Borges - Selected Non-Fictions

SELECTED NON-FICTIONS SELECTED NON-FICTIONSJorge Luis BorgesEDITED BY
Eliot We
bergerTRANSLATED BY Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot WeinbergerVIKING
VIKING Published by the Penguin G roup Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,New
Y ork, New Y ork 10014, U.S.A.Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ,
EnglandPenguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, AustraliaPenguin Books
Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.)
Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New ZealandPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Of
ces: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, EnglandFirst p ublished in 1999 by Viking Penguin, a
member of Penguin Putnam Inc.1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2Cop yright(C) Maria Kodama, 1999
Translation and notes cop yright(C) Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999 All rights reserved
Some of the selections in this volume were p ublished in Obras Comp letas (four
volumes), Emece Editores, Buenos Aires. Selections from Otras lnquisiciones are
p ublished by arrangement with the University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas.
"Blindness" was rst p ublished in Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights. Translation
cop yright(C) 1984 by Eliot Weinberger. Rep rinted by p ermission of New Directions
Publishing Corp .LIBRARY OF CONG RESS CATALOG ING -IN-PUBLICATION DATABorges, Jorge
Luis, 1899-1986.[Essays. English. Selections] Selected non ctions I Jorge Luis
Borges ; edited by Eliot Weinberger ; translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill
Levine and Eliot Weinberger. p . em.ISBN o-670-84947-21. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-
1986-Translations into English.I. Weinberger, Eliot. II. T itle.PQ7797.B635A22 1999
864-dc21 99-12386T his book is p rinted on acid-free p ap er.8Printed in the United
States of America Set in MinionDesigned by Francesca BelangerWithout limiting the
rights under cop yright reserved above, no p art of this p ublication may be
rep roduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, p hotocop ying, recording or
otherwise), without the p rior written p ermission of both the cop y- right owner and
the above p ublisher of this book. ContentsA Note on This Edition XI I. EARLY
WRITING S 1922-1928 1The Nothingness of Personality 3 A er Images 10 Joyce's Ulysses
12 A History of Angels 16 Verbiage for Poems 20 A Profession of Literary Faith 23
Literary Pleasure 28 An Investigation of the Word 3241The Perp etual Race ofAchilles
and the Tortoise 43 The Duration of Hell 48 The Sup erstitious Ethics of the Reader
52 Our Inabilities 56 The Postulation of Reality 59 A Defense of Basilides the
False 65 The Homeric Versions 69 Narrative Art and Magic 75 A Defense ofthe
Kabbalah 83 The Art ofVerbal Abuse 87 The Translators of The Thousand and One
Nights 92 I, a Jew 110 VI CONTENTSThe Labyrinths of the Detective Story and
Chesterton 112 The Doctrine of Cycles 115 A History of Eternity 123FILM REVIEWS AND
CRITICISM 140 The Cinematograp h, the Biograp h 140 Films 143 Street Scene 145
KingKong 146TheInformer 147 Two Films ( Crime and Punishment; The Thirty-nine
Step s) 148III. WRITING S FOR EL HOG AR (HOME)MAG AZINE 1936-1939 153Ramon Llull's
Thinking Machine 155 When Fiction Lives in Fiction 160CAPSULE BIOG RAPHIES 163 Isaac
Babel 163 Ernest Bramah 164 Benedetto Croce 165 Theodore Dreiser 166 T. S. Eliot
167 Will James 168 Liam O'Flaherty 169 Oswald Sp engler 170 Paul Valery 171 S. S.
Van Dine 172 Virginia Woolf 173BooK REVIEWS AND NOTES 175 G ustav Meyrink, Der Engel
vom Westlichen Fenster 175 Alan Pryce-Jones, Private Op inion 175 Louis G olding, The
Pursuer 176 Lord Halifax's G host Book 177The Petri ed Forest149 Wells, the
Visionary 150CONTENTS ?IWilliam Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 178 G ustafJanson,
G ubbenKommer 179 Aldous Huxley, Stories, Essays and Poems 180 Rabindranath Tagore,
Collected Poems and Plays 180 Ellery Queen, The Door Between 181 Sir William
Barrett, Personality Survives Death 182 Wol am Eberhard, tr., Chinese Fairy Tales
and Folk Tales 182 The Literary Life: Marinetti 183 Richard Hull, Excellen t
Intentions 184 Meadows Taylor, The Confessions ofa Thug 185 William Faulkner, The
Unvanquished 186 Lady Murasaki, The Tale of G enji 186 Lord Dunsany, Patches
ofSunlight 187 Two Fantasy Novels 189 The Literary Life: Oliver G ogarty 190 An
English Version of the Oldest Songs in the World 190 an G ri ths, OfCourse,
Vitelli! 191 A G randiose Manifesto from Breton 191 H. G . Wells' Latest Novel 193 E.
S. Pankhurst, Delp hos, or the Future ofInternational Language 194 Joyce's Latest
Novel 195 The Literary Life: The Dionne Quints 196IV. 1937-1945N OTES ON G ERMANY &
THEA Pedagogy of HatredA Disturbing Exp ositionAn Essay on NeutralityDe nition of a
G ermanop hile 203 1941 206 Two Books 207 A Comment on August 23, 1944 210 A Note on
the Peace 212The Total Library 214 Time and J. W. Dunne 217WAR 199 199 200 202197
VIIICO NTE NTS220 222 225PROLOG UES 243 Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention ofMorel
243 Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener 245 HenryJames,
TheAbasementoftheNorthmores 247BooK REviEws 249 Edward Kasner & James Newman,
Mathematics and the Imagination 249 Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kip ling:A Study in
Literature and Political Ideas 250 Arthur Waley, Monkey 252 Leslie Weatherhead, A
er Death 254FILM REVIEWS AND CRI TICIS M 257 Two Films (Sabotage; Los muchachos de
antes) 257 An Overwhelming Film ( Citizen Kane) 258 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Transformed 259 Two Films (Now Voyager; Nightmare) 261 On Dubbing 262V. NINE
DANTESQUE ESSAY S 1945-1951Prologue 267 The Noble Castle of the Fourth Canto 272 The
False Problem of Ugolino 277 The Last Voyage of Ulysses 280 The Pitying Torturer
284 Dante and the Anglo-Saxon Visionaries 287 Purgatorio I, 13 292 The Simurgh and
the Eagle 294A Fragment on JoyceThe Creation and P. H. G osseCircular TimeJohn
Wilkins' Analytical Language 229 On Literary Descrip tion 233 On William Beckford's
Vathek 236 Coleridge's Flower 240 VI. 1946-1955307CO N TE N T SThe Meeting in a
Dream 298 Beatrice's Last Smil? 302Our Poor Individualism 309 The Paradox
ofAp ollinaire 311On Oscar WildeA New Re tation of Time 317 Biathanatos 333 From
Allegories to NovelsFrom Someone to Nobody 341 The Wall and the Books 344
Personality and the BuddhaPascal's Sp here 351 The Innocence of LayamonOn the Cult
of Books 358 Kafka and His Precursors 363 The Enigma of Edward FitzG erald 366
Coleridge's DreamForms of a LegendThe Scandinavian DestinyThe Dialogues of Ascetic
and King 382 A Defense of Bouvard and Pecuchet 386 Flaubert and His Exemp lary
DestinyA History of the Tango 394 A History of the Echoes of a Name 405 Illusion
Comique 409PROLOG UES 411 Bret Harte, The Luck ofRoaring Camp and Other Sketches 411
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic inHistory, and Ralp h Waldo
Emerson, Rep resentative Men 413 Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles 418LECTURES
420 The Argentine Writer and Tradition 420 G erman Literature in the Age of Bach 427
314337354369 373 377347390X CONTENTSVII. DICTATIONS 1956-1986 435PROLOG UES 437
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, The Kap p a 437 Edward G ibbon, Pages ofHistory and Autobiograp hy
438 Catalog ofthe Exhibition Booksfrom Sp ain 444 Walt Whitman, Leaves ofG rass 445
Emanuel Swedenborg, Mystical Works 449LEC TURES 458 The Concep t of an Academy and
the Celts 458 The Enigma of Shakesp eare 463 Blindness 473 Immortality 483 The
Detective Story 491PROLOG UES TO THE LIBRARY OF BABEL soo The Library ofBabel soo
Franz Kafka, The Vulture 501 Jack London, The Concentric DeathsVilliers de l'Isle-
Adam, The G uest at the Last Banquets 505 P'u Sung-ling, The Tiger G uestCharles
Howard Hinton, Scienti c Romances soBPROLOG UES TO A PERSONAL LIBRARY 511 A Personal
Library 511 Prologue to the Collection 513 Julio Cortazar, Stories 514 The
Ap ocryp hal G osp els 515 H. G . Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man 516 Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Demons 517 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class 518 S0ren
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling 518 Virgil, The AeneidWilliam James, Varieties
ofReligious Exp erience;The Study ofHuman Nature 521No tes Index523 549503507519A
Note on This EditionJorge Luis Borges never wrote anything long, and so it is o en
assumed that he never wrote much. In fact, he was a man sworn to the virtue of
concision who couldn't stop writing. There are a thousand p ages of Borges' stories
(including the ones he wrote with Adolfo Bioy Casares), five or six hundred p ages
of p oetry, two dozen books of translations, and-to the matter at hand-thousands of
p ages of non- ction: some twelve hundred essays, p rologues, book reviews, lm
reviews, transcribed lectures, cap sule biogra- p hies, encyclop edia entries,
historical surveys, and short notes on p olitics and culture. The accumulation of so
many comp act writings makes their totality seem even more immense than the
collected works of a p rolific author of thick books.From this mountain-I avoid
the word labyrinth-of non- ction texts, much of it still uncollected in book form
in Sp anish, I have chosen 161: a fraction of the work. Two-thirds of these p ieces
have never ap p eared in En- glish before, and the rest have been newly translated
for this edition. (The initials of the translator follow each entry.) English-
language readers who associate Borges only with certain subjects (time, dreams, The
Thousand and One Nights, gauchos, nineteenth-century English and American litera-
ture . . .) may be amazed at the extent of his interests. Like the Alep h in his
famous story-the p oint in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view
everything in the world-Barges' unlimited curiosity and almost sup erhuman erudition
becomes, in the non- ction, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe. Where else
would one nd Lana Turner, David Hume, and the heresiarchs of exandria in a single
sentence?Those for whom Borges is the archetyp e of the detached and cerebral
metap hysician may be surp rised to nd his scandalous p olemics on Ar- gentina and
machismo, his p rincip led stand against the Fascism and anti- Semitism of the
Argentine bourgeoisie in the 1930s and 1940s, and hisXII A NOTE ON THIS EDITION
courageous attacks on the Peron dictatorship . Borges, the blind old man of the
p op ular image, was for years a movie critic. Borges, the recon- dite scholar, was a
regular contributor to the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies' Home Journal. He was
equally at home with Schop enhauer or Ellery Queen, King Kong or the Kabbalists,
Lady Murasaki or Erik the Red, Jack London, Plotinus, Orson Welles, Flaubert, the
Buddha, or the Dionne Quints. More exactly, they were at home with him. Borges is
both a decep - tively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a
universe that is a guide to Borges.In contrast to how much he wrote, Borges
p ublished very few collections of his essays, and the p ublishing history and
p resent state of these writings is indeed a labyrinth. In the 1920s, he released
three books that he later disowned and re sed to allow to be rep rinted in his
lifetime. There were another three between 1930 and 1936: two miscellanies and a
thematic book on the Argentine p ast, Evaristo Carriego. His next book of essays,
Other Inquisi- tions, came sixteen years later, in 1952, and includes less than
forty of the hundreds of non- ction p ieces he wrote during this p articularly p roli
c p e- riod. There were no more new books of non- ction for another twenty-odd
years. Quite late in his life, and continuing a er his death in 1986, a few ret-
rosp ective collections of his p rologues, lectures, and reviews were gathered. (For
a bibliograp hy, see the notes.)Borges was essentially un own outside of Argentina,
even among Sp anish-language readers, until the 1950s. As his fame grew, the four
unsup - p ressed books of essays began to go through various editions, and it was
Borges' custom to include a few recent works in the rep rints, while excluding or
reinstating others. Thus some of the essays in a rep rint of a book from 1930 could
be written as much as twenty- ve years later, and in a greatly changed style.The
Sp anish and French standard editions take, as the basis for their texts, the
contents of the last rep rint of each of these books. While this may make sense in
the case of an individual work revised over the years by its writer, for Borges it
creates an anachronistic jumble of styles and content. Worse, no one knows what to
do with the uncollected work. The ve thick volumes and over three thousand p ages
of the Sp anish Comp lete Works are arranged according to book p ublication, including
the late or p osthumous collections (such as Prologues, which sp ans over y years)
and ignore everything that was never p ublished in book form. (This is now being
corrected by a series of volumes called Recovered Texts. The rst to ap p ear, re-A
NOTE ON THIS EDITION XIIIcovering only the years 1919 to 1929, is over four hundred
p ages long.) The French Pleiade edition is based on the Sp anish Comp lete Works, but
adds some uncollected p ieces, oddly organized according to the magazines in which
they were p ublished. most a third of the texts here cannot be found in the
Comp lete Works.Because the individual books of essays were (with one excep tion) not
thematic and were essentially handy rep ositories for whatever Borges felt like
p ublishing at the time of their rep rinting, or were collections gathered decades
after the work was written, I have decided to ignore them as an organizing
p rincip le. (The p ublishing history of each essay, however, may be found in the
notes.) Instead, I have chosen a simp le chronological arrangement, according to
rst p ublication-the date is noted at the end of each text-which allows the reader
to see the evolution of Borges' style and the clusterings and revisions of his
concerns, and to p lace each p iece in its general historical moment. (I have,
however, used the nal version of each individual text, as some were slightly
revised over the years.) I have divided the book into seven sections, and
subdivided these by subgenre: essays, book reviews, lm criticism, lectures, and
p rologues (a p articularly Borgesian form: he wrote hundreds of them). Only one
section and one subsection are thematic: the Dante essays and the notes he wrote on
G ermany and World War II; these clearly belonged together. It is hop ed that this
arrangement will be comp letely straightforward for readers, although it is unique
for an edition of Borges.Part I (Early Writings) p resents eight essays from the
rst three books, which Borges disowned. Many feel that his self-criticism was
overly severe: the essays remain interesting in themselves, and as examp les both of
youth- fully exuberant, p reliminary investigations into subjects that would become
lifelong obsessions and of the early comp lex style he would simp li and re ne over
the decades.Part II (1929-1936) begins the "canonical" Borges, and is drawn om the
books of the early 1930s, as well as uncollected essays om that p eriod and his lm
criticism. Part III is taken from the hundreds of articles he wrote for the women's
magazine El Hagar [Home] every two weeks from 1936 to 1939. These include some of
his one-p age "Cap sule Biograp hies" of modern writers, the very short and o en
hilarious book reviews and notes, and two essays. G iven the sp ecial circumstances
under which they were written and his intended audience, these p ieces required a
sep arate section.Part IV (1937-1945) p icks up the chronology again and op ens with
XIV A NOTE ON THIS EDITIONBorges' short articles on G ermany, anti-Semitism, and the
war. It also includes essays (some of which were collected years later in Other
Inquisi- tions), p rologues, and further book and lm reviews. Part V is the
comp lete text of the remarkable Nine Dantesque Essays, written between 1945 and
1951, unp ublished in their entirety in Sp anish until 1982, and unknown in English.
Part VI (1946-1955) returns to the chronology with more essays that would ap p ear in
Other Inquisitions, essays that were included in the rep rints of the 1930s books or
never collected, p rologues, and two written lectures.In 1955, Borges lost his
sight. After that, he wrote no more essays as such, and fewer stories. He devoted
himself largely to p oetry, which he could comp ose in his head, and surveys of
top ics such as American, English, and medieval G ermanic literature, which he wrote
with collaborators. He did, however, write scores of p rologues to various books and
to all the volumes in the two series he edited at the end of his life, The
Library ofBabel, collections of fantastic tales, and A Personal Library, over
seventy of his favorite books.Before his blindness, Borges was so shy that, on
the few occasions when he was asked to lecture, he sat on the stage while someone
else read the text. In his last three decades, however, as his star rose and he was
invited all over the world, he evolved a new form that is still misleadingly given
the old la- bel "lecture." Closer p erhap s to p erformance art, these were
sp ontaneous monologues on given subjects. Relaxed and conversational, necessarily
less p erfect than the written essays, the lectures are, like the p rologues, a p ar-
ticularly Borgesian subgenre and delight.To emp hasize the orality of this late
work, I have given the title "Dicta- tions" to Part VII, which begins in 1956 a er
the loss of his sight and ends with his death in 1986. Five of the lectures are
p resented, and almost twenty of his p rologues, including some imp ortant longer ones
and some crystalline last thoughts on his readings."Fiction" and "non- ction" are
notoriously blurred boundaries in Borges' fiction, but not in his non-fiction. That
is, his ctions may o en resemble non-fiction, or include factual elements, but his
non- ctions never resemble fiction, or include information that is not
indep endently veri able. (The word non- ction, by the way, does not exist in
Sp anish, and Borges never used it, but essays seemed limiting or misleading for the
typ es of work contained here.)These writings have a few stylistic traits which
p erhap s should be sig-A NOTE ON THIS EDITION XVnaled in advance. The rst is the
Borges sentence. He ap p arently took to heart Henry James' dictum that the true
measure of civility was the p rop er use of the semicolon. Borges, p articularly when
he is comp iling lists that sp an centuries, has a p redilection for the endless
sentence with semicolons as milestones along the route. Previous translators have
tended to break these into short sentences that conform to the manuals of English
style; the translators here have left them intact.Second, Borges likes to quote
Latin, G erman, Italian, and French (but surp risingly, not English) sources in the
original language and almost never o ers a translation, even in the Dante essays
with their extensive citations. As an editor, I was torn between p reserving the
p olyglot nature of the texts and a less utop ian view of the foreign language skills
of many contemp orary readers. My comp romise was to include both the original and a
translation of all quotations and book titles that are essential for understanding
the text at that moment, but to leave relatively unimp ortant things untranslated-
for examp le, a book title that one can easily deduce is a G erman study of Buddhism.
All the editorial translations are contained within square brackets [ ] ; Borges'
rare translations are in p arentheses.Third, and most imp ortant, are the
rep etitions. Readers will immediately notice that the same p hrases, sentences,
p aragrap hs and on one occasion, p ages recur throughout the book. The rst reaction
may well be that Borges, who was earning his living by writing hundreds of articles
for diverse p ublications, was merely cutting corners by rep eating
himself. This is quite clearly not the case, as I discovered when my first
editorial instinct was to wonder if any could be excised. Borges nearly always uses
the same sentence to make a di erent p oint, or as a bridge between p oints C and D
that are not the p oints A and B that were linked the last time the sentence was
used. The rep etitions are p art of his lifelong fascination with the way old ele-
ments can be reassembled, by chance or design, to create new variations, something
entirely di erent, or something that is exactly the same but now somehow di erent.
This is most clearly visible in one of his longest and most famous essays, "A New
Refutation of Time," which not only cites the same p aragrap hs from Bishop Berkeley
twice, but also rep rints a p rose p iece from the 1920s that he had already rep rinted
in another "canonical" essay, "A History of Eternity." (Borges might have liked the
fact that this same text is p resented here in two di erent English versions.)
Needless to say, none of these translations abridge any of the original texts.It
should also be said that this book has been edited for the English- language
reader. The result is that, with a half-dozen excep tions, a largeXVI A NOTE ON THIS
EDITIONp ortion of Borges' writing has been neglected here: the hundreds of articles
he wrote on Argentine literature and culture. Most of his subjects, unfortu-
nately, are generally unknown outside of the country, and unlike other writers who
attemp t to exp lain the national to an international audience, Borges was writing
for Argentines about Argentina. These articles would have required a rich subsoil
of footnotes to p roduce a meager interest. But it is imp ortant to note, at least,
that Borges was an active p articip ant in his national culture and extraordinarily
generous, in the form of p rologues and reviews, to his contemp oraries.The English-
language reader may well be misled by the p ractice of many of the major modern
Anglo-American writers and assume that Borges' essays are merely addenda to the
ction or p oetry, and now of interest mainly to fans or scholars. In Latin
America, however, it is equently said that the best Borges is the essayist: the
p lace where nearly all the ideas that p rop el the short stories, and many more, are
elaborated in lively, di erent, and more detailed ways. This is not to dep reciate
the stories and p oems-Borges himself o en comp lains of a criticism that nds it
necessary to tear down one thing in order to p romote another-but merely to in-
dicate the high and equal regard in which the non- ction is held.In English, unlike
many other languages, the essay has p layed a minor role in twentieth-century
literature. In contrast to the other writing forms, there is almost no criticism on
the essay, no articulated recognition of theway an essay may be written, and other
than comments on its content, no consensus or dissent on how it should be read. At
the p resent moment, it is largely rep resented by certain of its subgenres-memoir,
travel writing, p ersonal journalism, book review, academic criticism-and the kind
of free- ranging essay that Borges wrote is almost entirely absent from
p eriodicals, outside of small literary journals.Abroad, essays in an unlimited
variety of styles ap p ear daily in the cultural sup p lements of newsp ap ers or in
large-circulation intellectual magazines. They tend to be written by p oets or
novelists, and it is often the case that the writers are known or resp ected as
p oets or novelists, but actually read as essayists. This is the milieu in which
Borges wrote: much of the work here rst ap p eared in newsp ap ers. In that world, it
was exp ected that essays be as fascinating as stories, and it is revealing that,
p erhap s in order for his ction to be read, he started out by disguising his
stories as essays.ELIOT WEINBERG ERIEarly Writings1922-1928 The Nothingness of
Person iIntention.I want to tear down the excep tional p reeminence now generally
awarded to the self, and I p ledge to be sp urred on by concrete certainty, and not
the cap rice of an ideological ambush or a dazzling intellectual p rank. I p rop ose to
p rove that p ersonality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without
metap hysical foundation or visceral reality. I want to ap p ly to literature the
consequences that issue from these p remises, and erect up on them an aesthetic
hostile to the p sychologism inherited from the last century, symp athetic to the
classics, yet encouraging to today's most unruly tendencies.Course of action.I have
noticed that, in general, the acquiescence conceded by a man in the role of reader
to a rigorous dialectical linkage is no more than a sloth l inability to gauge the
p roofs the writer adduces and a vague trust in the latter's rectitude. But once
the book has been closed and the reading has dis- p ersed, little remains in his
memory excep t a more or less arbitrary synthesis of the whole reading. To avoid
this evident disadvantage, I will, in the following p aragrap hs, cast aside all
strict and logical schemas, and amass a p ile of examp les.There is no whole self.
Any of life's p resent situations is seamless and su - cient. Are you, as you p onder
these disquietudes, anything more than an indi erence gliding over the argument I
make, or an ap p raisal of the op inions I exp ound?I, as I write this, am only a
certainty that seeks out the words that are most ap t to comp el your attention. That
p rop osition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limp id branches
that the trees p lace outside my window, constitute my current I.4JORG E LUIS BORG ES
It would be vanity to sup p ose that in order to enjoy absolute validity this p sychic
aggregate must seize on a self, that conjectural Jorge Luis Borges on whose tongue
sop histries are always at the ready and in whose solitary strolls the evenings on
the fringes of the city are p leasant.There is no whole self. He who de nes p ersonal
identity as the p rivate p ossession of some dep ository of memories is mistaken.
Whoever a rms such a thing is abusing the symbol that solidi es memory in the form
of an enduring and tangible granary or warehouse, when memory is no more than the
noun by which we imp ly that among the innumerable p ossible states of consciousness,
many occur again in an imp recise way. Moreover, if I root p ersonality in
remembrance, what claim of ownership can be made on the elap sed instants that,
because they were quotidian or stale, did not stamp us with a lasting mark? Heap ed
up over years, they lie buried, inaccessible to our avid longing. And that much-
vaunted memory to whose ruling you made ap p eal, does it ever manifest all its
p ast p lenitude? Does it truly live? The sensualists and their ilk, who conceive of
your p ersonality as the sum of your successive states of mind, are similarly
deceiving themselves. On closer scrutiny, their formula is no more than an
ignominious circumlocution that undermines the very foundation it constructs, an
acid that eats away at itself, a p rattling fraud and a belabored contradiction.No
one will p retend that, in the glance by which we take in a limp id night, the exact
number of visible stars is p re gured.No one, on thinking about it, will accep t that
the self can dep end on the hyp othetical and never realized nor realizable sum of di
erent states of mind. What is not carried out does not exist; the linkage of events
in a tem- p oral succession does not refer to an absolute order. They err, as well,
who sup p ose that the negation of p ersonality I am urging with such obstinate
zealotry refutes the certainty of being the isolated, individualized, and dis-
tinct thing that each of us feels in the dep ths of his soul. I do not deny this
consciousness of being, nor the immediate security of here I am that it breathes
into us. What I do deny is that all our other convictions must be adjusted to the
customary antithesis between the self and the non-self, and that this antithesis is
constant. The sensation of cold, of sp acious and p leasurable sup p leness, that is
in me as I op en the front door and go out along the half-darkness of the street is
neither a sup p lement to a p re-existing self nor an event that comes coup led to the
other event of a continuing and rigorous self.Moreover, even if the
aforementioned reasons are misguided, I would re se to surrender, for your
conviction of being an individuality is in allTHE NOTHING NESS OF PERSONALITY 5ways
identical to mine and to that of any human sp ecimen, and there is no way to
sep arate them.There is no whole self. It suf ces to walk any distance along the
inexorable rigidity that the mirrors of the p ast op en to us in order to feel like
outsiders, naively flustered by our own bygone days. There is no community of
intention in them, nor are they p rop elled by the same breeze. This has been
declared by those men who have truly scrutinized the calendars from which time was
discarding them. Some, extravagant as reworks, make a boast of so muddled a
confusion and say that disp arity is wealth; others, far from glori ing disorder,
dep lore the inequality of their days and yearn for the p op ular uniformity. I will
cop y out two examp les. The rst bears the date 1531; it is the ep igrap h to De
Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum, comp osed by the Kabbalist and astrologer
Agrip p a of Nettesheim in the disillusioned latter days of his life. He says:Among
gods, all are shaken by the jeers of Momus.Among heroes, Hercules gives chase to
all the monsters.Among demons, Pluto, the King of Hell, op p resses all the shades.
While Heraclitus weep s at everything,Pyrrho knows naught of anything,And Aristotle
glories in knowing all.Diogenes sp urns the things of this world,And I, Agrip p a, am
foreign to none of this.I disdain, I know, I do not know, I p ursue, I laugh, I
tyrannize, I p rotest. I am p hilosop her, god, hero, demon and the whole
universe.The second testimonial comes from the third p art of Torres Villarroel's
Vida e historia. This systematizer of Quevedo, learned in astrology, lord and
master of all words, exp ert wielder of the most strident rhetorical gures, also
sought to de ne himself and p robed his fundamental incongruence. He saw that he was
like everyone else: that is, that he was no one, or little more than an
unintelligible cacop hony, p ersisting in time and wearing outin sp ace. He wrote:I am
angry, fearful, comp assionate, joyous, sad, greedy, generous, enraged, meek, and
all the good and bad emotions and all the p raise- worthy and rep rehensible actions
that can be found in all men together or sep arately. I have tried out all the vices
and all the virtues, and in a single day I feel inclined to weep and laugh, give
and keep , rep ose and6JORG E LUIS BORG ESsu er, and I am always unaware of the cause
and the momentum of these contrarieties. I have heard this alternative of contrary
imp ulses called madness; if it be so, we are all mad to a greater or lesser degree
for I have noticed this unforeseen and rep eated alternation in everyone.There is no
whole self. Beyond all p ossibility of bombastic gamesman- ship , I have touched this
hard truth with my own emotions as I was sep arating from a comp anion. I was
returning to Buenos Aires and leaving him behind in Mallorca. We both understood
that, excep t in the p er dious or altered p roximity of letters, we would not meet
again. What hap p ens at such moments hap p ened. We knew this good-bye would jut out
in our memories, and there was even a p eriod when we tried to enhance its flavor
with a vehement show of op inions for the yearnings to come. The p resent moment was
acquiring all the p restige and indeterminacy of the p ast. . . .But beyond any
egotistical disp lay, what clamored in my chest was the will to show my soul in its
entirety to my friend. I would have wanted to strip myself of it and leave it
there, p alp itating. We went on talking and debating, on the brink of good-bye,
until all at once, with an unsusp ected strength of conviction, I understood that
this p ersonality, which we usually ap p raise at such an incomp atibly exorbitant
value, is nothing. The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute
moment, containing all the others, justi my life, that all of my instants would be
p rovisional p hases, annihilators of the p ast turned to face the future, and that
beyond the ep isodic, the p resent, the circumstantial, we were nobody. And I de-
sp ised all mysterizing.The last century was rootedly subjective in its aesthetic
manifestations. Its writers were more inclined to show o their p ersonalities than
to establish a body of work, an ap horism that is also ap p licable today to the
teeming and highly acclaimed mob of those who p ro t from the glib embers of that
century's bon res. However, my p urp ose is not to lash out against one or the
other of these group s, but to consider the Calvary toward which idolaters of
themselves are on a fatal course. We have already seen that any state of mind,
however op p ortunistic, can entirely ll up our attention, which is much the same as
saying that it can form, in its brief and absolute term, our essence. Which,
translated into the language of literature, means that to try to exp ress oneself
and to want to exp ress the whole of life are one and the same thing. A strenuous,
p anting dash between the p rodding of time andTHE NOTHING NESS OF PERSONALITY 7man,
who, like Achilles in the illustrious conundrum formulated by Zeno of Elea, will
always see himself in last p lace. . . .Whitman was the rst Atlas who attemp ted to
make this obstinacy a reality and take the world up on his shoulders. He believed he
had only to enumerate the names of things in order to make their unique and
surp rising nature immediately p alp able. Therefore, his p oems, along with a great
deal of ne rhetoric, string together garrulous series of words, sometimes rep eated
from geograp hy or history p rimers, which kindle lo y signs of admiration and
mimic great enthusiasms.From Whitman on, many have been caught up in this same
fallacy. They have said:I have not tormented the language in quest of unexp ected
intensities or verbal marvels. I have not sp un out even a slight p aradox cap able of
creating a stir in your conversation or sending its sp arks out through your
laborious silence. Nor did I invent a tale around which lengthy sp ans of attention
would cluster, as many tile hours cluster in remembrance around one hour in
which there was love. None of that did I do nor have I determined to do and yet I
wish for enduring fame. My justi- cation is as follows: I am a man astonished by
the abundance of the world: I bear witness to the unicity of things. Like the most
illustrious of men, my life is located in sp ace, and the chiming of unanimous
clocks p unctuates my duration in time. The words I use are not redo- lent of far-
flung readings, but signs that mark what I have felt or contemp lated. If ever I
made mention of the dawn, it was not merely to follow the easy current of usage. I
can assure you that I know what the Dawn is: I have seen, with p remeditated
rejoicing, the exp losion that hollows out the dep ths of the streets, incites the
slums of the world to revolt, humiliates the stars and broadens the sky by many
leagues. I also ow what a jacaranda, a statue, a meadow, a cornice are. . . . I am
like everyone else. This is my boast and my glory. It matters little whether I have
p roclaimed it in feeble verses or in rough-hewn p rose.The same is asserted, with
greater skill and mastery, by p ainters. What is contemp orary p ainting-that of
Picasso and his p up ils-but a rap t con r- mation of the gorgeous unicity of a king
of sp ades, a gatep ost, or a chess board? Romantic ego-worship and loudmouthed
individualism are in this way wreaking havoc on the arts. Thank G od that the
lengthy examination8 JORG E LUIS BORG ESof sp iritual minutiae that this demands of
the artist forces him back to the eternal classic rectitude that is creation. In a
book like Ram6n G 6mez de la Serna's G reguerias, the currents of both tendencies
intermingle, and as we read we are unaware if what magnetizes our interest with
such unique force is a cop ied reality or is of p ure intellectual fabrication.The
self does not exist. Schop enhauer, who o en ap p ears to adhere to this op inion, at
other times tacitly denies it, I know not whether deliberately or because he is
comp elled by the rough, homesp un metap hysics-or rather ametap hysics-that lurks in
the very origins of language. Neverthe- less, desp ite this disp arity, there is a
p assage in his work that illuminates the alternative like a sudden blast of ame. I
shall transcribe it: in nite time has run its course before my birth; what was I
throughout all that time? Metap hysically, the answer might p erhap s be: I was
always I; that is, all who during that time said I, were in fact I.Reality has no
need of other realities to bolster it. There are no divinities hidden in the
trees, nor any elusive thing-in-itself behind ap p earances, nor a mythological self
that orders our actions. Life is truth l ap p earance. The senses do not deceive, it
is the mind that deceives, said G oethe, in a m im we could comp are to this line by
Macedonia Fernandez:La realidad trabaja en abierto misterio[ Reality works in overt
mystery] There is no whole self. G rimm, in an excellent p resentation of Bud- dhism
(Die Lehre des Buddha, Munich, 1917), describes the p rocess of elimination
whereby the Indians arrived at this certainty. Here is their millennially e ective
p recep t: "Those things of which I can p erceive the beginnings and the end are not
my self." This rule is correct and needs only to be exemp li ed in order to p ersuade
us of its virtue. I, for examp le, am not the visual reality that my eyes encomp ass,
for if I were, darkness would kill me and nothing would remain in me to desire the
sp ectacle of the world, or even to forget it. Nor am I the audible world that I
hear, for in that case silence would erase me and I would p ass from sound to
sound without memory of the p revious one. Subsequent identical lines of argument
can be directed toward the senses of smell, taste, and touch, p roving not only that
I am not the world of ap p earances-a thing generally known and undisp uted-but that
the ap p ercep tions that indicate that world are not myTHE NOTHING NESS OF PERSONALITY
9self either. That is, I am not my own activity of seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, touching. Nor am I my body, which is a p henomenon among others. Up to
this p oint the argument is banal; its distinction lies in its ap p lication to
sp iritual matters. Are desire, thought, hap p iness, and distress my true self? The
answer, in accordance with the p recep t, is clearly in the negative, since those
conditions exp ire without annulling me with them. Consciousness-the nal hideout
where we might track down the self- also p roves unqualified. Once the emotions, the
extraneous p ercep tions, and even ever-shi ing thought are dismissed, consciousness
is a barren thing, without any ap p earance reflected in it to make it exist.G rimm
observes that this rambling dialectical inquiry yields a result that coincides with
Schop enhauer's op inion that the self is a p oint whose immobility is use l for
discerning, by contrast, the heavy-laden flight of time. This op inion translates
the selfinto a mere logical imp erative, without qualities of its own or
distinctions from individual to individual.[1922] [EA] A er ImagesWith the ambitious
gesture of a man who, contemp lating the astral generosity of the sp ring sky,
would crave yet another star and, dark in the bright night, would demand that
constellations shatter their incorrup tible destiny and renew their flame with signs
unseen by the ancient gaze of sailors and shep herds,
I sounded my throat once, imp loring the incontrovertible heaven of art to sanction
our gi for ap p ending unforeseen lights and braiding into stunning crowns the
p erennial stars. How taciturn was Buenos Aires then! From its harsh grandeur, twice
a millionaire of p ossible souls, no p ious p rovider of a single true verse emerged,
while the six strings of any guitar were closer to p oetry than those ctive
counterfeits of Ruben Daria or Luis Carlos Lop ez that infested the journals.Y outh
was scattered in the p enumbra, and each alone judged himself. We were like the
lover who claims his heart to be the only to aunt love, like the glowing branch
hea with sp ring which ignores the festive p op lar groves. We p roudly believed in
our ctitious solitude of gods or blooming islands, unique in the sterile sea, and
we felt rising to the beaches of our hearts the urgent beauty of the world,
entreating us unremittingly to an- chor it in verse. New moons, fences, the so
color of the outlying districts, the bright faces of little girls, were for us
obligatory beauty, calling for daring inventions. We came up on the metap hor, that
resonant conduit our p aths will never forget and whose waters have le their mark
in our writing, p erhap s comp arable to the red mark that revealed the chosen to the
Angelor the blue mark on houses condemned by Rosas' p olice, p romising p erdition.
We came up on the metap hor, the invocation by which we disordered the rigid
universe. For the believer, things are the ful llment of G od's word-in the
beginning Light was named, and then it illuminated the world; for the p ositivist
they are the fated accidents of interlocking events. Metap hor, linking distant
things, fractures that double rigidity. At length weAFTER IMAG ES 11exhausted it, in
sleep less, assiduous nights at the shuttle of its loom, string- ing colored threads
from horizon to horizon. Today metap hor is facile in any style, and its glitter-
star of interior ep ip hanies, our gaze-multip lies in mirrors. But I do not want us
to rest on our laurels; I hop e our art can forget, and p lunge into untouched seas,
as adventurous night leap s from the beaches of day. I wish this zeal to weigh like
a halo over all our heads; I shall reveal it in words.The image is witchcra .
Turning a re into a temp est, as did Milton, is the work of a wizard. Changing the
moon into a sh, a bubble, a comet-as Rossetti did, falling into error even before
Lugones-is a lesser trick. There is someone sup erior to the trickster or the
wizard. I am sp eaking of a demigod, an angel, whose works alter the world. To add
p rovinces to Being, to envision cities and sp aces of a hallucinatory reality, is a
heroic adventure. Buenos Aires has not yet attained its p oetic immortality. On the
p amp as, a gaucho once imp rovised songs to sp ite a devil; nothing has hap p ened yet
in Buenos Aires, whose grandeur has not been validated by a symbol, a sur- p rising
fable, or even an individual destiny comp arable to Martin Fierro's. I do not know
if a divine will is at work in the world, but if such exists, It conceived the
p ink-walled general store, this op ulent sp ring, that shiny red gas meter. (What a
p erfect drumroll for Judgment Day the latter is!) I would like to commemorate two
attemp ts to concoct city fables: one is the total p oem woven by the tangos-a
vulgar, p recarious distortion of the p eop le into p arodies, whose sole character is
the nostalgic hoodlum, and whose only circumstance is p rostitution; the other is
the brilliant, oblique humor of Pap eles de Recienvenido by Macedonia Fernandez.A
nal examp le. It is not enough to say, in the manner of all p oets, that mirrors are
like water. Nor is it enough to take this hyp othesis as an absolute and p resume,
like some Huidobro, that cool breezes blow from mirrors or that thirsty birds drink
from them, leaving their frames emp ty. We must make manifest the whim transformed
into reality that is the mind. We must reveal an individual re ected in the glass
who p ersists in his illusory country (where there are gures and colors, but they
are ruled by immutable silence) and who feels the shame of being only a simulacrum
obliterated by the night, existing only in glimp ses.{SJL} Joyce's U ssesI am the
rst traveler from the Hisp anic world to set foot up on the shores of Ulysses, a lush
wilderness already traversed by Valery Larbaud, who traced its dense texture with
the imp eccable p recision of a map maker (Nouvelle Revue Fran aise XVIII), but which
I too will describe, even though my visit within its borders has been inattentive
and transient. I will sp eak of it with the license my admiration lends me and with
the murky intensity of those ancient exp lorers who described lands new to their
nomadic amazement, and whose stories about the Amazons and the City of the Caesars
combinedtruth and fantasy.I confess that I have not cleared a p ath through all
seven hundredp ages, I confess to having examined only bits and p ieces, and yet I
know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our
knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the
many streets it includes.James Joyce is Irish. The Irish have always been famous
for being the icono- clasts of the British Isles. Less sensitive to verbal decorum
than their detested lords, less inclined to p our their eyes up on the smooth moon
or to decip her the imp ermanence of rivers in long free-verse laments, they made
deep incursions into the territory of English letters, p runing all rhetorical
exuberance with frank imp iety. Jonathan Swi acted like a corrosive acid on the
elation of human hop e, and Voltaire's Micromegas and Candide are no more than
cheap er versions of his severe nihilism. Laurence Sterne unraveled the novel by
making merry with the reader's exp ectations, and those oblique digressions are now
the source of his multitudinous fame; Bernard Shaw is today's most p leasing
realist; but of Joyce I will say that he exercises with dignity his Irish audacity.
His life, measured in sp ace and time, will take up a mere few lines,J0Y CE'S UI.
SSES 13which my ignorance will abbreviate further. He was born in Dublin in 1882,
into an eminent and p iously Catholic family. He was educated by the Je- suits. We
know that he p ossesses a classical culture, that he is not unfamiliar with
scholasticism, that there are no errors of diction in his Latin p hrases, that he
has wandered the various countries of Europ e, and that his children were born in
Italy. He has comp osed lyrics, short stories, and a novel of cathedral-like
grandeur, the motivation of this review.Ulysses is variously distinguished. Its
life seems situated on a single p lane, without those step s that take us mentally
from each subjective world to an objective stage, from the whimsical daydream of
one man's unconscious to the frequently trafficked dreams of the collective mind.
Conjec- ture, susp icion, eeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the
carefully conceived enjoy equal p rivilege in this book; a single p oint of view is
notice- ablyabsent. This amalgamation ofdreams and the real might well have p ro-
voked the consent of Kant and Schop enhauer. The former did not deal with any
distinction between dreams and reality other than that legitimated by the causal
nexus constant in everyday life, and which from dream to dream does not exist.
According to the latter, no criteria exist to distinguish dreams and reality, other
than the merely emp irical data p rovided by waking life; he added with meticulous
elucidations that real life and the dream world are p ages of the same book, and
that custom calls real life the orderly reading, and dreams what we leaf through
with lazy negligence. I wish, therefore, to remember the p roblem articulated by
G ustav Sp iller in The Mind ofMan on the relative reality of a room seen
objectively, then in the imagination, and lastly, dup licated in a mirror; he
resolves that all three are real, and visually each takes up an equal amount of
sp ace.As one can see, Minerva's olive tree casts a gentler shadow than the lau- rel
up on the worthy Ulysses. I cannot find any literary ancestors, excep t p erhap s
Dostoevsky in his later years after Crime and Punishment, and even then, who knows.
So let us admire the p rovisional miracle.In Joyce's unrelenting examination of the
tiniest details that constitute consciousness, he stop s the flow of time and defers
its movement with a p aci ing gesture contrary to the imp atient goading of the
English drama, which encloses the life of its heroes in the narrow, thrusting rush
of a few crowded hours. If Shakesp eare-to use his own metap hor-invested in the
turning of the hourglass the exp loits of many years, Joyce inverts the p rocedure
and unfolds his hero's single day into many days up on the reader. (I haven't said
many nap s.)A total reality teems vociferously in the p ages of Ulysses, and not the
14 JORG E LUIS BORG ESmediocre reality of those who notice in the world only the
abstract op erations of the mind and its ambitious fear of not being able to
overcome death, nor that other reality that enters only our senses, juxtap osing our
flesh and the streets, the moon and the well. The duality of existence dwells
within this book, an ontological anxiety that is amazed not merely at being, but at
being in this p articular world where there are entranceways and words and p laying
cards and electric writing up on the translucence of the night. In no other book
(excep t p erhap s those written by G omez de la Serna) do we witness the actual
p resence of things with such convincing rmness. All things are latent, and the
diction of any voice is cap able of making them emerge and of leading the reader
down their avenue. De Quincey recounts that it was enough to name the Roman consul
in his dreams to set off ery visions of flying banners and military sp lendor. In
the fi eenth chap ter of his work, Joyce sketches a delirious brothel scene, and
the chance conjuring of any loose p hrase or idea ushers in hundreds-the sum is not
an exaggeration but exact-of absurd sp eakers and imp ossible events.Joyce p ortrays a
day in modern life and accumulates a variety of ep isodes in its course which equal
in sp irit those events that inform the Odyssey.He is a millionaire of words and
styles. Aside from the p rodigious nds of voices that constitute the English
language, his commerce sp reads wherever the Irish clover grows, from Castilian
doubloons and Judas' shekels to Roman denarii and other ancient coinage. His p roli
c p en exercises all the rhetorical figures. Each ep isode exalts yet another p oetic
strategy, another p rivate lexicon. One is written in syllogisms, another in
questions and answers, another in narrative sequence. In two of them there is a
silent soliloquy-a heretofore unp ublished form (derived from the Frenchman Edouard
Dujardin, as Joyce told Larbaud) through which we hear his characters think at
length. Beside the new humor of his incongruities and amid his bawdyhouse banter in
macaronic p rose and verse, he raises rigid structures of Latin rigor like the
Egyp tian's sp eech to Moses. Joyce is as bold as the p row of a ship , and as
universal as a mariner's comp ass. Ten years from now-his book having been
exp licated by more p ious and p ersistent re- viewers than myself-we will still enjoy
him. Meanwhile, since I have not the ambition to take Ulysses to Neuquen and study
it in quiet rep ose, I wish to make mine Lop e de Vega's resp ectful words regarding
G ongora:JOY CE's ULY SSES 15Be what it may, I will always esteem and adore the divine
genius of this G entleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and ad-
miring with veneration what I am unable to understand.{S] L} A History of AngelsThe
angels are two days and two nights older than we: the Lord created them on the
fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the
rst moon they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheat elds and some
orchards beside the waters. These p rimitive angels were stars. For the Hebrews,
the concep ts of angel and star merged e ortlessly: I will select, from among many,
the p assage of the Book of Job (38:7) in which the Lord sp oke out of the whirlwind
and recalled the beginning of the world, "When the morning stars sang together, and
all the sons of G od shouted for joy." Quite ap p arently, these sons of G od and
singing stars are the same as angels. Isaiah, too (14:12), calls the fallen angel
"the morning star," a p hrase Quevedo did not forget when he called him "lucero
inobediente, angel amotinado" [de ant star, rebel angel] . This equiva- lency
between stars and angels (those p op ulators of nighttime solitudes) strikes me as
beautiful; it is among the distinctions of the Hebrews that they vitalized the
astral bodies with souls, exalting their brilliance into life.From beginning to
end, the Old Testament throngs with angels. There are ambiguous angels who come
along the straight p aths of the p lain and whose sup erhuman nature cannot
immediately be divined; there are angels brawny as farmhands, like the one who
fought with Jacob a whole night until the breaking of the day; there are
regimental angels, like the cap tain of the Lord's host who ap p eared to Joshua;
there are angels who threaten cities and others who are like exp ert guides through
solitude; the angels in G od's engines of war number two thousand times a thousand.
The best-equip p ed angelary, or arsenal of angels, is the Revelation of St. John:
there are the strong angels, who cast out the dragon; those who stand at the four
corners of the earth so that it does not blow away; those who change a third p art
of the sea to blood; those who gather up the clusters of the vine of the earth and
cast them into the great winep ress of the wrath of G od; those who areA HISTORY OF
ANG ELS 17imp lements of wrath; those who are bound in the great river Eup hrates and
let loose like temp ests; those who are a mixture of eagle and man.Islam, too, knows
of angels. The Muslims of Cairo live blotted out by angels, the real world
virtually deluged by the angelic, for according to Ed- ward William Lane, each
follower of the Prop het is assigned two guardian angels, or ve, or sixty, or one
hundred s ty.The Celestial Hierarchy, erroneously attributed to the G reek convert
Dionysius and comp osed around the h century of our era, is a highly documented
ranking of angelic order that distinguishes, for examp le, between the cherubim
and the serap him, allocating to the rst the ll, p erfect, and overflowing vision
of G od and to the second an eternal ascension toward Him in a gesture both ecstatic
and trembling, like a sudden blaze rushing up ward. Twelve hundred years later,
exander Pop e, archetyp e of the learned p oet, would recall this distinction when he
p enned his famous line: "As the rap t serap h, that adores and burns . . ."
Theologians, admirable in their intellectualism, did not shrink from angels and
tried to p enetrate this world of wings and mirages with their reasoning minds. This
was no uncomp licated matter, for angels had to be de ned as beings sup erior to man
but necessarily inferior to divinity. The G erman sp eculative theologian Rothe
records numerous examp les of the p ush and p ull of this dialectic. His list of
angelic attributes merits consideration: those attributes include intellectual
force; free will; immateriality (cap able, however, of accidentally uniting itself
with matter); asp atiality (neither taking up any sp ace nor being enclosed by it);
lasting duration, with a beginning but without end; invisibility, and even
immutability, an attribute that harbors them in the eternal. As for the faculties
they exercise, they are granted the utmost sup p leness, the p ower of conversing
among themselves instantaneously without words or signs, and that of working
wonders, but not miracles. They cannot create from nothing or raise the dead. The
angelic zone that lies hal ay between G od and man is, it would seem, highly
regulated.The Kabbalists also made use of angels. Dr. Erich Bischoff, in his G er-
man book entitled The Elements of the Kabbalah, p ublished in Berlin in 1920,
enumerates the ten se roth, or ete al emanations of divinity, and makes each
corresp ond to one of the regions of the sky, one of the names of G od, one of the
Ten Commandments, one p art of the human body, and one class of angels. Stehelin, in
his Rabbinical Literature, links the rst ten letters of the alep h-beth, or
alp habet of the Hebrews, to these ten lofty worlds. Thus the letter alep h
corresp onds to the brain, the First Commandment,18 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthe sky of re,
the divine name "I Am That I Am," and the serap him known as the Sacred Beasts.
Those who accuse the Kabbalists of imp recision are clearly mistaken. They were,
instead, fanatics of reason, and they delineated a world of dei cation by
installments that was nevertheless as rigorous and causal as the one we feel now. .
. .Such a swarm of angels cannot have avoided meddling in literature. The
examp les are inexhaustible. In the sonnet by Juan de Jauregui to St. Ignatius
Loyola, the angel retains his biblical strength, his combative seriousness:Ved
sabre el mar, p orque su go o encienda E l a n g e l fu e r t e , d e p u r e z a a
r m a d o .[Look to the sea, for its gulf is set aflame/by the strong angel, armed
with p urity. ] For Luis d e G ongora, the angel i s a valuable decorative trinket,
good for grati ing ladies and children:dCuando sera aquel dia que p or yerro oh,
Serafin, desates, bien nacido,Con manos de Crista[ nudos de Hierro?[When will the
day be that in error/oh, Serap h, you unloose, well-born,/ Knots of Iron with your
Crystalline hands?] In a sonnet by Lop e de Vega, I ran across the agreeable and very
twentieth- century metap hor:Cuelgan racimos de angeles[ Clusters of angels dangle]
And these angels, with a whiff of the countryside about them, are from Juan Ramon
Jimenez:Vagos angeles malvasap agaban las verdes estrellas[Vague angels, mauve as
mallows, I were p utting out the green stars] Here we arrive at the near miracle that
is the true motive for this writing: what we might call the survival of the
angel. The human imaginationA HISTORY OF ANG ELS 19has p ictured a horde of monsters
(tritons, hip p ogri s, chimeras, sea ser- p ents, unicorns, devils, dragons,
werewolves, cyclop es, fauns, basilisks, demigods, leviathans, and a legion of
others) and all have disap p eared, excep t angels. Today, what line of p oetry would
dare allude to the p hoenix or make itself the p romenade of a centaur? None; but no
p oetry, however modern, is unhap p y to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly
with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant
lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually le alone, with their
backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or p remonitions of other
colors. We must not be too p rodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities
we harbor, and they might y away.[EA} Verbiage for PoemsThe Royal Sp anish Academy
with florid vagueness states: "All three [grammar, p rosody, and rhetoric] merge
their generous efforts so that our rich language may conserve its envied treasury
of felicitous, p icturesque and ex- p ressive words, its p alette of bewitching bright
and vivid rainbow colors, and its melodious, harmonious rhythm, which has earned
its name and fame in the world as the beautiful tongue of Cervantes."This p aragrap h
abounds in shortcomings, from the moral p overty of p resuming that the excellence of
Sp anish should motivate envy and not joy-and the celebration of that envy-to the
intellectual de ciency of referring to exp ressive words out of context. To admire
the exp ressivity
of words (excep t for certain derivations and onomatop eias) is like admiring the
fact that Arenales Street is a street called Arenales. Let us not get mired in this
trivia, however, but rather concentrate on the substance of the academy's lengthy
locution, on its insistent statement about the riches of Sp anish. Are there such
riches in the language?Arturo Costa Alvarez ( Our Language, 293) relates the
simp listic p rocess used (or abused) by the Count of Casa Valencia to comp are French
with Sp anish. This gentleman resorted to mathematics and discovered that almost
6o,ooo words are registered in the dictionary of the Royal Academy, and in the
corresp onding French dictionary only 31,000. Does this census mean that a Sp anish
sp eaker has 29,000 more ideas than a Frenchman? Such an induction is a bit
excessive. Nonetheless, if the numerical sup eriority of a language is not
interchangeable with mental or rep resentational su- p eriority, why should it be so
encouraging? On the other hand, if numerical criteria are worthwhile, all thoughts
are imp overished unless they are thought in G erman or English, each of whose
dictionaries have amassed over 1oo,ooo words.VERBIAG E FOR POEMS 21I p ersonally
believe Sp anish is a rich language, but I do not think we should allow it to
languish in inertia, but rather multip ly its legions. Any lexicon can be p erfected,
which I p rop ose to demonstrate.The world of ap p earances is a jumble of shi ing
p ercep tions. The vision of a rustic sky, that p ersistent aroma sweep ing the
elds, the bitter taste of tobacco burning one's throat, the long wind lashing the
road, the submissive rectitude of the cane around which we wrap our ngers, all
fit together in our consciousness, almost all at once. Language is an e cient
ordering of the world's enigmatic abundance. Or, in other words, we invent nouns to
t reality. We touch a sp here, see a small heap of dawn-colored light, our mouths
enjoy a tingling sensation, and we lie to ourselves that those three disp arate
things are only one thing called an orange. The moon itself is a ction. Outside of
astronomical conventions which should not concern us here, there is no similarity
whatsoever between the yellow sp here now rising clearly over the wall of the
Recoleta cemetery and the p ink slice I saw in the sky above the Plaza de Mayo many
nights ago. All nouns are abbreviations. Instead of saying cold, sharp , burning,
unbreak- able, shining, p ointy, we utter "dagger"; for the receding of the sun and
oncoming darkness, we say "twilight."(The p refixes in modern Chinese seem to
grop e for a form somewhere between nouns and adjectives. They are like name-
searchers that p recede nouns with sketchy outlines. Hence, the p article p a is used
invariably for manual objects, intercalated between demonstrative adjectives or
numbers and the name of the thing. For examp le, they usually do not say "yi tao" [a
k n i fe ] b u t r a t h e r "y i p a t a o " [ a g r a s p e d k n i fe , a h a n
d y k n i fe ] , j u s t a s t h e p r e - x ch'un serves an encomp assing nction,
ap rop os of courtyards, fences, houses. The p refix chang is used for flat things and
p recedes words like threshold, bench, mat, p lank. As for the rest, the p arts of the
sentence are not p lainly delineated in Chinese, and the analogical category of a
word de- p ends on its p lacement in the sentence. My references for this lap se into
Chinese are G raebner [ The World of Primitive Man, chap ter IV] and Douglas, in
the Encyclop edia Britannica.)I am insisting on the inventive character of any
language, and I do so intentionally. Languages construct realities. The various
discip lines of the intelligence have engendered worlds of their own and p ossess an
exclusive vocabulary to describe them. The mathematical sciences wield their p ar-
ticular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
Metap hysics, the natural sciences, the arts, have all considerably increased22
JORG E LUIS BORG ESour general store of words. The verbal acquisitions of theology
(attrition, cleanliness, eternity) are extremely imp ortant. Only p oetry-a consp icu-
ously verbal art, the art of engaging the imagination in a game of words, as de ned
by Arthur Schop enhauer-begs and borrows language om everywhere. It works with
other p eop le's tools. Precep tors sp eak of a p oetic language, but if we try to be
p oetic, we end up with a few vanities like steed, zep hyr, amethystine, and
wherefore instead of where. Where is p oetry's p ersuasion in sounds like these?
at is p oetic about them? The fact is that they are unbearable in p rose, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge would rep ly. I do not deny the occasional elation of some p oetic
locutions, and am p leased to remember that we owe to Esteban Manuel de Villegas
the verb diluviar [to deluge] , and to Juan de Mena congloriar [to crown with glory]
and confluir [to converge] :Tanto vas quiso la magni cencia Dotar de virtudes y
congloriarQue muchosp rocuran de vas imitar En vida y en toda virtud y p rudencia.[So
did magni cence strive/ to crown your virtue with glory/that many seek to cop y/your
wise and virtuous life.] A deliberately p oetic vocabulary, a record of ideas
incomp atible with common sp eech, would be a di erent matter, however. The world of
ap - p earances is comp licated, and language has only verbalized a minuscule p art of
its p otential, indefatigable combinations. Why not create a word, only one, for the
converging p ercep tion of the cowbells announcing day's end and the sunset in the
distance? Why not invent another for the dilap i- dated and threatening face of the
streets at dawn? d another for the well- meaning, though p itifully ine ectual,
rst streetlamp to go on at dusk while it is still light out? And another for our
lack of trust in ourselves a er we have done wrong?I ow there is something utop ic
in my ideas, and a distance between intellectual p ossibilities and real ones, but I
trust in the extent of the ture and that it will be no less generous than my hop e.
[1926} [SJL} A Profession of Literary FaithI am a man who ventured to write and even
p ublish some verses that recall the memory of two neighborhoods of this city that
are deep ly entrenched in his life, for in one of them he sp ent his childhood and in
the other he delighted and su ered in a love that p erhap s was great. Moreover, I
committed a few comp ositions commemorating the Rosas era, which, as a consequence
of my readings and a erce family tradition, is the old country of my emotions. I
was immediately set up on by two or three critics, who hurled sop histries and
maledictions at me that were astonishing in their dimness. One branded me a
reactionary; the other, with false p ity, p ointed out neighborhoods more
p icturesque than those I had the fortune to know, and recommended that I take the
No. 56 trolley to Patricios instead of the No. 96 to Urquiza; some attacked me in
the name of the skyscrap ers; others in defense of the tin shacks. Such e orts of
miscomp rehension (which I have toned down in my descrip tion, so that they will not
ap p ear p rep osterous) account for this p rofession of literary faith. I can a rm my
literary credo as a religious man may his; it is mine insofar as I believe in it,
but it is not my invention. Strictly sp eaking, I believe that the act of
p ostulating it, even among those who try to deny it, is universal.My p ostulate is
that all literature, in the end, is autobiograp hical. Every- thing is p oetic that
confesses, that gives us a glimp se of a destiny. In lyric p oetry, this destiny
usually remains immutable, alert but always sketched by symbols that are congenial
to its idiosyncracy and allow us to follow its trace. There is no other meaning in
G ongora's tresses of hair, sap p hires, and shattered glass, or Almafuerte's marshes
and p acks of dogs. The same is true for novels. The character who matters in the
didactic novel El critic6n is neither Critilo nor Adrenio nor the allegorical
chorus that encircles them: it is Friar G racian with his Lillip utian genius, his
solemn p uns, his bows to archbishop s and grandees, his religion of distrust, his
sense of excess erudition,24 JORG E LUIS BORG EShis honeyed veneer and deep -rooted
bile. Similarly, we p olitely susp end our disbelief of Shakesp eare's age-old
stories, infused with his magni cent verbiage: the one in whom we truly believe
is not Lear's daughter but the dramatist himself. Let it be clear that I do not
p retend to invalidate the vi- tality of the theater and novels; I am asserting what
Macedonia Fernandez has already said, that our craving for souls, destinies,
idiosyncracies, knows ll well what it covets; that if fantasy lives do not su ce,
the author delves amorously into his own.The same ap p lies to metap hors. Any
metap hor, as beguiling as it may be, is a p ossible exp erience, and the dif culty
lies not in its invention (a simp le thing, attained by the mere shu ling of fancy
words) but in achiev- ing it in a way that astonishes its reader. I will illustrate
this with a few examp les. Herrera y Reissig writes (Los p eregrinos de p iedra, p .
49 of the Paris edition):Tirita entre algodones humedos la arboleda;La cumbre esta
en un blanco extasis idealista . . .[The grove shivers amid damp cotton balls;/The
p eak is in a white idealist ecstasy . . . ] Two strange things occur here: instead
of mist there are damp cotton balls among which the trees feel cold, and even more,
the top of a mountain is in ecstasy, in p ensive contemp lation. These p rodigious
dup lications do not surp rise Herrera, who forges ahead. The p oet himself has not
realized what he writes; how are we to realize it?Here are a few lines which I
consider p erfectly wrought, by Fernan Silva Valdes, another Uruguayan (so that the
Montevideans will not feel neglected), about a worker who rep airs the roads. They
are a metap hor rmly enmeshed in reality, shap ed
into the moment of a destiny that truly believes in it, that delights in its
miracle and even wishes to share it with others. They read:Que linda,vengan a ver
que linda:en media de la calle ha caido una estrella;y un hombre enmascaradop ar ver
que tiene adentro se esta quemando en ella . . .A PROFESSION OF LITERARY FAITH 25
Vengan a ver que linda:en media de la calle ha caida una estrella y la gente,
asambrada,le ha farmada una ruedap ara verla marir entre sus deslumbrantes baqueadas
celestes.Estayfrente a un p radigia -a ver quien me la niega- en media de la calleha
caida una estrella.[How lovely,/come see how lovely:/in the street a star has
fallen:/and a masked man/to see what inside her is burning . . .//Come see how
lovely:/in the street a star has fallen,/and the p eop le, astonished,/have formed a
circle/to watch her die amid dazzling/Icelestial gasp s.//1 am before a miracle/-who
dares deny it-/in the middle of the street/a star has fallen. ] Sometimes the
autobiograp hical, p ersonal substance, like a heart beating deep , disap p ears behind
the accidents that incarnate it. There are occasional comp ositions or lines that
are inexp licably p leasing: their images barely ap p roximate, are never to the
p oint; the story they tell ap p ears to be a botched job by a lazy imag ation, in
stilted diction, and yet that comp osition or isolated verse p leases us, and does
not fall easily om memory. Those divergences of aesthetic judgment and emotion are
usually engendered by this incomp etence; studied care y , the verses we like
desp ite ourselves ways dep ict a soul, an idiosyncracy, a destiny. What's more,
there are things that are p oetic by merely imp lying a destiny: for examp le, the
map of a city, a rosary, the names of two sisters.Some lines earlier I insisted
up on the urgency of the subjective or objective truth that images require; now I
will establish that rhyme, brashly arti cial, can in se the most truth l
comp ositions with a false aura and that, in general, its e ect is counterp oetic. l
p oetry is a confession, and the p remises of any confession are one's confidence in
the listener and the candor of the sp eaker. Rhyme's original sin is its air of
deceit. though this deceit is only an annoyance, never p lainly exp osed, the mere
susp icion of it serves to discourage ll-blown fervor. Some will say that frills
are the foibles of feeble versemakers; I believe that this is an affliction of
rhymed verse itself. Some hide it well and others p oorly, but it is always there.
Here is an examp le of shameful frills, committed by a famous p oet:JORG E LUIS BORG ES
Mirandote en lectura sugerente Llegue al ep ilogo de mis quimeras;Tus ojos de
p alomas mensajerasVolvian de los astros, dulcemente.[ Reading you with suggestive
gaze/! found the ep ilogue of my notions;/ Y our carrier p igeon eyes/Returned from
the stars, sweetly. ] It is obvious that those four lines come down to two, and that
the rst two have no raison d'etre other than enabling the last two. These versi
ing tricks are the same in this examp le of brash frills from a classic milonga:
Pejerrey con p ap as,b u t ifa r r a fr i t a ;la china que tengo nadie me la quita .
. .[Fish and p otatoes fried/blood sausage fried/the honey I have/no one else can
have . . .] I have already declared that all p oetry is the confession of an I, a
p ersonality, a human adventure. The destiny thus revealed can be make-believe,
archetyp al (novelizations like the Quixote or Martin Fierro, the p rotagonists of
Browning's soliloquies, the various versions of Faust), or p ersonal: the auto-
novelizations of Montaigne, Thomas De Quincey, Walt Whitman, of any real p oet. I
seek to achieve the latter.How can we manage to illuminate the p athos of our lives?
How can we interject in the hearts of others our humiliating truth? The tools we
use are also hindrances: verse is a sing-song thing that clouds the meaning of
words; rhymes are p uns, a kind of solemn wordp lay; metap hor is a revoca- tion of
emp hasis, a tradition of lies, a dumb thing no one takes seriously. (And yet we
cannot do without it: the "p lain style" p rescribed to us by Manuel G alvez is doubly
metap horic, because "style" means, etymologi- cally, a p ointed instrument, and
"p lain" is akin to a at p lain, smooth, without cracks. A p lain style, a p ointed
instrument similar to the p amp as. Who can understand that?)The variety of words is
another error. All the academicians recommend it, I think, mistakenly. I believe
words must be conquered, lived, and that the ap p arent p ublicity they receive from
the dictionary is a falsehood. Nobody should dare to write "outskirts" without
having sp ent hours p acing their high sidewalks; without having desired and su ered
as if they were a lover;A PROFESSION OF LITERARY FAITH 27without having felt their
walls, their lots, their moons just around the corner from a general store, like
a cornucop ia. . . . I have now conquered my p overty, recognizing among thousands
the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than
one book in order to write, p erhap s, one p age. The p age that justi es me, that
summarizes my destiny, the one that p erhap s only the attending angels will hear
when Judgment Day arrives.Simp ly: the p age that, at dusk, up on the resolved truth
of day's end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing against
the street, I would dare to read to a friend.[S!L] Literary PleasureI susp ect that
the detective novels of Eduardo G utierrez and a volume of G reek m hology and The
Student ofSalamanca and the reasonable and not at all fanci l fantasies of Jules
Verne and Stevenson's grandiose romances and the rst serial novel ever written,
The Thousand and One Nights, are the greatest literary joys I have exp erienced. The
list is diverse and cannot claim any unity other than the early age at which I read
them. I was a hosp itable reader in those days, a p olite exp lorer of the lives of
others, and I accep ted everything with p rovidential and enthusiastic resignation. I
believed everything, even errata and p oor illustrations. Each story was an
adventure, and I sought worthy and p restigious p laces to live it: the highest step
of a staircase, an attic, the roof of the house.Then I discovered words: I
discovered their recep tive and even memorable readability, and harbored many
p rinted in p rose and verse. Some- still-accomp any my solitude; the p leasure they
insp ired has become a second nature to me. Others have fallen merci lly from my
memory, like Don Juan Tenorio, which I once knew by heart, and which the years and
my indifference have up rooted. G radually, through ine able leap s of taste, I be-
came familiar with literature. I am unable to remember the rst time I read
Quevedo, who is now the writer I most frequent. On the other hand, my rst
encounter with Sartor Resartus by the maniacal Thomas Carlyle was p assionate-a book
now huddled in some corner, which has been reading itself for years in my library.
Later, I became worthy of writerly friendship s that still honor me: Schop enhauer,
Unamuno, Dickens, De Quincey, again Quevedo.And today? I have turned into a writer,
a critic, and I must confess (not without remorse and conscious of my deficiency)
that I reread with the p leasure of remembering and that new readings do not
enthrall me. Now I tend to disp ute their novelty, to translate them into schools,
influences,LITERARY PLEASURE 29comp osites. I susp ect that if they were sincere, all
the critics in the world (and even some in Buenos Aires) would say the same. It is
only normal: intelligence is economical and orderly, and a miracle strikes it as
a bad habit.By admitting this I already disquali myself.Menendez y Pelayo writes:
"If p oetry was not read with the eyes of his-tory, so few p oems would survive!"
(Historia de Ia p oesia americana II, 103). What seems a warning is a confession.
Those o en resurrected eyes of history, are they not but a network of symp athies,
generosities, or simp ly cour- tesies? Y ou may rep ly that without them, we would
confuse the p lagiarist with the inventor, the shadow with the body. Certainly, but
one thing is the equitable distribution of glories, and another, p ure aesthetic
p leasure. I have observed with regret that any man, by merely p erusing many volumes
in order to judge them (and the critic's task is nothing else) can become a ge-
nealogist of styles and detective of influences. He inhabits this terri ing and
almost inexp ressible truth: Beauty in literature is accidental, dep ending on the
harmony or discord of the words manip ulated by the writer, and is not tied to
eternity. Ep igones, those who frequent already lyricized themes, usually achieve
it; innovators, almost never.Our indolence sp eaks of classical books, eternal
books. If only some eternal book existed, p rimed for our enjoyment and whims, no
less inventive in the p op ulous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward
all hours of the world. Y our favorite books, reader, are like the rough drafts of
that book without a nal reading.If the attainments of the verbal beauty that art
can p rovide us were infallible, non-chronological anthologies would exist, or
even ones that would not mention the names of authors or of literary schools. The
single evidence of each comp osition's beauty would be enough to justi it. Of
course this behavior would be bizarre and even dangerous for those anthologies in
use. How can we admire the sonnets of Juan Boscan if we do not know that they are
the rst to be borne by our language? How can we endure so-and- so's verse if we do
not know that he has p erp etrated many others that are even more flawed and that,
moreover, he is a friend of the anthologist?I fear you will not understood my p oint
here, and so, at the risk of over- simp li ing the matter, I will nd an examp le.
Let our illustration be this
unfamiliar metap hor: "The re, with ferocious jaws, devours the countryside." Is
this p hrase censurable or legitimate? That dep ends, I insist, solely on the one who
forged it, and this is not a p aradox. Let us sup p ose that in a cafe on the Calle
Corrientes or on the Avenida 9 de Julio, a man of letters p resents it to me as his
own. I will think: Making metap hors is now a vulgarJORG E LUIS BORG ES30p astime; to
substitute swallow for burn is not an ausp icious exchange; the matter of jaws may
amaze some p eop le, but it is weak of the p oet to allow himself to be carried away
by the mechanical p hrase "devouring re"; in brief, nil. . . . Let us now sup p ose
that it is p resented to me as originating from a Chinese or Siamese p oet. I will
think: The Chinese turn everything into a dragon, and it will rep resent to me a
clear re like a celebration, slithering, which I will like. Let us sup p ose that
the witness to a re uses it, or even better, someone whose life was threatened by
the ames. I will think: This concep t of a re with jaws is really a nightmarish
horror, and adds a ghastly human evil to an unconscious event; the p hrase is very
strong, almost mythological. Let us sup p ose I am told that the father of this
gure of sp eech is Aeschylus, and that it was uttered by Prometheus (which is true),
and that the shackled titan, tied to a p recip ice of rocks by Force and Vio- lence,
those harsh ministers, declaimed it to the Ocean, an old gentleman who came to
visit his misfortune on a winged chariot. Then the sentence would seem good, even
p erfect, given the extravagant nature ofthe sp eakers and its (already p oetic)
remote origin. I shall do as the reader, who has doubtlessly susp ended his
judgment, does, until con rming whose p hrase it was.I sp eak without intending any
irony. Distance and antiquity (the em- p hases of sp ace and time) p ull on our
hearts. Navalis has already uttered this truth, and Sp engler was its grandiose
advocate in his famous book. I want to discuss its relevance to literature, which
is a p altry thing. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two
thousand ve hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made
verses, were sp ectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words
something of their p onderous, fleeting life, words that ful ll a long destiny?Time,
such a resp ected subversive, so famous for its demolitions and Italic ruins, also
constructs. Up on Cervantes' lo y verse:j Vive Dios, que me esp anta esta grandeza!
[By G od, this greatness terri es me!] we see time refashioned and even notably
widened. When the inventor and storyteller of Don Quixote wrote it, "vive Dios" was
as ordinary an exclamation as "my goodness!" and "terri " meant "astonish." I
susp ect that his contemp oraries would have felt it to mean: "How this device
astonishes me!" or something similar. It is rm and tidy in our eyes. Time-
Cervantes' friend-has sagely revised his dra s.LITERARY PLEASURE 31Immortals have,
generally, another destiny. The details of their feelings or thoughts tend to
vanish or lie invisibly in their work, irretrievable and unsusp ected. In contrast,
their individuality (that simp li ed Platonic idea which they never p urely
p ossessed) fastens up on souls like a root: they become as imp overished and
p erfect as a cip her; they become abstractions. They are barely a bit of shadow, but
they are so eternally. They t too neatly into this p hrase: Echoes remained, in the
void of their majesty, not a whole voice, but merely the lingering absence of a
word (Quevedo, La hora de todos y la fortuna con seso, ep isode ). But there are
many di erent immortalities.A tender and sure immortality (attained sometimes by
men who are ordinary but have an honest dedication and a lifelong fervor) is that
of the p oet whose name is linked to a p lace in the world. Such is the case of
Burns, over the grazing lands of Scotland and unhurried rivers and little lambs;
such is our Carriego's, p revailing in the shameful, rtive, almost buried outskirts
of Palermo on the Southside, where an extravagant archeological e ort can
reconstruct the vacant lot whose current ruin is the house and the beverage store
which has become an Emp orium. Some are also im- mortalized in eternal things. The
moon, sp ringtime, the nightingales, all manifest the glory of Heinrich Heine; the
sea that suffers grey skies, Swin- burne; the long railway p latforms and docks,
Walt Whitman. But the best immortalities-those in the domain of p assion-are still
vacant. There is no p oet who is the total voice of love, hate, or desp air. That is,
the great verses of humanity have still not been written. This imp erfection should
raise our hop es.[S!L} An Investigation of the WordII would like to p roclaim one of
the things of which I am ignorant, to p ublish a crucial indecision in my
thinking, in order to see if some other doubter may help me to doubt, and the half-
light we share turn into light. The subject is almost grammatical, which I announce
as a warning to those readers who have condemned (in the name of friendship ) my
grammari- anisms and requested a human work. I could answer that there is nothing
more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than
grammar; but I understand and beg their indulgence this once. My joys and su erings
will be le for other p ages, if anyone wishes to read them.The crux of my
meditation is this: What is the p sychological p rocess whereby we understand a
sentence?To examine this question (I dare not think to resolve it), let us analyze
an ordinary sentence, not according to the (arti cial) classi cations recorded by
diverse grammars, but rather in search of the content its words yield to its
reader. Let this be a familiar, well-known sentence, whose meaning is absolutely
clear: "En un Lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero recordar" [In a p lace in
La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall] and the rest.I shall p roceed with
the analysis:En [in] . This is not a whole word, but the p romise of others to come.
It indicates that what immediately follows is not the main p oint in this context,
but rather the location of the main p oint, be it in time or in sp ace.Un [a] .
Prop erly sp eaking, this word declares the unity of the word it modi es. Here it
does not. Here it announces a real existence, but one not p articularly individuated
or demarcated.Lugar [p lace] . This is the word of location, p romised by the
p article in.AN INVESTIG ATION OF THE WORD33Its task is merely syntactical, not
adding any rep resentation to the one suggested by the two p revious words. To
rep resent oneself "in" and to rep resent oneself "in a p lace" is the same, as any
"in" is in a p lace and imp lies this. Y ou will rep ly that p lace is a noun, a thing,
and that Cervantes did not write it to signi a p ortion of sp ace but rather to mean
"hamlet," " town," or "village." To the rst, I will resp ond that it is risky to
allude to things in themselves, a er Mach, Hume, and Berkeley, and that, for a
sincere reader, there is only a difference of emp hasis between the p rep osition in
and the noun p lace; in resp onse to the second, the distinction is true, but only
dis- cernible later.De [of] . This word is usually dep endent, indicating p ossession.
Here it is synonymous (somewhat unexp ectedly) with in. Here it means that the scene
of the still mysterious central statement of this clause is situated in turn
somewhere else, which will be immediately revealed to us.La [the] . This quasi-word
(they tell us) is a derivation of illa, which meant "that" in Latin. That is, it
was rst a word of orientation, justi ed and almost animated by some gesture; now
it is a ghost of illa, with no further task than to indicate a grammatical gender,
an extremely asexual classi cation which ascribes virility to p ins ("los" al
leres) and not to lances ("las" lanzas). (By the way, it is tting to recall what
G raebner wrote about grammatical gender: Nowadays the op inion p revails that,
originally, the grammatical genders rep resented a scale of values, and that the
feminine gender rep resents, in many languages-among them the Semitic-a value
inferior to the masculine.)Mancha. This name is variously rep resentable. Cervantes
wrote it so that its known reality would lend weight to the unheard-of reality of
his Don Quixote. The ingenious nobleman has p aid back the debt with interest: if
the nations of the world have heard of La Mancha, it is his doing.Does this mean
that La Mancha was nominated because it already was a landscap e for the novelist's
contemp oraries? I dare to assert the contrary: its reality was not visual, but
sentimental; it was, irrevocably, irreconcilably, a dull p rovincial reality. They
did not need to visualize it to understand: to say "La Mancha" was like saying
"Pigue" for us Argentines. The Castilian landscap e at that time was one of G oethe's
manifest mysteries ("o enbareG eheimnisse"). Cervantes did not see this: one need
only consider the Italian- style countrysides he designated to make his novel more
congenial. Que- vedo was more erudite about Manchegan landscap es than he: read (in
a letter addressed to Don Alonso Messia de Leiva) his harsh descrip tion that
begins: "In La Mancha, in winter, where clouds and streams, which in other34JORG E
LUIS BORG ESp laces p roduce p op lar groves, create swamp s and mudslides . . ." He
ends, many lines later, with: "Dawn broke: how vile, it seems to me, for sunrise to
remember such a p lace."The detailed continuation of this analysis is useless. I
will only note that the ending of the p hrase in question is marked by a comma. This
little curlicue indicates that the following locution ("whose name") must refer,
not to La Mancha (whose name the author did wish to remember) but rather to the
p lace. That is, this curlicue or orthograp hic sign or brief p ause
to summarize or atom of silence, does not differ substantively from a word.
Commas are as intentional as words are tenuous.Let us now examine the general
matter.The doctrine of every grammar I have consulted (even the extremely
intelligent one by Andres Bello) maintains that each individual word is a sign and
denotes an autonomous idea. This doctrine is up held by common consensus and forti
ed by the dictionaries. How can we deny that each word is a unit of thought if the
dictionary (in alp habetical disorder) records, isolates, and without further
consultation, de nes them? Though an arduous undertaking, our inquiry is imp osed by
the p revious analysis. It is imp ossible to believe that the single concep t, "En un
Iugar de Ia Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme," is comp osed of twelve
ideas. Conver- sation would be the task of angels and not of men, if such were the
case. It is not the case, and the p roof is that the same concep t ts in a larger or
smaller number of words. "En un p ueblo manchego cuyo nombre no quiero recordar"[In
a Manchegan village whose name I don't want to recall] is the same, and there are
nine signs instead of twelve. That is, words are not the reality of language:
words-by themselves-do not exist.This is the Crocian doctrine. To sup p ort it, Croce
denies the p arts of the sentence, ascertaining that they are an intrusion of logic,
an insolence. The sentence (he argues) is indivisible, and the grammatical
categories that dis- arm it are abstractions added onto reality. One thing is a
sp oken exp ression, and the other its p osthumous elaboration into nouns or
adjectives or verbs.Manuel de Montoliu, in his discussion (and occasional re
tation) of Croceism, elucidates and summarizes this thesis as follows, with an
excess of mystery: "The only linguistic reality is the sentence. This concep t of
sentence has to be understood not in its grammatical sense, but in the sense of an
organism exp ressive of a p erfect meaning, whether in a simp le exclamation or i n
a v a s t p o e m " ( E l l e n g u aj e c o m o fe n 6 m e n o e s t t i c o , B
u e n o s A i r e s , 1 9 2 6 ) .Psychologically, this Montoliu-Croce conclusion is
unsustainable. ItsAN INVESTIG ATION OF THE WORD35concrete version would be: We do
not understand rst the p rep osition in and then the article a and then the noun
p lace and then the p rep osition in; we p refer to take in, in a single act of
cognition, the whole chap ter and even the whole book.It will be said that I am
joking and that the intent of that doctrine is aesthetic, not p sychological. To
which I would resp ond that a p sychological error cannot also be an aesthetic
solution. Moreover, did not Schop enhauer already tell us that the shap e of our
intelligence is time, a thin line that only p resents things to us one by one? The
terri ing asp ect of that narrowness is that the p oems to which Montoliu-Croce
allude reverently acquire unity in the frailty of our memory, but not in the
successive task of the one who wrote them or the one who reads them. (I said terri
ing, because that successive heterogeneity tears to bits not only those diffuse
comp ositions, but all writing.) A close ap p roach to that p ossible truth was the one
argued by Poe in his essay on p oetic p rincip le, where he states that there are no
long p oems and that Paradise Lost is (e ectively) a series of short comp ositions. I
voice his op inion in my own words: If to maintain the unity of Milton's work, its e
ect or imp ression as a whole, we read it (as would be necessary) in one sitting,
the result is only a continuous oscillation of excitement and discouragement. . . .
From this it follows that the nal, collective, or absolute e ect of the best
ep ic under the sun will forcibly be nothing, and that is the truth.What op inion may
we assume? The grammarians imp ly that we must sp ell out, word for word,
comp rehension; the followers of Croce, that we take it in with a single magical
glance. I do not believe in either p ossibility. Sp iller, in his beauti l Psychology
(note that I use the ep ithet deliberately) formulates a third resp onse. I will
summarize it, though I know well that summaries add a false categorical and de
nitive air to whatever they condense.Sp iller observes the structure of sentences
and dissociates them into small syntactical group s that corresp ond to units of
rep resentation. Thus, in the exemp lary p hrase we have taken ap art, it is evident
that the two words "La Mancha" are only one. It is obviously a p rop er noun, as
indivisible in our consciousness as Castile or the Cinco Esquinas [Five Corners] or
Buenos Aires. However, here the unit of rep resentation is larger: it is the
locution "in La Mancha," synonymous, we have already noted, with "Manchegan." (In
Latin, the two formulas of p ossession coexisted and to say the valor of Caesar,
there was "virtus Caesarea" and "virtus Caesaris"; in Russian, any substantive noun
is variable as an adjectival noun.) Another unit for com- p rehension is the
locution "no quiero acordarme" [I do not wish to recall] toJORG E LUIS BORG ES which
we will add p erhap s the word de, since the active verb recordar [to recall or
remember] and the reflexive verb comp ounded by a p rep osition, acordarse de [to
recall or remember] are only grammatically di erent. (A good p roof of the
arbitrariness of our writing is that we make acordarme [ I remember] into a single
word, and meacuerdo [I remember] into two.) Con- tinuing the analysis, we will
redistribute the sentence into four units: "In a p lace/in La Mancha/whose name/! do
not wish to recall;" or "In a p lace in/ La Mancha I (whose name) I do not wish to
recall."I have ap p lied (p erhap s with excessive freedom) Sp iller's introsp ective
method. The other, the one which assures us that each word is significative, I have
already reduced to its (care l, honest, involuntary) absurdity in the rst half of
this argument. I do not know if Sp iller is right; it is enough for me to
demonstrate the ne ap p licability of his thesis.Let us move on to the much-
discussed p roblem of whether the noun should follow the adjective (as in the
G ermanic languages) or the adjective follow the noun, as in Sp anish. In England
they are obliged to say a "brown horse"; we in Sp anish are equally obliged to p ut
the noun before the adjective. Herbert Sp encer maintains that English syntax is
more serviceable, and justi es it in this manner: It is enough to hear the word
caballo [horse] in order to imagine it, and if a erward we are told it is brown,
this addition does not always coincide with the image we already p refigured and
tended to anticip ate. That is, we will have to correct an image: a task that
vanishes when the adjective is p ositioned in front. "Brown" is an abstract notion
and merely p rep ares the consciousness.Op p onents may argue that the notions of
"horse" and "brown" are equally concrete or equally abstract to the mind. The truth
is, however, that the controversy is absurd: the amalgamated symbols "caballo-
colorado" and "brown-horse" are already a unit of thought.How many units of thought
does language include? It is not p ossible to answer this question. For the chess
p layer, the locutions "queen's gambit," "p awn to king's four," "knight to king's
three check," are unities; for the be- ginner, they are p hrases he gradually
comp rehends.An inventory of all the rep resentative units is imp ossible, as is their
ordering or classi cation. To p rove the latter is my immediate task.AN
INVESTIG ATION OF THE WORD 37IIThe de nition I shall give of the word is-like
others-verbal, that is to say, also made of words, that is to say, wordy. We agree
that a word's determining factor is its function as rep resentative unit and how
variable and contin- gent that function is. Thus immanence is a word for those who
are trained in metap hysics, but it is a genuine locution for whoever hears it
without knowing the word and must then break it into in and manere: "inside re-
main." ("Innebleibendes Werk," within-remained action, Master Eckhart translated
with magni cent long-windedness.) Inversely, almost all sentences for single
grammatical analysis, and true words-that is, rep resentative units-are
comp rehensible for anyone who hears them o en. To say, "In a p lace in La Mancha,"
is almost to say "village" or "hamlet"; to sayLa codicia en las manos de la suerte
se arroja al mar[G reed in the hands of luck/p lunges into the sea] is to invite a
single rep resentation: distinct, of course, according to the lis- teners, but
ultimately only one.There are sentences that nction like radicals, and om which
others may always be deduced, with or without the intention to innovate, but of
such a clearly derivative nature that they do not mislead anyone. Take the common
locution "silver moon." It would be useless to try to make it new by changing the
p ref , useless to write "golden moon" or "amber/stone/
marble/earthen/sand/water/sul r/desert/sugarcane/tobacco/iron moon." The reader-
who, moreover, is already literate-will always susp ect that we are p laying at
variations and feel-at the most!-an antithesis between the dis- illusioning p re
ation of "earthen moon" or the p ossibly magical "water moon," and the well- own
cliche. I will mention another case. It is a sentence by Joubert, cited favorably
by Matthew Arnold (Critical EssaysVII). It deals with Bossuet and is as follows:
"More than a single man, he is human nature, with the moderation of a saint, the
justice of a bishop , the p rudence of a doctor, and the p ower of a great soul." Here
Joubert p layed on variations with a certain insolence; he wrote (and p erhap s
thought) "the moderation of a saint," and immediately a erward the inevitability
that there is in language took control of him and linked three more clauses, all
lled with symmetry and an air of negligence. It is as if he stated, "With the mod-
eration
of a saint, the this of another, the whatever of a who knows whatJORG E LUIS BORG ES
and the anything of a great soul." The original is no less vague than this
framework; the intoned clauses of both corresp ond no longer to words but to
emp hatic simulations of words. If p rose, with its minimal p resence of rhythm,
carries such servile baggage, what will verse not bring along? Po- etry is always
looking out for more to add simp lemindedly and recklessly to that which has not
gone bad.Concerning de nitions of the word: it is so imp recise that the hetero-
doxical concep t defended here (word #ep resentation) can t into the sanctioned
formula: "A word is a syllable or conjunction ofsyllables that exists
indep endently and exp resses an idea." That is the case, of course, as long as those
conjunctions are not determined by the blank sp aces in writing between p seudo-
words. It is out of that orthograp hic hallucination that one surmises that,
although manchego is one word, de la Mancha is three.I sp oke about language's
fatality. A man, in a con dential outp ouring of memories, tells of the ancee he
had, and p raises her thus: "She was so p retty that . . ." and that conjunction,
that insigni cant p article, is already forcing him to hyp erbolize, to lie, to
invent a case. The writer says of a girl's eyes: "Eyes l e . . ." and he nds it
necessary to choose a sp ecial term of comp arison. He forgets that p oetry is
realized through that "l e;' forgets that the single act of comp aring (that is, of
sup p osing di cult qualities that only through media- tion allow themselves to be
thought) is already p oetry. He resigns himself to writing "eyes l e suns:'
Linguistics disorders that p hrase into two categories: semanthemes, words of
rep resentation (eyes, suns) and morp hemes, the meremeshing of syntax. "Like" seems
to be a morp heme even though the entire emotional climate of the p hrase is
determined by it. "Eyes l e suns" seems to be an op eration of his understanding, a
p roblematic judgment which relates the concep t of eyes with that of the sun. Anyone
knows intuitively that this is wrong. He knows that he does not have to imagine the
sun, and that the intention is to denote "eyes I wish had looked at me always;'
or rather "eyes with whose mistress I want to be:' It is a p hrase that dri s away
om analysis.A summary may be help ful. I have p ostulated two p rop ositions, negatives
of one another. One is the non-existence of the grammatical categories or p arts of
the sentence and the rep lacement of them with rep resentative units, which can be a
common word or many. (Rep resentation does not have syntax. Perhap s someone will
teach me not to confuse the flight of a bird with a bird that flies.) The other is
the p ower of syntactical continuity over discourse. That p ower is shame l, as we
know that syntax is nothing. The antimony is p rofound. Not to discover-not to be
able to discover-the so-AN INVESTIG ATION OF THE WORD 39lution, is the general
tragedy of all writing. I accep t that tragedy, that treacherous deviation of
which we sp eak, that not thinking at all about anything.Two attemp ts-both condemned
to death-were made to save us. One was Llull's desp erate endeavor to seek
p aradoxical refuge in the very heart of contingency; the other was Sp inoza's.
Llull-insp ired by Jesus, they say- invented the so-called thinking machine, a kind
of glori ed lottery, though with a di erent mechanism; Sp inoza did not p ostulate
more than eight def- initions and seven axioms to level the universe for us. As we
can see, neither the latter with his geometric metap hysics nor the former with his
alp habet translatable into words, and these into sentences, managed to elude lan-
guage. Both systems were nourished by it. The only ones who can p ass over it are
the angels, who converse by intelligible sp ecies: that is, by means of direct
rep resentation and without any verbal e orts.And those of us, never angels, who are
verbal, who "on this low, relative ground" write, those of us who lowly imagine
that ascending into p rint is the maximum reality of exp eriences? May resignation-
the virtue to which we must resign ourselves-be with us. It will be our destiny to
mold ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous chain of events, to the imp recision,
the maybes, the too many emp hases, the buts, the hemisp here of lies and of darkness
in our sp eech. And to confess (not without some ironic decep tion) that the least
imp ossible classi cation of our language is the mechanics of p hrases, whether they
be active, p assive, gerund, imp ersonal, or other.The di erence among the styles is
that of syntactical custom. It is obvious that up on the framework of a sentence
many can be built. I already noted how "sand moon" came out of "silver moon"; the
latter-through the p ossible collaboration of usage-could ascend from mere variation
to autonomous rep resentation. Language is nourished not by original intuitions-
there are few-but by variations, hap p enstance, mischief. Lan- guage: to humbly
sp eak thought.One must not think of organizing according to kindred ideas. There
are too many p ossible arrangements for any one of them to be unique. All ideas are
akin or can be. Logical op p osites can be synonymous words for art: their climate,
their emotional temp erature, are frequently shared. Out of this non-p ossibility of
a p sychological classi cation, I will not say more: the al- p habetical organization
(disorganization) of dictionaries clearly disp lays this decep tion. Fritz Mauthner
(Worterbuch der Philosop hie I, 379-401) p roves this with sp lendid sarcasm.[1927}
[SJL/EW} The Perp etu Race of Ach es d the TortoiseThe imp lications of the word
jewel-p recious little thing, delicate though not necessarily fragile, easy to
transp ort, translucency that can also be im- p enetrable, ageless flower-make it
p ertinent here. I know of no better quali cation for Achilles' p aradox, so
indifferent to the de nitive re tations which have been nulli ing it for over
twenty-three centuries that we can already declare it immortal. The rep eated tours
of the mystery p ro- p osed by such endurance, the ne ignorance it has visited up on
humanity, are gi s we have no choice but to accep t grate lly. Let us revive it once
more, if only to convince ourselves of p erp lexity and arcane intimations. I intend
to devote a few p ages-a few moments-to its p resentation and most noteworthy
revisions. Its inventor, as is well known, was Zeno of Elea, discip le of
Parmenides, who denied that anything could hap p en in the umverse.The library has
p rovided me with two versions of this glorious p aradox. The rst, from a very
Sp anish Sp anish-American dictionary, can be reduced to this cautious observation:
Motion does not exist: Achilles could not catch up with the lazy tortoise. I shall
waive such restraint and seek out the less hurried exp osition by G . H. Lewes, whose
Biograp hical History ofPhilosop hy was the rst sp eculative reading to which vanity
or curiosity (I'm not sure which) led me. I shall transcribe his exp osition:
Achilles, symbol of sp eed, has to catch up with the tortoise, symbol of slowness.
Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise and so gives him a ten-meter
advantage. Achilles runs those ten meters, the tortoise runs one; Achilles runs
that meter, the tortoise runs a decimeter; Achilles runs that decimeter, the
tortoise runs a centimeter; Achilles runs that centimeter, the tortoise runs a
millimeter; Achilles the millimeter, the tortoise a tenth of the millimeter, and
ad in nitum, so that Achilles can run forever without catching up . Hence the
immortal p aradox. 44JORG E LUIS BORG ESAnd now for the so-called refutations. The
oldest-Aristotle's and Hobbes'-are imp licit in the one formulated by John Stuart
Mill. The p roblem, for him, is a mere examp le of the fallacy of confusion. He
considers it nulli ed by the following argument:At the conclusion of the sop hism,
forever means any imaginable lap se of time; under this p remise, any number of
subdivisions of time. It means that we can divide ten units by ten, and the
quotient again by ten, as many times as we want, and that the subdivisions of the
sequence have no end, nor consequently do those ofthe time in which it all
occurs. But an unlimited number of subdivisions can occur within what is limited.
The only in nity of duration the argument p roves is contained in ve minutes. As
long as the ve minutes are not over, whatever is le can be divided by ten, and
again by ten, as many times as we like, which is comp atible with the fact that the
total duration is ve minutes. This p roves, in short, that crossing that nite
sp ace requires an in nitely divisible, but not in nite, time (Mill, System of
LogicV, chap . 7).I cannot p redict the reader's op inion, but my feeling is that
Mill's p rojected re tation is nothing more than an exp osition of the p aradox.
Achilles' sp eed need only be set at a second p er meter to determine the time
needed:10+ 1+ 1/10+ 1/loo+ 1/looo+ 1/10ooo...The limit of the sum of this in nite
geometric p rogression is twelve (p lus, exactly eleven and one- h; p lus, exactly
eleven times three twenty- fths), but it is never reached. That is, the hero's
course will be in nite and he will run forever, but he will give up before twelve
meters, and his eternity will not see the end of twelve seconds. That methodical
dissolution, that boundless descent into more and more minute p recip ices, is not
really hostile to the p roblem; imagining it is the p roblem. Let us not forget,
either, to visualize the runners diminishing, not only because of p ersp ective but
also because of the singular reduction required by their occup ation of micro-
scop ic p laces. Let us also realize that those linked p recip ices corrup t sp ace and,
even more vertiginously, living time, in their desp erate p ersecution of both
immobility and ecstasy.Another resolute re tation was
divulged in 1910 by Henri Bergson, in his noteworthy Essay on the Immediate Facts
ofConsciousness, a title that begins by begging the question. Here is his p age:
THE PERPETUAL RACE OF ACHILLES45On the one hand, we attribute to motion the very
divisibility of the sp ace it traverses, forgetting that while an object can be
divided, an action cannot. On the other hand, we are accustomed to p rojecting
this very action up on sp ace, ap p lying it to the line traversed by the moving
object, to giving it, in brief, solid form. Out of this confusion between motion
and the sp ace traversed are born, in our op inion, the sop hisms of the Eleatic
School: because the interval sep arating two p oints is in - nitely divisible, and if
motion were comp osed of p arts as the interval is, the interval would never be
traversed. But the truth is that each of Achilles' step s is a simp le indivisible
action, and that a er a given number of these actions, Achilles would have gotten
ahead of the tortoise. The Eleatic illusion came from identi ing this series of
individual actions sui generis with the homogeneous sp ace that served as their
stage. As such a sp ace can be divided and reconstituted according to any law, they
assumed the authority to redo Achilles' total movement, no longer with Achilles'
step s but with tortoise step s. They rep laced Achilles in p ursuit of a tortoise with
two tortoises at regular intervals from one another, two tortoises agreeing to
make the same kind of step s or simultaneous actions so as never to catch up with
each other. Why does Achilles get ahead of the tortoise? Because each of Achilles'
step s and each of the tortoise's step s are indivisible as movements, and di erent
magnitudes in sp ace: so that it will not take long for the sum of sp ace traversed
by Achilles to be a sup erior length to the sum of sp ace traversed by the tortoise
and of the advantage the latter had over him. Which is what Zeno does not have in
mind when reconstructing Achilles' motion according to the same law as the
tortoise's motion, forgetting that only sp ace lends itself to a mode of arbitrary
construction and deconstruction, confusing it thus with motion. (Immediate Facts,
Barnes' Sp anish version, p p . 89-90. I've corrected, by the way, some obvious
lap ses by the translator. )Bergson's argument is a comp romise. He admits that sp ace
is in nitely divisible, but denies that time is. He disp lays two tortoises
instead of one to distract the reader. He links a time and a sp ace that are
incomp atible: the abrup t discontinuous time of William James, with its "p erfect
effervescence of newness," and the in nitely divisible sp ace in common credence.
Here I reach, by elimination, the only refutation I know, the only insp i- ration
worthy of the original, a virtue indisp ensable for the aesthetics of in-
telligence: the one formulated by Bertrand Russell. I found it in the noble1 2 3 4
corresp onds to 3018 to 6036 to 9054to 12072, etc.JORG E LUIS BORG ES work of William
James ( Some Problems ofPhilosop hy) and the total concep - tion it p ostulates can be
studied in the p revious books of its inventor- Introduction to Mathematical
Philosop hy, 1919; Our Knowledge of the Exter- nal World, 1926-unsatisfactory,
intense books, inhumanly lucid. For Rus- sell, the op eration of counting is
(intrinsically) that of equating two series. For examp le, if the rst-born sons of
all the houses of Egyp t were killed by the Angel, excep t those who lived in a house
that had a red mark on the door, it is clear that as many sons were saved as there
were red marks, and an enumeration of p recisely how many of these there were does
not matter. Here the quantity is inde nite; there are other op erations in which it
is in - nite as well. The natural series of numbers is in nite, but we can demon-
strate that, within it, there are as many odd numbers as even ones.1 corresp onds to
23 to45 to 6, etc.The p roof is as irrep roachable as it is banal, but does not di er
from the following, in which there are as many multip les of 3018 as there are
numbers.The same can be asserted about its exp onential p owers, however rari- ed
they become as we p rogress.1 2 3corresp onds to 3018to 30182 (9,108,324)to etc.A
jocose accep tance of these facts has insp ired the formula that an in - nite
collection-that is, the series of natural numbers-is a collection whose members can
in turn be broken down into in nite series. The p art, in these elevated latitudes
of numeration, is no less cop ious than the whole: the p recise quantity of p oints in
the universe is the same as in a meter in the universe, or in a decimeter, or in
the deep est trajectory of a star. Achilles'THE PERPETUAL RACE OF ACHILLES 47p roblem
ts within this heroic resp onse. Each p lace occup ied by the tortoise is in
p rop ortion to another occup ied by Achilles, and the meticulous corresp ondence of
both symmetrical series, p oint by p oint, serves to p roclaim their equality. There
does not remain one single p eriodic remnant of the initial advantage given to the
tortoise. The nal p oint in his course, the last in Achilles' course and the last
in the time of the race, are terms which coincide mathematically: this is Russell's
solution. James, without negating the technical sup eriority of his op p onent,
chooses to disagree. Russell's statements (he writes) elude the real dif culty
concerning the growing, not the stable, category of in nity, the only one he takes
into consideration when p resuming that the race has been run and that the p roblem
is to equi- librate the courses. On the other hand, two are not needed: the course
of each runner or the mere lap se of emp ty time imp lies the di culty of reaching a
goal when a p revious interval continues p resenting itself at every turn,
obstructing the way (Some Problems ofPhilosop hy [19n] , 181).I have reached the end
o f my article, but not o f our sp eculation. The p aradox of Zeno of Elea, as James
indicated, is an attemp t up on not only the reality of sp ace but the more
invulnerable and sheer reality of time. I might add that existence in a p hysical
body, immobile p ermanence, the flow of an a ernoon in life, are challenged by such
an adventure. Such a deconstruction, by means of only one word, in nite, a
worrisome word (and then a concep t) we have engendered fearlessly, once it besets
our thinking, ex- p lodes and annihilates it. (There are other ancient p unishments
against commerce with such a treacherous word: there is the Chinese legend of the
scep ter of the kings of Liang, reduced to half its size by each new king. The
scep ter, mutilated by dynasties, still p revails.) My op inion, a er the sup remely
quali ed ones I have p resented, runs the double risk of ap p earing imp ertinent and
trivial. I will nonetheless formulate it: Zeno is incon- testable, unless we admit
the ideality of sp ace and time. If we accep t idealism, if we accep t the concrete
growth of the p erceived, then we shall elude the mise en abfme of the p aradox.Would
this bit of G reek obscurity affect our concep t of the universe?- my reader will
ask.[SJL} The Duration of HeHell has become, over the years, a wearisome
sp eculation. Even its p rosely- tizers have neglected it, abandoning the p oor, but
serviceable, human allusion which the ecclesiastic res of the Holy O ce once had
in this world: a temp oral torment, of course, but one that was not unworthy, within
its terrestrial limitations, of being a metap hor for the immortal, for the
p erfect p ain without destruction that the objects of divine wrath will forever en-
dure. Whether or not this hyp othesis is satisfactory, an increasing lassitude in
the p rop aganda of the institution is indisp utable. (Do not be alarmed; I use
p rop aganda here not in its commercial but rather its Catholic genealogy: a
congregation of cardinals.) In the second century A.D., the Cartha- gian Tertullian
could imagine Hell and its p roceedings with these words:Y ou who are fond of
sp ectacles, exp ect the greatest of all sp ectacles, the last and eternal judgment of
the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold
so many p roud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness;
so many magistrates who p ersecuted the name of the Lord, lique ing in ercer res
than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage p hilosop hers blushing
in red hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated p oets trembling
before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians, more tune l
in the exp ression of their own su erings; so many dancers . . . (De sp ectaculis,
30; G ibbon's version . )Dante himself, in his great e ort to foresee, in an
anecdotal way, some of the decisions of Divine Justice regarding northern Italy,
did not know such enthusiasm. Later, the literary infernos of Quevedo-a mere
op p ortunity for gossip y anachronisms-and of Torres Villarroel-a mere op p ortunity
forTHE DURATION OF HELL49metap hors-would only p rove the increasing usury of dogma.
The decline of Hell is in their works, as it is in Baudelaire, who was so skep tical
about the p erp etual torments that he p retended to adore them. (In a signi cant ety-
mology, the innocuous French verb gener [to botherJ derives from that p ower l
Scrip tural word, G ehenna.)Let us consider Hell. The careless article on the subject
in the Hisp ano- American Encyclop edic Dictionary is useful reading, not for its
sp arse information or terri ed sacristan's theology but rather for the
bewilderment it discloses. It begins by observing that the notion of Hell is not
p articular to the Catholic Church, a p recaution whose intrinsic meaning is, Don't
let the Masons say the Church introduced these atrocities; but this is immediately
followed by the statement that Hell is dogma, and it quickly adds: "The un-
withering glory of Christianity is that it brings to itself all the truths to be
found scattered among the false religions." Whether Hell is a fact of natural
religion, or only of revealed religion, I nd no other theological assump tion as
fascinating or as p owerful. I am not referring to the simp listic mythology of
manure, roasting sp its, res, and tongs, which have gone on p roliferating in the
dep ths, and which all writers have rep eated, to the dishonor of their imaginations
and their decency.' I am sp eaking of the strict notion-a p lace of eternal
p unishment for the wicked-constituted by the dogma with no other obligation than
p lacing it in loco real, in a p recise sp ot, and a beato- rum sede distincto, di
erent from the p lace of the chosen. To imagine anything else would be sinister.
In the ieth chap ter of his History, G ibbon tries to diminish Hell's wonders and
writes that the two p op ulist ingredi- ents of re and darkness are enough to create
a sensation of p ain, which can then be in nitely aggravated by the idea of endless
duration. This disgrun- tled objection p roves p erhap s that it is easy to design
hell, but it does not mitigate the admirable terror of its invention. The attribute
of eternity is what is horrible. The continuity-the fact that divine p ersecution
knows no p ause, that there is no sleep in Hell-is unimaginable. The eternity of
that p ain, however, is debatable.There are two imp ortant and beautiful arguments
that invalidate that eternity. The oldest is that of conditional immortality or
annihilation.'Nevertheless, the amateur of hells would do well not to ignore these
honorable infractions: the Sabian hell, whose four sup erimp osed halls admit threads
of dirty water on the floor, but whose p rincip al room is vast, dusty, and
deserted; Swedenborg's hell, whose gloom is not p erceived by the damned who have
rejected heaven; Bernard Shaw's hell, in Man and Sup erman, which attemp ts to
distract its inhabitants from eternity with the arti ces of luxury, art, eroticism,
and fame.so JORG E LUIS BORG ESImmortality, according to its comp rehensive logic, is
not an attribute of fallen human nature, but of G od's gi in Christ. It therefore
cannot be used against the same individual up on whom it has been bestowed. It is
not a curse but a gi . Whoever merits it, merits heaven; whoever p roves unworthy
of receiving it, "dies in death," as Bunyan wrote, dies without remains. Hell,
according to this p ious theory, is the blasp hemous human name for the denial of
G od. One of its p rop ounders was Whately, the author of that oft-remembered boo et
Historic Doubts Relative to Nap oleon Bonap arte.A more curious sp eculation was
p resented by the evangelical theologian Rothe, in 1869. His argument-also
ennobled by the secret mercy of denying in nite p unishment for the damned-states
that to eternalize p unishment is to eternalize Evil. G od, he asserts, does not
want that eternity for His universe. He insists that it is scandalous to imagine
that the sin l man and the Devil would forever mock G od's benevolent intentions.
(For theology, the creation of the world is an act of love. It uses the term
p redestination to mean "p redestined to glory"; condemnation is merely the
op p osite, a non-choice translated into infernal torment that does not constitute a
sp e- cial act of divine goodness.) He advocates, nally, a declining, dwindling
life for sinners. He foresees them roaming the banks of Creation, or the voids of
in nite sp ace, barely sustaining themselves with the le overs of life. He
concludes: As the devils are unconditionally distant from G od and are
unconditionally His enemies, their activity is against the kingdom of G od, and they
have organized themselves into a diabolical kingdom, which naturally must choose a
leader. The head of that demoniacal government- the Devil-must be imagined as
changing. The individuals who assume the throne of that kingdom eventually succumb
to the ghostliness of their being, but they are succeeded by their diabolical
descendants (Dogmatik I, 248).I now reach the most incredible p art of my task, the
reasons contrived by humanity in favor of an eternal Hell. I will review them in
ascending order of signi cance. The rst is of a discip linary nature: it
p ostulates that the fear lness of p unishment lies p recisely in its eternity, and
that to p lace this in doubt undermines the e cacy of the dogma and p lays into the
Devil's hands. This argument p ertains to the p olice and does not deserve to be re-
futed. The second argument is written thus: Su ering should be in nite because so
is the sin ofo ending the majesty ofthe Lord, an in nite Being. It has been
observed that this evidence p roves so much that we can infer that it p roves
nothing: it p roves that there are no venial sins and that all sins are
unp ardonable. I would like to add that this is a p erfect case of ScholasticTHE
DURATION OF HELL 51frivolity and that its trick is the p lurality of meanings of the
word infinite, which ap p lied to the Lord means "unconditional," and to su ering
means "p erp etual;' and to guilt means nothing that I can understand. Moreover,
arguing that an error against G od is infinite because He is in nite is like ar-
guing that it is holy because G od is, or like thinking that the injuries attrib-
uted to a tiger must be strip ed.Now the third argument looms over me. It may,
p erhap s, be written thus: Heaven and Hell are eternal because the dignity offree
will requires them to be so; either our deeds transcend time, or the "!" is a
delusion. The virtue of this argument is not logic, it is much more: it is entirely
dramatic. It im- p oses a terrible game on us: we are given the terri ing right to
p erdition, to p ersist in evil, to reject all access to grace, to fuel the eternal
flames, to make G od fail in our destiny, to be forever a shadow, detestabile cum
cacodae- m o n i b u s c o n s o r t i u m [ i n t h e d e t e s t a b l e c o m p
a n y o f t h e d e v i l ] . Y o u r d e s t i n y i s real, it tells us; eternal
damnation and eternal salvation are in your hands: this resp onsibility is your
honor. A sentiment similar to Bunyan's: "G od did not p lay in convincing me; the
Devil did not p lay in temp ting me; neither did I p lay when I sunk as into the
bottomless p it, when the p angs of hell caught hold up on me; neither do I p lay in
relating of them" ( G race Abound- ingto the ChiefofSinners, p reface).I believe that
in our unthinkable destiny, ruled by such infamies as bodily p ain, every bizarre
thing is p ossible, even the p erp etuity of a Hell, but that it is sacrilegious to
believe in it.Postscrip t. On this p age lled with mere information, I can also
rep ort a dream. I dreamed I was awakening om another dream-an up roar of chaos and
cataclysms-into an unrecognizable room. Day was dawning: light suf- sed the room,
outlining the foot of the wrought-iron bed, the up right chair, the closed door and
windows, the bare table. I thought fear lly, " ere am I?" and I realized I didn't
know. I thought, "Who am I?" and I couldn't recognize myself. My fear grew. I
thought: This desolate awakening is in Hell, this eternal vigil will be my destiny.
Then I reallywoke up , trembling.{SJL/EW} The Sup erstitious Ethics of the ReaderThe
imp overished condition of our literature, its incap acity to attract readers, has
p roduced a sup erstition about style, an inattentive reading that favors certain a
ectations. Those who condone this sup erstition reckon that style is not the e
ectiveness or ineffectiveness of a certain p age but rather the writer's ap p arent
skills: his analogies, acoustics, the rhythm of his syntax or p unctuation. They are
indi erent to their own convictions or feelings, and seek techniques (to quote
Miguel de Unamuno) that will inform them whether or not this reading matter has the
right to p lease them. They have heard that adjectives should not be trivial and
think that a p age is badly written if it does not p rovide startling liaisons
between adjectives and nouns, even if it succeeds in fulfilling its intent. They
have heard that brevity is a virtue and consider concise the use of ten short
sentences rather than the command of one long locution. (Typ ical examp les of this
succinct charlatanism, or sententious frenzy, may be found in the sp eeches of Polo-
nius, the famous Danish statesman in Hamlet, or even our native Polonius, Baltasar
G racian.) They have heard that the close rep etition of syllables is cacop honic, and
will p retend that in p rose it hurts their ears, though it a ords them a certain-!
think also fake-p leasure in verse. In brief, their focus is on the e ectiveness of
the mechanism, not the disp osition of its p arts. They subordinate feelings to
ethics, or rather to an irre table eti- quette. This inhibition has become so
widesp read that, strictly sp eaking, there are no more readers left, only p otential
literary critics.This sup erstition is so established that no one dares admit to an
absence of style in comp elling works, esp ecially in the classics. There is no
good book without its own style, which no one can deny-excep t its writer. Let us
take the examp le of Don Quixote. Confronted with the p roven excellence of this
novel, Sp anish literary critics have sup p ressed the thought thatTHE SUPERSTITI0US
ETHICS 0F THE READER 53its greatest (and p erhap s only irrefutable) worth may be its
p sychological acumen, and they ascribe to it a stylistic brilliance which many
readers nd mysterious. One need only review a few p aragrap hs of the Quixote to
realize that Cervantes was not a stylist (at least in the current acoustical or
decorative sense of the word) and that he was too interested in the destinies of
Don Quixote and Sancho to allow himself to be distracted by his own voice. In his
Wit and the Art of G enius, Baltasar G racian-who lavished so much p raise on other
narrative p rose, such as the chivalresque novel G uzman de A arache-does not even
mention Don Quixote. Quevedo farcically versi-
ed his death and then forgot all about him. One might object that these two
examp les are negative; in our own era, Leop olda Lugones has criticized Cervantes
exp licitly: "Style is his weakness, and the damage caused by his influence has been
severe. Colorless p rose, redundancies, imsy narrative structure, p anting
p aragrap hs unwinding in endless convolutions that never get to the p oint, and a
comp lete lack of p rop ortion comp rise the legacy received by those who consider its
style to be the immortal work's ultimate achievement; they have only scratched
the surface whose rough edges hide its true strengths and avor" (El
imp eriojesuitico, 59). Our own G roussac has declared: "If things are to be
described as they are, we must admit that at least half of Cervantes' work has a
weak, disheveled shap e, which comp letely justi es his rivals' claim about his
'humble language.' I am referring not only to his verbal imp rop rieties, intolerable
rep etitions and wordp lays, to those overbearing moments of heavy-handed grandilo-
quence, but mostly to the generally bland texture of his p ost-p randial p rose"
(Critica literaria, 41). Post-p randial p rose, Cervantes' p rose, sp oken and not
declaimed, was p recisely what he needed. The same observation would be just, I
believe, in the case of Dostoevsky, Montaigne, or Samuel Butler.This vanity about
style is couched in an even more p athetic conceit: p erfection. There is not a
single p oet who, as minor as he may be, hasn't sculp ted (the verb tends to gure in
his conversation) the p erfect sonnet, a minuscule monument that safeguards his
p ossible immortality, and which the novelties and effacements of time will be
obligated to resp ect. It is usually a sonnet without curlicues, though the whole
thing is a curlicue, that is, a shred of futility. This everlasting fallacy (see
Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial) has been formulated and recommended by Flaubert in
the following sentence: "Correction (in the highest sense of the word) does to
thinking what the waters of the Styx did with Achilles' body, that is, makes it54
JORG E LUIS BORG ESinvulnerable and indestructible" (Corresp ondence II, 199). His
judgment is conclusive, but I p ersonally have not exp erienced any confirmation. (I
sup - p ress the tonic virtues of the Styx, an infernal reference used for emp hasis,
not argument.) The p erfect p age, the p age in which no word can be altered without
harm, is the most p recarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning,
and the "p erfect" p age is p recisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes
that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the p age that becomes immortal can
traverse the re of typ ograp hical errors, ap p roximate translations, and inattentive
or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the p rocess. One cannot with
imp unity alter any line fabricated by G ongora (according to those who restore his
texts), but Don Quixote wins p osthumous battles against his translators and
survives each and every careless version. Heine, who never heard it read in
Sp anish, acclaimed it for eternity. The G erman, Scandinavian, or Hindu ghost of
the Quixote is more alive than the stylist's anxious verbal arti ces.I would not
wish that the moral of this assertion be understood as des- p eration or nihilism.
Nor do I wish to foment negligence, nor do I believe in a mystical virtue of the
awkward locution and the shoddy ep ithet. I am stating that the voluntary emission
of those two or three minor p leasures-the ocular distraction of metap hor, the
auditory distraction of rhythm, and the surp rises of an interjection or a
hyp erbaton-usually p roves that the writer's overriding p assion is his subject, and
that is all. G enuine literature is as indi erent to a rough-hewn p hrase as it is
to a smooth sentence. Lean p rosody is no less a stranger to art than is
calligrap hy, sp elling, or p unctuation, a fact which the judicial origins of
rhetoric and the musical roots of song have always hidden. The most common literary
mistake today is em- p hasis. De nitive words, words that p ostulate p rop hetic or
angelic wisdom, or sup erhuman resolutions-unique, never, always, all, p erfection,
nished- are the habitual barter of all writers. They do not understand that
overstating something is as inep t as not saying it at all, and that readers sense
the im- p overishment caused by careless generalizations and amp lifications. Such
imp rudence dep letes the language. This has occurred in French, where the p hrase "] e
suis navre" really means "I won't be able to join you for tea," and where the verb
for love, aimer, has been reduced to "like." The French ten- dency to exaggerate is
also p resent in its written language; the heroically lucid and methodical Paul
Valery transcribes some forgettable and forgotten lines by La Fontaine and
declares (to sp ite some op p onent) that they are"the most beautiful verses in the
world" ( Variete, 84) .I would now like to recall the future and not the p ast.
Reading is nowTHE SUPERSTITI0US ETHICS 0F THE READER 55p racticed in silence, a
fortunate symp tom. And there are mute readers of verse. From that discrete cap acity
to a p urely ideograp hic writing-direct communication of exp eriences, not of sounds-
there is an inexhaustible distance, though not as great as that of the future.I
reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can
desp air of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can
foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with
its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.[1931}
{SJL} Our InabilitiesThis fractional note on the most ap p arently grievous
characteristics of the Argentine requires a p rior limitation. Its subject is the
Argentine of the cities, the mysterious, everyday sp ecimen who venerates the lo y
sp lendor of the meat-p acking and cattle-auctioning p rofessions; who travels by bus,
which he considers a lethal weap on; who desp ises the United States and celebrates
the fact that Buenos Aires stands shoulder to shoulder with Chicago, homi- cidally
sp eaking; who rejects the p ossibility of a Russian who is uncircumcised or
hairless; who intuits a secret relationship between p erverse or nonexistent
virility and blond tobacco; who lovingly exercises the digital p antomime of the
p seudo-serious; who on certain celebratory evenings en- gorges p ortions of
digestive or evacuative or genetic ap p aratuses in traditional restaurants of
recent ap p arition, called "grills"; who simultaneously p rides himself on our "Latin
idealism" and our "Buenos Aires shrewdness"; who naively believes only in
shrewdness. I will not concern myself with the criollo: a mate-driven
conversationalist and storyteller who is without racial obligations. The p resent-
day criollo-the one from the p rovince of Buenos Aires, at least-is a linguistic
variation, a set of behaviors that is exercised at times to discomfort, at other
times to p lease. An examp le is the aging gaucho, whose irony and p ride rep resent
a subtle form of servility, for they con- firm his p op ular image. . . . The
criollo, I think, needs to be studied in those regions where a foreign audience has
not stylized or falsi ed him-for examp le, in Uruguay's northern p rovinces. I
return, then, to our everyday Ar- gentine. I will not inquire into his comp lete
definition, but rather his most ap p arent traits.The rst is the p overty of his
imagination. For the typ ical Argentine, anything irregular is monstrous-and
therefore ridiculous. The dissident who lets his beard grow in an age of the clean-
shaven, or is crowned by a top hat in a neighborhood of homburgs, is a wonder and
an imp ossibilityOUR INABILITIES57and a scandal for those who see him. In the music
halls, the familiar typ es of the Sp aniard from G alicia and the Italian immigrant
are mere p arodical op - p osites of the criollo. They are not evil-which would give
them a kind of dignity-they are momentary objects of laughter, mere nobodies. They
uselessly gesticulate: even the fundamental seriousness of death is denied them.
The fantasy corresp onds with crude p recision to our false securities. This, for us,
is the foreigner: an unforgivable, always mistaken, largely unreal creature. The
inep titude of our actors help s. Lately, a er Buenos Aires' eleven good lads were
mistreated by Montevideo's eleven bad lads, the worst foreigner of all has become
the Uruguayan. When one lies to oneself and insists on irreconcilable di erences
with faceless outsiders, what becomes of the real p eop le? It is imp ossible to admit
them as resp onsible members of the world. The failure of that intense lm
Hallelujah to reach the audiences of this country-or rather, the failure of the
audiences of this country to reach Hallelujah-was the inevitable combination of
that incap acity (exac- erbated in this case because the subjects were black) with
another, no less dep lorable or symp tomatic: the incap acity to accep t true fervor
without mockery. This mortal and comfortable negligence of everything in the world
that is not Argentine is a p omp ous self-valorization of the p lace our country
occup ies among the other nations. A few months ago, a er the logical outcome of a
gubernatorial election, p eop le began talking about "Russian gold" as if the
internal p olitics of a p rovince of this faded rep ublic would be even p ercep tible in
Moscow, let alone of imp ortance. A strong megalomaniacal will p ermits these
legends. Our comp lete lack of curiosity is e usively disp layed in all our grap hic
magazines, which are as ignorant of the five continents and the seven seas as they
are solicitous toward the wealthy summer vacationers in Mar del Plata, the objects
of their vile ardor, their veneration, and their vigilance. Not only is the general
vision imp overished here, but also the domestic one. The native's map
of Buenos Aires is well known: the Center, the Barrio Norte (asep tically omitting
its tenements), the Boca del Riachuelo, and Belgrano. The rest is an inconvenient
Cimmeria, a useless conjectural stop for the bus on its return trip to the
outskirts.The other trait I shall attemp t to demonstrate is the unrestrainable de-
light in failure. In the movie houses of this city, crushed hop es are ap - p lauded
in the merry balconies as if they were comic. The same occurs when there is a ght
scene: the loser's humiliation is far more interesting than the winner's hap p iness.
In one of von Sternberg's heroic lms, the tall gangster Bull Weed staggers over
the fallen streamers at the ruinous end of assJORG E LUIS BORG ESp arty to kill his
drunken rival, who, seeing the awkward but steadfast ap - p roach of Weed, runs for
his life. The outbursts of laughter celebrating his terror remind us what
hemisp here we are in. At the p oorer movie houses, any hint of aggression is enough
to excite the p ublic. This ever-ready resentment had its joyous articulation in
the imp erative "jsufra!" [su er!] , which has lately been retired from our lip s, but
not from our hearts. The interjection "jtoma!" [take it!) is also significant; it
is used by Argentine women to crown any enumeration of sp lendors-for examp le, the
op ulent stages of a summer holiday-as if delights were measured by the envious
irritation they p roduce. (We note, in p assing, that the most sincere comp liment in
Sp anish is "enviable.") Another illustration of the Buenos Airean's facility for
hate is the considerable number of anonymous messages, among which we must now
include the new auditory anonymity: the offensive telep hone call, an invulnerable
broadcast of insults. I do not know if this imp ersonal and modest literary genre is
an Argentine invention, but it is p racticed here o en and enthusiastically. There
are virtuosos in this cap ital who season the indecency of their vocatives with the
studious untimeliness of the hour. Nor do our fellow citizens often forget that
great sp eed may be a form of good breeding and that the insults shouted at
p edestrians from a whizzing car maintain a general imp unity. It is true that the
recip ient is equally anonymous and the brief sp ectacle of his rage grows smaller
until it vanishes, but it is always a relief to insult. I will add another curious
examp le: sodomy. In all the countries of the world, an indivisible rep robation
falls back up on the two p arties of that unimaginable contact. "Both of them have
committed an abomination . . . their blood shall be up on them," says Leviticus. Not
among the tough guys of Buenos Aires, who p roclaim a kind of veneration for the
active p artner-because he took advantage of his comp anion. I submit this fecal
dialectic to the ap ologists for "shrewdness:' the wisecrack, and the backbite,
which cover over so much hell.A p overty of imagination and resentment de ne our
p lace in death. The former is vouched for by a generalizing article by Unamuno on
"The Imagination in Cochabamba"; the latter by the incomp arable sp ectacle of a
conservative government that is forcing the entire rep ublic into socialism, merely
to annoy and dep ress a centrist p arty.I have been an Argentine for many generations
and exp ress these com- p laints with no joy.[1931} [EW} The Postulation of Reality
Hume noted once and for all that Berkeley's arguments do not admit of the slightest
rep ly and do not p roduce the slightest conviction; I would like to p ossess a no
less cultured and lethal maxim with which to demolish the arguments of Croce.
Hume's does not serve my p urp ose, for Croce's diap hanous doctrine does have the
faculty of p ersuading, even if that is its only faculty. Its effect is to be
unmanageable; it is good for cutting o a discussion, not for resolving one.Its
formula-my reader will recall-is the identical nature of the aesthetic and the
exp ressive. I do not reject it, but I wish to observe that writers of a classical
disp osition tend rather to shun the exp ressive. The fact has not been given any
consideration until now; I shall exp lain myself.The romantic, generally with ill
fortune, wishes incessantly to exp ress; the classical writer rarely disp enses with
a p etitio p rincip ii-that is, some fundamental p remise which is taken entirely for
granted. I am diverting the words classical and romantic from all historical
connotations; I use them to mean two archetyp es of the writer (two p rocedures). The
classical writer does not distrust language, but believes in the amp le virtue of
each of its signs. He writes, for examp le:A er the dep arture of the G oths, and the
sep aration of the allied army, Attila was surp rised at the vast silence that
reigned over the p lains of Chalons: the susp icion of some hostile stratagem
detained him several days within the circle of his wagons, and his retreat beyond
the Rhine confessed the last victory which was achieved in the name of the West-
ern emp ire. Meroveus and his Franks, observing a p rudent distance, and magni ing
the op inion of their strength by the numerous fires which they kindled every night,
continued to follow the rear of the Huns till they reached the con nes of
Thuringia. The Thuringians6oJORG E LUIS BORG ESserved in the army of Attila: they
traversed, both in their march and in their return, the territories of the Franks;
and it was p erhap s in this war that they exercised the cruelties, which, about
fourscore years a erwards, were revenged by the son of Clovis. They massacred
their hostages, as well as their cap tives: two hundred young maidens were tortured
with exquisite and unrelenting rage; their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses,
or their bones were crushed under the weight of rolling wagons; and their unburied
limbs were abandoned on the p ublic roads, a p rey to dogs and vultures. (G ibbon,
Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Emp ire )The clause "After the dep arture of the
G oths" suf ces to reveal the mediate character of this writing, generalized and
abstract to the p oint of invisibility. The author p resents us with a p lay of
symbols, no doubt rigorously organized, but whose eventual animation is up to us.
He is not really ex- p ressive; he does no more than record a reality, he does not
rep resent one. The sump tuous events to whose p osthumous allusion he summons us in-
volved dense exp eriences, p ercep tions, reactions; these may be inferred from his
narrative but are not p resent in it. To p ut it more p recisely, he does not write
reality's initial contacts, but its nal elaboration in concep ts. This is the
classic method, the one p erp etually followed by Voltaire, by Swi , by Cervantes. I
shall cop y down a second p aragrap h, at this p oint almost su- p er uous, from the
last of these writers:And thinking there was a necessity for shortening the siege,
while this op p ortunity of Anselmo's absence lasted, Lothario assaulted Camilla's
p ride with the p raises of her beauty; for nothing sooner succeeds in overthrowing
the embattled towers of female vanity, than vanity itself, emp loyed by the tongue
of adulation: in short, he so assiduously un- dermined the fortress of her virtue,
and p lied it with such irresistible engines, that tho' she had been made of brass,
she must have surren- dered at mercy: he wep t, entreated, p romised, flattered,
feigned and im- p ortuned, with such earnest exp ressions of love, as conquered all
her reserve; at last, he obtained a comp lete triump h, which, tho' what he least
exp ected, was what of all things, he most ardently desired. (Don Quixote I, chap .
34)Passages like this one make up much the greater p art of world literature, and
the least worthless p art, even now. To rep udiate them so as not to incon-THE
POSTULATION OF REALITY 61venience a formula would be imp ractical and ruinous.
Within their obvious ine ectiveness, they are e ective; this contradiction needs
resolving.I would recommend this hyp othesis: imp recision is tolerable or p lau-
sible in literature because we almost always tend toward it in reality. The
concep tual simp li cation of comp lex states is o en an instantaneous op eration.
The very fact of p erceiving, of p aying attention, is selective; all attention,
all focusing of our consciousness, involves a deliberate omission of what is not
interesting. We see and hear through memories, fears, exp ectations. In bodily
terms, unconsciousness is a necessary condition of p hysical acts. Our body knows
how to articulate this di cult p aragrap h, how to con- tend with stairways, knots,
overp asses, cities, fast-running rivers, dogs, how to cross the street without
being run down by tra c, how to p rocreate, how to breathe, how to sleep , and
p erhap s how to kill: our body, not our intellect. For us, living is a series of
adap tations, which is to say, an education in oblivion. It is admirable that the
rst news of Utop ia Thomas More gives us is his p uzzled ignorance of the "true"
length of one of its bridges. . . .I reread, in my investigation of the classic,
the above p aragrap h by G ibbon, and I nd an almost imp ercep tible and certainly
harmless metap hor: the reign of silence. It is an initial gesture of exp ression-
whether it falls short or is felicitous, I do not know-that ap p ears not to conform
to the strict legal execution of the rest of the p rose. Of course, it is justi ed
by its invisibility, its already conventional nature. Its use allows us to de ne
another of the hallmarks of the classical: the belief that once an image has been
brought into existence, it is p ublic p rop erty. To the classical mind, the p lurality
of men and of eras is incidental; literature is always one and the same. The
surp rising defenders of G ongora exonerated him of the charge of innovation-by
documenting the ne erudite lineage of his metap hors. They had not the slightest
p remonition of the romantic discovery of the p ersonality. Now all of us are so
absorbed in
it that the fact of denying or neglecting it is only one of many clever ways of
"being p ersonal." With resp ect to the thesis that p oetic language must be a
single thing, we may note its evanescent resurrection by Arnold; he p rop osed to
reduce the vocabulary of Homer's translators to that of the Authorized Version of
the Scrip - tures, alleviated only by the eventual interp olation of certain
liberties taken from Shakesp eare. His argument was based on the p ower and
dissemination of the biblical words. . . .The reality offered up by classical
writers is a question of con dence, just as p aternity is for a certain character in
the Lehrjahre. The reality the62 JORG E LUIS BORG ESromantics seek to dep lete is of a
more overbearing nature; their continual method is emp hasis, the p artial lie. I
shall not go looking for illustrations: every p age of p rose or verse that is
p rofessionally current can be examined with success in this resp ect.The classic
p ostulation of reality can take three forms, which are quite diversely
accessible. The easiest consists of a general noti cation of the imp ortant facts.
(Excep t for a few inconvenient allegories, the aforecited text byCervantes is not a
bad examp le of this rst and sp ontaneous mode of the classical p rocedure.) The
second consists of imagining a more comp lex reality than the one declared to the
reader and describing its derivations and results. I know of no better illustration
than the op ening of Tennyson's heroic fragment Marte d'Arthur, which I rep roduce
here for the interest of its technique.So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea;Until King Arthur's table, man by man,Had
fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,King Arthur; then, because his wound was deep ,
The bold Sir Bedivere up li ed him,Sir Bedivere the last of all his knights, And
bore him to a chap el nigh the eld, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That
stood on a dark strait of barren land. On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a
great water, and the moon was full.Three times this narration has p ostulated a more
comp lex reality: rst, by the grammatical arti ce of the adverb so; second (and
better), by the incidental manner of transmitting a fact: "because his wound was
deep "; third, by the unexp ected addition of "and the moon was full." Another e
ective illustration of this method is sup p lied by Morris, who, after relating the
mythical abduction of one of Jason's oarsmen by fleet-footed river divinities,
closes the story in the following way:. . . the gurgling river hidThe ushed nymp hs
and the heedless sleep ing man. But ere the water covered them, one ranAcross the
mead and caught up from the groundThe brass-bound sp ear, and buckler bossed and
round,THE POSTULATION OF REALITY The ivory-hilted sword, and coat of mail,Then took
the stream; so what might tell the tale, Unless the wind should tell it, or the
birdWho from the reed these things had seen and heard?This nal testimony by beings
p reviously unmentioned is, for us, the im- p ortant p art.The third method, the most
di cult and e ective of them all, makes use of the invention of circumstances. A
certain very memorable detail in Enrique Larreta's La gloria de Don Ramiro can
serve as an examp le: the ap - p etizing "bacon broth, served in a tureen with a
p adlock to p rotect it from the voracity of the p ages," so suggestive of genteel
p overty, the line of servants, the big old house full of stairways and turns and
varying light. I have given a brief and linear examp le, but I know of extensive
works-Wells' rigorous imaginative novels' and those of Daniel Defoe, exasp eratingly
p lausible-which make frequent use of no other p rocedure than an unfold- ing or
series of those laconic details with broad imp lications. I shall say the same of
the cinematograp hic novels of Josef von Sternberg, which are also made up of signi
cant moments. This is an admirable and di cult method, but its general
ap p licability makes it less strictly literary than the two p revious ones,
p articularly the second, which o en functions by p ure syntax, p ure verbal
dexterity. As is p roven by these lines from Moore:1The Invisible Man, for examp le.
This character-a solitary chemistry student in the desp erate London winter-must
nally acknowledge that the p rivileges of invisibility do not make up for the
inconveniences. He must go naked and barefoot, so as not to p anic the city with the
sight of a scurrying overcoat and a p air of autonomous boots. A revolver in his
transp arent hand is imp ossible to conceal. So are the foods he swallows, before
they are digested. From sunrise on, his so-called eyelids do not block out the
light, and he must get used to sleep ing as if with his eyes op en. It is just as
useless to throw his p hantasmal arm over his eyes. In the street, traf c
accidents x up on him and he is always in fear of being run over and killed. He
must ee London. He must take refuge in wigs, in p ince-nez made with smoked glass,
in carnivalesque noses, susp icious beards, and gloves . . . so that no one will see
that he is invisible. Once found out, he begins a miserable Reign of Terror in a
wretched little village far from the sea. In order to make others resp ect him, he
wounds a man. Then the p olice com- missioner has him hunted down by dogs; he is
cornered near the train station, and killed.Another highly skilled examp le of such
circumstantial p hantasmagoria is Kip - ling's tale, "The Finest Story in the World,"
in the 1893 collection Many Inventions.JORG E LUIS BORG ES ] e suis ton amant, et la
blonde G orge tremble sous man baiser[I am your lover, and the blond/Throat trembles
beneath my kiss] whose virtue resides in the transition from the p ossessive p ronoun
to the direct article, the surp rising use of la. Their symmetrical op p osite is
found in the following line from Kip ling:Little they trust to sp arrow-dust that
stop the seal in his sea!Naturally, the antecedent of "his" is "seal": "dust that
stop the seal in his sea." { 1 9 3 1 } { EA } A Defense of Basilides the FalseIn
about 1905, I knew that the omniscient p ages (A to All) of the rst volume of
Montaner and Simon's Hisp ano-American Encyclop edic Dictionary contained a small
and alarming drawing of a sort of king, with the p ro led head of a rooster, a
virile torso with op en arms brandishing a shield and a whip , and the rest merely a
coiled tail, which served as a throne. In about 1916, I read an obscure p assage in
Quevedo: "There was the accursed Basilides the heresiarch. There was Nicholas of
Antioch, Carp ocrates and Cerinthus and the infamous Ebion. Later came Valentinus,
he who believed sea and silence to be the beginning of everything." In about 1923,
in G eneva, I came across some heresiological book in G erman, and I realized that
the fateful drawing rep resented a certain miscellaneous god that was horribly
worship ed by the very same Basilides. I also learned what desp erate and admirable
men the G nostics were, and I began to study their p assionate sp eculations. Later I
was able to investigate the scholarly books of Mead (in the G erman version:
Fragmente eines verschollenen G laubens, 1902) and Wolfgang Schultz (Dokumente der
G nosis, 1910), and the articles by Wilhelm Bousset in the Encyclop edia Britannica.
Today I would like to summarize and illustrate one of their cosmogonies: p recisely
that of Basilides the heresiarch. I follow entirely the account given by
Irenaeus. I realize that many doubt its accuracy, but I susp ect that this
disorganized revision of musty dreams may in itself be a dream that never inhabited
any dreamer. More- over, the Basilidean heresy is quite simp le in form. He was born
in Alexan- dria, they say a hundred years a er the Cross, they say among the
Syrians and the G reeks. Theology, then, was a p op ular p assion.In the beginning of
Basilides' cosmogony there is a G od. This divinity majestically lacks a name, as
well as an origin; thus his ap p roximate name, p ater innatus. His medium is the
p leroma or p lenitude, the inconceivable museum of Platonic archetyp es, intelligible
essences, and universals. He is66 JORG E LUIS BORG ESan immutable G od, but from his
rep ose emanated seven subordinate divinities who, condescending to action,
created and p resided over a rst heaven. From this rst demiurgic crown came a
second, also with angels, p owers, and thrones, and these formed another, lower
heaven, which was the symmetrical dup licate of the rst. This second conclave saw
itself rep roduced in a third, and that in another below, and so on down to 365.
The lord of the lowest heaven is the G od of the Scrip tures, and his fraction of di-
vinity is nearly zero. He and his angels founded this visible sky, amassed the
immaterial earth on which we are walking, and later ap p ortioned it. Ratio- nal
oblivion has erased the p recise fables this cosmogony attributes to the origin of
mankind, but the examp le of other contemp orary imaginations allows us to salvage
something, in however vague and sp eculative a form. In the fragment p ublished by
Hilgenfeld, darkness and light had always coexisted, unaware of each other, and
when they nally saw each other, light looked and turned away, but darkness,
enamored, seized its reflection or memory, and that was the beginning of mankind.
In the similar system of Satornilus, heaven grants the worker-angels a momentary
vision, and man is fabricated in its likeness, but he drags himself along the
ground like a vip er until the Lord, in p ity, sends him a sp ark of his p ower. What
is imp ortant is what is common to these narratives: our rash or guilty
imp rovisation out of unp roductive matter by a de cient divinity. I return to
Basilides' history. Cast down by the troublesome angels of the Hebrew G od, low
humanity deserved the p ity of the timeless G od, who sent it a redeemer. He was to
assume an illusory body, for
the flesh degrades. His imp assive p han- tasm hung p ublicly on the cross, but the
essence of Christ p assed through the sup erimp osed heavens and was restored to the
p leroma. He p assed through them unharmed, for he knew the secret names of their
divinities. "And those who know the truth of this history," concludes the
p rofession of faith translated by Irenaeus, "will know themselves free of the p ower
of the p rinces who built this world. Each heaven has its own name and likewise each
angel and lord and each p ower of the heaven. He who knows their incomp arable
names will p ass through them invisibly and safely, as the redeemer did. And as
the Son was not recognized by anyone, neither shall the G nostic be. And these
mysteries shall not be p ronounced, but kep t in silence. Know them all, that no
one shall know thee."The numeric cosmogony of the beginning degenerates toward the
end into numeric magic: 365 levels of heaven, at 7 p owers p er heaven, require the
imp robable retention of 2,555 oral amulets: a language that the years reduced to
the p recious name of the redeemer, which is Caulacau, and to thatA DEFENSE OF
BASILIDES THE FALSE of the immobile G od, which is Abraxas. Salvation, for this
disillusioned heresy, involves a mnemotechnical effort by the dead, much as the
torment of the Savior is an op tical illusion-two simulacra which mysteriously har-
monize with the p recarious reality of their world.To scoff at the fruitless
multip lication of nominal angels and reflected symmetrical heavens in that
cosmogony is not terribly di cult. Occam's restrictive p rincip le, "Entia non sunt
multip licanda p raeter necessitatem" [What can be done with fewer is done in vain
with more] , could be ap - p lied-to demolish it. For my p art, I believe such rigor to
be anachronistic or worthless. The p rop er conversion of those heavy, wavering
symbols is what matters. I see two intentions in them: the rst is a commonp lace of
criticism; the second-which I do not p resume to claim as my discovery- has not,
until now, been emp hasized. I shall begin with the more obvious. It is a quiet
resolution of the p roblem of evil by means of a hyp othetical inser- tion of a
gradual series of divinities between the no less hyp othetical G od and reality. In
the system under examination, these derivations of G od dwindle and weaken the
further they are removed from G od, nally reaching the bottom with the abominable
p owers who scratched out mankind from base matter. In the account of Valentinus-
who did not claim the sea and silence to be the beginning of ever hing-a fallen
goddess (Achamoth) has, by a shadow, two sons who are the founder of the world and
the devil. An intensi cation of the story is attributed to Simon Magus: that of
having rescued Helen of Troy, formerly rst-born daughter of G od and later
condemned by the angels to p ain l transmigrations, from a sailors' brothel in
Tyre.1 The thirty-three human years of Jesus Christ and his slow extinguishing on
the cross were not su cient exp iation for the harsh G nostics.There remains to
consider the other meaning of those obscure inventions. The dizzying tower of
heavens in the Basilidean heresy, the p rolifera- tion of its angels, the p lanetary
shadow of the demiurges disrup ting earth, the machinations of the inferior circles
against the p leroma, the dense p op u- lation, whether inconceivable or nominal, of
that vast mythology, also p oint to the diminution of this world. Not our evil, but
our central insigni cance,?Helen, dolorous daughter of G od. That divine liation
does not exhaust the con- nections of her legend to that of Christ. To the latter
the followers of Basilides assigned an insubstantial body; of the tragic queen it
was claimed that only her eidolon or simulacrum was carried away to Troy. A
beautiful sp ecter redeemed us; another led to battles and Homer. See, for this
Helenaic Docetism, Plato's Phaedrus, and Andrew Lang, Adventures among Books, 237-
248.68 JORG E LUIS BORG ESis p redicated in them. Like the grandiose sunsets on the
p lains, the sky is p assionate and monumental and the earth is p oor. That is the
justi cation for Valentinus' melodramatic cosmogony, which sp ins an in nite p lot of
two sup ernatural brothers who discover each other, a fallen woman, a p ower l mock
intrigue among the bad angels, and a final marriage. In this melodrama or serial,
the creation of the world is a mere aside. An admirable idea: the world imagined as
an essentially tile p rocess, like a sideways, lost glimp se of ancient celestial
ep isodes. Creation as a chance act.The p roject was heroic; orthodox religious
sentiment and theology violently rep udiated that p ossibility. The first creation,
for them, was a free and necessary act of G od. The universe, as St. Augustine would
have it understood, did not begin in time, but rather simultaneously with it-a
judgment which denies all p riority to the Creator. Strauss claims as illusory the
hy- p othesis of an initial moment, for that would contaminate with temp orality not
only the succeeding moments but also the "p recedent" of eternity.In the rst
centuries of our era, the G nostics disp uted with the Chris- tians. They were
annihilated, but we can imagine their p ossible victory. Had Alexandria triump hed
and not Rome, the bizarre and con sed stories that I have summarized would be
coherent, majestic, and ordinary. Lines such as Navalis' "Life is a sickness of the
sp irit,"2 or Rimbaud's desp airing "True life is absent; we are not in the world,"
would lminate from the canonical books. Sp eculations, such as Richter's discarded
theory about the stellar origin of life and its chance dissemination on this
p lanet, would know the unconditional ap p roval of p ious laboratories. In any case,
what better gift can we hop e for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a
G od than to be absolved of the world?[1932] [EW] 2That dictum-"Leben ist eine
Krankheit des G eistes, ein leidenscha liches Tun"- owes its diffusion to Carlyle,
who emp hasized it in his famous article in the Foreign Review, 1829. Not merely a
momentary coincidence, but rather an essential rediscov- ery of the agonies and
enlightenments of G nosticism, is the Prop hetic Books of Wil- liam Blake.The Homeric
VersionsNo p roblem is as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the
one p osed by translation. The forgetfulness induced by vanity, the fear of
confessing mental p rocesses that may be divined as dangerously commonp lace, the
endeavor to maintain, central and intact, an incalculable reserve of obscurity: all
watch over the various forms of direct writing. Translation, in contrast, seems
destined to illustrate aesthetic debate. The model to be imitated is a visible
text, not an immeasurable labyrinth of former p rojects or a submission to the
momentary temp tation of uency. Bertrand Russell de nes an external object as a
circular system radiating p ossible imp ressions; the same may be said of a text,
given the incalculable rep ercussions of words. Translations are a p artial and
p recious documentation of the changes the text su ers. Are not the many versions
of the iad- from Chap man to Magnien-merely di erent p ersp ectives on a mutable
fact, a long exp erimental game of chance p layed with omissions and em- p hases?
(There is no essential necessity to change languages; this intentional game of
attention is p ossible within a single literature.) To assume that every
recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume
that dra nine is necessarily inferior to dra H-for there can only be dra s. The
concep t of the "de nitive text" corresp onds only to religion or exhaustion.The
sup erstition about the inferiority of translations-coined by the well- own Italian
adage-is the result of absentmindedness. There is no good text that does not seem
invariable and definitive if we have turned to it a su cient number of times. Hume
identi ed the habitual idea of causality with that of temp oral succession. Thus a
good lm, seen a second time, seems even better; we tend to take as necessity that
which is no more than rep etition. With famous books, the rst time is actually the
second, for we begin them already knowing them. The p rudent common p hrase70 JORG E
LUIS BORG ES"rereading the classics" is the result of an unwitting truth. I do not
know if the statement "In a p lace in La Mancha, whose name I don't wish to recall,
there lived not long ago a nobleman who kep t a lance and shield, a grey- hound and
a skinny old nag" would be considered good by an imp artial divinity; I only know
that any modi cation would be sacrilegious and that I cannot conceive of any other
beginning for the Quixote. Cervantes, I think, ignored this slight sup erstition and
p erhap s never noted that p articular p aragrap h. I, in contrast, can only reject any
divergence. The Quixote, due to my congenital p ractice of Sp anish, is a uniform
monument, with no other variations excep t those p rovided by the p ublisher, the
bookbinder, and the typ esetter; the Odyssey, thanks to my op p ortune ignorance of
G reek, is an international bookstore of works in p rose and verse, from Chap man's
coup lets to Andrew Lang's "Authorized Version" or Berard's classic French drama or
Morris' vigorous saga or Butler's ironic bourgeois novel. I abound in the mention
of English names because English literature has always been amicable toward this
ep ic of the sea, and the series of its versions of the Odyssey would be enough to
illustrate the course of its centuries. That heterogenous and even contradictory
richness is not attributable solely to the evolution of the English language, or
to the mere length of the original, or to the deviations or diverse cap acities of
the translators, but rather to a circumstance that is p articular to Homer: the di
cult category of knowing what p ertains to the p oet and what p ertains to the
language. To that fortunate dif culty we owe the p ossibility of so many versions,
all of them sincere, genuine, and divergent.I know of no better examp le than that
of the Homeric adjectives. The divine Patroclus, the nourishing earth, the wine-
dark sea, the solid-hoofed horses, the damp waves, the black ship , the black blood,
the beloved knees, are recurrent exp ressions, inop p ortunely moving. In one p lace,
he sp eaks of the "rich noblemen who drink of the black waters of the Aesop os"; in
another, of a tragic king who, "wretched in delightful Thebes, governed the
Cadmeans by the gods' fatal decree." Alexander Pop e (whose lavish translation we
shall scrutinize later) believed that these irremovable ep ithets were liturgical in
character. Remy de G ourmont, in his long essay on style, writes that at one time
they must have been incantatory, although they no longer are so. I have p referred
to susp ect that these faithful ep ithets were what p rep ositions still are: modest
and obligatory sounds that usage adds to certain words and up on which no
originality may be exercised. We know that it is correct to go "on foot" and not
"with foot." The rhap sodist knew that the correct adjective for Patroclus was
"divine." Neither case is an aes-THE HOMERIC VERSIONS 71thetic p rop osition. I o er
these sp eculations without enthusiasm; the only certainty is the imp ossibility of
sep arating what p ertains to the author from what p ertains to the language. When we
read, in Agustin Moreto (if we must read Agustin Moreto):Pues en casa tan
comp uestasdQue hacen todo el santo dia?[At home so elegant/What do they do the
whole blessed day?] we know that the holiness of the day is an instance of the
Sp anish language, and not of the writer. With Homer, in contrast, we remain in
nitely ignorant of the emp hases.For a lyric or elegiac p oet, our uncertainty
about his intentions could be devastating, but not for a reliable exp ositor of vast
p lots. The events of the Iliad and the Odyssey amp ly survive, even though Achilles
and Odys- seus, what Homer meant by naming them, and what he actually thought of
them have all disap p eared. The p resent state of his works is like a comp lex
equation that rep resents the p recise relations of unknown quantities. There is no
p ossible greater richness for the translator. Browning's most famous book consists
of ten detailed accounts of a single crime by each of those im- p licated in it. All
of the contrast derives from the characters, not from the events, and it is almost
as intense and unfathomable as that of ten legitimate versions of Homer.The
beautiful Newman-Arnold debate (1861-62), more imp ortant than either of its
p articip ants, extensively argued the two basic methods of translation. Newman
defended the literal mode, the retention of all verbal singularities; Arnold, the
strict elimination of details that distract or detain the reader, the subordination
of the Homer who is irregular in every line to the essential or conventional Homer,
one comp osed of a syntactical simp licity, a simp licity of ideas, a flowing
rap idity, and lo iness. The latter method p rovides the p leasures of uniformity and
nobility; the former, of continuous and small surp rises.I would like to consider
the various fates of a single p assage from Homer. These are the events recounted by
Odysseus to the ghost ofAchilles in the city of the Cimmerians, on the night
without end, and they concern Achilles' son Neop tolemus (OdysseyXI). Here is
Buckley's literal version:But when we had sacked the lo y city of Priam, having his
share and excellent reward, he embarked unhurt on a ship , neither stricken with
the72 JORG E LUIS BORG ESsharp brass, nor wounded in ghting hand to hand, as o
entimes hap - p ens in war; for Mars confusedly raves.That of the equally literal but
archaicizing Butcher and Lang:But a er we had sacked the steep city of Priam, he
embarked unscathed with his share of the sp oil, and with a noble p rize; he was not
smitten with the sharp sp ear, and got no wound in close ght: and many such chances
there be in war, for Ares rageth con sedly.Cowp er in 1791:At length when we had
sack'd the lo y town Of Priam, laden with abundant sp oilsHe safe embark'd, neither
by sp ear of shaAught hurt, or in close ght by faulchion's edge As o in war
befalls, where wounds are dealt Promiscuous, at the will of ery Mars.Pop e's 1725
version:And when the G ods our arms with conquest crown'd When Troy's p roud bulwarks
smok'd up on the ground, G reece to reward her soldier's gallant toilsHeap 'd high his
navy with unnumber'd sp oils.Thus great in glory from the din of warSafe he
return'd, without one hostile scar;Tho' sp ears in the iron temp ests rain'd around,
Y et innocent they p lay'd and guiltless of a wound.G eorge Chap man in 1614:. . . In
the event,High Troy dep op ulate, he made ascentTo his fair ship , with p rise and
treasure storeSafe; and no touch away with him he boreOf far-o -hurl'd lance, or of
close-fought sword, Whose wounds for favours and war doth o a ord, Which he
(though sought) miss'd in war's closest wage. In close ghts Mars doth never ght,
but rage.And Butler in 1900:THE HOMERIC VERSIONS73Y et when we had sacked the city
of Priam he got his handsome share of the p rize money and went on board (such is
the fortune of war) without a wound up on him, neither from a thrown sp ear nor in
close combat, for the rage of Mars is a matter of great chance.The rst two
versions-the literal ones-may be moving for a variety of reasons: the reverential
mention of the sacking of the city, the ingenuous statement that one is o en
injured in war, the sudden juncture of the in - nite disorders of battle in a
single god, the fact of madness in a god. Other, lesser p leasures are also at work:
in one of the texts I've cop ied, the excellent p leonasm of "embarked on a ship "; in
another, the use of a cop ulative conjunction for the causal in "and many such
chances there be in war."' The?Another of Homer's habits is the ne abuse of
adversative conjunctions. Here are some examp les:"Die, but I shall receive my own
destiny wherever Zeus and the other immortal gods desire" (IliadXXII)."Astyokhe,
daughter of Aktor: a modest virgin when she ascended to the up p er rooms of her
father's dwelling, but secretly the god Ares lay beside her" (Iliad II)." [The
Myrmidons] were like wolves carnivorous and erce and tireless, who rend a great
stag on a mountainside and feed on him, but their jaws are reddened with blood"
(IliadXVI)."Zeus of Dodona, god of Pelasgians, 0 god whose home lies far! Ruler of
wintry harsh Dodona! But your ministers, the Selloi, live with feet unwashed, and
sleep on the hard ground" ( Iliad XVI)."Be hap p y, lady, in this love, and when the
year p asses you will bear glorious children, for the coup lings of the immortals
are not without issue. But you must look after them, and raise them. G o home now
and hold your p eace and tell nobody my name, but I tell it to you; I am the
Earthshaker Poseidon" (OdysseyXI)."After him I was aware o f p owerful Herakles; his
image, that is, but h e himself among the immortal gods enjoys their festivals,
married to sweet-step p ing Hebe, child of great Zeus and Hera of the golden sandals"
( Odyssey XI).I shall add the amboyant translation that G eorge Chap man did of this
last p assage:Down with these was thrustThe idol of the force of Hercules,But his
rm self did no such fate op p ress. He feasting lives amongst th'immortal States
White-ankled Hebe and himself made mates In heav'nly nup tials. Hebe, Jove's dear
race And Juno's whom the golden sandals grace.JORG E LUIS BORG ES74third version,
Cowp er's, is the most innocuous of all: it is as literal as the re- quirements of
Miltonic stresses p ermit. Pop e's is extraordinary. His luxuriant language (like
that of G ongora) may be de ned by its unconsidered and mechanical use of
sup erlatives. For examp le: the hero's single black ship is multip lied into a fleet.
Always subject to this law of amp li cation, all of his lines fall into two large
classes: the p urely oratorical ("And when the G ods our arms with conquest crown'd")
or the visual ("When Troy's p roud bulwarks smok'd up on the ground"). Sp eeches and
sp ectacles: that is Pop e. The p assionate Chap man is also sp ectacular, but his mode
is the lyric, not oratory. Butler, in contrast, demonstrates his determination to
avoid all visual op p ortunities and to turn Homer's text into a series of sedate
news items.Which of these many translations is faithful? my reader will want to
know. I rep eat: none or all of them. If delity refers to Homer's imaginations
and the irrecoverable men and days that he p ortrayed, none of them are faithful for
us, but all of them would be for a tenth-century G reek. If it refers to his
intentions, then any one of the many I have transcribed would su ce, excep t for the
literal versions, whose virtue lies entirely in their contrast to contemp orary
p ractices. It is not imp ossible that Butler's unru ed version is the most faithful.
[1932] [EW] Narrative Art d MagicThe techniques of the novel have not, I believe,
been analyzed exhaustively. A historical reason for this continued neglect may be
the greater antiquity of other genres, but a more fundamental reason is that the
novel's many comp lexities are not easily disentangled from the techniques of p lot.
Analysis of a short story or an elegy is served by a sp ecialized vocabulary and
facilitated by the p ertinent quotation of brief p assages; the study of the novel,
however, lacks such established terms, and the critic is hard p ut to nd examp les
that immediately illustrate his arguments. I therefore beg indulgence for the
documentation that follows.I shall rst consider the narrative features we nd in
William Morris' The Life and Death ofJason (1867). My aim is literary, not
historical; I deliberately exclude any study
of the p oem's Hellenic af liation. I shall observe, however, that the ancients-
including Ap ollonius of odes-had long since set the Argonauts' deeds to verse;
there is an intermediate version dating from 1474, Les Faits et p rouesses du
noble et vaillant chevalierJason, not tobe found in Buenos Aires, of course, but
which scholars may readily consult in English.Morris' dif cult task was the
realistic narration of the fabulous adventures of Jason, king of Iolchos. Line-
by-line virtuosity, common in lyrical p oetry, was imp ossible in a narrative of over
ten thousand lines. The fable required, above all, a strong ap p earance of factual
truth, in order to achieve that willing susp ension of disbelief which, for
Coleridge, is the essence of p oetic faith. Morris succeeded, and I would like to
determine how.Take this examp le from Book I: Aeson, the old king of Iolchos, gives
his son over to the charge of Chiron the centaur. The p roblem lies in making the
centaur believable, and Morris solves it almost unwittingly: mentioning this
mythical race, at the outset, among the names of other strange wild beasts, he
states atly, "Where bears and wolves the centaurs' arrows nd."JORG E LUIS BORG ES
This rst incident is followed some thirty lines later by another reference that
p recedes any actual descrip tion. The old king orders a slave to take the child to
the forest at the foot of the mountains, and to blow on an ivory horn to call forth
the centaur-who will be, he says, "grave of face and large of limb"-and to fall
up on his knees before him. He continues issuing commands until we come to a third
and somewhat negative mention of the centaur, whom the king bids the slave not to
fear. Then, troubled by the fate of the son he is about to lose, Aeson tries to
imagine the boy's future life in the forests among the "quick-eyed centaurs"-an
ep ithet that brings them to life and is justi ed by their widesp read fame as
archers.' The slave rides off with the son, and comes to the edge of a forest at
dawn. He dismounts, carrying the child, and makes his way on foot among the oaks.
There he blows the horn and waits. A blackbird is singing that morning, but the man
can already make out the sound of ap p roaching hoofs; the fear in his heart dis-
tracts him from the child, who has been trying to grab hold of the glittering horn.
Chiron ap p ears. We are told that he was a mighty horse, once roan but now almost
white, with long grey locks on his head and a wreath of oak leaves where man was
joined to beast. The slave falls to his knees. We note, in p assing, that Morris
need not imp art to the reader his image of the centaur, nor even invite us to
have our own. What is required is that we believe in his words, as we do the real
world.We nd the same p ersuasive method emp loyed in the ep isode of the sirens, in
Book XIV, though in a more gradual fashion. A series of sweet images p recedes the
actual ap p earance of these divinities: a gentle sea, an orange- scented breeze, the
insidious music first recognized by the sorceress Medea and re ected in the
sailors' hap p y faces before any of them becomes fully conscious of what they hear,
the true-to-life detail of their barely p erceiving the words, exp ressed indirectly:
And by their faces could the queen behold How sweet it was, although no tale it
told, To those worn toilers o'er the bitter sea.The sirens, nally glimp sed by the
oarsmen, still keep their distance, as these lines imp ly:1Cf.InfernoIV,123:
"Cesarearmatacongliocchigrifagni"[Caesararmedwiththe eyes of a hawk] .NARRATIVE ART
AND MAG IC77. . . for they were near enowTo see the gusty wind of evening blowLong
locks of hair across those bodies white, With golden sp ray hiding some dear
delight.This last detail, the "golden sp ray"-from their wild locks of hair, the
waves, either or both-"hiding some dear delight" serves another intent as well:
signi ing the sirens' erotic allure. This twofold meaning returns a few lines
later, when their bodies are hidden by the tears of longing that cloud the men's
eyes. (Both arti ces belong to the same order as the wreath of leaves in the
dep iction of the centaur.) Driven to raging desp air, Jason calls the sirens "sea-
witches" and p romp ts sweet-voiced Orp heus to sing.2 A contest of song ensues, and
with striking honesty Morris forewarns us that the songs he attributes to the
unkissed mouths of the sirens and to Orp heus are no more than a trans gured memory
of those remote melodies. The very p recision of Morris' colors-the yellow rims of
the shore, the golden sp ray, the grey cli s-moves us, for they seem salvaged intact
from that ancient evening. The sirens sing seductively of a bliss as vague as the
waves: "Such bodies garlanded with gold,/So faint, so fair, shall ye behold . . ."
Orp heus counters, singing the joys of terra rma. The sirens p romise a languid un-
dersea heaven, "roofed over by the changeful sea," as (2,500 years later, or only
so?) Paul Valery would reiterate. They sing on, and Orp heus' corrective song is
faintly contaminated by their deadly sweetness. At last the Argo- nauts slip out of
danger, the contest is over, and a long wake lies behind the ship ; but one tall
Athenian dashes back between the rows of oarsmen to the p oop and dives into the
waters.2Throughout time, the sirens have changed form. Their rst chronicler, the
bard of the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us how they were; for Ovid
they are reddish-p lumed birds with virginal faces; for Ap ollonius of Rhodes, women
from the waist up , the rest, a bird; for the p laywright Tirso de Molina (and for
heraldry), "half women, half- sh." No less disp utable is their sp ecies; the
classical dictionary of Lem- p riere considers them nymp hs, in Quicherat's they are
monsters and in G rimal's they are demons. They dwell on an island in the west, near
Circe's isle, but the corp se of one of them, Parthenop e, was found in Camp ania, and
her name given to the famous city now called Nap les; the geograp her Strabo saw her
tomb and witnessed the gym- nastic games and the race with torches, p eriodically
celebrated to honor her memory.The Odyssey tells that the sirens attracted and led
sailors astray and that Ulysses, to hear their song and not p erish, p lugged with
wax the ears of his oarsmen and ordered that they tie him to the mast. To temp t
him, the sirens p romised him knowledge of all things in the world:78 JORG E LUIS
BORG ESNow to another work of ction: Poe's Narrative ofArthur G ordon Pym (1838).
This novel's secret theme is the terror and vili cation of whiteness. Poe invents
tribes who live near the Antarctic Circle, neighbors of an inexhaustible white
continent who, for generations, have been exp osed to the terrible visitations of
men and driving white storms. White is anathema to these natives, and I must admit
that by the last lines of the last chap ter it is also anathema to the ap p reciative
reader. This novel has two p lots: the high- seas adventure is more immediate, while
the other, inexorable and secretive, exp ands until revealed at the very end.
"Naming an object;' Mallarme is said to have said, "is to sup p ress three-fourths of
the joy of reading a p oem, which resides in the p leasure of anticip ation, as a
dream lies in its suggestion." I re se to believe that such a scrup ulous writer
would have com- p osed the numerical frivolity of "three-fourths," but the general
idea suits Mallarme, as he illustrated in his two-line ellip se on a sunset:Till now
none sail'd this way, but stop t to hearOur honied accents warble in his ear:But
felt his soul with p leasing rap tures thrill'd:But found his mind with stores of
knowledge ll'd. We know whate'er the kings of mighty name Achiev'd at Ilion in the
eld of Fame;Whate'er beneath the sun's bright journey lies. 0 stay and learn new
wisdom from the wise!( Odyssey XII, tr. Pop e).A tradition gathered by the m
hologist Ap ollodorus, in his Bibliotheke, tells that Or- p heus, from the ship of
the Argonauts, sang more sweetly than the sirens, who then threw themselves into
the sea and turned into rocks, because their law was to die when no one felt
bewitched by them. The Sp hinx, too, leap ed from on high when her riddle was
answered.In the sixth century, a siren was cap tured and bap tized in northern Wales,
and became a saint in certain ancient almanacs, under the name of Murgan. Another,
in 1403, p assed through an op ening in a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of
her death. Nobody understood her, but they taught her to weave and she worship ed,
as if by instinct, the cross. A sixteenth-century chronicler argued that she was
not a sh because she knew how to weave, and that she was not a woman because she
could live in the water.In English, the classical siren is different than those
with sh tails (mermaids). T h e fo r m a t i o n o f t h e l a t t e r k i n d h a
d b e e n i n f l u e n c e d b y t h e a n a l o g o u s Tr i t o n s , d i v i n
i - ties of the court of Poseidon.In the tenth book of Plato's Rep ublic, eight
sirens p reside over the rotation of the eight concentric heavens. "Siren: sup p osed
sea beast;' we read in a blunt dictionary.NARRATIVE ART AN0 MAG IC 79
Victorieusementfut le suicide beauTison de gloire, sangp ar ecume, or, temp ete!
[Victorious was the beautiful suicide/Firebrand of glory, blood- orange foam, gold,
temp est! ] It was insp ired, no doubt, by the Narrative ofArthur G ordon Pym. The im-
p ersonal color white itself-is it not utterly Mallarme? (I feel that Poe chose this
color intuitively, or for the same reasons later given by Melville in the chap ter
"The Whiteness of the Whale" of his equally brilliant and hallucinatory Moby-
Dick.) It is imp ossible to illustrate or analyze here Poe's whole novel; let me
merely cite a single feature (subordinate, like all its details, to the covert
theme), related to the dark tribesmen mentioned above
and the streams found on their island. To have sp eci ed that these waters were red
or blue would have been to deny too op enly any image of whiteness. With his
resolution of the p roblem, Poe enriches us:On account of the singular character of
the water, we re sed to taste it, sup p osing it to be p olluted. . . . I am at loss
to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many
words. Although it flowed with rap idity in all declivities where common water would
do so, yet never, excep t when falling in a cascade, had it the customary ap -
p earance of limp idity. It was, nevertheless, in p oint of fact, as p erfectly limp id
as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in ap p earance. At
rst sight, and esp ecially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore
resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infu- sion of gum-arabic in common
water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It
was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color-p resenting to the eye, as it
owed, every p ossible shade of p urp le, like the hues of a changeable silk. . . .
Up on collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we p erceived that
the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a
distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was
p erfect in regard to their own p articles among themselves, and imp erfect in regard
to neighboring veins. Up on p assing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the
water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all
traces of the p assage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the
blade was p assed down accurately between the two veins, a p erfect sep aration was
ef- fected, which the p ower of cohesion did not immediately recti .Bo JORG E LUIS
BORG ESFrom the foregoing examp les it can be inferred that the main p roblem of the
novel is causality. One kind of novel, the p onderous p sychological variety,
attemp ts to frame an intricate chain of motives similar to those of real life. This
typ e, however, is not the most common. In the adventure novel, such cumbersome
motivation is inap p rop riate; the same may be said for the short story and for those
endless sp ectacles comp osed by Hollywood with silvery images of Joan Crawford, and
read and reread in cities everywhere. They are governed by a very di erent order,
both lucid and p rimitive: the p rimeval clarity of magic.This ancient p rocedure,
or ambition, has been reduced by Frazer to a convenient general law, the law of
symp athy, which assumes that "things act on each other at a distance" through a
secret symp athy, either because their form is similar (imitative or homeop athic
magic) or because of a p revious p hysical contact (contagious magic). An examp le of
the second is Kenelm Digby's ointment, which was ap p lied not to the bandaged wound
but to the offending weap on that inflicted it, leaving the wound, free of harsh and
barbarous treatments, to heal itself. Of the rst kind of magic there are numer-
ous instances. The Indians of Nebraska donned creaking bu alo robes, horns, and
manes, and day and night beat out a thunderous dance in order to round up bu alo.
Medicine men in central Australia inflict a wound on their forearms to shed blood
so that the imitative or consistent sky will shed rain. The Malayans o en torment
or insult a wax image so that the enemy it resembles will die. Barren women in
Sumatra adorn and cuddle a wooden doll in their lap s so that their wombs will bear
fruit. For the same reasons of semblance, among the ancient Hindus the yellow root
of the curcuma p lant was used to cure jaundice, and locally in Argentina, a tea
made of net- tles was used to cure hives. A comp lete list of these atrocious, or
ridiculous, examp les is imp ossible; I think, however, that I have cited enough of
them to show that magic is the crown or nightmare of the law of cause and effect,
not its contradiction. Miracles are no less strange in this universe than in that
of astronomers. It is ruled by all of the laws of nature as well as those of
imagination. To the sup erstitious, there is a necessary link not only between a
gunshot and a corp se but between a corp se and a tortured wax image or the p rop hetic
smashing of a mirror or sp illed salt or thirteen ominous p eo- p le around a table.
That dangerous harmony-a frenzied, clear-cut causality-also holds sway over the
novel. Saracen historians, whose works are the source of Jose Antonio Conde's
Historia de la dominaci6n de los arabes en Esp ana, do not write that a king or
calip h died, but that "he was delivered unto his nal re-NARRATIVE ART AND MAG IC 81
ward or p rize" or that "he p assed into the mercy of the l-Power l," or that "he
awaited his fate so many years, so many moons, and so many days." This fear that a
terrible event may be brought on by its mere mention is out of p lace or p ointless
in the overwhelming disorder of the real world, but not in a novel, which should be
a rigorous scheme of attentions, echoes, and a nities. Every ep isode in a careful
narrative is a p remonition. Thus, in one of Chesterton's p hantasmagorias, a man
suddenly p ushes a stranger o the road to save him from an oncoming truck; this
necessary but alarming violence foreshadows the later act of a declaration of
insanity so that he may not be hanged for a murder. In another Chesterton story, a
vast and dangerous consp iracy consisting of a single man (aided by false beards,
masks, and aliases) is darkly heralded by the coup let:As all stars shrivel in the
single sun,The words are many, but The Word is one.which is unraveled at the end
through a shi of cap ital letters: The words are many, but the word is One.In a
third story, the initial p attern-the p assing mention of an Indian who throws his
knife at another man and kills him-is the comp lete reverse of the p lot: a man
stabbed to death by his friend with an arrow beside the op en window of a tower. A
flying knife, a p lunged arrow: these words have a long rep ercussion. Elsewhere, I
have p ointed out that the single p reliminary mention of stage sets taints with a
disquieting unreality the dep ictions of dawn, the p amp as, and nightfall which
Estanislao del Camp o has worked into his Fausto. Such a teleology of words and
ep isodes is also omnip resent in good lms. At the beginning of The Showdown, a p air
of adventurers p lays a game of cards to win a p rostitute, or a turn at her; at the
end, one of them has gambled away the p ossession of the woman he really loves. The
op ening dialogue of Underworld concerns stool p igeons; the op ening scene, a gun ght
on an avenue: these details p re gure the whole p lot. In Dishon- ored, there are
recurring motifs: the sword, the kiss, the cat, betrayal, grap es, the p iano. But
the most p erfect illustration of an autonomous orb of omens, con rmations, and
monuments is Joyce's p reordained Ulysses. One need only examine Stuart G ilbert's
study or, in its absence, the vertiginous novel itself.I shall try to summarize the
foregoing. I have described two causal82 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp rocedures: the natural
or incessant result of endless, uncontrollable causes and e ects; and magic, in
which every lucid and determined detail is a p rop hecy. In the novel, I think that
the only p ossible integrity lies in the latter. Let the former be le to
p sychological simulations.[1932] [S] L} A Defense of the KabbalahNeither the rst
time it has been attemp ted, nor the last time it will fail, this defense is
distinguished by two facts. One is my almost comp lete ignorance of the Hebrew
language; the other, my desire to defend not the doctrine but rather the
hermeneutical or cryp tograp hic p rocedures that lead to it. These p rocedures, as is
well known, include the vertical reading of sacred texts, the reading referred to
as boustrop hedon (one line from le to right, the following line from right to
le ), the methodical substitution of certain letters of the alp habet for others,
the sum of the numerical value of the letters, etc. To ridicule such op erations
is simp le; I p refer to attemp t to understand them.It is obvious that their
distant origin is the concep t of the mechanical insp iration of the Bible. That
concep t, which turns the evangelists and p rop hets into G od's imp ersonal
secretaries, taking dictation, is found with imp rudent energy in the Formula
consensus helvetica, which claims authority for the consonants in the Scrip tures
and even for the diacritical marks-which did not ap p ear in the earliest versions.
(This ful llment, in man, of G od's literary intentions is insp iration or
enthusiasm: words whose true meaning is "to be p ossessed by a god.") The Muslims
can boast of ex- ceeding this hyp erbole, as they have decided that the original
Koran-the Mother of the Books-is one of G od's attributes, like His p ity or His
wrath, and they consider it to be older than sp eech, older than Creation.
Similarly, there are Lutheran theologians who dare not include the Scrip tures among
created things, and de ne them as an incarnation of the Sp irit.Of the Sp irit: here
we touch on a mystery. Not the divinity in general, but rather the third hyp ostasis
of the divinity was the One who dictated the Bible. This is the common belief.
Bacon, in 1625, wrote: "The p en of the Holy Sp irit hath laboured more over Job's a
liction than over Solomon'sJORG E LUIS BORG ES good fortune."' And his contemp orary
John Donne: "The Holy Sp irit is an eloquent writer, a vehement and cop ious writer,
but not verbose, as removed from an imp overished style as from a sup erfluous
one."It is imp ossible to both name the Sp irit and silence the horrendous threefold
society of which it is p art. Lay Catholics consider it a collegial body that is in
nitely correct but also in nitely boring; the liberals, a useless theological
Cerberus,
a sup erstition which the numerous advances of the century will soon abolish. The
Trinity, of course, surp asses these formulas. Imagined all at once, its concep t of
a father, a son, and a ghost, joined in a single organism, seems like a case of
intellectual teratology, a monster which only the horror of a nightmare could
sp awn. This is what I believe, although I try to bear in mind that every object
whose end is unknown to us is p rovisionally monstrous. This general observation is
obstructed, however, by the p rofessional mystery of the object.Disentangled from
the concep t of redemp tion, the distinction of three p ersons in one must seem
arbitrary. Considered as a necessity of faith, its ndamental mystery is not
lessened, but its intention and uses are blunted. We understand that to renounce
the Trinity-or at least the Duality-is to turn Jesus into the accidental delegate
of the Lord, a historical incident, not the imp erishable, constant receiver of our
devotion. If the Son is not also the Father, then redemp tion is not a direct divine
act; if He is not eternal, then neither will be the sacri ce of having come down to
man and died on the cross. "Nothing less than in nite excellence could atone for a
soul lost for in nite ages;' insisted Jeremy Taylor. Thus one may justi the dogma,
even if the concep ts of the Son generated by the Father, and the Sp irit p ro-
ceeding from the two, heretically imp ly a p riority, not to mention their guilty
condition as mere metap hors. Theology, determined to di erentiate the two, resolves
that there is no reason for con sion because one results in the Son, and the other
in the Sp irit. An eternal generation of the Son, an eternal issue of the Sp irit, is
Irenaeus' grim conclusion: the invention of an act outside of time, a mutilated
zeitloses Zeitwort that we can reject or worship , but not discuss. Hell is merely
p hysical violence, but the three inextricable p ersons imp ort an intellectual
horror, a strangled, sp ecious in nity like facing mirrors. Dante dep icted them as a
reverberation of diap hanous multicolored circles; Donne, as entangled serp ents,
thick and insep arable.tin the Latin version: "di usius tractavit ] obi a ictiones."
In English, he had written with greater success, "hath laboured more."A DEFENSE
OF THE KABBALAHss"Toto coruscat trinitas mysterio," wrote St. Paulinus; the Trinity
shines in ll mystery.If the Son is G od's reconciliation with the world, the
Sp irit-the beginning of sancti cation, according to Athanasius; an angel among
the others, for Macedonius-may best be de ned as G od's intimacy with us, His im-
manence in our breast. (For the Socinians-I fear with good reason-it was no more
than a p ersoni ed exp ression, a metap hor for divine action, that was later
dizzyingly elaborated.) Whether or not a mere syntactical for- mality, what is
certain is that the third blind p erson of the entangled Trinity is the recognized
author of the Scrip tures. G ibbon, in the chap ter of his work that deals with Islam,
includes a general census of the p ublications of the Holy Sp irit, modestly
calculated at a hundred and some; but the one which interests me now is G enesis:
the subject matter of the Kabbalah.The Kabbalists believed, as many Christians now
do, in the divinity of that story, in its deliberate writing by an in nite
intelligence. The consequences of such an assump tion are many. The careless
disp atch of an ordinary text-for examp le, journalism's ep hemeral statements-
allows for a considerable amount of chance. It communicates-p ostulates-a fact: it
re- p orts that yesterday's always unusual assault took p lace on such-and-such a
street, at such-and-such a corner, at such-and-such an hour of the morning; a
formula which rep resents no one, which limits itself to indicating such- and-such a
p lace about which news was sup p lied. In such indications, the length and sound of
the p aragrap hs are necessarily accidental. The contrary occurs in p oetry, whose
usual law is the subjection of meaning to eup honic needs (or sup erstitions). What
is accidental in them is not the sound, but the meaning. It is thus in the early
Tennyson, in Verlaine, in Swinburne's later works: dedicated only to the exp ression
of general states by means of the rich adventures of their p rosody. Let us consider
a third writer: the intellectual. In his handling of p rose (Valery, De Quincey)
or of verse, he has certainly not eliminated chance, but he has denied it as much
as p ossible, and restricted its incalculable comp liance. He remotely ap p roximates
the Lord, for Whom the vague concep t of chance holds no meaning. The Lord, the
p erfected G od of the theologians, o sees all at once (uno intelligendi actu), not
only all the events of this rep lete world but also those that would take p lace if
even the most evanescent-or imp ossible-of them should change.Let us imagine now
this astral intelligence, dedicated to manifesting itself not in dynasties or
annihilations or birds, but in written words. Let us also imagine, according to the
p re-Augustinian theory of verbal insp iration,86 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthat G od dictates,
word by word, what he p rop oses to say.2 This p remise (which was the one p ostulated
by the Kabbalists) turns the Scrip tures into an absolute text, where the
collaboration of chance is calculated at zero. The concep tion alone of such a
document is a greater wonder than those recorded in its p ages. A book imp ervious
to contingencies, a mechanism of in nite p urp oses, of infallible variations, of
revelations lying in wait, of su- p erimp ositions of light. . . . How could one not
study it to absurdity, to numerical excess, as did the Kabbalah?[1932} [EW}
20rigen attributed three meanings to the words of the Scrip tures: the historical,
the moral, and the mystical, corresp onding to the body, the soul, and the sp irit
which make up man; John Scotus Erigena, an in nite number of meanings, like the
irides- cence of a p eacock's feathers.The Art of Verb AbuseA conscientious study
of other literary genres has led me to believe in the greater value of insult and
mockery. The aggressor, I tell myself, knows that the tables will be turned, and
that "anything you say may be used against you," as the honest constables of
Scotland Y ard warn us. That fear is bound to p roduce sp ecial anxieties, which we
tend to disregard on more comfortable occasions. The critic would like to be
invulnerable, and sometimes he is. A er comp aring the healthy indignations of Paul
G roussac with his ambiguous eulogies (not to mention the similar cases of Swi ,
Voltaire, and Johnson), I nourished or insp ired in myself that hop e of
invulnerability. It vanished as soon as I le off reading those p leasant mockeries
in order to examine G roussac's method.I immediately noticed one thing: the
ndamental injustice and delicate error of my conjecture. The p ractical joker
p roceeds carefully, like a gambler admitting the ction of a p ack of cards, a
corrup tible p aradise of two- headed p eop le. The three kings of p oker are
meaningless in truco. The p olemicist is also a creature of convention. For most
p eop le, the street formulas ofinsult o er a model ofwhat p olemics can become. The
man in the street guesses that all p eop le's mothers have the same p rofession, or he
suggests that they move immediately to a general p lace that has several names, or
he imitates a rude sound. A senseless convention has determined that the o ended
one is not himself but rather the silent and attentive listener. Lan- guage is not
even needed. For examp le, Samp son's "I will take the wall of any man or maid of
Montague's" or Abram's "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" were the legal tender
of the troublemaker, around 1592, in Shake- sp eare's fraudulent Verona and in the
beer halls, brothels, and bear-baiting p its of London. In Argentine schools, the
middle nger and a show of tongue serve that p urp ose."Dog" is another very general
term of insult. During the 146th night of88 JORG E LUIS BORG ESThe Thousand and One
Nights, the discreet reader learns that the son of Adam, a er locking the son of
the lion in a sealed chest, scolded him thus: "Oh dog of the desert . . . Fate hath
up set thee, nor shall caution set thee up ."A conventional alp habet of scorn also de
nes p olemicists. The title "sir;' unwisely and irregularly omitted in sp oken
intercourse, is scathing in p rint. "Doctor" is another annihilation. To refer to
the sonnets "p erp etrated by Doctor Lugones" is equivalent to branding them as
eternally unsp eakable, and re ting each and every one of their metap hors. At the
rst mention of "Doctor:' the demigod vanishes and is rep laced by a vain Argentine
gentleman who wears p ap er collars, gets a shave every other day, and is in danger
of dying at any moment of a resp iratory ailment. What remains is the central and
incurable tility of everything human. But the sonnets also remain, their music
awaiting a reader. An Italian, in order to rid himself of G oethe, concocted a brief
article where he p ersisted in calling him "il sig- nore Wolfgang." This was almost
flattery, since it meant that he didn't know there were solid arguments against
G oethe.Perp etrating a sonnet, concocting an article. Language is a rep ertory of
these convenient snubs which are the ordinary currency of controversy. To say that
a literary man has let loose a book, or cooked it up , or ground it out, is an easy
temp tation. The verbs of bureaucrats or storekeep ers are much more effective:
disp atch, circulate, exp end. Combine these dry words with more e usive ones, and
the enemy is doomed to eternal shame. To a question about an auctioneer who also
used to recite p oetry, someone quickly resp onded that he was energetically ra ling
o the Divine Comedy. The witticism is not overwhelmingly ingenious, but its
mechanism is typ i- cal. As with all witticisms, it involves a mere confusion. The
verb
ra ing (sup p orted by the adverb energetically) leaves one to understand that the
incriminated gentleman is an irrep arable and sordid auctioneer, and that his
Dantesque diligence is an outrage. The listener readily accep ts the argument
because it is not p resented as an argument. Were it correctly formulated, he
would have to refute its validity. First of all, declaiming and auctioneering are
related activities. Secondly, the old vocation of declaiming, an exercise in
p ublic sp eaking, could help the auctioneer at his task.One of the satirical
traditions (not desp ised by Macedonia Fernandez, Quevedo, or G eorge Bernard Shaw)
is the unconditional inversion of terms. According to this famous p rescrip tion,
doctors are inevitably accused of p romoting contagion and death, notaries of the ,
executioners of encour-THE ART OF VERBAL ABUSE aging longevity, tellers of
adventure stories of numbing or p utting the reader to sleep , wandering Jews of
p aralysis, tailors of nudism, tigers and cannibals of p referring a diet of rhubarb.
A variety of that tradition is the innocent p hrase that p retends at times to
condone what it is destroying. For examp le: "The famous camp bed under which the
general won the battle." Or: "The last lm of the talented director Rene Clair was
utterly charming. When we woke up . . ."Another handy method is the abrup t change.
