowledge that we have to reach, if you will, while speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (e. e. subjectless) discourse on ideology. (1971a: 173)

One has to wonder, by the way, how Althusser would have modified his notion of ideology and the ideological state-apparatus if he had read and seriously meditated upon "La lotería en Babilonia". Or perhaps he did, and perhaps he did it to an unfathomable extent. We shall probably never know, but that should be no obstacle to the recognition that "La lotería en Babilonia" is one of the theoretical sources for the Althusserian notion of ideology. Uncannily enough, Borges' text includes a reference to Althusser that Borges could not know would be a reference to Althusser. Perhaps, then, it was Althusser who retrospectively made it a reference to himself. Toward the end of the story the narrator asks: "el soñador que se despierta de golpe y ahoga con las manos a la mujer que duerme a su lado, ¿no [ejecuta], acaso, una secreta decisión de la Compañía?" (Borges 1989: 446). As it is well-known, on Sunday morning, November 16th, 1980, Althusser found himself in the position of that Borgesian dreamer. In Althusser's words, I surfaced after an unfathomable night which I have never been able to fathom, and found myself standing at the foot of my bed, in a dressing-gown, with Hélene stretched out before me, and with me continuing to massage her neck and feeling intense pain in my forearms, obviously due to the massage. Then I realised, without knowing why, other than from her motionless eyes and the pitiful tip of her tongue showing between her teeth and lips, that she was dead. (1993: 253-54)

There is of course no telling how Althusser's own theorization of the discourse of the unconscious as discourse of "the Order of the human signifier" (1971: 213) relates to his own inscription in a Borgesian text which is also a text about the Other as absolute signifier. The narrator compares the workings of "la Compañía" to the workings of

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God ("ese funcionamiento silencioso, comparable al de Dios" [Borges 1989: 446]) just as for Althusser (1971a: 178) "the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes the 'existence' of a Unique and central Other Subject". But I will stop this apparent digression. The position of the narrator in "La lotería en Babilonia" is objectively constitutive of ideology in Althusserian terms. Ideology is for Althusser a necessary condition of what he terms "reproduction of labour-power". In effect, whether the lottery exists actually or spectrally, the narrator's mission is ideological through and through. He could either be an unwitting servant, therefore positioning himself as a worker, or a willing collaborator, and therefore an agent of exploitation. Either way, he serves the same interests: the reproduction of labour-power requires [...] a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i. e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class 'in words', (ibid: 132-33)

The final sentences of the story would at first sight simply seem to ensure reproduction of labor-power, in other words, the perpetuation of State power through the preservation of the lottery system's social hegemony: "es indiferente afirmar o negar la realidad de la tenebrosa corporación" (Borges 1989: 447). The dreamer will forever strangle his wife, after all. But something else is also being said. Is " L a lotería en Babilonia", as a total textual act, meant to contribute to the reproduction of labor-power in the Althusserian sense, i. e. by ideologically sustaining it through either submission to it or through its naturalization as equivalent to life itself? Or is it, on the contrary, a way of opening into the subjectless process of history, into the outside of interpellation by the lottery apparatus, into a rupture of the Order of the signifier? The narrator of "La lotería en Babilonia" tells us a monstruous story, because it encompasses all stories to the same extent that it kills them all, by voiding them of autonomy. If the lottery orders and determines every human event, every story is simply that story. The total administration of life through an infinite and unceasing lottery means that life is thoroughly denarrativized, as it responds in every one of its moments to an order issuing from above. From the perspective of Total Lottery, life is always already heteronomous, "no otra cosa que un infinito juego de azares". 4 Paradoxically but inevitably, however, this thorough denarrativization of life as ideological apotheosis returns us to an alternative possibility of understanding. The

4

Althusser's final insistence on denarrativization is interesting in this context: [...] my objective: never to tell myself stories, which is the only definition of materialism I have ever subscribed to (1993: 169); 'Not to indulge in story-telling' still remains for me the one and only definition of materialism, (ibid: 221)

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final closure of the story, that is, the successful allegorization of social totality as always already alienated, always already disappropriated, "redirects", in words that Jameson (1994: 288) applies to a different context, "our attention toward history itself and the variety of alternative situations it offers". There is certainly, in Borges' text, no affirmation of human autonomy - there is only, through the metacritical dimension of the text, a loosening up of radical heteronomy, which is, to a given extent, also an affirmation (non-humanist?) of the human potential for freedom. "Los ignorantes suponen que infinitos sorteos requieren un tiempo infinito; en realidad basta que el tiempo sea infinitamente subdivisible, como lo enseña la famosa parábola del Certamen con la Tortuga" (Borges 1989: 445). In another text on the Greek paradox Borges says: Nosotros (la indivisa divinidad que opera en nosotros) hemos soñado el mundo. Lo hemos soñado resistente, misterioso, visible, ubicuo en el espacio y firme en el tiempo; pero hemos consentido en su arquitectura tenues y eternos intersticios de sinrazón para saber que es falso. (1989a: 204)

Such falsities destroy ontology. Through the destruction of ontology history returns, and with it historical consciousness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS Borges, Jorge Luis. (1989). "La lotería en Babilonia", in: Obras completas 1923-1972. Vol. I. Buenos Aires, pp. 456-460.

— . (1989a). "Avatares de la tortuga", in: Obras completas 1923-19720. Vol. I. Buenos Aires, pp. 254-258.

CRITICAL WORKS Althusser, Louis. (1971). "Freud and Lacan", in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York. pp. 189-219. — . (1971a). "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus. (Notes Towards an In-

vestigation)", in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York. pp. 127-86.

— . (1993). The Future Lasts Forever. A Memoir, trans. Richard Veasey. New York. Beverley, John/Oviedo, José/Aronna, Michael (eds.). (1995). The Postmodernism

Debate in Latin America. Durham.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). "Postscript on the Societies of Control", in: October, 59 (winter): 3-7.

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Gereffi, Gary/Hempel, Lynn. (1996). "Latin America in the Global Economy: Running Faster to Stay in Place", in: NACLA Report on the Americas. 29. 4. 1996: 18-27. Halperin Donghi, Tulio. (1993). The Contemporary History of Latin America, trans. John Chasteen. Durham. Herlinghaus, Hermann/Walter, Monika. (eds.). (1994). Posmodernidad en la periferia. Enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoría cultural. Berlin. Jameson, Frederic. (1987). "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capi talism", in: Social Text, 15 (autumn): 65-88. -—. (1994). "Postmodernism and the Market", in: Slavoj Zizek (ed.). Mapping Ideology. Londres, pp. 278-95. Negri, Antonio/Hardt, Michael. (1994). Labor of Dionysus. A Critique of the StateForm. Minneapolis. Toro, Fernando de/Toro, Alfonso de. (eds.). (1995). Borders and Margins. Frankfurt (on the Main). Vilas, Carlos. (1996). "Neoliberal Social Policy. Managing Poverty (Somehow)". NACLA Report on the Americas. 29. 6. 1996: 16-25.