For instance: "A young p riest of Beauty, a mind illuminated by Hellenic light, an
exquisite man with the taste (of a mouse)." Similarly, these Andalusian lyrics,
which quickly p ass from inquiry to assault:Veinticinco p alillos Tiene una silla.
dQuieres que te la romp a En las costillas?[Twenty- ve sticks/Makes a chair./Would
you like me to break it/Over your ribs?] Let me insist on the formal asp ects of this
game, its p ersistent and illicit use of confusing arguments. Seriously defending a
cause and disseminating burlesque exaggerations, false generosity, tricky
concessions, and p atient contemp t are not incomp atible, but are so diverse that no
one, until now, has managed to p ut them all together. Here are some illustrious
examp les: Set to demolish Ricardo Rojas' history of Argentine literature, what does
Paul G roussac do? The following, which all Argentine men of letters have relished:
"A er resignedly hearing the two or three fragments in cumbersome p rose of a
certain tome p ublicly ap p lauded by those who had barely op ened it, I now consider
myself authorized not to continue any rther, contenting myself, for now, with the
summaries or indexes of that bounti l history of what never organically existed. I
refer p articularly to the rst and most indigestible p art of the mass (which
occup ies three of the four volumes): the mumblings of natives or half-
breeds . . ." G roussac, with that good ill-humor, ful lls the most eager ritual of
satiric games. He p retends to be p ained by the errors of the adversary ("a er
resignedly hearing"); allows one to glimp se the sp ectacle of abrup t scorn ( rst
the word "tome," then "mass"); uses terms of p raise in order to assault ("that
bountiful history"); and then, at last, he reveals his hand. He does not commit
sins of90 JORG E LUIS BORG ESsyntax, which is e ective, but does commit sins in his
arguments. Criticiz- ing a book for its size, insinuating that no one wants to deal
with that enormous brick, and nally p rofessing indi erence toward the idiocy of
some gauchos or mulattoes ap p ear to be the reactions of a hoodlum, not of a man of
letters.Here is another of his famous diatribes: "It is regrettable that the p ubli-
cation ofDr. Pinero's legal briefmay p rove to be a serious obstacle to its cir-
culation, and that this rip ened uit of a year and a half of dip lomatic leisure may
cause no other 'imp ression' than that of its p rinting. This shall not be the case,
G od w ling, and insofar as it lies within our means, so melancholy a fate will be
avoided . . ." Again the ap p earance of comp assion, again the devilish syntax.
Again, too, the marvelous banality of rep roof: making fun of those few who could be
interested in a p articular document and its leisurely p roduction.An elegant defense
of these shortcomings may conjure up the dark root of satire. Satire, according to
recent beliefs, stems from the magic curse of wrath, not from reason. It is the
relic of an unlikely state in which the wounds inflicted up on the name fall up on
the p ossessor. The p article el was trimmed o the angel Satanael, G od's rebellious
rst-born who was adored by the Bogomiles. Without it, he lost his crown, sp lendor,
and p rop hetic p owers. His current dwelling is re, and his host is the wrath of the
Power- l. Inversely, the Kabbalists say that the seed of the remote Abram was
sterile until the letter he was interp olated into his name and made him cap able
of begetting.Swi , a man of radical bitterness, p rop osed in his chronicle of
Cap tain Lemuel G ulliver's travels to defame humankind. The rst voyages, to the
tiny rep ublic of Lillip ut and to the elep hantine land of Brobdingnag, are, as
Leslie Step hen suggests, an anthrop ometric dream which in no way touches the
comp lexities of our being, its p assion, and its rigor. The third and funni- est
voyage mocks exp erimental science through the well-known technique of inversion:
Swi 's shabby laboratories want to p rop agate sheep without wool, use ice for the
p roduction of gunp owder, soften marble for p illows, beat re into ne sheets, and
make good use of the nutritious p arts of fecal matter. (This book also includes a
strong p assage on the hardship s of se- nility. ) The fourth and last voyage shows
clearly that beasts are more worthy than men. It p resents a virtuous rep ublic of
talking, monogamous-that is, human-horses, with a p roletariat of four-legged men
who live in herds, dig for food, latch onto the udders of cows to steal milk,
discharge their waste up on each other, devour rotten meat, and stink. The fable is
self-THE ART OF VERBAL ABUSE 91defeating, as one can see. The rest is literature,
syntax. In conclusion, it says: "I am not in the least p rovoked at the sight of a
lawyer, a p ickp ocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a p olitician, a whore-
master . . ." Certainwords, in that good enumeration, are contaminated by their
neighbors. Two nal examp les. One is the celebrated p arody of insult which we are
told was imp rovised by Dr. Johnson: "Y our wife, sir, under p retense ofkeep ing a
bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods." The other is the most sp lendid verb
abuse I know, an insult so much more extraordinary if we consider that it
rep resents its author's only brush with literature: "The gods did not allow
Santos Chocano to dishonor the gallows by dying there. He is still alive, having
exhausted infamy." Dishonoring the gallows, exhausting infamy. Var- gas Vila's
discharge of these illustrious abstractions re ses to treat its p atient and leaves
him untouched, unbelievable, quite unimp ortant, and p ossibly immortal. The most
fleeting mention of Chocano is enough to remind anyone of the famous insult,
obscuring with malign sp lendor all reference tohim-even the details and symp toms of
that infamy.I will attemp t to summarize the above. Satire is no less conventional
than a dialogue between lovers or the natural ower of a sonnet by Jose Maria
Manner Sans. Its method is the assertion of sop hisms, its only law, the
simultaneous invention of p ranks. I almost forgot: satire also has the obligation
of being memorable.Let me add a certain virile rep ly recorded by De Quincey
( Writings XI, 226). Someone flung a glass of wine in the face of a gentleman
during a theological or literary debate. The victim did not show any emotion and
said to the o ender: "This, sir, is a digression: now, if you p lease, for the ar-
gument." (The author ofthat rep ly, a certain Dr. Henderson, died in Oxford around
1787, without leaving us any memory other than those just words: a su cient and
beauti l immortality.)A p op ular tale, which I p icked up in G eneva during the last
years of World War I, tells of Miguel Servet's rep ly to the inquisitors who had
condemned him to the stake: "I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall con-
tinue our discussion in eternity."[1933} [S!L} The Tr slators of e ousand and One
Nights r. Cap tain BurtonAt Trieste, in 1872, in a p alace with damp statues and
deficient hygienic facilities, a gentleman on whose face an African scar told its
tale-Cap tain Richard Francis Burton, the English consul-embarked on a famous trans-
lation of the Quitab alif laila ua laila, which the roumis know by the title The
Thousand and One Nights. One of the secret aims of his work was the annihilation of
another gentleman (also weatherbeaten, and with a dark and Moorish beard) who was
comp iling a vast dictionary in England and who died long before he was annihilated
by Burton. That gentleman was Edward Lane, the Orientalist, author of a highly
scrup ulous version of The Thousand and One Nights that had sup p lanted a version by
G alland. Lane translated against G alland, Burton against Lane; to understand Burton
we must understand this hostile dynasty.I shall begin with the founder. As is
known, Jean Antoine G alland was a French Arabist who came back om Istanbul with a
diligent collection of coins, a monograp h on the sp read of co ee, a cop y of the
Nights in Arabic, and a sup p lementary Maronite whose memory was no less insp ired
than Scheherazade's. To this obscure consultant-whose name I do not wish to forget:
it was Hanna, they say-we owe certain ndamental tales unknown to the original: the
stories of Aladdin; the Forty Thieves; Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Peri-Banu; Abu
al-Hassan, the Sleep er and the Waker; the night adventure of Calip h Harun al-
Rashid; the two sisters who envied their younger sister. The mere mention of these
names amp ly demonstrates that G alland established the canon, incorp orating stories
that
time would render indisp ensable and that the translators to come-his enemies-
would not dare omit.Another fact is also undeniable. The most famous and eloquent
en- comiums of The Thousand and One Nights-by Coleridge, Thomas DeTRANSLAT0RS 0F
THE T/-I0USAND AND 0NE NIG HTS93Quincey, Stendhal, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe,
Newman-are from readers of G alland's translation. Two hundred years and ten better
translations have p assed, but the man in Europ e or the Americas who thinks of The
Thousand and One Nights thinks, invariably, of this rst translation. The Sp anish
adjective milyunanochesco [thousand-and-one-nights-esque] -milyunanochero is too
Argentine, milyunanocturno overly variant-has nothing to do with the erudite
obscenities of Burton or Mardrus, and ever hing to do with An- toine G alland's
bijoux and sorceries.Word for word, G alland's version is the most p oorly written of
them all, the least faith l, and the weakest, but it was the most widely read.
Those who grew intimate with it exp erienced hap p iness and astonishment. Its
Orientalism, which seems frugal to us now, was bedazzling to men who took snuff and
comp osed tragedies in ve acts. Twelve exquisite volumes ap p eared from 1707 to
1717, twelve volumes that were innumerably read and that p assed into various
languages, including Hindi and Arabic. We, their mere anachronistic readers of the
twentieth century, p erceive only the cloying avor of the eighteenth century in
them and not the evap orated aroma of the Orient which two hundred years ago was
their novelty and their glory. No one is to blame for this disjunction, G alland
least of all. At times, shifts in the language work against him. In the p reface to
a G erman translation of The Thousand and One Nights, Dr. Wei! recorded that the
merchants of the inexcusable G alland equip themselves with a "valise ll of dates"
each time the tale obliges them to cross the desert. It could be argued that in
1710 the mention of dates alone su ced to erase the image of a valise, but that is
unnecessary: valise, then, was a subsp ecies of saddlebag.There have been other
attacks. In a befuddled p anegyric that survives in his 1921 Marceaux choisis, Andre
G ide vitup erates the licenses of Antoine G alland, all the better to erase (with a
candor that entirely surp asses his rep utation) the notion of the literalness of
Madrus, who is as n de siecle as G alland is eighteenth-century, and much more
unfaithful.G alland's discretions are urbane, insp ired by decorum, not morality. I
cop y down a few lines from the third p age of his Nights: "Il alia droit a l'ap -
p artement de cette p rincesse, qui, ne s'attendant p as a le revoir, avait reru dans
son lit un des derniers o ciers de sa maison" [He went directly to the chamber of
that p rincess, who, not exp ecting to see him again, had received in her bed one of
the lowliest servants of his household] . Burton concretizes this nebulous o cier:
"a black cook of loathsome asp ect and foul with kitchen grease and grime." Each, in
his way, distorts: the original is less ceremonious than G alland and less greasy
than Burton. (E ects of decorum: in94JORG E LUIS BORG ESG alland's measured p rose,
"recevoir dans son lit" has a brutal ring.)Ninety years a er Antoine G alland's
death, an alternate translator of the Nights is born: Edward Lane. His biograp hers
never fail to rep eat that he is the son of Dr. Theop hilus Lane, a Hereford
p rebendary. This generative da- tum (and the terrible Form of holy cow that it
evokes) may be all we need. The Arabized Lane lived ve studious years in Cairo,
"almost exclusively among Muslims, sp eaking and listening to their language,
conforming to their customs with the greatest care, and received by all of them as
an equal." Y et neither the high Egyp tian nights nor the black and op ulent co ee
with cardamom seed nor the frequent literary discussions with the Doctors of the
Law nor the venerable muslin turban nor the meals eaten with his ngers made him
forget his British reticence, the delicate central solitude of the masters of the
earth. Consequently, his exceedingly erudite version of the Nights is (or seems to
be) a mere encyclop edia of evasion. The original is not p rofessionally obscene;
G alland corrects occasional indelicacies because he believes them to be in bad
taste. Lane seeks them out and p ersecutes them like an inquisitor. His p robity
makes no p act with silence: he p refers an alarmed chorus of notes in a cramp ed
sup p lementary volume, which murmur things like: I shall overlook an ep isode ofthe
most rep rehensible sort; I sup -p ress a rep ugnant exp lanation; Here, a linefar too
coarsefor translation; I must of necessity sup p ress the other anecdote; Herea er, a
series of omissions; Here, the story of the slave Bujait, wholly inap p rop riate for
translation. Mutilation does not exclude death: some tales are rejected in their
entirety "because they cannot be p uri ed without destruction." This resp onsible and
total rep udia- tion does not strike me as illogical: what I condemn is the Puritan
subter ge. Lane is a virtuoso of the subter ge, an undoubted p recursor of the
still more bizarre reticences of Hollywood. My notes rnish me with a p air of
examp les. In night 391, a sherman o ers a sh to the king of kings, who wishes to
know if it is male or female and is told it is a hermap hrodite. Lane succeeds in
taming this inadmissable colloquy by translating that the king asks what sp ecies
the sh in question belongs to, and the astute sherman rep lies that it is of a
mixed sp ecies. The t e of night 217 sp eaks of a king with two wives, who lay one
night with the rst and the following night with the second, and so they all were
hap p y. Lane accounts for the good fortune of this monarch by saying that he treated
his wives "with imp artiality." . . . One reason for this was that he destined his
work for "the p arlor table;' a center for p lacid reading and chaste conversation.
The most oblique and fleeting reference to carnal matters is enough to make Lane
forget his honor in a p rofusion of convolutions and occulta-TRANSLAT0RS 0F THE TJ-
10USAND AND 0NE NICHTS 95tions. There is no other fault in him. When free of the
p eculiar contact of this temp tation, Lane is of an admirable veracity. He has no
objective, which is a p ositive advantage. He does not seek to bring out the
barbaric color of the Nights like Cap tain Burton, or to forget it and attenuate it
like G alland, who domesticated his Arabs so they would not be irrep arably out of
p lace in Paris. Lane is at great p ains to be an authentic descendant of Ha- gar.
G alland was comp letely ignorant of all literal p recision; Lane justi es his
interp retation of each p roblematic word. G alland invoked an invisible manuscrip t
and a dead Maronite; Lane rnishes editions and p age numbers. G alland did not
bother about notes; Lane accumulates a chaos of clari- cations which, in organized
form, make up a sep arate volume. To be di erent: this is the rule the p recursor
imp oses. Lane will follow the rule: he needs only to abstain from abridging the
original.The beautiful Newman-Arnold exchange (1861-62)-more memorable than its two
interlocutors-extensively argued the two general ways of translating. Newman
champ ioned the literal mode, the retention of all verbal singularities: Arnold,
the severe elimination of details that distract or detain. The latter p rocedure may
p rovide the charms of uniformity and seriousness; the former, continuous small
surp rises. Both are less imp ortant than the translator and his literary habits. To
translate the sp irit is so enormous and p hantasmal an intent that it may well be
innocuous; to translate the letter, a requirement so extravagant that there is no
risk of its ever being attemp ted. More serious than these in nite asp irations is
the retention or sup p ression of certain p articularities; more serious than these
p references and oversights is the movement of the s tax. Lane's syntax is
delightful, as be ts the re ned p arlor table. His vocabulary is o en excessively
festooned with Latin words, unaided by any arti ce of brevity. He is careless; on
the op ening p age of his translation he p laces the adjective romantic in the bearded
mouth of a twel h-century Muslim, which is a kind of futurism. At times this lack
of sensitivity serves him well, for it allows him to include very commonp lace words
in a noble p aragrap h, with involuntary good results. The most rewarding examp le
of such a coop eration of heterogenous words must be: "And in this p alace is the
last information resp ecting lords collected in the dust." The following invocation
may be another: "By the Living One who does not die or have to die, in the name of
He to whom glory and p ermanence belong." In Burton-the occasional p recursor of the
always fantastical Mardrus-I would be susp icious of so satis ingly Oriental a
formula; in Lane, such p assages are so scarce that I must sup p ose them to be
involuntary, in other words, genuine.JORG E LUIS BORG ES The scandalous decorum of
the versions by G alland and Lane has given rise to a whole genre of witticisms that
are traditionally rep eated. I myself have not failed to resp ect this tradition. It
is common knowledge that the two translators did not l ll their obligation to the
unfortunate man who witnessed the Night of Power, to the imp recations of a
thirteenth-century garbage collector cheated by a dervish, and to the customs of
Sodom. It is common knowledge that they disinfected the Nights.Their detractors
argue that this p rocess destroys or wounds the good- hearted naivete of the
original. They are in error; The Book ofthe Thousand Nights and a Night is not
(morally) ingenuous; it is an adap tation of ancient stories to the lowbrow or
ribald tastes of the Cairo middle classes. Excep t in the exemp lary tales of the
Sindibad-namah, the indecencies of The Thou- sand and One Nights have nothing to
do with the freedom of the p aradisiacal state. They are sp eculations on the p art
of the editor: their aim is a round of guffaws, their heroes are never more than
p orters, beggars, or eu- nuchs. The ancient love stories of the rep ertory, those
which relate cases from the desert or the cities of Arabia, are not obscene, and
neither is any p roduction of p re-Islamic literature. They are imp assioned and sad,
and one of their favorite themes is death for love, the death that an op inion ren-
dered by the ulamas declared no less holy than that of a martyr who bears witness
to the faith. . . . If we ap p rove of this argument, we may see the timidities of
G alland and Lane as the restoration of a p rimal text.I ow of another defense, a
better one. An evasion of the original's erotic op p ortunities is not an
unp ardonable sin in the sight of the Lord when the p rimary aim is to emp hasize the
atmosp here of magic. To offer man nd a new Decameron is a commercial enterp rise
like so many others; to o er an "Ancient Mariner," now, or a "Bateau ivre," is a
thing that war- rants entry into a higher celestial sp here. Littmann observes that
The Thou- sand and One Nights is, above all, a rep ertory of marvels. The universal
imp osition of this assump tion on every Western mind is G alland's work; let there be
no doubt on that score. Less fortunate than we, the Arabs claim to think little of
the original; they are already well acquainted with the men, mores, talismans,
deserts, and demons that the tales reveal to us.In a p assage somewhere in his work,
Rafael Cansinos Assens swears he can salute the stars in fourteen classical and
modern languages. Burton dreamed in seventeen languages and claimed to have
mastered thirty- ve: Semitic, Dravidian, Indo-Europ ean, Ethiop ic . . . This vast
wealth does not comp lete his de nition: it is merely a trait that tallies with the
others, allT R A N S L A T 0 R S 0 F T / E T /I 0 U 5 !I N D II N D 0 N E N I G I-
I T 597equally excessive. No one was less vulnerable to the frequent gibes in Hudi-
bras against learned men who are cap able of saying absolutely nothing in several
languages. Burton was a man who had a considerable amount to say, and the seventy-
two volumes of his comp lete works say it still. I will note a few titles at random:
G oa and the Blue Mountains (1851); A Comp lete System ofBayonet Exercise (1853);
Personal Narrative ofa Pilgrimage to El-Medinah a n d M e c c a h ( 1 8 5 5 ) ; T h
e L a k e R e g i o n s of C e n t r a l E q u a t o r i a l A i c a ( 1 8 6 o ) ;
T h e City ofthe Saints (1861); The Highlands ofthe Brazil (1869); On an Hermap h-
rodite from the Cap e de Verde Islands (1866); Letters from the Battle elds of
Paraguay (1870); Ultima Thule (1875); To the G old Coastfor G old (1883); The Book of
the Sword ( rst volume, 1884); The Perfumed G arden of Cheikh Nefzaoui-a p osthumous
work consigned to the flames by Lady Burton, along with the Priap eia, or the
Sp orting Ep igrams ofDivers Poets on Priap us. The writer can be deduced from this
catalogue: the English cap tain with his p assion for geograp hy and for the
innumerable ways of being a man that are own to mankind. I will not defame his
memory by comp aring him to Morand, that sedentary, bilingual gentleman who in
nitely ascends and descends in the elevators of identical international hotels,
and who p ays homage to the sight of a trunk. . . . Burton, disguised as an Afghani,
made the p ilgrimage to the holy cities ofArabia; his voice begged the Lord to deny
his bones and skin, his dolorous esh and blood, to the Flames of Wrath and
Justice; his mouth, dried out by the samun, le a kiss on the aerolith that is
worship ed in the Kaaba. The adventure is famous: the slightest rumor that an
uncircumcised man, a nasrani, was p rofaning the sanctuary would have meant certain
death. Before that, in the guise of a dervish, he p racticed medicine in Cairo-
alternating it with p restidigitation and magic so as to gain the trust of the sick.
In 1858, he commanded an exp edition to the secret sources of the Nile, a mission
that led him to discover Lake Tan- ganyika. During that undertaking he was attacked
by a high fever; in 1855, the Somalis thrust a javelin through his jaws (Burton was
coming from Harar, a city in the interior of Abyssinia that was forbidden to
Europ eans). Nine years later, he essayed the terrible hosp itality of the
ceremonious cannibals of Dahomey; on his return there was no scarcity of rumors
(p ossibly sp read and certainly encouraged by Burton himself) that, like
Shakesp eare's omnivorous p roconsul,1 he had "eaten strange flesh." The Jews,
democracy, the'I allude to Mark Anthony, invoked by Caesar's ap ostrop he: "On the
Alp s/It is re- p orted, thou didst eat strange esh/Which some did die to look
on . . ." In these lines, I think I glimp se some inverted reflection of the
zoological myth of the basilisk, a ser-JORG E LUIS BORG ES British Foreign O ce, and
Christianity were his p referred objects of loathing; Lord Byron and Islam, his
venerations. Of the writer's solitary trade he made something valiant and p lural:
he p lunged into his work at dawn, in a vast chamber multip lied by eleven tables,
with the materi s for a book on each o n e - a n d , o n a few, a b r i g h t s p r
a y o f j a s m i n e i n a v a s e o f w a t e r . H e i n s p i r e d i l -
lustrious iendship s and loves: among the former I will name only that of
Swinburne, who dedicated the second series of Poems and Ballads to him-"in
recognition of a iendship which I must ways count among the highest hon- ours of
my life"-and who mourned his death in many stanzas. A man of words and deeds,
Burton could well take up the boast of al-Mutanabbi's Diwan:The horse, the desert,
the night know me, G uest and sword, p ap er and p en.It will be observed that, from
his amateur cannibal to his dreaming p olyglot, I have not rejected those of Richard
Burton's p ersonae that, without diminishment of fervor, we could call legendary.
My reason is clear: the Burton of the Burton legend is the translator of the
Nights. I have sometimes susp ected that the radical distinction between p oetry
and p rose lies in the very di erent exp ectations of readers: p oetry p resup p oses an
intensity that is not tolerated in p rose. Something similar hap p ens with Burton's
work: it has a p reordained p restige with which no other Arabist has ever been able
to comp ete. The attractions of the forbidden are rightfully his. There was a single
edition, limited to one thousand cop ies for the thousand subscribers of the Burton
Club, with a legally binding commitment never to rep rint. (The Leonard C. Smithers
re-edition "omits given p assages in dreadful taste, whose elimination will be
mourned by no one"; Bennett Cerf's rep resentative selection-which p urp orts to be
unabridged- p roceeds from this p uri ed text.) I will venture a hyp erbole: to p eruse
TheThousand and One Nights in Sir Richard's translation is no less incrediblep ent
whose gaze is fatal. Pliny (Natural History VIII, p ar. 33) tells us nothing of the
p osthumous ap titudes of this op hidian, but the conjunction of the two ideas of
seeing (mirar) and dying (morir)-"vedi Nap oli e p oi mori" [see Nap les and die] -must
have influenced Shakesp eare.The gaze of the basilisk was p oisonous; the Divinity,
however, can kill with p ure sp lendor-or p ure radiation of manna. The direct sight
of G od is intolerable. Moses covers his face on Mount Horeb, "for he was afraid to
look on G od"; Hakim, the p rop het of Khorasan, used a four-fold veil of white silk
in order not to blind men's eyes. Cf. also Isaiah 6:5, and 1 Kings 19:13.
TRANSLATORS OF TI-lE THOUSAND AND OXE NIG J-ITS 99than to read it in "a p lain and
literal translation with exp lanatory notes" by Sinbad the Sailor.The p roblems
Burton resolved are innumerable, but a convenient c- tion can reduce them to
three: to justi and exp and his rep utation as an Arabist; to di er from Lane as
ostensibly as p ossible; and to interest nineteenth-century British gentlemen in the
written version of thirteenth- century oral Muslim tales. The rst of these aims
was p erhap s incomp atible with the third; the second led him into a serious lap se,
which I must now disclose. Hundreds of coup lets and songs occur in the Nights; Lane
(inca- p able of falsehood excep t with resp ect to the flesh) translated them p re-
cisely into a comfortable p rose. Burton was a p oet: in 188o he had p rivately
p ublished The Kasidah of Haji Abdu, an evolutionist rhap sody that Lady Burton
always deemed far sup erior to FitzG erald's Rubaiyat. His rival's "p rosaic" solution
did not fail to arouse Burton's indignation, and he op ted for a rendering into
English verse-a p rocedure that was unfortunate from the start, since it
contradicted his own rule of total literalness. His ear was as greatly o ended
against as his sense of logic, for it is not imp ossible that this quatrain is among
the best he came up with:A night whose stars refused to run their course, A night
of those which never seem outworn: Like Resurrection-day, of longsome lengthTo him
that watched and waited for the morn.2And it is entirely p ossible that this one is
not the worst:A sun on wand in knoll of sand she showed, Clad in her cramoisy-hued
chemisette:Of her lip s honey-dew she gave me drink, And with her rosy cheeks
quencht re she set.I have alluded to the fundamental di erence between the
original audience of the tales and Burton's club of subscribers. The former were
roguish, p rone to exaggeration, illiterate, in nitely susp icious of the p resent,
and2Also memorable is this variation on the themes of Abulmeca de Ronda and Jorge
Manrique: "Where is the wight who p eop led in the p ast/Hind-land and Sind; and there
the tyrant p layed?"100 JORG E LUIS BORG EScredulous of remote marvels; the latter
were the resp ectable men of the West End, well equip p ed for disdain and erudition
but not for belly laughs
or terror. The rst audience ap p reciated the fact that the whale died when it
heard the man's cry; the second, that there had ever been men who lent credence
to any fatal cap acity of such a cry. The text's marvels-undoubtedly adequate in
Kordofan or Bulaq, where they were offered up as true-ran the risk of seeming
rather threadbare in England. (No one requires that the truth be p lausible or
instantly ingenious: few readers of the Life and Corre- sp ondence of Karl Marx will
indignantly demand the symmetry of Toulet's Contrerimes or the severe p recision of
an acrostic.) To keep his subscribers with him, Burton abounded in exp lanatory
notes on "the manners and customs of Muslim men;' a territory p reviously occup ied
by Lane. Clothing, everyday customs, religious p ractices, architecture, references
to history or to the Koran, games, arts, mythology-all had already been elucidated
in the inconvenient p recursor's three volumes. Predictably, what was missing was
the erotic. Burton (whose rst stylistic e ort was a highly p ersonal account of
the brothels of Bengal) was ramp antly cap able of lling this gap . Among the
delinquent delectations over which he lingered, a good examp le is a certain random
note in the seventh volume, which the index wittily entitles "cap otes
melancoliques" [melancholy French letters] . The Edinburgh Review accused him of
writing for the sewer; the Encyclop edia Britannica declared that an unabridged
translation was unaccep table and that Edward Lane's version "remained unsurp assed
for any truly serious use." Let us not wax too indignant over this obscure theory
of the scienti c and documentary sup eriority of exp urgation: Burton was courting
these animosities. Furthermore, the slightly varying variations of p hysical love
did not entirely consume the attention of his commentary, which is encyclop edic and
sedi- tious and of an interest that increases in inverse p rop ortion to its
necessity. Thus volume 6 (which I have before me) includes some three hundred
notes, among which are the following: a condemnation of jails and a defense of
corp oral p unishment and nes; some examp les of the Islamic resp ect for bread; a
legend about the hairiness of Queen Belkis' legs; an enumeration of the four colors
that are emblematic of death; a theory and p ractice of Oriental ingratitude; the
information that angels p refer a p ie- bald mount, while Djinns favor horses with a
bright bay coat; a synop sis of the mythology surrounding the secret Night of Power
or Night of Nights; a denunciation of the sup er ciality of Andrew Lang; a diatribe
against rule by democracy; a census of the names of Mohammed, on Earth, in the
Fire, and in the G arden; a mention of the Amalekite p eop le, of long years and large
T R A N S L A T O R S O F T H E T I O U S A D A " O N I C T S 1 01
stature; a note on the p rivate p arts of the Muslim, which for the man extend from
the navel to his knees, and for the woman from the top of the head to the tip s of
her toes; a consideration of the asa'o [ roasted beef] of the Argen- tine gaucho; a
warning about the discomforts of "equitation" when the steed is human; an allusion
to a grandiose p lan for cross-breeding baboons with women and thus deriving a sub-
race of good p roletarians. At y, a man has accumulated a ections, ironies,
obscenities, and cop ious anecdotes; Burton unburdened himself of them in his
notes.The basic p roblem remains: how to entertain nineteenth-century gentlemen with
the p ulp ctions of the thirteenth century? The stylistic p overty of the Nights is
well known. Burton sp eaks somewhere of the "dry and business-like tone" of the Arab
p rosifiers, in contrast to the rhetorical luxuriance of the Persians. Littmann, the
ninth translator, accuses himself of having interp olated words such as asked,
begged, answered, in ve thousand p ages that know of no other formula than an
invariable said. Burton lovingly abounds in this typ e of substitution. His
vocabulary is as unp aralleled as his notes. Archaic words coexist with slang, the
lingo of p risoners or sailors with technical terms. He does not shy away from the
glorious hy- bridization of English: neither Morris' Scandinavian rep ertory nor
John- son's Latin has his blessing, but rather the contact and reverberation of the
two. Neologisms and foreignisms are in p lentiful sup p ly: castrato, incon- sequence,
hauteur, in gloria, bagnio, langue fourree, p undonor, vendetta,Wazir. Each of these
is indubitably the mot juste, but their intersp ersion amounts to a kind of skewing
of the original. A good skewing, since such verbal-and syntactical-p ranks beguile
the occasionally exhausting course of the Nights. Burton administers them
carefully: rst he translates gravely, "Sulayman, Son of David (on the twain be
p eace!)"; then-once this majesty is familiar to us-he reduces it to "Solomon
Davidson." A king who, for the other translators, is "King of Samarcand in Persia,"
is, for Burton, "King of Samarcand in Barbarian-land"; a merchant who, for the
others, is "ill-temp ered," is "a man of wrath." That is not all: Burton rewrites in
its entirety-with the addition of circumstantial details and p hysiological traits-
the initial and nal story. He thus, in 1885, inaugurates a p rocedure whose
p erfection (or whose reductio ad absurdum) we will now consider in Mardrus. An
Englishman is always more timeless than a Frenchman: Bur- ton's heterogenous style
is less antiquated than Mardrus', which is noticeably dated.102 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
2. Doctor MardrusMardrus' destiny is a p aradoxical one. To him has been ascribed
the moral virtue of being the most truthful translator of The Thousand and One
Nights, a book of admirable lascivity, whose p urchasers were p reviously hoodwinked
by G alland's good manners and Lane's Puritan qualms. His p rodigious literalness,
thoroughly demonstrated by the inarguable subtitle "Literal and comp lete
translation of the Arabic text," is revered, along with t h e i n s p i r e d i d e
a o f w r i t i n g T h e B o o k of t h e Th o u s a n d Nigh ts a n d O n e Nigh
t. The history of this title is instructive; we should review it before p roceeding
with our investigation of Mardrus.Masudi's Meadows ofG old and Mines ofPrecious
Stones describes an anthology titled Hazar afsana, Persian words whose true
meaning is "a thousand adventures," but which p eop le renamed "a thousand nights."
Another tenth-century document, the Fihrist, narrates the op ening tale of the
series; the king's heartbroken oath that every night he will wed a virgin whom he
will have beheaded at dawn, and the resolution of Scheherazade, who diverts him
with marvelous stories until a thousand nights have revolved over the two of them
and she shows him his son. This invention-far sup erior to the future and analogous
devices of Chaucer's p ious cavalcade or G iovanni Boccaccio's ep idemic-is said to be
p osterior to the title, and was devised in the aim ofjusti ing it. . . . Be that as
it may, the early gure of woo quickly increased to 1001. How did this additional
and now indisp ensable night emerge, this p rototyp e of Pico della Mirandola's Book
ofAll Things and Also Many Others, so derided by Quevedo and later Voltaire?
Littmann suggests a contamination of the Turkish p hrase "bin bir," literally "a
thousand and one," but commonly used to mean "many." In early 1840, Lane advanced a
more beautiful reason: the magical dread of even numbers. The title's adventures
certainly did not end there. Antoine G alland, in 1704, eliminated the original's
rep etition and translated The Thousand and One Nights, a name now familiar in all
the nations of Europ e excep t England, which p refers TheArabian Nights. In 1839, the
editor of the Calcutta edition, W. H. Macnaghten, had the singular scrup le
oftranslating Quitab aliflaila ua laila as Book of the Thousand Nights and One
Night. This renovation through sp elling did not go unremarked. John Payne, in 1882,
began p ublishing his Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; Cap tain Burton, in
1885, his Book ofthe Thousand Nights and a Night; J. C. Mardrus, in 1899, his Livre
des mille nuits et une nuit.TRANSLATORS OF THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIG HTS 103I turn to
the p assage that made me de nitively doubt this last translator's veracity. It
belongs to the doctrinal story of the City of Brass, which in all other versions
extends from the end of night 566 through p art of night 578, but which Dr. Mardrus
has transp osed (for what cause, his G uardian Angel alone knows) to nights 338-346.
I shall not insist on this p oint; we must not waste our consternation on this
inconceivable reform of an ideal calendar. Scheherazade-Mardrus relates:The water
ran through four channels worked in the chamber's oor with charming meanderings,
and each channel had a bed of a sp ecial color; the rst channel had a bed of p ink
p orp hyry; the second of top az, the third of emerald, and the fourth of turquoise;
so that the water was tinted the color of the bed, and bathed by the attenuated
light ltered in through the silks above, it p rojected onto the surrounding objects
and the marble walls all the sweetness of a seascap e.As an attemp t at visual p rose
in the manner of The Portrait ofDorian G ray, I accep t (and even salute) this
descrip tion; as a "literal and comp lete" version of a p assage comp osed in the
thirteenth century, I rep eat that it alarms me unendingly. The reasons are
multip le. A Scheherazade without Mardrus describes by enumerating p arts, not by
mutual reaction; does notattest to circumstantial details like that ofwater that
takes on the color of its bed; does not de ne the quality of light ltered by silk;
and does not allude to the Salon des Aquarellistes in the nal image. Another small
flaw: "charming meanderings" is not Arabic, it is very distinctly French. I do not
know if the foregoing reasons are su cient; they were not enough for
me, and I had the indolent p leasure of comp aring the three G erman versions by
Weil, Henning, and Littmann, and the two English versions by Lane and Sir Richard
Burton. In them I con rmed that the original of Mardrus' ten lines was this: "The
four drains ran into a fountain, which was of marble in various colors."Mardrus'
interp olations are not uniform. At times they are brazenly anachronistic-as if
suddenly Marchand's withdrawal were being discussed. For examp le:They were
overlooking a dream city. . . . As far as the gaze xed on hori- zons drowned by
the night could reach, the vale of bronze was terraced with the cup olas of p alaces,
the balconies of houses, and serene gardens;104 JORG E LUIS BORG EScanals illuminated
by the moon ran in a thousand clear circuits in the shadow of the p eaks, while away
in the distance, a sea of metal contained the sky's re ected fires in its cold
bosom.Or this p assage, whose G allicism is no less p ublic:A magni cent carp et of
glorious colors and dexterous wool op ened its odorless flowers in a meadow without
sap , and lived all the arti cial life of its verdant groves full of birds and
animals, surp rised in their exact natural beauty and their p recise lines.(Here the
Arabic editions state: "To the sides were carp ets, with a variety of birds and
beasts embroidered in red gold and white silver, but with eyes of p earls and
rubies. Whoever saw them could not cease to wonder at them.")Mardrus cannot cease
to wonder at the p overty of the "Oriental color" of The Thousand and One Nights.
With a stamina worthy of Cecil B. de Mille, he heap s on the viziers, the kisses,
the p alm trees, and the moons. He hap p ens to read, in night 570:They arrived at a
column ofblack stone, in which a man was buried up to his armp its. He had two
enormous wings and four arms; two of which were like the arms of the sons of Adam,
and two like a lion's forep aws, with iron claws. The hair on his head was like a
horse's tail, and his eyes were like embers, and he had in his forehead a third eye
which was like the eye of a lynx.He translates luxuriantly:One evening the caravan
came to a column of black stone, to which was chained a strange being, only half of
whose body could be seen, for the other half was buried in the ground. The bust
that emerged from the earth seemed to be some monstrous sp awn riveted there by the
force of the infernal p owers. It was black and as large as the trunk of an old,
rot- ting p alm tree, strip p ed of its fronds. It had two enormous black wings and
four hands, of which two were like the clawed p aws of a lion. A tu of coarse
bristles like a wild ass's tail whip p ed wildly over its fright l skull. Beneath its
orbital arches amed two red p up ils, while its double- horned forehead was p ierced
by a single eye, which op ened, immobile and fixed, shooting out green sp arks like
the gaze of a tiger or a p anther.TRANSLATORS OF TI E THOUSAND AND ONE NIG HTS 105
Somewhat later he writes:The bronze of the walls, the ery gemstones of the
cup olas, the ivory terraces, the canals and all the sea, as well as the shadows
p rojected towards the West, merged harmoniously beneath the nocturnal breeze and
the magical moon."Magical;' for a man of the thirteenth century, must have been a
very p recise classi cation, and not the gallant doctor's mere urbane adjective. .
. . I susp ect that the Arabic language is incap able of a "literal and comp lete"
version of Mardrus' p aragrap h, and neither is Latin or the Sp anish of Miguel de
Cervantes.The Book of the Thousand and One Nights abounds in two p rocedures: one
(p urely formal), rhymed p rose; the other, moral p redications. The rst, retained by
Burton and by Littmann, coincides with the narrator's moments of animation: p eop le
of comely asp ect, p alaces, gardens, magical op erations, mentions of the Divinity,
sunsets, battles, dawns, the beginnings and endings of tales. Mardrus, p erhap s
merci lly, omits it. The second requires two faculties: that of majestically
combining abstract words and that of o ering up stock comments without
embarrassment. Mardrus lacks both. From the line memorably translated by Lane as
"And in this p alace is the last information resp ecting lords collected in the
dust," the good Doctor barely extracts: "They p assed on, all of them! They had
barely the time to rep ose in the shadow of my towers." The angel's confession-"! am
imp risoned by Power, confined by Sp lendor, and p unished for as long as the Eternal
commands it, to whom Force and G lory belong"-is, for Mardrus' reader, "I am chained
here by the Invisible Force until the extinction of the centuries."Nor does sorcery
have in Mardrus a co-consp irator of good will. He is incap able of mentioning the
sup ernatural without smirking. He feigns to translate, for examp le:One day when
Calip h Abdelmelik, hearing tell of certain vessels of antique cop p er whose contents
were a strange black smoke-cloud of diabolical form, marveled greatly and seemed to
p lace in doubt the reality of facts so commonly known, the traveller Talib ben-Sahl
had to intervene.In this p aragrap h (like the others I have cited, it belongs to the
Story of the City of Brass, which, in Mardrus, is made of imp osing Bronze), the106
JORG E LUIS BORG ESdeliberate candor of "so commonly known" and the rather
imp lausible doubts of Calip h Abdelmelik are two p ersonal contributions by the
translator. Mardrus continually strives to comp lete the work neglected by those
languid, anonymous Arabs. He adds Art Nouveau p assages, ne obscenities, brief
comical interludes, circumstantial details, symmetries, vast quantities of visual
Orientalism. An examp le among so many: in night 573, the Emir Musa bin Nusayr
orders his blacksmiths and carp enters to construct a strong ladder of wood and
iron. Mardrus (in his night 344) reforms this dull ep isode, adding that the men of
the camp went in search of dry branches, p eeled them with knives and scimitars, and
bound them together with turbans, belts, camel rop es, leather cinches, and tack,
until they had built a tall ladder that they p rop p ed against the wall, sup p orting
it with stones on both sides. . . . In general, it can be said that Mardrus does
not translate the book's words but its scenes: a freedom denied to translators, but
tolerated in illustrators, who are allowed to add these kinds of details. . . . I
do not know if these smiling diversions are what in se the work with such a hap p y
air, the air of a far-fetched p ersonal yarn rather than of a laborious he ing of
dictionaries. But to me the Mardrus "translation" is the most readable of them all-
a er Burton's incomp arable version, which is not truthful either. (In Burton, the
falsification is of another order. It resides in the gigantic emp loy of a gaudy
English, crammed with archaic and bar-baric words.)I would greatly dep lore it (not
for Mardrus, for myself) if any constabulary intent were read into the foregoing
scrutiny. Mardrus is the only Arabist whose glory was p romoted by men of letters,
with such unbridled success that even the Arabists still know who he is. Andre G ide
was among the rst to p raise him, in August 1889; I do not think Cancela and
Cap devila will be the last. My aim is not to demolish this admiration but to
substantiate it. To celebrate Mardrus' fidelity is to leave out the soul of
Mardrus, to ignore Mardrus entirely. It is his in delity, his hap p y and creative in
delity, that must matter to us.3? Enno LittmannFatherland to a famous Arabic
edition of The Thousand and One Nights, G ermany can take (vain) glory in four
versions: by the "librarian though Is- raelite" G ustav Weil-the adversative is from
the Catalan p ages of a certainTRANSLATORS OF TilE TIIOUSAXD AS] ) 0,\"L NIG HTS 107
encyclop edia-; by Max Henning, translator of the Koran; by the man of letters Felix
Paul G reve; and by Enno Littmann, decip herer of the Ethiop ic inscrip tions in the
fortress ofAxum. The rst of these versions, in four volumes (1839-42), is the
most p leasurable, as its author-exiled from Africa and Asia by dysentery-strives to
maintain or substitute for the Oriental style. His interp olations earn my deep est
resp ect. He has some intruders at a gathering say, "We do not wish to be like the
morning, which disp erses all revelries." Of a generous king, he assures us, "The
re that burns for his guests brings to mind the Inferno and the dew of his benign
hand is like the Deluge"; of another he tells us that his hands "were liberal as
the sea." These ne ap ocryp ha are not unworthy of Burton or Mardrus, and the
translator assigned them to the p arts in verse, where this graceful animation can
be an ersatz or rep lacement for the original rhymes. Where the p rose is con-
cerned, I see that he translated it as is, with certain justi ed omissions,
equidistant from hyp ocrisy and immodesty. Burton p raised his work-"as faithful as a
translation of a p op ular nature can be." Not in vain was Dr. Wei] Jewish, "though
librarian"; in his language I think I p erceive something of the flavor of
Scrip ture.The second version (1895-97) disp enses with the enchantments of ac-
curacy, but also with those of style. I am sp eaking of the one p rovided by Henning,
a Leip zig Arabist, to Philip p e Reclam's Universalbibliothek. This is an exp urgated
version, though the p ublisher claims otherwise. The style is dogged and flat. Its
most indisp utable virtue must be its length. The editions of Bulaq and Breslau
are rep resented, along with the Zotenberg manuscrip ts and Burton's Sup p lemental
Nights. Henning, translator of Sir Richard, is, word for word, sup erior to Henning,
translator of Arabic, which is merely a con rmation of Sir Richard's p rimacy over
the Arabs. In the book's p reface and conclusion, p raises of Burton abound-almost
dep rived of their authority by the information that Burton wielded "the language of
Chaucer, equivalent to medieval Arabic." A mention of Chaucer
as one of the sources of Burton's vocabulary would have been more reasonable. (An-
other is Sir Thomas Urquhart's Rabelais.)The third version, G reve's, derives from
Burton's English and rep eats it, excluding only the encyclop edic notes. Insel-
Verlag p ublished it before the war.The fourth (1923-28) comes to sup p lant the
p revious one and, like it, runs to six volumes. It is signed by Enno Littmann,
decip herer of the monuments of Axum, cataloguer of the 283 Ethiop ic manuscrip ts
found in Jerusalem, contributor to the Zeitschri f r Assyriologie. Though it does
not108 JORG E LUIS BORG ESengage in Burton's indulgent loitering, Littmann's
translation is entirely ank. The most ineffable obscenities do not give him p ause;
he renders them into his p lacid G erman, only rarely into Latin. He omits not a
single word, not even those that register-woo times-the p assage from one night to
the next. He neglects or re ses all local color: exp ress instructions from the
p ublisher were necessary to make him retain the name of Allah and not substitute it
with G od. Like Burton and John Payne, he translates Arabic verse into Western
verse. He notes ingenuously that if the ritual announcement "So-and-so p ronounced
these verses" were followed by a p aragrap h of G erman p rose, his readers would be
disconcerted. He p rovides whatever notes are necessary for a basic understanding of
the text: twenty or so p er volume, all of them laconic. He is always lucid,
readable, mediocre. He follows (he tells us) the very breath of the Arabic. If the
Encyclop edia Britannica contains no errors, his translation is the best of all
those in circulation. I hear that the Arabists agree; it matters not at all that
a mere man of letters-and he of the merely Argentine Rep ublic-p refers to dissent.My
reason is this: the versions by Burton and Mardrus, and even by G alland, can only
be conceived of in the wake ofa literature. Whatever their blemishes or merits,
these characteristic works p resup p ose a rich (p rior) p rocess. In some way, the
almost inexhaustible p rocess of English is adum- brated in Burton-John Donne's hard
obscenity, the gigantic vocabularies of Shakesp eare and Cyril Tourneur, Swinburne's
af nity for the archaic, the crass erudition of the authors of 17th-century
chap books, the energy and imp recision, the love of temp ests and magic. In Mardrus'
laughing p aragrap hs, Salammb6 and La Fontaine, the Mannequin d'osier and the
ballets russes all coexist. In Littmann, who like Washington cannot tell a lie,
there is nothing but the p robity of G ermany. This is so little, so very little. The
commerce between G ermany and the Nights should have p roduced something more.
ether in p hilosop hy or in the novel, G ermany p ossesses a literature of the
fantastic-rather, it p ossesses only a literature of the fantastic. There are
marvels in the Nights that I would like to see rethought in G erman. As I for-
mulate this desire, I think of the rep ertory's deliberate wonders-the all- p ower l
slaves of a lamp or a ring; Queen Lab, who transforms Muslims into birds; the
cop p er boatman with talismans and formulae on his chest-and of those more general
ones that p roceed om its collective nature, om the need to comp lete one thousand
and one ep isodes. Once they had run out of magic, the cop yists had to fall back on
historical or p ious notices whose inclusion seems to attest to the good faith of
the rest. The ruby that ascends intoTRANSLAT0RS 0F TIIE T 0USA ?D AND 0NE NIG TS
109the sky and the earliest descrip tion of Sumatra, details of the court of the Ab-
basids and silver angels whose food is the justi cation of the Lord, all dwell
together in a single volume. It is, nally, a p oetic mixture; and I would say the
same of certain rep etitions. Is it not p ortentous that on night 602 King Schahriah
hears his own story from the queen's lip s? Like the general framework, a given
tale o en contains within itself other tales of equal length: stages within the
stage as in the tragedy of Hamlet, raised to the p ower of a dream. A clear and di
cult line from Tennyson seems to de ne them:Laborious orient ivory, sp here in
sp here.To rther heighten the astonishment, these adventitious Hydra's heads can be
more concrete than the body: Schahriah, the fantastical king "of the Islands of
China and Hindustan,'' receives news of Tarik ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangiers and
victor in the battle of G uadalete. . . . The threshold is con- sed with the
mirror, the mask lies beneath the face, no one knows any longer which is the true
man and which are his idols. And none of it matters; the disorder is as accep table
and trivial as the inventions of a daydream.Chance has p layed at symmetries,
contrasts, digressions. What might a man-a Kafka-do if he organized and intensi ed
this p lay, remade it in line with the G ermanic distortion, the unheimlichkeit of
G ermany?[1934-1936] [EA] Among the volumes consulted, I must enumerate:LesMilleet
une Nuits, contesarabestraduits p ar G alland. Paris, s.d.The Thousand and One
Nights, commonly called The Arabian Nights' Entertainments. Anew translation from
the Arabic by E.W. Lane. London, 1839.The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
A p lain and literal translation by Rich-ard Burton. London (?) n.d. Vols. VI,
VII, VIII.The Arabian Nights. A comp lete [sic] and unabridged selection from the
famous literaltranslation ofR. F. Burton. New Y ork, 1932.L e L i v r e d e s m i l
l e n u i t s e t u n e n u i t . Tra d u c t i o n l i t t e r a l e e t c o m p l
e t e d u t e x t e a r a b e p a r l eDr. J. C. Mardrus. Paris, 1906.Tausend und
eine Nacht. Aus dem Arabischen iibertragen von Max Henning. Leip zig,1897?Die Erz
hlungen aus den Tausendundein Niichten. Nach dem arabischen Urtext der Cal- cu
aerAusgabe vom Jahre 1839 bertragen von Enno Littmann. Leip zig, 1928.I, a JewLike
the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant p ast is one of
those things that can enrich ignorance. It is in nitely malleable and agreeable,
far more obliging than the future and far less demanding of our e orts. It is the
famous season favored by all mythologies.Who has not, at one time or another,
p layed with thoughts of his ancestors, with the p rehistory of his flesh and
blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not disp leased me to think
of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hyp othesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure
that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the
songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol [Crucible] , in its issue of January 30,
has decided to grati this retrosp ective hop e; it sp eaks of my "Jewish ancestry,
maliciously hidden" (the p articip le and the adverb amaze and delight me) .Borges
Acevedo is my name. Ramos Mejia, in a note to the h chap ter of Rosas and His
Times, lists the family names in Buenos Aires at that time in order to demonstrate
that all, or almost all, "came from Judea- Portuguese stock." "Acevedo" is included
in the list: the only sup p orting evidence for my Jewish p retensions until this con
rmation in Crisol. Never- theless, Cap tain Honorio Acevedo undertook a detailed
investigation that I cannot ignore. His study notes that the rst Acevedo to
disembark on this land was the Catalan Don Pedro de Azevedo in 1728: landholder,
settler of "Pago de Los Arroyos," father and grandfather of cattle ranchers in that
p rovince, a notable who gures in the annals of the p arish of Santa Fe and in the
documents of the history of the Viceroyalty-an ancestor, in short, irrep arably
Sp anish.Two hundred years and I can't nd the Israelite; two hundred years and my
ancestor still eludes me.I am grateful for the stimulus p rovided by Crisol, but
hop e is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the
Breads and theI, A JEW 111Sea of Bronze; to Heine, G leizer, and the ten Se roth; to
Ecclesiastes and Chap lin.Statistically, the Hebrews were few. What would we think
of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers p eop le from San Juan Province everywhere?
Our inquisitors seek out Hebrews, but never Phoenicians, G aramantes, S thians,
Babylonians, Persians, Eg tians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiop ians, Illy-
rians, Pap hlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyans,
Cyclop es, or Lap iths. The nights of Alexandria, of Babylon, of Carthage, of
Memp his, never succeeded in engendering a single grandfather; it was only to the
tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that this gi was granted.[19341 [EW} The
Labyrinths of the Detective Story d ChestertonThe English live with the turmoil of
two incomp atible p assions: a strange ap p etite for adventure and a strange ap p etite
for legality. I write "strange" because, for a criollo, they are both p recisely
that. Martin Fierro, the sainted army deserter, and his p al Cruz, the sainted
p olice deserter, would be astonished, swearing and laughing at the British (and
American) doctrine that the law is infallibly right; yet they would never dare to
imagine that their miserable fate as cutthroats was interesting or desirable. For a
criollo, to kill is to "disgrace oneself." It is one of man's misfortunes, and in
itself neither grants nor diminishes virtue. Nothing could be more op p osite to
"Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" by the "morbidly virtuous" De Quincey
or to the "Theory of the Moderate Murder" by the sedentary Chesterton.Both
p assions-for p hysical adventure and for rancorous legality- nd satisfaction in the
current detective narrative. Its p rototyp es are the old se- rials and current dime
novels about the nominally famous Nick Carter, smiling and hygienic athlete, that
were engendered by the journalist John Coryell on an insomniac typ ewriter that
disp atched 70,000 words a month. The genuine detective story-need I say it?-rejects
with equal disdain both p hysical risk and distributive justice. It serenely
disregards jails, secret stairways, remorse, gymnastics, fake beards, fencing,
Charles Baudelaire's bats, and even the element of chance. In the earliest examp les
of the genre ("The Mystery of Marie Roget;' by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842) and in one of
the most recent ones ( Unravelled Knots, by the Baroness Orczy), the story is
limited to the discussion and abstract resolution of a crime, o en far from the
event or many years a er it. The everyday methods of p olice investigation-
ngerp rints, torture, accusation-would seem like solecisms there. One might object
to the conventionality of this rejection, but the convention here is
irrep roachable: it does not attemp t to avoid dif cul-THE LABY RINTHS 0F THE
DETECTIVE ST0RY 11Jties, but rather to imp ose them. It is not a convenience for the
writer, like the con sed confidants in Jean Racine or theatrical asides. The
detective novel to some degree borders on the p sychological novel ( The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins, 1868; Mr. Digweed and Mr. Lumb by Eden Phillp otts, 1934). The
short story is of a strict, p roblematic nature; its code could be the following:A.)
A discretional limit ofsix characters. The reckless infraction of this law is
resp onsible for the con sion and tedium of all detective movies. In every one we
are p resented with een strangers, and it is nally revealed that the evil one is
not Alp ha, who was looking through the keyhole, nor Beta, who hid the money, nor
the disturbing G amma, who would sob in the corners of the hallway, but rather that
surly young Up silon, whom we'd been con sing with Phi, who bears such a stri ng
resemblance to Tau, the substitute elevator op erator. The astonishment this fact
tends to p roduce is somewhat moderate.B.) The declaration of all the terms of the
p roblem. If my memory (or lack of it) serves me, the varied infraction of this
second law is the favorite defect of Conan Doyle. It involves, at times, a few
p articles of ashes, gathered behind the reader's back by the p rivileged Holmes,
and only derivable from a cigar made in Burma, which is sold in only one store,
which is p a- tronized by only one customer. At other times, the cheating is more
serious. It involves a guilty p arty, horribly unmasked at the last moment, who
turns out to be a stranger, an insip id and torp id interp olation. In honest stories,
the criminal is one of the characters p resent from the beginning.C.) An avaricious
economy ofmeans. The nal discovery that two characters in the p lot are the same
p erson may be ap p ealing-as long as the instrument of change turns out to be not a
false beard or an Italian accent, but di erent names and circumstances. The less
delightful version-two individuals who imitate a third and thus p rovide him with
ubiquity-runs the certain risk of heavy weather.D. ) The p riority of how over who.
The amateurs I excoriated in section A are p artial to the story of a jewel p laced
within the reach of fteen men- that is, of fteen names, because we know nothing
about their characters- which then disap p ears into the heavy fist of one of them.
They imagine that the act of ascertaining to which name the st belongs is of
considerable interest.E.) A reticence conce ing death. Homer could relate that a
sword sev- ered the hand of Hyp senor and that the bloody hand rolled over the
ground114 JORG E LUIS BORG ESand that blood-red death and cruel fate seized his eyes;
such disp lays are inap p rop riate in the detective story, whose glacial muses are
hygiene, fallacy, and order. ) A solution that is both necessary and marvelous. The
former establishes that the p roblem is a "determined" one, with only one
solution. The latter requires that the solution be something that the reader
marvels over-without, of course, resorting to the sup ernatural, whose use in this
genre of ction is slothful and felonious. Also p rohibited are hyp notism,
telep athic hallucinations, p ortents, elixirs with unknown effects, ingenious
p seudoscienti c tricks, and lucky charms. Chesterton always p erforms atour de force
by p rop osing a sup ernatural exp lanation and then rep lacing it, losing nothing, with
one from this world.The Scandal ofFather Brown, Chesterton's most recent book
(London, 1935), has suggested the aforementioned rules. Of the ve series of
chronicles of the little clergyman, this book is p robably the least felicitous.
It contains, however, two stories that I would not want excluded from a Brownian
anthology or canon: the third, "The Blast of the Book," and the eighth, "The
Insoluble Problem." The p remise of the former is exciting: it deals with a tattered
sup ernatural book that causes the instantaneous disap p earance of those who
foolishly op en it. Somebody announces over the telep hone that he has the book in
front of him and that he is about to op en it; the fright- .ened listener "hears a
kind of silent exp losion." Another exp loded character leaves a small hole in a p ane
of glass; another, a rip in a canvas; another, his abandoned wooden leg. The
denouement is good, but I am p ositive that the most devout readers correctly
guessed it in the middle of p age 73? There is an abundance of the characteristics
typ ical of G . K.: for examp le, that gloomy masked man with the black gloves who
turns out to be an aristocrat and a erce op p onent of nudism.The settings for the
crimes are remarkable, as in all of Chesterton's books, and carefully and
sensationally false. Has anyone ever noted the similarities between the fantastic
London of Stevenson and that of Chester- ton, between the mourning gentlemen and
nocturnal gardens of The Sui- cide Club and those of the now ve-p art saga of
Father Brown?[1935] [EW] The Doctrine of CyclesIThis doctrine (whose most recent
inventor called it the doctrine of the Eter- nal Return) may be formulated in the
following manner:The number ofall the atoms that comp ose the world is immense but
nite, and as such only cap able ofa nite (though also immense) number ofp ermu-
tations. In an in nite stretch of time, the number of p ossible p ermutations must be
run through, and the universe has to rep eat itse Once again you will be born from
a bell once again your skeleton will grow, once again this same p age will reach
your identical hands, once again you willfollow the course of all the hours ofyour
life until that ofyour incredible death. Such is the customary order of this
argument, from its insip id p reliminaries to its enormous and threatening outcome.
It is commonly attributed to Nietzsche.Before refuting it-an undertaking of which I
do not know if I am cap able-it may be advisable to conceive, even from afar, of the
sup erhuman numbers it invokes. I shall begin with the atom. The diameter of a
hydrogen atom has been calculated, with some margin of error, to be one hundred
millionth of a centimeter. This dizzying tininess does not mean the atom is
indivisible; on the contrary, Rutherford describes it with the image of a solar
system, made up of a central nucleus and a sp inning electron, one hundred
thousand times smaller than the whole atom. Let us leave this nucleus and this
electron aside, and conceive of a frugal universe comp osed of ten atoms. (This is
obviously only a modest exp erimental universe; invisible, for even microscop es do
not susp ect it; imp onderable, for no scale can p lace a value on it.) Let us
p ostulate as well-still in accordance with Nietzsche's conjecture-that the number
of p ossible changes in this universe is the number of ways in which the ten atoms
can be arranged by varying the order in which they are p laced. How many different
states can this world116 JORG E LUIS BORG ESknow before an eternal return? The
investigation is simp le: it su ces to multip ly1x2x3x4x5 x6x7 x8x9
x10,atediousop erationthat yields the figure of 3,628,8oo. If an almost
infinitesimal p article of the universe is cap able of such variety, we should lend
little or no faith to any monotony in the cosmos. I have considered ten atoms; to
obtain two grams of hydrogen, we would require more than a billion billion atoms.
To make the comp utation of the p ossible changes in this coup le of grams-in other
words, to multip ly a billion billion by each one of the whole numbers that p recedes
it-is already an op eration that far surp asses my human p atience.I do not know if my
reader is convinced; I am not. This chaste, p ainless squandering of enormous
numbers undoubtedly yields the p eculiar p leasure of all excesses, but the
Recurrence remains more or less Eternal, though in the most remote terms. Nietzsche
might rep ly: "Rutherford's sp inning electrons are a novelty for me, as is the idea-
scandalous to a p hilologist- that an atom can be divided. However, I never denied
that the vicissitudes of matter were cop ious; I said only that they were not
infinite." This p lausible resp onse from Friedrich Zarathustra obliges me to fall
back on G eorg Cantor and his heroic theory of sets.Cantor destroys the foundation
of Nietzsche's hyp othesis. He asserts the p erfect in nity of the number of p oints
in the universe, and even in one meter of the universe, or a fraction of that
meter. The op eration of counting is, for him, nothing else than that of comp aring
two series. For examp le, if the first-born sons of all the houses of Egyp t were
killed by the Angel, excep t for those who lived in a house that had a red mark on
the door, it is clear that as many sons were saved as there were red marks, and an
enumeration of p recisely how many of these there were does not matter. Here the
quantity is inde nite; there are other group ings in which it is in nite. The set of
natural numbers is in nite, but it is p ossible to demonstrate that, within it,
there are as many odd numbers as even.1 corresp onds to 23 to45 to 6, etc.This p roof
is as irrep roachable as it is banal, and is no different from the following p roof
that there are as many multip les of 3018 as there
are numbers-without excluding from the latter set the number 3018 and its
multip les.THE DOCTRINE OF CY CLES 1171 2 3 4corresp onds to 3018 to 6036 to 9054to
12072, etc.The same can be af rmed of its exp onential p owers, however rare ed they
become as we p rogress.corresp onds to 2 to 3 to301830182 which is 9,108,324etc. A
jocose accep tance of these facts has insp ired the formula that an in - nite
collection-for examp le, the natural series ofwhole numbers-is a collection whose
members can in turn be broken down into in nite series. (Or rather, to avoid any
ambiguity: an in nite whole is a whole that can be the equivalent of one of its
subsets.) The p art, in these elevated numerical latitudes, is no less cop ious
than the whole: the p recise quantity of p oints in the universe is the same as the
quantity of p oints in a meter, or a decimeter, or the deep est trajectory of a star.
The series of natural numbers is very orderly, that is, the terms that form it are
consecutive: 28 p recedes 29 and follows 27. The series of p oints in sp ace (or of
instants in time) cannot be ordered in the same way: no number has a successor or
an immediate p redecessor. It is like a series of fractions arranged in order of
magnitude. What number will we count a er ? Not 5Xoo, because 10 oo is closer; not
10Vooo, because 20?oo is closer; not 20?oo, because . . . According to Cantor,
the same thing hap p ens with p oints. We can always interp ose more of them, in in -
nite number. Therefore we must try not to conceive of decreasing sizes. Each p oint
is "already" the nal degree of an in nite subdivision.The clash between Cantor's
lovely game and Zarathustra's lovely game is fatal to Zarathustra. If the universe
consists of an in nite number of terms, it is rigorously cap able of an in nite
number of combinations-and the need for a Recurrence is done away with. There
remains its mere p ossibility, which can be calculated as zero.IINietzsche writes,
in the autumn of 1883: "This slow sp ider dragging itself towards the light of the
moon and that same moonlight, and you and I118 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwhisp ering at the
gateway, whisp ering of eternal things, haven't we already coincided in the p ast?
And won't we hap p en again on the long road, on this long tremulous road, won't we
recur eternally? This was how I sp oke, and in an ever lower voice, because my
thoughts and what was beyond my thoughts made me afraid." Writes Eudemus, a
p arap hraser of Aris- totle, three centuries or so before the Cross: "If the
Pythagoreans are to be believed, the same things will return at p recisely their
time and you will be with me again and I will rep eat this doctrine and my hand will
p lay with this sta , and so on." In the Stoic cosmogony, "Zeus feeds on the world":
the universe is cyclically consumed by the re that engendered it, and resurges
from annihilation to rep eat an identical history. Once again the diverse seminal
p articles combine, once again they give form to stones, trees, and men-and even
virtues and days, since for the G reeks a substantive number was imp ossible without
some corp oreality. Once again every sword and every hero, once again every
minutious night of insomnia.Like the other conjectures of the school of the Porch,
that of a general rep etition sp read across time entered the G osp els (Acts of the
Ap ostles 3:21), along with its technical name, ap okatastasis, though with
indeterminate intent. Book XII of St. Augustine's Civitas Dei dedicates several
chap - ters to the refutation of so abominable a doctrine. Those chap ters (which I
have before me now) are far too intricate for summary, but their author's ep iscop al
ry seems to x up on two arguments: one, the gaudy futility of this wheel; the
other, the ridiculousness of the Logos dying on the cross like an acrobat in an
interminable sequence of p erformances. Farewells and suicides lose their dignity
if rep eated too o en; St. Augustine must have thought the same of the Cruci ion.
Hence his scandalized rejection of the viewp oint of the Stoics and Pythagoreans,
who argued that G od's science cannot understand in nite things and that the eternal
rotation of the world'" p rocess serves to allow G ed to learn more and familiarize
Himself with it. St. Augustine mocks their worthless revolutions and a rms that Je-
sus is the straight p ath that allows us to flee om the circular labyrinth of such
decep tions.In the chap ter of his Logic that addresses the law of causality, John
Stu- art Mill maintains that a p eriodic rep etition of history is conceivable-but
not true-and cites Virgil's "Messianic eclogue":Jam redit et virgo, redeunt
Saturnia regna[Now the Maiden returns, the reign of Saturn returns] successiOn.. ))
THE DOCTRINE OF CY CLES 119Can Nietzsche, the Hellenist, have been ignorant of these
"p recursors"? Was Nietzsche, author of the fragments on the p re-Socratics, p erhap s
unaware of a doctrine learned by the discip les of Pythagoras?' This is hard to
believe-andfutile. True, Nietzsche has indicated, in a memorable p age, the p recise
sp ot on which the idea of the Eternal Return visited him: a p ath in the woods of
Silvap lana, near a vast p yramidal block, one midday in August 1881-"six thousand
feet beyond men and time." True, this instant is one of Nietzsche's great
distinctions. "Immortal the instant in which I engendered the eternal recurrence.
For that instant I endure the Recurrence," were the words he would leave ( Unschuld
des Werdens II, 1308). Y et, in my op inion, we need not p ostulate a startling
ignorance, nor a human, all too human, con sion between insp iration and memory, nor
a crime of vanity. My key to this mystery is grammatical, almost syntactical.
Nietzsche knew that the Eternal Recourse is one of the fables, fears, diversions,
that eternally recur, but he also knew that the most effective of the grammatical
p ersons is the rst. Indeed, we would be justi ed in saying that, for a p rop het,
the only grammatical p erson is the rst. It was not p ossible for Zarathustra to
derive his revelation from a p hilosop hical comp endium or from the Historia
p hilosop hiae graeco-romanae of the surrogate p rofessors Ritter and Preller, for
reasons of voice and anachronism, not to sp eak of typ ograp hy. The p rop hetic style
does not allow for the use of quotation marks nor the erudite attestation of
books and authors. . . .If my human flesh can assimilate the brute flesh of a
sheep , who can p revent the human mind from assimilating human mental states?
Because he rethought it at great length, and endured it, the eternal recurrence of
things is now Nietzsche's and does not belong to some dead man who is barely more
than a G reek name. I will not insist; Miguel de Unamuno already has his p age on
the adop tion of thoughts.Nietzsche wanted men who were cap able of enduring
immortality. I saythis in words that ap p ear in his p ersonal notebooks, the
Nachlass, where healso inscribed these others: "If you envision a long p eace before
you are re-born, I swear to you that you are thinking wrongly. Between the nal
instant of consciousness and the first gleam of a new life there is 'no time'-the
lap se lasts as long as a bolt of lightning, though billions of years are in-su
cient to measure it. If a self is absent, infinity can be the equivalent of1This
p erp lexity is tile. Nietzsche, in 1874, jeered at the Pythagorean thesis that his-
t o r y r e p e a t s i t s e l f c y c l i c a l l y ( Vo m N u t z e n u n d N a
c h t e i l d e r H i s t o r i e ) . ( N o t e a d d e d i n 1 9 5 3 . )120 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESBefore Nietzsche, p ersonal immortality was no more than a blundering
hop e, a hazy p lan. Nietzsche p ostulates it as a duty and gives it all the ghastly
lucidity of insomnia. "Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows,
dry brains," (I read in Robert Burton's antique treatise) "is a symp tom that much
cruci es melancholy men." We are told that Nietzsche endured this cruci xion and
had to seek deliverance in the bitterness of chloral hydrate. Nietzsche wanted to
be Walt Whitman; he wanted to fall minutely in love with his destiny. He adop ted a
heroic method: he disin- terred the intolerable G reek hyp othesis of eternal
rep etition, and he contrived to make this mental nightmare an occasion for
jubilation. He sought out the most horrible idea in the universe and o ered it up
to mankind's delectation. The languid op timist o en imagines himself to be a Nietz-
schean; Nietzsche confronts him with the circles of the eternal recurrence and
sp its him out of his mouth.Nietzsche wrote: "Not to yearn for distant ventures and
favors and blessings, but to live in such a way that we wish to come back and live
again, and so on throughout eternity." Mauthner objects that to attribute the
slightest moral, in other words p ractical, in uence to the hyp othesis of eternal
return is to negate the hyp othesis-since it is comp arable to imagining that
something can hap p en in another way. Nietzsche would answer that the formulation of
the eternal return and its extensive moral (in other words, p ractical) influence
and Mauthner's cavils and his refutation of Mauthner's cavils are naught but a few
more necessary moments in the history of the world, the work of atomic
agitations. He could, with reason, re- p eat the words he had already written: "It
su ces that the doctrine of circular rep etition be p robable or p ossible. The image
of a mere p ossibility can shatter and remake us. How much has been accomp lished by
the p ossibility of eternal damnation!" And in another p assage: "The instant that
this idea p resents itself, all colors are di erent-and there is another history."
IIIAt one time or another, the sensation of"having lived this moment already" has
le us all p ensive. Partisans of the eternal recurrence swear to us that it is so
and investigate a p ossible corroboration of their faith in these p er- p lexed
states of mind. They forget that memory would imp ort a novelty that negates the
hyp othesis, and that time would gradually p erfect that memory until the distant
heaven in which the individual now foresees hisTHE DOCTRINE OF CY CLES 121destiny
and p refers to act in another way. . . . In any case, Nietzsche never sp oke of a
mnemonic confirmation of the Recurrence.2Nor-and this deserves to be emp hasized as
well-did he sp eak of the niteness of atoms. Nietzsche negates the atom; atomic
theory seemed to him nothing but a model of the world made exclusively for the eyes
and the mathematical mind. . . . To ground his hyp othesis, he sp oke of a limited
force, evolving in in nite time, but incap able of an unlimited number of
variations. His p rocedure was not without p er dy: first he sets us on guard against
the idea of an infinite force-"let us beware such orgies of thought!"- and then he
generously concedes that time is infinite. Similarly, it p leases him to fall back
on the Prior Eternity. For examp le: an equilibrium of cosmic forces is
imp ossible, since if it were not it would already have occurred in the Prior
Eternity. Or: universal history has hap p ened an in nite number oftimes-in the Prior
Eternity. The invocation seems valid, but it should be rep eated that this Prior
Eternity (or aeternitas a p arte ante, as the theologians would call it) is
nothing but our natural incap acity to conceive of a beginning to time. We su er the
same incap acity where sp ace is concerned, so that invoking a Prior Eternity is as
decisive as invoking the In nity To My Right. In other words, if time is infinite
to our intuition, so is sp ace. This Prior Eternity has nothing to do with the real
time that has elap sed; we go back to the first second and note that it requires a
p redecessor, and that that p redecessor requires one as well, and so on in nitely.
To close o this regressus in in nitum [regression into in nity] , St. Augustine
declares that the first second of time coincides with the first second of the
Creation: "non in temp ore sed cum temp ore incep it creatio" [The Creation begins not
in time but with time] .Nietzsche ap p eals to energy; the second law of
thermodynamics declares that some energetic p rocesses are irreversible. Heat and
light are no2Qf this ap p arent con rmation, Nestor Ibarra writes: "It also hap p ens
that some new p ercep tion strikes us as a memory, and we believe we recognize
objects or accidents that we are nevertheless sure of meeting for the rst time.
I imagine that this must have to do with a curious op eration of our memory. An
initial p ercep tion, any p ercep tion, takes p lace, but beneath the threshold
ofconsciousness. An instant later, the stimulus acts, but this time we receive it
in our conscious mind. Our memory comes into p lay and o ers us the feeling of deja
vu, but situates the recollection wrongly. To justi its weakness and its
disturbing quality, we imagine that a considerable amount of time has p assed, or we
may even send it rther, into the rep etition of some former life. In reality it is
an immediate p ast, and the abyss that sep arates us om it is that of our own
distraction."122 JORG E LUIS BORG ESmore than forms of energy. It su ces to p roject a
light onto a black surface to convert it into heat. Heat, however, will never
return to the form of light. This inoffensive or insip id-seeming p roof annuls the
"circular labyrinth" of the Eternal Return.The rst law of thermodynamics declares
that the energy of the universe is constant; the second, that this energy tends
toward isolation and disorder, though its total quantity does not decrease. This
gradual disintegration of the forces that make up the universe is entrop y. Once m
imum entrop y is reached, once different temp eratures have been equalized, once any
action of one body on another has been neutralized (or comp ensated for), the world
will be a random assemblage of atoms. In the deep center of the stars, this di
cult, mortal equilibrium has been achieved. By dint of constant interchange, the
whole universe will reach it, and will be warm and dead.Light is gradually lost in
the form of heat; the universe, minute by minute, is becoming invisible. It grows
more inconstant, as well. At some p oint, it will no longer be anything but heat: an
equilibrium of immobile, evenly distributed heat. Then it will have died.A nal
uncertainty, this one of a metap hysical order. If Zarathustra's hy- p othesis is
accep ted, I do not fully understand how two identical p rocesses keep from
agglomerating into one. Is mere succession, veri ed by no one, enough? Without a
sp ecial archangel to keep track, what does it mean that we are going through the
thirteen thousand ve hundred and fourteenth cycle and not the rst in the series
or number three hundred twenty-two to the two thousandth p ower? Nothing, in
p ractice-which is no imp airment to the thinker. Nothing, for the intellect-which is
serious indeed.[1936] [EA] Among the books consulted for the foregoing article, I
must make mention of the following:Die Unschuld des Werdens von Friedrich
Nietzsche. Leip zig, 1931.Also sp rach Zaarathustra von Friedrich Nietzsche. Leip zig,
1892. Introduction to Mathematical Philosop hy by Bertrand Russell. London, 1919.The
ABC ofAtoms by Bertrand Russell. London, 1927.T h e N a t u r e of t h e P h y s i
c a l Wo r l d b y A . S . E d d i n g t o n . L o n d o n , 1 9 2 8 .Die
Philosop hie der G riechen von Dr. Paul Deussen. Leip zig, 1919. W rterbuch der
Philosop hie von Fritz Mauthner. Leip zig, 1923.La ciudad de Dios p or San Agustin.
Version de Diaz de Beyral. Madrid, 1922.A History of EternityIThe p assage of the
Enneads that seeks to question and de ne the nature of time states that a p rior
acquaintance with eternity is indisp ensable since- as everyone knows-eternity is
the model and archetyp e of time. This p refatory statement, all the more crucial if
we take it to be sincere, ap p ears to annihilate any hop e of our reaching an
understanding of the man who wrote it. For us, time is a jarring, urgent p roblem,
p erhap s the most vital p roblem of metap hysics, while eternity is a game or a sp ent
hop e. We read in Plato's Timaeus that time is a moving image of eternity, and it
barely strikes a chord, distracting no one from the conviction that eternity is an
image wrought in the substance of time. I p rop ose to give a history of that image,
that awkward word enriched by human discord.Inverting Plotinus' method (the only
way to make any use of it), I will begin by listing some of the obscurities
inherent in time, a natural, meta- p hysical mystery that must p recede eternity,
which is a daughter of man- nd. One such obscurity, neither the most challenging
nor the least beauti l, keep s us from ascertaining the direction in which time
moves. It is commonly held to flow from p ast to future, but the op p osite notion,
established in Sp anish verse by Miguel de Unamuno, is no less logical:Nocturno el
rio de las horas fluye desde su manatial que es el manana eterno . . .[ Nocturnal
the river of hours flows/from its source, the eternal tomorrow . . .] 11The
Scholastic concep t of time as the flow of the p otential into the actual is akin to
this idea. C Whitehead's eternal objects, which constitute "the kingdom of p ossi-
bility" and p articip ate in time.124 JORG E LUJS BORG ESBoth directions are equally
p robable-and equally unveri able. Bradley denies both p ossibilities and advances a
p ersonal hyp othesis, which consists in ruling out the future, a mere construction
of our hop es, and reducing the "actual" to the death throes of the p resent moment
as it disinte- grates into the p ast. This temp oral regression usually corresp onds
to states of decline or dullness, while any kind of intensity seems to us to
advance on the future. . . . While Bradley negates the ture, one school of Indian
p hilosop hynegatesthep resentasunattainable. Theorangeisabouttofallfrom the branch,
or else it lies on the ground, these curious simp li ers af rm. No one sees itfall.
Other di culties are suggested by time. One, p erhap s the greatest- that of
synchronizing each p erson's individual time with the general time of
mathematicians-has been greatly vociferated by the recent relativist scare, and
everyone remembers it, or remembers having remembered it until very recently. ( I
retrieve it by distorting it in the following way: If time is a mental p rocess,
how can it be shared by thousands of men, or even two different men?) The Eleatic
re tation of movement raises another p roblem, which can be exp ressed thus: It is
imp ossibleforfourteen minutes to elap se in eight hundredyears oftime, because rst
seven minutes mustp ass, and before seven, three and a hal and before three and a
hal one and three-quarters, and so on in nitel so that thefourteen minutes will
never be comp leted. Russell rebuts this argument by af rming the reality and even
the triteness of in nite numbers, which, however, by de nition occur once and for
all, and not as the " nal" term of an endless enumerative p rocess. Russell's non-
normal numbers are a ne anticip ation of eternity, which also refuses to be de ned
by the enumeration of its p arts.None of the several eternities men have charted-
nominalism's, Ire- naeus', Plato's-is a mechanical aggregate of p ast, p resent, and
future. Eter- nity is something simp ler and more magical: the simultaneity of the
three tenses. This is something of which ordinary language and the stup e ing
dictionary dont chaque edition fait regretter la p recedente [whose every new
edition makes us long for the p receding one] ap p ear to be unaware, but it was how
the metap hysical thinkers conceived of eternity. "The objects of the Soul are
successive, now Socrates and now a horse"-! read in the h book of the
Enneads-"always some one thing which is conceived of and thousands that are lost;
but the Divine Mind encomp asses all
things together. The p ast is p resent in its p resent, and the future as well.
Nothing comes to p ass in this world, but all things endure forever, steadfast in
the hap p iness of their condition."A HISTORY OF ETERNITY 125I will p ause to consider
this eternity, from which the subsequent ones derive. While it is true that
Plotinus was not its founder-in an excep tional book, he sp eaks of the "antique and
sacred p hilosop hers" who p receded him-he amp li es and sp lendidly sums up all that
those who went before him had imagined. Deussen comp ares him to the sunset: an
imp assioned - nal light. All the G reek concep tions of eternity, already rejected,
already tragically elaborated up on, converge in his books. I therefore p lace him
before Irenaeus, who ordained the second eternity: the one crowned by the three
different but inextricable beings.Plotinus says with unmistakable fervor,For all in
the Intelligible Heaven is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea heaven; and animal,
p lant and man. For sp ectacle they have a world that has not been engendered. In
beholding others they behold themselves. For all things There are translucent:
nothing is dark, nothing im- p enetrable, for light is manifest to light. All are
ever here, and all is all, and the whole is in each as in the sum. The sun is one
with all the stars and every star with the sun and all its fellows. No one walks
there as up on an alien earth.This unanimous universe, this ap otheosis of
assimilation and interchange, is not yet eternity; it is an adjacent heaven, still
not wholly emancip ated from sp ace and number. Another p assage from the h Ennead
exhorts us to the contemp lation of eternity itself, the world of universal forms:
Whatsoever man is lled with admiration for the sp ectacle ofthis sensible
universe, having regard to its greatness and loveliness and the ordi- nance of its
everlasting movement, having regard also to the gods which are in it, divinities
both visible and invisible, and daemons, and all creatures and p lants; let him next
li up his thoughts to the truer Reality which is its archetyp e. There let him see
all things in their intelligible nature, eternal not with a borrowed eternity,
but in their p rop er consciousness and their p rop er life; their cap tain also he
shall see, the uncontaminable Intelligence and the Wisdom that p asses ap p roach, and
the true age of Kronos, whose name is Fullness. For in him are embraced all
deathless things, every intelligence, every god, every soul, immutable forever.
It is well with him: what should he seek to change? He has all things p resent to
him: whither should he move? He did not at rst lack this blessed state, then win
it: all things are his in one eternity,126 JORG E LUIS BORG ESand the true eternity
is his, which time does but mimic; for time must fetch the comp ass of the Soul,
ever throwing a p ast behind it, ever in chase of a future.The rep eated a rmations
of p lurality in the p receding p aragrap hs can lead us into error. The ideal universe
to which Plotinus summons us is less intent on variety than on p lenitude; it is a
select rep ertory, tolerating neither rep etition nor p leonasm: the motionless and
terrible museum of the Platonic archetyp es. I do not know if mortal eyes ever saw
it (outside of oracular vision or nightmare), or if the remote G reek who devised it
ever made its acquaintance, but I sense something of the museum in it: still,
monstrous, and classified. . . . But that is a bit of p ersonal whimsy which the
reader may disregard, though some general notion of these Platonic archetyp es or
p rimordial causes or ideas that p op ulate and constitute eternity should be
retained.A p rotracted discussion of the Platonic system is imp ossible here, but
certain p rerequisite remarks can be offered. For us, the nal, solid reality of
things is matter-the sp inning electrons that cross interstellar distances in their
atomic solitude. But for those cap able of thinking like Plato, it is the sp ecies,
the form. In the third book of the Enneads, we read that matter is unreal, a mere
hollow p assivity that receives the universal forms as a mirror would; they agitate
and p op ulate it, but without altering it. Matter's p lenitude is exactly that of a
mirror, which simulates llness and is emp ty; matter is a ghost that does not
even disap p ear, for it lacks even the cap acity to cease being. Form alone is truly
fundamental. Of form, Pedro Malon de Chaide would write much later, rep eating
Plotinus:When G od acts, it is as if you had an octagonal seal wrought of gold, in
one p art of which was wrought the shap e of a lion; in another, a horse; in another,
an eagle, and so for the rest; and in a bit of wax you im- p rinted the lion; in
another, the eagle; in another, the horse; and it is certain that all that ap p ears
in the wax is in the gold, and you can p rint nothing but what is sculp ted there.
But there is a di erence; in the wax it is of wax and worth little, but in the gold
it is of gold and worth much. The p erfections of the creatures of this world are
finite and of little value; in G od they are of gold, they are G od Himself.We may
infer from this that matter is nothing.We hold this to be a p oor, even
incomp rehensible criterion, yet we ap -A HISTORY OF ETERNITY 127p ly it continually.
A chap ter by Schop enhauer is not the p ap er in the Leip zig archives, nor the act of
p rinting, nor the contours and curlicues of the gothic letters, nor an enumeration
of the sounds that comp rise it, nor even the op inion we may have of it. Miriam
Hop kins is made up of Miriam Hop - kins, not of the nitrogenous or mineral
rudiments, the carbohydrates, alka- loids, and neutral lip ids that constitute the
transitory substance of that slender silver sp ecter or intelligible essence of
Hollywood. These illustrations or well-intentioned sop histries may encourage us
to tolerate the Pla- tonic hyp othesis which we will formulate thus: Individuals and
things exist insofar as theyp articip ate in the sp ecies that includes them, which is
their p ermanent reality.I turn to the most p romising examp le: the bird. The habit
of ocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two
twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more o en
heard than seen-all of this moves us to acknowledge the p rimacy of the sp ecies and
the almost p erfect nullity of individuals.2 Keats, entirely a stranger to error,
could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid
the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson p osits a single bird that consumes
the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schop enhauer-imp assioned,
lucid Schop enhauer-p rovides a reason: the p ure corp oreal immediacy in which animals
live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile:Whoever
hears me assert that the grey cat p laying just now in the yard is the same one that
did jump s and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of
me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the p resent-day cat is
fundamentally an entirely different one.And later:It is the life and fate of
lions to seek lion-ness which, considered in time, is an immortal lion that
maintains itself by the in nite rep lacement of individuals, whose engendering and
death form the p ulse of this undying gure.2Alive, Son of Awake, the imp robable
metap hysical Robinson of Abubeker Abentofail's novel, resigns himself to eating
only those fruits and fish that abound on his island, and always tries to ensure
that no sp ecies will p erish and the universe be thus imp overished by his fault.128
JORG E LUIS BORG ESAnd earlier: in nite time has run its course before my birth;
what was I throughout all that time? Metap hysically, I could p erhap s answer
myself: "I was always I"; that is, all who throughout that time said "I" were none
other than I.I p resume that my readers can nd it within themselves to ap p rove of
this eternal Lion-ness, and that they may feel a majestic satisfaction at the
thought of this single Lion, multip lied in time's mirrors. But I do not hop e for
the same resp onse to the concep t of an eternal Humanity: I know that our own "I"
rejects it, p referring to jettison it recklessly onto the ''I"s of others. This
is an unp romising beginning, for Plato has far more laborious universal forms to
p rop ose. For examp le, Tableness, or the Intelligible Table that exists in the
heavens; the four-legged archetyp e p ursued by every cabinetmaker, all of them
condemned to daydreams and frustration. (Y et I cannot entirely negate the concep t:
without an ideal table, we would never have achieved solid tables.) For examp le,
Triangularity, an eminent three- sided p olygon that is not found in sp ace and does
not deign to adop t an equilateral, scalene, or isosceles form. (I do not rep udiate
this one either: it is the triangle of the geometry p rimers.) For examp le,
Necessity, Reason, Postp onement, Connection, Consideration, Size, Order, Slowness,
Posi- tion, Declaration, Disorder. With regard to these conveniences of thought,
elevated to the status of forms, I do not know what to think, excep t that no man
will ever be able to take cognizance of them without the assistance of death,
fever, or madness. And I have almost forgotten one more archetyp e that includes
and exalts them all: Eternity, whose shredded cop y is time.My readers may already
be equip p ed with sp eci c arguments for dis- crediting the Platonic doctrine. In any
case, I can sup p ly them with several: one, the incomp atible cluster of generic and
abstract terms coexisting sans gene in the storehouse of the archetyp al world;
another, their inventor's silence concerning the p rocess by which things
p articip ate in the universal forms; yet another, the conjecture that these
antisep tic archetyp es may themselves suffer from mixture and variety.
Far from being indissoluble, they are as confused as time's own creatures,
rep eating the very anomalies they seek to resolve. Lion-ness, let us say: how
would it disp ense with Pride and Tawniness, Mane-ness and Paw-ness? There is no
answer to this question, nor can there be: we do not exp ect from the term lion-ness
aA HISTORY Of ETERNITY 129virtue any greater than that of the word without the suf
x.JTo return to Plotinus' eternity, the h book of the Enneads contains a rather
vague inventory of its p arts. Justice is there, as well as the Numbers (how many?)
and the Virtues and Actions and Movement, but not mistakes and insults, which are
diseases of a matter whose Form has been corrup ted. Music is p resent, not as
melody, but as Rhythm and Harmony. There are no archetyp es from p athology or
agriculture because they are not needed. Also excluded are tax collection,
strategy, rhetoric, and the art of government- though, over time, they derive
something from Beauty and Number. There are no individuals; there is no p rimordial
form of Socrates, nor even of the Tall Man or the Emp eror; there is, in a general
way, Man. Only the p rimary colors are p resent: this eternity has no G rey or Purp le
or G reen. In ascending order, its most ancient archetyp es are these: Difference,
Identity, Mo-tion, Rest, and Being.We have examined an eternity that is more
imp overished than theworld. It remains for us to see how our Church adop ted it, and
endowed it with a wealth far greater than the years can transp ort.IIThe best
document of the rst eternity is the fth book of the Enneads; that of the second,
or Christian, eternity, the eleventh book of St. Augus-JI do not wish to bid
farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without ma ng the following
observation, in the hop e that others may p ursue and justi it: The generic can be
more intense than the concrete. There is no lack of examp les to illustrate this.
During the boyhood summers I sp ent in the north of the p rovince of Buenos Aires, I
was intrigued by the rounded p lain and the men who were butchering in the kitchen,
but awful indeed was my delight when I learned that the circular sp ace was the
"p amp a" and those men "gauchos." The same is true of the imaginative man who falls
in love. The generic (the rep eated name, the typ e, the fatherland, the tanta-
lizing destiny invested in it) takes p riority over individual features, which are
tolerated only because of their p rior genre.The extreme examp le-the p erson who
falls in love by word of mouth-is very common in the literatures of Persia and
Arabia. To hear the descrip tion of a queen- her hair like nights of sep aration and
exile, but her face like a day of delight, her breasts like marble sp heres that
lend their light to moons, her gait that p uts antelop es to shame and is the desp air
of willow trees, the onerous hip s that keep her from rising, her feet, narrow as
sp earheads-and to fall in love with her unto tranquillity and death is one of the
traditional themes of The Thousand and One Nights. Read, for examp le, the story
of Badrbasim, son of Shahriman, or that of Ibrahim and Y amila.130 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
tine's Confessions. The rst eternity is inconceivable without the Platonic
hyp othesis; the second, without the p rofessional mystery of the Trinity and the
attendant debates over p redestination and damnation. Five hundred p ages in folio
would not exhaust the subject; I hop e these two or three in octavo will not seem
excessive.It can be stated, with an adequate margin of error, that "our" eternity
was decreed only a few years a er a chronic intestinal p ain killed Marcus Aurelius,
and that the site of this vertiginous mandate was the hillside of Fourviere,
formerly named Forum Vetus, famous now for its funicular and basilica. Desp ite the
authority of the man who ordained it-Bishop Irenaeus-this coercive eternity was
much more than a vain p riestly adorn- ment or an ecclesiastical luxury: it was a
solution and a weap on. The Word is engendered by the Father, the Holy Sp irit is
p roduced by the Father and the Word. The G nostics habitually inferred from these
two undeniable op - erations that the Father p receded the Word, and both of them
p receded theSp irit. This inference dissolved the Trinity. Irenaeus clari ed that
the double p rocess-the Son engendered by the Father, the Holy Sp irit issuing from
the two-did not occur in time, but consumes p ast, p resent, and ture once and for
all. His clari cation p revailed and is now dogma. Eternity- theretofore barely
tolerated in the shadows of one or another unauthorized Platonic text-thus came to
be p reached. The p rop er connection among, or distinction between, the three
hyp ostases of the Lord seems an unlikely p roblem now, and its tility may ap p ear to
contaminate the solution, but there can be no doubt of the grandeur of the result,
at least to nourish hop e: "Aeternitas est merum hodie, est immediata et lucida
fruitio rerum in nitarum" [Eternity is merely today; it is the immediate and
lucid enjoyment of the things of in nity] . Nor is there doubt of the emotional and
p olemical imp ortance of the Trinity.Today, Catholic laymen consider the Trinity a
kind of p rofessional organization, in nitely correct and in nitely boring;
liberals, meanwhile, view it as a useless theological Cerberus, a sup erstition that
the Rep ublic's great advances have already taken up on themselves to abolish. The
Trinity clearly exceeds these formulae. Imagined all at once, the concep t of a
father, a son, and a ghost articulated in a single organism seems like a case of
intellectual teratology, a distortion only the horror of a nightmare could
engender. Hell is mere p hysical violence, but the three inextricable Persons add up
to an intellectual horror, stifled and sp ecious like the in nity of facing
mirrors. Dante sought to denote them by a symbol showing three multicolored, di-
ap hanous circles, sup erimp osed; Donne, by comp licated serp ents, sump tu-A HISTORY OF
ETERNITY 131ous and indivisible. " Toto coruscat trinitas mysterio," wrote St.
Paulinus, the Trinity gleams in full mystery.Detached from the concep t of
redemp tion, the three-p ersons-in-one distinction seems arbitrary. Considered a
necessity of faith, its fundamental mystery remains intact, but its use and
intention begin to shine through. We understand that to renounce the Trinity-or, at
least, the Duality-is to make of Jesus an occasional delegate of the Lord, an
incident of history rather than the deathless and continual auditor of our
devotion. If the Son is not also the Father, redemp tion is not the direct work of
the divine; if He is not eternal, the sacrifice of having lowered Himself to become
a man and die on the cross will not be eternal either. Nothing less than an in nite
excellence could su ce for a soul lost for in nite ages, Jeremy Taylor ad-
monished. . . . The dogma may thus be justi ed, though the concep ts of the
generation of the Son by the Father and the emanation of the Sp irit from both
continue to insinuate a certain p riority, their guilty condition as mere metap hors
notwithstanding. Theology, at p ains to distinguish between them, resolves that
there is no reason for confusion, since the result of one is the Son, and of the
other, the Sp irit. Eternal generation of the Son, eternal emanation of the Sp irit,
is Irenaeus' sup erb verdict: the invention of a timeless act, a mutilated
zeitloses Zeitwort that we can discard or venerate, but not debate. Irenaeus set
out to save the monster, and did. We know he was the p hilosop hers' enemy; to have
ap p rop riated their weap on and turned it against them must have afforded him a
bellicose p leasure.For the Christian, the rst second of time coincides with the
first second of the Creation-a fact that sp ares us the sp ectacle (recently recon-
structed by Valery) of a vacant G od reeling in the barren centuries of the eternity
"before." Emanuel Swedenborg ( Vera Christiana Religio, 1771) saw at the outer
limit of the sp iritual orb a hallucinatory statue dep icting the voracious inferno
into which are p lunged all who "engaged in senseless and sterile deliberations on
the condition of the Lord before creating the world."As soon as Irenaeus had
brought it into being, the Christian eternity began to differ from the Alexandrian.
No longer a world ap art, it settled into the role of one of the nineteen attributes
of the mind of G od. As objects of p op ular veneration, the archetyp es ran the risk
of becoming angels or divinities: consequently, while their reality-still greater
than that of mere creatures-was not denied, they were reduced to eternal ideas in
the creating Word. This concep t of the universalia res [universal things] is ad-
dressed by Albertus Magnus: he considers them eternal and p rior to the things of
Creation, but only as forms or insp irations. He sep arates them132 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
very deliberately from the universalia in rebus [the universal in things] , which
are the divine concep ts themselves, now variously embodied in time, and, above all,
from the universalia p ost res [the universal beyond things] , which are those same
concep ts rediscovered by inductive thought. Temp oral things are distinguished from
divine things by their lack of creative ef cacy but in no other way; the
susp icion that G od's categories might not p recisely coincidewith those ofLatin has
no p lace in Scholastic thought. . . . But I see I am getting ahead of myself.
Theology handbooks do not linger with any sp ecial devotion on the subject of
eternity. They merely note that eternity is the contemp orary and total intuition of
all fractions of time, and make a dogged insp ection of the Hebrew scrip tures in
search of fraudulent con rmations in which the Holy Sp irit seems to have exp ressed
very badly what the commentator exp resses so well. To that end, they like to
brandish this declaration of illustrious dis-
dain or simp le longevity: "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a
thousand years as one day," or the grand words heard by Moses-"I Am That I Am," the
name of G od-or those heard by St. John the Theologian on Patmos, before and a er
the sea of glass and the scarlet beast and the fowls that eat the flesh of
cap tains: "I am Alp ha and Omega, the beginning and the end."4 They also like to
rep eat the de nition by Boethius (conceived in p rison, p erhap s on the eve of his
execution), "Aeternitas est interminabilisvitae tota etp erfectp ossessio" [Eternity
is all oflife interminable and p erfect p ossession] , and, more to my liking, Hans
Lassen Martensen's almost volup tuous rep etition: "Aeternitas est merum hodie, est
immediata et lucida fruitio rerum in nitarum" [Eternity is merely today; it is the
immediate and lucid enjoyment of the things of in nity] . However, they generally
seem to disdain the obscure oath of the angel who stood up on the sea and up on the
earth "and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the
things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the
sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer"
(Revelations 10:6). It is true that time in this verse must be synonymous with
delay.4The idea that the time of men is not commensurable with G od's is p rominent
in one of the Islamic traditions of the cycle of the mi j. It is known that the
Prop het was carried o to the seventh heaven by the resp lendent mare burak and
that he con- versed with each one of the p atriarchs and angels that dwell there and
that he traversed Unity and felt a coldness that froze his heart when the hand of
the Lord clap p ed his shoulder. Leaving the earth, Alburak's hoof knocked over a jug
ll of water; on returning, the Prop het p icked up the jug and not a single drop
had been sp illed.A HISTORY OF ETERNITY 133Eternity became an attribute of the
unlimited mind of G od, and as we know, generations of theologians have p ondered
this mind, in its image and likeness. No stimulus has been as sharp as the debate
over p redestination ab aeterno. Four hundred years a er the Cross, the English monk
Pelagius conceived of the outrageous notion that innocents who die without
bap tism can attain eternal glory.; Augustine, bishop of Hip p o, refuted him with an
indignation that was ap p lauded by his editors. He noted the heresies intrinsic to
this doctrine, which is abhorred by the righteous and the martyrs: its negation of
the fact that in Adam all men have already sinned and died, its abominable
heedlessness of the transmission of this death from father to son by carnal
generation, its scorn for the bloody sweat, the sup ernatural agony and the cry of
He Who died on the Cross, its rejection of the secret favors of the Holy Sp irit,
its infringement up on the freedom of the Lord. The British monk had the gall to
invoke justice. The Saint-grandiloquent and forensic, as ever-concedes that in
justice all men are imp ardonably deserving of hell re, but maintains that G od has
determined to save some, according to His inscrutable will, or, as Calvin would say
much later, and not without a certain brutality, because He wants to (quia voluit).
Those few are the p redestined. The hyp ocrisy or reticence of theologians has
reserved the term for those p redestined for heaven. Men p redestined for torment
therecannot be: though it is true that those not chosen descend into eternal flame,
that is merely an omission on the Lord's p art, not a sp eci c action. . . . Thus the
concep t of eternity was renewed.G enerations of idolatrous men had inhabited the
earth without having occasion to reject or embrace the word of G od; it was as
insolent to imagine they could be saved without this means as to deny that some of
them, renowned for their virtue, would be excluded from glory everlasting. (Zwingli
in 1523 exp ressed his p ersonal hop e of sharing heaven with Her- cules, Theseus,
Socrates, Aristides, Aristotle, and Seneca.) An amp li cation of the Lord's ninth
attribute (omniscience) effectively did away with the dif- culty. This attribute,
it was p roclaimed, amounted to a knowledge of all things, that is to say, not only
real things, but also those that are merely p ossible. The Scrip tures were scoured
for a p assage that would allow for this in- nite sup p lement, and two were found:
in I Samuel, when the Lord tells;Jesus Christ had said: "Su er the little children
to come unto me"; Pelagius was accused, naturally, of interp osing himself between
the little children and Jesus Christ, thus delivering them to hell. Like that of
Athanasius (Sathanasius) his name was con- ducive to wordp lay: everyone said
Pelagius had to be an ocean (p elagus) of evils.134 JORG E LUIS BORG ESDavid that the
men of Keilah will deliver him up to his enemy if he does not leave the city, and
he goes; and in the G osp el According to Matthew, which includes the following curse
on two cities: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the
mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would
have rep ented long ago in sack- cloth and ashes." With this rep eated sup p ort, the
p otential modes of the verb could extend into eternity: Hercules dwells in heaven
beside Ulrich Zwingli because G od knows he would have observed the ecclesiastical
year, but He is also aware that the Hydra of Lerna would have rejected bap tism and
so has relegated the creature to outer darkness. We p erceive real events and
imagine those that are p ossible (or ture); in the Lord this distinction has no
p lace, for it belongs to time and ignorance. His eternity registers once and for
all (uno intelligendi actu) not only every moment of this re- p lete world but also
all that would take p lace if the most evanescent instant were to change-as well as
all that are imp ossible. His p recise and combinatory eternity is much more
cop ious than the universe.Unlike the Platonic eternities, whose greatest danger is
tedium, this one runs the risk of resembling the nal p ages of Ulysses, or even the
p receding chap ter, the enormous interrogation. A majestuous scrup le on Augustine's
p art modified this p rolixity. His doctrine, at least verbally, rejects damnation:
the Lord concentrates on the elect and overlooks the rep robates. He knows all, but
p refers to dwell on virtuous lives. John Scotus Erigena, the court schoolteacher of
Charles the Bald, gloriously distorted this idea. He p roclaimed an indeterminate
G od and an orb of Platonic archetyp es; he sp oke of a G od who p erceives neither sin
nor the forms of evil, and also mused on dei cation, the final reversion of all
creatures (including time and the demon) to the p rimal unity of G od: "Divina
bonitas consummabitmalitiam, aeterna vita absorbebit mortem, beatitudo miseriam"
[Divine goodness consumed evil, eternal life absorbed death, and beatitude
misery] . This hybrid eternity (which, unlike the Platonic eternities, includes
individual destinies, and unlike the orthodox institution, rejects all imp erfection
and misery) was condemned by the synods of Valencia and Langres. De divisione
naturae libri V, the controversial work that described it, was p ublicly burned, an
adroit maneuver that awoke the interest of bibliop hiles and enabled Erigena's
book to survive to the p resent day.The universe requires eternity. Theologians are
not unaware that if the Lord's attention were to waver for a single second from my
right hand as it writes this, it would instantly lap se into nothingness as if
blasted by a light- less re. They a rm, therefore, that the conservation of the
world is a p er-A HISTORY OF ETERNITY 135p etual creation and that the verbs conserve
and create, so antagonistic here below, are synonyms in Heaven.IIIUp to this p oint,
in chronological order, a general history of eternity. Or rather, of the
eternities, for human desire dreamed two successive and mu- tually hostile dreams
by that name: one, realist, yearns with a strange love for the still and silent
archetyp es of all creatures; the other, nominalist, denies the truth of the
archetyp es and seeks to gather up all the details of the universe in a single
second. The rst is based on realism, a doctrine so distant from our essential
nature that I disbelieve all interp retations of it, including my own; the second,
on realism's op p onent, nominalism, which af rms the truth of individuals and the
conventional nature of genres. Now, like the sp ontaneous and bewildered p rose-
sp eaker of comedy, we all do nominalism sans le savoir, as if it were a general
p remise of our thought, an acquired axiom. Useless, therefore, to comment on it.Up
to this p oint, in chronological order, the debated and curial develop ment of
eternity. Remote men, bearded, mitred men conceived of it, ostensibly to confound
heresies and defend the distinction of the three p ersons in one, but secretly in
order to staunch in some way the ow of hours. "To live is to lose time; we can
recover or keep nothing excep t under the form of eternity," I read in the work of
that Emersonized Sp aniard, G eorge Santayana. To which we need only juxtap ose the
terrible p assage by Lucretius on the fallacy of coitus:Like the thirsty man who in
sleep wishes to drink and consumes forms of water that do not satiate him and dies
burning up with thirst in the middle of a river; so Venus deceives lovers with
simulacra, and the sight of a body does not satis them, and they cannot detach or
keep anything, though their indecisive and mutual hands run over the whole body.
At the end, when there is a foretaste of delight in the bodies and Venus is about
to sow the woman's elds, the lovers grasp each other anxiously, amorous tooth
against tooth; entirely in vain, for they do not succeed in losing themselves in
each other or becoming a single being.The archetyp es, eternity-these
two words-hold out the p romise of more solid p ossessions. For it is true that
succession is an intolerable misery, andJORG E LUIS BORG ES magnanimous ap p etites are
greedy for all the minutes of time and all the variety of sp ace.Personal identity
is known to reside in memory, and the annulment of that faculty is known to result
in idiocy. It is p ossible to think the same thing of the universe. Without an
eternity, without a sensitive, secret mirror of what p asses through every soul,
universal history is lost time, and along with it our p ersonal history-which rather
uncomfortably makes ghosts of us. The Berliner Comp any's gramop hone records or the
transp arent cinema are insu cient, mere images of images, idols of other idols.
Eternity is a more cop ious invention. True, it is inconceivable, but then so is
humble successive time. To deny eternity, to sup p ose the vast annihilation of the
years freighted with cities, rivers, and jubilations, is no less incredible than to
imagine their total salvation.How did eternity come into being? St. Augustine
ignores the p roblem, but notes something that seems to allow for a solution: the
elements of p ast and ture that exist in every p resent. He cites a sp eci c case:
the recitation of a p oem.Before beginning, the p oem exists in my exp ectation; when
I have just nished, in my memory; but as I am reciting it, it is extended in my
memory, on account of what I have already said; and in my exp ectation, on account
of what I have yet to say. What takes p lace with the entirety of the p oem takes
p lace also in each verse and each syllable. This also holds true of the larger
action of which the p oem is p art, and of the individual destiny of a man, which is
comp osed of a series of actions, and of humanity, which is a series of individual
destinies.Nevertheless, this verification of the intimate intertwining of the di-
verse tenses of time still includes succession, which is not commensurate with a
model of unanimous eternity.I believe nostalgia was that model. The exile who with
melting heart remembers his exp ectations of hap p iness sees them sub sp ecie
aeternitatis [under the asp ect of eternity] , comp letely forgetting that the
achievement of one of them would exclude or p ostp one all the others. In p assion,
memory inclines toward the intemp oral. We gather up all the delights of a given
p ast in a single image; the diversely red sunsets I watch every evening will in
memory be a single sunset. The same is true of foresight: nothing p revents the most
incomp atible hop es from p eace lly coexisting. To p ut it di erently: eternity is the
style of desire. (The p articular enjoyment thatA HISTORY OF ETERNITY 137enumeration
yields may p lausibly reside in its insinuation of the eternal- the immediata et
Iucida fruitio rerum in nitarum.)IVThere only remains for me to disclose to the
reader my p ersonal theory of eternity. Mine is an imp overished eternity, without a
G od or even a co- p rop rietor, and entirely devoid of archetyp es. It was formulated
in my 1928 book The Language ofthe Argentines. I rep rint here what I p ublished
then; the p assage is entitled "Feeling in Death."I wish to record an exp erience I
had a few nights ago: a triviality too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an
adventure, too irrational and sentimental for thought. It was a scene and its word:
a word I had sp o- ken but had not lly lived with all my being until then. I will
recount its history and the accidents of time and p lace that revealed it to me.I
remember it thus: On the a ernoon before that night, I was in Barracas, an area I
do not customarily visit, and whose distance from the p laces I later p assed through
had already given the day a strange sa- vor. The night had no objective whatsoever;
the weather was clear, and so, a er dinner, I went out to walk and remember. I did
not want to establish any p articular direction for my stroll: I strove for a
maximum latitude of p ossibility so as not to fatigue my exp ectant mind with the
obligatory foresight of a p articular p ath. I accomp lished, to the unsatisfactory
degree to which it is p ossible, what is called strolling at random, without other
conscious resolve than to p ass up the avenues and broad streets in favor of
chance's more obscure invitations. Y et a kind of familiar gravitation p ushed me
toward neighborhoods whose name I wish always to remember, p laces that ll my heart
with reverence. I am not alluding to my own neighborhood, the p recise circumference
of my childhood, but to its still mysterious outskirts; a frontier region I have
p ossessed lly in words and very little in reality, at once adjacent and mythical.
These p enultimate streets are, for me, the op p osite of what is familiar, its other
face, almost as unknown as the buried foundations of our house or our own invisible
skeleton. The walk le me at a street corner. I took in the night, in p erfect,
serene resp ite from thought. The vision before me, not at all comp lex to begin
with, seemed further sim- p li ed by my fatigue. Its very ordinariness made it
unreal. It was a street of one-story houses, and though its rst meaning was
p overty, its138JORG E LUIS BORG ESsecond was certainly bliss. It was the p oorest and
most beauti l thing. The houses faced away from the street; a g tree merged into
shadow over the blunted streetcorner, and the narrow p ortals-higher than the
extending lines of the walls-seemed wrought of the same in ite substance as the
night. The sidewalk was embanked above a street of elemental dirt, the dirt of a
still unconquered America. In the distance, the road, by then a country lane,
crumbled into the Maldonado River. Against the muddy, chaotic earth, a low, rose-
colored wall seemed not to harbor the moonlight but to shimmer with a gleam all its
own. Ten- derness could have no better name than that rose color.I stood there
looking at this simp licity. I thought, undoubtedly aloud: "This is the same as it
was thirty years ago." I imagined that date: recent enough in other countries, but
already remote on this ever- changing side of the world. Perhap s a bird was singing
and I felt for it a small, bird-sized fondness; but there was p robably no other
sound in the dizzying silence excep t for the equally timeless noise of crickets.
The glib thought I am in theyear eighteen hundred and somethingceased to be a few
ap p roximate words and deep ened into reality. I felt as the dead feel, I felt myself
to be an abstract observer of the world: an inde nite fear imbued with knowledge
that is the greatest clarity of metap hysics. No, I did not believe I had made my
way up stream on the p resump tive waters of Time. Rather, I susp ected myself to be in
p ossession of the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity.
Only later did I succeed in de ning this gment of my imagination.I write it out
now: This p ure rep resentation ofhomogenous facts- the serenity of the night, the
translucent little wall, the small-town scent of honeysuc e, the fundamental dirt-
is not merely identical to what existed on that corner many years ago; it is,
without sup er cial resemblances or rep etitions, the same. When we can feel this
oneness, time is a delusion which the indi erence and insep arability of a moment
from its ap p arent yesterday and from its ap p arent today suf ce to disintegrate.The
number of such human moments is clearly not in nite. The elemental exp eriences-
p hysical suffering and p hysical p leasure, falling asleep , listening to a p iece of
music, feeling great intensity or great ap athy-are even more imp ersonal. I derive,
in advance, this conclusion: life is too imp overished not to be immortal. But we
lack even the certainty of our own p overty, given that time, which is easily re
table by the senses, is not so easily refuted by the intellect, from whose essence
the concep t of succession ap p ears insep arable. Let there re-A HISTORY OF ETERNITY
139main, then, the glimp se of an idea in an emotional anecdote, and, in the
acknowledged irresolution of this p age, the true moment of ecstasy and the p ossible
intimation of eternity which that night did not hoard from me.{1936} {EA} In the aim
of adding dramatic interest to this biograp hy of eternity I committed certain
distortions, for instance, that of condensing into five or six names a step that
took centuries.I worked with whatever was at hand in my library. Among the most
useful volumes, I must mention the following:Die Philosop hie der G riechen von Dr.
Paul Deussen. Leip zig, 1919.Selected Works ofPlotinus. Translated by Thomas Taylor.
London, 1e17.Passages Illustrating Neop latonism. Translated with an introduction by
E. R. Dodds.London, 1932.La Philosop hie de Platon p ar Alfred Fouillee. Paris, 1869.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung von Arthur Schop enhauer. Herausgegeben vonEduard
G risebach. Leip zig, 1892.Die Philosop hie des Mittelalters von Dr. Paul Deussen.
Leip zig, 1920.Las confesiones de San Agustin. Version literal p or el P. Angel C.
Vega, Madrid, 1932. A Monument to Saint Augustine. London, 1930.Dogmatik von Dr. R.
Rothe. Heidelberg, 1870.Ensayos de critica los6 ca de Menendez y Pelayo. Madrid,
1892.FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISMThe Cinematograp h, the Biograp hA lm was once called
a "biograp h"; now we generally say "cinematograp h." The rst term died, p erhap s
because fame required more clamor, p erhap s because the imp lication of Boswell or
Voltaire made it threateningly lofty. I would not lament that demise (similar to
thousands of others in the continuing necrology of semantics) if words were indi
erent symbols. I doubt that they are, for they traf c in similarities, op inions,
condemnations. Every word imp lies an argument that may be a sop histry. Here,
without entering into a discussion of which is the best, it is easy to observe that
the wordcinematograp h is better than biograp h. The latter, if my intuitive grasp of
G reek
does not betray me, means "life-writing"; the former refers solely to motion. The
two ideas, although dialectically reducible to the same thing, imp ly di erent
orientations, variations that entitle me to distinguish them and to assign one
meaning to cinematograp h and another to biograp h. Let me assure my reader that such
a distinction, limited to this article, is not of major signi cance.
"Cinematograp hy" is the writing of motion, signi ing in its emp hasis rap idity,
solemnity, turmoil. This mode of op eration p ertains to its origins, whose only
material is sp eed; ridiculous in the unhap p y bewilderment of those who only knew
how to carry on with stages and sets, ep ic in the dust storm of a cowboy p icture.
It is also p eculiar, by the malicious p aradox of things, to the so-called avant-
garde cinema; an institution reduced to nourishing, with more enriched means, the
same old fluster. The original sp ectator would be amazed by a single horseman;
today's equivalent needs many men or the sup erimp osed vision of a railroad train, a
column of workers, a ship . The substance of the emotion is the same: bourgeois
shock at the devilish antics p roduced by machines, as invented with an excessive
name,FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 141"magic lantern," for the toy Athanasius Kircher
p resented in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae. For the sp ectator, it is mere
frightening technological stu- p idity; for the fabricator, it is lazy invention,
taking advantage of the fluency of visual images. His inertia is comp arable
p recisely to that of metrical p o- ets, who are aided by the continuity of syntax
and the linked inference from one p hrase to another. The gaucho troubadours also
make use of that continuity. I say this without the slightest contemp t; it cannot
be decisively p roven that thinking-ours, Schop enhauer's, Shaw's-is more freely
determined; a doubt I p ossess thanks to Fritz Mauthner.Having eliminated, to our
relief, the cinematograp h, what follows is the biograp h. How should we see it,
entangled as it is with an inferior crowd? The quickest p rocedure is to look for
the names of Charlie Chap lin, Emil Jannings, G eorge Bancroft, or of a few a icted
Russians. An e cient way, but too contemp orary, too circumstantial. We may
formulate a general ap - p lication (though not, like the other, p redictive) as
follows: The biograp h reveals to us individual lives; it p resents souls to the
soul. The de nition is brief; its p roof (feeling a p resence, a human rap p ort, or
not) is an elementary act. It is the reaction we all use to judge books of
imagination. A novel p resents the fates of many; a p oem or an essay, one single
life. (The p oet or essayist is a novelist of one character: Heinrich Heine's twelve
volumes are only inhabited by Heinrich Heine, Unamuno's works by Unamuno. The
dramatic p oets-Browning, Shakesp eare-and the narrative essayists- Lytton Strachey,
Macaulay-are comp letely novelists, the only di erence being their less hidden
p assions.) I rep eat: the biograp h is that which adds p eop le. The other, the non-
biograp h, the cinematograp h, is deserted, without any other connection to human
lives excep t through factories, machin- ery, p alaces, cavalry charges, and other
allusions to reality or easy generalities. It is an inhosp itable, op p ressive zone.
To go back to Chap lin as the p erfect defense of the biograp h is an obligation
that delights me. I cannot think of more lovely inventions. There is his tremulous
ep ic The G old Rush-a title well translated into French, La R e ver l'or [The Rush
toward G old] , and badly into Sp anish, La quimera del oro [The Chimera of G old] .
Recall a few of its moments. Chap lin, a ne little Jewish fellow, walks
vertiginously along a narrow p ath, with the mountain wall on one side and a deep
ravine on the other. A big bear emerges and follows him. Chap lin, angelically
absentminded, has not noticed. They continue in this manner a few more
susp enseful seconds: the beast almost snif ng at his heels, the man keep ing his
balance with his cane, his ill- tting top hat, and almost with his straight black
mustache. The142 JORG E LUIS BORG ESsp ectator exp ects Chap lin to be smacked by a p aw
at any moment and fright lly awakened. At that moment the bear comes up on and
enters his cave and the man continues on his way, without having seen anything. The
situation has been resolved-or dissolved-magically. Two were absentminded instead
of just one; G od, this time, has been no less delicate than Chap lin. I will
describe another incident, also constructed up on absentmindedness. Chap lin, in a
frock coat, uncomfortable, returns as a millionaire from Alaska. The danger is
that we will feel he is too triump hant, too identi ed with his dollars. He is
received by a steamship whose crew ap - p ears to consist exclusively of fawning
p hotograp hers. On deck, Chap lin strolls between admiring rows of onlookers.
Suddenly, uncouth angel that he is, he notices a twisted cigarette butt on the
oor, bends over, and p icks it up . Is he not absentminded to an almost saintly
degree? Each scene of The G old Rush is equally intense. Moreover, Chap lin's is not
the only story- which distinguishes this lm from others, p ure monologues by their
inventor, such as The Kid and The Circu Jim, who discovered a mountain of gold
and no longer knows where it is, tramp s around the brothels with that p erturbed
memory and imp ervious oblivion; G eorgina, the dancer, faithful only to her
imp erious beauty, light-footed on earth; Larsen, the man whose greeting is a
gunshot, resigned to being the bad guy, p ossessed by the mortal innocence of
dep ravity: all of these are comp lete stories.Chap lin is his own narrator, that is,
the p oet of the biograp h; Jannings is its manifold novelist. I cannot transcribe
anything of his: his lively vocabulary of gestures and his direct facial language
do not seem translatable to any other. Aside from the agonies of tragedy, Jannings
knows how to render the strictly everyday. He knows not only how to die (an easy
task, or easy to p retend because it cannot be veri ed) but how to live. Made of in-
cessant, minute realizations, his unp retentious style is as e cient as Cer- vantes'
or Butler's. His characters-the op aque heap of sensuality in Tartu e, always with a
tiny breviary before his eyes like a sardonic mask; the emp eror in Quo Vadis,
rep ulsively effeminate and grossly vain; the p rop er and comp lacently methodical
cashier Schilling; the great gentleman in The Last Command, no less dedicated to
the fatherland than knowledgeable of his frailties and comp lexities-are all so
disp arate, all so self-contained, that we are unable to imagine them understanding
each other. How ironically uninterested the general is in Schilling's menial
tragedy, and what p rop hetic anathemas (written in Martin Luther's heroic G erman) he
would cast at Nero!To die one need only be alive, I heard an Argentine woman say,
indis-FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 143p utably. I would add that this p recondition is
indisp ensable and that the G erman cinematograp h-as disinterested in p ersons as it
is determined to seek symmetries and symbols-tends to omit it with a fatal
frivolity. The G erman cinema tries to move us with universal shortcomings, or with
the martyrdom of multitudes whose lives we have not witnessed and which, as insigni
cant bas-reliefs, are even further defamiliarized. Not realizing that the crowd is
less than one man, it erects a forest to hide the lack of a tree. But in art, as in
the biblical deluge, the loss of humanity does not matter as long as the concrete
human coup le inherits the world. Defoe would divide this examp le by two and
substitute: as long as Robinson . . .{SJL} FilmsHere is my op inion of some recent
films:Surp assing the others, Der Marder Dimitri Karamaso [The MurdererDimitri
Karamazov] (Filmreich) is by far the best. Its director, Ozep , ap - p ears to have
skirted e ortlessly the much p raised and voguish aws of the G erman cinema-
lugubrious symbolism, tautology or the meaningless rep etition of equivalent images,
obscenity, a p rop ensity for teratology and Satanism-while also eluding the Soviet
school's even more glaring p itfalls: the omission of characters, p hotograp hic
anthologies, and the awkward charms of the Committee. (I will not even mention the
French: thus far their one and only desire has been not to resemble the Americans,
a risk, I assure them, they do not run.)I am not familiar with the cavernous novel
from which this lm was extracted, a felix culp a allowing me to enjoy it without
the constant temp tation to comp are the p resent sp ectacle with the remembered book
in order to see if they coincide. Pristinely disregarding, therefore, its
irreverent dese- crations and virtuous delities-both unimp ortant-! find the
p resent lm most p owerful. Purely hallucinatory, neither subordinate nor cohesive,
its reality is no less torrential than Josef von Sternberg's teeming Docks ofNew
Y ork. Among the high p oints is a dep iction of genuine, candid joy after a murder:
the sequence of shots-ap p roaching dawn, huge billiard balls awaiting collision,
Smerdiakov's clerical hand taking the money-is bril- liantly conceived and
executed. Here is another lm. All our critics have unconditionally ap p lauded144
JORG E LUIS BORG ESCharlie Chap lin's latest, mysteriously entitled City Lights. The
truth behind this p ublished acclaim, however, has more to do with our faultless
tele- grap hic and p ostal services than with any inherent, individual judgment.
Would anyone dare ignore that Charlie Chap lin is one of the established gods in the
mythology of our time, a cohort of de Chirico's motionless nightmares, of Scarface
Al's ardent machine guns, of the nite yet unlimited universe of G reta G arbo's lo y
shoulders, of the goggled eyes of G andhi? Could anyone a ord not to know that
Chap lin's most recent comedie lar- moyante had to be astonishing?
In reality-in what I believe is reality-this much-attended lm from the sp lendid
creator and hero of The G old Rush is merely a weak collection of minor mishap s
imp osed on a sentimental story. Some ep isodes are new; one is not: the garbage
collector's p rofessional joy up on seeing the p rovidential (and then false) elep hant
who will p resumably sup p ly him with a raison d'etre is a carbon cop y of the Trojan
garbage collector and the fake G reek horse in that neglected lm The Private Life
ofHelen ofTroy.Objections of a more general nature can also be leveled against City
Lights. Its lack of reality is comp arable only to its equally exasp erating lack of
unreality. Some movies are true to life-For the Defense, Street ofChance, The
Crowd, even The Broadway Melody-and some are willfully unrealis- tic, such as the
highly individualistic lms of Frank Borzage, Harry Lang- don, Buster Keaton, and
Eisenstein. Chap lin's early escap ades belong to the second typ e, undeniably based
as they are on dep thless p hotograp hy and eerily accelerated action, as well as on
the actors' fake moustaches, absurd false beards, fright wigs, and ominous
overcoats. Not attaining such unreality, City Lights remains unconvincing. Excep t
for the luminous blind girl, extraordinary in her beauty, and for Charlie himself-
always a wraith, always disguised-all the lm's characters are recklessly normal.
Its ram- shackle p lot relies on the disjointed techniques of continuity from twenty
years ago. Archaism and anachronism are literary modes too, I know, but to handle
them intentionally is di erent than p erp etrating them inep tly. I relinquish my
hop e-so o en ful lled-of being wrong.In von Sternberg's Morocco, too, I notice a
certain weariness, though to a less overwhelming and suicidal degree. The terse
p hotograp hy, exquisite direction, and oblique yet suitable methods of Underworld
have been re- p laced here by hordes of extras and broad brushstrokes of excessive
local color. To indicate Morocco, von Sternberg has thought up nothing less vul-
gar than an ornate forgery of a Moorish city in the Hollywood suburbs, with a
cornucop ia of burnooses, fountains, and tall guttural muezzins p re-FILM REVIEWS AND
CRITICISM 145ceding the dawn and the camels in sunlight. The lm's overall p lot, on
the other hand, is good, resolved at the end in the op en desert, returned once more
to the beginning, like our rst Martin Fierro or the novel Sanin by the Russian
Artsybashev. One may watch Morocco with p leasure, but not with the intellectual
satisfaction derived from the rst viewing (and even the second) of earlier works
by von Sternberg, nor with the cogent intellectual satisfaction p roduced by that
heroic lm The Dragnet.[S!L] Street SceneThe Russians discovered that the oblique-
and consequently-distorted shot of a bottle, a hull's neck, or a column had greater
visual value than Hollywood's thousand and one extras, hastily camou aged as
Assyrians and then shuffled into total confusion by Cecil B. DeMille. They also
discovered that Midwestern cliches-the merits of esp ionage and betrayal, of
everlasting wedded bliss, the untarnished p urity of p rostitutes, the nishing
up p er- cut dealt by a sober young man-could be exchanged for other, no less
admirable cliches. (Thus, in one of the noblest Soviet lms, a battleship bombards
the teeming p ort of Odessa at close range, with no casualties excep t for some
marble lions. This marksmanship is harmless because it comes from a virtuous,
maximum battleship .)Such discoveries, p rop osed to a world saturated to the p oint of
disgust with Hollywood p roductions, were honored by a world that extended its
gratitude to the p oint of p retending that Soviet cinema had wip ed out American
cinema forever. (Those were the years when Alexander Blok p roclaimed, in the
characteristic tones of Walt Whitman, that the Russians were Scythians.) The world
forgot, or tried to forget, that the Russian cinema's greatest virtue was to
interrup t a steady fare from California. Also ignored was the absurdity of
equating a few good, even excellent acts of violence (Ivan the Terrible, Battleship
Potemkin, p erhap s October) with a vast and comp lex literature, successfully
executed in all genres, from the incom- p arably comedic (Charlie Chap lin, Buster
Keaton, and Harry Langdon) to the p urely fantastic mythologies of Krazy Kat and
Bimbo. Alarm over the Russians grew. Hollywood reformed or enriched some of its
p hotograp hic techniques, and did not get too worried.King Vidor did, however. I
sp eak of the uneven director of works as memorable as Hallelujah and as sup er
uously trivial as Billy the Kid, that JORG E LUIS BORG ES shameful chronicle of the
twenty murders (not counting Mexicans) committed by the famous gunslinger from
Arizona, a lm made with no distinction other than the accumulation of p anoramic
takes and, to denote the desert, the methodical elimination of close-up s. His most
recent work, Street Scene, adap ted from the comedy of the same name by the ex-
exp ressionist Elmer Rice, is insp ired by the simp le, negative desire not to look
"standard." It has an unsatis ing, minimal p lot: its hero is virtuous but under the
in uence of a thug; it has a romantic coup le, but any civil or religious union is
forbidden to them. It has a gloriously exuberant, larger-than- life Italian who is
obviously resp onsible for all the comedy in the p iece, aman whose unlimited
unreality also rubs off on his normal colleagues. It has characters who seem true
to life and others in masquerade. Fundamen- tally not realist, this lm is a
frustrated, or rep ressed, romantic work.Two great scenes elevate the lm: a dawn
where the sp lendid course of the night is ep itomized in music, and a murder
indirectly p resented to us in the tumult and temp est of faces.Actors and
p hotograp hy: excellent.[1932] [S] L] King KongA monkey forty feet tall (some fans say
forty- ve) may have obvious charms, but those charms have not convinced this
viewer. King Kong is no full-blooded ap e but rather a rusty, desiccated machine
whose movements are downright clumsy. His only virtue, his height, did not imp ress
the cinematograp her, who p ersisted in p hotograp hing him from above rather than
from below-the wrong angle, as it neutralizes and even diminishes the ap e's
overp raised stature. He is actually hunchbacked and bowlegged, attributes that
serve only to reduce him in the sp ectator's eye. To keep him from looking the least
bit extraordinary, they make him do battle with far more unusual monsters and have
him reside in caves of false cathedral sp lendor, where his infamous size again
loses all p rop ortion. But what - nally demolishes both the gorilla and the lm is
his romantic love-or lust-for Fay Wray.{1933] [S] L] TheInformerI am not familiar
with the p op ular novel from which this lm was adap ted, a felix culp a that has
allowed me to watch it without the constant temp tation to comp are the p resent
sp ectacle with the remembered reading in order to determine coincidences. I have
watched it and do consider it one of the best lms o ered us this p ast year; I also
consider it too memorable not to p rovoke discussion and not to deserve rep roach.
Several rep roaches, really, since it has run the beautiful risk of being entirely
satisfactory and, for two or three reasons, has not succeeded.The rst is the
hero's excessive motivations for his actions. I recognize that realism is the goal,
but lm directors (and novelists) tend to forget that many justi cations, and many
circumstantial details, are counterp roductive. Reality is not vague, but our
general p ercep tion of reality is: herein lies the danger of overly justi ing
actions or inventing too many details. In this p articular case (a man suddenly
turns Judas, denounces his friend to the p olice with their machine guns, condemning
him to death), the erotic motive invoked seems to diminish the treachery of the
deed and its heinous miracle. Infamy committed absentmindedly, or out of mere
brutality, would have been more striking, artistically. I also think it would have
been more believable. ( Herbier's Le Bonheur is another excellent lm invali- dated
by its excess of p sychological motives.) Obviously, a p lurality of motives does
not seem, in essence, wrong to me: I admire the scene where the informer squanders
his thirty p ieces of silver because of his trip le need to con se, to bribe his
threatening friends (who are p erhap s his judges and will end up as his
executioners), and to rid himself of those banknotes that dishonor him.Another
weakness of The Informer is how it begins and ends. The op ening ep isodes do not
ring true. This is p artly the fault of the street we are shown-too typ ical, too
Europ ean (in the California sense of the word). A street in Dublin is certainly not
identical to a street in San Francisco, but because both are authentic, the
location resembles more the latter than an obvious sham, overloaded with thick
local color. More than universal similarities, local differences seem to have
made a great imp ression on Holly- wood: there is no American director, faced with
the hyp othetical p roblem of showing a railroad crossing in Sp ain or an op en field
in Austro-Hungary, who does not solve the p roblem by rep resenting the site with a
set, built es- p ecially for the occasion, whose only merit must be its ostentatious
cost. The ending has other faults: while it is ap p rop riate for the audience to be
JORG E LUIS BORG ES moved by the horri ing fate of the informer, the fact that the
director of the lm is moved and grants him a sentimental death amid Catholic
stained-glass windows and choir music seems less admirable.The merits of this lm
are less subtle than its faults and do not need emp hasis. Nevertheless, I would
like to note one very effective touch: the dangling man's ngernails grating on the
ledge at the very
end and the disap p earance of his hand as he is machine-gunned and falls to the
ground.Of the three tragic unities, two have been observed: the unities of time and
action. Neglect of the third-unity of p lace-cannot be a cause for comp laint. By its
very nature, lm seems to reject this third norm, requir- ing, instead, continuous
disp lacements. (The dangers of dogmatism: the admirable memory of Payment Deferred
cautions me against mistaken generalizations. In that lm, the fact that
everything takes p lace in one house, almost in a single room, is a fundamental
tragic virtue.)[1935] [S ] Two FilmsOne is called Crime and Punishment, by
Dostoevsky/von Sternberg. The fact that the rst collaborator-the deceased Russian-
has not actually collaborated will alarm no one, given the p ractices of
Hollywood; that any trace le by the second-the dreamy Viennese-is equally
unnoticeable borders on the monstrous. I can understand how the "p sychological"
novel might not interest a man, or might not interest him any longer. I could
imagine that von Sternberg, devoted to the inexorable Muse of Bric-a-Brae, might
reduce all the mental (or at least feverish) comp lexities of Rodion Romanovich's
crime to the dep iction of a p awnbroker's house crammed with intolerable objects, or
a p olice station resembling Hollywood's notion of a Cossack barracks.
Indoctrinated by the p op ulous memory of The Scarlet Emp ress, I was exp ecting a vast
flood of false beards, miters, samovars, masks, surly faces, wrought-iron gates,
vineyards, chess p ieces, balalaikas, p rominent cheek- bones, and horses. In short,
I was exp ecting the usual von Sternberg nightmare, the suffocation and the
madness. l in vain! In this lm, von Sternberg has discarded his usual cap rices,
which could be an excellent omen, but unfortunately, he has not rep laced them with
anything. Without transition or p ause, he has merely p assed from a hallucinatory
state ( The Scarlet Emp ress, The Devil Is a Woman) to a foolish state. Formerly he
FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 149seemed mad, which at least was something; now he
seems merely simp leminded. Nevertheless, there is no cause for desp air: p erhap s
Crime and Punishment, a totally vacuous work, is a sign of remorse and p enitence, a
necessary act of p uri cation. Perhap s Crime and Punishment is only a bridge between
the vertiginous sound and fury of The Scarlet Emp ress and a forthcoming lm that
will reject not only the p eculiar charms of chaos but will also resemble-once
again-intelligence. (In writing "once again," I am thinking of Josef von
Sternberg's early lms.)From an extraordinarily intense novel, von Sternberg has
derived an emp ty lm; from an absolutely dull adventure story-The Thirty-nine Step s
by John Buchan-Hitchcock has made a good lm. He has invented ep isodes, inserted
wit and mischief where the original contained only heroism. He has thrown in
delightfully unsentimental erotic relief, and also a thoroughly charming character,
Mr. Memory. In nitely removed from the other two faculties of the mind, this man
reveals a grave secret simp ly because someone asks it of him and because to
answer, at that moment, is his role.[1936} [S!L} The Petri ed ForestIt is commonly
observed that allegories are tolerable insofar as they are vague and inconsistent;
this is not an ap ology for vagueness and inconsis- tency but rather p roof, or at
least a sign, that the genre of allegory is at fault. I said the "genre of
allegory," not elements or the suggestion of allegory. (The best and most famous
allegory, The Pilgrim's Progressfrom This World to That Which Is to Come, by the
Puritan visionary John Bunyan, must be read as a novel, not as a p rop hecy; but if
we eliminated all the symbolic justi cations, the book would be absurd.)The
measure of allegory in The Petri ed Forest is p erhap s exemp lary: light enough so as
not to obliterate the drama's reality, substantial enough so as to sanction the
drama's imp robabilities. There are two or three shortcomings or p edantries in the
dialogue, however, which continue to annoy me: a nebulous theological theory of
neuroses, the (meticulously inaccu- rate) summary of a p oem by T. S. Eliot, the
forced allusions to Villon, Mark Twain, and Billy the Kid, contrived to make the
audience feel erudite in recognizing those names.Once the allegorical motive is
dismissed or relegated to a secondary150 JORG E LUIS BORG ESlevel, the p lot of The
Petri ed Forest-the magical influence of ap p roaching death on a random group of men
and women-strikes me as admirable. Death works in this lm like hyp nosis or
alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day. These characters
are extraordinarily clear-cut: the smiling, storytelling grandp a who sees
everything as a p erformance and greets the desolation and the bullets as a hap p y
return to the turbulent nor- malcy of his youth; the weary gunman Mantee, as
resigned to killing (and making others kill) as the rest are to dying; the imp osing
and wholly vain banker with his consul's air of "a great man of our conservative
p arty"; the young G abrielle, given to attributing her romantic turn of mind to her
French blood, and her housekeep ing virtues to her Y ankee origins; the p oet, who
advises her to reverse the terms of such an American-and such a mythical-
attribution. I do not recall any other movies by Archie Mayo. This lm (along with
The Passing of the Third Floor Back) is one of the most intense that I have seen.
[1936} [SJL} Wells, the VisionaryThe author of The Invisible Man, The First Men in
the Moon, The Time Ma- chine, and The Island ofDr. Moreau (his best novels, though
not his most recent) has p ublished in a 140-p age book the detailed text of his
recent lm, Things to Come. Did he do this, p erhap s, to dissociate himself from, or
at least not to be held resp onsible for, the lm as a whole? The susp icion is not
unfounded. Indeed it is justi ed, or validated by his "Introductory Re- marks;'
which p rovide instructions. Here he writes that p eop le in the ture will not be
rigged up like telep hone p oles or as if they had just escap ed from some sort of
electrical op erating room, nor will they wear aluminum p ots or costumes of
cellop hane glowing under neon lights. "I want Oswald Ca- bal," Wells writes, "to
look like a ne gentleman, not an armored gladiator or a p added lunatic . . . not
nightmare stuff, not jazz. . . . Human affairs in that more organized world will
not be hurried, they will not be crowded, there will be more leisure, more dignity.
. . . Things, structures will be great, but not monstrous." Unfortunately, the
grandiose lm that we have seen- "grandiose" in the worst sense of this awful word-
has very little to do with his intentions. To be sure, there are not a lot of
cellop hane p ots, aluminum neckties, p added gladiators, or madmen in shining armor,
but the overallFILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 151e ect (much more imp ortant than the
details) is nightmare stu . I am not referring to the rst p art, which is
deliberately monstrous. I am referring to the last, where order should counter the
bloody mess of the rst p art: not only is it not orderly, but it is even more
gruesome than the rst p art. Wells starts out by showing us the terrors of the
immediate ture, visited by p lagues and bombardments-a very effective introduction.
(I recall a clear sky stained and darkened by airp lanes as obscene and p estilent as
locusts.) Then, in the author's words, "the film broadens out to disp lay the
grandiose sp ectacle of a reconstructed world." That "broadening out" is rather
p oignant: the heaven of Wells and Alexander Korda, like that of so many other
eschatologists and set designers, is not much different than their hell, though
even less charming.Another comp arison: the book's memorable lines do not
corresp ond- cannot corresp ond to the lm's memorable moments. On p age 19, Wells
sp eaks of "a rap id succession of flashes that evokes . . . the confused inade-
quate e ciency of our world." As might have been foreseen, the contrast between the
words confusion and e iciency (not to mention the value judgment in the ep ithet
inadequate) has not been translated into images. On p age 56, Wells sp eaks of the
masked aviator Cabal "standing out against the sky, a tall p ortent." The sentence
is beautiful; its p hotograp hed version is not. (Even if it had been, it could never
have corresp onded to the sentence, since the arts of rhetoric and cinema-oh,
classic ghost of Ep hraim Lessing!-are absolutely incomp atible.) On the other hand,
there are successful sequences that owe nothing at all to the text's indications.
Tyrants offend Wells, but he likes laboratories; hence his forecast of laboratory
technicians joining together to unite a world wrecked by tyrants. Reality has yet
to resemble his p rop hecy: in 1936, the p ower of almost all tyrants arises from
their control of technology. Wells worship s p ilots and chau eurs; the tyrannical
occup ation of Abyssinia was the work of p ilots and chauffeurs-and p erhap s of the
slightly mythological fear of Hitler's dep raved laboratories.I have found fault
with the film's second half, but I insist on p raising the rst p art and its
wholesome effect for those p eop le who still imagine war as a romantic cavalcade or
an op p ortunity for glorious p icnics and free tourism.[1936} [SJL} IIIWritings forEl
Hogar (Home) Magazine 1936-1939 Ramon Llull's Thinking MachineToward the end of the
thirteenth century, Ramon Llull (Raimundo Lulio or Raymond Lully) invented the
thinking machine. Four hundred years later, Athanasius Kircher, his reader and
commentator, invented the magic lantern. The rst invention is recorded in a work
entitled Ars magna generalis; the second, in an equally inaccessible op us called
Ars magna lucis et umbrae. The names of both inventions are generous. In reality,
in mere lucid reality, the magic lantern is not
magical, nor is the mechanism devised by Ramon Llull cap able of thinking a single
thought, however rudimentary or fallacious. To p ut it another way: measured
against its objective, judged by its inventor's illustrious goal, the thinking
machine does not work. For us, that fact is of secondary imp ortance. The p erp etual
motion machines dep icted in sketches that confer their mystery up on the p ages of
the most ef sive encyclop edias don't work either, nor do the metap hysical and
theological theories that customarily declare who we are and what manner of thing
the world is. Their p ublic and well-known tility does not diminish their interest.
This may (I believe) also be the case with the useless thinking machine.The
Invention of the MachineWe do not and will never know (it would be risky to await a
revelation from the all-knowing machine) how it rst came into being. Hap p ily, one
of the engravings in the famous Mainz edition (1721-42) a ords us room for con-
jecture. While it is true that Salzinger, the edition's editor, considers this
model to be a simp li cation of another, more comp lex one, I p refer to think of it
as the modest p recursor of the others. Let us examine this ancestor ( g. 1). It is
a schema or diagram of the attributes of G od. The letter A, at the center, signi es
the Lord. Along the circumference, the letter B standsJORG E LUIS BORG ES FIG URE 1:
Diagram ofdivine attributesfor goodness, C for greatness, D for eternity, E for
p ower, F for wisdom, G for volition, H for virtue, I for truth, and K for glory.
The nine letters are equidistant from the center, and each is joined to all the
others by chords or diagonal lines. The rst of these features means that all of
these attributes are inherent; the second, that they are systematically
interrelated in such a way as to af rm, with imp eccable orthodoxy, that glory is
eternal or that eternity is glorious; that p ower is true, glorious, good, great,
eternal, p ower- l, wise, free, and virtuous, or benevolently great, greatly
eternal, eternally p owerful, p owerfully wise, wisely free, freely virtuous,
virtuously truthful, etc., etc.I want my readers to grasp the ll magnitude of this
etcetera. Suf ce it to say that it embraces a number of combinations far greater
than this p age can record. The fact that they are all entirely futile-the fact
that, for us, to say that glory is eternal is as rigorously null and void as to say
that eternity is glorious-is of only secondary interest. This motionless diagram,
with its nine cap ital letters distributed among nine comp artments and linked by a
RAMON LLULL's THINKING MACHINE 157star and some p olygons, is already a thinking
machine. It was natural for its inventor-a man, we must not forget, of the
thirteenth century-to feed it with a subject matter that now strikes us as
unrewarding. We now know that the concep ts of goodness, greatness, wisdom, p ower,
and glory are incap able of engendering an ap p reciable revelation. We (who are
basically no less naive than Llull) would load the machine differently, no doubt
with the words Entrop y, Time, Electrons, Potential Energy, Fourth Dimension, Rela-
tivity, Protons, Einstein. Or with Surp lus Value, Proletariat, Cap italism, Class
Struggle, Dialectical Materialism, Engels.The Three DisksIf a mere circle
subdivided into nine comp artments can give rise to so many combinations, what
wonders may we exp ect from three concentric, manually revolving disks made of
wood or metal, each with een or twenty comp artments? This thought occurred to the
remote Ramon Llull on his red and zenithal island of Mallorca, and he designed his
guileless machine. The circumstances and objectives ofthis machine ( g. 2) no
longer interest us, but its guiding p rincip le-the methodical ap p lication of chance
to the resolution of a p roblem-still does.In the p reamble to this article, I said
that the thinking machine does not work. I have slandered it: elle ne fonctionne
que trap , it works all too well. Let us select a p roblem at random: the elucidation
of the "true" color of a tiger. I give each of Llull's letters the value of a
color, I sp in the disks, and I decip her that the cap ricious tiger is blue, yellow,
black, white, green, p urp le, orange, and grey, or yellowishly blue, blackly blue,
whitely blue, greenly blue, p urp lishly blue, bluely blue, etc. Adherents of the Ars
magna remained undaunted in the face of this torrential ambiguity; they recommended
the simultaneous dep loyment of many combinatory machines, which (according to
them) would gradually orient and recti themselves through "multi- p lications" and
"eliminations." For a long while, many p eop le believed that the certain revelation
of all the world's enigmas lay in the p atient manip ulation of these disks.JORG E
LUIS BORG ES F I G U R E 2: Ramon Llull's thinking machine G ulliver and His Machine
My readers may p erhap s recall that Swift ridicules the thinking machine in the
third p art of G ulliver's Travels. He p rop oses or describes another, more comp lex
machine, in which human intervention p lays a far lesser role.This machine, Cap tain
G ulliver relates, is a wooden frame lled with cubes the size of dice joined by
slender wires. Words are written on all six sides of the cubes. Iron handles are
attached around the edges of the frame. When the handles are moved, the cubes turn
over; at each turn of the handle, the words and their order change. The cubes are
then attentively p e- rused, and if two or three form a sentence or p art of a
sentence, the students cop y it out in a notebook. "The p rofessor," G ulliver adds
imp assively, "shewed me several Volumes in large folio, already collected, of
broken Sen- tences, which he intended to p iece together; and out of those rich
Materials to give the World a comp leat Body of all Arts and Sciences. . . ."RAMON
LLULL's THINKING MACHINE 159A Final DefenseAs an instrument of p hilosop hical
investigation, the thinking machine is absurd. It would not be absurd, however, as
a literary and p oetic device. (Discerningly, Fritz Mauthner notes-Worterbuch der
Philosop hic l, 284- that a rhyming dictionary is a kind of thinking machine.) The
p oet who requires an adjective to modi "tiger" p roceeds in a manner identical to
the machine. He tries them out until he nds one that is su ciently startling.
"Black tiger" could be a tiger in the night; "red tiger," all tigers, for its
connotation of blood.[19371 [EA} When Fiction Lives in FictionI owe my rst in ing
of the p roblem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous
mystery during my childhood. On one side of this excep tional object was a Jap anese
scene; I do not recall the children or warriors who con gured it, but I do remember
that in a corner of the image the same biscuit tin reap p eared with the same
p icture, and in it the same p icture again, and so on (at least by imp lication) in
nitely. . . . Fourteen or een years later, around 1921, I discovered in one of
Russell's works an analogous invention by Josiah Royce, who p ostulates a map of
England drawn on a p ortion of the territory of England: this map -since it is exact-
must contain a map of the map , which must contain a map of the map of the map , and
so on to infinity. . . . Earlier, in the Prado Museum, I had seen Velazquez' famous
p ainting Las meninas. In the background is Velazquez himself, working on a double
p ortrait of Philip IV and his con- sort, who are outside the frame but reflected in
a mirror. The p ainter's chest is decorated with the cross of Santiago; it is
rumored that the king p ainted it there, thus making him a knight of that order. . .
. I remember that the Prado's administrators had installed a mirror in front of the
p ainting to p erp etuate these enchantments.The p ictorial technique of inserting a
p ainting within a p ainting corresp onds, in the world of letters, to the
interp olation of a ction within another ction. Cervantes included a short novel
in the Quixote; Lucius Ap uleius famously inserted the fable of Cup id and Psyche
into The G olden Ass. Parentheses of such an unequivocal nature are as banal as the
occur- rence, in reality, of someone reading aloud or singing. The two p lanes-the
actual and the ideal-do not intermingle. In contrast, The Thousand and One Nights
doubles and dizzyingly redoubles the rami cations of a central tale into digressing
tales, but without ever trying to gradate its realities, and the e ect (which
should be one of dep th) is sup er cial, like a Persian car-WHEN FICTION LIVES IN
FICTION 161p et. The story that introduces the series is well known: the king's
heartbroken oath that each night he will wed a virgin who will be decap itated at
dawn, and the fortitude of Scheherazade, who distracts him with wondrous tales
until a thousand and one nights have revolved over their two heads and she p resents
him with his son. The need to comp lete a thousand and one segments drove the work's
cop yists to all sorts of digressions. None of them is as disturbing as that of
night 602, a bit of magic among the nights. On that strange night, the king hears
his own story from the queen's lip s. He hears the beginning of the story, which
includes all the others, and also- monstrously-itself. Does the reader have a clear
sense of the vast p ossibility held out by this interp olation, its p eculiar
danger? Were the queen to p ersist, the immobile king would forever listen to the
truncated story of the thousand and one nights, now in nite and circular. . . . In
The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade tells many stories; one of them is,
almost, the story of The Thousand and One Nights.In the third act of Hamlet,
Shakesp eare erects a stage on the stage; the fact that the p lay enacted there-the
p oisoning of a king-in some way mirrors the p rimary p lay suf ces to suggest the
p ossibility of in nite involutions. (In an 1840 article, De Quincey observes that
the stolid, heavy- handed style of this minor p lay makes the overall drama that
includes it ap p ear, by contrast, more lifelike. I would add that its essential aim
is the op p osite: to make reality ap p ear unreal to us.)Hamlet dates from 1602.
Toward the end of 1635, the young writer Pierre Corneille comp osed the magical
comedy L'Illusion comique. Pridamant, father of Clindor, has traveled the nations
of Europ e in search of his son. With more curiosity than faith, he visits the cave
of the "p rodigious magician" - candre. The latter shows him, in p hantasmagorical
fashion, his son's hazardous life. We see Clindor stabbing a rival, eeing om
the law, being murdered in a garden, then chatting with some friends. Alcandre
clears up the mystery. Having killed his rival, Clindor becomes an actor, and the
scene of the blood-drenched garden belongs not to reality (the "reality" of Cor-
neille's ction), but to a tragedy. We were, without knowing it, in a theater. A
rather unexp ected p anegyric to that institution brings the work to its close:Meme
notre grand Roi, cefoudre de la guerre,Dont le nom sefait craindre aux deux bouts
de la terre, L e fr o n t c e i n t d e l a u r i e r s , d a i g n e b i e n q u e
l q u efo i s Preter l'oeil et l'oreille au Theatre Fran?ais.[That thunderbolt of
war himself, our great ng/Whose name sounds162 JORG E LUIS BORG ESat earth's ends
with fearsome ring/His forehead wreathed in laurels, sometimes deigns/To lend eye
and ear to the French Theater's refrains . ] It is p ain l to note that Corneille
p uts these not very magical verses in the mouth of a magician.G ustav Meyrink's
novel The G olem (1915) is the story of a dream; within this dream there are dreams;
and within those dreams (I believe) other dreams.I have enumerated many verbal
labyrinths, but none so comp lex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-
Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the p rop rietor of a Dublin p ublic
house, who writes a novel about the habitues of his p ub (among them, the student),
who in their turn write novels in which p rop rietor and student gure along with
other writers of novels about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely
diverse manuscrip ts of these real or imagined p ersons, cop iously annotated by the
student. At Swim- vo-Birds is not only a labyrinth: it is a discussion of the many
ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a rep ertory of exercises in p rose and verse
which illustrate or p arody all the styles of Ire- land. The magisterial influence
of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths; also a literary Proteus) is undeniable
but not disp rop ortionate in this manifold book.Arthur Schop enhauer wrote that
dreaming and wakefulness are the p ages of a single book, and that to read them in
order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within
p aintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.[1939]
[EA] CAPSULE BIOG RAPHIESIsaac BabelHe was born in the jumbled catacombs of the
stair-step p ed p ort of Odessa, late in 1894. Irrep arably Semitic, Isaac was the son
of a rag merchant from Kiev and a Moldavian Jewess. Catastrop he has been the normal
climate of his life. In the uneasy intervals between p ogroms he learned not only to
read and write but to ap p reciate literature and enjoy the work of Maup assant,
Flaubert, and Rabelais. In 1914, he was certi ed a lawyer by the Faculty of Law in
Saratov; in 1916, he risked a journey to Petrograd. In that cap ital city "traitors,
malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned: the category was somewhat arbitrary,
but-imp lacably-it included Babel. He had to rely on the friendship of a waiter who
took him home and hid him, on a Lithuanian accent acquired in Sebastop ol, and on an
ap ocr hal p assp ort. His rst writings date from that p eriod: two or three satires
of the Czarist bureaucracy, p ublished in Annals, G orky's famous newsp ap er. (What
must he think, and not say, about Soviet Russia, that indecip herable labyrinth of
state o ces?) Those two or three satires attracted the dangerous attention of the
government. He was accused of p ornograp hy and incitement of class hatred. From this
catastrop he he was saved by another catastrop he: the Rus- sian Revolution.In early
1921, Babel joined a Cossack regiment. Those blustering and useless warriors (no
one in the history of the universe has been defeated more o en than the Cossacks)
were, of course, anti-Semitic. The mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as
laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain
and sp ite. A coup le of well- timed and flashy exp loits enabled Babel to make them
leave him in p eace.By rep utation, though not according to the bibliograp hies, Isaac
Babel is still a homo unius libri.JORG E LUIS BORG ES His unmatched book is titled
Red Cavalry.The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of
certain scenes.One of the stories-"Salt"-enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for p o-
ems, and rarely attained by p rose: many p eop le know it by heart.[1938} [EA} Ernest
BramahA G erman scholar, around 1731, sp ent many p ages debating the issue of whether
Adam was the best p olitician of his time, the best historian, and the best
geograp her and top ograp her. This charming hyp othesis takes into account not only
the p erfection of the p aradisiacal state and the total absence of comp etitors but
also the simp licity of certain top ics in those early days of the world. The history
of the universe was the history of the universe's only inhabitant. The p ast was
seven days old: how easy it was to be an archeologist!This biograp hy runs the risk
of being no less useless and encyclop edic than a history of the world according to
Adam. We know nothing about Ernest Bramah, excep t that his name is not Ernest
Bramah. In August 1937, the editors of Penguin Books decided to include Kai Lung
Unrolls His Mat in their collection. They consulted Who's Who and came up on the
following entry: "Bramah, Ernest, writer," followed by a list of his works and the
address of his agent. The agent sent them a p hotograp h (undoubtedly ap ocryp hal)
and wrote that if they wished for more information, they should not hesitate to
consult Who's Who anew. (This suggestion may indicate that there is an anagram in
the list.)Bramah's books fall into two very unequal categories. Some, fortunately
the smaller p art, record the adventures of the blind detective, M Carra- dos.
These are comp etent, mediocre books. The rest are p arodic in nature: they p ass
themselves off as translations from the Chinese, and their boundless p erfection
achieved the unconditional p raise of Hilaire Belloc in 1922. Their names: The
Wallet ofKai Lung (1900), Kai Lung's G olden Hours (1922), Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
(1928), The Mirror ofKong Ho (1931), The Moon of Much G ladness (1936).Here are two
o f his ap op hthegms:"He who asp ires to dine with the vamp ire must bring his own
meat."CAPSULE BIOG RAPHIES "A frugal dish of olives seasoned with honey is
p referable to the most resp lendent p ie of p up p y tongues p resented on thousand-year-
old lac- quered trays and served to other p eop le."[EA] Benedetto CroceBenedetto
Croce, one of the few imp ortant writers in Italy today-the other is Luigi
Pirandello-was born in the hamlet of Pescasseroli, in the p rovince of Aquila, on
February 25, 1866. He was still a child when his family resettled in Nap les. He
received a Catholic education, much attenuated by the indifference of his
teachers and by his own eventual disbelief. In 1883, an earthquake that lasted
ninety seconds shook the south of Italy. In that earthquake, he lost his p arents
and his sister; he himself was buried by rub- ble. Two or three hours later, he was
rescued. To ward off total desp air, he resolved to think about the Universe-a
general p rocedure among the unfortunate, and sometimes a balm.He exp lored the
methodical labyrinths of p hilosop hy. In 1893, he p ublished two essays: one on
literary criticism, the other on history. In 1899, he realized, with a fear which
at times resembled p anic and at other times hap - p iness, that the p roblems of
metap hysics were organizing themselves within him, and that the solution-a
solution-was almost imminent. He stop p ed reading and dedicated his mornings and
nights to the vigil, p acing across the city without seeing anything, sp eechless and
furtively watched. He was thirty-three years old, the age, the Kabbalists say, of
the rst man when he was formed out of mud.In 1902, he inaugurated his Philosop hy
of the Sp irit with an initial volume: the Aesthetics. (In this sterile but
brilliant book, he rejects the distinction between form and content and reduces
everything to intuition.) The Logic ap p ears in 1905; the Practice in 1908; the
Theory ofHistoriograp hy in 1916.From 1910 to 1917, Croce was a senator of the
Kingdom. When war was declared and other writers gave themselves over to the
lucrative p leasures of hatred, Croce remained imp artial. From June 1920 to July
1921 he occup ied the p ost of Minister of Public Instruction.In 1923, Oxford
University granted him a doctorate honoris causa.His comp lete work exceeds twenty
volumes and includes a history of 166 JORG E LUIS BORG ESItaly, a study of the
literatures of Europ e during the nineteenth century, and monograp hs on Hegel, Vico,
Dante, Aristotle, Shakesp eare, G oethe, and Corneille.[1936} [EA] Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser's head is an arduous, monumental head, geological in character, a head of
the afflicted Prometheus bound to the Caucasus, and which, across the inexorable
centuries, has become ingrained with the Caucasus and now has a fundamental
comp onent of rock that is p ained by life. Dreiser's work is no di erent from his
tragic face: it is as torp id as the mountains or the deserts, but like them it is
imp ortant in an elemental and inarticulate
way.Theodore Dreiser was born in the state of Indiana on August 27, 1871. He is
the son of Catholic p arents. As a child he was on familiar terms with p overty; as a
youth he p lied many and diverse trades with the easy universality that is one of
the de ning characteristics of American destinies and that once (Sarmiento,
Hernandez, Ascasubi) de ned those of this Rep ublic as well. In 1887, long before
Scarface 's p unctual machine guns, he roamed a Chicago where men in bustling
beerhalls argued endlessly over the harsh fate of the seven anarchists the
government had sentenced to the gallows. Around 1889 he develop ed the strange
ambition of becoming a journalist. He started hanging around newsp ap er o ces,
"stubborn as a stray dog." In 1892, he was hired by the Chicago Daily G lobe; in
1894, he went to New Y ork, where for four years he edited a music magazine called
Ev'ry Month. During that time he read Sp encer's First Princip les and with p ain and
sincerity lost the faith of his forefathers. Toward 1898, he married a girl from
St. Louis, "beautiful, religious, thoughtful, addicted to books," but the marriage
was not a hap p y one. "I couldn't stand being tied down. I asked her to give me back
my freedom and she did."Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's rst novel, ap p eared in
the year 1900. Someone has observed that Dreiser always chose his enemies well.
Barely had Sister Carrie been p ublished when its p ublishers withdrew it from cir-
culation, an event that was catastrop hic at the time, but in nitely favorable to
his later rep utation. A er ten years of silence, he p ublished Jennie G er- hardt;
then, in 1912, The Financier; in 1913, his autobiograp hy, A Traveler at Forty; in
1914, The Titan; in 1915, G enius (which was banned); in 1922, an-CAPSULE
BIOG RAPHIES other autobiograp hical exercise entitled A Book About Myself The novel
An American Tragedy (1925) was outlawed in several states and disseminated by the
motion p icture industry across the globe."To understand North America better,"
Dreiser went to Russia in 1928. In 1930, he p ublished "a book of the mystery and
wonder and terror of life" and a volume of"natural and sup ernatural" dramas.Many
years ago, he recommended that his country cultivate a literature of desp air.[EA}
S. EliotAn unlikely comp atriot of the St. Louis Blues, Thomas Stearns Eliot was
born in the energetic city of that name, in the month of Sep tember 1888, on the
banks of the mythical Mississip p i. Scion of a wealthy family with commercial and
ecclesiastical interests, he was educated at Harvard and in Paris. In the autumn of
1911, he returned to North America and dedicated himself to the fervent study of
p sychology and metap hysics. Three years later he went to England. On that island
(and not without a certain initial wariness) he found his wife, his homeland, and
his renown; on that island he p ublished his rst essays-two technical articles on
Leibniz-and his rst p o- ems: "Rhap sody on a Windy Night," "Mr. Ap ollinax;' "The
Love Song of ] . Alfred Prufrock." The influence of Lafargue is ap p arent, and
sometimes fatal, in these p reludes. His construction is languid, but the clarity of
certain images is unsurp assable. For examp le:I should have been a p air of ragged
claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.In 1920, he p ublished Poems,
p erhap s the most disordered and uneven of his books of verse; its p ages include the
desp airing monologue "G eron- tion" and several trivial exercises-"le Directeur,"
"Melange adultere de tout;"'Lune de miel"-p erp etrated in a hap less French.In 1922,
he p ublished The Waste Land; in 1925, The Hollow Men; in 1930, Ash Wednesday; in
1934, The Rock; in 1936, Murder in the Cathedral, a lovely title that sounds like
Agatha Christie. The erudite obscurity of the rst of these p oems disconcerted (and
still disconcerts) the critics, but is less 168 JORG E LUIS BORG ESimp ortant than the
p oem's beauty. The p ercep tion of this beauty, moreover, p recedes any interp retation
and does not dep end on it. (Analyses of the p oem abound: the most sensitive and
faith l is 0. Matthiessen's in The Achievement ofT. S. Eliot.)Eliot-
whosep oetry,likePaulValery's,canbegloomyandinadequate-is, like Valery, an exemp lary
p rose stylist. The volume Selected Essays (London, 1932) includes his essential
p rose. The p revious volume, The Use ofPoetry and the Use ofCriticism (London,
1933), can be omitted without great loss.[19371 [EA] Will JamesOur Argentine
Rep ublic has a vast literature of the gaucho-Paulina Lucero, the Fausto, Martin
Fierro, Juan Moreira, Santos Vega, Don Segundo Sombra, Ramon Haza a-a body of work
p roduced exclusively by the literati of our cap ital city and documented by
childhood memories or a summer in the p rovinces.The United States has not p roduced
analogous works of a corresp onding p restige-cowboys count for less in their
country's literature than the black men of the South or the farmers of the Middle
West, and to this day they have not insp ired a good lm-but it can boast of this
almost scandalous p henomenon: books about cowboys written by an authentic cow-
boy. Written and illustrated.One night in early June 1892, a covered wagon on its
weary way from Texas made a stop in the wilderness of the Bitter Root Mountains,
near the Canadian border. On that night, in that lost wagon, Will James was born to
a Texas troop er and a woman with some Sp anish blood. James was or- p haned at the
age of four. An old hunter, Jean Baup re, took him in. Will James grew up on
horseback. A Bible and some old magazines in his adop ted father's shack gradually
taught him to read. (Until he was fourteen, he knew how to write only in block
letters.) Driven by p overty or by his own will, he worked as a hired hand, troop er,
bronco buster, foreman, caval- ryman. In 1920 he married a girl from Nevada; in
1924, he p ublished his rst book: Cowboys, North and South.Will James' books are
rather curious. They are not sentimental; they are not savage. They do not transmit
heroic anecdotes. They contain an in nite abundance of descrip tions (and
discussions) on the many ways to use stir-CAPSULE BIOG RAPHIES rup s, lasso, work in
a corral or in op en country, drive herds of cattle across rough terrain, break
colts. These are p astoral and theoretical documents; they deserve better readers
than myself. They are entitled: The Dri ing Cow-Boy (1925), Smoky the Cowhorse
(1926), Cow Country (1927), Sand (1929), the autobiograp hy Lone Cow-Boy (1930), and
the series of tales SunUp (1931).Will James is now the owner of a ranch in Montana.
[1938} [EA} Liam O'Fl erLiam O'Flaherty is a "man of Aran." He was born in 1896 to
p arents who were p oor and desp erately Catholic. He was educated in a Jesuit
college. From boyhood he p rofessed two p assions: hatred of England and reverence
for the Catholic Church. (The rst of these p assions was mitigated by his love of
En- glish literature; the second, by socialism.) In 1914, the two loyalties
clashed. O'Flaherty wished for an English defeat, but was enraged by the sp ectacle
of a small Catholic country, Belgium-so comp arable to Ireland at that moment!-
tramp led by a strong, heretic nation, G ermany-so much like En- gland! In 1915, he
solved the p roblem by enlisting under a false name to keep his family honor intact.
He sp ent two years ghting the G ermans. On his return he seized the op p ortunity
p rovided by the Irish Revolution to ght En- gland. As a revolutionary, he achieved
such distinction that for a time he had to relinquish the Emp ire. We know he was a
lumberjack in Canada, a steve- dore in a Venezuelan p ort, a Turkish agent in Asia
Minor, and a busboy, !ina- typ ist, and "subversive" orator in Minnesota and
Wisconsin. In a tire factory in St. Paul, he scribbled out his rst stories. Every
night he wrote one; every morning he reread it indignantly and threw it in the
trash bin.Thy Neighbor's Wife, his rst novel, was p ublished in London in 1924. In
1925, he p ublished The Informer; in 1927, The Life ofTim Healy; in 1928, The
Assassin; in 1929, A Tourist's G uide to Ireland (with detailed indications of the
tenements, barren lands, vacant lots, and swamp s); in 1930, the autobiograp hical
book, Two Y ears; in 1931, I Went to Russia. O'Flaherty is a generous, talkative
man. He is said to look like a re ned gangster. He likes unfamiliar cities,
alcohol, games of chance, early mornings, nights, arguments.[19371 [EA} 170 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESOswald Sp englerIt may legitimately be observed (with the lightness and
p eculiar brutality of such observations) that the p hilosop hers of England and
France are directly interested in the universe itself, or in one or another of its
features, while the G ermans tend to consider it a simp le motive, a mere material
cause for their enormous dialectical edi ces, which are always groundless but
always grandiose. Their p assion is for the p rop er symmetry of systems, not for any
eventual corresp ondence with the imp ure and disorderly universe. The latest of
these illustrious G ermanic architects-a tting successor to Alber- tus Magnus,
Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Novalis, Hegel-is Sp engler.Sp engler was
born on May 29, 1880, in the town of Blankenburgam- Harz, in the duchy of
Brunswick. He studied in Munich and Berlin. At the beginning of this century he
comp leted a degree in p hilosop hy and letters; his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus
(Halle, 1904) was the only thing he p ublished before the sensational work that
would make him famous. Sp engler sp ent six years writing The Decline ofthe West. Six
stubborn years in a hungry Munich tenement, in a lugubrious room that faced a
destitute landscap e of chimneys and grimy roo op s. During this p eriod, Oswald
Sp engler owns no books. He sp ends his mornings at the p ublic library, lunches in
working- class cafeterias, drinks vast, scalding quantities of tea when ill. Around
1915, he nishes revising
the rst volume. He has no friends. Secretly, he com- p ares himself to G ermany,
which is also alone.In the summer of 1918, The Decline ofthe West ap p ears in
Vienna.Schop enhauer wrote: "There is no general science of history. History is the
insigni cant tale of humanity's interminable, weighty, fragmented dream." In his
book, Sp engler set out to demonstrate that history could be something more than a
mere gossip y enumeration of individual facts. He wanted to determine its laws, lay
down the foundations of a morp hology of cultures. His manly p ages, comp osed in the
p eriod between 1912 and 1917, were never contaminated by the singular hatred of
those years.Around 1920, his glory began.Sp engler rented an ap artment on the Isar
River, lingered amorously over the p urchase of several thousand books, collected
Persian, Turkish, and Hindu weap onry, climbed high mountains, and denied himself to
the p ersis- tence of p hotograp hers. Above all, he wrote. He wrote Pessimism (1921),
Politi- cal Duties ofG erman Y outh (1924), Reconstruction ofthe G erman State (1926).
CAPSULE BIOG RAPHIES 171Oswald Sp engler died in the middle of this year. His
biological concep t of history is op en to debate, but not the sp lendor of his style.
{EA} Paul ValeryTo enumerate the facts of Valery's life is to ignore Valery, is not
even to allude to Paul Valery. Facts, for him, are worthwhile only as stimulants
to thought; thought, for him, is worthwhile only insofar as we can observe it; the
observation of that observation also interests him. . . .Paul Valery was born in
the small town of Sete, in the year 1871. G ood classic that he is, he disdains or
disregards childhood memories. He does little more than make us aware that one
morning, facing the mobile sea, he exp erienced the natural ambition to be a sailor.
In the year 1888, at the University of Montp ellier, Valery chatted with Pierre Lo
ys, who a year later founded the magazine La Conque. Valery's rst p oems, duly
mythological and sonorous, ap p eared in those p ages.Around 1891, Valery went to
Paris. To him, that urgent city signi ed two p assions: Step hane Mallarme's
conversation and the in nite study of geometry and algebra. In Valery's
typ ograp hical habits there remains some trace of this juvenile commerce with the
Symbolists: a certain charlatanry of ellip ses, italics, cap ital letters.He
p ublished his first volume in 1895: Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da
Vinci. In this book, which is of a divinatory or symbolic nature, Leonardo is an
eminent p retext for the exemp li ing descrip tion of a typ e of creator. Leonardo is
the rough dra for "Edmond Teste," the limit or demigod on which Paul Valery
verges. This p ersonage-the calm, half- glimp sed hero of the short La Soiree avec
Monsieur Teste-is p erhap s the most extraordinary invention of contemp orary letters.
In 1921, the writers of France, questioned by the magazine La Connais- sance,
declared that the foremost contemp orary p oet was Paul Valery. In 1925, he was
admitted to the Academy.It is not imp ossible that La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste and
the ten volumes of Variete constitute Valery's lasting work. His p oetry-p erhap s-
is not as organized for immortality as his p rose. In the Cimetiere marin itself-his
p oetic masterp iece-there is no organic melding of the sp eculative and visual
p assages, there is merely rotation. Sp anish versions of this 172 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
p oem abound; to my mind, the most dexterous of them ap p eared m Buenos Aires in
1931.[19371 [EA] S. S. Van DineWillard Huntington Wright was born in 1888, in
Virginia; S. S. Van Dine (whose name blazes from all the multicolored kiosks in the
world) was born in 1926, in a California sanitarium. Willard Huntington Wright was
born as all men are born; S. S. Van Dine (his dose- tting and lightweight
p seudonym) was born in the hap p y p enumbra of a convalescence.Here is the story of
both. The rst, educated at Pomona College and Har- vard, had p lied, remuneratively
and without glory, the trades of drama critic and music critic. He had tried his
hand at the autobiograp hical novel ( The Man ofPromise), aesthetic theory
(Philology and the Writer, The Creative Will, Modern Literature, Modern Painting),
the exp osition and discussion of doctrines (What Nietzsche Taught), and even a
bit of casual E tology and p rop hecy: The Future of Painting. The universe had
examined these works with more resignation than enthusiasm. To judge by the dazed
fragments that survive encrusted in his novels, the universe was correct. . . .
Around 1925, Wright was recovering from an illness that had been serious.
Convalescence and criminological fantasies go well together: Wright, by then
relaxed and hap p y in his sickbed, turned away from the laborious resolution of one
of Mr. Edgar Wallace's incomp etent labyrinths, p referring to construct a p roblem of
his own. He wrote The Benson Murder Case, and signed it with a name that had been
his for four generations: that of a maternal great-grandfather, Silas S. Van
Dine.The novel's success was considerable. The following year he p ublished The
Canary Murder Case, p erhap s his best book, though the central idea (a p honograp h
record used as alibi) is taken from Conan Doyle. An astute morning newsp ap er
comp ared the novel's style to certain p ages of Philology and the Writer and
discovered "that the omnip resent Van Dine was the distinguished p hilosop her, Mr.
Willard Huntington Wright." An astute evening newsp ap er comp ared the style of this
revelation with the two works in question and discovered that its author "was also
the distinguished p hiloso- p her, Mr. Willard Huntington Wright." CAPSULE
BIOG RAPHIES 173Van Dine p ublished The Bishop Murder Case in 1929; in 1930, the
ingenious Scarab Murder Case; in 1936, The Dragon Murder Case. This last book
p resents us with the bale l sp ectacle of an amp hibious millionaire, equip p ed with
trident and diving suit, who installs himself at the bottom of a swimming p ool and
gracefully skewers his guests.Van Dine has also comp iled a coup le of anthologies.
[1937] [EA] Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf has been called "England's leading
novelist." The p recise hierarchy is unimp ortant-literature not being a contest-
but hers is indis- p utably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations
now felicitously exp erimenting with the English novel.Adelina Virginia Step hen was
born in London in 1882. (Her rst name vanished without a trace.) She is the
daughter of Mr. Leslie Step hen, a com- p iler of biograp hies of Swift, Johnson, and
Hobbes-books whose value lies in the ne clarity of the p rose and factual
p recision, and which attemp t little analysis and no invention.Adelina Virginia was
the third of four children. The illustrator Rothen- stein remembers her as
"absorbed and quiet, all in black, with white lace col- lar and cuffs." From
infancy, she was raised not to sp eak if she had nothing to say. She was never sent
to school, but her domestic training included the study of G reek. Sundays at the
house were crowded: Meredith, Ruskin, Stevenson, John Morley, G osse, and Hardy were
all frequently in attendance.She sp ent the summers in Cornwall, at the seaside, in
a small house lost on an enormous, untended estate, with terraces, a garden, and a
green- house. The estate reap p ears in a 1927 novel. . . .In 1912, Virginia Step hen
marries Mr. Leonard Woolf in London, and the two acquire a p rinting p ress.
Typ ograp hy, that sometimes treacherous accomp lice of literature, ap p eals to them,
and they comp ose and p rint their own books. They undoubtedly have in mind the
glorious p recedent of William Morris, p rinter and p oet.Three years later Virginia
Woolf p ublishes her rst novel: The Voyage Out. In 1919, Night and Day ap p ears, and
in 1922, Jacob's Room. This book is already lly characteristic. There is no p lot,
in the narrative sense of the174 JORG E LUIS BORG ESword; the subject is a man's
character, studied not in the man himself, but indirectly in the objects and p eop le
around him.Mrs. Dalloway (1925) narrates a day in a woman's life; it is a
reflection- though not at all excessive-of Joyce's Ulysses. To the Lighthouse
(1927) em- p loys the same technique: it dep icts a few hours in several p eop les'
lives, so that in those hours we see their p ast and ture. The p reoccup ation with
time is p resent, as well, in Orlando (1928). The hero of this extremely original
novel-undoubtedly Virginia Woolf's most intense and one of the most singular and
maddening of our era-lives for three hundred years and is, at times, a symbol of
England and of its p oetry in p articular. Magic, bitterness, and hap p iness collude
in this book. It is also a musical work, not only in the eup honious virtues of its
p rose but in the structure of its comp osition, which consists of a limited number
of themes that return and combine. We also hear a kind of music in A Room ofOne's
Own (1930), in which dream and reality alternate and reach an equilibrium.In 1931,
Virginia Woolf p ublished another novel: The Waves. The waves that give their name
to the book take in, across time and its many vicissitudes, the characters' inner
soliloquies. Each p hase of their lives corresp onds to a different hour of the
day, from morning to night. There is no p lot, no conversation, no action. Y et the
book is moving. Like the rest ofVirginia Woolf's work, it is weighted with
delicate, p hysical facts.[1936} [EA} BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTESG ustav Meyrink, Der Engel
vom Westlichen FensterThis more or less theosop hical novel-TheAngel ofthe Western
Window-is not as beautiful as its title. Its author, G ustav Meyrink, was made
famous by his fantasy novel, The G olem, an extraordinarily visual book that
enchant- ingly combined mythology, eroticism, tourism, the "local color" of Prague,
p rop hetic dreams, dreams of p ast or future lives, and even reality. That wonder l
book was followed by others that
were less delight l. In them one could see the influence, no longer of Hoffmann or
Poe, but of the various theosop hical sects that swarmed (and swarm) in G ermany.
They revealed that Meyrink had been "enlightened" by Oriental wisdom, with the
baneful results that are customary to such visitations. He gradually became identi
ed with the most naive of his readers. His books became acts of faith, and then of
p rop aganda.The Angel of the Western Window is a chronicle of confused miracles,
barely salvaged, from time to time, by its p oetic ambience.[1936] [EW] Alan Pryce-
Jones, Private Op inionUnquestionably, though there are many Englishmen who sp eak
very little, there are far more who do not sp eak at all. Hence (p erhap s) the no
less unquestionable excellence of the "oral style" of English p rose writers. In
this regard, the book under review is exemp lary.The author's op inions,
unfortunately, are less irrep roachable than his syntax. In one p assage he sp eaks of
Stuart Merrill as "p erhap s the greatest176 JORG E LUIS BORG ESAmerican lyric p oet
since Edgar Allan Poe." Such a p romotion is absurd: comp ared with his own
colleagues in Symbolism, Stuart Merrill is largely insigni cant; comp ared with
Frost, Sandburg, Eliot, Masters, Lindsay, and twenty others (not to mention Sidney
Lanier), he is decidedly invisible.Elsewhere the author states: "At times I have
p layed with the idea of an essay on the subject that modern p oetry owes half of its
forms and contex- ture to the city of Montevideo." The thesis (quali ed and
weakened by numerous p reliminary vacillations) is ap p ealing, but frankly, we find
it dif cult to believe that the infancy of Jules Lafargue and the boyhood years of
the insu erable Comte de Lautreamont are enough to justi it.Moreover, Mr. Pryce-
Janes claims that Montevideo has no charm. Qui- etly, but with comp lete conviction,
I would beg to disagree, in the name of the p ink p atios of the Old City and the
damp and affecting mansions of the Paso del Molino.[EW} Louis G olding, The PursuerIt
has been said (and o en rep eated) that the p rotagonist of a true novel or of a
serious p lay cannot be insane. Limiting ourselves to Macbeth, his colleague the
analytical murderer Raskolnikov, Don Quixote, King Lear, Ham- let, and the almost
monomaniacal Lord Jim, we might say (and rep eat) that the p rotagonist of a novel or
a p lay must be insane.It will be argued that no one can symp athize with a madman,
and that the mere susp icion of madness is enough to estrange a man in nitely from
all others. We would resp ond that madness is one of the terrible p ossibilities for
any soul, and that the narrative or scenic p roblem of showing the origin and growth
ofthat terri ing ower is certainly not illegitimate. (Cervantes, by the way, did
not attemp t it; he merely says that his y-year-old knight "from little sleep and
much reading, dried up his brain to the p oint where he lost his judgment." We do
not witness the transition from the ordinary to the hallucinatory, the gradual dis
guration of the common order by the world of p hantoms.)These general observations
were p rovoked by the reading of this intense novel by Louis G olding, The Pursuer.
The book has two heroes, and both go mad: one from fear, the other from a horrible,
rancorous love. Of course, neither the word nor the concep t of "madness" ap p ears in
the book: BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 177we share the mental p rocesses of the
characters, we see them become troubled, we see them act, and the abstract
diagnosis that they are insane is rather less comp elling than their troubles and
acts. (Acts that sometimes involve a crime, which becomes a kind of relief,
however momentary, from the tension of p anic and evil. It is such that when the
crime has been committed, the reader fears for many p ages that it is a
hallucination of fear.)Horror is gradual in this novel, as in nightmares. The style
is transp arent, calm. As for its interest . . . I can only say that I began it a
er lunch, with the intention of skimming it, and that I did not p ut it down until
p age 285 (the last) at two in the morning.There are certain typ ograp hical
conventions derived from William Faulkner: for examp le, the narrative is sometimes
interrup ted by the thoughts of the characters, which are p resented in the rst
p erson and in italics.[EW] Lord Hal ax's G host BookEver since a certain Byzantine
historian of the s th century noted that the island of England consists of two
p arts-one with rivers and cities and bridges, the other inhabited by snakes and
ghosts-relations between En- gland and the Other World have been celebrated and
cordial. In 1666, Josep h G lanvill p ublished his Philosop hical Considerations of
Sorcery and Sorcerers, a book that was insp ired by an invisible drum that was heard
every night in a well in Wiltshire. Around 1705, Daniel Defoe wrote his True
Relation of the Ap p arition of One Mrs. Veal. At the end of the nineteenth century,
statistical rigor was ap p lied to these nebulous p roblems, and they were veri ed
with two censuses of hyp notic and telep athic hallucinations. (The later census
involved 16,ooo adults.) Now, in London, they have just p ublished this book-Lord
Halifax's G host Book-which gathers and exhausts the charms of sup erstition and of
snobbism. It deals with select ghosts, "ap p aritions who have troubled the rest of
the greatest names of En- gland, and whose comings and goings have invariably been
noted by an august hand." Lady G oring, Lord Desborough, Lord Lytton, the Marquis
of Hartingdom, and the Duke of Devonshire are among the names whose rest has been
troubled and who have furnished their august hands. The Honor- able Reginald
Fortescue became a rm believer in the existence of "an JORG E LUIS BORG ES alarming
sp ectre." As for myself, I don't know what to think: for the moment, I refuse to
believe in the alarming Reginald Fortescue until an honorable sp ectre becomes a
rm believer in his existence.The p reface contains this beauti l anecdote: Two
ladies are sharing a railway comp artment. "I don't believe in ghosts," says one to
the other. "Oh really?" the other rep lies, and vanishes.[1936] [EW] William
Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!I know of two kinds of writers: those whose central
p reoccup ation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and
p assions. The former tend to be dismissed as "Byzantine" or p raised as "p ure
artists." The latter, more fortunately, receive the laudatory ep ithets "p rofound,"
"human," or "p rofoundly human," and the flattering vitup eration "savage." The
former is Swinburne or Mallarme; the latter, Celine or Theodore Dreiser. Certain
excep tional cases disp lay the virtues and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo
remarked that Shakesp eare contained G ongora; we might also observe that he
contained Dostoevsky. . . . ong the great novelists, Josep h Conrad was p erhap s the
last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and in the fates and
p ersonalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous ap p earance
of Faulkner.Faulkner likes to exp ound the novel through his characters. This method
is not entirely original-Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868) details the
same crime ten times, through ten voices and ten souls- but Faulkner in ses it with
an intensity that is almost intolerable. There is an in nite decomp osition, an in
nite and black carnality, in this book. The theater is the state of Mississip p i:
the heroes, men disintegrating from envy, alcohol, loneliness, and the erosions of
hate.Absalom, Absalom! is comp arable to The Sound and the Fury. I know no higher
p raise.[19371 [EW] BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 179G ustaf Janson, G ubben KommerI have
frequented with true moderation the literature of Sweden. Three or four
theological-hallucinatory volumes of Swedenborg, een or twenty of Strindberg (who
was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche), a novel by Selma Lagerlof, and a
book of Heidenstam's stories strain the limits of my Hyp erborean education. Now I
have just read G ubben Kom mer by the very new writer G ustaf Janson, in an admirable
English translation by Claude Nap ier, p ublished in London under the title The Old
Man's Coming Out.Measured against the author's exalted intentions-the revelation of
a semi-divine man, slandered and loathed by the others, who ap p ears in the last
chap ters and decrees his omniscient Final Judgment on the characters in the novel-
the work itself is a disaster. A most forgivable disaster. Milton insisted that the
p oet himself be a p oem. A demand that is interminably ca- p able of reductions to
the absurd (to require, for examp le, that the sculp tor himself be a Roman chariot,
the architect himself a foundation, the p laywright himself an intermission) and
yet it raises a fundamental p roblem: Can writers create characters who are sup erior
to themselves? Intellectually, one must say no. Sherlock Holmes seems more
intelligent than Conan Doyle, but we are all in on the secret: the one is only
communicating the solutions that the other has devised. Zarathustra-oh, the
dangerous consequences of the p rop hetic style!-is less intelligent than
Nietzsche. As for Charles-Henri de G revy, the semi-divine hero of this novel, his
triviality is no less obvious than his loquacity. Janson, moreover, is hardly
astute. The four hundred p ages in octavo that p recede the return of the hero do not
include a single line that would feed or flatter our unease and allow us to
sp eculate, even in p assing, that his detractors may have their reasons. In the end,
the object of vili cation reap p ears, and we con rm that he is indeed a saint. Our
surp rise, of course, is null.I have criticized the mechanism, or rather the
conduct, of this novel. The only p raise I have is for the characters. Putting aside
the symbolic or sup ernatural hero (who merci lly delays his ominous ap p earance
until p age 414), the others are all convincing, and some-like Bengt-remarkable.
[1937} [EW} 180 JORG E LUIS BORG ESAldous Huxley, Stories, Essays and PoemsTo be
inducted into the Everyman's Library, rubbing shoulders with the Venerable Bede and
Shakesp eare, with The Thousand and One Nights and Peer G ynt, was, until recently, a
sort of beati cation. Lately, however, this narrow gate has widened, admitting
Pierre Loti and Oscar Wilde. And now Aldous Huxley has entered. There are 16o,ooo
of his words in this volume, divided into four unequal p arts: stories, travel
accounts, articles, and p o- ems. The articles and travel accounts demonstrate
Huxley's just p essimism and almost intolerable lucidity; the stories and p oems his
incurable p overty of invention. What is one to think of these melancholy exercises?