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Fernando de Toro University of Manitoba, Winnipeg

BORGES/DERRIDA AND WRITING It is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follow the given thread. That is, if you follow me, the hidden thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. Con los libros famosos, la primera vez ya es segunda, puesto que los abordamos sabiéndolos. La precavida frase común de releer a los clásicos resulta de inocente veracidad. [L]a Odisea, gracias a mi oportuno desconocimiento del griego, es una librería internacional de obras en prosa y verso, desde los pareados de Chapman hasta la Authorized Version de Andrew Lang o el drama clásico francés de Bérard o la saga vigorosa de Morris o la irónica novela burguesa de Samuel Butler. Jorge Luis Borges, "Las versiones homéricas" {Discusión.

1. BORGES BEFORE THE POST Today, when we look back and reflect on the criticism that Borges received, at least until the end of the 70s, it is easy to attest that most of it was practiced out-of-context, that is, outside the Post. This Post, which has been so much debated, vilified, defended, and denied, is both the Post that Borges inscribed in the late 30s and that which inscribedJloTgQS in the late 70s. Whatever position one chooses to assume, the fact remains that Borges' literary practice could notbt read until the reading codes changed, until the epistemological field entered an unprecedent re-thinking and the very logos of the West was confronted.1 It is for this very reason that Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and others have been particularly attractive to Borges. In 1966, in the Preface to The Order of Things (1994), Michel Foucault starts with

1

I do not wish to suggest that all the valuable criticism carried out before the end of the 70s is not valid. In fact, these scholars could only read according to the epistemological grounding and critical practices contemporaneous to them. I am arguing, however, that although Borges was read "within" the Modern paradigm, he did not "fit" either the canonical Modernism (Europe) or the vernacular "realism" (Argentina) of the late 30s onwards.

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Borges' taxonomy in "The Analytic Language of John Wilkins"; two years later, Derrida begins his "Plato's Pharmacy" with two quotations on writing from Borges' "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal", and from the famous "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". In 1981 Baudrillard again starts "Simulations" with another well known text by Borges: "Of Exactitude in Science". These three authors quote Borges for radically different reasons: Foucault because of "naming", Derrida because of writing, and Baudrillard (1981) because of simulation and hyperreality. There is, however, something in Borges' texts that weds not only these authors in particular, but also the PostModern, Post-Theoretical, and De-constructionist thinking in general. From the late 70s onwards there has been a new wave of Borgesian studies from this Post-Modernist/Post-Structuralist/Deconstructionist perspective. (A. de Toro 1990, 1992, 1994, 1994a, 1995). Perhaps one of the scholars who best personifies this change is Jaime Alazraki who has worked on Borges from the Modernist perspective and later from the Post-Modernist paradigm. (Alazraki 1967, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1977, 1988, 1988a). The intent of this paper is to continue thinking and inquiring about Borges both with respect to postmodernism3 and specifically its relation with Derrida, and the questions of reading/writing.4 At the same time, it is not my aim to simply re-confirm the well known fact that Borges was a Post-Modernist and a deconstructionist avant la lettre and that most of the issues discussed since at least the end of the 1960s were already clearly introduced by Borges with the utmost transparency, as Alfonso de Toro has shown. My aim is rather to compare and contrast the surprising proximity of thought between Borges and Derrida, particularly in terms of writing, reading and the instability of the signifier with respect to the signified.

2.

RE-READING/RE-WRITING

Perhaps the most important change which has taken place in the theory of literature and literary criticism from the late 70s to the present is hermeneutic activity: specifically, reading as a form of inquiry, a form drastically rejected by structuralist logocentrism, a form which has become a pivotal and dominant practice. To this new hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism, and now posttheory (F. de Toro

2

I will be italicizing writing every time I use it in the Derridian sense.

3

As it has been developed by Jaime Alazraki and particularly by Alfonso de Toro (1990, 1992, 1994, 1994a, 1995), and deconstruction as it has been dealt with in the insightful articles by Roberto González Echeverría (1983) and Emir Rodriguez Monegal (1972, 1990).

4

There is another article about Derrida and Borges by Mario Rodriguez (1979). A very substantial portion of this excellent article, however, deals with Derrida's notion of writing. Only a brief section is devoted to Borges and this is done, instead, from a structuralist perspective.

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1998)5 have made major contributions and, at the same time, have radically altered theoretical practices. This activity, based on the epistemological grounding of postmodernism, has brought about a new form of writing, a new conception of literature, and indeed, a new relationship with the past and past literatures. That is why intertextuality has become the raw material for the artists of the second half of the XXth century. However, Borges was the very first to realize with absolute clarity that the Modernist paradigm, which for all intents and purposes was dead by the end of the 1920s, had in fact concluded. He forsaw a new ideation of the arts, literature, and culture in general and he was absolutely conscious that he, Borges, was placed at its very inception. References to this awareness can be found in almost all of Borges works. The meta-fictionalcomponents of his works, in fact, always refer to this change/awareness. In the following metafictional passage of "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", we read: Menard (acaso sin quererlo) ha enriquecido mediante una técnica nueva el arte detenido y rudimentario de la lectura: la técnica del anacronismo deliberado y de las atribuciones erróneas. Esa técnica de aplicación infinita nos insta a recorrer la Odisea como si fuera posterior a la Eneida y el libro Le jardín du Centaure de Madame Henri Bachelier como si fuera de Madame Henri Bachelier. Esta técnica puebla de aventura los libros más calmosos. Atribuir a Louis Ferdinand Céline o a James Joyce la Imitación de Cristo ¿no es una suficiente renovación de esos tenues avisos espirituales? (Borges 1956: 56-57)

This new technique is reading as writing, a very Borgesian aesthetic practice and a theme which travels through all his work: reading, re-writing, palimpsest, rhizome, simulation, intertextuality. It is of the utmost importance to emphasize that Borges does not say that this "new technique" has enriched the art of writing, but rather the art of reading. It is this very same (heme that Derrida will make central to both Dissemination and Of Grammatology. When Derrida refers to this change, a change that Borges had already seized thirty years before, he does it in much the same terms as the latter: [...] beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (1974: 86-87)

In connection to reading, Derrida, in Of Grammatology, speaks of the trace as the already there, as differance which allows the generation of meaning. The trace is intimately connected to the notion or arche-writing,6 as that which preceeds any form of

5

I conducted an on-going-research seminar on this subject in the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) since September 1994, until the end of April 1996. This seminar culminated in a Colloquium held in October 1996 on "Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space". See F. De Toro (1999).

6

Derrida claims that: "The arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those of nongraphic expression" (1974: 60).

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graphie and also any form of presence or phonocentrism. In fact, what Derrida exposes not only in Of Grammatology, but also in Dissemination, is that writing preceeds speech, and that language does not exist: only writing exists. 7 Thus, the Saussurian binarism of langue/parole is deconstructed, and with it, the signifier/signi/Jei/binarism. The unsettling of this binarism has lasting consequences since the very structure of the Sign {signifier/signified) is put into question. Derrida stresses: [...] that the signified is originally and essentially (and not only for a finite created spirit) trace, that is, is always already in the position of the signifier, is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (1974: 73)8 Writing is that which cannot be defined. It is not an exterior, it has no origin and always preceeds speech. 9 This is why, for Derrida, the colloquial use of "writing" has nothing to do with his notion of writing, since the latter is always related to graphie, whereas the former it is not welded to any form of "plenitude expression" (1974: 6263): reading, writing, arche-writing, différance, trace, become synonous terms. For Borges, as we indicated above, reading is also writing and in fact is first and foremost writing. In "Kafka y sus precursores", he provides us with an excellent example of writing as trace, arche-writing.