They are not unskill l, they are not stup id, they are not extraordinarily boring:
they are, simp ly, worthless. They engender (at least in me) an in nite bewilder-
ment. Occasionally a single isolated line saves him. This, for examp le, that refers
to the flowing of time:The wound is mortal and is mine.The p oem "Theater of
Varieties" wants to be like Browning; "The G io- conda Smile" wants to be a
detective story. That at least is something, or is quite a lot, as it demonstrates
the intention. I know what they want to be, even if they are nothing, and for that
I am grate l. But as for the other stories and p oems in this book, I cannot even
imagine why they were written. As it is my job to understand, I make this p ublic
declaration in comp lete humility.Aldous Huxley's fame has always struck me as
excessive. I realize that his literature is of a typ e that is p roduced naturally in
France and more arti- cially in England. There are readers of Huxley who do not
feel this discomfort: I feel it continually, and can only derive an imp ure
p leasure from his work. It seems to me that Huxley always sp eaks with a borrowed
voice.[1937} [EW} Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and PlaysThirteen years ago,
I had the slightly terri ing honor of talking with the venerated and mellifluous
Rabindranath Tagore. We were sp eaking of theBOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 181p oetry of
Baudelaire. Someone recited "La Mort des amants," that sonnet so ap p ointed with
beds, couches, flowers, chimneys, mantelp ieces, mirrors, and angels. Tagore
listened intently, but at the end he exclaimed, "I don't like your rniture p oet!"
I deep ly agreed. Now, rereading his writings, I susp ect that he was moved less by a
horror of Romantic bric-a-brac than by an unconquerable love of vagueness.Tagore is
incorrigibly imp recise. In his thousand and one lines there is no lyric tension and
not the least verbal economy. In the p rologue he states that one "has submerged
oneself in the dep ths of the ocean of forms." The image is typ ical ofTagore; it is
typ ically fluid and formless. Here is a translation ofone ofthe p oems. [. . .]
[1937] [EW] Ellery Queen, The Door BetweenThere is a p roblem of enduring interest:
the corp se in the locked room "which no one has entered and no one has le ." Edgar
Allan Poe invented it, and p rop osed a good solution, although p erhap s not the best.
(I sp eak of the one concocted for the story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": a
solution that requires a high window and an anthrop omorp hic ap e.) Poe's story is
from 1841; in 1892 the English writer Israel Zangwill p ublished a short novel, The
Big Bow Mystery, that took up the p roblem once again. Zangwill's solution was
ingenious: two p eop le enter the room of the crime at the same time; one of them
screams that the landlord's throat has been slit and, taking advantage of the
other's stup efaction, murders the landlord. Another excellent solution was o ered
by G aston Leroux in his The Mystery ofthe Y ellow Room; another, less remarkable,
was that of Eden Phillp otts in Jigsaw. (In the latter, a man is stabbed in a tower;
in the end it turns out that the knife was red from a rifle.) In the story "The
Oracle of the Dog;' Chesterton returns to the p roblem; a sword and the crevices in
an arbor form the solution.The p resent volume by Ellery Queen formulates, for the
sixth time, this classic p roblem. I will not commit the blunder of revealing the
key. In any event, it is an unsatisfactory one, overly dep endent on chance. The
Door Be- tween is interesting, but the p lot is quite inferior to Queen's best
novels: Chinese Orange, Siamese Twin, and The Egyp tian Cross.[19371 [EW] JORG E LUIS
BORG ES Sir William Barrett, Personality Survives DeathThis book is truly
p osthumous. The late Sir William Barrett (ex-p resident and founder of the Society
for Psychic Research) has dictated it from the Other World to his widow. (The
transmissions were through the medium Mrs. Osborne Leonard.) In life, Sir William
was not a sp iritualist, and nothing delighted him more than to p rove the falsehood
of some "p sychic" p henomenon. In death, surrounded by ghosts and angels, he
remains unp ersuaded. He believes in the other world, of course, "because I know
that I am dead and because I do not wish to believe that I am mad." Never- theless,
he denies that the dead can assist the living, and he emp hasizes that the most
imp ortant thing is to believe in Jesus. He states:"I have seen Him, I have talked
with Him, and I will see Him again this coming Easter, in those days when you will
think of Him and of me."The other world described by Sir William Barrett is no less
material than that of Swedenborg or Sir Oliver Lodge. The rst of those exp lorers-
De coelo et inferno, 1758-rep orted that things in heaven are brighter, more solid,
and more numerous than those on earth, and that there are streets and avenues. Sir
William Barrett corroborates these facts, and sp eaks of hexagonal houses made of
brick and stone. (Hexagonal . . . is there an af- nity between the dead and bees?)
Another curious feature: Sir William says that each country on earth has its double
in heaven, exactly above it. There is a celestial England, a celestial Afghanistan,
a celestial Belgian Congo. (The Arabs believed that a rose falling from Paradise
would land p recisely on the Temp le in Jerusalem.)[1938] [EW] Wolfram Eberhard,
translator, Chinese Fai Tales and Folk TalesFew literary genres are as tedious as
the fairy tale, excep t, of course, the fable. (The innocence and irresp onsibility
of animals is the source of their charm; to reduce them to instruments of morality,
as Aesop and La Fon- taine did, seems to me an aberration.) I have confessed that
fairy tales bore me; now I must confess that I have read the rst half of this book
with great interest. The same occurred, ten years ago, with Wilhelm's Chinesische
Volksmaerchen. How to resolve this contradiction?BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES The p roblem
is simp le. The Europ ean fairy tale, and the Arab, are all conventional. A ternary
law rules them: there are two jealous sisters and a good younger sister, there are
the king's three sons, there are three crows, there is a riddle that is guessed by
the third one who tries. The Western tale is a sort of symmetrical artifact,
divided into comp artments. It is one of p erfect symmetry. Is there anything less
like beauty than p erfect symmetry? (I am not making an ap ology for chaos, but I
know that in the arts nothing is as p leasing as imp erfect symmetries. . . .) The
Chinese fairy tale, however, is irregular. The reader begins by finding them
incoherent. He thinks that there are too many loose ends, things that don't come
together. Later- p erhap s suddenly-he discovers why these gap s exist. He realizes
that these vagaries and anacoluthons imp ly that the narrator totally believes in
the reality of the wonders that he tells. Reality is neither symmetrical nor
schematic.Of the stories that comp rise this volume, the most delightful are
"Brother G host," "The Emp ress of Heaven;' "The Tale of the Silver Men;' "The Son of
the Turtle Sp irit," "Tung Po-hua Sells Thunder," and "The Strange Picture." This
last is the story of a p ainter with immortal hands who p ainted a moon that waxed
and waned just like the moon in the sky.I note, in the index, some titles that are
worthy of Chesteron: "The G ratitude of the Snake," "The King of the Ashes," "The
Actor and the G host."[1938} [EW} The Literary Life: Marinetti T. Marinetti is
p erhap s the most celebrated examp le of the kind of writer who lives by his wits and
to whom something witty rarely occurs. Here, according to a telegram from Rome,
is his latest p retense: "To the red of their lip s and ngernails, the women of
Italy must add light touches of the green of the Lombard p lains and the white of
the Alp ine snows. Attractive tricolor lip s will p erfect the words of love and
kindle the longing for a kiss in the rustic soldiers returning undefeated from the
wars."This bit of labial heraldry, suitable for kindling chastity and moderating or
annihilating the "longing for a kiss," has not exhausted Marinetti's inge- nuity.
He has also p rop osed that Italians rep lace chic with elettrizzante [ elec- tri ing]
( ve syllables instead of one) and bar with qui si beve [here oneJORG E LUIS BORG ES
drinks] -four syllables for one, and the unresolved enigma of how the p lural will be
formed. "Our Italian language must not be desp oiled by foreignisms!" declares
Filip p o Tommaso with a Puritanism not unworthy of the asep tic Cejador or the forty
stalls of the Sp anish Royal Academy. For- eignisms! The old imp resario of Futurism
cannot abide such mischief.[193 8} [EW} Richard Hull, Excellent IntentionsOne of the
p rojects that keep s me comp any, that will in some way justi me before G od, and
that I do not think I will accomp lish (for the p leasure is in foreseeing it, not in
bringing it to term) is a detective novel that would be somewhat heterodox. (This
last is imp ortant, for the detective genre, like all genres, lives on the continual
and delicate infraction
of its rules.)I conceived it one night, one wasted night in 1935 or 1934, up on
leaving a cafe in the Barrio Once. These meager circumstantial facts will have to
su ce for the reader; I have forgotten the others, forgotten them to the p oint
where I don't know whether I invented some of them. Here was my p lan: to p lot a
detective novel of the current sort, with an indecip herable murder in the rst
p ages, a long discussion in the middle, and a solution at the end. Then, almost in
the last line, to add an ambiguous p hrase-for examp le: "and everyone thought the
meeting of the man and woman had been by chance"-that would indicate, or raise the
susp icion, that the solution was false. The p erp lexed reader would go through the
p ertinent chap - ters again, and devise his own solution, the correct one. The
reader of this imaginary book would be sharp er than the detective. . . .Richard
Hull has written an extremely p leasant book. His p rose is able, his characters
convincing, his irony civilized. His solution, however, is so unsurp rising that I
cannot free myself from the susp icion that this quite real book, p ublished in
London, is the one I imagined in Balvanera, three or four years ago. In which case,
Excellent Intentions hides a secret p lot. me, or ah Richard Hull! I can't nd
that secret p lot anywhere.[1938} {EW} BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 185Meadows Taylor, e
Co essions a ThugThis unusual book-p ublished in Ap ril 1839 in three austere
volumes, and rep ublished exactly ninety-nine years later by Major Y eats-Brown-
arouses a curiosity that is le unsatis ed. The subject is the "thugs," a sect or
corp o- ration of hereditary stranglers who for eight centuries brought horror (with
bare feet and fatal scarves) to the streets and shadows of India. Hired assas-
sination was, for them, a religious duty. They were devotees of Bhawani, the
goddess whose idol is black, and who is worship ed under the names Durga, Parvati,
and Kali Ma, and they would offer for her blessing the executionary scarf, the
p iece of sacred sugar the p roselytes had to eat, and the hoe that dug the graves.
Not everyone, however, was worthy of the scarf and the hoe: devotees were forbidden
to murder "launderers, p oets, fakirs, Sikhs, musi- cians, dancers, oil-p ressers,
carp enters, blacksmiths, and sweep ers, as well as crip p les and lep ers."The adep ts
swore to be valiant, submissive, and secretive, and they roamed the vast
countryside in bands of een to two hundred men. They had a language, Ramasee,
that is now lost, and a sign language that could be understood anywhere in India,
from Amritsar to Ceylon. Their fraternity consisted of four orders: the Seducers,
who lured travelers with songs and fantastic tales; the Executioners, who strangled
them; the Hosp italers, who dug the graves; and the Puri ers, whose mission was to
strip the corp ses. The dark goddess allowed them treachery and treason: it is well
known that thugs were sometimes hired as escorts to p rotect against other thugs.
They would travel for leagues and leagues to the p recise and remote sp ot indi-
cated by ausp icious signs, and there the massacre would occur. There was a famous
strangler-Buhram of Allahabad-who in forty years on the job killed more than nine
hundred p eop le.This book was based on authentic court documents, and in its time
was p raised by Thomas De Quincey and Bulwer-Lytton. The p resent editor, Y eats-
Brown, has added gaudy titles-"The Jeweler and His Astrologer," "The Lady Who Knew
Too Much," "The Ep isode of the Obese Banker"- that are unsuited to the simp licity
of the style.I have said that this book arouses a curiosity that is le unsatis ed,
and that no doubt cannot be satis ed. For examp le, I would have liked to know if
the thugs were bandits who sancti ed their work with the cult of the goddess
Bhawani, or if the cult of Bhawani made them bandits.[1938] [EW] 186 JORG E LUIS
BORG ESWilliam Faulkner, The UnvanquishedIt is a general rule that novelists do not
p resent a reality, but rather the memory of one. They may write about true or
believable events, but these have been revised and arranged by recollection. (This
p rocess, needless to say, has nothing to do with the verb tenses they emp loy.)
Faulkner, however, at times wants to recreate the p ure p resent, neither simp lified
by time nor p olished by attention. The "p ure p resent" is no more than a
p sychological ideal-and thus some of Faulkner's decomp ositions are more confused-
and richer-than the original events.In earlier works, Faulkner has p layed
p owerfully with time, deliberately shu ing chronological order, deliberately
comp licating the labyrinths and ambiguities. He did it to such an extent that there
were those who insisted that his virtues as a novelist were entirely derived from
those involutions. This novel-direct, irresistible, straightforward-will destroy
that susp i- cion. Faulkner does not try to exp lain his characters: he shows us what
they feel and what they do. The events are extraordinary, but his narration is so
vivid that we cannot imagine them any other way. "Le vrai p eut quelquefois n'etre
p as vraisemblable," said Boileau. (What is true may sometimes not be p lausible.)
Faulkner heap s his imp lausibilities in order to seem truthful, and he succeeds. Or
more exactly: the world he imagines is so real that it also encomp asses the
imp lausible.W liam Faulkner has been comp ared to Dostoevsky. This is not unjust,
but the world of Faulkner is so p hysical, so carnal, that next to Colonel Bayard
Sartoris or Temp le Drake, the exp licative murderer Raskolnikov is as slight as a
p rince in Racine. . . . Rivers of brown water, crumbling mansions, black slaves,
battles on horseback, idle and cruel: the strange world of The Unvanquished is a
blood relation of this America, here, and its history; it, too, is criollo.There
are books that touch us p hysically, like the closeness of the sea or of the
morning. This-for me-is one of them.[1938] [EW} Lady Murasaki, The Tale G enjiThe
p ublishers of the Orientalist Arthur Waley have gathered into a single serviceable
volume his now-famous translation of Murasaki's Tale of G enji,BOOK REVIEWS AND
NOTES which p reviously was barely available (or unavailable) in six onerous
volumes. This version may be characterized as a classic: it is written with an
almost miraculous naturalness, and what interests us is not the exoticism- that
horrible word-but rather the human p assions of the novel. Such interest is just:
Murasaki's work is what one would quite p recisely call a p sychological novel. It
was written a thousand years ago by a noble lady in the court of the second Emp ress
of Jap an; in Europ e it would have been inconceivable before the nineteenth
century. This is not to say that Murasaki is more intense or more memorable or
"better" than Fielding or Cervantes; rather that she is more comp lex, and the
civilization to which she belonged was more re ned. To p ut it another way: I don't
claim that Murasaki Shikibu had the talent of Cervantes, but rather that she was
heard by a p ublic that was far more subtle. In the Quixote, Cervantes limits
himself to distinguish- ing day from night; Murasaki ( The Bridge of Dreams,
chap ter X) notes in a window "the blurred stars behind the falling snow." In the
p revious p aragrap h, she mentions a long bridge, damp in the mist, "that seems much
farther away." Perhap s the rst detail is imp lausible; the two together are
strangely effective.I have mentioned two visual details; now I would like to note a
p sychological one. A woman, behind a curtain, sees a man enter. Murasaki writes:
"Instinctively, although she ew quite well that he couldn't see her, she smoothed
her hair with her hand."It is obvious that two or three fragmentary lines cannot
take the measure of a novel of fty-four chap ters. I dare to recommend this book
to those who read me. The English translation that has insp ired this brief insu
cient note is called The Tale ofG enji; it was also translated into G erman last year
(Die G eschichte vom Prinzen G enji). In French, there is a comp lete translation of
the rst nine chap ters (Le roman de G enji, 1928) and a few p ages in Michel Revon's
Anthologie de la litteraturejap onaise.[1938} [EW} Lord Dunsany, Patches Sunl ht
This book, adorned with hunting and military gures, is the autobiograp hy of Lord
Dunsany: an autobiograp hy that deliberately avoids confessions. This avoidance is
not a mistake: there are autobiograp hies that relentlessly in ict intimacies up on
us, but whose intimacy eludes us; there are others,188 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp erhap s
involuntarily so, that cannot recall a sunset or mention a tiger without revealing
in some way the singular style of the soul who wrote it. Of the former, Frank
Harris is an examp le; of the latter, G eorge Moore . . . Lord Dunsany, too, p refers
the indirect manner; unfortunately that manner, in his hands, is not always e
ective.It is enough to recall some ofthe Dreamer's Tales (for examp le, the one
about the man buried forever in the mud of the Thames by a secret society, or the
one about the sandstorm, or the one about the eld haunted by the dead of a ture
battle) to admit that imagination is not a virtue that Lord Dunsany lacks.
Nevertheless, I susp ect that he has made a mistake in asserting that he has
invented "skies and earths, and kings and p eop les and customs." I susp ect that
this vast invention is limited to a series of p rop er names, p rop p ing up a vague
Oriental ambience. Those names are no less incomp etent than those that bring horror
to the cosmogonies of William Blake (Ololon, Fuzon, G olgonooza), but it is
difficult to share the jubilation of the bap tizer of G lorm, Mlo, Belzund,
Perdondaris, G olnuz, and Kyp h, or his rep entence at having written Babbulkund, City
of Wonders, instead of Babdarun, City of Wonders.Here is a p aragrap h from chap ter
, which describes the Sahara:I
shall always remember how, as we le the station, I li ed my le hand to see the
time by my wrist-watch, and rode into the desert. Time was of enormous imp ortance
on the railway; and so was one's luggage, and there were sp eed and noise there,
among other worries; but in the desert there were only sunrise and sunset to
notice, and noon, when all animals slep t and the gazelles were not to be found.In
this disheveled and comfortable book, Lord Dunsany talks of watches and gazelles,
swords and moons, angels and millionaires. In the whole universe there is only one
thing ofwhich he doesn't sp eak, and that is writers. There are two exp lanations for
this staggering omission. The first(and the most p etty) is that writers do not
sp eak of him. The second (the more p lausible) is that the writers of England may be
as avoidable as those that adorn our city.[EW] BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Two Fantasy
NovelsJacques Sp itz (who, in Sever the Earth, imagined that the Americas slip p ed o
the earth and formed their own p lanet) p lays with dwarves and giants in his latest
book, L'Homme elastique [Elastic Man] . The fact that Wells, Voltaire, and Jonathan
Swift have p reviously p layed this curious anthrop o- metrical game is as obvious and
indisp utable as it is insigni cant. Sp itz's novelty is in the variations he
p rovides. He has imagined a biologist-Dr. Flohr-who discovers a way to reduce or
enlarge atoms, a discovery that allows him to alter the dimensions of living
organisms, p articularly humans. The doctor begins by correcting a dwarf. Later, an
op p ortune Europ ean war allows him to exp and his exp eriments. The War Ministry sends
him seven thousand men. Instead of turning them into ostentatious and vulnerable
giants, Flohr makes them four centimeters tall. These abbreviated warriors secure a
victory for France. Humanity, later on, op ts for a variable stature. There are
p eop le of only a few millimeters, and others who cast enormous threatening shadows.
Sp itz quite humorously investigates the p sychology, ethics, and p olitics of this
uneven humanity.Still stranger is the p lot of Man with Four Lives, by the American
writer William Joyce Cowen. An English cap tain, in the 1918 war, kills four times
the same G erman cap tain, with the same manly features, the same name, the same hea
gold ring with the same seal of a tower and the head of a unicorn. Toward the
end, the author p osits an exp lanation that is quite beautiful: the G erman is an
imp risoned soldier who, through meditation, p rojects a kind of corp oreal p hantom
that ghts and dies again and again for his country. On the last p age, however, the
author absurdly decides that a magical exp lanation is inferior to an unbelievable
exp lanation, and he o ers us four facsimilar brothers, with identical manly
features, names, and unicorns. This p rofusion oftwins, this imp lausible and
cowardly tautology, le me in a stup or. I can only rep eat the words of Adolfo
Becquer:Cuando me lo contaron, senti elfriode una hoja de acero en las entra as
[When they told me, I felt the cold/of a steel blade in my entrails] More stoic than
I am, Hugh Walp ole writes: "I am not quite sure of the veracity of the solution
offered by Mr. Cowen."[1938} [EW} 190 JORG E LUIS BORG ESThe Literary Life: Oliver
G ogartyToward the end of the civil war in Ireland, the p oet Oliver G ogarty was im-
p risoned by some Ulster men in a huge house on the banks of the Barrow, in County
Kildare. He knew that at dawn he would be shot. Under some p retext, he went into
the garden and threw himself into the glacial waters. The night grew large with
gunshots. Swimming under the black water ex- p loding with bullets, he p romised the
river that he would give it two swans if it allowed him to reach the other bank.
The god of the river heard him and saved him, and the p oet later fulfilled his
p ledge.[1938} [EW} An English Version of the Oldest Songs in the WorldAround 1916, I
decided to devote myself to the study of the Oriental literatures. Working with
enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of a certain Chinese
p hilosop her, I came across this memorable p assage: "A man condemned to death
doesn't care that he is standing at the edge of a p recip ice, for he has already
renounced life." Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me
that this interp retation was p referable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had
translated the p assage thus: "The servants destroy the works of art, so that they
will not have to judge their beauties and defects." Then, like Paolo and Francesca,
I read no more. A mysterious skep ticism had slip p ed into my soul.Each time fate
brings me before a "literal version" of some masterp iece of Chinese or Arabian
literature, I remember that sorry incident. Now I recall it again, reading the
translations that Arthur Waley has just p ublished of the Shih Ching, or The Book of
Songs. These songs are of a p op ular nature, and it is believed they were comp osed
by Chinese soldiers or p easants in the seventh or eighth century B.C. Here are some
translations of a few of them. [. . .] [1938} [EW} BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 191Alan
G rif ths, OJ Course, telli!The p lot of this novel is not entirely original (it was
anticip ated by Jules Ro- mains and more than once by reality), but it is extremely
entertaining. The p rotagonist, Roger Diss, invents an anecdote. He tells it to a
few friends, who don't believe him. To p ersuade them, he claims that the event took
p lace around 1850 in the south of England, and he attributes the story to the
"famous cellist Vitelli." Everyone, of course, recognizes this invented name.
Encouraged by his success, Diss p ublishes an article on Vitelli in a local
magazine. Various strangers miraculously ap p ear who p oint out mistakes in the
article, and a p olemic ensues. Diss, victorious, p ublishes a full-length bi-
ograp hy ofVitelli, "with p ortraits, sketches, and manuscrip ts."A movie comp any
acquires the rights to the book and makes a techni- color lm. The critics declare
that the lm has distorted the facts of Vitelli's life. . . . Diss becomes
embroiled in another p olemic, and they demolish him. Furious, he decides to reveal
the hoax. No one believes him, and p eo- p le hint that he has gone mad. The
collective m h is stronger than he is. A Mr. Clutterbuck Vitelli defends the a
ronted memory of his late uncle. A sp iritualist center in Tunbridge Wells receives
direct messages from the deceased. If this were a book by Pirandello, Diss would
end up believing in Vitelli."Every book contains its counter-book," Navalis said.
The counter of this book would be cruel and far stranger. It would be the story of
a group of consp irators who p lot that a certain p erson does not exist or has never
existed.[1938] [EW] A G randiose Manifesto from BretonTwenty years ago there were
swarms of manifestos. Those authoritarian documents rehabilitated art, abolished
p unctuation, avoided sp elling, and o en achieved solecism. If issued by writers,
they delighted in slandering rhyme and exculp ating metap hor; if by p ainters, they
defended (or attacked) p ure color; if by comp osers, they worship ed cacop hony; if
by architects, they p referred the humble gas meter to the cathedral of Milan.
Each, nevertheless, had its moment. Those garrulous sheets (of which I had a192
JORG E LUIS BORG EScollection that I donated to the rep lace) have now been surp assed
by the p amp hlet that Andre Breton and Diego Rivera have just emitted.The p amp hlet
is adamantly titled, For an Indep endent Revolutionary Art: Manifesto by Diego
Rivera and Andre Breton for the De nitive Liberation ofArt. The text is even more
stuttering and e usive. It consists of some three thousand words that say exactly
two (incomp atible) things. The rst is that art should be free and that it is not
free in Russia. Rivera-Breton remark:Under the influence of the totalitarian regime
of the USSR, a deep twilight has extended over the entire world, hostile to the
emergence of any kind of sp iritual value. A twilight of mud and blood in which,
disguised as intellectuals and artists, men who have made servility a recourse,
the denial of their p rincip les a p erverse game, false venal testimony a habit, and
the ap ology for crime a p leasure, p ractice their decep tions. The of cial art of the
Stalinist era reflects their risible attemp ts to deceive and to disguise their true
mercenary role. . . . To those who urge us, be it today or tomorrow, to admit that
art can be subordinated to a discip line which we consider to be radically in-
comp atible with its nature, we offer in op p osition a nameless negative, and our
deliberate decision to ally ourselves to the formula "All license in art."What
conclusions may we draw from this? I believe, and only believe, that Marxism (like
Lutheranism, like the moon, like a horse, like a line from Shakesp eare) may be a
stimulus for art, but it is absurd to decree that it is the only one. It is absurd
for art to be a dep artment of p olitics. That, however, is p recisely what this
incredible manifesto claims. Having barely stamp ed the formula "All license in
art:' Breton rep ents his daring and dedicates two fleeting p ages to the denial of
that reckless statement. He rejects "p olitical indi erence," denounces p ure art,
"which generally serves the most imp ure aims of reaction," and p roclaims that "the
sup reme task of contemp orary art is to p articip ate consciously and actively in the
p rep aration of revolution." He then p rop oses "the organization of modest local
and international congresses." Eager to exhaust the delights of rhymed p rose, he
announces that "in the next stage, a world congress will meet for the o cial
dedication of the foundation of the International Federation of Indep endent
RevolutionaryArt (IFIRA)."BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 193A p oor indep endent art they are
imagining, subordinate to the p edantries
of committees and ve cap ital letters![193 8} [EW} H. G . Wells' Latest NovelExcep t
for the always astonishing Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (which the
English, equally beautifully, called The Arabian Nights) I believe that it is safe
to say that the most celebrated works of world literature have the worst titles.
For examp le, it is di cult to conceive of a more op aque and visionless title than
The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, although one must grant that The
Sorrows of Y oung Werther or Crime and Punishment are almost as dreadful. . . . (In
p oetry, I need only mention one unforgivable name: Flowers ofEvil.) I raise these
illustrious examp les so that my readers will not tell me that a book with the
absurd title Ap rop os ofDolores must necessarily be unreadable.Ap rop os ofDolores is
sup er cially identical to the p sychological detective novels of Francis lies. Its
p ages detail the initial love and growing unbearable hatred between a man and a
woman. In order for there to be a suitably tragic outcome, it would have been
convenient if we gradually sensed that the narrator would end up killing the woman.
But of course Wells is not interested in tragic p resentiments. He does not believe
in the solemnity of either death or murder itself. No one is less disp osed toward
nerals, no one less likely to believe that the nal day is more imp ortant than
those p revious. It is not unjust to say that Wells is interested in everything,
excep t p erhap s the story he is telling at that moment. Of the human beings who
comp rise this talkative book, he is interested in only one: Do- lores Wilbeck. The
others must hop elessly comp ete with biology, ethnogra- p hy, and p olitics. Among the
p erp etual digressions in which the author takes p leasure, there is this invective
against the G reeks:"Hellenic culture! Have you asked yourself what it was?
Omnip resent Corinthian cap itals, buildings p ainted red, p ink statues, bosses in the
atri- ums, the incessant resounding Homer and his hysterical heroes, p ure tears and
rhetoric."[19381 [EW} 194 JORG E LUIS BORG ESE. S. Pankhurst, De hos) or the Future
International LanguageThis entertaining book p retends to be a general defense of
arti cial languages and a p articular defense of "Interlingua;' Peano's simp li ed
Latin. It ap p ears to have been written with enthusiasm, but the strange
circumstance of the author having based her documentation exclusively on the
articles contributed to the Encyclop edia Britannica by Dr. Henry Sweet leads us to
sup p ose that her enthusiasm is rather moderate or fictitious.The author (and Dr.
Henry Sweet) divide arti cial languages into a p riori and a p osteriori; that is,
original and derived languages. The former are ambitious and imp ractical. Their
sup erhuman goal is to classi , in a p ermanent fashion, all human ideas. They do
not consider a definitive classifi- cation of reality to be imp ossible, and they
p lot dizzying inventories of the universe. The most illustrious of these
rationalizing catalogs is undoubtedly that of John Wilkins, in 1668. Wilkins
distributed the universe into forty categories, indicated by two-letter
monosyllabic names. Those categories were subdivided into genuses (indicated by a
consonant), and the genuses into sp ecies (indicated by a vowel). Thus de meant
element, deb was fire, and deba a flame.Two hundred years later, Letellier invented
a similar p rocess. A, in the international language he p rop osed, stood for animal,
ab for mammal, abo for carnivore, aboj for feline, aboje for cat, abod for canine,
abode for dog, abi for herbivore, abiv for equine, abive for horse, abivu for
donkey.The languages comp osed a p osteriori are less interesting. Of all of them,
the most comp lex is Volap iik. It was invented in 1879 by a G erman p riest, Johann
Martin Schleyer, in order to p romote p eace among nations. In 1880, he added the
nishing touches and dedicated it to G od. His vocabulary is absurd, but his
ability to encomp ass many nuances in a single word merits some resp ect. Volap k is
interminably abundant with in ections: a verb may have 505,440 di erent forms.
(PeglidalOd, for examp le, means "Y ou ought to be greeted.")Volap k was disp laced by
Esp eranto, Esp eranto by Neutral Idiom, Neutral Idiom by Interlingua. The latter
two-"equitable, simp le, and economical," according to Lugones-are immediately
comp rehensible to those who know a Romance language. Here is a sentence written in
Neutral Idiom:Idiom Neutral es usabl no sole p ra skribasion, a etp ro p erlasion;
sikause in kongres internasional de medisinisti mi av intension sar ist idiom p ro
mieBOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 195rap ort di maladrit "lup us," e mi esp er esar komp rended
p er omni medisinisti p resent.[1939} {EW} Joyce's Latest NovelWork in Progress has
ap p eared at last, now titled Finnegans Wake, and is, they tell us, the rip ened and
lucid fruit of sixteen energetic years of literary labor. I have examined it with
some bewilderment, have unenthusiastically decip hered nine or ten calembours, and
have read the terror-stricken p raise in the N.R.F. and the L.S. The trenchant
authors of those accolades claim that they have discovered the rules of this
comp lex verbal labyrinth, but they abstain from ap p lying or formulating them; nor
do they attemp t the analysis of a single line or p aragrap h. . . . I susp ect that
they share my essential bewilderment and my useless and p artial glances at the
text. I susp ect that they secretly hop e (as I p ublicly do) for an exegetical
treatise from Stu- art G ilbert, the of cial interp reter ofJames Joyce.It is
unquestionable that Joyce is one of the best writers of our time. Verbally, he is
p erhap s the best. In Ulysses there are sentences, there are p aragrap hs, that are
not inferior to Shakesp eare or Sir Thomas Browne. In Finnegans Wake itself there
are some memorable p hrases. (This one, for examp le, which I will not attemp t to
translate: "Beside the rivering waters of, hither and thithering waters of,
night.") In this enormous book, however, e cacy is an excep tion.Finnegans Wake is a
concatenation of p uns committed in a dreamlike English that is di cult not to
categorize as frustrated and incomp etent. I don't think that I am exaggerating.
Ameise, in G erman, means "ant." Joyce, in Work in Progress, combines it with the
English amazingto coin the adjective ameising, meaning the wonder insp ired by an
ant. Here is another examp le, p erhap s less lugubrious. Joyce fuses the English
words banister and star into a single word, banistar, that combines both images.
Jules Lafargue and Lewis Carroll have p layed this game with better luck.[1939} [EW}
JORG E LUIS BORG ES The Literary Life: The Dionne QuintsOne of the disconcerting
features of our time is the enthusiasm generated across the entire p lanet by the
Dionne sisters, for numerical and biological reasons. Dr. William Blatz has devoted
a large volume to them, p redictably illustrated with charming p hotograp hs. In the
third chap ter, he states: "Y vonne is easily recognizable for being the eldest,
Marie for being the youngest, nette because everyone mistakes her for Y vonne, and
Cecile because she is comp letely identical to Emilie."[1939} [EW} NOTES ON G ERMANY &
THE WARA Pedagogy of HatredDisp lays of hatred are even more obscene and denigrating
than exhibition- ism. I de p ornograp hers to show me a p icture more vile than any
of the twenty-two illustrations that comp rise the children's book Trau keinem Fuchs
aufgruenerHeid und keinem ] ud bei seinem Eid [Don't Trust Any Fox from a Heath or
Any Jew on his Oath] whose fourth edition now infests Bavaria. It was rst
p ublished a year ago, in 1936, and has already sold 51,000 cop ies. Its goal is to
instill in the children of the Third Reich a distrust and animosity toward Jews.
Verse (we know the mnemonic virtues of rhyme) and color engravings (we know how e
ective images are) collaborate in this veritable textbook of hatred.Take any p age:
for examp le, p age 5. Here I nd, not without justi able bewilderment, this didactic
p oem-"The G erman is a p roud man who knows how to work and struggle. Jews detest him
because he is so handsome and enterp rising"-followed by an equally informative
and exp licitquatrain: "Here's the Jew, recognizable to all, the biggest scoundrel
in the whole kingdom. He thinks he's wonderful, and he's horrible." The engrav-
ings are more astute: the G erman is a Scandinavian, eighteen-year-old athlete,
p lainly p ortrayed as a worker; the Jew is a dark Turk, obese and middle-aged.
Another sop histic feature is that the G erman is clean-shaven and the Jew, while
bald, is very hairy. (It is well known that G erman Jews are Ashkenazim, cop p er-
haired Slavs. In this book they are p resented as dark half-breeds so that they'll
ap p ear to be the exact op p osite of the blond beasts. Their attributes also include
the p ermanent use of a fez, a rolled cigar, and ruby rings.) other engraving shows
a lecherous dwarf trying to seduce a young G erman lady with a necklace. In another,
the father rep rimands his daughter200 JORG E LUIS BORG ESfor accep ting the gi s and
p romises of Solly Rosenfeld, who certainly will not make her his wife. Another
dep icts the foul body odor and shoddy negligence of Jewish butchers. (How could
this be, with all the p recautions they take to make meat kosher?) Another, the
disadvantages of being swindled by a lawyer, who solicits from his clients a
constant flow of flour, fresh eggs, and veal cutlets. A er a year of this, the
clients have lost their case but the Jewish lawyer "weighs two hundred and forty
p ounds." Y et another dep icts the op p ortune exp ulsion of Jewish p rofessors as a
relief for the children: "We want a G erman teacher," shout the enthusiastic p up ils,
"a joyful teacher who knows how to p lay with us and maintain order and discip line.
We want a G erman teacher who will teach us common sense." It
is di cult not to share such asp irations.What can one say about such a book?
Personally I am outraged, less for Israel's sake than for G ermany's, less for the o
ended community than for the o ensive nation. I don't know if the world can do
without G erman civilization, but I do know that its corrup tion by the teachings
of hatred is a cnme.[19371 [SJL)A Disturbing Exp ositionDoctor Johannes Rohr (of
Berlin) has revised, rewritten, and G ermanized the very G ermanic G eschichte der
deutschen National-Literatur [History of G erman Literature] by A. C. Vilmar. In
editions p revious to the Third Reich, Vilmar's work was decidedly mediocre; now it
is alarming. This p erverse catalog includes about seven hundred authors but,
incredibly, silences the name of Heine.Nennt man die besten NamenSo wird auch der
meine genannt[When the best men were named/my name was among them] wrote Heine
around 1823, not foreseeing that the racial p edantry of 1938 would contradict him.
Also obliterated are Franz Werfel, Alfred Doblin, Jo- hannes Becher, Wilhelm Klemm,
G ustav Meyrink, M Brad, Franz Kafka, G ottfried Benn, Martin Buber, Albert
Ehrenstein, Fritz von Unruh, Kasimir Edschmid, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig,
Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria NOTES ON G ERMANY & THE WAR 201Remarque, and Bertholt
Brecht. . . . I do not want to list names; I need only recall that three of them-
Becher, Doblin, Franz Kafka-belong to extraordinary writers and that, among the
others, there is not one that in all honesty should be excluded from a history of
G erman literature. The (un- reasonable) reasons for this manifold silence are
evident: most of those eliminated are Jewish, none is a National Socialist. As for
the rest of the book, let us examine one of the last p ages, number 435. Written on
that severe p age is: "Rivers of re of a verbal p otency p reviously unheard on
G erman soil inundated the p eop le: the great sp eeches of the Fuhrer, swelling with
lo y thoughts, yet op ened wide to the understanding of the simp le man, thoughts
braced by remote, almost invisible hop e, and yet instantly revered." Next we are
regaled with a eulogy of the literary labors of Josep h G oebbels, the unexp ected
author of a vast symbolic novel "which because of the exemp lary, vital,
revolutionary conduct of the hero, its manly but chaste idealism and ery language,
is the book of the new youth and youths everywhere."The book TheMyth ofthe
Twentieth CenturybyAlfredRosen- berg p rovokes yet another enthusiastic critique.
(How immeasurable is Rohr's anti-Semitism! It p rohibits any mention of Heine in a
history of G erman literature, but allows him to extol Rosenberg.)As if that were
not enough, G oethe, Lessing, and Nietzsche have been distorted and mutilated.
Fichte and Hegel ap p ear, but there is not even a mention of Schop enhauer. Of Stefan
G eorge we are informed only of a lively p reamble which advantageously p re gures
Adolf Hitler . . .Things are worse in Russia, I hear p eop le say. I in nitely agree,
but Rus- sia does not interest us as much as G ermany. G ermany-along with France,
England, the United States-is one of the essential nations of the western world.
Hence we feel devastated by its chaotic descent into darkness, hence the
symp tomatic seriousness of such books as this.I nd it normal for the G ermans to
reject the treaty ofVersailles. (There is no good Europ ean who does not detest that
ruthless contrivance.) I nd it normal to detest the Rep ublic, an op p ortunistic
(and servile) scheme to ap - p ease Wilson. I nd it normal to sup p ort with fervor a
man who p romises to defend their honor. I nd it insane to sacri ce to that honor
their culture, their p ast, and their honesty, and to p erfect the criminal arts of
barbarians.[19] 8} [SJL} 202 JORG E LUIS BORG ESAn Essay on NeutralityIt is easy to
p rove that an immediate (and even instantaneous) effect of this much-desired war
has been the extinction or abolishment of all intellectual p rocesses. I am not
sp eaking of Europ e, where G eorge Bernard Shaw luckily endures; I am thinking of the
charlatans and ap ologists that indefatigable fate obliges me to encounter on the
streets and in the houses of Buenos Aires. Exclamations have taken over the nction
of reasoning; it is true that the scatterbrains who carelessly utter them give
their slogans a discursive air, and that this tenuous syntactical simulacrum satis
es and p ersuades whoever hap p ens to be listening. He who swears that the war is a
kind of liberal jihad against dictatorship s yearns, in the next minute, for
Mussolini to fight Hitler, an act that would annihilate his thesis. He who swore
forty days ago that Warsaw was imp regnable, now wonders (sincerely) how it held out
so long. He who denounces the English for being p irates is the same one who
ardently declares that Adolf Hitler is acting in the sp irit of Zarathustra, beyond
good and evil. He who p roclaims that Nazism is a regime that frees us from
p arliamentary charlatans and hands the government of nations over to a group of
"strong silent men," listens in awe to the e sions of the incessant Hitler or-an
even more secret p leasure- G oring. He who p raises the current inaction of the
French troop s will ap - p laud tonight the rst signs of an offensive. He who
disap p roves of Hitler's greed, greets Stalin's with veneration. The bitter p romise
of the immediate disintegration of the unjust British Emp ire also shows that
G ermany has the right to p ossess colonies. (We should note, in p assing, that the
juxtap o- sition of the terms colonies and right is what some dead science-logic-
denominates as a contradictio in adjecto.) He who rejects with sup erstitious fear
the mere insinuation that the Reich can be defeated, p retends that the slightest
success of its weap ons is an incomp rehensible miracle. I shall not continue: I do
not want this p age to be in nite.I must take care, then, not to add an exclamation
to the already innumerable ones that are overwhelming us. (I do not understand,
for examp le, how someone could p refer a G erman victory to an English one: it would
be easy for me to attach a gure of logic to such a conviction, but I cannot de-
fend a raison de coeur.)Those who hate Hitler usually hate G ermany. I have always
admired G ermany. My blood and love of literature make me a natural ally of En-
gland; the years and books draw me to France; but to G ermany, p ure incli-NOTES ON
G ERMANY & THE WAR 203nation. (That inclination moved me, around 1917, to undertake
the study of G erman, without any guide other than Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo and
a laconic, sp oradically dep endable G erman-English glossary.) I am certainly not one
of those fake G ermanists who p raise the eternal G ermany in order to deny it any
p articip ation in the p resent. I am not sure that having p roduced Leibniz and
Schop enhauer crip p les G ermany's cap acity for p olitical action. Nobody asks England
to choose between its Emp ire and Shake- sp eare, nor insists in France that
Descartes and Conde are incomp atible. I naively believe that a p owerful G ermany
would not have saddened Novalis or been rep udiated by Holderlin. I detest Hitler
p recisely because he does not share my faith in the G erman p eop le; he has decided
that to undo 1918, the only p ossible lesson is barbarism; the best incentive,
concentration camp s. Bernard Shaw, on this p oint, coincides with the melancholy F
hrer and thinks that only an incessant regime of marches, countermarches, and
salutes to the flag can turn the p lacid G ermans into p assable warriors. . . . If I
had the tragic honor of being G erman, I would not resign myself to sacri cing to
mere military ef ciency the intelligence and integrity of my fatherland; if I were
English or French, I would be grateful for the p erfectcoincidence of my country's
p articular cause with the universal cause of humanity.It is p ossible that a G erman
defeat might be the ruin of G ermany; it is indisp utable that its victory would
debase and destroy the world. I am not referring to the imaginary danger of a South
American colonial adventure; I am thinking of those native imitators, those
homesp un Ubermenschen that inexorable chance would bring down up on us.I hop e the
years will bring us the ausp icious annihilation of Adolf Hitler, this atrocious o
sp ring ofVersailles.{1939] {S] LjDefinition of a G ermanop hileThe imp lacable
detractors of etymology argue that the origins of words do not instruct us in what
they now mean; its defenders could rep ly that origins always instruct us in what
words no longer mean. They demonstrate, for examp le, that p onti s are not builders
of bridges; that miniatures are not p ainted with minium; that crystal is not
comp osed of ice; that the leop - ard is not a cross between a p anther and a lion;
that a candidate need not be robed in white; that sarcop hagi are not the op p osite
of vegetarians; that204 JORG E LUIS BORG ESalligators are not lizards; that rubrics
are not red; that the discoverer of America was not Amerigo Vesp ucci; and that
G ermanop hiles are not devotees of G ermany.This last is neither incorrect, nor
even an exaggeration. I have been naive enough to talk with many Argentine
G ermanop hiles; I have tried to sp eak of G ermany and the G erman things that are
imp erishable; I have mentioned Holderlin, Luther, Schop enhauer, and Leibniz; I have
discovered that my "G ermanop hile" interlocutor could barely identi those names and
p referred to discuss a more or less Antarctic archip elago that the English
discovered in 1592 and whose relation to G ermany I have yet to p erceive.Total
ignorance of things G ermanic does not, however, exhaust the de nition of our
G ermanop hiles. There are other unique characteristics that are, p erhap s, equally
essential. Among them: the G ermanop hile is greatly distressed that the railroad
comp anies of a certain South American rep ublic have English stockholders. He is
also troubled by the hardship s of the
South African war of 1902. He is also anti-Semitic, and wishes to exp el from our
country a Slavo-G ermanic community in which names of G erman origin p redominate
(Rosenblatt, G ruenberg, Nierenstein, Lilienthal) and which sp eaks a G erman dialect:
Y iddish.One might infer from this that the G ermanop hile is actually an Anglo-
p hobe. He is p erfectly ignorant of G ermany, and reserves his enthusiasm for any
country at war with England. We shall see that such is the truth, but not the whole
truth, nor even its most significant p art. To demonstrate this I will reconstruct,
reducing it to its essentials, a conversation I have had with many G ermanop hiles-
something in which I swear never to involve myself again, for the time granted to
mortals is not in nite and the fruit of these discussions is vain.Invariably, my
interlocutor begins by condemning the Treaty of Ver- sailles, imp osed by sheer
force on G ermany in 1919. Invariably, I illustrate the inculp atory judgment with a
text from Wells or Bernard Shaw, who, in the hour of victory, denounced that
imp lacable document. The G ermanop hile never rejects this text. He p roclaims that
a victorious country must abjure op p ression and vengeance. He p roclaims it natural
that G ermany wanted to annul that outrage. I share his op inion. A erward, imme-
diately a erward, the inexp licable occurs. My p rodigious interlocutor argues that
the old injustice su ered by G ermany authorizes it, in 1940, to destroy not only
England and France (why not Italy?), but also Denmark, Holland, and Norway, who are
all comp letely free of blame for that injustice. In 1919, G ermany was badly
treated by its enemies: that all-p ower lNOTES ON G ERMANY & THE WAR 205reason now
allows it to burn, raze, and conquer all the nations of Europ e and p erhap s the
globe. . . . The reasoning is monstrous, as can be seen.I timidly p oint out this
monstrousness to my interlocutor. He laughs at my antiquated scrup les and raises
Jesuitical or Nietzschean arguments: the end justi es the means, necessity knows no
law, there is no law other than the will of the strongest, the Reich is strong, the
air forces of the Reich have destroyed Coventry, etc. I mumble that I am resigned
to p assing from the morality of Jesus to that of Zarathustra or the Black Ant but
that our rap id conversion then p rohibits us from p itying G ermany for the injustice
it suffered in 1919. On that date which he does not want to forget, England and
France were strong; there is no law other than the will of the strongest;
therefore, those calumnied nations acted correctly in wanting to ruin G ermany,
and one cannot condemn them for anything other than having been indecisive (and
even culp ably merciful) in the execution of that p lan. Dis- daining these dry
abstractions, my interlocutor begins or outlines a p anegyric to Hitler: that
p rovidential man whose indefatigable discourses p reach the extinction of all
charlatans and demagogues, and whose incendiary bombs, unmitigated by verbose
declarations of war, announce from the rmament the ruin of rap acious imp erialism.
A erward, immediately a erward, a second wonder occurs. It is of a moral nature
and almost unbelievable.I always discover that my interlocutor idolizes Hitler, not
in sp ite of the high-altitude bombs and the rumbling invasions, the machine guns,
the accusations and lies, but because of those acts and instruments. He is de-
lighted by evil and atrocity. The triump h of G ermany does not matter to him; he
wants the humiliation of England and a satis ing burning of Lon- don. He admires
Hitler as he once admired his p recursors in the criminal underworld of Chicago. The
discussion becomes imp ossible because the of- fenses I ascribe to Hitler are, for
him, wonders and virtues. The ap ologists of Amigas, Ramirez, Quiroga, Rosas, or
Urquiza p ardon or gloss over their crimes; the defender of Hitler derives a sp ecial
p leasure from them. The Hitlerist is always a sp iteful man, and a secret and
sometimes p ublic worship er of criminal "vivacity" and cruelty. He is, thanks to a
p overty of imagination, a man who believes that the future cannot be di erent from
the p resent, and that G ermany, till now victorious, cannot lose. He is the cunning
man who longs to be on the winning side.It is not entirely imp ossible that there
could be some justi cation for Adolf Hitler; I know there is none for the
G ermanop hile.[1940} [EW} 206 JORG E LUIS BORG ES The notion of an atrocious consp iracy
by G ermany to conquer and op p ress all the countries of the atlas is (I rush to
admit) irrevocably banal. It seems an invention of Maurice Leblanc, of Mr. Phillip s
Op p enheim, or of Baldur von Schirach. Notoriously anachronistic, it has the
unmistakable flavor of 1914. Symp tomatic of a p oor imagination, grandiosity, and
crass make- believe, this dep lorable G erman fable counts on the comp licity of the
oblique Jap anese and the docile, untrustworthy Italians, a circumstance that makes
it even more ridiculous . . . Unfortunately, reality lacks literary scru- p les. All
liberties are p ermitted, even a coincidence with Maurice Leblanc. As versatile as
it is monotonous, reality lacks nothing, not even the p urest indigence. Two
centuries a er the p ublished ironies ofVoltaire and Swift, our astonished eyes
have seen the Eucharist Congress; men lminated against by Juvenal rule the
destinies of the world. That we are readers of Russell, Proust, and Henry James
matters not; we are in the rudimentary world of the slave Aesop and cacop honic
Marinetti. Ours is a p aradoxical destiny.Le vrai p eut quelque fois n'etre p as
vraisemblable: the unbelievable, indisp utable truth is that the directors of the
Third Reich are p rocuring a universal emp ire, the conquest of the world. I will
not enumerate the countries they have already attacked and p lundered, not wishing
this p age to be in - nite. Y esterday the G ermanop hiles swore that the maligned
Hitler did not even dream ofattacking this continent; now they justi and p raise
his latest hostility. They have ap p lauded the invasion of Norway and G reece, the
So- viet Rep ublics and Holland; who knows what celebrations theywill unleash the
day our cities and shores are razed. It is childish to be imp atient; Hitler's
charity is ecumenical; in short (if the traitors and Jews don't disrup t him) we
will enjoy all the bene ts of torture, sodomy, rap e, and mass executions. Do not
our p lains abound in Lebens um, unlimited and p recious matter? Someone, to
frustrate our hop es, observes that we are very far away. My answer to him is that
colonies are always far from the metrop olis; the Belgian Congo is not on the
borders of Belgium.[1941} {SJL} Two BooksWells' latest book-G uide to the New World:
A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution-runs the risk of seeming, at rst
glance, like a mere encyclop edia of insults. His extremely readable p ages
denounce the F hrer, who squeals "like a grip p ed rabbit"; G oring, who " 'destroys'
towns overnight and they resume work and sweep up their broken glass in the
morning"; Eden, who, "having wedded himself to the p oor dead League of Nations,
still cannot believe it dead"; Josep h Stalin, who, in an unreal dialect,
continues to defend the dictatorship of the p roletariat, although "nobody knows
really what and where this 'p roletariat' is, still less do they know how and where
it dictates"; "the absurd Ironside"; the generals of the French army, "beaten by a
sudden realization of their own unp rep aredness and incomp etence, by tanks that had
been made in Czechoslovakia, by radio voices around them, and behind them,
messenger boys on motor bicy- cles who told them to surrender"; the "p ositive will
for defeat" of the British aristocracy; the "sp ite slum," southern Ireland; the
British Foreign O ce, which, although "the G ermans have already lost it, seem to be
doing their utmost to throw it back to them"; Sir Samuel Hoare, "not only silly
mentally but morally silly"; the Americans and English who "betrayed the liberal
cause in Sp ain"; those who believe that this war is "a war of ideologies" and not a
criminal formula "of the current disorder"; the naifs who imagine that merely
exorcising or destroying the demons G oring and Hitler will makethe world a
p aradise.I have gathered some of Wells' invectives: they are literarily memorable;
some strike me as unjust, but they demonstrate the imp artiality of his hatred or
his indignation. They also demonstrate the freedom enjoyed by writers in England,
even in the crucial hours of the battle. More imp ortant than his ep igrammatic ill-
humor (the few examp les I have given could easily be trip led or quadrup led) is the
doctrine of this revolutionary manual. That doctrine may be summarized as a sp eci c
alternative: either Britain identi es her cause with that of a general revolution
(with that of a federated world), or victory is unattainable and worthless. Chap ter
XII (p p . 48-54) establishes the basic p rincip les of the new world. The three nal
chap ters discuss some lesser p roblems.Wells, incredibly, is not a Nazi. Incredibly,
because nearly all my contemp oraries are, although they either deny it or don't
know it. Since 1925, no writer has failed to claim that the inevitable and trivial
fact of having been208 JORG E LUIS BORG ESborn in a certain country and of belonging
to a certain race (or certain mixture of races) is a singular p rivilege and an
effective talisman. Defenders of democracy, who believe themselves to be quite
different from G oebbels, urge their readers, in the same language as the enemy, to
listen to the beating of a heart that answers the call of the blood and the land.
I remember, during the Sp anish Civil War, certain imp enetrable discussions. Some
declared themselves Rep ublicans; others, Nationalists; others, Marxists; yet all,
in a lexicon of a G auleite sp oke of the Race and of the Peop le. Even the men of
the hammer and the sic e turned out to be racists. . . . I also remember with
some amazement a certain assembly that was convoked to condemn anti-Semitism. For
various reasons, I am not an anti-Semite; the p rincip al one is that I find the di
erence between Jews and non-Jews generally insigni cant, and sometimes illusory
or imp ercep tible. No one, that day, wanted to share my op inion; they all swore that
a G erman Jew was vastly di erent from a G erman. In vain I reminded them that Adolf
Hitler said the same thing; in vain I suggested that an assembly against racism
should not tolerate the doctrine of a Chosen Peop le; in vain I quoted the wise
words of Mark Twain: "I have no race p rejudices. . . . All that I care to know is
that a man is a human being-that is enough for me; he can't be any worse." ( The
Man that Corrup ted Hadleyburg, 204).In this book, as in others-The Fate ofHomo
Sap iens (1939), The Com- mon Sense ofWar and Peace (1940)-Wells exhorts us to
remember our essential humanity and to sup p ress our miserable differential
traits, no matter how p oignant or p icturesque. In fact, that sup p ression is not
exorbitant: it merely demands of states, for a better coexistence, what an
elementary courtesy demands of individuals. "No one in his right mind," says Wells,
"thinks the British are a chosen p eop le, a more noble sp ecies of Nazis, who are
disp uting the hegemony of the world with the G ermans. They are the battle front of
humanity. If they are not that front, they are nothing. That duty is a p rivilege."
Let the Peop le Think is the title of a selection of essays by Bertrand Rus- sell.
Wells, in the book I outlined above, urges us to rethink the history of the world
without geograp hical, economic, or ethnic p references; Russell also advises
universality. In the third article, "Free Thought and Of cial Prop aganda," he
p rop oses that elementary schools teach the art of reading the newsp ap er with
incredulity. I believe that this Socratic discip line would not be useless. Of the
p eop le I know, very few p ractice it at all. They let themselves be deceived by
typ ograp hical or syntactical devices; they think that an event has occurred because
it is p rinted in large black letters; theyNOTES ON G ERMANY & THE WAR 209don't want
to know that the statement "All the aggressor's attemp ts to advance beyond B have
failed miserably" is merely a eup hemism for admitting the loss of B. Even worse:
they p ractice a kind of magic, and think that to exp ress any fear is to collaborate
with the enemy. . . . Russell p rop oses that the State attemp t to immunize p eop le
against such decep tions and sop h- istries. For examp le, he suggests that students
should study Nap oleon's nal defeats through the ostensibly triump hant bulletins in
Moniteur. A typ ical assignment would be to read the history of the wars with France
in English textbooks, and then to rewrite that history from the French p oint of
view. Our own "nationalists" have already adop ted that p aradoxical method: they
teach Argentine history from a Sp anish viewp oint, if not Quechua or QuerandLOf the
other articles, among the most accurate is the one entitled "G e- nealogy of
Fascism." The author begins by observing that p olitical events derive from much
older theories, and that o en a great deal of time may elap se between the
formulation of a doctrine and its ap p lication. This is so: the "burning reality;'
which exasp erates or exalts us and frequently annihilates us, is nothing but an
imp erfect reverberation of former discussions. Hitler, so horrendous with his
p ublic armies and secret sp ies, is a p leonasm of Carlyle (1795-1881) and even of J.
G . Fichte (1762-1814); Lenin, a transcrip tion of Karl Marx. That is why the true
intellectual refuses to take p art in contemp orary debates: reality is always
anachronous.Russell ascribes the theory of fascism to Fichte and to Carlyle. The
former, in the fourth and fth of the famous Reden an die deutsche Nation, at-
tributes the sup eriority of the G ermans to their uninterrup ted p ossession of a p ure
language. Such reasoning is almost inexhaustibly fallacious; we can hyp othesize
that there is no p ure language on earth (even if the words were, the
rep resentations would not be; although Sp anish-language p urists say dep orte, they
write sp ort); we can recall that G erman is less "p ure" than Basque or Hottentot; we
can ask why an unmixed language should be p referable. . . . Carlyle's
contribution is more comp lex and more eloquent. In 1843, he wrote that democracy
was the desp air of not nding heroes to lead us. In 1870, he hailed the victory of
"noble, p atient, deep , p ious and solid G ermany" over "vap ouring, vainglorious,
gesticulatory, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France" (Miscellanies VII,
251). He p raised the Middle Ages, condemned the windbags of Parliament, defended
the memory of the god Thor, William the Bastard, Knox, Cromwell, Frederick II, the
taciturn Dr. Francia, and Nap oleon; longed for a world that was not "chaos equip p ed
with ballot urns"; dep lored the abolition of slavery; p rop osed that statues,210
JORG E LUIS BORG ES"horrible bronze solecisms," be converted into bronze bathtubs;
p raised the death p enalty; rejoiced that every town had a barracks; adulated and
invented the Teutonic Race. Those who yearn for rther imp recations or ap otheoses
may consult Past and Present (1843) and the Latter-Day Pam- p hlets (1850).Bertrand
Russell concludes: "In a certain sense, it is legitimate to state that the
atmosp here at the beginning of the eighteenth century was rational, and that of
our time is antirational." I would omit the timid adverbial p hrase with which the
sentence begins.{1941} {EW} A Co ent on August 23, 1944That crowded day gave me
three distinct surp rises: the p hysical degree of joy I felt when they told me that
Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the
p uzzling and agrant enthusiasm of many who were sup p orters of Hitler. I know that
if I question that enthusiasm, I may easily resemble those futile hydrograp hers
who asked why a single ruby was enough to arrest the course of a river; many will
accuse me of trying to exp lain a fantastic event. Still, it hap p ened, and thousands
of p ersons in Buenos Aires can bear witness.I realized immediately that it was
useless to ask those p eop le themselves. They are fickle, and by behaving
incoherently they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justi ed. They adore
the G erman race, but they abhor "Saxon" erica; they condemn the articles of
Versailles, but they ap p laud the wonders of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic,
but they p rofess a religion of Hebrew origin; they celebrate submarine warfare, but
they vigorously condemn British acts of p iracy; they denounce imp erialism, but they
defend and p roclaim the theory of Lebensraum; they idolize San Martin, but they
regard the indep endence of America as a mistake; they ap p ly the canon of Jesus to
the actions of England, but the canon of Zara- thustra to those of G ermany.I also
re ected that any other uncertainty was p referable to the uncertainty of a
dialogue with these siblings of chaos, exonerated from honor and p iety by the in
nite rep etition of the interesting formula I am Argentine. Furthermore, did Freud
not argue and Walt Whitman not foresee that menNOTES ON G ERMANY & THE WAR 211have
very little knowledge of the real motives for their conduct? Perhap s, I said to
myself, the magic of the symbols Paris and liberation is so p owerful that Hitler's
p artisans have forgotten that the defeat of his forces is the meaning of those
symbols. Wearily, I chose to imagine that the p robable ex- p lanation for this
conundrum was their fear, their inconstancy, and their mere adherence to reality.
Several nights later, I was enlightened by a book and a memory. The book was Shaw's
Man and Sup erman; the p assage in question was John Tan- ner's metap hysical dream,
where he a rms that the horror of Hell is its unreality. This conviction can be
comp ared with the doctrine of another Irishman, John Scotus Erigena, who denied the
substantive existence of sin and evil, and declared that all creatures, including
the Devil, will return to G od. The memory was the day that had been the exact and
hateful op p osite ofAugust 23, 1944: June 14, 1940. A certain G ermanop hile, whose
name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway,
he announced the dreadful news: the Nazi armies had occup ied Paris. I felt a con
sion of sadness, disgust, malaise. Then it occurred to me that his insolent joy
did not exp lain the stentorian voice or the abrup t p roclamation. He added that the
G erman troop s would soon be in London. Any op p osition was useless, nothing could
p revent their victory. That was when I knew that he, too, was terri ed.I do not
know whether the facts I have related require clari cation. I believe I can
interp ret them like this: for Europ eans and Americans, one order and only one is
p ossible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a
Nazi (to p lay the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tar- tar, sixteenth-century
conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, a er all, mentally and morally imp ossible.
Nazism su ers from unreality, like Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can
only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate dep ths
of his being, can wish it to triump h. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to
be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will
annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that
they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.[19441 [SJL} 212
JORG E LUIS BORG ESA Note on the PeaceA worthy heir of the English nominalists, H. G .
Wells rep eats that to sp eak of the desires of Iraq or the p ersp icacity of
Holland is to fall into foolish mythologies. France, he likes to remind us,
consists of children, women, and men; it is not a temp estuous woman with a liberty
cap . To this admoni- tion, we may resp ond, with the nominalist Hume, that every
p erson is equally p lural and consists of a series of p ercep tions; or with Plutarch,
"No- body is what he was, nor will be what he is now"; or with Heraclitus, "No one
step s into the same river twice." To sp eak is to make metap hors, to falsi ; to
sp eak is to resign oneself to being G ongora. We know (or think we know) that
history is a p erp lexing, incessant web of causes and effects; that web, in its
natural comp lexity, is inconceivable; we cannot think about it without resorting to
the names of nations. Moreover, such names are ideas that op erate within history,
that rule and transform history.Having said this, I would like to state that, for
me, one single fact justi- es this tragic moment; that joyous fact, which no one
can ignore and few can evaluate, is England's victory. To say that England has
triump hed is to say that Western civilization has triump hed, that Rome has
triump hed;1 it is also the triump h of that secret p ortion of divinity that exists
in the soul of every p erson, even that of the executioner destroyed by this
victory. I am not fabricating a p aradox; the p sychology of the G ermanop hile is that
of the defender of gangsters, of Evil; we all know that during the war the his-
torical triump hs of G ermany interested him less than the notion of a secret army or
of the satis ing burning of London.The military strength of the three nations that
have thwarted the G erman comp lot is more equally admirable than the cultures they
rep resent. The United States has not ful lled the great p romise of its nineteenth
century; Russia naturally combines the stigmas of the rudimentary, the schol-
arly, the p edantic, and the tyrannical. Of England, of the comp lex and almost in
nite England, of that torn and lateral island that rules continents and seas, I
will not risk a de nition; it is enough to recall that it is p erhap s1In Macaulay's
Lays of Ancient Rome (so vili ed by Arnold), Rome is almost a metap hor for England;
the feeling of an identity between the two is the basic theme of Kip ling's Puck of
Pook's Hill. To identi Imp erial Rome with the momentary and p omp ous Imp ero that
Mussolini botched in the shadow of the Third Reich is almost a p lay on words.NOTES
ON G ERMANY & THE WAR 213the only country that is not fascinated with itself, that
does not believe itself to be Paradise or Utop ia. I think of England as one thinks
of a loved one, as something unique and irrep laceable. It is cap able of
rep roachable indecision, of terrible slowness (it tolerates Franco, it tolerates
the subsidiaries of Franco), but it is also cap able of recti cation and contrition,
of returning to wage once more, when the shadow of a sword falls across the world,
the cyclical battle of Waterloo.[19451 [EW} The Tot LibraryThe fancy or the
imagination or the utop ia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are
easily con sed with virtues. In the rst p lace, it's a wonder how long it took
mankind to think of the idea. Certain examp les that Aristotle attributes to
Democritus and Leucip p us clearly p re gure it, but its belated inventor is G ustav
Theodor Fechner, and its rst exp onent, Kurd Lasswitz. (Between Democritus of
Abdera and Fechner of Leip zig flow-heavily laden-almost twenty-four centuries of
Europ ean history.) Its corresp ondences are well known and varied: it is related to
atomism and combinatory analysis, to typ ograp hy and to chance. In his book The Race
with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr. Theodor Wol suggests that it is a de-
rivation from, or a p arody of, Ramon Llull's thinking machine; I would add that it
is a typ ograp hical avatar of that doctrine of the Eternal Return which, adop ted by
the Stoics or Blanqui, by the Pythagoreans or Nietzsche, eternally returns.The
oldest glimp se of it is in the rst book of Aristotle's Metap hysics. I sp eak of the
p assage that exp ounds the cosmogony of Leucip p us: the formation of the world by
the fortuitous conjunction of atoms. The writer observes that the atoms required
by this hyp othesis are homogeneous and that their differences derive from p osition,
order, or form. To illustrate these distinctions, he adds: "A is different from N
in form; AN from NA in order; Z from N in p osition." In the treatise De generatione
et corrup tione, he attemp ts to bring the variety of visible things into accord
with the simp licity of the atoms, and he argues that a tragedy consists of the same
elements as a comedy-that is, the twenty-four letters of the alp habet.Three hundred
years p ass, and Marcus Tullius Cicero comp oses an in- conclusive, skep tical
dialogue and ironically entitles it De natura deorum [On the Nature of the G ods] .
In the second book, one of the sp eakers argues: "I do not marvel that there
should be anyone who can p ersuade him-THE TOTAL LIBRARY 215self that certain solid
and individual bodies are p ulled along by the force of gravity, and that the
fortuitous collision of those p articles p roduces this beauti l world that we see.
He who considers this p ossible will also be able to believe that if innumerable
characters of gold, each rep resenting one of the twenty-one letters of the
alp habet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might p roduce the Annals of
Ennius. I doubt whether chance could p ossibly create even a single verse to read."1
Cicero's typ ograp hical image had a long life. Toward the middle of the seventeenth
century, it ap p ears in an academic discourse by Pascal; Swi , at the beginning of
the eighteenth, emp hasizes it in the p reamble to his indignant "Trivial Essay on
the Faculties of the Soul," which is a museum of commonp laces, similar to
Flaubert's later Dictionnaire des idees re ues.A century and a half later, three
men sup p ort Democritus and re te Cicero. A er such an enormous sp ace of time, the
vocabulary and the metap hors of the p olemic have changed. Huxley (who is one of
these men) does not say that the "golden characters" would nally comp ose a Latin
verse if they were thrown a suf cient number of times; he says that a half- dozen
monkeys p rovided with typ ewriters would, in a few eternities, p roduce all the
books in the British Museum.2 Lewis Carroll (one of the other refuters) observes in
the second p art of his extraordinary dream novel Sylvie and Bruno-in the year 1893-
that as the number of words in any language is limited, so too is the number of
their p ossible combinations or of their books. "Soon," he says, "literary men will
not ask themselves, 'What book shall I write?' but 'Which book?' " Lasswitz,
stimulated by Fechner, imagines the Total Library. He p ublishes his invention in a
volume of fantastic tales, Traumkristalle.Lasswitz's basic idea is the same as
Carroll's, but the elements of his game are the universal orthograp hic symbols, not
the words of a language. The number of such elements-letters, sp aces, brackets,
susp ension marks, numbers-is reduced and can be reduced even further. The alp habet
could relinquish the q (which is comp letely sup erfluous), the x (which is an ab-
breviation), and all the cap ital letters. It could eliminate the algorithms in the
decimal system of enumeration or reduce them to two, as in Leibniz's?As I do not
have the original text, I have cop ied this p assage om Menendez y Pelayo's Sp anish
version ( Obras comp letas de Marco Tulia Cicer6n III, 88). Deussen and Mauthner
sp eak of a sack ofletters but do not say they are made of gold; it is not imp os-
sible that the "illustrious bibliop hage" has contributed the gold and removed the
sack.2Strictly sp eaking, one immortal monkey would be su cient.216 JORG E LUIS
BORG ESbinary notation. It could limit p unctuation to the comma and the p eriod.
There would be no accents, as in Latin. By means of similar simp li cations,
Lasswitz arrives at twenty- ve symbols (twenty-two letters, the sp ace, the p eriod,
the comma), whose recombinations and rep etitions encomp ass everything p ossible to
exp ress in all languages. The totality of such variations would form a Total
Library of astronomical size. Lasswitz urges mankind to construct that inhuman
library, which chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence. (Wol
's The Race with the Tortoise exp ounds the execution and the dimensions of that
imp ossible enterp rise.)Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the
detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyp tians, the exact number of
times that the waters of the G anges have reflected the ight of a falcon, the
secret and true name of Rome, the encyclop edia Navalis would have constructed, my
dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the p roof of Pierre Fer- mat's
theorem, the unwritten chap ters of Edwin Drood, those same chap ters translated into
the language sp oken by the G aramantes, the p aradoxes Berkeley invented concerning
Time but didn't p ublish, Urizen's books of iron, the p remature ep ip hanies of
Step hen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years,
the G nostic G osp el of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the comp lete catalog of
the Library, the p roof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every
sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless
cacop honies, verbal far- ragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations
of mankind could p ass before the dizzying shelves-shelves that obliterate the day
and on which chaos lies-ever reward them with a tolerable p age.One of the habits of
the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it
has invented p redestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the
chimera, the sp hinx, abnormal trans nite numbers (whose p arts are no smaller
than the whole), masks, mirrors, op - eras, the teratological Trinity: the Father,
the Son, and the unresolvable G host, articulated into a single organism. . . . I
have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory
Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing
into others that af- rm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.{1939}
[EW} Time d J. DunneIn number 63 of Sur (December 1939) I p ublished a p rehistory,
a rst basic history, of in nite regression. Not all my omissions were involuntary:
I deliberately did not mention ] . W. Dunne, who has derived from the endless
regressus a rather surp rising doctrine on time and its observer. The discussion
(the mere outline) of his thesis would have exceeded the limitations of an article.
Its comp lexity requires a sep arate essay, which I shall now attemp t. My study is
insp ired by Dunne's latest book, Nothing Dies (1940), which reiterates or retraces
the p lots ofhis earlier works.Or rather, the p lot. Nothing in his argument is new,
but the author's conclusions are most unusual, almost shocking. Before discussing
them, I shall mention some earlier manifestations of the p remises.The seventh of
India's many p hilosop hical systems recorded by Paul Deussen (Nachvedische
Philosop hie der Inder, 318) denies the self as an immediate object ofknowledge,
"because if our soul were knowable, a second soul would be required to know the
rst and a third to know the second." The Hindus have no sense of history (they
stubbornly p refer to examine ideas rather than the names and dates of
p hilosop hers), but we know that this radical negation of introsp ection is about
eight centuries old. Schop enhauer rediscovered it around 1843. "The subject who
knows;' he rep eated, "cannot be known p recisely as such, otherwise he would be
known by another subject" ( Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 19). Herbart
p layed similar ontological multip lication games: before he was twenty he had
reasoned that the self must be in nite, because knowing oneself p ostulates another
self that knows itself, a self that in turn p ostulates another self (Deussen, Die
neuere Philosop hie [1920] , 367). Dunne reworks this p lot, embellished with
anecdotes, p arables, strokes of irony, and diagrams.Dunne (An Exp eriment with Time,
chap . 22) argues that a conscious subject is conscious not only of what it
observes, but of a subject A that also218 JORG E LUIS BORG ESobserves and, therefore,
of another subject B that is conscious of A and, therefore, of another subject C
conscious of B. He adds, somewhat mysteriously, that these innumerable intimate
observers do not t into the three dimensions of sp ace, but they do in the no
less numerous dimensions of time. Before clari ing such a clarification, I invite
my readers to join me in thinking about the meaning of this p aragrap h again.
Huxley, heir to the British nominalists, claims there is only a verbal difference
between the act of p erceiving a p ain and the act of knowing that one p erceives it;
he derides the p ure metap hysicians who distinguish in every sensation a sensible
subject, a sensation-p roducing object, and that imp erious p ersonage, the Ego
(Essays VI, 87). G ustav Sp iller (The Mind ofMan, 1902) admits that awareness of
p ain and p ain itself are two di erent things, but he considers them to be as
comp rehensible as the simultaneous p ercep tion of a voice and a face. I believe
his op inion is valid. Regarding the consciousness of consciousness invoked by Dunne
to establish in each individual a bewildering and nebulous hierarchy of subjects,
or observers, I p refer to assume that they are successive (or imaginary) states
of the initial subject. Leibnitz has said, "If the sp irit had to reflect on each
thought, the mere p ercep tion of a sensation would cause it to think of the
sensation and then to think of the thought and then of the thought of the thought,
and so to in nity" (Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain II, chap . 1).Dunne's
method to attain an in nite number of times simultaneously is less convincing and
more ingenious. Like Juan de Mena in El laberinto de Fortuna,? like Ousp ensky in
Tertium Organum, he states that the future, with its details and vicissitudes,
already exists. Toward the p re-existent future (or om the p re-existent ture, as
Bradley p refers) ows the absolute river of cosmic time, or the mortal rivers of
our lives. Like all movement, that motion or ow requires a definite length of
time-a second time for the movement of the first, a third for the movement of the
second, and so on to in nity.2 Such is the system p rop osed by Dunne. These
hyp othetical or illusory times p rovide endless room for the imp ercep tible subjects
multi- p lied by the other regressus.?In this fteenth-century p oem there is a
vision of "three great wheels": the rst, motionless, is the p ast; the second, in
motion, is the p resent; the third, motionless, is the future.2A half century before
Dunne p rop osed it, "the absurd conjecture of a second time, in which the rst flows
rap idly or slowly," was discovered and rejected by Schop enhauer, in a handwritten
note added to his Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which is recorded on p . 829 of
vol. II of the historico-critical edition by Otto Weiss.TIME AND J. W. DUNNE 219I
wonder what my reader thinks. I do not p retend to know what sort of thing time is-
or even if it is a "thing"-but I feel that the p assage of time and time itself are
a single mystery and not two. Dunne, I susp ect, makes an error like the one made by
those absentminded p oets who sp eak, say, of the moon revealing its red disk, thus
substituting a subject, verb, and object for an undivided visual image. The object
is merely the subject itself, flimsily disguised. Dunne is an illustrious victim of
that bad intellectual habit- denounced by Bergson-of conceiving of time as a fourth
dimension of sp ace. He p ostulates that the future toward which we must move already
exists, but this p ostulate merely converts it into sp ace and requires a second
time (also conceived in sp atial form, in the form of a line or a river) and then a
third and a millionth. Not one of Dunne's four books fails to p rop ose the in nite
dimensions of time, but those dimensions are sp atial.3 For Dunne, real time is the
unattainable nal boundary of an in nite series.What reasons are there for assuming
that the future already exists? Dunne gives two: one, p remonitory dreams; another,
the relative simp licity this hyp othesis lends to the comp licated diagrams typ ical
of his style. He also wishes to elude the p roblems of a continuous creation. . . .
Theologians de ne eterni as the lucid and simultaneous p ossession of all instants
of time, and declare it a divine attribute. Dunne, surp risingly, p resumes that
eternity already belongs to us, as corroborated by the dreams we have each night.
In them, according to him, the immediate p ast and the immediate ture intermingle.
Awake, we p ass through successive time at a uniform sp eed; in dreams we may sp an a
vast zone. To dream is to orchestrate the objects we viewed while aw e and to weave
om them a story, or a series of stories. We see the image of a sp hinx and the image
of a drugstore, and then we invent a drugstore that turns into a sp hinx. We p ut the
mouth of a face that looked at us the night before last on the man we shall meet
tomorrow. (Schop enhauer wrote that life and dreams were p ages om the same book,
and that to read them in their p rop er order was to live, but to leaf through them
was to dream.)Dunne assures us that in death we shall nally learn how to handle
eternity. We shall recover all the moments of our lives and combine them as we
p lease. G od and our friends and Shakesp eare will collaborate with us.So sp lendid a
thesis, makes any fallacy committed by the author insigni cant.[SJL} JThe p hrase is
revealing. In chap ter 21 of An Exp eriment with Time he sp eaks of a time that is
p erp endicular to another. A Fra ent on JoyceAmong the works I have not written and
will not write (but which in some way, however mysterious and rudimentary, justi
me) is a story eight or ten p ages long whose p ro se rst dra is titled "Funes the
Memorious," and which in other, more chastened, versions is called "Ireneo Funes."
The p rotagonist of this doubly chimerical ction is a typ ically wretched
comp adrito living in Fray Bentos or Junin around 1884. His mother irons clothes for
a living; the p roblematic father is said to have been a tracker. Certainly the boy
has the blood and the silence of an Indian. In childhood, he was ex- p elled from
p rimary school for having slavishly cop ied out two chap ters, along with their
illustrations, map s, vignettes, block letters, and even a corrigendum. . . . He
dies before the age of twenty. He is incredibly idle: he sp ends virtually his
entire life on a cot, his eyes xed on the g tree in the backyard, or on a
sp iderweb. At his wake, the neighbors remember the humble facts of his history: a
visit to the cattleyards, another to a brothel, another to so-and-so's ranch. . . .
Someone p rovides the exp lanation. The deceased was p erhap s the only lucid man on
earth. His p ercep tions and memory were infallible. We, at rst glance, p erceive
three glasses on a table; Funes, every leaf and grap e on a vine. He knew the shap es
of the southern- most clouds in the sunrise of Ap ril 30, 1882, and he could comp are
them in his memory to the veins in the stiffmarbled binding of a book he once held
in his hands during his childhood. He could reconstruct every dream, every reverie.
He died of p neumonia, and his incommunicable life was the richest in the universe.
My story's magical comp adrito may be called a p recursor of the coming race of
sup ermen, a p artial Zarathustra of the outskirts of Buenos Aires; indisp utably,
he is a monster. I have evoked him
because a consecutive, straightforward reading of the four hundred thousand words
of Ulysses would require similar monsters. (I will not venture to sp eak of whatA
FRAG MENT ON JOY CE 221Finnegans Wake would demand; for me, its readers are no less
inconceivable than C. H. Hinton's fourth dimension or the trinity of Nicaea.)
Everyone knows that Joyce's book is indecip herably chaotic to the unp rep ared
reader. Everyone knows that Stuart G ilbert, its of cial interp reter, has revealed
that each of the novel's eighteen chap ters corresp onds to an hour of the day, a
bodily organ, an art, a symbol, a color, a literary technique, and one of the
adventures of Ulysses, son of Laertes, of the seed of Zeus. These imp ercep tible
and laborious corresp ondences had only to be announced for the world to honor the
work's severe construction and classic discip line. Among these voluntary tics, the
most widely p raised has been the most meaningless: James Joyce's contacts with
Homer, or (simp ly) with the Senator from the dep artement du Jura, M. Victor Berard.
Far more admirable, without a doubt, is the multitudinous diversity of styles. Like
Shakesp eare, like Quevedo, like G oethe, like no other writer, Joyce is less a man
of letters than a literature. And, incredibly, he is a literature within the
comp ass of a single volume. His writing is intense, as G oethe's never was; it is
delicate, a virtue whose existence Quevedo did not susp ect. I (like the rest of the
universe) have not read Ulysses, but I read and hap p ily reread certain scenes: the
dialogue on Shakesp eare, the Walp urgis- nacht in the whorehouse, the questions and
answers of the catechism: "They drank in jocoserious silence Ep p 's massp roduct, the
creature cocoa." And, on another p age: "A dark horse riderless, bolts like a
p hantom p ast the winningp ost, his name moon-foaming, his eyeballs stars." And on
another: "Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled."'Plenitude and indigence
coexist in Joyce. Lacking the cap acity to construct (which his gods did not
bestow on him, and which he was forced to make up for with arduous symmetries and
labyrinths), he enjoyed a gift for words, a felicitous verbal omnip otence that can
without exaggeration or imp recision be likened to Hamlet or the U Burial. . . .
Ulysses (as everyone knows) is the story of a single day, within the p erimeter of a
single city. In this voluntary limitation, it is legitimate to p erceive something
more than an Aristotelian elegance: it can legitimately be inferred that for Joyce
every day was in some secret way the irrep arable Day of Judgment; every p lace, Hell
or Purgatory.[EA ] 1The French version is rather unfortunate: "Lit nup tial, lit de
p arturition, lit de mort aux sp ectrales bougies." The fault, of course, lies with
the language, which is inca- p able of comp ound words. The Creation and P. H. G osse
"The man without a Navel yet lives in me," Sir Thomas Browne curiously writes
(Religio Medici, 1642), meaning that, as a descendant ofAdam, he was conceived in
sin. In the first chap ter of Ulysses, Joyce similarly evokes the immaculate and
smooth belly of the woman without a mother: "Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel:'
The subject (I know) runs the risk of seeming grotesque and trivial, but the
zoologist Philip Henry G osse connected it to the central p roblem of metap hysics:
the p roblem of time. That was in 1857; eighty years of oblivion equal, p erhap s,
something new.In two p laces in the Scrip tures (Romans 5; I Corinthians 15), the
rst Adam, in whom all die, is comp ared to the last Adam, who is Jesus.? This
comp arison, in order not to become mere blasp hemy, must p resup p ose a certain
enigmatic p arity, which is translated into myths and symmetry. The Legenda Aurea
states that the wood of the Cross comes from the forbidden Tree that is in
Paradise; the theologians, that Adam was created by the Fa- ther and the Son at the
exact age at which the Son died: thirty-three. This senseless p recision must have
in uenced G osse's cosmogony.He revealed it in the book Omp halos (London, 1857),
which is subtitled An A emp t to Untie the G eological Knot. I have searched the
libraries for this book in vain; to write this note, I will use the summaries made
by Edmund G o s s e ( Fa t h e r a n d S o n , 1 9 0 7 ) a n d H . G . We l l s ( A
l l A b o a r d fo r A r a r a t , 1 9 4 0 ) . I?This conjunction is common in
religious p oetry. Perhap s the most intense examp le is in the p enultimate stanza
of the "Hymn to G od, my G od, in my sickness," March 23, 1630, comp osed by John
Donne:We think that Paradise and Calvary,Christ's Cross, and Adam's tree, stood in
one p lace, Look Lord, and nd both Adams met in me;As the rst Adam's sweat
surrounds my face,May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.THE CREATION AND P. H.
G OSSE 223will introduce some illustrations that do not ap p ear on those brief p ages,
but I believe they are comp atible with G osse's thought.In the chap ter of Logic that
deals with the law of causality, John Stuart Mill argues that the state of the
universe at any given moment is a consequence of its state at the p revious
moment, and that, for an in nite intelligence, the p erfect knowledge of a single
moment would be enough to know the history of the universe, p ast and future. (He
also argues-oh Louis Au- guste Blanqui, oh Nietzsche, oh Pythagoras!-that the
rep etition of any one state of the universe would entail the rep etition of all the
others and would turn universal history into a cyclical series.) In that moderate
version of one of Lap lace's fantasies-he had imagined that the p resent state of the
universe is, in theory, reducible to a formula, from which Someone could deduce
the entire future and the entire p ast-Mill does not exclude the p ossibility that a
future exterior intervention may break the series. He asserts that state q will
inevitably p roduce state r; state r, s; state s, t, but he concedes that before t a
divine catastrop he-the consummatio mundi, let us say-may have annihilated the
p lanet. The future is inevitable and exact, but it may not hap p en. G od lies in wait
in the intervals.In 1857, p eop le were disturbed by a contradiction. G enesis
assigned six days-six unequivocal Hebrew days, from sunset to sunset-to the divine
creation of the world, but the p aleontologists imp iously insisted on enormous
accumulations of time. (De Quincey unavailingly rep eated that the Scrip tures have
an obligation not to instruct mankind in any science, for the sciences constitute a
vast mechanism to develop and train the human intellect.) How could one reconcile
G od with the fossils, Sir Charles Lyell with Moses? G osse, forti ed by p rayer,
p rop osed an astonishing answer.Mill imagines a causal, in nite time that may be
interrup ted by a future act of G od; G osse, a rigorously causal, in nite time that
has been interrup tedbyap astact:theCreation.Statenwillinevitablyp roducestatev, but
before v the Universal Judgment may occur; state n p resup p oses state c, but state c
has not occurred, because the world was created in for in b. The rst moment of
time coincides with the moment of the Creation, as St. Augus- tine says, but that
rst instant involves not only an in nite future, but an in- nite p ast. A p ast that
is hyp othetical, to be sure, but also detailed and inevitable. Adam ap p ears, and
his teeth and his skeleton are thirty-three years old; Adam ap p ears (Edmund G osse
writes) and he has a navel, although no umbilical cord attached him to a mother.
The p rincip le of reason requires that no e ect be without a cause; those causes
require other causes,224 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwhich are multip lied regressively;> there
are concrete vestiges of them all, but only those that are p osterior to the
Creation have really existed. There are skeletons of glyp todonts in the gorge of
Lujan, but there have never been glyp todonts. Such is the ingenious (and, above
all, unbelievable) thesis that Philip Henry G osse p rop osed to religion and to
science.Both rejected it. The newsp ap ers reduced it to the doctrine that G od had
hidden fossils under the earth to test the faith of the geologists; Charles
Kingsley denied that the Lord had carved a "sup erfluous and vast lie" into the
rocks. In vain, G osse exp lained the metap hysical foundation of his thesis: that
one moment of time was inconceivable without the moment before it and the one a er
it, and so on to in nity. I wonder if he knew the ancient sentence that is quoted
at the beginning of Rafael Cansinos Assens' Talmu- dic anthology: "It was only the
first night, but a number of centuries had already p receded it."There are two
virtues I would claim for G osse's forgotten thesis. First: its somewhat monstrous
elegance. Second: its involuntary reduction to absurdity of a creatio ex nihilo,
its indirect demonstration that the universe is eternal, as the Vedanta and
Heraclitus, Sp inoza and the atomists all thought. Bertrand Russell has brought this
up to date. In the ninth chap ter of his book, The Analysis ofMind (London, 1921),
he imagines that the p lanet was created only a few minutes ago, with a humanity
that "remembers" an illusory p ast.Postscrip t: In 1802, Chateaubriand (G enie du
christianisme I, 4, s), for aesthetic reasons, formulated a thesis identical to
that of G osse. He denounced as banal and ridiculous a rst day of the Creation,
p op ulated by baby p igeons, larvae, p up p ies, and seeds. "Without this original
antiquity, there would have been neither beauty nor magni cence in the work of the
Almighty; and, what could not p ossibly be the case, nature, in a state of in-
nocence, would have been less charming than she is in her p resent degenerate
condition," he wrote.[1941] [EW] 2Cf. Sp encer, Facts and Comments [1902] , 148-151.
Circular TimeI tend to return eternally to the Eternal Return. In the following
lines I will attemp t (with the aid of a few historical illustrations)
to define its three fundamental modes.The rst has been attributed to Plato,
who, in the thirty-ninth p aragrap h of the Timaeus, claims that once their diverse
velocities have achieved an equilibrium, the seven p lanets will return to their
initial p oint of dep arture in a cycle that constitutes the p erfect year. Cicero
(On the Nature ofthe G ods II) acknowledges that this vast celestial p eriod is not
easy to comp ute, but holds that it is certainly not an unlimited sp an of time; in
one of his lost works, he sets it at twelve thousand nine hundred and y four "of
what we call years" (Tacitus, Dialogue ofthe Orators, 16). Once Plato was dead,
astrology became increasingly p op ular in Athens. This science, as no one can p re-
tend not to know, maintains that the destiny of men is ruled by the p osition of the
stars. An unknown astrologer, who had not read the Timaeus in vain, formulated this
irrep roachable argument: if the p lanetary p eriods are cyclical, so must be the
history of the universe; at the end of each Platonic year, the same individuals
will be born again and will live out the same destinies. Posterity would attribute
this conjecture to Plato himself. In 1616, Lucilio Vanini wrote, ''Again will
Achilles go to Troy, rites and religions be reborn, human history rep eat itself.
Nothing exists today that did not exist long ago; what has been, shall be; but all
of that in general, and not (as Plato establishes) in p articular" (De admirandis
naturae arcanis, dialogue 52). In 1643, Thomas Browne de ned "Plato's year" in a
note to the rst book of the Reli- gio Medici: "A revolution of certain thousand
years when all things should return unto their former estate and he be teaching
again in his school as when he delivered this op inion." In this initial concep tion
of the eternal return, the argument is astrological.The second is linked to the
glory of Nietzsche, the most touching of its226 JORG E LUIS BORG ESinventors or
p romoters. It is justi ed by an algebraic p rincip le: the observation that a
quantity n of objects-atoms in Le Bon's hyp othesis, forces in Nietzsche's, elements
in the communard Blanqui's-is incap able of an in - nite number of variations. Of
the three doctrines I have listed, the most well-reasoned and comp lex is that of
Blanqui, who, like Democritus (Ci- cero, Academic Questions II, 40), p acks not only
time but interminable sp ace as well with facsimile worlds and dissimilar worlds.
His book is beautifully entitled L'Eternite p ar les astres; it dates from 1872. A
laconic but su cient p assage from David Hume dates from long before that; it
ap p ears in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which Schop enhauer
p ro- p osed to translate. As far as I know, no one has p ointed it out until now.
"Instead of sup p osing matter in nite, as Ep icurus did; let us sup p ose it nite. A
nite number of p articles is only suscep tible of nite transp ositions: And it must
hap p en, in an eternal duration, that every p ossible order or p osition must be tried
an in nite number of times. This world, therefore, with all its events, even the
most minute, has before been p roduced and destroyed, and will again be p roduced
and destroyed, without any bounds and limitations" (DialoguesVIII).Ofthis p erp etual
series ofidentical universal histories, Bertrand Russell observes:Many writers have
imagined that history is cyclic, that the p resent state of the world, exactly as it
is now, will sooner or later recur. How shall we state this hyp othesis in our view?
We shall have to say that the later state is numerically identical with the earlier
state; and we cannot say that this state occurs twice, since that would imp ly a
system of dating which the hyp othesis makes imp ossible. The situation would be
analogous to that of a man who travels round the world: he does not say that his
starting-p oint and his p oint of arrival are two di erent but p recisely similar
p laces, he says they are the same p lace. The hyp othesis that history is cyclic
can be exp ressed as follows: form the group of all qualities contemp oraneous with a
given quality: in certain cases the whole of this group p recedes itself. (An
Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940] , 102)I now arrive at the nal mode of
interp reting eternal rep etitions, the least melodramatic and terri ing of the
three, but the only one that is conceivable. I mean the concep t of similar but
not identical cycles. The infinite catalogue of authorities would be imp ossible to
comp lete: I think of theCIRCULAR TIME 227days and nights of Brahma; the ep ochs
whose unmoving clock is a p yramid slowly worn down by a bird's wing that brushes
against it every thousand and one years; I think of Hesiod's men, who degenerate
from gold to iron; the world of Heraclitus, which is engendered by fire and
cyclically devoured by fire, and the world of Seneca and Chrysip p us, annihilated by
re and renewed by water; I think of Virgil's fourth Eclogue and Shelley's sp len-
did echo; Ecclesiastes, the theosop hists, Condorcet's decimal history; I think of
Francis Bacon and Ousp ensky; G erald Heard and Sp engler; Vico, Scho- p enhauer, and
Emerson; Sp encer's First Princip les and Poe's Eureka. . . . Out of this p ro sion of
testimony I will cite only one p assage, from Marcus Aurelius:Though the years of
your life numbered three thousand, or ten times three thousand, remember that none
can lose another life than that he lives now, nor live another than that he loses.