1

In Of Grammatology he indicates that: [...] writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. (1974: 60) I would rather wish to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, as possible only on one condition: that the "original", "natural", etc. language had never existed, was never intact, had been untouched by writing, and that it had itself always been a writing, (ibid: 56)

8

For Derrida The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the différance which opens appearance and signification. (1974: 65)

9

This is made clear in "El Inmortal": Al principio, creí que se trataba de una escritura bárbara; después vi que es absurdo imaginar que hombres que no llegaron a la palabra lleguen a la escritura. (Borges 1989: 22)

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Yo premedité alguna vez un examen de los precursores de Kafka. A éste, al principio, lo pensé tan singular como el fénix de las alabanzas retóricas; a poco de frecuentarlo, creí reconocer su voz, o sus hábitos, en dos textos de diversas literaturas y de diversas épocas. Registraré unos pocos aquí, en orden cronológico. (1989c: 170)

What Borges recognizes is precisely the trace, the arche-writing, since what he identifies from Kafka is his "voice", his "habits" in literatures of the past; it is not the past recognized in the present (Kafka) but the present recognized in the past. The basic Borgesian position is that everything has already been written and said, therefore the only option a writer has, as he has indicated in the prologue to Ficciones, is to "escribir notas sobre libros imaginarios" (Borges 1956: 12) since "desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos" (Borges 1956: 11). Derrida expresses this very same theme by asserting that [...] if the trace referes to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a present-past. Since past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained in the trace no longerrigorouslymerits the name "past". Another name to erase, especially since the strange movement of the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: differance defers-differs. (1974: 66)

The series of examples that Borges provides to the reader in "Kafka y sus Precursores", in order to expose Kafka's traces in the past are in themselves a trace, since the chain that is established is "Borges/Kafka/the trace": [...] la forma de este ilustre problema [la paradoja de Zenón] es, exactamente, la de El castillo, y el móvil y laflechay Aquiles son los primeros personajes kafkianos de la literatura. En el segundo texto que el azar de los libros me deparó, la afinidad no está en la forma sino en el tono. Se trata de un apólogo de Han Yu, prosista del siglo IX [...]. (1989c: 170-171) [...] El tercer texto procede de una fuente más previsible; los escritos de Kierkegaard. La afinidad mental de ambos escritores es cosa de nadie ignorada [...]. (1989c: 172)

Borges accomplishes two operations with these texts. On the one hand, he traces the trace in Kakfa's writing; on the other hand, he discloses and displays his own writing system - one inscribed solely on the trace, on the arche-writing and the play of differance. In fact, as Alfonso de Toro has indicated, la trace, in Borges is disclosed by an "affinity" or a "tone" found in the works of authors of the past such as Carlyle, De Quincy, Russel, Berkeley, Kakfa, etc. (1994: 248). What Borges says about Kafka in "Kafka y sus Precursores", therefore, can also be applied to him. In the same text, Borges comments: "En cada uno de esos textos está la idiosincrasia de Kafka, en grado mayor o menor, pero si Kafka no hubiera escrito, no la percibiríamos; vale decir, no existiría" (1998c: 174). This comment has particular consequences: we recognize Kafka's writing in the trace, but at the same time, in the same movement, undecida-

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bility and différance are inscribed since the only manner by which we are able to trace the trace is by Kafka's writing. Without Kafka, writing does not exist. This undecidablity (Kafka/¿race/Kafka/trace) introduced by Borges joins Derrida's thought when he declares that: The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.) concept or operation, motor or sensory. (1974: 62)10

Borges accomplishes and expounds the very epistemological ground set by the deconstruction of the West, the de-centring andfragmentationof the logos, eurocentrism and phonocentrism. "Kafka y sus precursores" completely dislodges the ex-novo attitude of Modernity and its many -isms, ironizing his own first readings of Kafka himself ("A éste, al principio, lo pensé tan singular como el fénix de las alabanzas retóricas" [ibid]) only to discover the trace, the true Kafka ("a poco de frecuentarlo, creí reconocer su voz, o sus hábitos, en textos de diversas literaturas y de diversas épocas" [ibid]). For Borges all that exists is reading, that is, writing, since to write is nothing more than to re-write what you have read. Yet as Borges states, even this reading/re-writing can be performed "on imaginary books". (1962: 16). This implies that writing is an already-there that does not have to belong to any pragmatized system of signs. (A. De Toro 1994: 246). Similar to "Kafka y sus precursores" is "Las versiones homéricas" (1989a) and "Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw" (1989c) where Borges suggests that there is only one Book where everything is contained and insists on the activity of reading/writing. In "Las versiones homéricas" Borges states: "Con los libros famosos, la primera vez ya es segunda, puesto que los abordamos sabiéndolos. La precavida frase común de releer a los clásicos resulta de inocente veracidad" (1989a: 106). In this text Borges attributes a particular characteristic to "famous books", arguing that before we read them, we already know them, since these books are in themselves the Book of Books, an entire library. In the next paragraph Borges stresses this point: 10

This text continues as follows: This differance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of sings among themselves within the same abstract order a phonic or graphic text for example - or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing - in the colloquial sense - as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived "notation" would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise. (1974: 62-63)

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[...] la Odisea, gracias a mi oportuno desconocimiento del griego, es una librería internacional de obras en prosa y verso, desde los pareados de Chapman hasta la Authorized Version de Andrew Lang o el drama clásico francés de Bérard o la saga vigorosa de Morris o la irónica novela burguesa de Samuel Butler. (1989a: 106-107)

Thus, the Odyssey becomes the Books of Books or the arche- writing and the trace. It is particularly revealing that Borges refers to the Odyssey, since this text is considered to be the very beginning of Western literature. In it, all writing has already been inscribed: the Odyssey is Différance (non-self-presence), since, according to Derrida, "Différance is therefore the formation of form" and "[o]n the other hand [is] the being-imprinted of the imprint". (1974: 63). This is so because writing neither interior nor exterior to language. Writing is a gap which implies a marking and erasure: a hymen, an exterior/interior, and in fact, a pharmakon. (Derrida 1981: 61-171). The Odyssey is, according to Borges, an "international library" due to its power of dissemination, of the graft "without a body proper, of the skew without a straight line, of the bias without a front", (ibid 1981: 11). The other implicit notion present in Borges' text is writing as repetition, as simulacrum, but a repetition/simulacrum which is never the same or identical to itself. In "La supersticiosa ética del lector" (1989a) Borges emphasizes the superior faculty of writing, at least at the level of the transmission of experience. It is, for Borges, as if the graft/graph were inscribed on the surface of the text, since the trace enacted as dissemi-nation overpowers presence and phonocentricism. According to Borges, "De esa capacidad sigilosa a una escritura puramente ideográfica - directa comunicación de experiencias, no de sonidos - hay una distancia incansable, pero siempre menos dilatada que el porvenir" (1989a: 49).