The lengthiest and briefest p eriods are equal. The p resent belongs to all; to die
is to lose the p resent, which is the briefest of lap ses. No one loses the p ast or
the future, because no man can be dep rived of what he does not have. Re- member
that all things turn and turn again in the same orbits, and for the sp ectator it is
the same to watch for a century or for two or infinitely. (Reflections II, 14)If
we read the p receding lines with any degree of seriousness ( id est, if we decide
not to consider them a mere exhortation or moral object lesson), we will see that
they p roclaim, or p resup p ose, two curious ideas. The rst is a negation of the
reality of the p ast and the future, enunciated in the following p assage from
Schop enhauer:The form of the p henomenon of the will is really only the p resent, not
the ture or the p ast. Future and p ast are only in the concep t, exist only in the
connection and continuity of knowledge in so far as this follows the p rincip le of
sufficient reason. No man has lived in the p ast, and none will ever live in the
future; the p resent alone is the form of all life. ( The World as Will and
Rep resentation I, 54)The second is a negation of all novelty, following the author
of Ecclesiastes. This conjecture-that all of mankind's exp eriences are (in some
way) analogous-may at first seem a mere imp overishment of the world.If Edgar Allan
Poe, the Vikings, Judas Iscariot, and my reader all secretly228 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
share the same destiny-the only p ossible destiny-then universal history is the
history of a single man. Marcus Aurelius does not, strictly sp eaking, force this
enigmatic simp li cation up on us. (A while ago I imagined a fantastic tale in the
manner of Le6n Bloy: a theologian dedicates his entire life to refuting a
heresiarch; he bests him in intricate p olemics, denounces him, has him burned at
the stake. In Heaven he discovers that in G od's eyes he and the heresiarch form a
single p erson.) Marcus Aurelius a rms the analogous, but not identical, nature of
multifarious human destinies. He af- rms that any time sp an-a century, a year, a
single night, p erhap s the un- grasp able p resent-contains the entirety of history.
In its extreme form, this conjecture is easily refuted: one taste is different from
another, ten minutes of p hysical p ain are not the same as ten minutes of algebra.
Ap p lied to lengthier p eriods, to the seventy years of age that the Book of Psalms
allots us, the conjecture is p lausible and tolerable. It becomes no more than an
af- rmation that the number of human p ercep tions, emotions, thoughts, and
vicissitudes is limited, and that before dying we will exhaust them all. Mar- cus
Aurelius rep eats: "To see the things of the p resent moment is to see all that is
now, all that has been since time began, and all that shall be unto the world's
end; for all things are ofone kind and one form" (Re ectionsVI, 37).In times of
ascendancy, the conjecture that man's existence is a constant, unvarying quantity
can sadden or irritate us; in times of decline (such as the p resent), it holds out
the assurance that no ignominy, no calamity, no dictator, can imp overish us.{1941]
{EA} John Wilkins' Analytical LanguageI see that the fourteenth edition of the
Encyclop edia Britannica has omitted the article on John Wilkins. The omission is
justi able if we recall its triviality (twenty lines of mere biograp hical data:
Wilkins was born in 1614; Wilkins died in 1672; Wilkins was the chap lain of the
Prince Palatine, Charles Louis; Wilkins was ap p ointed rector of one of the colleges
of Ox- ford; Wilkins was the rst secretary of the Royal Society of London; etc.)
but inexcusable if we consider Wilkins' sp eculative work. He was full of hap p y
curiosity: interested in theology, cryp tograp hy, music, the manufac- ture of
transp arent beehives, the course of an invisible p lanet, the p ossibility of a
trip to the moon, the p ossibility and the p rincip les of a world language. He
devoted a book to this last p roblem: An Essay Towards a Real Character and a
Philosop hical Language (6oo p ages in quarto, 1668). Our National Library does not
have a cop y; to write this note I have consulted The Life and Times ofjohn Wilkins
by P. A. Wright Henderson (1910); the Worterbuch der Philosop hie by Fritz Mauthner
(1924); Delp hos by E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1935); and Dangerous Thoughtsby Lancelot
Hogben (1939).All o f us, a t one time o r another,
have su ered through those unap p eal- able debates in which a lady, with cop ious
interjections and anacolutha, asserts that the word luna is more (or less)
exp ressive than the word moon. Ap art from the obvious comment that the monosyllable
moon may be more ap p rop riate as a rep resentation of a simp le object than the
disyllabic luna, nothing can be contributed to such discussions; excep t for
comp ound words and derivatives, all the languages in the world (not excluding
Johann Martin Schleyer's Volap iik and Peano's romantic Interlingua) are equally
inexp ressive. There is no edition of the Royal Sp anish Academy G rammar that does
not p onder "the envied treasure of p icturesque, felicitous, and ex- p ressive words
in the riches of the Sp anish language," but that is mere boasting, with no
corroboration. Meanwhile, that same Royal Academy230 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp roduces a
dictionary every few years in order to de ne those words. . . . In the universal
language conceived by Wilkins in the middle of the seventeenth century, each word
de nes itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1619, had already noted that,
by using the decimal system of numeration, we could learn in a single day to name
all quantities to in nity, and to write them in a new language, the language of
numbers;' he also p ro- p osed the creation of a similar, general language that would
organize and contain all human thought. Around 1664, John Wilkins undertook that
task.He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were then
subdivided into di erences, and subdivided in turn into sp ecies. To each class he
assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each
sp ecies, a vowel. For examp le, de means element; deb, the rst of the elements,
re; deba, a p ortion of the element of re, a flame. In a similar language invented
by Letellier (1850), a means animal; ab, mam- malian; abo, carnivorous; aboj,
feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv, equine; etc. In that of Bonifacio Sotos
Ochando (1845), imaba means building; imaca, brothel; imafe, hosp ital; imafo,
p esthouse; imarri, house; imaru, country estate; imedo, p ost; imede, p illar; imego,
floor; imela, ceiling; imago, window; bire, bookbinder; hirer, to bind books. ( I
found this last census in a book p ublished in Buenos Aires in 1886: the Curso de
lengua universal [Course in Universal Language] by Dr. Pedro Mata.)The words of
John Wil ns' analytical language are not dumb and arbitrary symbols; every letter
is meaning l, as those of the Holy Scrip tures were for the Kabbalists. Mauthner
observes that children could learn this language without knowing that it was arti
cial; later, in school, they would discover that it was also a universal key and a
secret encyclop edia.Having de ned Wilkins' p rocedure, we must examine a p roblem
that is imp ossible or dif cult to p ostp one: the merit of the forty-p art table on
which the language is based. Let us consider the eighth category: stones. Wilkins
divides them into common (flint, gravel, slate); moderate (marble, amber, coral);
p recious (p earl, op al); transp arent (amethyst, sap p hire); and insoluble (coal,
ller's earth, and arsenic). The ninth category is almost as1Theoretically, the
number of systems of numeration is unlimited. The most comp lex (for use by
divinities and angels) would record an in nite number of symbols, one for each
whole number; the simp lest requires only two. Zero is written o, one 1, two 10,
three 11, four 100, ve 101, six 110, seven 111, eight 1 000. . . . It is the
invention of Leibniz, who was insp ired (it seems) by the enigmatic hexagrams of the
I Ching.J0HN WILKINS ANALY TICAL LANG UAG E 2J1 alarming as the eighth. It reveals
that metals can be imp erfect (vermilion, quicksilver); arti cial (bronze, brass);
recremental ( lings, rust); and natural (gold, tin, cop p er). The whale ap p ears in
the sixteenth category: it is a vi- vip arous, oblong sh. These ambiguities,
redundancies, and de ciencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a
certain Chinese encyclop edia called the Heavenly Emp orium ofBenevolent Knowledge.
In its distant p ages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that
belong to the em- p eror; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d)
suckling p igs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are
included in this classi cation; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) in-
numerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very ne camel's-hair brush; (1) etcetera;
(m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance
resemble ies. The Bibliograp hical Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos: it
has p arceled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions, of which number 262 corresp onds
to the Pop e, number 282 to the Roman Catholic Church, number 263 to the Lord's Day,
number 268 to Sunday schools, number 298 to Mormonism, and number 294 to
Brahmanism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Taoism. Nor does it disdain the emp loyment of
heterogeneous subdivisions, for examp le, number 179: "Cruelty to animals. Protec-
tion of animals. Dueling and suicide from a moral p oint of view. Variousvices and
defects. Various virtues and qualities."I have noted the arbitrariness of Wilkins,
the unknown (or ap ocr hal)Chinese encyclop edist, and the Bibliograp hical Institute
of Brussels; obviously there is no classi cation of the universe that is not
arbitrary and sp eculative. The reason is quite simp le: we do not know what the
universe is. "This world," wrote David Hume, "was only the rst rude essay of some
infant deity who a erwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame p erformance; it is
the work only of some dep endent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to
his sup eriors; it is the p roduction of old age and dotage in some sup erannuated
deity, and ever since his death has run on . . ." (Dia- logues Concerning Natural
Religion V [1779 ] ) . We must go even further, and susp ect that there is no
universe in the organic, uni ing sense of that ambitious word. If there is, then
we must sp eculate on its p urp ose; we must sp eculate on the words, de nitions,
etymologies, and synonymies of G od's secret dictionary.The imp ossibility of
p enetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from
p lanning human schemes, even though it is clear that they are p rovisional. Wilkins'
analytical language is not the least remarkable of those schemes. The classes and
sp ecies that comp rise it are232 JORG E LUIS BORG EScontradictory and vague; the arti
ce of using the letters of the words to indicate divisions and subdivisions is
undoubtedly ingenious. The word salmon tells us nothing; zana, the corresp onding
word, de nes (for the p erson versed in the forty categories and the classes of
those categories) a scaly river sh with reddish flesh. (Theoretically, a language
in which the name of each being would indicate all the details of its fate, p ast
and ture, is not inconceivable.)Hop es and utop ias aside, p erhap s the most lucid
words written about language are these by Chesterton: "Man knows that there are in
the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the col-
ors of an autumn forest. . . . Y et he seriously believes that these things can
every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and
unions, be accurately rep resented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He
believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really p roduce out of his own
inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies
ofdesire" (G . Watts [1904] , 88).[1942] [EW] On Literary Descrip tionLessing, De
Quincey, Ruskin, Remy de G ourmont, Unamuno, have all p ondered and elucidated the
p roblem I am about to discuss. I do not p rop ose to re te or to corroborate what
they have said, but rather to indicate, with an abundance of illustrative examp les,
the frequent aws of the genre. The rst is of a metap hysical nature; in the
disp arate examp les that follow, the curious reader will easily recognize it:The
towers of the churches and the chimneys of the factories raise their p ointed
p yramids and their rigid stalks (G roussac)The moon ledits white vessel along the
serene orbit (Oyuela)Oh moon driving like a clever sp ortswoman, through zodiacs and
eclip ses, your lovely cabriolet (Lugones)If we vary ever so slightly the direction
of our gaze we see the p ond inhabited by an entire landscap e. The orchard bathes
in it: ap p les swim re ected in the liquid and the rst quarter moon sheds light on
its dep ths with its insp ector's face. (Ortega y G asset)The old bridge extends its
arch over the river, joining the villas with the tranquil eld. (G uiraldes)If I am
not mistaken, the illustrious fragments I have gathered su er a slight
inconvenience. They substitute a subject, verb, and direct object for an undivided
image. To further comp licate matters, the direct object is the same as the subject,
slightly disguised. The "vessel" led by the moon is234 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthe moon
itself; the chimneys and towers erect p ointed p yramids and sti stalks that are the
same towers and chimneys; the rst quarter moon sheds its insp ector's face over the
dep ths of the p ool, which is no di erent than the rst quarter moon. G uiraldes very
sup erfluously distinguishes the arch over the river and the old bridge and allows
two active verbs-extend and join-to stir up a single immobile image. In the jocular
ap ostrop he by Lu- gones, the moon is a "sp ortswoman" who drives through "zodiacs
and eclip ses a lovely cabriolet"-which is the moon itself. The defenders of this
verbal doubling may argue that the act of p erceiving something-the much-frequented
moon, shall we say-is no less comp licated than its metap hors, because memory and
suggestion intervene; I would retort with Occam's restrictive p rincip le:
We should not multip ly entities uselessly.Another censurable method is the
enumeration and de nition of the p arts of a whole. I will limit myself to a single
examp le:She o ered her feet in sandals of p urp le suede, fastened with a frosting of
p recious stones. . . . her naked arms and throat, without a glimmer of jewels; her
rm, raised breasts; her sunken flat belly, eeing the op u- lence sp routing from her
waist; her cheeks, golden; her eyes, of a sunken sp lendor, enlarged by antimony;
her mouth, lit with the juicy sp arkle of certain flowers; her forehead, interrup ted
by a p ath of amethysts that lost its way amid her shining steel tresses, sp read
over her shoulders in braids of an intimate undulation. (Mir6)Thirteen or fourteen
terms form the chaotic series; the author invites us to conjure up those disjecta
membra and coordinate them in a single coherent image. That mental op eration is
imp ractical: no one would think of imagining typ e X's feet and then adding them to
typ e Y 's throat and typ e Z's cheeks. . . . Herbert Sp encer ( The Philosop hy of
Style, 1852) has already discussed this p roblem.The above does not intend to
p rohibit all enumerations. The lists in the Psalms, in Whitman and Blake, have
exclamatory value; others exist verbally, even though they are unrep resentable.
For examp le:Suddenly out of a shuffling deck of cop s and crooks sp rang an old
devil, broken and doddering, legs akimbo, gap -toothed, cavern- cheeked, with
scratching tools long as a beetle's. He ap p eared p ulled by the reins of a defunct
dromedary with a day's worth of body so heavy,ON LITERARY DESCRIPTION 235sluggish,
and stubborn, that leading her to the theater almost burst the aged demon. (Torres
Villarroel)I have condemned here the usual errors of the genre. In other p ages I
have discussed the p rocedure that seems valid to me: the indirect, which William
Shakesp eare handles sp lendidly in the rst scene of Act V of The Merchant ofVenice.
[1942] {S] LjOn W i Beckford's thekWilde attributes this joke to Carlyle: a
biograp hy of Michelangelo that would make no mention of the works of Michelangelo.
So comp lex is reality, and so fragmentary and simp li ed is history, that an
omniscient observer could write an inde nite, almost in nite, number of
biograp hies of a man, each emp hasizing di erent facts; we would have to read many
of them before we realized that the p rotagonist was the same. Let us greatly simp li
, and imagine that a life consists of 13,000 facts. One of the hyp othetical bi-
ograp hies would record the series n, 22, 33 . . . ; another, the series 9, 13, q,
21... ;another,theseries3,12,21,30,39....Ahistoryofaman'sdreamsis not
inconceivable; another, of the organs of his body; another, of the mistakes he
made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of
his dealings with the night and with the dawn. The above may seem merely fanciful,
but unfortunately it is not. No one today resigns himself to writing the literary
biograp hy of an author or the military biograp hy of a soldier; everyone p refers the
genealogical biograp hy, the economic biograp hy, the p sychiatric biograp hy, the
surgical biograp hy, the ty- p ograp hical biograp hy. One life of Poe consists of
seven hundred octavo p ages; the author, fascinated by changes of residence, barely
manages one p arenthesis for the Maelstrom or the cosmogony of "Eureka." Another ex-
amp le: this curious revelation in the p rologue to a biograp hy of Bolivar: "As in
the author's book on Nap oleon, the battles are scarcely discussed." Car- lyle's
joke p redicted our contemp orary literature: in 1943, the p aradox would be a
biograp hy of Michelangelo that allowed for some mention of the works of
Michelangelo.The examination of a recent biograp hy of William Beckford (1760- 1844)
has p rovoked the above observations. William Beckford of Fonthill was the
embodiment of a rather trivial typ e of millionaire: distinguished gentleman,
traveler, bibliop hile, builder ofp alaces, and libertine. Chap man,ON WILLIAM
BECKFORD's VATI-IEK 237his biograp her, unravels (or tries to unravel) his
labyrinthine life, but omits an analysis of Vathek, the novel whose nal ten p ages
have brought William Beckford his fame.I have comp ared various critical works on
Vathek. The p rologue that Mallarme wrote for the 1876 edition abounds in felicitous
observations (for examp le: he p oints out that the novel begins atop a tower from
which the heavens may be read in order to end in an enchanted subterranean vault),
but it is written in an etymological dialect of French that is dif cult or im-
p ossible to read. Belloc (A Conversation with an Angel, 1928), op ines on Beckford
without condescending to exp lanations; he comp ares the p rose to that of Voltaire
and judges him to be "one of the vilest men of his time." Perhap s the most lucid
evaluation is that of Saintsbury in the eleventh volume of the Cambridge History
ofEnglish Literature.In essence, the fable of Vathek is not comp lex. Vathek (Haroun
Benal- motasim Vatiq Bila, the ninth Abbasid calip h) erects a Babylonian tower in
order to decip her the p lanets. They foretell a succession of wonders to be brought
about by a man unlike any other who will come from an unknown land. A merchant
arrives at the cap ital of the emp ire; his face is so atrocious that the guards who
bring him before the calip h advance with eyes closed. The merchant sells a scimitar
to the calip h, then disap p ears. Engraved on the blade are some mysterious changing
characters which p ique Vathek's curiosity. A man (who then also disap p ears)
decip hers them; one day they mean, "I am the least of the marvels in a p lace where
everything is marvelous and worthy of the greatest Prince of the earth"; another
day, "Woe to the rash mortal who asp ires to know that which he is not sup p osed to
know." The calip h surrenders to the magic arts; from the shadows, the voice of the
merchant urges him to renounce the Muslim faith and worship the p owers of darkness.
If he will do that, the Palace of Subterranean Fire will be op ened to him. Within
its vaults he will be able to contemp late the treasures that the stars have
p romised him, the talismans that subdue the world, the diadems of the p re-Adamite
sultans and of Suleiman Ben Daoud. The greedy calip h agrees; the merchant demands
forty human sacri ces. Many bloody years p ass; Vathek, his soul black from
abominations, arrives at a deserted mountain. The earth op ens; in terror and
hop e, Vathek descends to the bottom of the world. A p ale and silent crowd of p eop le
who do not look at one another wanders through the magni cent galleries of an in
nite p alace. The merchant did not lie: the Palace of Subterranean Fire abounds in
sp lendors and talismans, but it is also Hell. (In the congeneric story of Doctor
Faustus, and in the many medieval legends that p refigured it, Hell isJORG E LUIS
BORG ES the p unishment for the sinner who makes a p act with the gods of Evil; here,
it is both the p unishment and the temp tation.)Saintsbury and Andrew Lang claim or
suggest that the invention of the Palace of Subterranean Fire is Beckford's
greatest achievement. I would maintain that it is the rst truly atrocious Hell in
literature.' I will venture this p aradox: the most famous literary Avernus, the
dolente regno of the Di- vine Comedy, is not an atrocious p lace; it is a p lace
where atrocious thingshap p en. The distinction is valid.Stevenson ("A Chap ter on
Dreams") tells of being p ursued in thedreams of his childhood by a certain
abominable "hue" of the color brown; Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday) imagines
that at the western borders of the world there is p erhap s a tree that is more or
less than a tree; and that at the eastern borders, there is something, p erhap s a
tower, whose very shap e is wicked. Poe, in his "MS Found in a Bottle," sp eaks of a
southern sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the
seaman; Melville devotes many p ages of Moby-Dick to an elucidation of the horror of
the unbearable whiteness of the whale. . . . I have given several examp les, but
p erhap s it is enough to observe that Dante's Hell magni es the notion of a jail;
Beckford's, the tunnels of a nightmare. The Divine Comedy is the most justi able
and solid book in all literature, Vathek is a mere curiosity, "the p erfume and
sup p liance of a minute"; yet I believe that Vathek fore- tells, in however
rudimentary a way, the satanic sp lendors of Thomas De Quincey and Poe, of Charles
Baudelaire and Huysmans. There is an un- translatable English ep ithet, "uncanny;'
to denote sup ernatural horror; that ep ithet ( unheimlich in G erman) is ap p licable
to certain p ages of Vathek, but not, as far as I recall, to any other book before
it.Chap man notes some of the books that in uenced Beckford: the Biblio- theque
orientale of Barthelemy d'Herbelot; Hamilton's Quatre Facardins; Voltaire's La
Princesse de Babylone; the always reviled and admirable Mille et une nuits of
G alland. To that list I would add Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione: etchings,
p raised by Beckford, that dep ict mighty p alaces which are also im- p enetrable
labyrinths. Beckford, in the rst chap ter of Vathek, enumerates ve p alaces
dedicated to the ve senses; Marino, in the Adone, had already described ve
similar gardens.William Beckford needed only three days and two nights in the
winter of 1782 to write the tragic history of his calip h. He wrote it in French;?In
literature, that is, not in mysticism: the elective Hell of Swedenborg-De coelo et
inferno, 545, 554-is of an earlier date.0N WILLIAM BECKF0RD'S I?;?TIIEK 239Henley
translated it into English in 1785. The original is unfaithful to the translation;
Saintsbury observes that eighteenth-century French is less suitable than English
for communicating the "unde ned horrors" (the p hrase is Beckford's) of this unusual
story.Henley's English version
is volume 856 of the Everyman's Library; Perrin, in Paris, has p ublished the
original text, revised and p rologued by Mallarme. It is strange that Chap man's
laborious bibliograp hy does not mention that revision and that p rologue.[19431 [EW]
Coleridge's FlowerAround 1938, Paul Valery wrote: "The history of literature should
not be the history of authors and the course of their careers or of the career of
their works, but rather the history of the Sp irit as the p roducer or consumer of
literature; such a history could be written without mentioning a single writer." It
was not the rst time the Sp irit had made this observation; in 1844, one of its
amanuenses in Concord had noted: "I am very much struck in literature by the
ap p earance that one p erson wrote all the books . . . there is such equality and
identity both ofjudgment and p oint ofview in the narrative that it is p lainly the
work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman" (Emerson, Essays: Second Series,
"Nominalist and Realist;' 1844). Twenty years earlier, Shelley exp ressed the
op inion that all the p oems of the p ast, p resent, and future were ep isodes or
fragments of a single in nite p oem, written by all the p oets on earth.These
considerations (imp lied, of course, in p antheism) could give rise to an endless
debate; I invoke them now to carry out a modest p lan: a history of the evolution
of an idea through the diverse texts of three authors. The rst, by Coleridge-I am
not sure if he wrote it at the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the
nineteenth century-says: "If a man could p ass through Paradise in a dream, and have
a ower p resented to him as a p ledge that his soul had really been there, and if he
found that ower in his hand when he awoke-Ay!-and what then?"I wonder what my
reader thinks of such a fancy; to me it is p erfect. To use it as the basis for
other inventions seems quite imp ossible, for it has the wholeness and unity of a
terminus ad quem, a nal goal. Of course, it is just that: in literature as in
other sp heres, every act crowns an in nite series of causes and causes an in nite
series of e ects. Behind Coleridge's idea is the general and age-old idea of
generations of lovers who craved the gi of a ower.COLERIDG E's FLOWER 241The
second text I shall quote is a novel Wells dra ed in 1887 and rewrote seven years
later, in the summer of 1894. The rst version was called The Chronic Argonauts
(chronic in this rejected title is the etymological equivalent of temp oral); the
nal version, The Time Machine. In this novel, Wells continued and renewed an
ancient literary tradition: that of foreseeing ture events. Isaiah sees the
destruction of Babylon and the restoration of Israel; Aeneas, the military destiny
of his descendants, the Romans; the p rop hetess of the Edda Saemundi, the return of
the gods who, a er the cyclical battle in which our world will be destroyed, will
discover, lying on the grass of a new meadow, the same chess p ieces they p layed
with before. . . . Wells' p rotagonist, unlike those p rop hetic sp ectators, travels
p hysically to the ture. He returns tired, dusty, shaken; he returns from a remote
humanity that has sp lit into sp ecies who hate each other (the idle Eloi, who live
in dilap idated p alaces and ruined gardens; and the subterranean and nyctalop ic
Morlocks, who feed on the Eloi). He returns with his hair grown grey and brings
from the future a wilted flower. This is the second version of Coleridge's image.
More incredible than a celestial flower or a dream ower is a ture flower, the
contradictory flower whose atoms, not yet assembled, now occup y other sp aces.The
third version I shall mention, the most imp robable of all, is by a writer much more
comp lex than Wells, though less gi ed with those p leasant virtues we usually call
classical. I refer to the author of "The Abasement of the Northmores," the sad,
labyrinthine Henry James. When he died, he le an un nished novel, The Sense ofthe
Past, a fantastic invention that was a variation or elaboration on The Time
Machine.? Wells' p rotagonist travels to the future in an outlandish vehicle that
advances or regresses in time as other vehicles do in sp ace; James' p rotagonist
returns to the p ast, to the eighteenth century, by identi ing himself with that
p eriod. (Both techniques are imp ossible, but James' is less arbitrary. ) In The
Sense of the Past the nexus between the real and the imaginary (between p resent and
p ast) is not a flower, as in the p revious stories, but an eighteenth-century
p ortrait that mysteriously rep resents the p rotagonist. Fascinated by this canvas,
he succeeds in going back to the day when it was p ainted. Among the p ersons he
meets, he nds, of course, the artist, who p aints him with fear and aver-?I have
not read The Sense of the Past, but I am acquainted with the comp etent analysis of
it by Step hen Sp ender in his book The Destructive Element (p p . ws-no) . James was a
friend ofWells; to learn more about their relationship , consult the latter's vast
Exp eriment in Autobiograp hy.242 JORG E LUIS BORG ESsion, having sensed something
unusual and anomalous in those future features. James thus creates an
incomp arable regressus in in nitum when his hero Ralp h Pendrel returns to the
eighteenth century because he is fascinated by an old p ortrait, but Pendrel needs
to have returned to the eighteenth century for that p ortrait to exist. The cause
follows the effect, or the reason for the journey is a consequence of the journey.
Wells was p robably not acquainted with Coleridge's text; Henry James knew and
admired Wells' text. If the doctrine that all authors are one is valid, such facts
are, of course, insignificant.2 Strictly sp eaking, it is not necessary to go that
far; the p antheist who declares the p lurality of authors to be illusory nds
unexp ected sup p ort in the classicist, to whom such a p lurality barely matters.
For the classical mind, literature is the essential thing, not individuals. G eorge
Moore and James Joyce incorp orated in their works the p ages and sentences of
others; Oscar Wilde used to give p lots away for others to develop ; both p rocedures,
though ap p arently contradictory, may reveal an identical sense of art, an
ecumenical, imp ersonal p ercep tion. An- other witness of the Word's p rofound unity,
another who de ed the limitations of the individual, was the renowned Ben Jonson,
who, up on writing his literary testament and the favorable or adverse op inions he
held of his contemp oraries, simp ly combined fragments from Seneca, Quintilian, Jus-
tus Lip sius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two Scaligers.One last
observation. Those who carefully cop y a writer do so imp ersonally, because they
equate that writer with literature, because they susp ect that to dep art from him in
the slightest is to deviate from reason and orthodoxy. For many years I thought
that the almost in nite world of literature was in one man. That man was Carlyle,
he was Johannes Becher, he was Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos Assens, he was De
Quincey.[19451 [SJL)2Around the middle of the seventeenth century the ep igrammist
of p antheism, Angelus Silesius, said that all the blessed are one ( Cherubinscher
Wandersmann V, 7) and that every Christian must be Christ (ibid., V, 9).PROLOG UES
Adolfo Bioy Casares, e Invention MorelAround 1882, Stevenson observed that the
adventure story was regarded as an object of scorn by the British reading p ublic,
who believed that the ability to write a novel without a p lot, or with an in
nitesimal, atrop hied p lot, was a mark of skill. In The Dehumanization ofArt (1925),
Jose Ortega y G asset, seeking the reason for that scorn, said, "I doubt very much
whether an adventure that will interest our sup erior sensibility can be invented
today" (p . 96), and added that such an invention was "p ractically imp ossible" (p .
97). On other p ages, on almost all the other p ages, he up held the cause of the
"p sychological" novel and asserted that the p leasure to be derived from adventure
stories was nonexistent or p uerile. That was undoubtedly the p revailing op inion of
1882, 1925, and even 1940. Some writers (among whom I am hap p y to include Adolfo
Bioy Casares) believe they have a right to disagree. The following, briefly, are
the reasons why.The first of these (I shall neither emp hasize nor attenuate the
fact that it is a p aradox) has to do with the intrinsic form of the adventure
story. The typ ical p sychological novel is formless. The Russians and their
discip les have demonstrated, tediously, that no one is imp ossible: hap p y suicides,
benevolent murderers, lovers who adore each other to the p oint of sep aration,
informers who act out of fervor or humility. . . . In the end such comp lete freedom
is tantamount to chaos. But the p sychological novel would also be a "realistic"
novel, and have us forget that it is a verbal arti ce, for it uses each vain
p recision (or each languid obscurity) as a new p roof of verisimilitude. There are
p ages, there are chap ters in Marcel Proust that are unaccep t- able as inventions,
and we unwittingly resign ourselves to them as we resign ourselves to the
insip idity and the emp tiness of each day. The adventure story, on the other hand,
does not p rop ose to be a transcrip tion of reality: it244 JORG E LUIS BORG ESis an
arti cial object, no p art of which lacks justi cation. It must have a rigid p lot if
it is not to succumb to the mere sequential variety of The G olden Ass, the seven
voyages of Sinbad, or the Quixote.I have given one reason of an intellectual sort;
there are others of an emp irical nature. We hear sad murmurs that our century lacks
the ability to devise interesting p lots; no one attemp ts to p rove that if this
century has any ascendancy over the p receding ones it lies in the quality of its
p lots. Stevenson is more p assionate, more diverse, more lucid, p erhap s more de-
serving of our
unquali ed friendship than is Chesterton, but his p lots are inferior. De Quincey
p lunged deep into labyrinths on his nights of meticulously detailed horror, but
he did not coin his imp ression of "unutterable and self-rep eating in nities" in
fables comp arable to Kafka's. Ortega y G asset was right when he said that
Balzac's "p sychology" does not satis us; the same thing could be said of his
p lots. Shakesp eare and Cervantes were both delighted by the antinomian idea of a
girl who, without losing her beauty, could be taken for a man; but we nd that idea
unconvincing now. I believe I am free from every sup erstition of modernity, of any
illusion that yesterday di ers intimately from today or will differ from
tomorrow; but I maintain that during no other era have there been novels with
such admirable p lots as The Turn of the Screw, The Trial, Le Voyageur sur Ia terre,
and the one you are about to read, which was written in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy
Casares.Detective stories-another p op ular genre in this century that cannot invent
p lots-tell of mysterious events that are later exp lained and justi ed by reasonable
facts. In this book, Adolfo Bioy Casares easily solves a p roblem that is p erhap s
more dif cult. The odyssey of marvels he unfolds seems to have no p ossible
exp lanation other than hallucination or symbolism, and he uses a single fantastic,
but not sup ernatural, p ostulate to decip her it. My fear of making p remature or
p artial revelations restrains me from examining the p lot and the wealth of
delicate wisdom in its execution. Let me sayonly that Bioy renews in literature a
concep t that was refuted by St. Augus- tine and Origen, studied by Louis Auguste
Blanqui, and exp ressed in memorable cadences by Dante G abriel Rossetti:I have been
here before,But when or how I cannot tell:I know the grass beyond the door,The
sweet keen smell,The sighing sound, the lights around the shore . . .PROLOG UES 245
In Sp anish, works of reasoned imagination are infrequent and even very rare. The
classicists emp loyed allegory, the exaggerations of satire, and sometimes simp le
verbal incoherence. The only recent works of this typ e I remember are a story in
Las fuerzas extranas and one by Santiago Dabove: now unjustly forgotten. The
Invention of Morel (the title alludes lially to another island inventor, Moreau)
brings a new genre to our land and our language.I have discussed with the author
the details of his p lot; I have reread it; it seems to me neither imp recise nor
hyp erbolic to classi it as p erfect.[1940} [S] L} Herman Melville, Bartleby the
ScrivenerIn the winter of 1851, Melville p ublished Moby-Dick, the in nite novel
that brought about his fame. Page by p age, the story grows until it takes on the
dimensions of the cosmos: at the beginning the reader might consider the subject to
be the miserable life of whale harp ooners; then, that the subject is the madness of
Cap tain Ahab, bent on p ursuing and destroying the white whale; nally, that the
whale and Ahab and the p ursuit which exhausts the oceans of the p lanet are symbols
and mirrors of the universe. To insinuate that the book is symbolic, Melville
declares emp hatically that it is not and that no one should "scout at Moby-Dick as
a monstrous fable or, still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable
allegory" (chap . 45). The usual connotation of the word allegory seems to have
confused the critics; they all p refer to limit themselves to a moral interp retation
of the work. Thus, E. M. Forster (Asp ects of the Novel, chap . 7) summarizes the
sp iritual theme as, more or less, the following: "a battle against evil conducted
too long or in the wrong way."I agree, but the symbol of the whale is less ap t to
suggest that the cosmos is evil than to suggest its vast inhumanity, its beastly
or enigmatic stu- p idity. In some of his stories, Chesterton comp ares the atheists'
universe to a centerless labyrinth. Such is the universe of Moby-Dick: a cosmos (a
chaos) not only p ercep tibly malignant as the G nostics had intuited, but also
irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius.Moby-Dick is written in
a romantic dialect of English, a vehement dialect that alternates or conjugates
the techniques of Shakesp eare, Thomas De Quincey, Browne, and Carlyle; "Bartleby,"
in a calm and evenly jocularJORG E LUIS BORG ES language deliberately ap p lied to an
atrocious subject, seems to foreshadow Kafka. There is, however, a secret and
central a nity between both ctions. Ahab's monomania troubles and nally destroys
all the men on board; Bartleby's candid nihilism contaminates his comp anions and
even the stolid gentleman who tells his tale and endorses his imaginary tasks. It
is as if Melville had written, "It's enough for one man to be irrational for others
and the universe itself to be so as well." Universal history p roli cally con- rms
that terror."Bartleby" belongs to the volume entitled The Piazza Tales (New Y ork
and London, 1896). About another story in the book, John Freeman observed that it
would not be lly understood until Josep h Conrad p ublished certain analogous p ieces
almost a half-century later; I would observe that Kafka's work casts a curious
ulterior light on "Bartleby." Melville's story de- nes a genre which, around 1919,
Franz Kafka would reinvent and rther exp lore: the fantasies of behavior and
feelings or, as they are now wrongly called, p sychological tales. As it is, the
rst p ages of "Bartleby" are not anticip ations of Kafka but rather allude to or
rep eat Dickens. . . . In 1849, Melville p ublished Mardi, an imp enetrable and almost
unreadable novel, but one with an essential p lot that p refigures the obsessions and
the mechanism of The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika: the subject is an in nite
chase on an in nite sea.I have stated Melville's a nities with other writers. But
this is not to de- mean his achievements: I am following one of the laws of
descrip tion or de nition, that of relating the unknown to the known. Melville's
greatness is unquestionable, but his glory is recent. Melville died in 1891; twenty
years a er his death the eleventh edition of the Encyclop edia Britannica considers
him a mere chronicler of sea life; Lang and G eorge Saintsbury, in 1922 and 1914,
entirely ignore him in their histories of English literature. Later, he was
defended by Lawrence of Arabia and D. H. Lawrence, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford.
In 1921, Raymond Weaver p ublished the rst American monograp h, Herman Melville,
Mariner and Mystic; John Freeman, in 1926, the critical biograp hy Herman Melville.
Vast p op ulations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous p ublicity, have
consp ired to make unknown great men one of America's traditions. Edgar Allan Poe
was one of these; so was Melville.[19441 [S } PROLOG UES 247Henry J es, e Abasement
the NorthmoresSon of the Swedenborgian convert of the same name and brother of the
famous p sychiatrist who founded p ragmatism, Henry James was born in New Y ork on
Ap ril 15, 1843. The father wanted his sons to be cosmop olitan- citizens of the
world in the Stoic sense of the word-and he p rovided for their education in
England, France, G eneva, and Rome. In 1860, Henry returned to America, where he
undertook and abandoned a vague study of law. In 1864, he dedicated himself to
literature, with growing self-denial, lucidity, and hap p iness. Beginning in 1869,
he lived in London and in Sussex. His later trip s to America were occasional and
never went beyond New En- gland. In July 1915, he adop ted British citizenship
because he understood that the moral duty of his country was to declare war on
G ermany. He died February 28, 1916. "Now, at last, that distinguished thing,
death," he said in his dying hour.The de nitive edition of his works covers thirty-
ve volumes edited meticulously by himself. The p rincip al p art of that scrup ulous
accumulation consists of stories and novels. It also includes a biograp hy of
Hawthorne, whom he always admired, and critical studies of Turgenev and Haubert,
close friends of his. He had little regard for Zola and, for comp lex reasons,
Ibsen. He p rotected Wells, who corresp onded ungratefully. He was the best man at
Kip ling's wedding. The comp lete works comp rise studies of a most diverse nature:
the art of narrative, the discovery of as yet unex- p lored themes, literary life as
a subject, indirect narrative techniques, evil and the dead, the risks and virtues
of imp rovisation, the sup ernatural, the course of time, the need to be interesting,
the limits that the illustrator must imp ose up on himself so as not to comp ete with
the text, the unaccep tability of dialect, p oint of view, the rst-p erson narration,
reading aloud, the rep - resentation of unsp eci ed evil, the American exiled in
Europ e, man exiled in the universe. . . . These analyses, duly organized in a
volume, would form an enlightening rhetoric.He p resented several comedies on the
London stage, which were greeted with hisses and Bernard Shaw's resp ectful
disap p roval. He was never p op ular; the English critics offered him a careless and
frigid glory that usually excluded the e ort of reading him."The biograp hies of
James," Ludwig Lewisohn wrote, "are more signi - cant for what they omit than for
what they contain."I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have
comp iledJORG E LUIS BORG ES an encyclop edic anthology of fantastic literature; I have
translated Ka a, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry
James. The writers I have enumerated are, from the rst line, amazing; the universe
p ostulated by their p ages is almost p rofessionally unreal; James, before re-
vealing what he is, a resigned and ironic inhabitant of Hell, runs the risk of
ap p earing to be no more than a mundane novelist, less color l than others. As we
begin to read him, we are annoyed by some ambiguities, some sup er-
cial features; after a few p ages we realize that those deliberate faults enrich
the book. Of course, we are not dealing here with that p ure vagueness of the
Symbolists, whose imp recisions, by eluding meaning, can mean anything. We are
dealing with the voluntary omission of a p art of the novel, which allows us to
interp ret it in one way or another; both p remeditated by the author, both de ned.
Thus we shall never know, in "The Lesson of the Master," if the advice given to the
discip le is or is not treacherous; if, in "The Turn of the Screw;' the children are
victims or agents of the ghosts which in turn could be demons; in "The Sacred
Fount;' which of the ladies who p retend to investigate the mystery of G ilbert
Long is the p rotagonist of that mystery; in "The Abasement of the Northmores," the
nal destiny of Mrs. Hop e's p roject. I want to p oint out another p roblem of this
delicate story of revenge: the intrinsic merits or demerits of Warren Hop e, whom we
have met only through his wife's eyes.James has been accused of resorting to
melodrama; this is because the facts, to him, merely exaggerate or emp hasize the
p lot. Thus, in The Ameri- can, Madame Belleregarde's crime is incredible in itself,
but accep table as a sign of the corrup tion of an ancient family. Thus, in that
story titled "The Death of the Lion;' the demise of the hero and the senseless loss
of the manuscrip t are merely metap hors which declare the indi erence of those who
p retend to admire him. Paradoxically, James is not a p sychological novelist. The
situations in his books do not emerge from his characters; the characters have been
fabricated to justi the situations. With Meredith, the op p osite occurs.There are
many critical studies of James. One may consult Rebecca West's monograp h (Henry
fames, 1916); The Cra ofFiction (1921) by Percy Lubbock; the sp ecial issue of
Hound and Horn corresp onding to the months Ap ril-May 1934; The Destructive Element
(1935) by Step hen Sp ender; and the p assionate article by G raham G reene in the
collective work, The English Novelists (1936). That article ends with these words:
"Henry James, as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakesp eare in the
history of p oetry."[1945} [S!L} BOOK REVIEWSEdward Kasner & James Newman,
Mathematics and the ImaginationLooking over my library, I am intrigued to nd that
the works I have most reread and scribbled with notes are Mauthner's Dictionary of
Philosop hy, Lewes' Biograp hical History ofPhilosop hy, Liddell Hart's History of the
War of1914-1918, Boswell's Life ofSamuel Johnson, and G ustav Sp iller's p sycho-
logical study The Mind ofMan, 1902. To this heterogeneous catalog (not excluding
works that are mere habits, such as G . H. Lewes) I p redict that theyears will
ap p end this charming book.Its four hundred p ages lucidly record the immediate and
accessiblecharms of mathematics, those which even a mere man of letters can under-
stand, or imagine he understands: the endless map of Brouwer, the fourth dimension
glimp sed by More and which Charles Howard Hinton claims to have intuited, the
mildly obscene Moebius strip , the rudiments of the theory of trans nite numbers,
the eight p aradoxes of Zeno, the p arallel lines of Desargues that intersect in in
nity, the binary notation Leibniz discovered in the diagrams of the I Ching, the
beauti l Euclidean demonstration of the stellar in nity of the p rime numbers, the
p roblem of the tower of Hanoi, the equivocal or two-p ronged syllogism.Of the
latter, with which the G reeks p layed (Democritus swears that the Abderites are
liars, but Democritus is an Abderite; then it is not true that the Abderites are
liars; then Democritus is not lying; then it is true that the Abderites are liars;
then Democritus lies; then . . .) there are almost innumerable versions which do
not vary in method, though the characters and the story change. Aulus G ellius
(Attic Nights V, chap . 10) resorts to an orator and his student; Luis Barahona de
Soto (Angelica, Canto XI), to two slaves; Miguel de Cervantes ( Quixote II, chap .
51), to a river, a bridge, and a gallows; Jeremy Taylor, in some sermon, to a man
who has dreamed a voice revealing250 JORG E LUIS BORG ESto him that all dreams are
meaningless; Bertrand Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosop hy, 136), to
the sum total of all sum totals which do not include themselves.To these
illustrious p erp lexities I dare add this one:In Sumatra, someone wishes to receive
a doctorate in p rop hecy. The master seer who administers his exam asks if he will
fail or p ass. The candidate rep lies that he will fail. . . . One can already
foresee the in nite continuation.{1940} {S!L} Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kip ling:A Study
in Literature and Political IdeasImp ossible to mention the name of Kip ling without
bringing up this p seudo-p roblem: should art be a p olitical instrument or not? I use
the p re- p seudo- because those who bludgeon us (or amuse themselves) with such a
foolhardy inquiry seem to forget that in art nothing is more secondary than the
author's intentions. Let us imagine that, around 1853, Walt Whitman had been
motivated not by Emerson's ebullient doctrine but by the somber p hilosop hy of
Schop enhauer. Would his songs be much di erent? I think not. The biblical
citations would maintain their ndamental bitterness, the enumerations would
disp lay our p lanet's ap p alling diversity, the Americanisms and barbarisms would be
no less ap t for comp laint as they were for joy. Technically the work would be the
same. I have imagined a counterp rop osal: in any literature there are famous books
whose p urp ose is imp ercep tible or dubious. Martin Fierro, for Miguel de Unamuno, is
the song of the Sp anish ghter who, a er having p lanted the cross in G ranada, went
to America to serve as advance scout for civilization and to clear the road to the
wilderness; for Ricardo Rojas it is "the sp irit of our native land;' and also "an
elemental voice of nature"; I always believed it was the story of a decent
countryman who degenerates into a barroom ife- ghter. . . . Butler, who knew the
Iliad by heart and translated it into English, considered the author a Trojan
humorist; there are scholars who do not share that op mwn.Kip ling's case is curious.
For glory, but also as an insult, Kip ling has been equated with the British Emp ire.
The p artisans of that federation have vocif- BOOK REVIEWS 251erated his name as
well as the ethics of "If," and those p ages cast in bronze which p roclaim the
untiring variety of the Five Nations and the glad sacri ce of the individual to
imp erial destiny. The enemies of the Emp ire (p artisans of other emp ires) re te or
ignore it. The p aci sts counter his manifold work with Erich Maria Remarque's one
or two novels, and forget that the most alarming news in All Quiet on the Western
Front-the discomforts of war, signs of p hysical fear among the heroes, the use and
abuse of military jargon-is in the Barrack-Room Ballads of rep robate Rudyard, whose
rst series dates om 1892. Naturally, that "crude realism" was condemned by
Victorian critics, and now his realist successors will not forgive its sentimen-
tal features. The Italian Futurists forget that he was the rst Europ ean p oet to
celebrate the sup erb and blind activity of machines. . . .' Whether detractors or
worship ers, they all reduce him to a mere ap ologist for the Emp ire, and tend to
believe that a coup le of simp leminded p olitical op inions can exhaust the analysis
of the diverse aesthetics of thirty- ve volumes. The error of so dim-witted a
belief is exp osed by merely alluding to it.What is indisp utable is that Kip ling's
p rose and p oetic works are in - nitely more comp lex than the theses they elucidate.
Comp ared with "Daysp ring Mishandled," "The G ardener," and "The Church That Was at
Antioch," the best of Maup assant's stories-"Le lit 29," we could say, or"Boule de
Sui -is like a child's drawing. The related circumstance that Kip ling was the
author of children's stories and that his writing always obeyed a certain verbal
restraint has obscured this truth. Like all men, Rud- yard Kip ling was many men
(English gentleman, Eurasian journalist, bibliop hile, sp okesman for soldiers and
mountains), but none with more conviction than the arti cer. The exp erimental arti
cer, secret, anxious, like James Joyce or Mallarme. In his teeming life there was
no p assion like the p assion for technique.Edward Shanks (the author of forgettable
p oems and a mediocre study of Poe) declares in this book that Kip ling ended up
hating war and p redict- ing that mankind would eliminate or reduce the State.{SJL} ?
In this case, as in others, the p recursor is in nitely more valuable than the
successors. 252 JORG E LUIS BORG ESArthur Waley, MonkArthur Waley, whose delicate
versions of Murasaki are classic works of En- glish literature, has now translated
Wu Ch'eng-en's Tale ofJourneys to the Western Lands. This is an allegory from the
sixteenth century; before com- menting on it, I would like to examine the p roblem
or p seudo-p roblem thatthe genre of allegory p oses.We all tend to believe that
interp retation exhausts the meaning of a sym-bol. There is nothing more false. I
will take a simp le examp le: the p rop hecy. Everyone knows that Oedip us was asked by
the Theban sp hinx: What is the animal that has four legs in the morning, two at
noon, and three in the evening? Everyone also knows that Oedip us resp onded that
it was a man. But who among us does not immediately p erceive that the bare concep t
of man is as inferior to the magical animal that is glimp sed in the question as an
ordinary man is to that changeable monster, seventy years to one day, and an old
man's sta to a third foot? Symbols, beyond their rep resentative worth, have an
intrinsic worth; in riddles (which may consist of only twenty words) it is natural
that every characteristic is justi able; in allegories
(which o en surp ass twenty thousand words) such rigor is imp ossible. It is also
undesir- able, for the investigation of continual minute corresp ondences would numb
any reader. De Quincey ( Writings XI, 199) states that we may attribute any sp eech
or act to an allegorical character as long as it does not contradict the idea he
p ersoni es. '' legorical characters," he says, "occup y an intermediate p lace
between the absolute truths of human life and the p ure abstractions of logical
understanding." The lean and hungry wolf of the rst canto of the Divine Comedy is
not an emblem or a gure of avarice: it is a wolf and it is also avarice, as in
dreams. That p lural nature is the p rop erty of all symbols. For examp le, the vivid
heroes of Pilgrim's P gres Christian, Ap ol- lyon, Master G reat-Heart, Master
Valiant-for-Truth-maintain a double intuition; they are not gures who may be
exchanged for abstract nouns. ( insoluble p roblem would be the creation of a short
and secret allegory in which everything one of the characters says or does would be
an insult; another character, a favor; another, a lie; etc.)I am familiar with an
earlier version by Timothy Richard of the novel translated by Waley, curiously
entitled A Mission to Heaven (Shanghai, 1940). I have also looked at the excerp ts
G iles includes in his History ofChi- nese Literature (1901) and Sung-Nien Hsu in
the Anthologie de Ia litterature chinoise (1933).BOOK REVIEWS 253Perhap s the most
obvious characteristic ofWu Ch'eng-en's dizzying allegory is its p anoramic
vastness. Everything seems to take p lace in a detailed in nite world, with
intelligible zones of light and some of darkness. There are rivers, caves,
mountains, seas, and armies; there are sh and drums and clouds; there is a
mountain of swords and a p unitive lake of blood. Time is no less marvelous than
sp ace. Before crossing the universe, the p rotagonist-an insolent stone monkey,
p roduced by a stone egg-idles away centuries in a cave. In his journeys he sees a
root that matures every 3,000 years; those who nd it live 370 years; those who eat
it, 47,000 years. In the Western Paradise, the Buddha tells him about a god whose
name is the Jade Emp eror; every 1,750 kalp as this Emp eror p erfects himself, and
each kalp a consists of 129,000 years. Kalp a is a Sanskrit term; the love of cycles
of enormous time and of unlimited sp aces is typ ical of the nations of India, as it
is of contemp orary astronomy and the Atomists of Abdera. (Os- wald Sp engler, as I
recall, stated that the intuition of an in nite time and sp ace was p articular to
the culture he called Faustian, but the most unequivocal monument to that
intuition of the world is not G oethe's wandering and miscellaneous drama but
rather the ancient cosmological p oem De rerum natura.)A unique characteristic of
this book: the notion that human time is not commensurate with that of G od. The
monkey enters the Jade Emp eror's p alace and returns at dawn; on earth a year has
p assed. The Muslim traditions offer something similar. They say that the Prop het
was carried off on the resp lendent mare Alburak through the seven heavens, and that
in each one of them he talked with the p atriarchs and angels who inhabited it, and
that he crossed the Oneness and felt a chill that froze his heart when the hand of
the Lord clap p ed him on his shoulder. On leaving the p lanet, the sup ernatural hoof
of Alburak had smashed a water jar; the Prop het returned before a single drop of
water had sp illed. . . . In the Muslim story, the time of G od is richer than that
of man; in the Chinese story it is p oorer and p rotracted.An exuberant monkey, a
lazy p ig, a dragon of the weste seas turned into a horse, and a confused and
p assive evildoer whose name is Sand embark on the dif cult adventure of
immortality, and in order to obtain it p ractice fraud, violence, and the magic
arts; such is the general p lot of this allegorical comp osition. It should also be
added that this task p uri es all of the characters who, in the nal chap ter, ascend
to the Buddhas and return to the world with the p recise cargo of 5,048 sacred
books. J. M. Robertson, in his Short History of Christianity, suggests that the
G nostics based their254 JORG E LUIS BORG ESdivine hierarchies on the earthly
bureaucracy; the Chinese also emp loyed this method. Wu Ch'eng-en satirizes the
angelical bureaucracy and consequently the one of this world. The genre of
allegory tends toward sadness and tedium; in this excep tional book, we nd an
unrestrained hap p iness. Reading it does not remind us of El Critic6n or the mystery
p lays, but rather the last book of Pan tagruel or The Thousand and One Nights.
Wonders abound in this journey. The hero, imp risoned by demons in a metal sp here,
magically grows larger, but the sp here grows too. The p risoner shrinks to the p oint
of invisibility, and so does his p rison. In another chap - ter there is a battle
between a magician and a demon. The magician,wounded, turns into four thousand
magicians. The demon, horribly, tells him: "To multip ly yourself is a trifle; what
is dif cult is p utting yourself back together."There are also humorous moments. A
monk, invited by some fairies to an atrocious banquet of human flesh, p leads that
he is a vegetarian and leaves.One of the last chap ters includes an ep isode that
combines the symbolic and the p oignant. A real human, Hsian Tsang, guides the
fantastic p ilgrims. A er many adventures, they arrive at a swollen and dark river
tossed with high waves. A boatman o ers to carry them across. They accep t, but the
man notices with horror that the boat has no bottom. The boatman declares that
since the beginning of time he has p eace lly carried thousands of generations of
humans. In the middle of the river they see a corp se being p ulled along by the
current. Again the man feels the chill of fear. The others tell him to look at it
more carefully: it is his own corp se. They all congratu- late and embrace him.
Arthur Waley's version, although literarily far sup erior to Richard's, is p erhap s
less felicitous in its selection of adventures. It is called Monkey and was
p ublished in London this year. It is the work of one of the very few Si- nologists
who is also a man of letters.{1942} {EW} Leslie Weatherhead, After DeathI have
recently comp iled an anthology of fantastic literature. While I admit that such a
work is among the few a second Noah should rescue from a second deluge, I must
confess my guilty omission of the unsusp ected majorBOOK REVIEWS 255masters of the
genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Erigena, bertus Magnus, Sp inoza, Leibniz,
Kant, Francis Bradley. What, in fact, are the wonders of Wells or Edgar Allan
Poe-a flower that visits us from the future, a dead man under h nosis-in comp arison
to the invention of G od, the la- bored theory of a being who in some way is three
and who endures alone outside oftime? What is the bezoar stone to p re-established
harmony, what is the unicorn to the Trinity, who is Lucius Ap uleius to the
multip liers of Buddhas of the G reater Vehicle, what are all the nights of
Scheherazade next to an argument by Berkeley? I have worship ed the gradual
invention of G od; Heaven and Hell (an immortal p unishment, an immortal reward) are
also admirable and curious designs of man's imagination.The theologians de ne
Heaven as a p lace of everlasting glory and good fortune and advise us that such a
p lace is not devoted to infernal torments. The fourth chap ter of A er Death denies
such a division between Heaven and Hell, which, it argues, are not top ograp hical
locations but rather extreme states of the soul. This concurs fully with Andre
G ide (Journal, 677), who sp eaks of an immanent Hell-already con rmed by Milton's
verse: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell"-and p artially with Swedenborg,
whose unredeemable lost souls p refer caverns and swamp s to the unbearable
sp lendor of Heaven. Weatherhead p rop oses the thesis of a single heterogeneous
world beyond, alternating between hell and p aradise according to the souls'
cap acity.For almost all men, the concep ts of Heaven and hap p iness are insep ara-
ble. Nonetheless, in the nal decade of the nineteenth century, Butler conceived
of a Heaven in which everything was slightly frustrating (since no one can tolerate
total contentment) and a comp arable Hell lacking all un- p leasant stimuli excep t
those which p revent sleep . Around 1902, Bernard Shaw installed in Hell the
illusions of eros, self-denial, glory, and p ure undying love; in Heaven, the
comp rehension of reality (Man and Sup erman, act 3). Weatherhead is a mediocre and
almost nonexistent writer, stimulated by p ious readings, but he intuits that the
direct p ursuit of a p ure and p erp etual hap p iness is no less laughable on the other
side of death than on this side. He writes: "The highest form of joy that we have
conceived as Heaven is the exp erience of serving, that is, a l lling and voluntary
p articip ation in the work of Christ. This can occur among other sp irits, p er-
hap s in other worlds; p erhap s we can help save our own." In another chap ter he
asserts: "Heaven's p ain is intense, but the more we have evolved in this world, the
more we can share in the other the life of G od. The life of G od is p ainful. In his
heart are all the sins and su ering of the world. AsJORG E LUIS BORG ES long as there
remains a single sinner in the universe, there will be no hap p i- ness in Heaven."
(Origen, p redicating a nal reconciliation of the Creator with all creatures,
including the devil, had already dreamed that dream.)I do not know what the reader
will think of such semi-theosop hical conjectures. Catholics (read: Argentine
Catholics) believe in an ultraterres- trial world, but I have noticed that they are
not interested in it. With me the op p osite occurs: I am interested but I do not
believe.[19431 [SJL} FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISMTwo
FilmsI have seen two lms on two consecutive nights. The rst (in both senses),
according to the director himself, was "insp ired by Josep h Conrad's novel The
SecretAgent." Even without his statement, however, I must admit that I would have
stumbled up on the connection he reveals, but never that resp i- ratory and divine
verb insp ire. Skillful p hotograp hy, clumsy lmmaking- these are my indi erent
op inions "insp ired" by Hitchcock's latest lm. As for Josep h Conrad . . . There is
no doubt, aside from certain distortions, that the story line of Sabotage (1936)
coincides with the p lot of The Secret Agent (1907); there also is no doubt that the
actions narrated by Conrad have a p sychological value-only a p sychological value.
Conrad unfolds for us the destiny and character of Mr. Verloc, a lazy, fat, and
sentimental man who comes to "crime" as a result of con sion and fear. Hitchcock
p refers to translate him into an inscrutable Slavo-G ermanic Satan. An almost
p rop hetic p assage in The Secret Agent invalidates and refutes this translation:But
there was also about Mr. Verloc [. . .] the air common to men who live on the
vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common
to keep ers of gambling halls and disorderly houses; to p rivate detectives and
inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating
electric belts and to the inventors of p atent medicines. But of that last I am
not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the dep ths. For all I
know, the exp ression of these last may be p erfectly diabolic. I shouldn't be sur-
p rised. What I want to af rm is that Mr. Verloc's exp ression was by no means
diabolic.258 JORG E LUIS BORG ESHitchcock has chosen to disregard this indication. I
do not regret his strange in delity; I do regret the p etty task he has assigned
himself. Conrad enables us to understand comp letely a man who causes the death of a
child; Hitchcock devotes his art (and the slanting, sorrowful eyes of Sylvia
Sidney) to making that death reduce us to tears. Conrad's undertaking was intellec-
tual; the other's merely sentimental. That is not all: the lm-oh comp lementary,
insip id horror-adds a love interest whose characters, as chaste as they are
enamored, are the martyred Mrs. Verloc and a dap p er, good- looking detective,
disguised as a greengrocer.The other lm is informatively titled Los muchachos de
antes no usaban gomina [ The Boys of Y esteryear Didn't Slick Their Hair] . (Some
informative titles are beauti l: The G eneral Died at Dawn.) This lm-The Boys
ofY esteryear, etc.-is unquestionably one of the best Argentine lms I have seen,
that is, one of the worst lms in the world. The dialogue is totally unbeliev-
able. The characters-gangland bosses and hoodlums in 1906-sp eak and live solely as
a nction of their di erence om p eop le in 1937. They have no existence outside of
local and historical color. There is one st ght and another ght with knives. The
actors do not know how to thrust and p arry nor how to box, which dims these
sp ectacles.The lm's theme, "moral nihilism" or the p rogressive decline of Buenos
Aires, is certainly ap p ealing, but is wasted by the lm's director. The hero, who
ought to be emblematic of the old virtues-and the old skep ticism-is a citizen of
Buenos Aires who has already been Italianized, a p ortefw cloy- ingly suscep tible to
the shame l seduction of ap ocryp hal p atriotism and sentimental tangos.[19371 [SJL}
An Overwhelming FilmCitizen Kane (called The Citizen in Argentina) has at least two
p lots. The rst, p ointlessly banal, attemp ts to milk ap p lause from dimwits: a vain
millionaire collects statues, gardens, p alaces, swimming p ools, diamonds, cars,
libraries, men and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are usually
ascribed to the Holy G host), he discovers that this cornucop ia of miscellany is a
vanity of vanities: all is vanity. At the p oint of death, he yearns for one single
thing in the universe, the humble sled he p layed with as a child!FILM REVIEWS AND
CRITICISM 259The second p lot is far sup erior. It links the Koheleth to the memory
of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. A kind of metap hysical detective story, its
subject (both p sychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man's inner
self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has sp oken, the many lives he
has ruined. The same technique was used by Josep h Conrad in Chance (1914) and in
that beautiful lm The Power and the G lory: a rhap - sody of miscellaneous scenes
without chronological order. Overwhelm- ingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows
fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine
them and to reconstruct him. Forms of multip licity and incongruity abound in the
lm: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a
p oor woman, luxuriant and su ering, p lays with an enormous jigsaw p uzzle on the
floor of a p alace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments
are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a
simulacrum, a chaos of ap p earances. (A p ossible corollary, foreseen by David
Hume, Ernst Mach, and our own Macedonia Fernandez: no man knows who he is, no man
is anyone.) In a story by Chesterton-"The Head of Caesar," I think-the hero
observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This lm is
p recisely that labyrinth.We all know that a p arty, a p alace, a great undertaking, a
lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosp here ofcordial and sp ontaneous
camaraderie, are essentially horrendous. Citizen Kane is the rst film to show such
things with an awareness of this truth.The p roduction is, in general, worthy of its
vast subject. The cinematograp hy has a striking dep th, and there are shots whose
farthest p lanes (like Pre-Rap haelite p aintings) are as p recise and detailed as the
close-up s.I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as certain
G ri th or Pudovkin lms have "endured"- lms whose historical value is undeniable
but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, p edantic, tedious. It is
not intelligent, though it is the work of genius-in the most nocturnal and G ermanic
sense of that bad word.[1941] [S!L] Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, TransformedHollywood
has defamed, for the third time, Robert Louis Stevenson. In Ar- gentina the title
of this defamation is El hombre y la bestia [The Man and260 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthe
Beast] and it has been p erp etrated by Victor Fleming, who rep eats with ill-fated
fidelity the aesthetic and moral errors of Mamoulian's version-or p erversion. I
shall begin with the moral errors.In the 1886 novel, Dr. Jekyll is morally
dup licitous in the way all men are double, while his hyp ostasis-Edward Hyde-is
relentlessly, unredeemably endish. In the 1941 lm, Dr. Jekyll is a young
p athologist who p ractices chastity while his hyp ostasis-Hyde-is a sadistic and
acrobatic p rofligate. For the sages of Hollywood, G ood is the courtship of the
chaste and wealthy Miss Lana Turner, and Evil (which similarly concerned David Hume
and the heresiarchs of Alexandria) is illicit cohabitation with Fraken Ingrid
Bergman or Miriam Hop kins. It would be tile to observe that Stevenson is com-
p letely innocent of such limitations or distortions of the p roblem. In the book's
last chap ter, he asserts that Jekyll's vices are sensuality and hyp ocrisy; in one
of his Ethical Studie?in 1888-he tried to list "all the disp lays of the truly
diabolic" and p rop osed the following: "envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean
silence, the calumnious truth, the backbiter, the p etty tyrant, the p eev- ish
p oisoner of family life." (I would add that ethics do not include sexual matters so
long as they are not contaminated by betrayal, greed, or vanity.)The structure of
the film is even more rudimentary than its theology. In the book, the identity of
Jekyll and Hyde is a surp rise: the author saves it for the end of the ninth
chap ter. The allegorical tale p retends to be a detective story; no reader guesses
that Hyde and Jekyll are the same p erson. The very title of the book makes us
assume they are two. There is nothing easier than shi ing this device to the
screen. Let us imagine any detective mystery: two well-known actors gure in the
p lot (let us say G eorge Raft and Sp encer Tracy); they may use analogous words or
refer to events that p resup p ose a common p ast. When the mystery seems inexp licable,
one of them swallows the magic drug and changes into the other. (Of course the
success l execution of this p lan would require two or three p honetic adjustments,
such as changing the p rotagonists' names.) More civilized than I, Victor Fleming
avoids all surp rise and mystery: in the early scenes of the lm, Sp encer Tracy
fearlessly drinks the versatile p otion and transforms himself into Sp encer Tracy,
with a di erent wig and Negroid features.Beyond Stevenson's dualist p arable and
closer to the Conference of the Birds, which Farid al-Oin Attar comp osed in the
twel h century (of the Christian era), we may imagine a p antheist film, whose
numerous characters nally become One, who is everlasting.[1941} {SJL} Two Films
FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 261The doctrine of the transmigration of souls and
circular time, or the Eter- nal Return, was suggested (it is said) by p aramnesia,
by the sudden, disturbing imp ression of having already lived the p resent moment.
No matter how forgetful, there is not a single moviegoer in Buenos Aires-at 6:30
and 10:45 P.M.-who has not exp erienced this imp ression. Hollywood, like the G reek
tragedians, has stuck for many years to ten or twelve basic p lots: the aviator who
dies in a convenient catastrop he in order to save the friend whom his wife loves;
the deceitful typ ist who does not refuse the gi s of furs, ap artments, cars, and
tiaras,
but who slap s or kills the giver when he "goes too far"; the unsp eakable and
acclaimed rep orter who seeks the friendship of a gangster with the sole motive of
betraying him and making him die on the gallows. . . .The latest victim of this
disconcerting asceticism is Miss Bette Davis. They have made her p ortray the
following romance: a woman, weighed down by a p air of eyeglasses and a domineering
mother, considers herself ugly and insip id; a p sychiatrist (Claude Rains) p ersuades
her to vacation among p alm trees, to p lay tennis, to visit Brazil, to take o her
glasses, to change dressmakers. The ve-p art treatment works: the cap tain of the
ship who brings her home rep eats the obvious truth that not one of the other women
aboard has had Miss Davis' success. In the face of this endorsement, a niece,
p reviously intimidating in her sarcasm, now sobs for forgiveness. Across the
screens of the most remote movie houses, the lm sp reads its bold thesis: A dis
gured Miss Davis is less beautiful.The distorted drama I have summarized is called
Now Voyager. It was directed by a certain Irving Rap p er, who might not be stup id,
but who has now unfortunately degraded the tragic heroine of The Little Foxes, The
Let- ter, and OfHuman Bondage.Nightmare is less ambitious and more tolerable. It
begins as a detective lm but wastes no time in lap sing into an erratic adventure
lm. It suffers from all the defects of both genres, with the sole virtue of not
belonging to the genre of the boring. Its p lot is the kind that has surp rised every
sp ectator hundreds of times: a p retty girl and an average man battle against an
all- p owerful, malicious society, which before the war was China and now is the
G estap o or the international sp ies of the Third Reich. The hap less directors of
such lms are motivated by two intentions, rst, to show that Orientals (or
Prussians) combine p erfect evil with p erfect intelligence and treachery,JORG E LUIS
BORG ES and secondly, to show that there is always a well-intentioned man who will
succeed in outwitting them. Inevitably, these cross-p urp oses cancel each other out.
Various imp ending dangers threaten the heroine and hero, which turn out to be
imaginary and ine ectual since the sp ectators know very well that the lm must last
an hour-a well-known fact that guarantees the characters a longevity or immortality
of sixty minutes. Another convention that sp oils p ictures of this sort is the
p rotagonists' sup erhuman courage: they are told they are going to die, and they
smile. The audience smiles too.{19431 {S] L} On DubbingThe art of combination is not
in nite in its p ossibilities, though those p ossibilities are ap t to be
ightening. The G reeks engendered the chimera, a monster with the head of a lion,
the head of a dragon, and the head of a goat; the second-century theologians, the
Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy G host are inextricably linked;
the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a bright red, sup ernatural bird equip p ed with
six feet and s wings but with neither face nor eyes; nineteenth-century
geometrists, the hyp ercube, a four- dimensional figure enclosing an in nite number
of cubes and bounded by eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just
enriched this ivo- lous museum of teratology: by means of a p erverse arti ce they
call dubbing, they devise monsters that combine the famous face of G reta G arbo with
the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo. How can we fail to p roclaim our admiration forthis
bleak magic, for these ingenious audio-visual deformations?Those who defend dubbing
might argue (p erhap s) that objections to it can also be raised against any nd of
translation. This argument ignores, or avoids, the p rincip al defect: the arbitrary
imp lant of another voice and another language. The voice of Hep burn or G arbo is
not accidental but, for the world, one of their de ning features. Similarly, it is
worth rememberingthat gestures are di erent in English and Sp anish.1I have heard
that dubbing is ap p reciated in the p rovinces. This is asimp le authoritarian
argument, and as long as they do not p ublish the syllo-1More than one sp ectator
will ask himself: Since they are usurp ing voices, why not also faces? When will the
system be p erfect? When will we see Juana G onzalez p laying the role of G reta G arbo
p laying the role of Queen Christina of Sweden?FILM REVIEWS AND CRITICISM gisms of
those rustic connoisseurs from Chilecito and Chivilcoy, I, for one, shall not let
myself be intimidated. I also hear that p eop le who do not know English nd dubbing
delightful, or tolerable. My understanding of English is less p erfect than my
ignorance of Russian, but I would never resign myself to seeing Alexander Nevsky
again in any language other than the original, and I would see it eagerly, nine
or ten times, if they showed it in the original or in a version I believed to be
the original. The latter is imp ortant: worse than dubbing or the substitution that
dubbing imp lies, is one's general awareness of a substitution, of a fake.There is
no advocate of dubbing who does not invoke determinism and p redestination, swearing
that this exp edient is the result of an inevitable evolution and that soon we will
have to choose between dubbed lms or no lms whatsoever. G iven the global decline
of motion p ictures-scarcely corrected by a single excep tion such as The Mask
ofDimitrio t he second alternative is not p ain l. Recent bad lms-I am thinking of
Moscow's The Diary ofa Nazi and Hollywood's The Story ofDr. Wassell-p romp t us to
regard the movies as a kind of negative p aradise. "Sightseeing is the art of dis-
ap p ointment;' Stevenson noted. The de nition ap p lies to lms and, with sad
frequency, to that continuous and unavoidable exercise called life.{19451 {SJL} v
Nine Dantesque Essays1945-1951 Prolo eImagine, in an Oriental library, a p anel
p ainted many centuries ago. It may be Arabic, and we are told that all the legends
of The Thousand and One Nights are rep resented on its surface; it may be Chinese,
and we learn that it illustrates a novel that has hundreds or thousands of
characters. In the tumult of its forms, one shap e-a tree like an inverted cone; a
group of mosques, vermilion in color, against an iron wall-catches our attention,
and from there we move on to others. The day declines, the light is wearing thin,
and as we go deep er into the carved surface we understand that there is nothing on
earth that is not there. What was, is, and shall be, the history of p ast and
future, the things I have had and those I will have, all of it awaits us somewhere
in this serene labyrinth. . . . I have fantasized a magical work, a p anel that is
also a microcosm: Dante's p oem is that p anel whose edges enclose the universe. Y et
I believe that if we were able to read it in innocence (but that hap p iness is
barred to us), its universality would not be the first thing we would notice, and
still less its grandiose sublimity. We would, I believe, notice other, less
overwhelming and far more delightful characteristics much sooner, p erhap s rst of
all the one singled out by the British Danteans: the varied and felicitous
invention of p recise traits. In describing a man intertwined with a serp ent, it is
not enough for Dante to say that the man is being transformed into a serp ent and
the serp ent into a man; he comp ares this mutual metamorp hosis to a flame devouring
a p age, p receded by a reddish strip where whiteness dies but that is not yet
black (In- ferno V, 64). It is not enough for him to say that in the darkness of
the seventh circle the damned must squint to see him; he comp ares them to men
gazing at each other beneath a dim moon or to an old tailor threading a needle
(Inferno , 19). It is not enough for him to say that the water in the dep ths of
the universe has frozen; he adds that it looks like glass, not water (Inferno
II, 24). . . . Such comp arisons were in Macaulay's mind268 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwhen he
declared, in op p osition to Cary, that Milton's "vague sublimity" and "magni cent
generalities" moved him less than Dante's sp eci cs. Later, Ruskin (Modern Painters
IV, XIV) also condemned Milton's fog and uncertainty and ap p roved of the strictly
accurate top ograp hy by which Dante en- gineered his infernal p lane. It is common
knowledge that p oets p roceed by hyp erbole: for Petrarch or for G ongora, every
woman's hair is gold and all water is crystal. This crude, mechanical alp habet of
symbols corrup ts the rigor of words and ap p ears to arise from the indifference of
an imp erfect observation. Dante forbids himself this error; not one word in his
book is unjusti ed.The p recision I have just noted is not a rhetorical arti ce but
an a - mation of the integrity, the p lenitude, with which each incident of the
p oem has been imagined. The same may be said of the p sychological traits which are
at once so admirable and so modest. The p oem is interwoven with such traits, of
which I will cite a few. The souls destined for hell weep and blasp heme against
G od; then, when they step onto Charon's bark, their fear changes to desire and an
intolerable eagerness (Inferno III, 124). Dante hears from Virgil's own lip s that
Virgil will never enter heaven; immediately he calls him "master" and "sir,"
p erhap s to show that this confession does not lessen his affection, p erhap s
because, knowing Virgil to be lost, he loves him all the more (Inferno IV, 39). In
the black hurricane of the second circle, Dante wishes to learn the root of Paolo
and Francesca's love; Francesca tells him that the two loved each other without
knowing it, "soli eravamo e sanza alcun sosp etto" [we were alone, susp ecting
nothing] , and that their love was revealed to them by a casual reading. Virgil
rails against p roud sp irits who asp ire to encomp ass infinite divinity with mere
reason; suddenly he bows his head and is silent, because one of those
unfortunates is he (Purgato- rio III, 34). On the rugged slop e of Purgatory, the
shade of Sordello the Mantuan inquires of Virgil's shade as to its homeland; Virgil
says Mantua; Sordello interrup ts and embraces him (Purgatorio VI, 58). The novels
of our own day follow mental p rocesses with extravagant verbosity; Dante allows
them to glimmer in an intention or a gesture.Paul Claude! has observed that the
sights that await us after dying will not, in all likelihood, include the nine
circles of Hell, the terraces of Purga- tory, or the concentric heavens. Dante
would undoubtedly have agreed; he devised his top ograp hy of death as an arti ce
demanded by Scholasticism and by the form of his p oem.Dante's universe is described
by Ptolemaic astronomy and Christian theology. Earth is a motionless sp here; in
the center of the Boreal hemi-PROLOG UE sp here-the one p ermitted to mankind-is the
Mount of Zion; ninety degrees to the east of that mountain, a river, the G anges,
dies; ninety degrees to the west, a river, the Ebro, is born. The Austral
hemisp here consists of water, not land, and is barred to mankind; in the center is
a mountain that is the antip ode of Zion, the Mount of Purgatory. The two rivers and
the two mountains, all equidistant, inscribe a cross on the terrestrial orb.
Beneath the Mount of Zion, but considerably wider, an inverted cone-Hell-tap ers
toward the center of the earth, divided into diminishing circles like the rows of
an amp hitheater. The circles are nine in number, and their top ograp hy is ap p alling
and ruinous; the first five form the Up p er Inferno, the last four, the Lower
Inferno, a city with red mosques surrounded by walls of iron. Within it are cryp ts,
p its, p recip ices, swamp s, and dunes; at the cone's ap ex is Lucifer, "the worm that
gnaws the world." A crack op ened in the rock by the waters of Lethe connects Hell's
lowest dep ths to the base of the Mount of Purgatory, which is an island and has a
door. Its slop es are step p ed with terraces that signi the mortal sins; at its
p eak, the G arden of Eden blos- soms. Nine concentric sp heres sp in around the earth;
the rst seven are the p lanetary heavens (those of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the
Sun, Mars, Jup iter, and Saturn); the eighth is the Heaven of the Fixed Stars; the
ninth, the Crystalline Heaven, also called the Primum Mobile. This is surrounded by
the emp yrean, where the Rose of the Just op ens, immeasurable, around a p oint, which
is G od. Predictably, the choirs that make up the Rose are nine in number. . . .
Such are the broad outlines of the general con guration of Dante's world, which is
subordinate, as the reader will have observed, to the p reeminence of the numbers 1
and 3 and of the circle. The Demiurge or Cra sman of the Timaeus, a book mentioned
by Dante (Convivio III, s; Paradiso IV, 49) considered rotation the most p erfect
form of movement, and the sp here the most p erfect body; this dogma, which Plato's
Demiurge shared with Xenop hanes and Parmenides, governs the geograp hy of the three
worlds traversed by Dante.The nine revolving circles and the southern hemisp here
made of water with a mountain at its center p lainly corresp ond to an antiquated
cos- mology; there are those who feel that the same adjective is ap p licable to the
sup ernatural economy of the p oem. The nine circles of Hell (they argue) are no less
outdated and indefensible than the nine heavens of Ptolemy, and Purgatory is as
unreal as the mountain where Dante p laces it. A variety of considerations can serve
to counter this objection: first, that Dante did not p rop ose to establish the true
or realistic top ograp hy of the other world. He stated this himself: in his famous
ep istle to Can G rande, written in Latin, he270 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwrote that the
subject of his Commedia is, literally, the state of souls a er death and,
allegorically, man, whose merits and faults make him deserving of divine p unishment
or reward. Iacop o di Dante, the p oet's son, develop ed this idea further. In the
p rologue to his commentary, we read that the Com- media seeks to p aint humanity's
three modes of being in allegorical colors, so that in the rst p art the author
considers vice, calling it Hell; in the second, the p assage from vice to virtue,
calling it Purgatory; in the third, the condition of p erfect men, calling it
Paradise, "to demonstrate the lo iness of their virtues and their hap p iness, both
of which are necessary to man in order for him to discern the highest good." Other
time-honored commentators understood it in the same way; Iacop o della Lana, for
examp le, ex- p lains that "the p oet, considering human life to be of three
conditions, which are the life of the sin l, the life of the p enitent and the life
of the good, divided his book into three p arts, which are Hell, Purgatory and
Paradise."Another trustworthy testimony is that of Francesco da Buti, who anno-
tated the Commedia toward the end of the fourteenth century. He makes the words of
Dante's letter his own: "The subject of this p oem is, literally, the state of souls
once sep arated from their bodies and, morally, the rewards or p ains that man
attains by the exercise of his free will."In Ce que dit la bouche d'ombre, Hugo
writes that in Hell, the shade that ap p ears to Cain in the form ofAbel is the same
shade Nero recognizes as Agrip p ina.Much more serious than the accusation of
obsolescence is that of cruelty. Nietzsche, in the Twilight of the Idols (1888),
gave currency to this notion in the be ddled ep igram that de nes Dante as "the
hyena that p oetizes on graves"-a de nition that is clearly more emp hatic than
ingenious. It owes its fame, its excessive fame, to the fact that it formulates,
with thought- less violence, a commonp lace op inion. The best way to re te that
op inion is to investigate the reason for it.There is a technical exp lanation for
the hardheartedness and cruelty of which Dante has been accused. The p antheistic
idea of a G od who is also the universe, a god who is every one of his creatures and
the destiny of those creatures, may be a heresy and an error if we ap p ly it to
reality, but it is indisp utable when ap p lied to the p oet and his work. The p oet
is each one of the men in his ctive world, he is every breath and every detail.
One of his tasks, and not the easiest of them, is to hide or disguise this
omnip resence. The p roblem was p articularly burdensome in Dante's case, for he was
forced by the nature of his p oem to mete out glory or damnation, but in such a way
as to keep his readers from noticing that the Justice handingPROLOG UE 271down these
sentences was, in the nal analysis, he himself. To achieve this, he included
himself as a character in the Commedia, and made his own reactions contrast or
only rarely coincide-in the case of Filip p o Argenti, or in that of Judas-with the
divine decisions.[EA} The Noble Castle of the Fourth CantoToward the beginning of
the nineteenth century, or the end of the eighteenth, certain adjectives of Saxon
or Scottish origin (eerie, uncanny, weird) came into circulation in the English
language, serving to de ne those p laces or things that vaguely insp ire horror. Such
adjectives corresp ond to a romantic concep t of landscap e. In G erman, they are
p erfectly translated by the word unheimlich; in Sp anish, the best word may be
siniestro. With this p eculiar quality of uncanniness in mind, I once wrote, "The
Palace of Sub- terranean Fire that we nd in the nal p ages ofWilliam Beckford's
Vathek (1782) is the rst truly atrocious hell in literature. The most famous
literary Avernus, the dolente regno of the Commedia, is not an atrocious p lace; it
is a p lace where atrocious things hap p en. The distinction is valid."Stevenson ("A
Chap ter on Dreams") relates that in the dreams of his childhood he was p ursued by
an abominable hue of brown; Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday) imagines that at
the western limits of the world there exists, p erhap s, a tree that is more and less
than a tree, and at the eastern limits, something else, p erhap s a tower, whose very
shap e is wicked. Poe, in the "MS Found in a Bottle," sp eaks of a southern sea where
the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman; Melville
sp ends many p ages of Moby-Dick dilucidating the horror of the whale's un- endurable
whiteness. . . . I have been lavish with examp les; p erhap s it would have suf ced to
observe that Dante's hell magni es the idea of a jail;' Beck- ford's, the tunnels
of a nightmare.Several nights ago, on a p latform at the Constituci6n railway
station, I suddenly recalled a p erfect case of uncanniness, of calm, silent horror,
at the very entrance to the Commedia. An examination of the text con rmed the'
"Carcere cieco," blind p rison, says Virgil of Hell (Purgatorio II, 103; Inferno X,
58-59) .THE N0BLE CASTLE 0F THE F0URTH CANT0 273correctness of this delayed
recollection. I am sp eaking of Canto IV of the Inferno, one of the most celebrated.
To one who has reached the nal p ages of the Paradiso, the Commedia can be many
things, p erhap s all things; at the beginning, it is obviously a dream dreamt by
Dante, who for his p art is no more than the subject of the dream. He tells us he
does not know how he found himself in the dark wood, "tant' era p ien di sonno a
que[ p unta" [I was so full of sleep at the moment] ; the sonno is a metap hor for
the bewilderment of the sinning soul, but it suggests the inde nite onset of the
act of dreaming. He then writes that the she-wolf who blocks his p ath has caused
many to live in sorrow; G uido Vitali observes that this information could not have
emanated from the mere sight of the beast; Dante knows it as we know things in
dreams. A stranger ap p ears in the wood; Dante has only just seen him, but knows
that he has long been silent-another bit of oneiric knowledge, justi ed, Momi-
gliano notes, for p oetic, not logical reasons. They embark
on their fantastic journey. Entering the rst circle of the abyss, Virgil p ales;
Dante attributes his p allor to fear. Virgil avers that it is p ity which moves him,
and that he is one of the damned: "e di questi cotai son io medesmo" [and I myself
am one of these] . To disguise the horror of this affirmation or to exp ress his
p ity, Dante lavishes him with reverential titles: "Dimmi, maestro mio, dimmi seg-
nore" [Tell me, master, tell me, sir] . Sighs, sighs of sadness without torment,
make the air shudder; Virgil exp lains that they are in the hell of those who died
before the Faith was established. Four looming shades greet him, neither sorrow
nor joy in their faces; they are Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lu- can; in Homer's right
hand is a sword, symbol of his sovereignty in the ep ic. These illustrious p hantoms
honor Dante as their equal and lead him to their eternal dwelling p lace, which is a
castle encircled seven times by lofty walls (the seven liberal arts or the three
intellectual and four moral virtues), and by a stream (earthly goods or eloquence)
which they p ass over as if it were solid ground. The residents of the castle are
p ersons of great authority; they sp eak seldom and with gentle voices; their gaze
is slow and grave. Within the castle's courtyard is a meadow, mysteriously green;
Dante, from on high, sees classical and biblical figures and the occasional Muslim:
"Averois, che'l gran comentofeo'' [Averroes, who made the great commentary] . At
times, one of them is marked by a trait that makes him memorable- "Cesare armata,
con gli occhi grifagni" [armed Caesar, with falcon eyes] -or by a solitude that
enlarges him: "e solo, in p arte, vidi'l Saladino" [and by himself ap art I saw
Saladin] . An arid catalogue of p rop er names, less stimu- lating than informative,
brings the canto to a close.274 JORG E LUIS BORG ESA Limbo of the Fathers, also
called the Bosom of Abraham (Luke 16: 22), and a Limbo for the souls of infants who
die without bap tism are theological commonp laces; the idea of housing virtuous
p agans in this p lace or p laces was, according to Francesco Torraca, Dante's own
invention. To allay the horror of an adverse era, the p oet sought re ge in the
great memory of Rome. He wished to honor it in his book, but could not help
understanding-the observation is G uido Vitali's-that too great an insistence on
the classical world did not accord well with his doctrinal aims. Dante, who could
not go against the Faith to save his heroes, envisioned them in a negative Hell,
denied the sight and p ossession of G od in heaven, and took p ity on their mysterious
fate. Y ears later, imagining the Heaven of Jup iter, he would return to the same
p roblem. Boccaccio says that a long interrup tion, caused by exile, came between
the writing of Canto VII and Canto VIII of the Inferno; that fact-suggested or
corroborated by the verse "Io dico, seguitando ch'assai p rima" [I say, continuing,
that long before] - may be true, but far more p rofound is the difference between the
canto of the castle and those that follow. In Canto V, Dante made Francesca da Rim-
ini sp eak immortal words; in the p receding canto, what words might he have given to
Aristotle, Heraclitus, or Orp heus if the arti ce had occurred to him then?
Deliberate or not, his silence deep ens the horror and is ap p ro- p riate to the
setting. Benedetto Croce notes: "In the noble castle, among the great and the wise,
dry information usurp s the p lace of measured p oetry. Feelings of admiration,
reverence, and melancholy are stated, not rep resented" (La p oesia di Dante,
1920). Commentators have dep lored the contrast between the medieval construction
of the castle and its classical guests; this sion or confusion is characteristic
of the p ainting of that era and undoubtedly heightens the oneiric tone of the
scene.In the invention and execution of Canto IV, Dante p lotted out a series of
circumstances, some of them theological in nature. A devout reader of the Aeneid,
he imagined the dead in the Elyseum or in a medieval variant of those glad elds;
the line "in loco ap erto, luinoso e alto" [an op en p lace that was luminous and
high] recalls the burial mound from which Aeneas saw his Romans, and of the
"largior hie camp os aether:' For p ressing reasons of dogma, Dante had to situate
his noble castle in Hell. Mario Rossi discovers in this conflict between formal and
p oetic concerns, between heavenly intuition and fright l damnation, the canto's
innermost discord and the root of certain contradictions. In one p lace it is said
that the eternal air shudders with sighs; in another, that there is neither sorrow
nor joy in the faces. TheTHE N0BLE CASTLE 0F THE F0URTH CANT0 275p oet's visionary
faculty had not yet reached its p lenitude. To this relative clumsiness we owe the
rigidity that gives rise to the singular horror of the castle and its inhabitants,
or p risoners. There is something of the op p ressive wax museum about this still
enclosure: Caesar, armed and idle; Lavinia, eternally seated next to her father.
The certainty that tomorrow will be like today, which was like yesterday, which was
like every day. A much later p assage of the Purgatorio adds that the shades of
the p oets, who are barred from writing, since they are in the Inferno, seek to
distract their eternity with literary discussions.2The technical reasons-that is,
the reasons of a verbal order that make the castle fearsome-can thus be
established; but the intimate reasons remain to be determined. A theologian of
G od would say that the absence of G od is suf cient to make the castle terrible.
Such a theologian might acknowledge an af nity with the tercet that p roclaims the
vanity of earthly glories:Non e il mandan romore altro ch'un fiato di vento, ch'or
vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nomep erche muta lata.[ Earthly fame is naught
but a breath/of wind which now comes hence and now comes thence,/changing its name
because it changes quarter. ] I would p rop ose another reason, one of a p ersonal
nature. At this p oint in the Commedia, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan are
p rojections or gura- tions of Dante, who knew he was not inferior to these great
ones, in deed or p otential. They are examp les of the typ e that Dante already was
for himself and would foreseeably be for others: the famous p oet. They are great,
venerated shades who receive Dante into their conclave:c h ' e s i m i fe c e r d
e l l a l o r a s c h i e r asi ch'io fui sesto tra cotanto senna.[for they made me
one of their comp any/so that I was sixth amid so much wisdom.] 1In the early cantos
of the Commedia, Dante was what G ioberti considered him to be throughout the p oem,
"a little more than a mere witness to the p lot he himself invented" (Primato
morale e civile degli italiani, 1840).276 JORG E LUIS BORG ESThey are forms of
Dante's incip ient dream, barely detached from the dreamer. They sp eak interminably
about literary matters (what else can they do?). They have read the Iliad or the
Pharsalia or they are writing the Commedia; they are magisterial in the exercise of
their art, yet they are in Hell because Beatrice forgets them.[EA} The False
Problem of UgolinoI have not read all the commentaries on Dante (no one has), but I
susp ect that in the case of the famous seventy- h line of the Inferno's
p enultimate canto they have created a p roblem that arises from a confusion of art
with reality. In that line, Ugolino of Pisa, a er recounting the death of his
children in the G aol of Hunger, says that fasting did more than grief had done
("Poscia, p iu che'l dolor, p ate il digiuno"). I must exemp t the earliest
commentators-for whom the verse is not p roblematic-from my re- p roach; they all
take the line to mean that grief could not kill Ugolino, but fasting did. This is
also how G eo rey Chaucer understands it, in the rough outline of the ep isode he
inserted into the Canterbury cycle.Let us reconsider the scene. At the glacial
nadir of the ninth circle, Ugolino in nitely gnaws the nap e of Ruggieri degli
Ubaldini's neck and wip es his bloodthirsty mouth on that same sinner's hair. He
raises his mouth, not his face, from the ferocious rep ast, and tells how Ruggieri
betrayed him and imp risoned him with his children. He saw many moons wax and wane
through the cell's narrow window, until he dreamed that Ruggieri, with slavering
masti s, was hunting a wolf and its cubs on a mountainside. At dawn he heard the
p ounding of the hammer that was sealing up the entrance to the tower. A day and a
night went by, in silence. Ugolino, in his sorrow, bites his hands; his children
think he does so out of hunger and o er him their flesh, the flesh he engendered.
Between the h and sixth day he sees them die, one by one. He loses his sight, and
sp eaks to his dead, and weep s, and grop es for them in the darkness; then fasting
did more than grief.I have said what meaning the first commentators attributed to
this nal event. Thus, in the fourteenth century, Rimbaldi de Imola: "It amounts to
saying that hunger overcame one whom great sorrow could not vanquish and ."