3. THE BOOK THAT IS NOT Borges and Derrida proclaim a book that is not, not only because it has already been written, but also because the book is infinite. It does not exist yet, it does exist; it inscribes and it is inscribed. As the book is destroyed, it is replaced by the text, a new form of inscribing, a new form of writing. Regarding the destruction of the book, Derrida states: If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary. (1974: 18)

This denudation of "the surface of the text" is precisely the deliverance of the text as a rhizomatic surface which can never be completely inscribed or exhausted. It is, in fact, open-ended. Borges (1975: 172), in "El libro de arena" uses "book" in the same sense as text when he quotes the unknown man who: "le dijo que su libro se llamaba

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el Libro de Arena, porque ni el libro ni la arena tienen ni principio ni fin". In "Tlón, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Borges (1956: 27) proclaims that: [...] en los hábitos literarios también es todopoderosa la idea de un sujeto único. Es raro que los libros estén firmados. No existe el concepto de plagio: se ha establecido que todas las obras son obra de un solo autor, que es intemporal y es anónimo.11 This new textuality and writing becomes evident by dismantling mimesis and the linear narrative model. In terms of Western narrative Borges is one of the very first to incribe a new literary paradigm by "not considering literature as a 'miméis of reality' but rather as a partial and illusory 'literary mimesis' based on the multiplication of organized codes according to the principle of the rhizome", as Alfonso de Toro has indicated. (1994: 237). 12 In "Tlón, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" he introduces this new paradigm: Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela en primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permiten a unos pocos lectores - a muy pocos lectores - la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal. (1956: 13) The emphasis on the "handful of readers" reveals Borges' awareness of the introduction of a new code whose decodification will be possible only by those capable of reading in a new manner. For his part, Derrida also indicates this change when he points out that: If today the problem of reading occuppies the forefront of sicence, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. [...] For over a century, this uneasiness has been

11

In "Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw" Borges (1989c: 249-250) states something similar: La literatura no es agotable, por la suficiente y simple razón de que un solo libro no lo es. El libro no es un ente incomunicado: es una relación, es un eje de innumerables relaciones. Una literatura diferente de otra, ulterior o anterior, menos por el texto que por la manera de ser leída: si me fuera otorgado leer cualquier página actual - ésta, por ejemplo - como la leerán el año 2000, yo sabría cómo será la literatura del año 2000. In "La Biblioteca de Babel" he adds: En algún anaquel de algún hexágono (razonaron los hombres) debe existir un libro que sea la cifra y el compendio perfecto de todos los demás. (1956: 92)

12

My translation. Alfonso de Toro adds: "Furthermore, the quoted texts [in Borges' stories] do not contribute with an a priori new signification, but to the formation of a new signifier, where intertextuality is imitated" (1994: 237).

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evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model. Which is to say the epic model. (1974: 87)

It is this 'epic model' that Borges deconstructs, creating a minimalist writing founded on intertextuality, simulation, palimpsest, and rhizome, as I indicated above. But he also erases the distinctions and binarisms of fiction/reality, theory/practice, author/ reader, writing/reading, etc. The erasure is typically revealed in his role as reader and particularly as editor of writings belonging to others. Borges' work is full of this Cervantinian literary device, but with one major exception: for Borges, editorship is not simply a rhetorical device but a writing practice connected to the act of reading/ writing. If everything has been written, the only role that an author can assume is that of editor or, at best, as commentator of others' writings.13 Emir Rodriguez Monegal points out that Borges "admits that to reread, to translate, to retell are part of the literary invention. And perhaps that to reread and translate are what literary creation is about. An aesthetics of reading is implicit here" (1972: 116).

4. THE INSTABILITY OF THE SIGN After Dissemination and Of Grammatology our thinking about the sign changed due to the fact that the classical Saussurian relationship between signifier and signified has been broken. What was revealed is that the signifier does not contain in itself anything that can inscribe it in the signified, therefore what we are left with is a mass of signifies (floating) with no fixed signifieds. As a result, the signified is always sliding under the signifier. Jorge Luis Borges was fully aware of this slippery nature of the signified, particularly with respect to writing. If the "formal essence of the signified is presence, and the privilege of its proximity the logos as phone is the privilege of presence" (Derrida 1974: 18), then the signified cannot be but slippery and always slides under the

13

One of the best examples is provided by the sources quoted at the end of Historia Universal de la Infamia (1970: 245-146). Many are the texts where Borges assumes this role as reader/writer/editor. Some examples: in EI informe de Brodier. "La Intrusa", "El Indigno", "Historia de Rosendo Juárez", "Juan Muraña", "El Toro Duelo", "El Informe de Brodie"; El libro de arena: "La Secta de los Treinta"; ElAleplr. "El Inmortal", "Los Teólogos", "Historia del Guerrero y la Cautiva", "La Busca de Averroes"; Historias déla Eternidad. "Historia de la eternidad", "Las Kenningar", "La Metáfora", "La Doctrina de los Ciclos", "El Tiempo Circular", Las Traducciones de Las Mil y Una Noches", "El Doctor Mardrus", "Enno Littmann", "Dos Notas"; Otras inquicisiones. "Las Alarmas del Doctor Américo Castro", "Quevedo", "Magias Parciales del Quijote", etc.

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signifier. Thus, the signifier always presents itself as an autonomous chain in the Lacanian sense; that is, the autonomy of the signifying chain from the signified, or "the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" (1966: 260).14 The well known Saussureaian formulation of the sign = signifier/signified and its binary opposition is radically challenged by Borges all through his work. In "El informe de Brodie" we read: La palabra nrz, por ejemplo, sugiere la dispersión o las manchas; puede significar el cielo estrellado, un leopardo, una bandada de aves, la viruela, lo salpicado, el acto de desparramar o la fuga que sigue a la derrota. Hrl, en cambio, indica lo apretado o lo denso; puede significar la tribu, un tronco, una piedra, un montón de piedras, el hecho de apilarlas, el congreso de los cuatro hechiceros, la unión camal y un bosque. Pronunciada de otra manera o con otros visajes, cada palabra puede tener un sentido contrario. No nos maravillemos con exceso; en nuestra lengua, el verbo to cleavepor hendir y adherir. Por supuesto, no hay oraciones, ni siquiera frases truncas. (Borges 1970: 117)

According to Borges, the Yahoos had a writing system, but this system was not governed by the sign conventions. On the contrary, the arbitrariness of the sign is not in relation to the referent of the thing but to the signified itself: nrz and hrl correspond to the Derridian floating signifier and to the Lacanian signified constantly sliding under the signifier. Each one of them [nrz ox hrl\ is potentially invested with infinite signifieds, since each follows the Pearcean logic of continually becoming new signifers. This is why nrz, may signify spots or a starry sky and hri, a tribe or a heap of stones. Furthermore, Borges even unsettles the very logos, presence and phonation (living speech) by breaking the relationship between signifier/signified (which since Plato onwards, has been the guarantor of truth, that is, the spoken word is posited in close proximity to thought and meaning): "[...] pronunciada de otra manera o con otros visajes, cada palabra puede tener un sentido contrario" (Borges 1970: 117). The meaning is always trace, and the sign must be the unity of a heterogeneity, since the signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not in itself a signifier, a trace-, in any case its meaning, is constituted by its relationship with a possible trace (Derrida 1974: 18). In "El informe de Brodie" we read: Confirman esta conjetura las inscripciones que he descubierto en la cumbre de la meseta y cuyos caracteres, que se asemejan a las runas que nuestros mayores grababan, ya no se dejan descifrar por la tribu. Es como si ésta hubiera olvidado el lenguaje escrito y sólo le quedara el oral. (Borges 1970: 117)

The fact that the characters "are no longer within the tribe's capacity to decipher" is due to the sliding of the signified under the signifier to the point that the written language is forgotten, leaving behind only the orality or presence without the trace.

14

My translation.

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In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Borges performes the instability of the signified with respect to the signifier, leaving only a chain of signifiers with no precise signified: the production of meaning becomes erratic; the floating signifier may produce a plurality of meaning similar to the /z/zand to the hrl in "El informe de Brodie", or the hörn in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". In this story (1956: 28-29) Borges clearly shows his position with respect to the nature of the sign when he says that: [...] los hrönir te segundo y de tercer grado - los hrönirderivados de otro hrön, los hrönir derivados del hrön de un hörn - exageran las aberraciones del inicial; los de quinto son casi uniformes; los del noveno se confunden con los de segundo; en los de undécimo hay una pureza que los originales no tienen. El proceso es periódico; el hrön de duodécimo grado ya empieza a decaer. Más extraño y más puro que todo hrön es a veces el ur. la cosa producida por sugestión, el objeto aducido por la esperanza.

Borges succeeded not only in utterly obliterating the signified, but also in imploding the referent, since at the end of the process, the original hrön is left behind and only its simulation remains. The more the hrön distances itself from its source, the more perfect it becomes, replacing the "real" with a perfect fake. The chain of signifiers does not lead, as is the case witht Lacan, to the un-packing and discovery of the master signifier where the first alienation and lack are inscribed. Instead, in Borges, it leads away from the source towards an enactment of the sign without referent, evoked by hope, by floating signifiers: there is no symbol or sign, but only the becoming-sign of the symbol (Derrida 1974: 47). At the end, Borges seems to be saying that we are only left with truncated signs, since, as Derrida has indicated, There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself iprope, proprius). The represented is always a representamen. (1974: 4950)

The non self-identity of the signified is encapsulated by the incessant sliding: there is no difference, then, between signifier/signified. 15 At the same time it marks the gap, différance, preceeding speech, or rather the writing in speech, where speech is another form of writing. In "El Inmortal" Borges (1989: 22) clearly suggests that writing is not writing and he gives the following evidence when he discovers the man, who has followed him to the City of the Immortals, writing on the sand:

15

According to Derrida, "[...] nothing escapes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing?. (1974: 22-23)

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Cuando salí del último sótano, lo encontré en la boca de la caverna. Estaba tirado en la arena, donde trazaba torpemente y borraba una hilera de signos, que eran como las letras de los sueños, que uno está a punto de entender y luego se juntan. Al principio, creí que se trataba de una escritura bárbara; después vi que es absurdo imaginar que hombres que no llegaron a la palabra lleguen a la escritura.

This text illustrates in all its complexity the basic contradictions of the logos and presence. As we know far too well, from Plato onwards, and particularly in Saussureaian linguistics, writing and/or the phonic symbolization is only an exteriority whose function is to translate phonation which is truth, presence, phone. Thus, writing is always exteriority and speech, interiority. "El Inmortal", however, not only exposes that writing is not exteriority but also not necessary symbolic, since it is founded not on différence but on différance. If we follow this logic of exteriority, then phonation, speech and presence are also exteriority since they represent thought and in turn they are also represented by signs. Of little importance is the nature the sing's substance of the expression. Whether phonic or graphic, it is always writing. What Borges also indicates in the texts I have quoted is that what is always discovered is the trace - in one word the arche-writing, as practiced by the man in the sands of the City of the Immortals.16 My reading of Borges/Derrida, I hope, has simply shown the obvious: the extraordinary affinity between two writers separated in time and space but not in thought. Derrida shows, that presence and phonocentrism is a product of over two and half thousand years of Western metaphysics governed by the logos by deconstructing painstakingly and unremittingly the authors of presence such as Plato and his pharmakon, Rousseau and his supplément, and Saussure and his sign. Borges in turn inhabits the trace, différance, attempting to dwell outside the Western logos and produces an archewriting by inhabiting the whole of literature and of all epochs. If Plato is the father of presence and the logos, Borges is the grandfather of arche-writing and cartography. To conclude, let us end where we started: I believe that generalized writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. (Derrida: 1974: 55)

16

Derrida states regarding this aspect that: [...] the peoples said to be "without writing" lack only a certain type of writing. To refuse the name of writing to this or that technique of consignment is the "ethnocentrism that best defines the prescientific vision of man'' and at the same time results in the fact that "in many human groups, the only word by which the members designate their ethnic group is the word 'man'". (1974: 83-84)

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El tratado Sefer Yetsirah (Libro de la Formación), redactado en Siria o en Palestina hacia el siglo VI, revela que Jehová de los Ejércitos, Dios de Israel y Dios Todopoderoso, creó el universo mediante los números cardinales que van del uno al diez y las ventidós letras del alfabeto. Que los números sean instrumentos o elementos de la Creación es dogma de Pitágoras y de Jámblico, que las letras lo sean es claro indicio del nuevo culto de la escritura. El segundo párrafo del segundo capítulo reza: "Veintidós letras fundamentales: Dios las dibujó, las grabó, las combinó, las pesó, las permutó, y con ellas produjo todo lo que es y todo lo que será." Luego se revela qué letra tiene poder sobre el aire, y cuál sobre la sabiduría, [...]. (Borges, "Del culto de los libros" 1989c: 180-181)

BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS Borges, Jorge Luis. (1956). Ficciones. Buenos Aires. — . (1962). Ficciones. trans, and introd. Anthony Kerrigan. New York. -—. (1964). Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. A. Donald Yates/J. E. Irby (eds.). New York. — . (1970). El informe de Brodie e Historia universal de la infamia. Buenos Aires. — . (1972). DoctorBrodie'sReport, trans. Norman Thorns Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author. New York. -—. (1972a). El hacedor. Madrid, Buenos Aires. -—. (1975). El libro de arena. Buenos Aires. — . (1979). Historia universal de la infamia. Madrid. — . (1989). ElAleph. Buenos Aires. — . (1989a). Discusión. Buenos Aires. — . (1989b). Historia de la eternidad. Buenos Aires. — . (1989c). Other Inquisitions, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, introd. J. E. Irby. Austin.