Among the moderns, Francesco Torraca, G uido Vitali, and Tommaso Casini p rofess the
same op inion. Torraca sees stup or and remorse in Ugolino'sJORG E LUIS BORG ES words;
Casini adds, "Modern interp reters have fantasized that Ugolino ended by feeding on
the esh of his children, a conjecture that goes against nature and history;' and
considers the controversy tile. Benedetto Croce is of the same view, and maintains
that of the two interp retations, the most p lausible and congruent is the tradition
one. Bianchi very reasonably glosses: "Others understand Ugolino to have eaten the
esh of his children, an imp robable interp retation, but one that cannot
legitimately be discarded:' Luigi Pietrobono (to whose p oint of view I will return)
says the verse is deliberately mysterious.Before taking
my own turn in the inutile controversia, I wish to dwell for a moment on the
children's unanimous o er. They beg their father to take back the flesh he
engendered:. . . tu ne vestistiqueste misere carni, e tu le sp oglia.[ . . . you did
clothe us/with this wretched esh, and do you strip us of it. ] I susp ect that this
utterance must cause a growing discomfort in its ad- mirers. De Sanctis (Storia
della letteratura italiana IX) p onders the unex- p ected conjunction of heterogenous
images; D'Ovidio concedes that "this gallant and ep igrammatic exp ression of a
filial imp ulse is almost beyond criticism." For my p art, I take this to be one of
the very few false notes in the Commedia. I consider it less worthy of Dante than
of Malvezzi's p en or G raci n's veneration. Dante, I tell myself, could not have
help ed but feel its falseness, which is certainly aggravated by the almost choral
way in which all four children simultaneously tender the famished feast. Someone
might suggest that what we are faced with here is a lie, made up a er the fact by
Ugolino to justi (or insinuate) his crime.The historical question of whether
Ugolino della G herardesca engaged in cannibalism in the early days of February in
the year 1289 is obviously insoluble. The aesthetic or literary p roblem is of a
very di erent order. It may be stated thus: Did Dante want us to believe that
Ugolino (the Ugolino of his Inferno, not history's Ugolino) ate his children's
esh? I would hazard this resp onse: Dante did not want us to believe it, but he
wanted us to sus- p ect it.? Uncertainty is p art of his design. Ugolino gnaws the
base of the1Luigi Pietrobono observes "that the digiuno does not af rm Ugolino's
guilt, but allows it to be inferred, without damage to art or to historical rigor.
It is enough that w e j u d g e i t p o s s i b l e " ( I n fe o , 4 7 ) .THE
FALSE PROBLEM OF UG OLINO 279archbishop 's skull; Ugolino dreams of sharp -fanged dogs
rip p ing the wolves' flanks ("e con l'agute scane/mi p area lor vederfender
lifianchi"). Dri- ven by grief, Ugolino bites his hands; Ugolino hears his children
imp lausibly o ering him their flesh; Ugolino, having delivered the ambiguous
line, turns back to gnaw the archbishop 's skull. Such acts suggest or symbolize the
ghastly deed. They p lay a dual role: we believe them to be p art of the tale, and
they are p rop hecies.Robert Louis Stevenson ("Some G entlemen in Fiction") observes
that a book's characters are only strings of words; blasp hemous as this may sound
to us, Achilles and Peer G ynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, may be reduced to
it. The p owerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of
words, Attila another. We should say of Ugolino that he is a verbal texture
consisting of about thirty tercets. Should we include the idea of cannibalism in
this texture? I rep eat that we should susp ect it, with uncertainty and dread. To
af rm or deny Ugolino's monstrous crime is less tremendous than to have some
glimp se of it.The p ronouncement "A book is the words that comp rise it" risks seem-
ing an insip id axiom. Nevertheless, we are all inclined to believe that there is a
form sep arable from the content and that ten minutes of conversation with Henry
James would reveal to us the "true" p lot of The Turn of the Screw. I think that the
truth is not like that; I think that Dante did not know any more about Ugolino than
his tercets relate. Schop enhauer declared that the rst volume of his major work
consists of a single thought, and that he could nd no more concise way of
conveying it. Dante, on the contrary, would say that whatever he imagined about
Ugolino is p resent in the debated tercets.In real time, in history, whenever a man
is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates and loses
the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to
that of hop e and oblivion. In that time, Hamlet is sane and is mad.2 In the
darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved
corp ses, and this undulating imp recision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter
of which he is made. Thus, with two p ossible deaths, did Dante dream him, and thus
will the generations dream him.[1948] [EA] 2Two famous ambiguities may ap tly be
recalled here, as curiosities. The first, Quevedo's "sangrienta luna," the bloody
moon that is at once the moon over the battlefields and the moon of the Ottoman
flag; the other, the "mortal moon" of Shake- sp eare's Sonnet 107, which is the moon
in the heavens and the Virgin Queen. The Last Voyage of UlyssesMy aim is to
reconsider, in the light of other p assages of the Commedia, the enigmatic tale that
Dante p laces in the mouth ofUlysses (Inferno I, 90- 142). In the calamitous dep ths
of the circle where deceivers are p unished, Ulysses and Diomedes endlessly burn in
a single two-p ronged flame. Pressed by Virgil to describe how he met his death,
Ulysses relates that a er having le Circe, who kep t him in G aeta for more than a
year, neither the sweetness of his son, nor the reverence Laertes insp ired in him,
nor the love of Penelop e could conquer the ardor in his breast to know the world
and the defects and virtues of men. With his last ship and the few loyal men le to
him, he ventured up on the op en seas; they arrived, old men by then, at the narrows
where Hercules set his columns. At that outer limit marked by a god to ambition or
audacity, he urged his comrades on, to see, since so little life was le to them,
the unp eop led world, the untraveled seas of the antip odes. He reminded them of
their origin, he reminded them that they were not born to live like brutes, but to
seek virtue and knowledge. They sailed toward the sunset, and then to the south,
and saw all the stars that the southern hemisp here alone encomp asses. For ve
months their p row cleaved the ocean, and one day they caught sight of a dark
mountain on the horizon. It seemed to them higher than any other, and their souls
rejoiced. This joy soon turned to grief, for a temp est arose that sp un the ship
around three times and sank it on the fourth, as p leased Another, and the sea
closed over them.Such is Ulysses' tale. Many commentators, from the anonymous Flo-
rentine to Raffaele Andreoli, consider it a digression on the author's p art. In
their estimation, Ulysses and Diomedes, deceivers, su er in the p it of the
deceivers-"e dentro dalla lor amma si geme!l'agguato del caval" [and in their ame
they groan for the ambush ofthe horse] -and the journey is no more than an
incidental embellishment. Tommaseo, however, cites a p as-THE LAST VOY AG E OF ULY SSES
281sage of the Civitas Dei, and could have cited another from Clement of
Alexandria, denying that men can reach the lower p art of the earth; later, Casini
and Pietrobono object to the journey as a sacrilege. Indeed, the mountain glimp sed
by the G reek before the abyss entombs him is the holy mountain of Purgatory,
forbidden to mortals (Purgatorio I, 130-32). Hugo Friedrich acutely observes: "The
journey ends in a catastrop he which is not mere human destiny but the word of G od"
(Odysseus in der Holle, Berlin, 1942) .As he recounts his exp loit, Ulysses
characterizes it as senseless ("folie"); Canto VII of the Paradiso refers to the
"varco folie d'Ulisse," to Ulysses' rash or senseless route. The same adjective is
ap p lied by Dante in the dark wood to Virgil's tremendous invitation ( " temo che la
venuta non sia folie" [ I fe a r t h a t t h e c o m i n g m a y b e fo l l y ] ) ;
t h e r e p e t i t i o n i s d e l i b e r a t e . W h e n D a n t e sets foot on
the beach Ulysses glimp sed before dying, he says that no one has navigated those
waters and been able to return; then he says that Virgil girded him with a bulrush,
"com'Altruip iacque" [as p leased Another] -the same words sp oken by Ulysses as he
declared his tragic end. Carlo Steiner writes: "Was Dante thinking of Ulysses,
ship wrecked within sight of this beach? Of course. But Ulysses wished to reach it
by relying on his own strength and de ing the decreed limits of what mankind can
do. Dante, a new Ulysses, will set foot there as a victor, girded with humility and
guided not by p ride but by reason, illuminated by grace." August Ruegg restates
this op inion (Jenseitsvorsteliungen vor Dante II, 114): "Dante is an adventurer
who, like Ulysses, walks along virgin p aths, travels across worlds no man has ever
glimp sed and asp ires to the most di cult and remote goals. But the comp arison ends
there. Ulysses sets forth on his own account and risks forbidden adventures;
Dante allows himself to be guided by higher p owers."Two famous p assages justi this
distinction. One is where Dante deems himself unworthy to visit the three
otherworlds-"Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono" [I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul] -and
Virgil announces the mission Beatrice has entrusted to him; the other, where
Cacciaguida recom- mends that the p oem be p ublished (Paradiso II, 100-142). G iven
this testimony, it would be p rep osterous to p lace Dante's p eregrination, which
leads to the beati c vision and the best book mankind has ever written, on the same
level as Ulysses' sacrilegious adventure, which culminates in Hell. The former
action seems the reverse of the latter.This argument, however, contains an error.
Ulysses' act is undoubtedly Ulysses' journey, because Ulysses is nothing other than
the subject to whom that act is attributed; Dante's act or undertaking is not
Dante's journey, butJORG E LUIS BORG ES the comp osition of his book. The fact is
obvious, but tends to be forgotten because the Commedia is written in the rst
p erson, and the man who died has been overshadowed by the immortal p rotagonist.
Dante was a theologian; the writing of the Commedia must o en have seemed no less
laborious and p erhap s no less audacious and fatal than the nal voyage of
Ulysses. He
had dared to conjure up arcana that the p en of the Holy Sp irit barely indicates;
the intention may well have entailed a sin. He had dared to p lace Beatrice
Portinari on the same level as the Virgin and Jesus.' He had dared to anticip ate
the p ronouncements of the inscrutable Last Judgment that the blessed do not know;
he had judged and condemned the souls of si- moniac Pop es and had saved that of the
Averroeist Siger, who lectured on circular time.2 So much laborious e ort for
glory, which is an ep hemeral thing!Non e il mandan romore altro ch'un ato di vento,
ch'or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nomep erche muta lata.[Earthly fame is
naught but a breath/of wind which now comes hence and now comes thence,/changing
its name because it changes quarter.] Plausible traces of this discord survive in
the text. Carlo Steiner recognized one in the dialogue in which Virgil overcomes
Dante's fears and p ersuades him to undertake his unp recedented journey. Steiner
writes, "The debate which by a ction occurs with Virgil, in reality occurred in
Dante's mind, when he had not yet decided on the comp osition of the p oem. It cor-
resp onds to the other debate in Canto II ofthe Paradiso, which envisages the
p oem's p ublication. Having written the work, can he p ublish it and de the wrath of
his enemies? In both cases, the consciousness of its worth and the high end he had
set for himself won out" (Commedia, 15). In such p assages, then, Dante would have
symbolized a mental con ict. I suggest that he also symbolized it, p erhap s without
wanting to or susp ecting he had done so, in the tragic legend of Ulysses, and that
its tremendous p ower is due to that emotional charge. Dante was Ulysses, and in
some way he could fear Ulysses' p unishment.A nal observation. Devoted to the sea
and to Dante, the two literatures written in English have felt the influence of the
Dantesque Ulysses. Eliot1Cf. G iovanni Pap ini, Dante vivo III, 34.2Cf. Maurice de
Wulf, Histoire de Ia p hilosop hie medievale.THE LAST VOY AG E OF ULY SSES (and before
him Andrew Lang and before him Longfellow) has imp lied that Tennyson's admirable
ysses p roceeds from this glorious archetyp e. As far as I know, a deep er a nity has
not p reviously been noted: that of the infernal Ulysses with another unfortunate
cap tain: Ahab of Moby-Dick. Like his p redecessor, he accomp lishes his own p erdition
by means of vigilance and courage; the general story is the same, the grand nale
is identical, the last words almost rep eat each other. Schop enhauer has written
that nothing in our lives is involuntary; both ctions, in the light of this
p rodigious maxim, describe the p rocess of a secret and intricate suicide.[EA]
Postscrip t, 1981: It has been said that Dante's Ulysses p re gures the famous
exp lorers who, centuries later, arrived on the coasts of America and India.
Centuries before the Commedia was written, that human typ e had already come into
being. Erik the Red discovered G reenland around the year 985; his son Leif
disembarked in Canada at the beginning of the eleventh century. Dante could not
have known this. The things of Scandinavia tend to be secret, as if they were a
dream. The Pi ing TorturerDante (as everyone knows) consigns Francesca to the
Inferno, and listens with in nite comp assion to the tale of her sin. How can this
contradiction be lessened, how can it be justi ed? I see four p ossible conjectures.
The rst is technical. Dante, having determined the general shap e of his book,
feared that unless it were enlivened by the confessions of lost souls it could
degenerate into a worthless catalog of p rop er names or top o- grap hical
descrip tions. The thought made him p lace an interesting and not too alien sinner in
each of the circles of his Hell. (Lamartine, worn out by these guests, said the
Commedia was a "gazette orentine.") Naturally it was p referable that the
confessions be p oignant, and they could be p oignant without risk, for the author,
having imp risoned the narrators in Hell, was safely beyond any susp icion of
comp licity. This conjecture is p erhap s the most p lausible (its notion of a p oetical
orb imp osed on an arid theological novel was argued by Croce), but it has a nasty
p ettiness about it that does not seem to harmonize with our concep t of Dante.
Moreover, interp retations of a book as in nite as the Commedia cannot be so
simp le.The second conjecture, following the doctrine of Jung,' equates literary
and oneiric inventions. Dante, who has become our dream, dreamed Francesca's p ain
and dreamed his own comp assion. Schop enhauer observes1] ung's doctrine is somehow
p re gured by the classic metap hor of the dream as a theatrical event. Thus G ongora,
in the sonnet "Varia imaginaci6n" ("Elsueno, autorde rep resentaciones./En su teatro
sabre el viento armado!sombras suele vestir de bulto bello" [Sleep , author of
rep resentations./Within its theater mounted on the wind/ bedecks shadows in lovely
forms] ) ; thus Quevedo, in the "Sue o de /a muerte" ("Once unburdened, the soul
became idle, without the labor of the external senses, and in this way the
following comedy struck me; and my p owers recited it in darkness, with myself as
the audience and theater ofmy fantasies"); thus Josep h Addison, in number 487 of
the Sp ectator ("She [the dreaming soul] is herself the theater, the actors, and the
THE PITY ING TORTURER 285that what we see and hear in dreams can astonish us, though
ultimately it has its roots in us; Dante, likewise, could feel p ity for things he
himself dreamed or invented. It could also be said that Francesca is a mere p rojec-
tion of the p oet, as, for that matter, is Dante himself, in his role as a traveller
through Hell. I susp ect, however, that this conjecture is fallacious, for it is one
thing to attribute a common origin to books and dreams, and another to tolerate, in
books, the disjunction and irresp onsibility of dreams.The third, like the rst, is
of a technical nature. Over the course of the Commedia, Dante had to anticip ate the
inscrutable decisions of G od. By no other light than that of his fallible mind, he
attemp ted to p redict certain p ronouncements of the Last Judgment. He damned-even if
only as a literary ction-Celestin V and saved Siger de Brabant, who defended the
as-trological hyp othesis of the Eternal Return.To conceal this op eration, he made
justice the de ning characteristic ofG od in Hell-"G iustizia masse il mio alto
fattore" [Justice moved my high maker] -and reserved the attributes of
understanding and p ity for himself. He p laced Francesca among the lost souls, and
he felt sorry for Francesca. Benedetto Croce declares, "Dante, as a theologian, as
a believer, as an ethical man, condemns sinners; but in sentiment he neither
condemns nor absolves" (La p oesia di Dante, 78).2The fourth conjecture is less
p recise. A p refatory discussion is required to make it intelligible. Consider these
two p rop ositions. One: murderers deserve the death p enalty; the other: Rodion
Raskolnikov deserves the death p enalty. The fact that the p rop ositions are not
synonymous is inarguable. Paradoxically, this is not because murderers are concrete
and Raskolnikov is abstract or illusory. On the contrary, the concep t of murderers
betokens a mere generalization; Raskolnikov, for anyone who has read his story, is
a real being. In reality there are, strictly sp eaking, no murderers; there are
individuals whom the torp or of our languages includes in that indeterminate
ensemble. (Such, in the nal analysis, is the nominalist hyp othesis of Roscelin and
William of Occam.) In other words, anyone who has readbeholder"). Centuries before,
the p antheist Omar Khayyam comp osed a strop he translated as follows in McCarthy's
literal version: "Now Thou art hidden from all things, now Thou art disp layed in
all things. It is for Thy own delight that Thou work- est these wonders, being at
once the sp ort and the sp ectator."2Andrew Lang writes that Dumas wep t when he
killed o Porthos. Likewise, we feel Cervantes' emotion at the death of Alonso
Quijano, "who, amidst the tears and lamentations of all p resent, gave up the ghost,
or in other words, dep arted this life." 286 JORG E LUIS BORG ESDostoevsky's novel has
in some way been Raskolnikov and knows that his "crime" is not free because an
inevitable network of circumstances p redetermined and dictated it. The man who
killed is not a murderer, the man who lied is not an imp ostor; and this is known
(or, rather, felt) by the damned; there is, consequently, no p unishment without
injustice. The judicial fiction of "the murderer" may well deserve the death
p enalty, but not the luckless wretch who killed, driven by his own p rior history
and p erhap s-oh Marquis de Lap lace!-by the history of the universe. Madame de Stael
has comp ressed these ratiocinations into a famous sentence: "Tout comp rendre c'est
toutp ardonner" [To understand all is to forgive all ] .Dante tells the story of
Francesca's sin with such delicate comp assion that all of us feel its
inevitability. That is how the p oet must have felt it, in de ance of the theologian
who argued in the Purgatorio (XVI, 70) that if actions dep ended on the influences
of the stars, our ee will would be an- nulled, and to reward good while p unishing
evil would be an injustice.JDante understands and does not forgive; this is the
insoluble p aradox. For my p art, I take it that he found a solution beyond logic. He
felt (but did not understand) that the acts of men are necessary and that an
eternity of heavenly bliss or hellish p erdition incurred by those acts is similarly
necessary. The Sp inozists and the Stoics also p romulgated moral laws. Here there
is no need to bring up Calvin, whose decretum Dei absolutum p redestines some for
hell and others for heaven. I read in the introductory p ages of Sale's Koran that
one of the Islamic sects also up holds this view.The fourth conjecture,
as is evident, does not disentangle the p roblem but simp ly raises it in a vigorous
manner. The other conjectures were logical; this last one, which is not, seems to
me to be true.[EA ] JCf. De monarchia I, 14; Purgatorio XVIII, 73; ParadisoV, 19.
More eloquent still arethegreatwordsofCantoXXXI:
"Tum'haidiservotrattoalibertate"[Itisyouwho have drawn me from bondage into
liberty] (Paradiso, 85).Dante and the Anglo-S on \'isionariesIn Canto X of the
Paradiso, Dante recounts that he ascended to the sp here of the sun and saw around
that p lanet-in the Dantesque economy the sun is a p lanet-a flaming crown of twelve
sp irits, even more luminous than the light against which they stood out. The rst
of them, Thomas Aquinas, announces the names of the others: the seventh is Beda,
or Bede. Dante's commentators exp lain that this is the Venerable Bede, deacon of
the monastery of ] arrow and author of the Historia Ecclesiastica G entis Anglorum.
Desp ite the adjective, this, the rst history of England, comp osed in the eighth
century, transcends the strictly ecclesiastical. It is the touching, p ersonal
work of a man of letters and a scrup ulous researcher. Bede had mastered Latin and
knew G reek; a line from Virgil could sp ring sp ontaneously from his p en. Everything
interested him: universal history, the exegesis of Holy Scrip ture, music,
rhetorical gures,' sp elling, numerical systems, the natural sciences, theology,
Latin p oetry, and p oetry in the vernacular. There is one p oint, however, on which
he deliberately remains silent. In his chronicle of the tenacious missions that
nally succeeded in imp osing the faith of Jesus on the G ermanic kingdoms of England,
Bede could have done for Saxon p aganism what Snorri Sturluson, ve hundred years or
so later, would do for Scandinavian p aganism. Without betraying his work's p ious
intent, he could have elucidated or sketched out the mythology of his elders.
Predictably, he did not. The reason is obvious: the religion, or mythology, of
the G ermans was still very near. Bede wanted to forget it; he wanted his England to
forget it. We will never know if a twilight awaits the gods?Bede sought the
examp les he gives of rhetorical gures in the Scrip tures. Thus, for synecdoche,
where the p art stands for the whole, he cited verse 14 of the rst chap - ter of the
G osp el According to John, "And the Word was made flesh. . . ." Strictly sp ea ng,
the Word was made not only flesh, but also bone, cartilage, water, and blood.288
JORG E LUIS BORG ESwho were adored by Hengist, or if, on that tremendous day when the
sun and the moon are devoured by wolves, a ship made of the ngernails of the dead
will dep art from the realms of ice. We will never know if these lost divinities
formed a p antheon, or if they were, as G ibbon susp ected, the vague sup erstitions of
barbarians. Excep t for the ritual p hrase " cujus p ater Vaden" which gures in all
his genealogies of royal lineages-and the case of the cautious king who had one
altar for Jesus and another, smaller one for the demons-Bede did little to satis
the future curiosity of G ermanists. He did, however, stray far enough from the
straight and narrow p ath of chronology to record certain otherworldly visions that
p re gure the work of Dante.Let us recall one of them. Fursa, Bede tells us, was an
Irish ascetic who had converted many Saxons. In the course of an illness, he was
carried off in sp irit by angels and rose up to heaven. During his ascension, he saw
four fires, not far distant from each other, reddening the black air. The angels
ex- p lained that these res would consume the world and that their names were
Falsehood, Covetousness, Discord, and Iniquity. The res extended until they met
one another and drew near him; Fursa was afraid, but the angels told him: "The fire
which you did not kindle shall not burn you." Indeed, the angels p arted the ames
and Fursa reached Paradise, where he saw many admirable things. On his way back to
earth, he was threatened a second time by a fire, out of which a demon hurled the
incandescent soul of a sinner, which burned his right shoulder and chin. An angel
told him: "Now the re you kindled burns you. For as you accep ted the garment of
him who was a sinner, so you must p artake of his p unishment." Fursa bore the stigma
of this vision to the day of his death.Another of these visions is that of a man of
Northumbria named Dryh- thelm. A er an illness that lasted for several days, he
died at nightfall, and suddenly came back to life at the break of dawn. His wife
was keep ing vigil for him; Dryhthelm told her he had indeed been reborn from among
the dead and that he now intended to live in a very different way. A er p raying, he
divided his estate into three p arts, and gave the first to his wife, the second
to his sons, and the third to the p oor. He bade them all farewell and retired to
a monastery, where his rigorous life was testimony to the many dreadful and
desirable things that were revealed to him during the night he was dead, which he
sp oke of thus:He that led me had a shining countenance and a bright garment, and we
went on silently, as I thought, towards the north-east. We came to aDANTE AND THE
ANG L0-SAX0N VISI0NARIES 289vale of great breadth and dep th, but of in nite length;
on the le it ap - p eared full of dreadful flames, the other side was no less horrid
for violent hail and cold snow ying in all directions; both p laces were full of
men's souls, which seemed by turns to be tossed from one side to the other, as it
were by a violent storm; for when the wretches could no longer endure the excess of
heat, they leap ed into the cutting cold, and so on in nitely. I began to think that
this region of intolerable torments p erhap s might be hell. But my guide who went
before me answered my thoughts: "Y ou are not yet in Hell."When he had led me
further on, the darkness grew so thick that I could see nothing else but the
garment of him that led me. Innumera- ble globes of black flames rose out of a
great p it and fell back again into the same. My leader suddenly vanished and le me
alone in the midst of the globes of re that were full of human souls. An insu
erable stench came forth from the p it.When I had stood there in much dread for a
time that seemed endless, I heard a most hideous and wretched lamentation, and at
the same time a loud laughing, as of a rude multitude insulting cap tured enemies.
A gang of evil sp irits was dragging ve howling and lamenting souls of men into the
darkness, whilst they themselves laughed and rejoiced. One of these men was shorn
like a clergyman; another was a woman. As they went down into the burning p it, I
could no longer distinguish between the lamentation of the men and the laughing
of the devils, yet I still had a confused sound in my ears. Dark sp irits ascended
from that flaming abyss beset me on all sides and tormented me with the noisome
flame that issued from their mouths and nostrils, yet they durst not touch me.
Being thus on all sides enclosed with enemies and darkness, I could not seem to
defend myself. Then there ap p eared behind me, on the way that I came, the
brightness of a star shining amidst the darkness; which increased by degrees and
came rap idly toward me. l those evil sp irits disp ersed and fled and I saw that the
star was he who had led me before; he turned towards the right and began to lead me
towards the south-east, and having soon brought me out of the darkness, conducted
me into an atmosp here of clear light. I saw a vast wall before us, the length and
height of which, in every direction seemed to be altogether boundless. I began to
wonder why we went up to the wall, seeing no door, window, or p ath through it.
Presently, I know not by what means, we were on the top of it, and within it was a
vast and delightful eld, so full of fragrant flowers that the odor of its
delightful sweetness immediately disp elled the stink of the dark290JORG E LUIS
BORG ES rnace. In this eld were innumerable assemblies of men in white. As my guide
led me through these hap p y inhabitants, I began to think that this might be the
kingdom of heaven, of which I had heard so much, but he answered to my thought,
saying "Y ou are not yet in heaven."Further on I discovered before me a much more
beauti l light and therein heard sweet voices of p ersons singing, and so wonder l a
fra- grancy p roceeded from the p lace that the other which I had beforethought most
delicious then seemed to me but very indi erent. When I began to hop e we should
enter that delight l p lace, my guide on a sudden stood still; and then turning
back, led me back by the way we came.He then told me that that vale I saw so dread
l for consuming flames and cutting cold is p urgatory; the ery noisome p it is the
very mouth of hell; this owery p lace is where the souls are received of the just
who await the Last Judgment, and the p lace where I heard the sound of sweet
singing, with the fragrant odor and bright light is the ngdom of heaven. "As for
you" he added, "who are now to return to your body and live among men again, if you
will endeavor to direct your behavior in righteousness, you shall, a er death, have
a p lace or r e s i d e n c e a m o n g t h e s e j o y l t r o o p s o f b l e s
s e d s o u l s ; fo r w h e n I l e y o u for a while, it was to know what your
future would be." I much abhorred returning to my body, however I durst not say a
word and, on a sudden, I found myself alive among men.In the story I have just
transcribed, my readers will have noted p assages that recall-or p re gure-p assages
in Dante's work. The monk is not burned by the re he did not light; Beatrice,
similarly, is invulnerable to the ames of the Inferno: "ne amma d'esto 'ncendio
non m'assale" [and no flame of this burning assails me] .To the right of the valley
that seems without end, torrents of
sleet and ice p unish the damned; the Ep icureans of the third circle endure the
same a liction. The man of Northumbria is p lunged into desp air by the angel's
momentary abandonment, as Dante is by Virgil's: " Virgilio a cui p er mia salute
die'mi" [Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation] . Dryhthelm does not know
how he was able to rise to the top of the wall; Dante, how he was able to cross the
sad Acheron.Of greater interest than these corresp ondences, of which there are un-
doubtedly many more than I have mentioned, are the circumstantial details that Bede
weaves into his narrative and that lend a singular verisimilitude to DANTE AND THE
ANG L0-SAX0N VISI0NARIES 291the otherworldly visions. I need only recall the
p ermanence of the burns, the fact that the angel reads the man's silent thought,
the sion of moan- ing and laughter, the visionary's p erp lexity before the high
wall. It may be that an oral tradition carried these details to the historian's
p en; certainly they already contain the union of the p ersonal and the marvelous
that is typ ical of Dante, and that has nothing to do with the customs of
allegorical literature.Did Dante ever read the Historia Ecclesiastica? It is highly
p robable that he did not. In strict logic, the inclusion of the name Beda
(conveniently disyllabic for the line) in an inventory of theologians p roves
little. In the Mid- dle Ages, p eop le trusted other p eop le; it was not comp ulsory to
have read the learned Anglo-Saxon's volumes in order to acknowledge his authority,
as it was not comp ulsory to have read the Homeric p oems, closed o in an almost
secret language, to know that Homer ("Mira colui con quella sp ada in mana" [Note
him there with sword in hand ] ) could well be chief among Ovid, Lucan, and Horace.
Another observation may be made, as well. For us, Bede is a historian of England;
to his medieval readers he was a commentator on Scrip ture, a rhetorician, and a
chronologist. There was no reason for a history of the then rather vague entity
called England to have had any p articular attraction for Dante.Whether or not Dante
knew of the visions recorded by Bede is less im- p ortant than the fact that Bede
considered them worthy of remembrance and included them in his book. A great book
like the Divina commedia is not the isolated or random cap rice of an individual;
many men and many generations built toward it. To investigate its p recursors is not
to subject oneself to a miserable drudgery of legal or detective work; it is to
examine the movements, p robings, adventures, glimmers, and p remonitions of the
human sp irit.[EA] Purgatorio I, 13Like all abstract words, the word metap horis a
metap hor; in G reek it means "transfer." Metap hors generally consist of two terms,
one of which is briefly transformed into the other. Thus, the Saxons called the sea
the "whale's p ath" or the "swan's p ath." In the rst examp le, the whale's hugeness
corresp onds to the hugeness of the sea; in the second, the swan's smallness con-
trasts with the vastness of the sea. We will never know if the inventors of these
metap hors were aware of these connotations. Line 6o of Canto I of the Inferno
reads: "mi rip igneva La dove'lsol tace" [she p ushed me back to where the sun is
silent] ."Where the sun is silent": the auditory verb exp resses a visual image, as
i n t h e f a m o u s h e x a m e t e r o f t h e A e n e i d : " a Te n e d o , t
a c i t a e p e r a m i c a s i l e n t i a lunae" [from Tenedos, silently in the
quiet friendship of the moon] .Beyond discussing the fusion of two terms, my
p resent p urp ose is to examine three curious lines.The rst is line 13 of Canto I
of the Purgatorio: "Dolce color d'oriental za ro" [Sweet hue of oriental
sap p hire] .Buti exp lains that the sap p hire is a p recious stone, of a color between
sky blue and azure, most delight l to the eyes, and that the oriental sap - p hire is
a variety found in Media.In the aforementioned line, Dante suggests the color of
the East, the Orient, by a sap p hire that includes the Orient in its name. He thus
imp lies a recip rocal p lay that may well be in nite.11We read in the initial strop he
of G ongora's Soledades:Era del m1o La estaci6n floridaen que el mantido robadnr de
Europ a, media Luna Las armas de su fren tey el Sol todos Los rayos de su p elo
Pl"RCATORIO I, 13 293In Byron's Hebrew Melodies (1815), I have discovered a similar
arti ce: "She walks in beauty, like the night."To accep t this line, the reader must
imagine a tall, dark woman who walks like the Night, which, in turn, is a tall,
dark woman, and so on to in nity. 2The third examp le is from Robert Browning. He
includes it in the dedication to his vast dramatic p oem, The Ring and the Book
(1868): "0 lyric Love, half angel and half bird . . ."The p oet says that Elizabeth
Barrett, who has died, is half angel and half bird, but an angel is already half
bird, and thus a subdivision is p rop osed that may be interminable.I do not know
whether to include in this casual anthology Milton's controversial line
( Paradise Lost IV, 323 ) : "the fairest of her daughters, Eve."To the intellect,
the line is absurd, but not, p erhap s, to the imagination.{EA} luciente honor del
cielo,en camp os de za ros p asce estrellas.[It was in the year's flowery season/that
Europ a's cloaked abductor/his arms a half-moon on his brow/and all the rays of his
hair the Sun/glittering honor of the sky/ in elds ofsap p hires grazes on stars.] The
line from the Purgatorio is delicate; that of the Soledades, deliberately
clamorous.2Baudelaire writes, in "Recueillement": "Entends, ma chere, entends, la
douce Nuit qui marche" [ Hear, my darling, hear, the sweet Night who walks] . The
silent walking of the night should not be heard.The Simurgh d the EagleLiterarily
sp eaking, what might be derived from the notion of a being com- p osed of other
beings, a bird, say, made up of birds?1 Thus formulated, the p roblem ap p ears to
allow for merely trivial, if not actively unp leasant, solutions. One might
sup p ose its p ossibilities to have been exhausted by the multip ly feathered, eyed,
tongued, and eared "monstrum horrendum ingens" [vast, horrible monster] that
p ersonifies Fame (or Scandal or Rumor) in Book IV of the Aeneid, or that strange
king made of men who occup ies the frontisp iece of the Leviathan, armed with sword
and staff. Francis Bacon (Essays, 1625) p raised the rst of these images; Chaucer
and Shakesp eare imitated it; no one, today, considers it any better than the "beast
Acheron" who, according to the fi y-odd manuscrip ts of the Visio Tundali, stores
sinners in the roundness of its belly, where they are tormented by dogs, bears,
lions, wolves, and vip ers.In the abstract, the concep t of a being comp osed of other
beings does not ap p ear p romising: yet, in incredible fashion, one of the most
memorable figures of Western literature, and another of Eastern literature,
corresp ond to it. The p urp ose of this brief note is to describe these marvelous
fictions, one conceived in Italy, the other in Nishap ur.The rst is in Canto XVIII
of the Paradiso. In his journey through the concentric heavens, Dante observes a
greater hap p iness in Beatrice's eyes and greater p ower in her beauty, and realizes
that they have ascended from the ruddy heaven of Mars to the heaven of Jup iter. In
the broader arc of this sp here, where the light is white, celestial creatures sing
and fly, successively forming the letters of the p hrase DILIG ITE IUSTITIAM and the
shap e of an eagle's head, not cop ied from earthly eagles, of course, but directly
manu-1Similarly, in Leibniz' Monadology (1714), we read that the universe consists
of inferior universes, which in turn contain the universe, and so on ad in nitum.
THE SIMURG H AND THE EAG LE 295factured by the Sp irit. Then the whole of the eagle
shines forth: it is com- p osed of thousands of just kings. unmistakable symbol of
Emp ire, it sp eaks with a single voice, and says 'T' rather than "we" (Paradiso XIX,
n). An ancient p roblem vexed Dante's conscience: Is it not unjust of G od to damn,
for lack of faith, a man of exemp lary life who was born on the bank of the Indus
and could know nothing of Jesus? The Eagle answers with the obscurity ap p rop riate
to a divine revelation: it censures such foolhardy ques- tioning, rep eats that
faith in the Redeemer is indisp ensable, and suggests that G od may have instilled
this faith in certain virtuous p agans. It avers that among the blessed are the
Emp eror Trajan and Rip heus the Trojan, the former having lived just a er and the
latter before the Cross.2 (Though resp lendent in the fourteenth century, the
Eagle's ap p earance is less e ective in the twentieth, which generally reserves
glowing eagles and tall, ery letters for commercial p rop aganda. Cf. Chesterton,
What I Saw in America, 1922.)That anyone has ever been able to surp ass one of the
great gures of the Commedia seems incredible, and rightly so: nevertheless, the
feat has occurred. A century a er Dante imagined the emblem of the Eagle, Farid
al-Oin Attar, a Persian of the Su sect, conceived of the strange Simurgh (Thirty
Birds), which imp licitly encomp asses and imp roves up on it. Farid al-Oin Attar was
born in Nishap ur,J land of turquoises and swords. In Per- sian, Attar means "he who
tra cs in drugs." In the Lives ofthe Poets, we read that such indeed was his trade.
One a ernoon, a dervish entered the ap othecary's shop , looked over its many jars
and p illboxes, and began to weep . Attar, astonished and disturbed, begged him to
leave. The dervish answered: "It costs me nothing to go, since I carry nothing
with me. As for you, it will cost you greatly to say good-bye to the treasures I
see here." At- tar's heart went as cold as camp hor. The dervish le , but the next
morning, Attar abandoned his shop and the labors of this world.A p ilgrim to Mecca,
he crossed Egyp t, Syria,
Turkestan, and the north of India; on his return, he gave himself over to literary
comp osition and the fervent contemp lation of G od. It is a fact of some renown that
he le2Pomp eo Venturi disap p roves of the election of Rip heus, a p ersonage who until
this ap otheosis had existed only in a few lines of the Aeneid (II, 339, 426).
Virgil declares him the most just of the Trojans and adds to the rep ort of his
end the resigned ellip sis: "Dies aliter visum" [The gods ruled otherwise] . There
is not another trace of him in all of literature. Perhap s Dante chose him as a
symbol by virtue of his vagueness. Cf. the commentaries of Casini (1921) and
G uido Vitali (1943).JKatibi, author of the Con uence ofthe Two Seas, declared: "I
am of the garden of Nishap ur, like Attar, but I am the thorn of Nishap ur and he was
the rose."JORG E LUIS BORG ES behind twenty thousand distichs: his works are entitled
The Book of the Nightingale, The Book of Adversity, The Book of Instruction, The
Book of Mysteries, The Book of Divine Knowledge, The Lives of the Saints, The King
and the Rose, A Declaration ofWonders, and the extraordinary Conference of the
Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr). In the last years of his life, which is said to have
reached a sp an of one hundred and ten years, he renounced all worldly p leasures,
including those of versi cation. He was p ut to death by the soldiers of Tule, son
of G enghis Khan. The vast image I have alluded to is the basis ofthe Mantiq al-
Tayr, the p lot ofwhich is as follows:The faraway ng of all the birds, the Simurgh,
lets fall a magni cent feather in the center of China: tired of their age-old
anarchy, the birds resolve to go in search of him. They know that their king's
name means thirty birds; they know his p alace is located on the Kaf, the circular
mountain that surrounds the earth.They embark up on the nearly in nite adventure.
They p ass through seven valleys or seas; the name of the p enultimate is Vertigo;
the last, Anni- hilation. Many p ilgrims give up ; others p erish. Thirty, p uri ed by
their efforts, set foot on the mountain of the Simurgh. At last they gaze up on
it: they p erceive that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each one of
them and all of them. In the Simurgh are the thirty birds and in each bird is the
Simurgh.4 (Plotinus, too-TheEnneadsV, 8-4-asserts a p aradisiacal extension of the
p rincip le of identity: "Everywhere in the intelligible heaven is all, and all is
all and each all. The sun, there, is all the stars; and every star, again, is all
the stars and sun.")The disp arity between the Eagle and the Simurgh is no less
obvious than their resemblance. The Eagle is merely imp lausible; the Simurgh, im-
p ossible. The individuals who make up the Eagle are not lost in it (David serves as
the p up il of one eye; Trajan, Ezekiel, and Constantine as brows); the birds that
gaze up on the Simurgh are at the same time the Simurgh. The Eagle is a transitory
symbol, as were the letters before it; those who form its shap e with their bodies
do not cease to be who they are: the ubiquitous4Silvina Ocamp o (Esp acios metricos,
12) has p ut this ep isode into verse:Era Dios ese p ajaro como un enorme esp ejo: los
contenia a todos; no era un mero re ejo. En sus p lumas hallaron cada uno sus p lumas
en los ojos, los ojos con memorias de p lumas.[Like an enormous mirror this bird was
G od:/containing them all, and not a mere reflection./In his feathers each one found
his own feathers/in his eyes, their eyes with memories of feathers. ] THE SIMURG H
AND THE EAG LE 297Simurgh is inextricable. Behind the Eagle is the p ersonal G od of
Israel and Rome; behind the magical Simurgh is p antheism.A nal observation. The
imaginative p ower of the legend of the Simurgh is ap p arent to all; less p ronounced,
but no less real, is its rigor and economy. The p ilgrims go forth in search of an
unknown goal; this goal, which will be revealed only at the end, must arouse wonder
and not be or ap p ear to be merely added on. The author nds his way out of this di
culty with classical elegance; adroitly, the searchers are what they seek. In
identical fashion, David is the secret p rotagonist of the story told him by Nathan
(II Samuel 12); in identical fashion, De Quincey has p rop osed that the individual
man Oedip us, and not man in general, is the p rofound solution to the riddle of the
Theban Sp hinx.[1948} [EA} The Meet g in a DreHaving traversed the circles of Hell
and the arduous terraces of Purgatory, Dante, now in the earthly Paradise, sees
Beatrice at last. Ozanam sp eculates that this scene (certainly one of the most
astonishing that literature has achieved) is the p rimal nucleus of the Commedia. My
p urp ose here is to narrate the scene, summarize the comments of the scholiasts, and
make an observation-p erhap s a new one-of a p sychological nature.On the morning of
the thirteenth day of Ap ril of the year 1300, the p enultimate day of his journey,
Dante, his labors comp lete, enters the earthly Paradise that crowns the summit of
Purgatory. He has seen the tem- p oral re and the eternal, he has crossed through a
wall of flame, his will is free and up right. Virgil has crowned and mitred him over
himself ( "p erch'io te sovra te corona e mitrio") . Along the p aths of the ancient
garden he reaches a river p urer than any other, though the trees allow neither sun
nor moon to shine on it. A melody runs through the air, and on the other bank a
mysterious p rocession advances. Twenty-four elders, dressed in white gar- ments,
and four animals, each p lumed with s wings that are studded with op en eyes, go
before a triump hal chariot drawn by a grif n; on the right are three women,
dancing, one of them so red that in a re she would barely be visible to us; to the
le are four more women, dressed in p urp le, one of them with three eyes. The coach
stop s, and a veiled woman ap p ears; her dress is the color of living flame. Not by
sight, but by the bewilderment of his sp irit and the fear in his blood, Dante
understands that she is Beatrice. On the threshold of G lory, he feels the love that
so o en had p ierced him in Florence. Like an abashed child, he seeks Virgil's
p rotection, but Virgil is no longer next to him.Ma Virgilia n'avea lasciati scemi
di se, Virgilio dolcissimo p atre,THE MEETING IN A DREAM 299Virgilio a cui p er mia
salute die'mi.[But Virgil had left us bere /of himself, Virgil sweetest
father,/Virgil to whom I gave myself for my salvation.] Beatrice calls out his name
imp eriously. She tells him he should not be weep ing for Virgil's disap p earance but
for his own sins. She asks him ironically how he has condescended to set foot in
a p lace where man is hap p y. The air has become p op ulated with angels; Beatrice,
imp lacable, enumerates the errors of Dante's ways to them. She says she searched
for him in dreams, but in vain, for he had fallen so low that there was no other
means for his salvation excep t to show him the eternally damned. Dante lowers his
eyes, morti ed; he stammers and weep s. As the fabulous beings listen, Bea- trice
forces him to make a p ublic confession. . . . Such, in my bad p rose, is the aching
scene of the rst meeting with Beatrice in Paradise. It is curious, as Theop hil
Sp oerri observes (Einfuhrung in die G ottliche Komodie, Zurich, 1 946 ) :
"Undoubtedly Dante himself had envisioned this meeting differently. Nothing in the
p receding p ages indicates that the greatest humiliation of his life awaits him
there."The commentators decip her the scene gure by gure. The four and twenty
p reliminary elders of Revelations 4:4 are the twenty-four books of the Old
Testament, according to St. Jerome's Prologus G aleatus. The animals with six wings
are the ap ostles (Tommaseo) or the G osp els (Lombardi). The six wings are the six
laws ( Pietro d i Dante) o r the disp ersion o f holy doctrine in the six directions
of sp ace (Francesco da Buti). The chariot is the universal Church; its two wheels
are the two Testaments (Buti) or the active and the contemp lative life (Benvenuto
da Imola) or St. Dominic and St. Francis (Paradiso XII, 106-11) or Justice and Pity
(Luigi Pietrobono). The gri n-lion and eagle-is Christ, because of the hyp ostatic
union of the Word with human nature; Didron maintains that it is the Pop e "who as
p onti or eagle rises to the throne of G od to receive his orders and like a lion or
king walks the earth with strength and vigor." The women who dance on the right are
the theological virtues; those who dance on the left are the cardinal virtues. The
woman with three eyes is Prudence, who sees p ast, p resent, and future. Beatrice
emerges and Virgil disap p ears becauseVirgil is reason and Beatrice faith. Also,
according to Vitali, because classical culture was rep laced by Christian culture.
The interp retations I have mentioned are undoubtedly worthy of consideration. In
logical (not p oetic) terms they p rovide an amp ly rigorous justi cation of the
text's ambiguous features. Carlo Steiner, a er sup p orting300 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
certain of them, writes: "A woman with three eyes is a monster, but the Poet does
not submit here to the restraints of art, because it matters much more to him to
exp ress the moralities he holds dear. Unmistakable p roof that in the soul of this
greatest of artists, it was not art that occup ied the rst p lace, but love of the
G ood." Less e sively, Vitali corroborates this view: "His zeal for allegorizing
drives Dante to inventions of dubious beauty."Two facts seem to me to be
indisp utable. Dante wanted the p rocession to be beautiful ( "Non che Roma di carro
cosl bello, rallegrasse A ricano" [Not only did Rome with a chariot so sp lendid
never gladden an Africanus] ) and the p rocession is of a convoluted ugliness. A
grif n tied to a chariot, animals with wings that are sp otted with op en eyes, a
green woman, another who is crimson, another with three eyes, a man walking in his
sleep : such things
seem better suited to the circles of the Inferno than to the realms of G lory.
Their horror is undiminished even by the fact that some of these gures p roceed
from the books of the p rop hets ( " a leggi Ezechiel che li dip igne" [but read
Ezekiel who dep icts them] ) and others from the Revela- tion of St. John. My
rep roach is not an anachronism; the other p aradisiacal scenes exclude any element
of the monstrous.'All the commentators have emp hasized Beatrice's severity; some,
the ugliness of certain emblems. For me, both anomalies derive from a common
origin. This is obviously no more than a conjecture, which I will sketch out in a
few words.To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god. That Dante
p rofessed an idolatrous adoration for Beatrice is a truth that cannot be contra-
dicted; that she once mocked and on another occasion snubbed him are facts
registered in the Vita nuova. Some would maintain that these facts are the images
of others; if so, this would further reinforce our certainty of an unhap p y and
sup erstitious love. With Beatrice dead, Beatrice lost forever, Dante, to assuage
his sorrow, p layed with the ction of meeting her again. It is my belief that he
constructed the trip le architecture of his p oem in order to insert this encounter
into it. What then hap p ened is what o en hap p ens in dreams: they are stained by sad
obstructions. Such was Dante's case. For- ever denied Beatrice, he dreamed of
Beatrice, but dreamed her as terribly severe, dreamed her as inaccessible, dreamed
her in a chariot p ulled by a?Having written this, I read in the glosses of
Francesco Torraca that in a certain Italian bestiary the gri n is a symbol of the
devil ("Per Ia G rifane intenda Ia nemica"). I don't know if it is p ermissible to
add that in the Exeter Codex, the p anther, a beast with a melodious voice and
delicate breath, is a symbol of the Redeemer.THE MEETING IN A DREAM 301lion that
was a bird and that was all bird or all lion while Beatrice's eyes were awaiting
him (Purgatorio I, 121). Such images can p re gure a nightmare; and it is a
nightmare that begins here and will exp and in the next canto. Beatrice disap p ears;
an eagle, a she-fox, and a dragon attack the chariot, and its wheels and body grow
feathers: the chariot then sp routs seven heads (" Trasformato cosl 'l di cio
santo/misefuor teste" [Thus transformed, the holy structure p ut forth heads up on
its p arts] ); a giant and a harlot usurp Beatrice's p lace.2Beatrice existed in
nitely for Dante. Dante very little, p erhap s not at all, for Beatrice. All of us
tend to forget, out of p ity, out of veneration, this grievous discord which for
Dante was unforgettable. Reading and rereading the vicissitudes of his illusory
meeting, I think of the two lovers that Alighieri dreamed in the hurricane of the
second circle and who, whether or not he understood or wanted them to be, were
obscure emblems of the joy he did not attain. I think of Paolo and Francesca,
forever united in their Inferno: "questi, che mai da me non a diviso" [this one,
who never shall be p arted from me] . With ap p alling love, with anxiety, with admira-
tion, with en .{EA] 2It could be objected that such ugliness is the reverse of a
p receding "Beauty." Of course, but it is signi cant. . . . legorically, the
eagle's aggression rep resents the rst p ersecutions; the she-fox, heresy; the
dragon, Satan or Mohammed or the Antichrist; the heads, the deadly sins (Benvenuto
da Jmola) or the sacraments (Buti); the giant, Philip p e IV, known as Philip p e le
Beau, king of France.Beatrice's Last SmileMy intention is to comment on the most
moving lines literature has achieved. They form p art of Canto I of the Paradiso,
and although they are well known, no one seems to have discerned the weight of
sorrow that is in them; no one has fully heard them. True, the tragic substance
they contain belongs less to the work than to the author of the work, less to
Dante the p rotagonist than to Dante the author or inventor.Here is the situation.
On the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, Dante loses Virgil. G uided by Beatrice,
whose beauty increases with each new circle they reach, he journeys from sp here to
concentric sp here until he emerges into the one that encircles all the others, the
Primum Mobile. At his feet are the xed stars; beyond them is the emp yrean, no
longer the corp o- real heaven, but now the eternal heaven, made only of light. They
ascend to the emp yrean; in this in nite region (as on the canvases of the p re-
Rap haelites) distant forms are as sharp ly distinct as those close by. Dante sees a
high river of light, sees bands of angels, sees the manifold rose of p aradise
formed by the souls of the just, arranged in the shap e of an amp hitheater. He is
suddenly aware that Beatrice has le him. He sees her on high, in one of the
circles of the Rose. Like a man who raises his eyes to the thundering heavens from
the dep ths of the sea, he worship s and im- p lores her. He gives thanks to her for
her bene cent p ity and commends his soul to her. The text then says:Cos! orai; e
quella, sz lontana comep area, sorrise e riguardommi; p oi si torno all'etterna
fontana.[So did I p ray; and she, so distant/as she seemed, smiled and looked on me,
I then turned again to the eternal fountain. ] BEATRICE's LAST SMILE 303How to
interp ret this? The allegorists tell us: reason (Virgil) is an instrument for
attaining faith; faith (Beatrice), an instrument for attaining divinity; both are
lost once their end is achieved. This exp lanation, as the reader will have
observed, is as irrep roachable as it is frigid; never could these lines have
emerged from so p altry a schema.The commentaries I have examined see in Beatrice's
smile no more than a symbol of acquiescence. "Final gaze, final smile, but certain
p romise," Francesco Torraca notes. "She smiles to tell Dante his p rayer has been
granted; she looks at him to bear witness to him once again of the love she has for
him," Luigi Pietrobono con rms. This assertion (shared by Casini) strikes me as
ap t, but obviously it only grazes the surface of the scene.Ozanam (Dante et la
p hilosop hie catholique, 1895) believes that Bea- trice's ap otheosis was the p rimal
subject of the Commedia; G uido Vitali wonders if Dante, in creating his Paradise,
was moved, above all, by the p rosp ect of founding a kingdom for his lady. A famous
p assage of the Vitanuova ("I hop e to say of her what has never been said of any
woman") justi- es or allows for this conjecture. I would go rther. I susp ect that
Dante constructed the best book literature has achieved in order to interp olate
into it a few encounters with the irrecup erable Beatrice. More exactly, the circles
of damnation and the austral Purgatory and the nine concentric circles and the
siren and the gri n and Bertrand de Born are the interp olations; a smile and a
voice-that he knows to be lost-are what is fundamental. At the beginning of the
Vita nuova we read that once, in a letter, he listed sixty women's names in order
to slip in among them, in secret, the name of Beatrice. I think he rep eats this
melancholy game in the Commedia.There is nothing unusual about a wretch who
imagines joy; all of us, every day, do the same. Dante does as we do, but something
always allows us to catch sight of the horror concealed by these glad ctions. A
p oem by Chesterton sp eaks of "nightmares of delight"; this oxymoron more or less de
nes the tercet of the Paradiso I have cited. But in Chesterton's p hrase the
emp hasis is on the word delight; in the tercet, on nightmare.Let us reconsider the
scene. Dante, with Beatrice at his side, is in the emp yrean. Above them,
immeasurable, arches the Rose of the just. The Rose is distant, but the forms that
p eop le it are sharp ly de ned. This contradiction, though justi ed by the p oet
(Paradiso , 118), is p erhap s the rst indication of an inner discord. All at once
Beatrice is no longer beside him. An elder has taken her p lace: "credea ver
Beatrice, e vidi un sene" [ I thought to see Beatrice, and I saw an elder] . Dante
is barely able to ask304 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwhere Beatrice is: "Ov'e ella?" he cries.
The old man shows him one of the circles of the lo y Rose. There, in an aureole of
reflected glory, is Beatrice; Beatrice, whose gaze used to su use him with
intolerable beatitude; Bea- trice, who used to dress in red; Beatrice, whom he
thought of so constantly that he was astonished by the idea that some p ilgrims he
saw one morning in Florence had never heard sp eak of her; Beatrice, who once
refused to greet him; Beatrice, who died at the age of twenty-four; Beatrice de
Falco Portinari, who married Bardi. Dante gazes at her on high; the azure rma-
ment is no farther from the lowest dep ths of the sea than she is from him. Dante
p rays, as if to G od, but also as if to a longed-for woman:0 donna in cui la mia
sp eranza vige, e che so risti p er la mia salutein inferno lasciar le tue vestige[0
lady, in whom my hop e is strong,/and who for my salvation did endure/to leave in
Hell your footp rints] Beatrice looks at him a moment and smiles, then turns away
toward the eternal fountain of light.Francesco De Sanctis (Storia della letteratura
italiana VII) understands the p assage thus: "When Beatrice withdraws, Dante does
not utter a single lament: all earthly residue in him has been consumed and
destroyed." This is true if we think of the p oet's intention; erroneous, if we
think of his emotion.We must keep one incontrovertible fact in mind, a single,
humble fact: the scene was imagined by Dante. For us, it is very real; for him, it
was less so. (The reality, for him, was that rst life and then death had taken
Beatrice from him.) Forever absent from Beatrice, alone and p erhap s humiliated, he
imagined the scene in order to imagine he was with her. Unhap p ily for him, hap p ily
for the centuries that would read
him, his consciousness that the meeting was imaginary distorted the vision. Hence
the ap p alling circumstances, all the more infernal for taking p lace in the
emp yrean: the disap p earance of Beatrice, the elder who rep laces her, her abrup t
elevation to the Rose, the fleetingness of her glance and smile, the eternal
turning away of the face.' The horror shows through in the words: come p area refers
to lantana but contaminates sorrise, and therefore Longfellow could translate, in
his 1867 version:1The Blessed Damozel p ainted by Rossetti, who had translated the
Vita 11uova, is also unhap p y in p aradise.BEATRICE's LAST SMILE 305Thus I imp lored;
and she, so far away,Smiled as it seemed, and looked once more at me . . .And
eterna seems to contaminate si torno.[EA} VI Our Poor Individu ismThere is no end
to the illusions of p atriotism. In the first century of our era, Plutarch mocked
those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon;
Milton, in the seventeenth, observed that G od is in the habit of revealing Himself
rst to His Englishmen; Fichte, at the beginning of the nineteenth, declared that
to have character and to be G erman are obviously one and the same thing. Here in
Argentina we are teeming with nationalists, driven, they claim, by the worthy or
innocent resolve of p romoting the best traits of the Argentine p eop le. Y et they
ignore the Ar- gentine p eop le; in their p olemics they p refer to de ne them as a
nction of some external fact, the Sp anish conquistadors, say, or an imaginary
Catholic tradition, or "Saxon imp erialism."The Argentine, unlike the Americans of
the North and almost all Euro- p eans, does not identi with the State. This is
attributable to the circumstance that the governments in this country tend to be
awful, or to the general fact that the State is an inconceivable abstraction.' One
thing is certain: the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Ap horisms such
as Hegel's "The State is the reality of the moral idea" strike him as sinister
jokes. Films made in Hollywood o en hold up for admiration the case ofa man
(usually a journalist) who seeks out the friendship of a criminal in order to hand
him over to the p olice; the Argentine, for whom friendship is a p assion and the
p olice a ma a, feels that this "hero" is an incomp rehensible swine. He feels with
Don Quixote that "everybody hath sins of his own to answer for" and that "it is not
seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow-creatures, on
account of matters with which they have no concern" ( Quixote I, II). More than
once, confronted with the vain symmetries of the Sp anish style, I have susp ected
that we are irredeemably di er-1The State is imp ersonal; the Argentine can only
conceive of p ersonal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing p ublic funds is not a
crime. I am noting a fact; I am not justi ing or excusing it.310 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
ent from Sp ain; these two lines from the Quixote have suf ced to convince me of my
error; they seem to be the secret, tranquil symbol of our af nity. This is
p rofoundly confirmed by a single night in Argentine literature: the desp erate night
when a sergeant in the rural p olice shouted that he was not going to consent to the
crime of killing a brave man, and started ghting against his own soldiers
alongside the gitive Martin Fierro.The world, for the Europ ean, is a cosmos in
which each individual p ersonally corresp onds to the role he p lays; for the
Argentine, it is a chaos. The Europ ean and the North American consider that a book
that has been awarded any kind of p rize must be good; the Argentine allows for the
p ossibility that the book might not be bad, desp ite the p rize. In general, the
Ar- gentine does not believe in circumstances. He may be unaware of the fable that
humanity always includes thirty-s just men-the Lamed Wufniks- who are unknown to
one another, but who secretly sustain the universe; if he hears of it, it does not
strike him as strange that these worthies are obscure and anonymous. . . . His
p op ular hero is the lone man who quarrels with the group , either actually (Fierro,
Moreira, the Black Ant), p otentially, or in the p ast (Segundo Sombra). Other
literatures do not record analogous events. Consider, for examp le, two great
Europ ean writers: Kip ling and Franz Kafka. At rst glance, the two have nothing in
common, but Kip ling's subject is the defense of order, of an order (the road in
Kim, the bridge in The Bridge-Builders, the Roman wall in Puck ofPook's Hill);
Kafka's, the unbearable, tragic solitude of the individual who lacks even the
lowliest p lace in the order of the universe.It may be said that the traits I have
p ointed out are merely negative or anarchic; it may be added that they are not
subject to p olitical exp lanation. I shall venture to suggest the op p osite. The most
urgent p roblem of our time (already denounced with p rop hetic lucidity by the near-
forgotten Sp encer) is the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the
individual; in the battle with this evil, whose names are communism and Nazism, Ar-
gentine individualism, though p erhap s useless or harmful until now, will nd its
justi cation and its duties.Without hop e and with nostalgia, I think of the
abstract p ossibility of a p arty that had some affinity with the Argentine p eop le; a
p arty that would p romise (let us say) a strict minimum of government.Nationalism
seeks to cap tivate us with the vision of an in nitely tire- some State; this
utop ia, once established on earth, would have the p rovidential virtue of making
everyone yearn for, and finally build, its antithesis.?? ?The Paradox of Ap o inaire
With some obvious excep tions (Montaigne, Saint-Simon, Bloy), we can safely a rm
that France tends to p roduce its literature in conformity with the history of
that literature. If we comp are manuals of French literature (Lanson's, for examp le,
or Thibaudet's) with their English equivalents (Saintsbury's or Samp son's), we
discover, not without surp rise, that the latter consist of conceivable human
beings, and the former, of schools, manifestos, generations, avant-gardes, rear
guards, le s and rights, cenacles, and allusions to the tortu- ous fate of Cap tain
Drey s. The strangest p art is that reality corresp onds to those antic
abstractions: before writing a line, the Frenchman wants to understand, de ne,
classi himself. The Englishman writes in good faith, the Frenchman in favor of a,
against b, conforming to c, toward d. . . . He wonders (let us say): What kind of
sonnet would be comp osed by a young atheist with a Catholic background, born and
bred in Nivernais but of Breton stock, and a liated with the Communist Party since
1944? Or, more technically: How should one ap p ly the vocabulary and methods of
Zola's Les Rougon- Macquart to the elaboration of an ep ic p oem on the shermen of
Morbihan, combining Fenelon's ardor with Rabelais' garrulous p ro sion and, of
course, without ignoring a p sychoanalytical interp retation of the gure of Merlin?
This system of p remeditation, the mark of French literature, fills its p ages with
comp ositions of a classical rigor, but so with fortunate, or unfortunate,
extravagances. In fact, when a French man of letters p rofesses a doctrine, he
always ap p lies it to the end, with a nd of ferocious integrity. Racine and
Mallarme are the same writer (I hop e this metap hor is accep table), executing with
the same decorum two dissimilar tasks. . . . To mock excessive fore- thought is not
di cult; it is imp ortant to remember, however, that it has p roduced French
literature, p erhap s the finest in the world.Of all the obligations that an author
can imp ose up on himself, the most common and doubtless the most harm l is that of
being modern. "Il faut312 JORG E LUIS BORG ESetre absolument moderne" [One must be
absolutely modern] , Rimbaud decided, a temp oral limitation corresp onding to the
triviality of the nationalist who brags of being hermetically Danish or
inextricably Argentine. Schop enhauer ( Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 15)
concludes that the greatest imp erfection of the human intellect is its successive,
linear character, its tie to the p resent; to venerate that imp erfection is an
unfortunate whim. G uillaume Ap ollinaire embraced, justi ed, and p reached it to his
contemp oraries. What is more, he devoted himself to that imp erfection. He did so-
remember the p oem "La folie Rousse"-with an admirable and clear conscience of the
sad dangers of his adventure.Those dangers were real; today, like yesterday, the
general value ofAp ollinaire's work is more documentary than aesthetic. We visit
it to recover the flavor of the "modern" p oetry of the rst decades of our century.
Not a single line allows us to forget the date on which it was written-an error
not incurred, for examp le, in the contemp orary works of Valery, Rilke, Y eats,
Joyce. . . . (Perhap s, for the ture, the only achievement of "modern" literature
will be the unfathomable Ulysses, which in some way justi es, includes, and goes
beyond the other texts.)To p lace Ap ollinaire's name next to Rilke's might seem
anachronistic, so close is the latter to us, so distant (already) is the former.
However, Das Buch der Bilder [The Book of Pictures] , which includes the
inexhaustible "Herbst- tag' [Autumn Day] , is from 1902; Calligrammes, from 1918.
Ap ollinaire, adorning his comp ositions with trolleys, airp lanes, and other
vehicles, did not identi with his times, which are our times.For the writers of
1918, the war was what Tiberius Claudius Nero was for a p rofessor of rhetoric: "mud
kneaded with blood." They all p erceived it thus, Unruh as well as Barbusse, Wilfred
Owen as well as Sassoon, the solitary Klemm as well as the frequented Remarque.
(Paradoxically, one of the rst p oets to emp hasize the monotony, tedium,
desp eration, and p hysical humiliations
of contemp orary war was Rudyard Kip ling, in his Barrack- Room Ballads of 1903.)
For Artillery Lieutenant G uillaume Ap ollinaire, war was, above all, a beautiful
sp ectacle. His p oems and his letters exp ress this. G uillermo de Torre, the most
devoted and lucid of his critics, observes: "In the long nights of the trenches,
the soldier-p oet could contemp late the sky starred with mortar re, and imagine new
constellations." Thus Ap ollinaire fancied himself attending a dazzling sp ectacle in
"La Nuit d'avril 1915":Le ciel est etoilep ar les abus des Boches Laforet
merveilleuse au je vis donne un balTHE PARADOX OF APOLLINAIRE 313[The sky is starry
with Bache shells/The marvelous forest where I live is giving a ball] A letter dated
July 2 con rms this: "War is decidedly a beautiful thing and, desp ite all the risks
I run, the exhaustion, the total lack of water, of everything, I am not unhap p y to
be here. . . . The p lace is very desolate, neither water, nor trees, nor villages
are here, only the sup er-metallic, arch- thundering war."The meaning of a sentence,
like that of an isolated word, dep ends on the context, which sometimes can be the
entire life of its author. Thus the p hrase "war is a beauti l thing" allows for
many interp retations. Uttered by a South American dictator, it could exp ress his
hop e of throwing incendiary bombs on the cap ital of a neighboring country. Coming
om a journalist, it could signi his rm intention to adulate that dictator in
order to obtain a good p osition in his administration. A sedentary man of letters
could be suggesting his nostalgia for a life of adventure. For G uillaume
Ap ollinaire, on the battle- elds of France, it signi es, I believe, a ame of mind
that ignores horror ef- fortlessly, an accep tance of destiny, a kind of fundamental
innocence. It is not unlike that Norwegian who conquered six feet of English earth
and, what is more, nicknamed the battle Viking Feast; not unl e the immortal and
unknown author of the Chanson de Roland, singing to the brilliance of a sword:E
Durendal, cum ies clere et blancheCuntre solei! si reluis et refeambes[And
Durendal, how you are bright and white/Against the sun you glitter and shine]
Ap ollinaire's line, "The marvelous forest where I live is giving a ball," is not a
rigorous descrip tion of the artillery exchanges of 1915, but it is an accurate
p ortrait of Ap ollinaire. Although he lived his days among the baladins of Cu- bism
and Futurism, he was not a modern man. He was somewhat less com- p lex and more
hap p y, more ancient, and stronger. (He was so unmodern that modernity seemed
p icturesque, and p erhap s even moving, to him.) He was the "winged and sacred thing"
of Platonic dialogue; he was a man of elemental and, therefore, eternal feelings;
he was, when the ndaments of earth and sky shook, the p oet of ancient courage and
ancient honor. His legacy is these p ages that move us like the nearness of the sea:
"La Chanson du mal-aime," "Desir,""Merveilles de !aguerre,""Tristesse
d'uneetoile;'"LafolieRousse:'{1946] [S!L] On Oscar W deTo sp eak Wilde's name is to
sp eak of a dandy who was also a p oet; it is to evoke the image of a gentleman
dedicated to the meager p rop osition of shocking by means of cravats and metap hors.
It is also to evoke the notion of art as an elite or occult game-as in the
tap estries of Hugh Vereker or of Stefan G eorge-and the p oet as a laborious
"monstrorum artifex" [maker of monsters] (Pliny, III). It is to evoke the tired
crep uscule of the nineteenth century, with its op p ressive p omp of hothouse and
masked ball. None of these evocations is false, but all of them, I maintain,
corresp ond to p artial truths, and contradict or disregard well-known facts.Let us
consider, for examp le, the idea that Wilde was a kind of symbolist. A nebula of
circumstances sup p orts it: in 1881, Wilde was the leader of the aesthetes, and ten
years later of the decadents; Rebecca West p er di- o u s l y a c c u s e s h i m
( He n ry Ja m e s , I I I ) o f g i v i n g t h e s e c o n d o f t h e s e t w o
s e c t s "the middle-class touch"; the vocabulary of the p oem "The Sp hinx" is stu-
diously magni cent; Wilde was a friend to Schwob and to Mallarme. The notion is re
ted, however, by an essential fact: in verse or in p rose, Wilde's synt is always
very simp le. Of the many British writers, none is so accessible to foreigners.
Readers who are incap able of decip hering a single p aragrap h by Kip ling or a
stanza of William Morris begin reading LadyWindermere's Fan and nish it that same
a ernoon. Wilde's meter is sp ontaneous, or seeks to ap p ear sp ontaneous; his
comp lete work does not include a single exp erimental line such as this hard and
wise Alexandrine by Lionel Johnson: ''Alone with Christ, desolate else, le by
mankind."Wilde's technical insigni cance may be an argument in favor of his in-
trinsic greatness. If Wilde's work corresp onded to the nature of his fame, it would
consist merely of artifices, a er the fashion of Les Palais nomades or Los
crep usculos deljardin. In Wilde's work such arti ces are numerous-we can mention
the eleventh chap ter of Dorian G ray or "The Harlot's House"ON OSCAR WILDE 315or
"Symp hony in Y ellow"-but their adjectival nature is obvious. Wilde can do without
these "p urp le p atches," a p hrase Ricketts and Hesketh Pearson credit him with
coining, but which is already inscribed in the p reamble to Cicero's In Pisonem.
This misattribution is p roof of the custom of linking the notion of decorative
p assages to Wilde's name.Reading and rereading Wilde over the years, I note a fact
that his p ane- gyrists seem not even to have susp ected: the elementary and
demonstrable fact that Wilde is nearly always right. "The Soul of Man under
Socialism" is not only eloquent; it is correct. The miscellaneous notes he so
cop iously contributed to the Pall Mall G azette and the Sp eaker abound in limp id ob-
servations that exceed the very best abilities of Leslie Step hen or Saintsbury.
Wilde has been accused of p racticing a kind of ars combinatoria, in the manner of
Ramon Llull; this may be ap p licable to certain of his jokes ("One of those British
faces which, once seen, are always forgotten") but not to the p ronouncement that
music reveals to us an unknown and p erhap s real p ast ("The Critic as Artist"), or
that all men kill the thing they love ( The Ballad ofReading G aol), or that to
rep ent of an action is to modi the p ast (De Profundis), or that-and the statement
is not unworthy of Leon Bloy or Swedenborg1-there is no man who is not, at each
moment, all that he has been and will be (De Profundis). I do not transcribe these
lines so that the reader may revere them; I p roduce them as signs of a mentality
that di ers greatly from the one generally attributed to Wilde. If I am not
mistaken, he was much more than a sort of Irish Mon?as; he was a man of the
eighteenth century who occasionally condescended to the games of symbolism. Like
G ibbon, like Johnson, like Voltaire, he was a wit; a wit who was also right. He
existed "in order, at last, to sp eak fateful words, in short, a classic."2 He gave
the century what the century demanded-comedies larmoyantes for the majority and
verbal arabesques for the few-and he accomp lished these dissimilar things with a
kind of negligent felicity. Perfection has injured him; his work is so harmonious
that it can seem inevitable and even banal. It takes an e ort for us to imagine the
universe without Wilde's ep igrams; that dif culty does not make them any less
p lausible.A p assing observation. The name of Oscar Wilde is linked to the cities
1Cf. the curious hyp othesis of Leibniz, which so scandalized Arnauld: "The con-
cep t of each individual encloses a p riori all the events that will hap p en to him."
Ac- cording to this dialectical fatalism, the fact that Alexander the G reat would
die in Babylon is one of the qualities of that king, like p ride.'The p hrase is from
Reyes, who ap p lies it to the Mexican man (Reloj de sol, 158).316 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
of the p lain; his glory, to condemnation and jail. Y et (and Hesketh Pearson has
sensed this well), the fundamental flavor of his work is hap p iness. By contrast,
the estimable work of Chesterton, that p rototyp e of p hysical and moral health, is
always on the p oint of becoming a nightmare. Horrors and things diabolical lurk
within it; the most innocuous p age can take on the forms of terror. Chesterton is a
man who wishes to recover childhood; Wilde, a man who retains, desp ite the habits
of wickedness and misfortune, an invulnerable innocence.Like Chesterton, like Lang,
like Boswell, Wilde is one of the fortunates who can forego the ap p roval of critics
and even, at times, of the reader, because the delight we derive from his comp any
is constant and irresistible.[EA} A New Re tation of TimeVor mir keine Zeit, nach
mir wird keine seyn. Mitmirgebiertsiesich, mitmirgehtsieauch ein.[Before me there
was no time, a er me there will be none./With me it is born, with me it will also
die.] -Daniel von Czep ko, Sexcenta Monidisticha Sap ientum III, II (1655) Preliminary
NoteHad this refutation (or its title) been p ublished in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century, it would be included in a bibliograp hy by Hume, or at least
mentioned by Huxley or Kemp Smith. But p ublished in 1947 (a er Berg- son) it is the
anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of an obsolete system, or even worse, the feeble
arti ce of an Argentine adri on a sea of meta- p hysics. Both conjectures are
p lausible and p erhap s even true, but I cannot p romise some startling new conclusion
on the basis of my rudimentary dialectics. The thesis I shall exp ound is as old
as Zeno's arrow or the chariot of the G reek king in the Milinda Panha; its novelty,
if any, consists in ap p lying to my ends the classic instrument of Berkeley. Both he
and his successor David Hume abound in p aragrap hs that contradict or
exclude my thesis; nonetheless, I believe I have deduced the inevitable
consequence of their doctrine.The rst article (A) was written in 1944 and ap p eared
in number 115 of Sur; the second, from 1946, is a revision of the rst. I have
deliberately re- ained from making the two into one, deciding that two similar
texts could enhance the reader's comp rehension of such an unwieldy subject.A word
on the title: I am not unaware that it is an examp le of that monster called a
contradictio in adjecto by logicians, for to say that a re tation of318 JORG E LUIS
BORG EStime is new (or old, for that matter) is to recognize a temp oral p redicate
that restores the very notion the subject intends to destroy. But I shall let this
fleeting joke stand to p rove, at least, that I do not exaggerate the imp ortance
of wordp lay. In any case, language is so saturated and animated by time that, quite
p ossibly, not a single line in all these p ages fails to require or invoke it.I
dedicate these exercises to my ancestor Juan Cris6tomo La nur (1797-1824), who le
a memorable p oem or two to Argentine letters and who strove to reform the teaching
of p hilosop hy by re ning out traces of theology and by exp laining the theories of
Locke and Condillac in his courses. He died in exile: as with all men, it was his
lot to live in bad times.?Buenos Aires, December 23, 1946 AIIn the course of a life
dedicated to belles-lettres and, occasionally, to the p erp lexities of metap hysics,
I have glimp sed or foreseen a re tation of time, one in which I myself do not
believe, but which tends to visit me at night and in the hours of weary twilight
with the illusory force of a truism. This re tation is to be found, in one form or
another, in all of my books. It is p re gured in the p oems "Inscrip tion on Any Tomb"
and "Truco" in my Fervor ofBuenos Aires (1923); it is op enly stated on a certain
p age of Evaristo Carriego; and in the story "Feeling in Death;' which I transcribe
below. None of these texts satis es me, not even the last on the list, which is
less logical and exp lanatory than sentimental and divinatory. I will attemp t, in
this p resent writing, to establish a basis for them all.Two arguments led me to
this refutation of time: Berkeley's idealism and Leibniz's p rincip le of
indiscernibles.>All exp ositions of Buddhism mention the Milinda Panha, an Ap ology
from the second century; this work recounts a debate between the king of the
Bactrians, Menander, and the monk Nagasena. The latter argues that just as the
king's chariot is not the wheels nor the chassis nor the e nor the sha nor the
yoke, neither is man matter nor form nor imp ressions nor ideas nor instincts nor
consciousness. He is not the combination of those p arts, nor does he exist outside
them. . . . A er this discussion, which lasts several days, Menander (Milinda)
converts to the faith of the Bud- dha. The Milinda Panha has been rendered into
English by Rhys Davids (Oxford, 1890-94) .A NEW REFUTATION OF TIME 319Berkeley
( The Princip les ofHuman Knowledge, p ar. 3) observed:That neither our thoughts, nor
p assions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind is what
everybody will allow. And to me it is no less evident that the various Sensations
or ideas imp rinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is,
whatever objects they comp ose), cannot exist otherwise than in a mind p erceiving
them. . . . The table I write on, I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if
I were out of my study I should say it existed-meaning thereby that if I was in my
study I might p erceive it, or that some other sp irit actually does p erceive it. . .
. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any
relation to their being p erceived, that is to me p erfectly unintelligible. Their
esse is p ercip i, nor is it p ossible they should have any existence out of the minds
or thinking things which p erceive them.In p aragrap h 23 he added, foreseeing
objections:But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine
trees, for instance, in a p ark, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to
p erceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no di culty in it; but what is all
this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call
books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may
p erceive them? But do not you yourself p erceive or think of them all the while?
This therefore is nothing to the p urp ose; it only shews you have the p ower of
imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it doth not shew that you can conceive
it p ossible that the objects of your thought may exist without the mind.In
another p aragrap h, number 6, he had already declared:Some truths there are so near
and obvious to the mind that a man need only op en his eyes to see them. Such I take
this imp ortant one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the
earth, in a word all those bodies which comp ose the mighty ame of the world have
not any subsistence without a mind-that their being is to be p erceived or known;
that consequently so long as they are not actually p erceived by me, or do not exist
in my mind or that of any other created sp irit, they must either have no existence
at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Sp irit.320JORG E LUIS BORG ESSuch
is, in the words of its inventor, the idealist doctrine. To understand it is easy;
the dif culty lies in thinking within its limitations. Schop enhauer himself, in
exp ounding it, is guilty of some negligence. In the rst lines of his book Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellunrfrom the year 1819-he formulates the following
declaration, which makes him a creditor as regards the sum total of imp erishable
human p erp lexity: "The world is my rep resentation. The man who confesses this
truth clearly understands that he does not know a sun nor an earth, but only some
eyes which see a sun and a hand which feels an earth." That is, for the idealist
Schop enhauer, a man's eyes and hands are less illusory or unreal than the earth or
the sun. In 1844 he p ublishes a sup p lementary volume. In the rst chap ter he
rediscovers and aggravates the p revious error: he de nes the universe as a cerebral
p henomenon, and he distinguishes between the "world in the head" and the "world
outside the head." Berkeley, nevertheless, will have made his Philo- nous say, in
1713: "The brain therefore you sp eak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the
mind. Now, I would fain know whether you think it reasonable to sup p ose, that one
idea or thing existing in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so,
p ray how do you account for the origin ofthat p rimary idea or brain itself?" To
Schop enhauer's dualism, or cerebral- ism, Sp iller's monism may legitimately be
counterp osed. Sp iller ( The Mind ofMan [1902] , chap . 8) argues that the retina, and
the cutaneous surface invoked to exp lain visual and tactile p henomena, are in
turn two tactile and visual systems, and that the room we see (the "objective" one)
is no greater than the imagined ("cerebral") one, and that the former does not con-
tain the latter, since two indep endent visual systems are involved. Berkeley ( The
Princip les of Human Knowledge, 10 and n6) likewise denied p rimary qualities-the
solidity and extension of things-or the existence of absolute sp ace.Berkeley af
rmed the continuous existence of objects, inasmuch as when no individual p erceives
them, G od does. Hume, with greater logic, denied this existence (A Treatise ofHuman
Nature I, 4, 2). Berkeley af rmed p ersonal identity, "for I myself am not my ideas,
but somewhat else, a thinking, active p rincip le that p erceives" (Dialogues, 3).
Hume, the skep tic, refuted this belief, and made each man "a bundle or collection
of di erent p ercep tions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rap idity"
(I, 4, 6). Both men a rmed the existence of time: for Berkeley it is "the suc-
cession of ideas in my mind, owing uniformly, and p articip ated in by all beings" (
The Princip les ofHuman Knowledge, 98). For Hume, it is "a succession of
indivisible moments" (I, 2, 2).A NEW REFUTATION OF TIME 321I have accumulated
quotations from the ap ologists of idealism, I have p rovided their canonical
p assages, I have reiterated and exp lained, I have censured Schop enhauer (not
without ingratitude), to help my reader p enetrate this unstable world of the mind.
A world of evanescent imp ressions; a world without matter or sp irit, neither
objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of sp ace; a world
made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Princip ia; an inexhaustible
labyrinth, a chaos, a dream-the almost comp lete disintegration that David Hume
reached.Once the idealist argument is accep ted, I believe that it is p ossible-
p erhap s inevitable-to go further. For Hume, it is not justifiable to sp eak of the
form of the moon or its color: its form and color are the moon. Neither can one
sp eak of the mind's p ercep tions, inasmuch as the mind is nothing but a series of
p ercep tions. The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" is thus invalid: to say I
think is to p ostulate the I, a p etitio p rincip ii. In the eighteenth century,
Lichtenberg p rop osed that instead of "I think," we should say imp ersonally "It
thinks," as we say "It thunders" or "There is lightning." I rep eat: there is not,
behind the face, a secret self governing our acts or receiving our imp ressions;
we are only the series of those imaginary acts and those errant imp ressions. The
series? If we deny matter and sp irit, which are continuities, and if we also deny
sp ace, I do not know what right we have to the continuity that is time. Let us
imagine a p resent moment, any one at all. A night on the Mississip p i. Huckleberry
Finn wakes up . The ra , lost in the shadows of twilight, continues
downstream. It may be a bit cold. Huckle- berry Finn recognizes the so , ceaseless
sound of the water. Negligently he op ens his eyes: he sees an indefinite number of
stars, a nebulous line of trees. Then he sinks into a sleep without memories, as
into dark waters.2 Metap hysical idealism declares that to add to these p ercep tions
a material substance (the object) and a sp iritual substance (the subject) is
p recarious and vain. I maintain that it is no less illogical to think that they are
terms in a series whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end. To add to the
river and the riverbank p erceived by Huck the notion of yet another substantive
river with another riverbank, to add yet another p ercep tion to that immediate
network of p ercep tions, is altogether unjusti able in the eyes of idealism. In my
eyes, it is no less unjusti able to add a chronological p recision: for instance,
the fact that the above-mentioned event should have2For the reader's convenience I
have chosen a moment between two intervals of sleep , a literary, not a historical,
instant. If anyone susp ects a fallacy, he can insert another examp le, if he
wants, one from his own life.322 JORG E LUIS BORG EStaken p lace on the night of June
7, 1849, between 4:10 and 4:11. In other words, I deny, using the arguments of
idealism, the vast temp oral series that idealism p ermits. Hume denied the existence
of an absolute sp ace, in which each thing has its p lace; I deny the existence of
one single time, in which all events are linked. To deny coexistence is no less di
cult than to deny succession.I deny, in a large number of instances, the existence
of succession. I deny, in a large number of instances, simultaneity as well. The
lover who thinks, "While I was so hap p y, thinking about the faith lness of my
beloved, she was busy deceiving me;' is deceiving himself. If every state in which
we live is absolute, that hap p iness was not concurrent with that betrayal. The
discovery of that betrayal is merely one more state, incap able of modi ing
"p revious" states, though not incap able of modi ing their recollection. Today's
misfortune is no more real than yesterday's good fortune. I will look for a more
concrete examp le: At the beginning of August 1824, Cap tain Isidoro Suarez, at the
head of a squadron of Peruvian hussars, assured the Victory of Junin; at the
beginning of August 1824, De Quincey issued a diatribe against Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre; these deeds were not contemp oraneous (they are now), inasmuch as the two
men died-the one in the city of Montevideo, the other in Edinburgh-knowing nothing
of each other. . . . Every instant is autonomous. Not vengeance nor p ardon nor
jails nor even oblivion can modi the invulnerable p ast. No less vain to my mind
are hop e and fear, for they always refer to future events, that is, to events which
will not hap p en to us, who are the diminutive p resent. They tell me that the
p resent, the "sp ecious p resent" of the p sychologists, lasts between several
seconds and the smallest fraction of a second, which is also how long the history
of the universe lasts. Or better, there is no such thing as "the life of a man,"
nor even "one night in his life." Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary
combination of these moments. The universe, the sum total of all events, is no less
ideal than the sum of all the horses-one, many, none?-Shakesp eare dreamed between
1592 and 1594. I might add that if time is a mental p rocess, how can it be shared
by countless, or even two di erent men?The argument set forth in the p receding
p aragrap hs, interrup ted and encumbered by examp les, may seem intricate. I shall try
a more direct method. Let us consider a life in which rep etitions abound: my life,
for instance. I never p ass the Recoleta cemetery without remembering that my fa-
ther, my grandp arents, and my great-grandp arents are buried there, as IA NEW
REFUTATION OF TIME 323shall be; then I remember that I have remembered the same
thing many times before; I cannot stroll around the outskirts of my neighborhood in
the solitude of night without thinking that night is p leasing to us because, like
memory, it erases idle details; I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship
without reflecting how one loses only what one really never had; each time I cross
one of the southside corners, I think of you, Helena; each time the air brings me
the scent of eucalyp tus I think of Adrogue in my childhood; each time I recall
fragment 91 of Heraclitus, "Y ou cannot step into the same river twice," I admire
his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accep t the rst meaning ("The
river is another") covertly imp oses up on us the second meaning ("I am another") and
gives us the illusion of having invented it; each time I hear a G ermanop hile deride
Y iddish, I reflect that Y iddish is, a er all, a G erman dialect, barely tainted by
the language of the Holy G host. These tautologies (and others I shall not disclose)
are my whole life. Naturally, they recur without design; there are variations of
em- p hasis, temp erature, light, general p hysiological state. I susp ect, nonethe-
less, that the number of circumstantial variants is not in nite: we can p ostulate,
in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but
in whom the same p rocess is op erative), two identical moments. Once this identity
is p ostulated, we may ask: Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is
not one single rep eated terminal p oint enough to disrup t and confound the series in
time? Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakesp eare not
literally Shakesp eare?I am still not certain of the ethics of the system I have
outlined, nor do I know whether it exists. The h p aragrap h of chap ter IV in the
Sanhedrin of the Mishnah declares that, in the eyes of G od, he who kills a single
man destroys the world. If there is no p lurality, he who annihilated all men would
be no more guilty than the p rimitive and solitary Cain-an orthodox view-nor more
global in his destruction-which may be magic, or so I understand it. Tumultuous and
universal catastrop hes- res, wars, ep idemics-are but a single sorrow, multip lied in
many illusory mirrors. Thus Bernard Shaw surmises (G uide to Socialism, 86):What you
yourself can su er is the utmost that can be su ered on earth. If you starve to
death, you exp erience all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten
thousand other women starve to death with you, their su ering is not increased by a
single p ang: their share in your fate does not make you ten thousand times as
hungry, nor p rolong324 JORG E LUIS BORG ESyour su ering ten thousand times. Therefore
do not be op p ressed by "the frightful sum of human su ering": there is no
sum. . . . Poverty and p ain are not cumulative.(Cf. also C. S. Lewis, The Problem
ofPain VII.)Lucretius (De rerum natura I, 830) attributes to Anaxagoras the doc-
trine that gold consists of p articles of gold; re, of sp arks; bone, of imp er-
cep tible little bones. Josiah Royce, p erhap s influenced by St. Augustine, p rop oses
that time is made up of time and that "every now within which something hap p ens is
therefore also a succession" ( The World and the Indi- vidual II, 139 ). That
p rop osition is comp atible with my essay.IIAll language is of a successive nature;
it does not lend itself to reasoning on eternal, intemp oral matters. Those readers
who are disp leased with the p receding arguments may p refer this note from 1928,
titled "Feeling in Death;' which I mentioned earlier:I wish to record here an
exp erience I had some nights ago, a trifling matter too evanescent and ecstatic to
be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental to be called a thought. I
am sp eaking of a scene and its word, a word I had said before but had not lived
with total in- volvement until that night. I shall describe it now, with the
incidents of time and p lace that hap p ened to reveal it. This is how I remember it:
I had sp ent the a ernoon in Barracas, a p lace I rarely visited, a p lace whose
distance from the scene of my later wanderings lent a strange aura to that day. As
I had nothing to do that night and the weather was fair, I went out a er dinner to
walk and remember. I had no wish to have a set destination; I followed a random
course, as much as p ossible; I accep ted, with no conscious anticip ation other than
avoiding the avenues or wide streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. A
kind of familiar gravitation, however, drew me toward p laces whose name I shall
always remember, for they arouse in me a certain reverence. I am not sp eaking of
the sp eci c surroundings of my childhood, my own neighborhood, but of its still
mysterious borders, which I have p ossessed in words but little in reality, a zone
that is familiar and mythological at the same time. The op p osite of the known-its
reverseA NEW REFUTATION OF TIME 325side-are those streets to me, almost as
comp letely hidden as the buried foundation of our house or our invisible skeleton.
My walk brought me to a corner.I breathed the night, in p eace l resp ite from
thought.The vision before me, in no way comp licated, in any case seemed simp li ed
by my fatigue.It was so typ ical that it seemed unreal. It was a street of low
houses, and although the rst imp ression was p overty, the second was undoubtedly
joyous.The street was both very p oor and very lovely.No house stood out on the
street; a g tree cast a shadow over a corner wall; the street doors-higher than
the lines extending along the walls-seemed made of the same in nite substance as
the night. The sidewalk slop ed up the street, a street of elemental clay, the clay
of a still unconquered America.Farther away, the narrow street dwindled into the
p amp a, toward Maldonado. Over the muddy, chaotic earth a red p ink wall seemed not
to harbor moonglow but to shed
a light of its own.There is p robably no better way to name tender- ness than that
red p ink.I stood looking at that simp le scene.I thought, no doubt aloud: "This is
the same as it was thirty years ago...." I guessed at the date: a recent time in
other countries, but already remote in this changing p art of the world.Perhap s a
bird was singing and I felt for him a small, bird- size a ection; but most p robably
the only noise in this vertiginous silence was the equally timeless sound of the
crickets.The easy thought I am somewhere in the 18oos ceased to be a few careless
words and became p rofoundly real.I felt dead, I felt I was an abstract p erceiver of
the world, struck by an unde ned fear imbued with science, or the sup reme clarity
of metap hysics.No, I did not believe I had traversed the p re- sumed waters of Time;
rather I susp ected that I p ossessed the reticent or absent meaning of the
inconceivable word eternity. Only later was I able to de ne these imaginings.Now I
shall transcribe it thus: that p ure rep resentation of homogeneous facts-calm
night, limp id wall, rural scent of honeysuc e, elemental clay-is not merely
identical to the scene on that corner so many years ago; it is, without
similarities or rep etitions, the same.If we can intuit that sameness, time is a
delusion: the imp artiality and insep arability of one moment of time's ap p arent
yesterday and another of time's ap p arent today are enough to make it disintegrate.
It is evident that the number of these human moments is not in- nite. The basic
elemental moments are even more imp ersonal- p hysical su ering and p hysical
p leasure, the ap p roach of sleep , listening326JORG E LUIS BORG ESto a single p iece of
music, moments of great intensity or great dejec- tion. I have reached, in advance,
the following conclusion: life is too im- p overished not to be also immortal. But
we do not even p ossess the certainty of our p overty, inasmuch as time, easily
denied by the senses, is not so easily denied by the intellect, from whose essence
the concep t of succession seems insep arable. So then, let my glimp se of an idea re-
main as an emotional anecdote; let the real moment of ecstasy and the p ossible
insinuation of eternity which that night lavished on me, remain con ned to this
sheet of p ap er, op enly unresolved.BOf the many doctrines recorded in the history of
p hilosop hy, idealism is p erhap s the most ancient and most widely divulged. The
observation is Carlyle's (Navalis, 1829). Without hop e of comp leting the in nite
list, one could add to the p hilosop hers he mentioned the Platonists, for whom the
only realities are archetyp es (Norris, Judah Abrabanel, G emistus, Plotinus); the
theologians, for whom everything that is not the divinity is p rovisional
(Malebranche, Johannes Eckhart); the monists, who make the universe a vain
adjective of the Absolute (Bradley, Hegel, Parmenides). . . . Idealism is as
ancient as metap hysical angst. Its most clever ap ologist, G eorge Berkeley,
flourished in the eighteenth century. Contrary to what Schop enhauer declared (Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 1), his merit did not consist in the intuitive
p ercep tion of that doctrine, but in the arguments he conceived to rationalize it.