CRITICAL WORKS Alazraki, Jaime. (1967). "Borges y el problema del estilo", in: Revista Hispánica Moderna, 33: 204-215. — . (1968). La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges. Madrid. — . (1971). "Tlón y Asterión: Anverso y reverso de una epistemología", in: Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana, 1, 2: 21-33. — . (1972). "Borges and the New Latin American Novel", in: TriQuarterly, 25: 366398. — . (1975). "Borges, or Style as an Invisible Worker", in: Style, 9, 3 (Summer): 320-334. — . (1977). Versiones, Inversiones, Reversiones. Madrid.

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— . (1988). Borges and the Kabbalah and other Essays on his Fiction and Poetry. New York. — . (1988a). "Borges: entre la modernidad y la postmodernidad", in: Revista Hispánica Moderna, 41, 2: 175-179. Baudrillard, Jean. (1983). Simulacres et Simulation. Paris. Derrida, Jacques. (1974). Of Grammatology. trans, and preface Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, London. — . (1981). Dissemination, trans., introd. and additional notes Barbara Johnson. Chicago. Foucault, Michel. (1966). Les mots et les choses. Paris. González Echeverría, Roberto. (1983). "BdeORridaGES (Borges y Derrida)", in: idem. Isla a su vuelo fugitiva. Ensayos críticos sobre literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid, pp. 205-215. Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Écrits I. Paris. Rodríguez, Mario. (1979). "Borges y Derrida", in: Revista Chilena de Literatura, 13: 77-91. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. (1972). "Borges, the Reader as Writer", in: TriQuarterly, 25 (Fall): 102-143. — . (1990). "Borges and Derrida: Apothecaries", in: Edna Aizenberg. (ed.) Borges and His Successors. The Borgian Impact on Literature and the Arts. Columbia, London, pp. 128-138. Toro, Alfonso de. (1990). "Postmodernidad y Latinoamérica (con un modelo para la narrativa postmoderna)", in: Acta Literaria, 15: 71-99. — . (1992). "El productor 'rizomórfico' y el lector como 'dectective literario': la aventura de los signos o la postmodernidad del discurso borgesiano", in: Karl Alfred Blüher/Alfonso de Toro (eds.). Variaciones interpretativas sobre sus procedimientos literarios y bases epistemológicas. Frankfurt (on the Main), pp. 145184. — . (1994). "Borges y la 'simulación rizomática dirigida': percepción y objetivación de los signos", in: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 28: 235-266. — . (1994a). "Die Wirklichkeit als Reise durch die Zeichen: Cervantes, Borges und Foucault", in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 39, 2: 243-259. — . (1995). "Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges: The Periphery in the Centre, the Periphery as the Centre, the Centre of the Periphery", in: Fernando de Toro/Alfonso de Toro. (eds.). Borders and Margins: Post-Colonialism andPost-Modemism. Frankfurt (on the Main), pp. 11-43. Toro, Fernando de. (1999). "Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times", in: Fernando de Toro (ed.). Explorations on Post-Theory. Toward a Third Space. Frankfurt (on the Main), pp. 9-23.

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Alfonso de Toro Ibero-American Research Center Institute of Romance Languages and Literature University of Leipzig BORGES/DERRIDA/FOUCAULT: PHARMAKEUS/HETEROTOPIA OR BEYOND LITERATURE ('hors-littérature0: WRITING, PHANTOMS, SIMULACRA, MASKS, THE CARNIVAL AND ... ATLÔN/TLÔN, YKVA/UQBAR, HLAER, JANGR, HRÔN(N)/ HRÔNIR, UR AND OTHER FIGURES Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos. Mejor procedimiento es simular que esos libros ya existen y ofrecer un resumen, un comentario. [...] Más razonable, más inepto, más haragán, he preferido la escritura de notas sobre libros imaginarios. Estas son Tlón, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius / el Examen de la Obra de Herbert Quain. ("Tlón, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius",OC, I: 429)1 Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables (mirrors and fatherhood are hateful) porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan, (ibid: 432) En sus remotas páginas está escrito que los animales se dividen en (a) pertenecientes al Emperador, (b) embalsamados, (c) amaestrados, (d) lechones, (e) sirenas, (f) fabulosos, (g) perros sueltos, (h) incluidos en esta clasificación, (i) que se agitan como locos, (j) innumerables, (k) dibujados con un pincel finísimo de pelo de camello, (1) etcétera, (m) que acaban de romper el jarrón, (n) que de lejos parecen moscas. ("El idioma analítico de John Wilkins", OC, I: 708) Las dos teologías, sin embargo no coinciden íntegramente; la del griego [Homero/La Odisea] corresponde a la época de la palabra oral, y la del francés [Mallarmé], a una época de la palabra escrita. En una se habla de contar y en otra de libros. [...] [...] y en el Fedronarró [Platón] una fábula egipcia contra la escritura (cuyo hábito hace que la gente descuide el ejercicio de la memoria y dependa de símbolos), y dijo que los libros son como las figuras pintadas, "que parecen vivas, pero no contestan una palabra y las preguntas que les hacen". [...]

1

"Prólogo" to "El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", in: Ficciones. All citations are from Obras Completas (= OC).

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ALFONSO DE TORO Lo más prudente es no escribir sino aprender y enseñar de viva voz, porque lo escrito queda. ("Del culto de los libros",OC, I: 713) Me dijo que su libro se llamaba el Libro de Arena porque ni el libro ni la arena tienen ni principio ni fin. [...] - No puede ser, pero es. El número de páginas de este libro es exactamente infinito. Ninguna es la primera; ninguna, la última. No sé por qué están numeradas de ese modo arbitrario. Acaso para dar a entender que los términos de una serie infinita admiten cualquier número. ("El Libro de Arena", OC, II: 69) Son el irresponsable juego de un tímido que no se animó a escribir cuentos y que se distrajo en falsear y tergiversar (sin justifícación estética alguna vez) ajenas historias [...] Los doctores del Gran Vehículo enseñan que lo esencial del universo es la vacuidad. Tienen razón en lo referente a esa mínima parte del universo que es este libro. Patíbulos y piratas lo pueblan y la palabra infamia aturde en el título, pero bajo los tumultos no hay nada. No es otra cosa que apariencia, que una superfìcie de imágenes; por eso mismo puede acaso agradar. El hombre que lo ejecutó era asaz desdichado, pero se entretuvo escribiéndolo; ojalá algún reflejo de aquel placer alcance a los lectores. ("Prólogo" to the édition of 1954 of Historia universal de una infamia, OC, I: 291) La gêne qui fait rire quand on lit Borges est apparentée sans doute au profond malaise de ceux dont le langage est ruiné: avoir perdu le "commun " du lieu et du nom. Atopie, aphasie. (Foucault 1966: 10) Nous savons, disions-nous plus haut. Or nous savons ici quelque chose qui n'est plus rien, et d'un savoir dont la forme ne se laisse plus reconnaître sous ce vieux titre. Le traitement de la paléonymie n'est plus ici une prise de conscience, une reprise de connaissance. (Derrida 1972: 30)

0.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

This paper originates from two observations I made in another paper entitled "Überlegungen zur Textsorte 'Fantastik' oder Borges und die Negation des Fantastischen. Rhizomatische Simulation, 'dirigierter Zufall' und semiotisches Skandalon" (1998: 1174). There, when asking about the arche (origin), the eschaton (final reasons or things) and the telos (finality) in Borges' writing, I responded with yet another question: we should ask ourselves why Borges simulates. I found the answer at the epistemological level, that is, beyond literature, in the field of pure signs with the meaning of pure as postulated by Mallarmé, that is, a purity that does not lead to metaphysics, but to the signs' most absolute self-referentiality in a present without time in the world as absolute sign. I added that Borges goes far beyond the literary in as much as he attains the limit of what is thinkable, that is, he formulates the unthinkable. For instance, in "El idioma analitico de John Wilkins", a Chinese Encyclopedia offers a peculiar classification of animals, by liberating the signs from their established signifieds and signifers

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and by assigning them mythical and magical signifiers coupled with a primary vagueness which elicit through the sign a mythical revelation" (this is the case in "Undr" or in "La escritura del dios"). In the same paper, referring to Foucault, I wrote about the "monstrosity of Borges' discourse, about the destruction of the logos and of its consequences, about the terror when facing the unintelligibility of writing, when facing the unthinkable", when facing the phantom, the absence where I place the fantastic in Borges' discourse. I say this even though I seriously question the relevance of such a term, since the Borgesian fantastic is radically different from the so called 'fantastic genre' ? These observations, in particular the one regarding the passage of Borges 'beyond writing', "alarmed" one reader who demanded that I should clearly indicate what exactly I meant by this 'beyond'. On that occasion, I admit, I was unable to respond with the required precision. However, what became clear to me was that, since I began writing about Borges' work, I have not really been writing about the mimetic or anti-mimetic problem in Borges, but about the problem of presence and absence in writing. This 'beyond' refers precisely to the 'phantom absence' of Borges' writing; it refers to the abyss that I have elsewhere called 'rhizomatic guided randomness' ('azar dirigido rizomático') or 'rhizomatic directed simulation' ('simulación dirigida rizomática'). This is the problem of absence, much discussed by Derrida (1972) in his deconstruction/dissemination theory, related to Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic theory (1976) and to Baudrillard's simulation theory (1980). It is the following question that the present paper wishes to grapple with: the question of the description and formulation of Borges' absence in writing through writing. As in Derrida's theory of deconstruction,3 Borges thematizes, problematizes and attempts to perlaborate the problem of Western dualism, the "crisis of the versus" (Mallarmé: Mimique, Igitui), which includes the oppositions between signifier and signified, language and speech, orality and the writing of logical-hierarchic relations, and also the relation between the referent and mimesis, writing's self-referentiality, the negation of an origin, the proliferation of the trace through insemination and dissemination, the proliferation of rhizo-

2

If one decides to continue using the term 'fantastic' to refer to Borges' literature, then this term, in this case, would refer to the negation of the fantastic, the negation of the duality or opposition between the 'real' and the 'fantastic'. The 'real' would then be a consequence of the imagination, of the perception of self-referential signs. In order to perceive the world, it must first become signs, which do not have the function to confirm or explain the world, but only to make possible its perception. The 'fantastic' could be defined as the world as sign. According to Hager, "To achieve the fantastic Borges did not resort to griffins, trolls, and unicorns [...], but turned topoi of metaphysics such as life as a dream, the many and One, and the world as Text" (1985: 231).

3

Derrida's presence in this article is central. I assume that Derrida's work is sufficiently known so that I might avoid quoting him constantly. Those acquainted with Derrida's work will recognize when it is present in my writing and when it is not.

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made writing, re-doubling, the signifier/signified's deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the lack of archë, eschaton and telos, and its recovery as journey, contamination and search. My engagement with Borges as a reader dates back many years, but my boldness as an academic who studies Borges is relatively recent, and my writing about Borges work is even more recent. In any event, Borges has always intrigued me: his writing endured, like a thorn, like a black hole, as an uncomfortable spot; I went about my academic work with a sense of guilt, with a feeling that I was avoiding a strange figure. My uneasiness, my sense of defeat and anguish increased when, by the mid1970s, I read, although superficially, some of Derrida's work, specifically Delagrammatologie (1967) and La Dissémination (1972), and, most important, La pharmacie de Platan, whose third chapter quotes Borges' "La Esfera de Pascal" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". At this time I also came across a great book which became a traveller companion throughout all these years: Foucault's Les mots et les choses (1966). Both of these authors share a certain density, a cryptic language, and are highly recurrent and deconstructivist. They also share the status of being suspected and 'feared' by many established literary theorists, and perhaps, according to some, for a good reason. In these works, both authors refer to Borges, and the "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins" apparently constitutes the very starting point of the Les mots et le choses. Indeed, these connections between Borges and Foucault and Borges and Derrida had an effect on me. Perhaps, Borges would say that with this recognition "I began to understand Borges, I began to understand Foucault and Derrida, and then I began to understand Borges". However, my effort did not go any further. In 1989, ten years later, I entered the debate on Post-Modernity and conducted a seminar at the Universität Kiel in Germany on "Borges' Novellen: Moderne oder Postmoderne?" I finished my book Von den Ähnlichkeiten und Differenzen, whose point of departure was Foucault, and I wrote my very first article on Borges for a lecture tour in Latin America in the Fall of 1989. It is from this point that my article "El productor 'rizomórfico' y el lector como 'detective literario': la aventura de los signos o la postmodernidad del discurso borgesiano (intertextualidad-palimpsesto-rizoma-deconstrucción)" originated and it was published in 1992. In 1991 I conducted another seminar at the Universität Hamburg on "La obra narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges", which resulted in my second article on Borges: "Borges y la 'simulación rizomática dirigida': percepción y objetivación de los signos", published in 1994", and in which I developed a close relationship with Baudrillard's (1980) and Deleuze/Guattari's (1976) work. I also had the opportunity to present and discuss this article in Latin America, particularly in Puerto Rico, where a very lively debate developed. The last missing link of this enterprise was constituted by my article "Die Wirklichkeit als Reise durch die Zeichen: Cervantes, Borges und Foucault" (1994). This article was triggered by the following question: What is the relation between Borges and Cervantes, between Foucault and Cervantes, and what was the relation to Borges I had established in my 4

See A. de Toro (1994: 5-32).

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book Von den Ähnlichkeiten und Differenzen! In these various works I found a language that allowed me to feel comfortable with Borges, dissembling the uneasiness mentioned above. However, still lingering was a disquietude regarding Derrida, and I became even more anxious after conducting a seminar at the university of Leipzig about "Jorge Luis Borges und die Postmoderne", after a lecture on Borges and the fantastic (mentioned above), and after a seminar conducted at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico in September 1995. In this last seminar I became aware for the first time of something I had written in my article on the fantastic and I recalled that this 'something' was not clear to the students at the Universidad Iberoamericana. I have narrated this experience of my readings of Borges' works not so much to show the process through which I came to write the present article, since this type of experience is shared by many of us, but rather to relate a Gestalt, the discovery of Borges' thinking, the epistemological interrelation of what may or may not be Borges' writing: the discovery of a phantom; the possibility to bridge an abyss; the possibility to explore the very foundation of Borges' postmodern thinking and to uncover Borges' contribution to the French nouveau romanciers who have extensively 'borrowed' from Borges, but who rarely acknowledge his influence. Derrida's philosophy of dissemination, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome or Baudrillard's simulation are part and parcel of Borges' thinking. It is not a question of Borges' being a postmodern thinker avant la lettre, but rather the first to inhabit, live and executed it at least thirty years before postmodern thought entered the West. After reading Rodriguez Monegal's article entitled "Borges and Derrida" (1985/1990), I was able to confirm a series of coincidences between his experience and mine regarding the relation between Borges and Derrida and the statement that Borges had already dealt with all the issues that Derrida develops in a rather dense and cryptic manner. Rodriguez Monegal asserts: I could not understand why he took so long in arriving at the same luminous perspectives which Borges had opened up years earlier. His famed "deconstruction" [...] was all too familiar to me: I had experienced it in Borges avant la lettre. (1985/1990: 128)

Here, I found confirmation of my suspicion that Derrida's philosophy is intimately related to Borges' thinking and writing, clearly evident in Derrida's Hors livre in Dissémination, and throughout his work. A question comes to mind immediately: why has Derrida not paid the same close attention to Borges that he has paid, for instance, to Plato, Hegel, Mallarmé or Sollers5 (this is a question one may also ask to Genette's Palimpsests), since he came in contact with him in the mid-1960s?6

5

It is sufficient to read Rodriguez Monegal (1985/1990: 129-133) to realize how well Derrida knows Borges' work. Regarding this point, see Barbara Johnson's English translation of Dissémination and the articles by Mario Rodriguez and Roberto González Echevarría cited by Rodriguez Monegal.

6

See his article in L'Heme (1964: 223-227).

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In another article (1994: 15), I pointed out that Borges' discourse shatters the coherence of language, the lexical structures are broken into linguistic atoms that rejoin and disjoin themselves, atoms that lack a name and an identity and are found in discontinuous groups. At the very instant that a given structure is evoked in Borges'work, it disintegrates, it snaps, since it has no foundation to sustain it. This movement is endless and keeps obliterating likeness, disseminating identities, crushing commonalities which barely begin to emerge. And thus it continues an ad libitum, ad regressus movement towards nothingness; a movement in which all that remains are fascination, vertigo, anxiety, and emptiness.7 We are up against a type of thinking and writing without space and time: a rhizomatic thinking, simulacrum ad libitum: Estaba tirado en la arena, donde trazaba torpemente y borraba una hilera de signos, que eran como las letras de los sueños, que uno está a punto de entender y luego se juntan. 0OC; I: 538-540)

My interest is neither in exposing Derrida's 'debt' to Borges (or for that matter, that of Foucault or De Man), nor in describing a converging thinking (this, in fact, has already been done by authors such as Lamaitre 1977; Rodriguez 1979; González Echevarría 1983; Rodríguez Monegal; 1985/1990; Levine 1990; O'Sullivan 1990; Rapaport 1990, and, in this book, F. de Toro in a much better way that I could manage here). Rather, my goal is to describe the absence I detect in my reading of Borges' work. In spite of his writing of some very concrete texts, Borges always unravels them by a radical deconstruction, dissemination and simulation of writing and of Western thought. And this is also part and parcel of Derrida's theory of dissemination. Here I read Borges from/with Derrida, and Derrida from/with Borges: I project/smear/ cover/erase/strike out one with the other and I submerge my own text in their texts. That is to say, I am not engaged in "bibliographical research", either in the "search of sources" or in an "arqueology" which could lead us to an origin and/or to a harmonic unity. My interest is to trace how Borges uses references, how he refers, grafts writing, how he appropriates the tradition in such a manner that the boundary between past and present writing is attenuated. Thus his texts are those written by him and by others, and vice-versa. In this context, Rodriguez Monegal speaks of Borges' writing as a ritual-symbolic related to his father's death. I wonder if thisritual-symbolicrelation may be connected to the gnostic sophism which states that "Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables [mirrors and fatherhood are abominable] porque lo multiplican y 1o divulgan [because 7

According to Merrel (1988: 54): The Work of Borges and other contemporary writers such as John Barth, Beckett, Pirandello and Nabokov, evidence Godelian qualities: their narrative, in the manner of the liar paradox, is repeatedly self negating, it refers self referentially to that of which it is composed, and it often implies vicious circularity or infinite regress.

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they multiply and extend]" ("Tlòn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", OC, I: 432).8 What these sophisms suggest to me is the death of mimesis, that is, of intertextuality and the fantastic as mimesis, which is at the same time the resistence to the re-memory. I believe that the starting point of those scholars whose work is inspired by Lacan and Derrida, such as Rodriguez Monegal (1985/1990) and Levine (1990), with respect to memory, has led, on the one hand, to foregrounding of biographical and psychological aspects, and, on the other, to an emphasis on writing and poetological considerations. By this I do not wish to deny the possible relation between the death of Borges' father, Borges' accident in 1938, and the change that his writing experienced, including his devotion to what has been called fantastic literature. However, in my opinion, I believe that it is more appropriate, particularly when dealing with Borges, to consider his writing as a product of his own understanding of literature, of the concept of literature, by not distinguishing between writing, literature, fiction and reality. This is what actually and definitely determines the alleged change, a change already explicit in his work right from the very beginning (see Alazraki 1990: 99-108). One last observation: My point of departure is a hypothesis about Borges' work and Derrida's work on Plato and Mallarmé regarding their writing practices. However, I think that both Derrida and I are addressing the same question: writing.

1.

THE ELIMINATION OF THE MIMESIS

My interest in Borges in all my previous work on him since 1989 (1990, 1991, 1991a, 1992/21995, 1992a, 1994, 1994a, 1995, 1995a, 1996, 1996a, 1998) and to date, has hinged in showing that Borges creates a new literary paradigm and a new thinking in the twentieth century, and that he is, at least, one of its major forerunners. This new paradigm is present in two intellectual positions or two literary conceptions: the first one consists in Borges' understanding of literary activity not as a 'mimesis of reality', and this is why his literature has nothing to do with literary realism.9 Borges apparently postulates 'literary mimesis', understood as a game with literary references, within a network of relations that at first appears as intertextuality. Quoting the topic opposition between 'reality vs fiction' Borges then quotes '"reality of fiction' vs 'mimesis of fiction'", resulting in the opposition '"mimesis of fiction' vs 'pseudomimesis of fiction'". In this manner, Borges not only makes reality a sign, but he also gets rid of the ontological category of reality, of the fantastic (which always demands the relation 'reality vs fiction'), of intertextuality. If Borges refers at all, he refers to

8

See "Los espejos abominables" (OC\ I: 327), and "Los espejos velados" (OC, I: 786).

9

Obviously I am referring to works such as Discusión (1932), Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935). Historia de la eternidad (1936), Ficciones (\9