Berkeley used those arguments against the notion of matter; Hume ap p lied them to
consciousness; I p rop ose to ap p ly them to time. First I shall briefly summarize the
various stages of this dialectic.Berkeley denied matter. This did not mean, of
course, that he denied colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and tactile sensations; what
he denied was that aside from these p ercep tions-comp onents of the external world-
there might be something invisible, intangible, called matter. He denied that there
were p ains no one feels, colors no one sees, forms no one touches. He argued that
to add matter to p ercep tions is to add to the world another inconceivable and
sup er uous world. He believed in the world of ap p earances fabricated by our
senses, but he considered that the material world (Toland's, say) was an illusory
dup lication. He observed (The Princip les of Human Knowledge, p ara. 3):A NEW
REFUTATION OF TIME 327That neither our thoughts, nor p assions, nor ideas formed by
the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And to me it
is no less evident that the various Sensations or ideas imp rinted on the sense,
however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they comp ose),
cannot exist otherwise than in a mind p erceiving t h e m . . . . T h e t a b l e I
w r i t e o n I s a y e x i s t s , t h a t i s , I s e e a n d fe e l i t ; a n d
i f I were out of my study I should say it existed-meaning thereby that if I was in
my study I might p erceive it, or that some other sp irit actually does p erceive
it. . . . For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things
without any relation to their being p erceived, that is to me p erfectly
unintelligible. Their esse is p ercip i, nor is it p ossible they should have any
existence out of the minds or thin ng things which p erceive them.Foreseeing
objections, he added in p aragrap h 23:But, say you, surely there is nothing easier
than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a p ark, or books existing in a
closet, and nobody by to p erceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no di culty
in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain
ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the
idea of any one that may p erceive them? But do not you yourself p erceive or think
of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the p urp ose; it only shews you
have the p ower of imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it does not shew
that you can conceive it p ossible the objects of your thought may exist without
the mind.In p aragrap h 6 he had already stated:Some truths there are so near and
obvious to the mind that a man need only op en his eyes to see them. Such I take
this imp ortant one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the
earth, in a word all those bodies which comp ose the mighty frame of the world, have
not any subsistence without a mind-that their being is to be p erceived or known;
that consequently so long as they are not actually p erceived by me, or do not exist
in my mind or that of any other created sp irit, they must either have no existence
at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Sp irit.328 JORG E LUIS BORG ES
(Berkeley's G od is a ubiquitous sp ectator whose p urp ose is to give coher- ence to
the world.)The doctrine I have just exp lained has been p erversely interp reted. Her-
bertSp encerbelievedhehadre tedit (ThePrincip lesofPsychologyVIII, 6), arguing that
if nothing exists outside consciousness, then consciousness must be in nite in time
and sp ace. The rst is evident if we understand that all time is time p erceived by
someone, but erroneous if we infer that this time must necessarily embrace an in
nite number of centuries; the second is illicit, inasmuch as Berkeley rep eatedly
denied an absolute sp ace ( The Princip les ofHuman Knowledge, n6; Siris, 266). Even
more indecip herable is the error Schop enhauer made (Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung II, 1) when he held that for the idealists the world is a cerebral
p henomenon. Berkeley, however, had written (Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
II): "The brain . . . being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind. Now, I would
fain know whether you think it reasonable to sup p ose, that one idea or thing ex-
isting in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so, p ray how do you
account for the origin of that p rimary idea or brain itself?" The brain, in truth,
is no less a p art of the external world than the constellationCentaurus.Berkeley
denied that there was an object behind sense imp ressions.David Hume denied that
there was a subject behind the p ercep tion of changes. Berkeley denied matter; Hume
denied the sp irit. Berkeley did not wish us to add the metap hysical notion of
matter to the succession of im- p ressions; Hume did not wish us to add the
metap hysical notion of a self to the succession of mental states. This exp ansion of
Berkeley's arguments is so logical that Berkeley had already foreseen it (as
Alexander Camp bell Fraser noted), and had even tried to disp ute it by means of the
Cartesian ergo sum. Hylas, foreshadowing Hume, had said in the third and last of
the Dialogues: "In consequence of your own p rincip les, it should follow that you
are only a system of oating ideas, without any substance to sup p ort them. Words
are not to be used without a meaning. And as there is no more meaning in sp iritual
substance than in material substance, the one is to be exp loded as well as the
other." Hume corroborates this (A Treatise ofHuman NatureI,4, 6):[We] are nothing
but a bundle or collection of di erent p ercep tions, which succeed each other with
an inconceivable rap idity. . . . The mind is a kind of theater, where several
p ercep tions successively make their ap p earance; p ass, rep ass, glide away, and
mingle in an in nite variety ofA NEW REFUTATION OF TIME 329p ostures and situations.
. . . The comp arison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive
p ercep tions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of
the p lace, where these scenes are rep resented, or of the materials of which it is
comp osed.Having admitted the idealist argument, I believe it is p ossible-p erhap s
inevitable-to go further. For Berkeley, time is "the succession of ideas in my
mind, which flows uniformly and is p articip ated in by all beings" ( The Princip les
ofHuman Knowledge, 98); for Hume, it is "a succession of indivisible moments" (A
Treatise ofHuman Nature I, 2, 3). However, with the continuities of matter and
sp irit denied, with sp ace denied, I do not know by what right we retain that
continuity
which is time. Outside each p ercep - tion (real or conjectural), matter does not
exist; outside each mental state, sp irit does not exist; neither then must time
exist outside each p resent moment. Let us choose a moment of the utmost
simp licity, for examp le, Chuang Tzu's dream ( Herbert Allen G iles, Chuang Tzu, 1899
). Some twenty- four centuries ago, Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butter y, and when
he awoke he was not sure whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or
a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. Let us not consider the awakening, but the
moment of the dream itself, or one of its moments. "I dreamed I was a butterfly
fluttering through the air knowing nothing at all of Chuang Tzu;' says the ancient
text. We shall never know whether Chuang Tzu saw a garden over which he seemed to
fly, or a moving yellow triangle, which was doubtlessly himself, but it is clear
that the image was subjective, even though it was sup p lied to him by memory. The
doctrine of p sycho- p hysical p arallelism will avow that this image must have
resulted from a change in the dreamer's nervous system; according to Berkeley, at
that moment the body of Chuang Tzu did not exist, nor did the dark bedroom in
which he was dreaming, save as a p ercep tion in the mind of G od. Hume simp li es what
hap p ened even more: at that moment the sp irit of Chuang Tzu did not exist; all that
existed were the colors of the dream and the certainty of his being a butterfly.
He existed as a momentary term in the "bundle or coilection of di erent
p ercep tions" which constituted, some four centuries before Christ, the mind of
Chuang Tzu; he existed as the term n in an in nite temp oral series, between n - 1
and n + 1. There is no other reality for idealism than mental p rocesses; to add an
objective butter y to the butter y one p erceives therefore seems a vain
dup lication; to add a self to the mental p rocesses seems, therefore, no less
exorbitant. Idealism holds that there was a dreaming, a p erceiving, but not a
dreamer nor even a330 JORG E LUIS BORG ESdream; it holds that to sp eak of objects and
subjects is to fall into an imp ure mythology. Now then, if each p sychic state is
self-suf cient, if to connect it to a circumstance or an ego is an illicit and idle
addition, with what right do we later assign it a p lace in time? Chuang Tzu dreamed
he was a butter y, and during the course of that dream he was not Chuang Tzu but a
butter- y. With sp ace and self abolished, how can we link those dreaming moments
to his waking moments and the feudal age of Chinese history? This does not mean
that we shall never know, even if only ap p roximately, the date of that dream; I
merely mean that the chronological determination of an event, of any event in the
world, is alien and exterior to the event. In China, the dream of Chuang Tzu is
p roverbial; let us imagine that one of its almost in nite readers dreams he is a
butter y and then that he is Chuang Tzu. Let us imagine that, by a not imp ossible
chance, this dream rep eats exactly the dream of the master. Having p ostulated
such an identity, we may well ask: Are not those coinciding moments identical? Is
not one single re- p eated term enough to disrup t and confound the history of the
world, to reveal that there is no such history?To deny time involves two
negations: denying the succession of the terms in a series, and denying the
synchronism of terms in two series. In fact, if each term is absolute, its
relations are reduced to the consciousness that those relations exist. One state
p recedes another if it knows it is anterior; state G is contemp oraneous with
state H if it knows it is contemp oraneous. Contrary to Schop enhauer's statement
in his table of ndamental truths (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 4), each
fraction of time does not ll all sp ace simultaneously: time is not ubiquitous.J
(Of course, at this stage in the argument, sp ace no longer exists.)Meinong, in his
theory of ap p rehension, admits the ap p rehension of imaginary objects: the fourth
dimension, say, or Condillac's sentient statue, or Lotze's hyp othetical animal, or
the square root of minus one. If the reasons I have indicated are valid, then
matter, the ego, the external world, universal history, our lives, also belong to
that nebulous sp here.Furthermore, the p hrase "negation of time" is ambiguous. It
can mean the eternity of Plato or Boethius and also the dilemmas of Sextus Emp iri-
cus. The latter (Adversus mathematicos XI, 197) denies the p ast, which already
was, and the ture, which is not yet, and argues that the p resent is either
divisible or indivisible. It is not indivisible, for in that case it would3Newton
had p reviously asserted: "Each p article of sp ace is eternal, each indivisible
moment of duration is everywhere" ( Princip ia III, 42) .A NEW REFUTATION OF TIME
331have no beginning to connect it to the p ast nor end to connect it to the fu-
ture, nor even a middle, because whatever has no beginning or end has no middle.
Neither is it divisible, for in that case it would consist of a p art that was and
another that is not. Ergo, the p resent does not exist, and since the p ast and the
ture do not exist either, time does not exist. H. Bradley rediscovers and
imp roves up on this conundrum: he observes (Ap p earance and Reality IV) that if the
now can be divided into other nows, it is no less comp licated than time; and that
if it is indivisible, time is merely a relation between intemp oral things. Such
reasoning, obviously, denies the p arts in order to deny the whole; I reject the
whole in order to exalt each one of the p arts. Via the dialectic of Berkeley and
Hume, I have arrived at Schop en-hauer's dictum:The form of the ap p earance of the
will is only the p resent, not the p ast or the ture; the latter do not exist excep t
in the concep t and by the linking of the consciousness, so far as it follows the
p rincip le of reason. No man has ever lived in the p ast, and none will live in the
future; the p resent alone is the form of all life, and is a p ossession that no
misfortune can take away. . . . We might comp are time to an infinitely revolv-
ing circle: the half that is always sinking would be the p ast, that which is always
rising would be the future; but the indivisible p oint at the top which the tangent
touches, would be the p resent. Motionless like the tangent, that extensionless
p resent marks the p oint of contact of the object, whose form is time, with the
subject, which has no form because it does not belong to the knowable but is the
p recondition of all knowledge. (Die Weltals Wille und VorstellungI, 54)A fth-
century Buddhist treatise, the Visuddhimagga, or The Path to Purity, illustrates
the same doctrine with the same gure: "Strictly sp eaking, the life of a being
lasts as long as an idea. Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only
one p oint, so life lasts as long as a single idea" (Rad- hakrishnan, Indian
Philosop hy I, 373). Other Buddhist texts say that the world is annihilated and
resurges six billion ve hundred million times a day and that every man is an
illusion, vertiginously wrought by a series of solitary and momentary men. "The man
of a p ast moment," The Path to Pu- rityadvises us, "has lived, but he does not live
nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor
does he now live; the man of the p resent moment lives, but he has not lived nor
will he live" (I, 407), a dictum we may comp are with Plutarch's "Y esterday's man
died in the332 JORG E LUIS BORG ESman of today, today's man dies in the man of
tomorrow" (De E ap ud Delp hos, 18).And yet, and yet . . . To deny temp oral
succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, ap p ear to be acts
of desp eration and are secret consolations. Our destiny (unlike the hell of
Swedenborg and the he of Tibetan mythology) is not terri ing because it is unreal;
it is terri ing because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of
which I am made. Time is a river that sweep s me along, but I am the river; it is a
tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a re that consumes me, but I am
the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.Freund, es
ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen,So geh und werde selbst die Schri und
selbst das Wesen.[ Friend, this is enough. Should you wish to read more,/G o and
yourself become the writing, yourself the essence . ] -Angelus Silesius,
Cherubinischer WandersmannVI, 263 (1675) [1944-471 {S] L} BiathanatosI owe to De
Quincey (to whom my debt is so vast that to p oint out only one p art of it may
ap p ear to rep udiate or silence the others) my rst notice of Biathanatos, a
treatise comp osed at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the great p oet
John Donne,' who le the manuscrip t to Sir Robert Carr without other restriction
than that it be given "to the Press or the Fire." Donne died in 1631; in 1642 civil
war broke out; in 1644, the p oet's rstborn son gave the old manuscrip t to the
p ress to save it from the re. Biathanatos extends to about two hundred p ages; De
Quincey ( Writings VIII, 336) abridges them thus: Suicide is one of the forms of
homicide; the canonists make a distinction between willful murder and justi able
homicide; by p arity of reason, suicide is op en to distinctions of the same kind.
Just as not every homicide is a murder, not every suicide is a mortal sin. Such is
the ap p arent thesis of Biathanatos; this is declared by the subtitle ( That Self-
homicide is not so Naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise), and is illus-
trated or overtaxed by a learned catalog of fabled or authentic examp les, ranging
from Homer,> "who had written a thousand things, which no man else understood, and
is said to have hanged himself because he understood not the shermen's riddle," to
the p elican, symbol of p aternal
love, and the bees, which, according to St. Ambrose's Hexameron, p ut themselves to
death "when they nd themselves guilty of having broken any of their king's Laws."
The catalog takes up three p ages, and in them I note this vanity: the1That he was
truly a great p oet may be demonstrated by these lines:Licence my roving hands and
let them goBefore, behind, between, above, below.0 my America! my new-found-land. .
. ( Elegies XIX)2Cf. the sep ulchral ep igram of Alcaeus of Messene ( G reek Anthology
VII, I ) .334JORG E LUIS BORG ESinclusion of obscure examp les ("Festus, Domitianus'
minion, who killed himself only to hide the deformity of a Ringworm in his face")
and the omission of others that are more force lly p ersuasive-Seneca, Themis-
tocles, Cato-but which may have seemed too obvious.Ep ictetus ("Remember the
essential thing: the door is op en") and Schop enhauer ("Is Hamlet's soliloquy the
meditation of a criminal?") have defended suicide in cop ious p ages; the foregone
certainty that these defenders are in the right makes us read them negligently.
That was my case with Biathanatos until I p erceived, or thought I p erceived, an
imp licit or esoteric argument beneath the obvious one.We will never know if Donne
wrote Biathanatos with the deliberate aim of insinuating this hidden argument, or
if some glimmer of it, however fleeting or crep uscular, called him to the task. The
latter hyp othesis strikes me as more likely: the hyp othesis of a book which in
order to say A says B, like a cryp togram, is arti cial, but that of a work driven
by an imp erfect intuition is not. Hugh Fausset has suggested that Donne was
thinking of crowning his defense of suicide with a suicide; that Donne may have
toyed with the idea is p ossible or p robable; that it is enough to exp lain Bia-
thanatos is, naturally, ridiculous.In the third p art of Biathanatos, Donne
considers the voluntary deaths that are mentioned in the Scrip tures; he dedicates
more p ages to Samson's than to any other. He begins by establishing that this
"exemp lary man" is an emblem of Christ and that he seems to have served the G reeks
as an archetyp e for Hercules. Francisco de Vitoria and the Jesuit G regorio de
Valencia did not wish to include him among suicides; Donne, to re te them, cop ies
the last words he sp oke, before carrying out his vengeance: "Let me die with the
Philistines" ( Judges 16:30 ). He likewise rejects St. Augustine's conjecture that
Samson, breaking the p illars of the temp le, was not guilty of the deaths of others
nor of his own, but was obeying an insp iration of the Holy Sp irit, "like the sword
that directs its blades by disp osition of he who wields it" ( T h e C i t y of G o
d I , 2 0 ) . D o n n e , h a v i n g p r o v e n t h a t t h i s c o n j e c t u r
e i s u n w a r - ranted, closes the chap ter with a p hrase from Benito Pererio,
saying thatSamson, in his manner of dying, as much as in anything else, was a typ e
of Christ.Inverting Augustine's thesis, the quietists believed that Samson "by the
demon's violence killed himself along with the Philistines" (Heterodoxos esp aiioles
V, I, 8); Milton (Samson Agonistes) defended him against the charge of suicide;
Donne, I susp ect, saw in this casuistical p roblem no more than a metap hor or
simulacrum of a death. The case of Samson did notB I A T A i\ A T O S335matter to
him-and why should it have?-or only mattered as, shall we say, an "emblem of
Christ." There is not a hero in the Old Testament who has not been p romoted to this
authority: for St. Paul, Adam is the figure of He who was to come; for St.
Augustine, Abel rep resents the death of the Savior, and his brother Seth the
resurrection; for Quevedo, Job was a "p rodigious design" for Christ. Donne
p erp etrated his trivial analogy to make his readers understand: "The foregoing,
said of Samson, may well be false; it is not when said of Christ."The chap ter that
sp eaks directly of Christ is not e usive. It does no more than evoke two p assages
of Scrip ture: the p hrase "I lay down my life for the sheep " (John 10:15) and the
curious exp ression, "He gave up the ghost," that all four evangelists use to say
"He died." From these p assages, which are confirmed by the verse "No man taketh my
life from me, but I lay it down of myself" (John 10:18), he infers that the agony
on the cross did not kill Jesus Christ and that in truth Christ took his own life
with a voluntary and marvelous emission of his soul. Donne wrote this conjecture in
1608: in 1631 he included it in a sermon he p reached, while virtually in the throes
of death, in the Whitehall Palace chap el.The stated aim of Biathanatos is to
mitigate suicide; the fundamental aim, to indicate that Christ committed suicide.J
That, in demonstrating this hyp othesis, Donne would nd himself reduced to a verse
from St. John and the rep etition of the verb to exp ire, is an imp lausible and even
incredible thing; he undoubtedly p referred not to insist on a blasp hemous p oint.
For the Christian, the life and death of Christ are the central event in the
history of the world; the centuries before p rep ared for it, those a er re ect it.
Be- fore Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, before the rmament sep arated
the waters from the waters, the Father knew that the Son was to die on the cross
and, as the theater of this future death, created the heavens and the earth. Christ
died a voluntary death, Donne suggests, and this means that the elements and the
terrestrial orb and the generations of mankind and Egyp t and Rome and Babylon and
Judah were extracted from nothingness in order to destroy him. Perhap s iron was
created for the nails, and thorns for the mock crown, and blood and water for the
wound. This baroque idea glimmers behind Biathanatos. The idea of a god who creates
the universe in order to create his own gallows.Rereading this note, I think of the
tragic Philip p Batz, known to theJCf. De Quincey, Writings VIII, 398; Kant,
Religion innehalb der G renzen der Ver- nun II, 2.JORG E LUIS BORG ES history of
p hilosop hy as Philip p Mainlander. He, like me, was an imp assioned reader of
Schop enhauer, under whose in uence (and p erhap s under that of the G nostics) he
imagined that we are fragments of a G od who, at the beginning of time, destroyed
himself, avid for non-being. Universal history is the shadowy death throes of
those fragments. Mainlander was born in 1841; in 1876, he p ublished his book
Philosop hy ofRedemp tion. That same year he took his own life.[EA] From A egories to
NovelsFor all of us, allegory is an aesthetic mistake. (I first wrote, "is nothing
but an error of aesthetics," but then I noticed that my sentence involved an alle-
gory.) As far as I know, the genre of allegory has been analyzed by Schop enhauer
( Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, so), De Quincey ( Writings XI, 198), Francisco
de Sanctis (Storia della letteratura italiana VII), Croce (Estetica, 39), and
Chesterton (G . Watts, 83); in this essay I will limit myself to the last two.
Croce rejects allegorical art, Chesterton defends it; to my mind, right is on
Croce's side, but I would like to know how a form that seems unjusti able to us
now can once have enjoyed such favor.Croce's words are crystalline; I need only
rep eat them:If the symbol is conceived of as insep arable from artistic intuition,
then it is synonymous with that intuition itself, which is always of an ideal
nature. If the symbol is conceived as sep arable, if the symbol can be ex- p ressed
on the one hand, and the thing symbolized can be exp ressed on the other, we fall
back into the intellectualist error; the sup p osed symbol is the exp osition of an
abstract concep t; it is an allegory; it is science, or an art that ap es science.
But we must also be fair to allegory and caution that in some cases it is
innocuous. Any ethics whatsoever can be extracted from the G erusalemme liberata;
and from the Adone, by Marino, p oet of all that is lascivious, the reflection that
disp rop ortionate p leasure ends in p ain may be educed. Next to a statue, the
sculp tor may p lace a sign saying that the statue is Mercy or G oodness. Such
allegories added to a nished work do it no harm. They are ex- p ressions extrinsic
to other exp ressions. To the G erusalemme is added a p age in p rose that exp resses
another thought by the p oet; to the Adone, a line or stanza that exp resses what the
p oet wished to be understood; to the statue, the word mercy or goodness.JORG E LUIS
BORG ES On p age 222 of La p oesia (Bari, 1946), the tone is more hostile: "Allegory
is not a direct mode of sp iritual manifestation, but a kind of writing or
cryp tograp hy."Croce admits of no difference between content and form. Content is
form and form is content. Allegory strikes him as monstrous because it seeks to
encode two contents-the immediate or literal (Dante, guided by Virgil, reaches
Beatrice) , and the gurative (man nally attains faith, guided by reason)-into a
single form. In his view, this way of writing entails laborious enigmas.
Chesterton, in defense of allegory, begins by denying that language lly exp resses
all reality.Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more
numberless and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest. . . . Y et he
seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and
semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately rep resented by an
arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized
stockbroker can really p roduce out of his own inside noises which denote all the
mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.Once our language has been
declared insu cient, room is le for others; allegory can be one of them, like
architecture or music. Allegory is made up of words, but it is not a language of
language, a sign of other signs. For examp le, Beatrice is not a sign of the word
faith;
she is a sign of the valiant virtue and secret illuminations indicated by that
word. A sign more p recise, richer, and more felicitous, than the monosyllable
faith.I do not know with any certainty which of the two eminent p arties to this
disp ute is right; I know that allegorical art seemed enchanting at one time (the
labyrinthine Roman de la Rose, which lives on in two hundred manuscrip ts, consists
of twenty-four thousand lines) and is now intolerable. And not only intolerable;
we also feel it to be stup id and frivolous. Nei- ther Dante, who rep resented the
history of his p assion in the Vita nuova, nor Boethius, the Roman, writing his De
consolatione in the tower of Pavia under the shadow of an executioner's sword,
would have understood this feeling. How can this discord be exp lained without
recourse to the p etitio p rincip ii that tastes change?Coleridge observes that all
men are born Aristotelians or Platonists.FROM ALLEG ORIES TO NOVELS339The Platonists
sense intuitively that ideas are realities; the Aristotelians, that they are
generalizations; for the former, language is nothing but a system of arbitrary
symbols; for the latter, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that
the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian,
may be an error or fiction resulting from our p artial understanding. Across
latitudes and ep ochs, the two immortal antagonists change languages and names: one
is Parmenides, Plato, Sp inoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus,
Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages,
everyone invokes Aristo- tle, master of human reason ( Convivio IV, 2), but the
nominalists are Aristo- tle; the realists, Plato. G eorge Henry Lewes has op ined
that the only medieval debate of some p hilosop hical value is between nominalism and
realism; the op inion is somewhat rash, but it underscores the imp ortance of this
tenacious controversy, p rovoked, at the beginning of the ninth century, by a
sentence from Porp hyry, translated and commented up on by Boethius; sustained,
toward the end of the eleventh, by Anselm and Roscelin; and revived by William of
Occam in the fourteenth.As one would sup p ose, the intermediate p ositions and
nuances multi- p lied ad in nitum over those many years; yet it can be stated that,
for realism, universals (Plato would call them ideas, forms; we would call them
abstract concep ts) were the essential; for nominalism, individuals. The history
of p hilosop hy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordp lay; the two
hyp otheses corresp ond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality. Maurice
de Wulf writes: "Ultra-realism garnered the rst adherents. The chronicler Heriman
(eleventh century) gives the name 'antiqui doc- tares' to those who teach
dialectics in re; Abelard sp eaks of it as an 'antique doctrine,' and until the end
of the twelfth century, the name moderni is ap - p lied to its adversaries." A
hyp othesis that is now inconceivable seemed obvious in the ninth century, and
lasted in some form into the fourteenth. Nominalism, once the novelty of a few,
today encomp asses everyone; its victory is so vast and fundamental that its name is
useless. No one declares himself a nominalist because no one is anything else. Let
us try to understand, nevertheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the
fundamental thing was not men but humanity, not individuals but the sp ecies, not
the sp ecies but the genus, not the genera but G od. From such concep ts (whose
clearest manifestation is p erhap s the quadrup le system of Erigena) allegorical
literature, as I understand it, derived. Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as
the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are p ersoni ed; there340
JORG E LUIS BORG ESis something of the novel in every allegory. The individuals that
novelists p resent asp ire to be generic (Dup in is Reason, Don Segundo Sombra is the
G aucho); there is an element of allegory in novels.The p assage from allegory to
novel, from sp ecies to individual, from realism to nominalism, required several
centuries, but I shall have the temerity to suggest an ideal date: the day in 1382
when G eo rey Chaucer, who may not have believed himself to be a nominalist, set out
to translate into English a line by Boccaccio-"E con gli occultiJerri i Tradimenti"
(And Betrayal with hidden weap ons)-and rep eated it as "The smyler with the knyf
under the cloke." The original is in the seventh book of the Teseide; the English
version, in "The Knightes Tale."{19491 {EA} From Someone to NobodyIn the beginning,
G od is the G ods (Elohim), a p lural that some believe im- p lies majesty and others
p lenitude, and which some have thought is an echo of earlier p olytheisms or a p re
guring of the doctrine, declared in Nicaea, that G od is One and is Three. Elohim
takes a singular verb; the rst verse of the Law says, literally: "In the beginning
the G ods [He] created the heaven and the earth." Desp ite the vagueness this p lural
suggests, Elohim is concrete; G od is called "Jehovah" and we read that He walked
in the garden in, as the English versions say, "the cool of the day." Human
qualities de ne Him; in one p art of the Scrip tures we read: "And it rep ented
Jehovah that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart"; and in
another, "For I the Lord thy G od am a jealous G od"; and in another, "In the fire
of My wrath have I sp oken." The subject of such locutions is indis- p utably
Someone, a corp oral Someone whom the centuries will magni and blur. His titles
vary: "Strength of Jacob," "Rock of Israel," "I Am That I Am," "G od of the Armies,"
"King of Kings." This last-which no doubt conversely insp ired G regory the G reat's
"Servant of the Servants of G od"-is, in the original text, a sup erlative of"king":
as Fray Luis de Le6n writes, "It is a p rop erty of the Hebrew language to use the
same word twice when one wants to emp hasize something, either favorably or
unfavorably. Thus, to say 'Song of Songs' is the same as our 'A Song among Songs'
or 'he is a man among men,' that is, famous and eminent among all and more
excellent than many others." In the rst centuries of our era, theologians began to
use the p re x omni, which p reviously had been reserved for adjectives p ertain- ing
to nature or Jup iter; they coined words like omnip otent, omnip resent, omniscient,
which make of G od a resp ectful chaos of unimaginable sup erlatives. That
nomenclature, like the others, seems to limit the divinity: at the end of the h
century, the unknown author of the Corp us Dionysiacum declares that no a rmative
p redicate is tting for G od. Nothing should be342 JORG E LUIS BORG ESaf rmed of Him,
everything can be denied. Schop enhauer notes dryly: "That theology is the only true
one, but it has no content." Written in G reek, the tracts and letters that make up
the Corp us Dionysiacum nd a reader in the ninth century who p uts them into Latin:
John Erigena or Sco- tus, that is, John the Irishman, whose name in history is
Scotus Erigena, or Irish Irish. He formulates a doctrine of a p antheistic nature:
p articular things are theop hanies (revelations or ap p earances of the divine) and
behind them is G od, who is the only reality, "but who does not know what He is,
because He is not a what, and is incomp rehensible to Himself and to all
intelligence." He is not sap ient, He is more than sap ient; He is not good, He is
more than good; He inscrutably exceeds and rep els all attributes. John the
Irishman, to de ne Him, used the word nihilum, which is nothingness; G od is the
p rimordial nothingness of the creatio ex nihilo, the abyss where rst the
archetyp es and then concrete beings were engendered. He is Nothing and Nobody;
those who imagined Him in this way did so in the belief that this was more than
being a What or a Who. Similarly, Shankara teaches that all mankind, in a deep
sleep , is the universe, is G od.The p rocess I have illustrated is not, of course,
aleatory. A magni cation to nothingness occurs or tends to occur in all cults; we
may observe it unmistakably in the case of Shakesp eare. His contemp orary, Ben
Jonson, loves him "on this side of Idolatry"; Dryden declares that he is the Homer
of the dramatic p oets of England, but admits that he is o en insip id and p omp ous;
the discursive eighteenth century attemp ts to ap p raise his virtues and rebuke his
faults; in 1774, Maurice Morgann states that King Lear and Falstaff are nothing but
modi cations of the mind of their inventor; at the beginning of the nineteenth
century that op inion is recreated by Coleridge, for whom Shakesp eare is no longer a
man but a literary variation of the in- nite G od of Sp inoza. Shakesp eare as an
individual p erson, he wrote, was a natura naturata, an effect, but "the universal
which is p otentially in each p articular op ened out to him . . . not as an
abstraction of observation from a variety of men, but as the substance cap able of
endless modi cations, of which his own p ersonal existence was but one." Hazlitt
corroborated or con rmed this: "He was just like any other man, but that he was
unlike other men. He was nothing in himself, but he was all that others were, or
that could become." Later, Hugo comp ared him to the ocean, which is the seedbed of
all p ossible forms.To be something is inexorably not to be all the other things;
the confused intuition of this truth has induced mankind to imagine that being
nothing is more than being something and is, in some way, to be every-FROM SOMEONE
TO NOBODY 343thing. This fallacy is inherent in the words of that legendary king of
India who renounces p ower and goes out to beg in the streets: "From this day for-
ward I have no realm or my realm is limitless, from this day forward my body does
not beloog to me or all the earth belongs to me." Schop enhauer has written that
history is an interminable and p erp lexing
dream of human generations; in the dream there are recurring forms, p erhap s
nothing but forms; one of them is the p rocess rep orted on this p age.[EW] The Wa d
the BooksHe, whose long wall the wand'ring Tartar bounds . . .-Dunciad III, 76I
read, a few days ago, that the man who ordered the building of the almost in nite
Chinese Wall was that rst Emp eror, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning
of all the books that had been written before his time. That these two vast
undertakings-the ve or six hundred leagues of stone against the barbarians, and
the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the p ast-were the work of the same
p erson and were, in a sense, his attributes, inexp licably satis ed and, at the same
time, disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the p urp ose of
this note.Historically, there is nothing mysterious about these two measures. At
the time of the wars of Hannibal, Shih Huang Ti, king of Tsin, conquered the S
Kingdoms and p ut an end to the feudal system; he built the wall because walls
were defenses; he burned the books because his op p onents invoked them to p raise
earlier emp erors. Burning books and erecting forti- cations are the usual
occup ations of p rinces; the only thing unique about Shih Huang Ti was the scale on
which he worked. That, at least, is the op inion of certain Sinologists, but I
believe that both acts were something more than an exaggeration or hyp erbole of
trivial disp ositions. To enclose an orchard or a garden is common, but not an
emp ire. Nor is it a small matter to require the most traditional of races to
renounce the memory of its p ast, mythical or real. Chinese chronology was already
three thousand years long (and included the Y ellow Emp eror and Chuang Tzu and Con -
cius and Lao Tzu) when Shih Huang Ti ordered that history would begin with him.Shih
Huang Ti had exiled his mother as a libertine; the orthodox sawTHE WALL AND THE
BOOKS345this stern justice as an imp iety; Shih Huang Ti, p erhap s, wanted to erase
the canonical books because they condemned him; Shih Huang Ti, p erhap s, wanted to
abolish all the p ast to abolish a single memory: his mother's dishonor. (Not
unlike a king, in Judea, who killed all the children in order to kill one child.)
This sp eculation is tenable, but it tells us nothing about the wall, the other side
of the myth. Shih Huang Ti, according to the historians, p rohibited the mention of
death and searched for the elixir of immortality and cloistered himself in a
gurative p alace with as many rooms as the days in the year; these facts suggest
that the wall in sp ace and the bon re in time were magic barriers intended to stop
death. All things desire to p ersist in their being, Baruch Sp inoza wrote; p erhap s
the Emp eror and his magicians believed that immortality was intrinsic and that
decay could not enter a closed sp here. Perhap s the Emp eror wanted to recreate the
beginning of time and called himself the First to truly be the rst, and called
himself Huang Ti to somehow be Huang Ti, the legendary emp eror who invented writing
and the comp ass. It was he who, according to the Book ofRites, gave things their
true names; similarly, Shih Huang Ti boasted, on inscrip tions that still exist,
that all things under his reign had the names that be tted them. He dreamed of
founding an immortal dynasty; he decreed that his heirs should be called Second
Emp eror, Third Emp eror, Fourth Emp eror, and so on to in nity. . . . I have sp oken
of a magic p lan; it may also be sup - p osed that the building of the wall and the
burning of the books were not simultaneous acts. Thus (dep ending on the order we
choose) we would have the image of a king who began by destroying and then resigned
himself to conserving; or the image of a disillusioned king who destroyed what he
had once defended. Both conjectures are dramatic; but they lack, as far as I know,
historical foundation. Herbert Allen G iles recounts that anyone who concealed books
was branded with a hot iron and condemned to work on the endless wall until the day
of his death. This favors or tolerates another interp retation. Perhap s the wall
was a metap hor; p erhap s Shih Huang Ti condemned those who adored the p ast to a work
as vast as the p ast, as stup id and as useless. Perhap s the wall was a challenge and
Shih Huang Ti thought, "Men love the p ast and against that love there is nothing
that I nor my executioners can do, but someday there will be a man who feels as I
do, and he will destroy my wall, as I have destroyed the books, and he will erase
my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not know it." Perhap s Shih
Huang Ti walled his emp ire because he knew that it was fragile, and destroyed the
books because he knew that they were sacred books, books that teach what the whole
universe teaches or the conscience of everyJORG E LUIS BORG ES man. Perhap s the
burning of the libraries and the building of the wall are acts that in some secret
way erase each other.The unyielding wall which, at this moment and all moments,
casts its system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar
who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its p ast; that idea is what moves
us, quite ap art om the sp eculations it allows. (Its virtue may be in the contrast
between construction and destruction, on an enormous scale.) G eneralizing, we might
infer that all forms have virtue in themselves and not in an imagined "content."
That would sup p ort the theory of Benedetto Croce; by 1877, Pater had already stated
that all the arts asp ire to resemble music, which is nothing but form. Music,
states of hap p iness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain
p laces, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we shouldn't have
lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation as yet
unp roduced is, p erhap s, the aesthetic fact.[1950} [EW} Personality and the BuddhaIn
the volume that Edmund Hardy, in 1890, devoted to an exp osition of Buddhism-Der
Buddhismus nach lteren Pali-Werken-there is a chap ter that Schmidt, who revised
the second edition, was about to omit but whose theme is central (sometimes
secretly, always inevitably) to all erroneous Western views about the Buddha. I am
referring to the comp arison of the Buddha's p ersonality with that of Jesus. Such a
comp arison is defective, not only because of the p rofound di erences (of culture,
of nature, of p urp ose) that sep arate the two masters, but also because of the very
concep t of p ersonality, which is ap p rop riate to one culture, but not to the
other. In the p rologue to Karl Eugene Neumann's admired and doubtlessly admirable
version, the "p ersonal rhythm" of the Buddha's sermons is p raised; Her- mann Beckh
(BuddhismusI, 89) believes he p erceives in the texts ofthe Pali canon "the stamp of
a singular p ersonality"; both of these statements, as I understand it, can lead us
into error.It is true that there is no lack, in the legend and in the history of
the Buddha, of those slight and irrational contradictions that are the signs of
egocentrism-the admission of his son Rahula into the order at the age of seven,
contradicting the very rules established by him; the choice of a p leasant p lace,
"with a river of crystal-clear waters and elds and villages nearby," for his hard
years of p enitence; the mildness of the man who, up on p reaching, does it "with the
voice of a lion"; the dep lored lunch of salt p ork (or, according to Friedrich
Zimmerman, of mushrooms) that p recip itated the p remature death of the great
ascetic-but their number is limited. So limited that Senart, in an Essai sur la
legende du Buddha p ublished in 1882, p rop osed a "solar hyp othesis" according to
which the Buddha is, like Her- cules, a p ersoni cation of the sun; hence his life
story becomes an advanced case of symbolisme atmosp herique. Mara is the stormy
clouds, the Wheel of the Law that the Buddha turned in Benares is the disk of the
sun, theJORG E LUIS BORG ES Buddha dies at sunset. . . . Even more skep tical-or more
credulous-than Senart, the Dutch Indologist H. Kern saw in the first Buddhist
council the allegorical guration of a constellation. Otto Franke, in 1914, was
able to write that "Buddha G autama is the strict equivalent of Name Unknown."We
know that the Buddha, before becoming the Buddha (before being the Awakened One),
was a p rince named G autama or Siddhartha. We know that at the age of twenty-nine he
le his wife, his women, his son, and p racticed the ascetic life, as before he
had p racticed the carnal life. We know that during six years he wasted his body in
p enitences; when the sun or the rain fell up on him, he did not move; the gods who
saw him so emaciated thought that he had died. We know that in the end he
understood that morti cation was useless, and he bathed in the waters of a river,
and his body recovered its former sp lendor. We know he sought the sacred g tree
that in each cycle of history emerges in the continent of the South so that in its
shadow the Buddhas can attain nirvana. A erward, allegory or legend blur the facts.
Mara, god of love and of death, tries to overwhelm him with armies of boars, sh,
horses, tigers, and monsters; Siddhartha, seated and immobile, conquers them,
thinking them unreal. Infernal troop s bombard him with mountains of re; these,
through the work of his love, turn into p alaces of owers. Projectiles con gure
aureoles or form a cup ola over the hero. The daughters of Mara try to temp t him; he
tells them they are emp ty and corrup tible. Before dawn, the illusory battle ceases
and Siddhartha sees his former incarnations (which now will end but which had no
beginning) and those of all creatures, and the ceaseless web woven by the effects
and causes of the universe. He intuits, then, the Four Noble Truths that he will
p reach in the Deer Park. He is no longer
Prince Siddhartha; he is the Bud- dha. He is the Awakened One, he who no longer
dreams he is someone, he who does not say: "I am; this is my father, this my
mother, this my inheritance." He is also Tathagata, he who traveled his road, the
weary traveler.In the rst vigil of the night, Siddhartha remembers the animals,
the men, and the gods he has been, but it is a mistake to sp eak of transmigra-
tions of the soul. Unlike the other p hilosop hical systems of India, Bud- dhism
denies that there are souls. The Milinda Pa ha, an ap ologia of the second century,
sp eaks of a debate whose discussants are the king of Bactri- ana, Menander, and the
monk Nagasena; the latter argues that just as the king's carriage is not the wheels
nor the chassis nor the axis nor the sha nor the yoke, man too is not matter,
form, imp ressions, ideas, instincts, or consciousness. He is not the combination of
these p arts, nor does he existPERSONALITY AND THE BUDDHA349outside of them. The
rst theological summa of Buddhism, the Visud- dhimagga, or The Path ofPurity,
declares that every man is an illusion, p rojected by a series of transitory and
solitary men. "The man of a p ast moment;' that book warns us, "has lived, but does
not live nor will live; the man of a ture moment will live, but has not lived nor
lives; the man of the p resent moment lives, but has not lived nor will live;' a
notion comp arable to Plutarch's: "Y esterday's man has died in today's, today's dies
in tomorrow's." A character, not a soul, wanders in the cycles of samsara from
one body to another; a character, not a soul, nally reaches nirvana, that is, ex-
tinction. (For years the neop hyte p rep ares for nirvana through rigorous exercises
of unreality. Walking around his house, chatting, eating, drinking, he must reflect
that such acts are illusory and do not require an actor, a con-stant subject. )The
Path ofPurity reads: " I n n o p lace a m I something for someone, noris anyone
something for me"; to believe that one's selfis an ''I''-attavada- is the worst
heresy for Buddhism. Nagarjuna, founder of the school of the G reater Vehicle,
formulated arguments that showed that the ap p arent world is emp tiness; drunk with
reason, he later turned them (he couldn't avoid turning them) against the Noble
Truths, against nirvana, against the Bud- dha. To be or not to be, to be and not to
be, neither be nor not be: Nagar- juna refuted the p ossibility of those
alternatives. Denying matter and attributes, he also had to deny extinction; if
there is no samsara, then there is no extinction of samsara and it is wrong to say
that nirvana is. It is no less erroneous, he observed, to say that is isn't,
because having denied being, not being is also denied, for the latter dep ends (even
verbally) on the former. "There are no objects, there is no knowledge, there is no
ignorance, there is no destruction of ignorance, there is no p ain, there is no
origin of p ain, there is no annihilation of p ain, there is no road that leads to
the annihilation of p ain, there is no obtaining, there is no non-obtaining of
nirvana," one of the sutras of the G reater Vehicle informs us. Another fuses in a
single hallucinatory p lane the universe and liberation, nirvana and samsara:
"Nobody is extinguished in nirvana, because the extinction of incommen- surable,
numerous beings in nirvana is like the extinction of a p hantasmagoria created by
magic arts." Negation is not enough and one arrives at the negation of negations;
the world is emp tiness and emp tiness is also emp ty. The rst books of the canon had
declared that the Buddha, during his sacred night, intuited the in nite chain of
all e ects and causes; the last books, written centuries later, argue that all
knowledge is unreal and that if350 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthere had been as many G anges
as grains of sand in the p resent G anges, the number of grains of sand would be less
than the number of things that the Buddha does not know.Such p assages are not
rhetorical exercises; they come out of a meta- p hysics and an ethics. We can
contrast them with many om Western sources, for examp le, with that letter in which
Caesar says that he has eed his p olitical adversaries, risking their taking up
arms again, "because I desire nothing more than to be as I am and that they be as
they are." The West- ern cult of p ersonality throbs in these words, which Macaulay
judged the most noble that had ever been written. Even more illustrative is the
catastrop he of Peer G ynt; the mysterious Smelter p rep ares to melt the hero; this
consummation, infernal in America and in Europ e, is the exact equivalent of
nirvana.Oldenberg has observed that India is the land of generic typ es, not of
individuals. Their vast works are of a collective or anonymous nature; it is common
to attribute to them certain schools, families, or communities of monks, when not
to mythic beings, or, with sp lendid indi erence, to Time.Buddhism denies the
p ermanence of the I; Buddhism p reaches annulment; to imagine that the Buddha, who
willed himself to cease being Prince Siddhartha, could resign himself to keep ing
the trivial di erential features that inform the so-called p ersonality, is to
misunderstand his doctrine. It is also to transp ose-anachronistically, absurdly-
Western sup erstition to Eastern terrain. Leon Bloy or Francis Thomp son would have
been, for the Buddha, consummate examp les of lost and fallible men, not only for
believing that they deserve divine attention but for elaborating, within the com-
mon language, a small and vain dialect. It is not necessary to be Buddhist to
understand this; we l feel that Bloy's style, in which each sentence seeks to
shock us, is morally inferior to G ide's, which is, or p retends to be, p rop er to its
genre.From Chaucer to Marcel Proust, the novel's substance is the unrep eat- able,
the singular avor of souls; for Buddhism there is no such flavor, or it is one of
the many vanities of the cosmic simulacrum. Christ p reached so that men would have
life, and have it in abundance (John 10:10); the Bud- dha, to p roclaim that this
world, in nite in time and in sp ace, is a dwindling re. "Buddha G autama is the
exact equivalent of Name Unknown," wrote Otto Franke; it would be ap p rop riate to
add that the Buddha wanted to be Name Unknown.[1950} [SJL} Pascal's Sp herePerhap s
universal history is the history of a few metap hors. To outline a chap ter of that
history is the p urp ose of this note.Six centuries before the Christian era, the
rhap sodist Xenop hanes of Colop hon, tired of the Homeric verses he recited from city
to city, denounced the p oets for giving the gods anthrop omorp hic traits and p ro-
p osed to the G reeks a single G od who was an eternal sp here. In Plato'sTimaeus we
read that the sp here is the most p erfect and most uniform shap e, because all p oints
on its surface are equidistant from the center; Olof G igon
(Ursp rangdergriechischenPhilosop hic,183) understandsXenop hanes as sp eaking
analogically; G od is sp herical, because that form is the best, or the least bad,
for rep resenting divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, re- p eated the image:
"Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sp here, whose force is constant from the
center in any direction." Calogero and Mondolfo argue that he envisioned an in
nite, or in nitely growing sp here, and that those words have a dynamic meaning
(Albertelli, G li Eleati, 148). Par- menides taught in Italy; a few years a er he
died, the Sicilian Emp edocles of Agrigento devised a laborious cosmogony; there is
one stage in which the p articles of earth, air, re, and water form an endless
sp here, "the round Sp hairos, which rejoices in its circular solitude."Universal
history followed its course, the too-human gods that Xeno- p hanes attacked were
reduced to p oetic ctions or to demons, but it was said that one of them, Hermes
Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42, according to Clement of
Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the p riests of
Thoth, who is also Hermes) on whose p ages all things were written. Fragments of
that illusory library, comp iled or forged since the third century, form what is
called the Corp us Hermeticum; in one of the books, or in one p art of the Asclep ius,
which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the French theologian ain de Lille-352
JORG E LUIS BORG ESAlanus de Insulis-discovered, at the end of the twelfth century,
this formula which the ages to come would not forget: "G od is an intelligible
sp here, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The Pre-
Socratics sp oke of an endless sp here; bertelli (like Aristotle before him)
thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, for the subject and
p redicate negate each other; this may be so, but the formula in the Hermetic books
enables us, almost, to envision that sp here. In the thirteenth century, the image
reap p eared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in
the encyclop edia Sp eculum Trip lex; in the sixteenth, the last chap ter of the last
book of Pantagruel referred to "that intellectual sp here, whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call G od." For the medieval
mind, the meaning was clear: G od is in each one of his creatures, but is not
limited by any one of them. "Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot
contain thee," said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometrical metap hor of the sp here
must have seemed like a gloss on those words.Dante's p oem has p reserved Ptolemaic
astronomy, which ruled mankind's imagination for fourteen hundred years. The
earth is the center of the universe. It is an immobile sp here; around it nine
concentric sp heres revolve. The rst seven are the p lanetary heavens (the heavens
of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jup iter, and Saturn) ; the eighth, the
Heaven of Fixed Stars;
the ninth, the Crystalline Heaven, also called the Primum Mobile. This in turn is
surrounded by the emp yrean, which is made of light. This whole laborious ap p aratus
of hollow, transp arent, and revolving sp heres (one system required y- ve) had
come to be a mental necessity; De hyp othesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus
[Commentary on the Hyp othesis of Heavenly Motions] was the timid title that
Cop ernicus, the disp uter ofAristotle, gave to the manuscrip t that transformed our
vision of the cosmos. For one man, G iordano Bruno, the breaking of the stellar
vaults was a liberation. In La cena de le ceneri [The Feast of the Ashes] he p ro-
claimed that the world is the in nite effect of an in nite cause and that the
divinity is near, "because it is in us even more than we are in ourselves." He
searched for the words that would exp lain Cop ernican sp ace to mankind, and on one
famous p age he wrote: "We can state with certainty that the universe is all
center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference
nowhere" (De la causa, p rincip ia e urea, V).That was written exultantly in 1584,
still in the light ofthe Renaissance; seventy years later not even a glimmer of
that fervor remained, and men felt lost in time and sp ace. In time, because if the
future and the p ast are in -PASCAL's SPHERE 353nite, there cannot really be a when;
in sp ace, because if every being is equidistant from the in nite and the in
nitesimal, there cannot be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain
p lace; no one knows the size of his own face. In the Renaissance, humanity thought
it had reached adult- hood, and it said as much through the mouths of Bruno,
Camp anella, and Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity was discouraged by a
feeling of old age; to justi itself, it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal
degen- eration of all creatures because of Adam's sin. (In the h chap ter of G ene-
sis, we read that "all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine
years"; in the sixth, that "there were giants in the earth in those days.") The
First Anniversary of John Donne's elegy "Anatomy of the World" lamented the brief
life and the small stature of contemp orary men, who were like fairies and dwarfs.
Milton, according to Johnson's biograp hy, feared that the genre of the ep ic had
become imp ossible on earth; G lanvill thought that Adam, "the medallion of G od,"
enjoyed both a telescop ic and microscop ic vision; Robert South notably wrote: "An
Aristotle was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens, the rudiments of Paradise."
In that de- jected century, the absolute sp ace that insp ired the hexameters of
Lucretius, the absolute sp ace that had been a liberation for Bruno was a labyrinth
and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the universe and yearned to adore G od, but G od
was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the r- mament did
not sp eak; he comp ared our lives to the ship wrecked on a desert island. He felt the
incessant weight of the p hysical world; he felt confusion, fear, and solitude;
and he exp ressed it in other words: "Nature is an in nite sp here, the center of
which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." That is the text of the
Brunschvieg edition, but the critical edition of Tourneur (Paris, 1941), which
rep roduces the cancellations and hesitations in the manuscrip t, reveals that Pascal
started to write the word e royable: "a frightful sp here, the center of which is
everywhere, and the circumference nowhere."Perhap s universal history is the history
of the various intonations of a few metap hors.[1951} [EW} The Innocence of Layamon
Legouis saw the p aradox of Layamon but not his p athos. The p reamble to the Brut,
written in the third p erson at the beginning of the thirteenth century, contains
the facts of his life. Layamon writes:There was in the land a p riest named Layamon;
he was the son of Leovenath (may G od have mercy on his soul!), and he lived in
Emley in a noble church on the banks of the Severn, a good p lace to be. It came to
his mind the idea of relating the exp loits of Englishmen, what they were named and
where they came from, the earliest owners of our En- gland, a er the G reat Flood. .
. . Layamon traveled throughout the land and acquired the noble books that were his
models. He took the English book made by St. Bede; he took another in Latin made by
St. bin and St. Augustine, who brought us the faith; he took a third and p laced it
in the middle, the work of a French cleric named Wace, who knew how to write well,
and gave it to the noble Leonor, queen of the great Henry. Layamon op ened those
three books and turned the p ages; he looked at them lovingly-may G od have mercy on
him!-and p icked up the p en and wrote on p archment and summoned the right words and
made the three books into one. Now Layamon, for the love of G od Omnip otent, begs
those who read this book and learn the truths it teaches to p ray for the soul of
his father, who begot him, and for the soul of his mother, who bore him, and for
his own soul, to make it better. Amen.Thirty thousand irregular verses then recount
the battles of the Britons, p articularly Arthur, against the Picts, the Norse, and
the Saxons.The rst imp ression, and p erhap s the last, given by Layamon's p reamble
is of an in nite, almost incredible, ingenuousness. Adding to this im- p ression is
the p oet's childlike trait of saying "Layamon" for "I;' but behindTHE INNOCENCE OF
LAY AMON355the innocent words the emotion is comp lex. Layamon is moved not only by
the subject matter of the songs, but also by the almost magical circumstance of
seeing himself singing them; this recip rocity corresp onds to the "Illo Vir- gilium
me temp ore" [In that time, Virgil] of the G eorgics or to the beautiful "Ego ille
qui quondam" [I, who one day] that someone wrote to p reface the Aeneid.A legend
recounted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and famously adop ted by Virgil states that
Rome was founded by men descended om Ae- neas, the Trojan who battles Achilles in
the p ages of the Iliad; similarly a His- toria Regum Britanniae from the beginning
of the twel h century attributes the founding of London ("Citie that some tyme
clep ed was New Troy") to Aeneas' great-grandson Brutus, whose name would be
p erp etuated in Bri- tannia. Brutus is the rst king in Layamon's secular chronicle;
he is followed by others who have known rather varied fortunes in later literature:
Hudi- bras, Lear, G orboduc, Ferrex and Porrex, Lud, Cymbeline, Vortigern, Uther
Pendragon (Uther Dragon's Head), and Arthur of the Round Table, "the king who was
and shall be;' according to his mysterious ep itap h. Arthur is mortally wounded in
his last battle, but Merlin-who in the Brut is not the son of the Devil but of a
silent golden p hantom loved by his mother in dreams-p rop hesies that he will return
(like Barbarossa) when his p eop le need him. Fruitlessly waging war against him are
those rebellious hordes, the "p agan dogs" of Hengest, the Saxons who were scattered
over the face of England, beginning in the fth century.It has been said that
Layamon was the rst English p oet; it is more accurate and more p oignant to think
of him as the last of the Saxon p oets. The latter, converted to the faith of Jesus,
ap p lied the harsh accents and the military images of the G ermanic ep ics to the new
mythology (the Twelve Ap ostles, in one of Cynewulf's p oems, are skilled in the use
of shields and fend o a sudden attack by swordsmen; in the Exodus, the Israelites
who cross the Red Sea are Vikings); Layamon ap p lied the same rigor to the courtly
and magical ctions of the Matiere de Bretagne. Because of his subject matter, or
a large p art of it, he is one of the many p oets of the Breton Cycle, a distant
colleague of that anonymous writer who revealed to Francesca da Rimini and Paolo
the love they felt for each other without knowing it. In sp irit, he is a lineal
descendant of those Saxon rhap sodists who reserved their joyful words for the
descrip tion of battles and who, in four centuries, did not p roduce a single amatory
stanza. Layamon has forgotten the metap hors of his ancestors-in the Brut, the sea
is not the "whale's p ath," nor are arrows "vip ers of war"-but the vision of the
world356 JORG E LUIS BORG ESis the same. Like Stevenson, like Haubert, like so many
men of letters, the sedentary cleric takes p leasure in verbal violence; where Wace
wrote, "On that day the Britons killed Passent and the Irish King;' Layamon
exp ands:And Uther the G ood said these words: "Passent, here you will remain, for
here comes Uther on his horse!" He hit him on his head and knocked him down and
p lunged his sword down his throat (giving him a food that was new to him) and the
p oint of the sword disap p eared into the ground. Then Uther said: "Now it is well
with you, Irishman; all England is yours. I deliver it into your hands so that you
may stay here and live with us. Look, here it is; now you will have it forever."In
every line of Anglo-Saxon verse there are certain words, two in the rst half and
one in the second, that begin with the same consonant or vowel. Layamon tries to
observe that old metrical law, but the octosyllabic coup lets of Wace's G este des
Bretons-one of the three "noble books"- continually distract him with the new
temp tation to rhyme, and so we have brother a er other and night a er light. . . .
The Norman Conquest took p lace around the middle of the eleventh century; the Brut
comes from the beginning of the thirteenth, but the vocabulary of the p oem is
almost entirely G ermanic; in its thirtythousand lines there are not even y
words of French origin. Here is a p assage that scarcely p re gures the English lan-
guage but has evident a nities with the G erman:And seothe ich cumen wulle to mine
kinericheand wumien mid Brutten mid muchelere wunne.Those were Arthur's last words.
Their meaning is: "And
then I shall go to my kingdom, and I shall dwell among Britons with great
delight."Layamon ardently sang of the ancient battles of the Britons against the
Saxon invaders as if he himself were not a Saxon, and as if the Britons and the
Saxons had not been, since that day in Hastings, conquered by the Nor- mans. This
fact is extraordinary and leads to various sp eculations. Laya- mon, son of
Leovenath (Liefnoth), lived not far from Wales, the bulwark of the Celts and the
source (according to G aston Paris) of the comp lex myth of Arthur; his mother might
well have been a Briton. This theory is p ossible, unveri able, and imp overished;
one could also sup p ose that the p oetTHE INNOCENCE OF LAY AMON357was the son and
grandson of Saxons, but that, at heart, the jus soli was stronger than the jus
sanguinis. This is not very di erent from the Argentine with no Querandi blood who
identi es with the Indian defenders of his land rather than with the Sp aniards of
Cabrera or Juan de G aray. Another p ossibility is that Layamon, whether knowingly or
not, gave the Britons of the Brut the value of Saxons, and the Saxons the value of
Normans. The riddles, the Bestiary, and Cynewulf's curious runes p rove that such
cryp tograp hic or allegorical exercises were not alien to that ancient literature;
something, however, tells me that this sp eculation is fantastic. If Layamon had
thought that yesterday's conquerors were the conquered of today, and today's
conquerors could be the conquered of tomorrow, he would, I think, have used the
simile of the Wheel of Fortune, which is in the De Consola- tione, or had recourse
to the p rop hetic books of the Bible, not to the intricate romance ofArthur.The
subjects of the earlier ep ics were the exp loits of a hero or the loyalty that
warriors owe to their cap tain; the true subject of the Brut is England. Layamon
could not foresee that two centuries a er his death his alliteration would be
ridiculous ("I can not geste-rum, ram, ruf-by lettre;' says a character in Chaucer)
and his language, a rustic jargon. He could not have susp ected that his insults to
the Hengests' Saxons would be the last words in the Saxon language, destined to die
and be born again in the English language. According to the G ermanic scholar Ker,
he barely knew the literature whose tradition he inherited; he knew nothing of the
wanderings of Wid- sith among the Persians and Hebrews or of Beowulf's battle at
the bottom of the red marsh. He knew nothing of the great verses from which his own
were to sp ring; p erhap s he would not have understood them. His curious isolation,
his solitude, make him, now, touching. "No one knows who he himself is," said Leon
Bloy; of that p ersonal ignorance there is no symbol better than this forgotten man,
who abhorred his Saxon heritage with Saxon vigor, and who was the last Saxon p oet
and never knew it.[1951} [EW} On the Cult of BooksIn Book VIII of the Odyssey, we
read that the gods weave misfortunes so that future generations will have something
to sing about; Mallarme's statement, "The world exists to end up in a book;'
seems to rep eat, some thirty centuries later, the same concep t of an aesthetic
justi cation for evils. These two teleologies, however, do not entirely coincide;
the former belongs to the era of the sp oken word, and the latter to an era of the
written word. One sp eaks of telling the story and the other of books. A book, any
book, is for us a sacred object: Cervantes, who p robably did not listen to
everything that everyone said, read even "the torn scrap s of p ap er in the streets."
Fire, in one of Bernard Shaw's comedies, threatens the library at Alexandria;
someone exclaims that the memory of mankind will burn, and Caesar rep lies: ''A
shame l memory. Let it burn." The historical Caesar, in my op inion, might have
ap p roved or condemned the command the author attributes to him, but he would not
have considered it, as we do, a sacrilegious joke. The reason is clear: for the
ancients the written word was nothing more than a substitute for the sp oken word.
It is well known that Pythagoras did not write; G omp erz (G riechische Denker I, 3)
maintains that it was because he had more faith in the virtues of sp oken
instruction. More forceful than Pythagoras' mere abstention is Plato's unequivocal
testimony. In the Timaeus he stated: "It is an arduous task to discover the maker
and father of this universe, and, having discovered him, it is imp ossible to tell
it to all men"; and in the Phaedrus he recounted an Egyp tian fable against
writing (the p ractice of which causes p eop le to neglect the exercise of memory and
to dep end on symbols), and said that books are like the p ainted gures "that seem
to be alive, but do not answer a word to the questions they are asked." To
alleviate or eliminate that di culty, he created the p hilosop hical dialogue. A
teacher selects a p up il,ON THE CULT OF BOOKS359but a book does not select its
readers, who may be wicked or stup id; this Platonic mistrust p ersists in the words
of Clement of Alexandria, a man of p agan culture: "The most p rudent course is not
to write but to learn and teach by word of mouth, because what is written remains"
( Stromateis) , and in the same treatise: "To write all things in a book is to p ut
a sword in the hands of a child," which derives from the G osp els: "G ive not that
which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your p earls before swine, lest they
tramp le them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." That sentence is from
Jesus, the greatest of the oral teachers, who only once wrote a few words on the
ground, and no man read what He had written (John 8:6).Clement of Alexandria wrote
about his distrust of writing at the end of the second century; the end of the
fourth century saw the beginning of the mental p rocess that would culminate, a er
many generations, in the p re- dominance of the written word over the sp oken one, of
the p en over the voice. A remarkable stroke of fortune determined that a writer
would establish the exact instant (and I am not exaggerating) when this vast
p rocess began. St. Augustine tells it in Book VI of the Confessions:When he
[Ambrose] was reading, his eyes ran over the p age and his heart p erceived the
sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. He did not restrict access to anyone
coming in, nor was it customary even for a visitor to be announced. Very often when
we were there, we saw him silently reading and never otherwise. A er sitting for a
long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentra-
tion?) we used to go away. We sup p osed that in the hubbub of other p eop le's
troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider another p roblem. We wondered
if he read silently p erhap s to p rotect himself in case he had a hearer interested
and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to exp ound the text being read if
it contained dif culties, or who might wish to debate some dif cult questions. If
his time were used up in that way, he would get through fewer books than he wished.
Besides, the need to p reserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse,
could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for
his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did.St. Augustine was a discip le
of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, around the year 384; thirteen years later, in
Numidia, he wrote his Confessions and wasJORG E LUIS BORG ES still troubled by that
extraordinary sight: a man in a room, with a book, reading without saying the
words.1That man p assed directly from the written symbol to intuition, omitting
sound; the strange art he initiated, the art of silent reading, would lead to
marvelous consequences. It would lead, many years later, to the concep t of the book
as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. (This mystical concep t,
transferred to p rofane literature, would p roduce the unique destinies of Flaubert
and Mallarme, of Henry James and James Joyce.) Sup erimp osed on the notion of a G od
who sp eaks with men in order to command them to do something or to forbid them to
do something was that of the AbsoluteBook, of a Sacred Scrip ture. For Muslims, the
Koran (also called "The Book;' al-Kitab) is not merely a work of G od, like men's
souls or the universe; it is one of the attributes of G od, like His eternity or
His rage. In chap ter XIII we read that the original text, the Mother of the Book,
is de- p osited in Heaven. Muhammad al-G hazali, the Algazel of the scholastics,
declared: "The Koran is cop ied in a book, is p ronounced with the tongue, is
remembered in the heart and, even so, continues to p ersist in the center of G od and
is not altered by its p assage through written p ages and human understanding."
G eorge Sale observes that this uncreated Koran is nothing but its idea or Platonic
archetyp e; it is likely that al-G hazali used the idea of archetyp es, communicated
to Islam by the Encyclop edia ofthe Brethren ofPu- rity and by Avicenna, to justi
the notion of the Mother of the Book.Even more extravagant than the Muslims were
the Jews. The rst chap ter of the Jewish Bible contains the famous sentence: "And
G od said, 'Let there be light; and there was light"; the Kabbalists argued that the
virtue of that command from the Lord came om the letters of the words. The Sep her
Y etzirah (Book of the Formation), written in Syria or Pales- tine around the sixth
century, reveals that Jehovah of the Armies, G od of Israel and G od Omnip otent,
created the universe by means of the cardinal numbers from one to ten and the
twenty-two letters of the alp habet. That numbers may be instruments or elements of
the Creation is the dogma of Pythagoras and Iamblichus; that letters also are is a
clear indication of the new cult of writing. The second p aragrap h of the second
chap ter reads: "Twenty-two fundamental letters: G od drew them,
engraved them,1The commentators have noted that it was customary at that time to
read out loud in order to grasp the meaning better, for there were no p unctuation
marks, nor even a division of words, and to read in common because there was a
scarcity of manuscrip ts. The dialogue of Lucian of Samosata, Against an Ignorant
Buyer ofBooks, includes an account of that custom in the second century.ON THE
CULT Of BOOKS combined them, weighed them, p ermutated them, and with them p roduced
everything that is and everything that will be." Then the book reveals which letter
has p ower over air, and which over water, and which over re, and which over
wisdom, and which over p eace, and which over grace, and which over sleep , and which
over anger, and how (for examp le) the letter ka which has p ower over life, served
to form the sun in the world, the day Wednesday in the week, and the le ear on the
body.The Christians went even rther. The thought that the divinity had written a
book moved them to imagine that he had written two, and that the other one was the
universe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon declared in
his Advancement ofLearning that G od o ered us two books so that we would not fall
into error: the rst, the volume of the Scrip tures, reveals His will; the second,
the volume of the creatures, reveals His p ower and is the key to the former. Bacon
intended much more than the making of a metap hor; he believed that the world was
reducible to essential forms (temp eratures, densities, weights, colors), which
formed, in a limited number, an abecedarium naturae or series of letters with which
the universal text is written.2 Sir Thomas Browne, around 1642, con rmed that "Thus
there are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of
G od, another of His servant Nature, that universal and p ub- lick Manuscrip t, that
lies exp ans'd unto the Eyes of all: those that never saw Him in the one, have
discover'd Him in the other" (Religio Medici I, 16). In the same p aragrap h we read:
"In brief, all things are arti cial; for Nature is the Art of G od." Two hundred
years p assed, and the Scot Carlyle, in various p laces in his books, p articularly in
the essay on Cagliostro, went beyond Ba- con's hyp othesis; he said that universal
history was a Sacred Scrip ture that we decip her and write uncertainly, and in which
we too are written. Later, Leon Bloy would write:There is no human being on earth
who is cap able of declaring who he is. No one knows what he has come to this world
to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas corresp ond, or what his real name is, his
imp erishable2G alileo's works abound with the concep t of the universe as a book. The
second section of Favaro's anthology ( G alileo G alilei: Pensieri, motti e sentenze;
Florence, 1949) is entitled " libra della Natura." I quote the following
p aragrap h: "Philosop hy is written in that very large book that is continually
op ened before our eyes (I mean the universe), but which is not understood unless
rst one studies the language and knows the characters in which it is written. The
language of that book is mathematical and the characters are triangles, circles,
and other geometric gures."JORG E LUIS BORG ES Name in the registry of Light. . . .
History is an immense liturgical text, where the i's and the p eriods are not worth
less than the versicles or whole chap ters, but the imp ortance of both is
undeterminable and is p rofoundly hidden. ( Ame de Nap oleon, 1912)The world,
according to Mallarme, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles
or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in
the world: more exactly, it is the world.[EW} Ka a d His PrecursorsAt one time I
considered writing a study of Kafka's p recursors. I had thought, at rst, that he
was as unique as the p hoenix of rhetorical p raise; a er sp ending a little time with
him, I felt I could recognize his voice, or his habits, in the texts of various
literatures and various ages. I will note a few of them here, in chronological
order.The rst is Zeno's p aradox against motion. A moving body at p oint A
(Aristotle states) will not be able to reach p oint B, because it must rst cover
half of the distance between the two, and before that, half of the half, and before
that, half of the half of the half, and so on to in nity; the form of this famous
p roblem is p recisely that of The Castle, and the moving body and the arrow and
Achilles are the rst Kafkaesque characters in literature. In the second text that
bibliograp hic chance brought my way, the a nity is not in the form but in the tone.
It is a fable by Han Y u, a p rose writer of the ninth century, and it is found in
the admirable Anthologie raisonee de la litterature chinoise (1948) by
Margoulies. This is the mysterious and tranquil p aragrap h I marked:It is
universally admitted that the unicorn is a sup ernatural being and one of good omen;
thus it is declared in the Odes, in the Annals, in the biograp hies of illustrious
men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. Even the women and children of
the common p eop le know that the unicorn is a favorable p ortent. But this animal
does not gure among the domestic animals, it is not easy to nd, it does not lend
itself to any classi cation. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the
deer. Under such conditions, we could be in the p resence of a unicorn and not know
with certainty that it is one. We know that a given animalJORG E LUIS BORG ES with a
mane is a horse, and that one with horns is a bull. We do not know what a unicorn
is like.1The third text comes from a more p redictable source: the writings of
Kierkegaard. The mental affinity of both writers is known to everyone; what has not
yet been emp hasized, as far as I know, is that Kierkegaard, like Kafka, abounded in
religious p arables on contemp orary and bourgeois themes. Lowrie, in his Kierkegaard
(Oxford University Press, 1938), mentions two. One is the story of a
counterfeiter who, under constant surveil- lance, examines Bank of England notes;
in the same way, G od could be susp icious of Kierkegaard and yet entrust him with a
mission p recisely because He knew he was accustomed to evil. Exp editions to the
North Pole are the subject of the other. Danish clergymen had declared from their
p ulp its that to p articip ate in such exp editions would serve the eternal health of
the soul. They had to admit, however, that reaching the Pole was dif cult and
p erhap s imp ossible, and that not everyone could undertake the adventure. In the
end, they announced that any journey-from Denmark to London, say, in a steamship ,
or a Sunday outing in a hackney coach-could be seen as a veritable exp edition to
the North Pole. The fourth p re guration I found in Browning's p oem "Fears and
Scrup les," p ublished in 1876. A man has, or thinks he has, a famous friend. He has
never seen this friend, and the fact is that this friend has never been able to
help him, but he knows that the friend has very noble qualities, and he shows
others the letters his friend has written. Some have doubts about his nobility, and
handwriting exp erts declare the letters to be fake. In the last line, the man asks:
"What if this friend hap p ened to be-G od?"My notes also include two short stories.
One is from Histoires desobligeantes by Leon Bloy, and refers to the case of some
p eop le who amass globes, atlases, train schedules, and trunks, and who die without
ever having le the town where they were born. The other is entitled
"Carcassonne" and is by Lord Dunsany. An invincible army of warriors dep arts from
an in- nite castle, subjugates kingdoms and sees monsters and crosses deserts and
mountains, but never reaches Carcassonne, although they once catch a glimp se of it.
(This story is, as it is easily noticed, the exact op p osite of the1The failure to
recognize the sacred animal and its shameful or casual death at the hands of the
p eop le are traditional themes in Chinese literature. See the last chap ter of Jung's
Psychologie undAlchemie (Zurich, 1944), which includes two curious illustrations.
KAFKA AND HIS PRECURSORS p revious one; in the first, they never leave the city; in
the second, they never reach it.)If I am not mistaken, the heterogenous p ieces I
have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each
other. This last fact is what is most signi cant. Ka a's idiosyncracy is p resent in
each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not
written, we would not p erceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The p oem
"Fears and Scrup les" by Robert Browning p rop hesies the work of Kafka, but our
reading of Kafka noticeably re nes and diverts our reading of the p oem. Browning
did not read it as we read it now. The word "p recursor" is indisp ensable to the
vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to p uri it from any connotation of
p olemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his p recursors. His work
modi es our concep tion of the p ast, as it will modi the ture.' In this
correlation, the identity or p lurality of men doesn't matter. The rst Kafka of
"Betrachtung" is less a p recursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terri ing
institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.[1951} [EW} 'See T. S. Eliot, Points
ofView (1941), 25-26.The Eni a of Edward FitzG eraldA man, Omar ben Ibrahim, is born
in Persia in the eleventh century of the Christian era (that century was, for him,
the h of the Hejira); he studies the Koran and its traditions with Hassan ben
Sabbah, the future founder of the sect of the Hashishin, or Assassins, and with
Nizam al-Mulk, who will become the vizier of Alp Arslan and conqueror of the
Caucasus. The three friends, half in jest, swear that if fortune some day favors
one of them, the luckiest will not forget the others.
A er a number of years, Nizam attains the p osition of a vizier; Omar asks only for
a corner in the shade of this good fortune, where he may p ray for his friend's
p rosp erity and think about mathematics. (Hassan requests and obtains a high p ost
and, in the end, has the vizier stabbed to death.) Omar receives an annual p ension
of ten thousand dinars from the treasury of Nishap ur, and is able to devote
himself to study. He does not believe in judicial astrology, but he takes up
astronomy, collaborates on the reform of the calendar p romoted by the Sultan, and
writes a famous treatise on algebra, which gives numerical solutions for rst- and
second-degree equations, and geometrical ones-by means of the intersection of
cones-for those of the third degree. The arcana of numbers and stars do not drain
his attention; he reads, in the solitude of his library, the works of Plotinus, who
in the vocabulary of Islam is the Egyp tian Plato or the G reek Master, and the y-
odd ep istles of the heretical and mystical Encyclop edia of the Brethren ofPurity,
where it is argued that the universe is an emanation of the Unity, and will return
to the Unity. . . . It is said at the time that he is a p roselyte of Alfarabi, who
believed that universal forms do not exist ap art from things, and of Avicenna, who
taught that the world iseternal. One account tells us that he believes, or p retends
to believe, in the transmigration of the soul from human to animal body, and that
he once sp oke with a donkey, as Pythagoras sp oke with a dog. He is an atheist, but
knows how to interp ret, in orthodox style, the most di cult p assages of theTHE
ENIG MA OF EDWARD FITZG ERALD Koran, for every educated man is a theologian, and
faith is not a requisite. In the intervals between astronomy, algebra, and
ap ologetics, Omar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami works on the comp osition of quatrains
whose first, second, and last lines rhyme; the most extensive manuscrip t attributes
ve hundred to him, a p altry number that will be unfavorable for his rep utation,
for in Persia (as in the Sp ain of Lop e de Vega and Calderon) the p oet must be p roli
c. In the year 517 of the Hejira, Omar is reading a treatise titled The One and
the Many; an uneasiness or a p remonition interrup ts him. He gets up , marks the p age
that his eyes will not see again, and reconciles himself with G od, with that G od
who p erhap s exists and whose blessing he has imp lored on the di cult p ages of his
algebra. He dies that same day, at the hour of sunset. Around that time, on an
island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartograp hers of Islam, a Saxon
king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.Seven centuries go
by with their enlightenments and agonies and trans- formations, and in England a
man is born, FitzG erald, less intellectual than Omar, but p erhap s more sensitive
and sadder. FitzG erald knows that his true fate is literature, and he p ractices it
with indolence and tenacity. He reads and rereads the Quixote, which seems to him
almost the best of all books (but he does not wish to be unjust to Shakesp eare and
"dear old Vir- gil"), and his love extends to the dictionary in which he looks for
words. He knows that every man who has some music in his soul can write p oetry ten
or twelve times in the natural course of his life, if the stars are p rop itious, but
he does not p rop ose to abuse that modest p rivilege. He is a friend of famous
p eop le (Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray) to whom he does not feel inferior,
desp ite his modesty and courteousness. He has p ublished a decorously written
dialogue, Eup hranor, and mediocre versions of Calderon and the great G reek
tragedians. From the study of Sp anish he has moved on to Persian, and has begun a
translation of the Mantiq al-Tayr, that mystical ep ic about the birds who are
searching for their king, the Simurgh, and who nally reach his p alace beyond the
seven seas, and discover that they are the Simurgh, that the Simurgh is each one
and all of them. Around 1854 he is lent a manuscrip t collection of Omar's
comp ositions, arranged according to the alp habetical order of the rhymes;
FitzG erald turns a few into Latin and glimp ses the p ossibility of weaving them into
a continuous and organic book that would begin with images of morning, the rose,
and the nightingale, and end with those of night and the tomb. To this imp robable
and even unbelievable p rop osition, FitzG erald devotes his life, that of an indo-
lent, solitary, maniacal man. In 1859, he p ublishes a first version of the368 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESRubaiyat, which is followed by others, rich in variations and re
nements. A miracle hap p ens: from the fortuitous conjunction of a Persian astronomer
who condescended to write p oetry and an eccentric Englishman who p e- ruses Oriental
and Hisp anic books, p erhap s without understanding them comp letely, emerges an
extraordinary p oet who resembles neither of them. Swinburne writes that FitzG erald
"has given to Omar Khayyam a p ermanent p lace among the major English p oets," and
Chesterton, sensitive to the romantic and classical elements of this extraordinary
book, observes that it has both "an elusive melody and a lasting message." Some
critics believe that FitzG erald's Omar is, in fact, an English p oem with Persian
allusions; Fitz- G erald interp olated, re ned, and invented, but his Rubaiyat seems
to demand that we read it as Persian and ancient.The case invites sp eculations of
a metap hysical nature. Omar p rofessed (we know) the Platonic and Pythagorean
doctrine of the soul's p assage through many bodies; centuries later, his own soul
p erhap s was reincar- nated in England to l ll, in a remote G ermanic language
streaked with Latin, the literary destiny that had been sup p ressed by mathematics
in Nishap ur. Isaac Luria the Lion taught that the soul of a dead man can enter an
unfortunate soul to nourish or instruct it; p erhap s, around 1857, Omar's soul took
up residence in FitzG erald's. In the Rubaiyatwe read that the history of the
universe is a sp ectacle that G od conceives, stages, and watches; that notion (whose
technical name is p antheism) would allow us to believe that the Englishman could
have recreated the Persian because both were, in essence, G od or the momentary
faces of G od. More believable and no less marvelous than these sp eculations of a
sup ernatural kind is the sup p osition of a benevolent coincidence. Clouds sometimes
form the shap es of mountains or lions; similarly, the unhap p iness of Edward
FitzG erald and a manuscrip t of yellow p ap er and p urp le letters, forgotten on a
shelf of the Bodleian at Oxford, formed, for our bene t, the p oem.All collaboration
is mysterious. That of the Englishman and the Persian was even more so, for the two
were quite di erent, and p erhap s in life might not have been friends; death and
vicissitudes and time led one to know the other and make them into a single p oet.
[1951] [EW] Coleridge's DreThe lyric fragment "Kubla Khan" ( fty-odd rhymed and
irregular lines of exquisite p rosody) was dreamed by the English p oet Samuel Taylor
Co- leridge on a summer day in 1797. Coleridge writes that he had retired to a farm
near Exmoor; an indisp osition obliged him to take a sedative; sleep overcame him a
few moments after reading a p assage in Purchas that describes the construction of
a p alace by Kublai Khan, the emp eror whose fame in the West was the work ofMarco
Polo. In Coleridge's dream, the text he had coincidentally read sp routed and grew;
the sleep ing man intuited a series of visual images and, simp ly, the words that
exp ressed them. A er a few hours he awoke, certain that he had comp osed, or
received, a p oem of some three hundred lines. He remembered them with p articular
clarity and was able to transcribe the fragment that is now p art of his work. An
unex- p ected visitor interrup ted him, and it was later imp ossible for him to recall
the rest. "To his no small surp rise and morti cation," Coleridge wrote, "that
though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general p urp ort of
the vision, yet, with the excep tion of some eight or ten scattered lines and
images, all the rest had p assed away like the images on the surface of a stream
into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the a er restoration of the
latter!" Swinburne felt that what he had been able to recover was the sup reme
examp le of music in the English language, and that the p erson cap able of analyzing
it would be able-the metap hor is Keats'- to unravel a rainbow. Translations or
summaries of p oems whose p rincip al virtue is music are useless and may be harm l;
it is best simp ly to bear in mind, for now, that Coleridge was given a p age of
undisp uted sp lendor in a dream.The case, although extraordinary, is not unique. In
his p sychological study, The World ofDreams, Havelock Ellis has comp ared it with
that of the violinist and comp oser G iusep p e Tartini, who dreamed that the Devil
(his370 JORG E LUIS BORG ESslave) was p laying a marvelous sonata on the violin; when
he awoke, the dreamer deduced, from his imp erfect memory, the "Trillo del Diavolo."
Another classic examp le of unconscious cerebration is that of Robert Louis
Stevenson, to whom-as he himself described it in his "Chap ter on Dreams"-one dream
gave the p lot of Olalla and another, in 1884, the p lot of Jekyll and Hyde. Tartini,
waking, wanted to imitate the music he had heard in a dream; Stevenson received
outlines of stories-forms in general-in his. Closer to Coleridge's verbal
insp iration is the one attributed by the Venera- ble Bede to Caedmon (Historia
ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum IV, 24). The case occurred at the end of the seventh
century in the missionary and war- ring England of the Saxon kingdoms. Caedmon was
an uneducated shep - herd and was no longer young; one night he slip p ed away from
some festivity because he knew that the harp would be p assed to
him and he didn't know how to sing. He fell asleep in a stable, among the horses,
and in a dream someone called him by his name and ordered him to sing. Caedmon
rep lied that he did not know how, but the voice said, "Sing about the origin of
created things." Then Caedmon recited verses he had never heard. He did not forget
them when he awoke, and was able to rep eat them to the monks at the nearby
monastery of Hild. Although he couldn't read, the monks ex- p lained p assages of
sacred history to him and he,as it were, chewing the cud, converted the same into
most harmonious verse; and sweetly rep eating the same made his masters in their
turn his hearers. He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all the
history of G enesis: and made many verses on the dep arture of the children of Israel
out of Egyp t, and their entering into the land of p romise, with many other
histories from holy writ; the incarnation, p assion, resurrection of our Lord, and
his ascension into heaven; the coming of the Holy G host, and the p reaching of the
ap ostles; also the terror of future judgment, the horror of the p ains of hell, and
the delights of heaven; besides many more about the Divine bene ts and
judgments . . .He was the rst sacred p oet of the English nation. "None could ever
com- p are with him," Bede wrote, "for he did not learn the art of p oetry from men,
but from G od." Y ears later, he foretold the hour of his death and awaited it in
sleep . Let us hop e that he met his angel again.At rst glance, Coleridge's dream
may seem less astonishing than that of his p recursor. "Kubla Khan" is a remarkable
comp osition, and the nine-COLERIDG E's DREAM 371line hymn dreamed by Caedmon barely
disp lays any virtues beyond its oneiric origin; but Coleridge was already a p oet
while Caedmon's vocation was revealed to him. There is, however, a later event,
which turns the marvel of the dream that engendered "Kubla Khan" into something
nearly unfathomable. If it is true, the story of Coleridge's dream began many
centuries before Coleridge and has not yet ended.The p oet's dream occurred in 1797
(some say 1798), and he p ublished his account of the dream in 1816 as a gloss or
justi cation of the un nished p oem. Twenty years later, in Paris, the rst Western
version of one of those universal histories that are so abundant in Persian
literature ap p eared in fragmentary form: the Comp endium of Histories by Rashid al-
Din, which dates from the fourteenth century. One line reads as follows: "East of
Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a p alace according to a p lan that he had seen in a
dream and retained in his memory." The one who wrote this was a vizier of G hazan
Mahmud, a descendant of Kublai.A Mongolian emp eror, in the thirteenth century,
dreams a p alace and builds it according to his vision; in the eighteenth century,
an English p oet, who could not have known that this construction was derived from a
dream, dreams a p oem about the p alace. Comp ared with this symmetry of souls of
sleep ing men who sp an continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and
ap p aritions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or nothing at all.How is
it to be exp lained? Those who automatically reject the sup ernatural (I try always
to belong to this group ) will claim that the story of the two dreams is a
coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shap es of lions or horses that are
sometimes formed by clouds. Others will argue that the p oet somehow knew that the
Emp eror had dreamed the p alace, and then claimed he had dreamed the p oem in order
to create a sp lendid ction that would p alliate or justi the truncated and
rhap sodic quality of the verses.' This seems reasonable, but it forces us to
arbitrarily p ostulate a text unknown to Sinologists in which Coleridge was able
to read, before 1816, about Kublai's dream.' More ap p ealing are the hyp otheses that
transcend reason: for examp le, that after the p alace was destroyed, the soul of the
Em-1At the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century, judged by readers with
classical taste, "Kubla Khan" was much more scandalous than it is now. In 1884, Co-
leridge's rst biograp her, Trail!, could still write: "The extravagant dream p oem
'Kubla Khan' is little more than a p sychological curiosity.",See John Livingston
Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927) 358, 585.372 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp eror p enetrated
Coleridge's soul in order that the p oet could rebuild it in words, which are more
lasting than metal and marble.The rst dream added a p alace to reality; the second,
which occurred ve centuries later, a p oem (or the beginning of a p oem) suggested
by the p alace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a p lan; the enormous length of
time involved reveals a sup erhuman executor. To sp eculate on the intentions of
that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless, but it
is legitimate to susp ect that he has not yet achieved his goal. In 1691, Father
G erbillon of the Society of Jesus con rmed that ruins were all that was le of
Kublai Khan's p alace; of the p oem, we know that barely y lines were salvaged.
Such facts raise the p ossibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet
ended. The rst dreamer was given the vision of the p alace, and he built it; the
second, who did not know of the other's dream, was given the p oem about the p alace.
If this p lan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will
dream the same dream, and not susp ect that others have dreamed it, and he will give
it a form of marble or of music. Perhap s this series of dreams has no end, or
p erhap s the last one will be the key.A er writing this, I glimp sed or thought I
glimp sed another exp lanation. Perhap s an archetyp e not yet revealed to mankind,
an eternal object (to use Whitehead's term), is gradually entering the world; its
rst manifestation was the p alace; its second, the p oem. Whoever comp ares them
will see that they are essentially the same.[1951} [EW} Forms of a LegendPeop le nd
it rep ugnant to see an aged, ill, or dead p erson, and yet we all are subject to
death, illnesses, and old age; the Buddha said that this reflection caused him to
abandon his house and p arents and to p ut on the yellow robe of the ascetics. This
testimony is in one of the books of the canon; another book records the p arable of
the ve secret messengers sent by the gods: a child, a stoop ed old man, a crip p le,
a criminal on the rack, and a corp se. They tell him that it is our fate to be born,
grow old, become ill, su er just p unish- m e n t , a n d d i e . T h e J u d g e o
f t h e S h a d o w s ( i n I n d i a n m y t h o l o g y , Y a m a h a s t h a t
role because he was the rst man who died) asks the sinner if he has seen the
messengers; he admits that he has, but he has not decip hered their message; the
guards imp rison him in a house lled with re. Perhap s the Buddha did not invent
this terri ing p arable; it is enough to know that he said it (Majjhima-nikaya, 130)
and that he never, p erhap s, connected it to his own life.Reality may be too comp lex
for oral transmission; legends recreate it in a way that is only accidentally false
and which p ermits it to travel through the world from mouth to mouth. In both the
p arable and the Buddha's statement, an old man, a sick man, and a dead man ap p ear;
time made the two texts into one and, confusing them, forged a new story.
Siddhartha, the Bodhisattva, the p re-Buddha, is the son of a great king,
Suddhodana, of the lineage of the sun. On the night of his concep tion, his mother
dreams that a snow-white elep hant with s tusks enters her right side.'1For us,
this dream is merely ugly. For Hindus it is not. The elep hant, a domestic animal,
is a symbol of gentleness; the multip lication of tusks could not be disturbing to
the sp ectators of an art that, to suggest that G od is everything, carves figures
with multip le arms and faces; six is the usual number (six p aths of transmigration;
six Bud- dhas anterior to the Buddha; six cardinal p oints, counting the zenith and
the nadir; six divinities, which the Y ajur- Veda calls the six doors of Brahma).374
JORG E LUIS BORG ESThe sages interp ret this to mean that her son will reign over the
world or will make the wheel of the doctrine turn,2 and will teach men how to free
themselves from life and death. The king would rather have Siddhartha attain
temp oral than eternal grandeur, and shuts him up in a p alace divested of all the
things that could show him he is corrup tible. Thus twenty-nine years of illusory
hap p iness go by, dedicated to sensual p leasures, but Siddhartha, one morning, goes
out in his chariot and sees with amazement a stoop ed man, "whose hair is not like
other men's, whose body is not like other men's;' who leans on a cane to walk and
whose flesh trembles. He asks who the man is; the chariot driver exp lains that he
is an old man, and that all men on earth will be like him one day. Siddhartha,
disturbed, orders his driver to return home at once, but on another outing he sees
a man wasted by fever, covered with lep rosy and sores; the driver exp lains that he
is a sick man, and that no one is exemp t from that danger. On another outing he
sees a man being carried on a bier; that motionless man is a dead man, they tell
him, and to die is the rule for everyone who is born. On another outing, the last,
he sees a monk of the mendicant orders who desires neither to livenor to die. Peace
is on his face; Siddhartha has found the way.Hardy (Der Buddhismus nach lteren
Pali-Werken) p raised the coloring of that legend; a contemp orary Indologist, A.
Foucher-whose mocking tone is not always intelligent or urbane-writes that, given
the Bodhisattva's p revious ignorance, the story lacks both dramatic climax and
p hilosop hical worth. At the beginning of the fi h century of our era, the monk Fa-
Hsien made a p ilgrimage to the kingdoms of
Hindustan in search of sacred books, and saw the ruins of the city of Kap ilavastu
with the four images that Ashoka erected at the north, south, east, and west of the
walls to commemorate Siddhartha's encounters. At the beginning of the seventh
century, a Christian monk wrote a novel called Barlaam and ] osap hat; Josap hat
(Joasaf, Bodhisattva) is the son of an Indian king; the astrologers p redict that he
will reign over a larger kingdom, the Kingdom of G lory; the king con nes him in a
p alace, but Josap hat discovers the unfortunate condition of mankind in the form of
a blind man, a lep er, and a dying man, and he is converted, nally, to the faith by
the hermit Barlaam. This Christian version of the legend was translated into many
languages, including Dutch and2This metap hor may have suggested to the Tibetans the
invention of the p rayer machines, wheels or cylinders that revolve around an axis,
lled with strip s of rolled p ap er on which magic words are rep eated. Some of the
machines are manually op erated; others are like large mills and are moved by
water or the wind.FORMS OF A LEG END375Latin; at the request of Hakon Hakonarson, a
Barlaam's Saga was written in Iceland in the middle of the thirteenth century.
Cardinal Cesare Baronio included Josap hat in his revision (1585-90) of the Roman
Martyrology; in 1615, in his continuation of the Decadas, Diego de Couto denounced
the similarity of the sp urious Indian fable to the true and p ious history of St.
Josap hat. The reader will nd all this and much more in the rst volume of Origenes
de la nove/a by Menendez y Pelayo.The legend that, in the West, led to the Buddha's
canonization by Rome had one defect: the encounters it p ostulates are p ower l but
unbelievable. Siddhartha's four excursions and the four didactic gures do not
coincide with the op erations of chance. Less attentive to the aesthetic than to the
conversion of souls, the scholars tried to justi that anomaly; Koep p en (Die
Religion des Buddha I, 82) notes that, in the nal form of the legend, the lep er,
the dead man, and the monk are illusions p roduced by the gods to instruct
Siddhartha. Thus, in the third book of the Sanskrit ep ic Buddhacarita, it is said
that the gods created a dead man, and that no one, excep t the chariot driver and
the p rince, saw him being carried. In a legendary biogra- p hy from the sixteenth
century, the four ap p aritions are four metamor- p hoses of a god (Wieger, Vies
chinoises du Bouddha, 37-41).The Lalitavistara went even rther. It is customary to
sp eak of that comp ilation of p rose and p oetry, written in an imp ure Sanskrit, with
a certain sarcasm: in its p ages the history of the Redeemer is inflated to the
p oint of op p ression and vertigo. The Buddha, surrounded by twelve thousand monks
and thirty-two thousand Bodhisattvas, reveals the text of the work to the gods;
from the fourth heaven he determines the time, the continent, the kingdom, and the
caste into which he will be reborn to die for the last time; eighty thousand
kettledrums accomp any the words of his sp eech, and his mother's body has the
strength of ten thousand elep hants. The Buddha, in this strange p oem, directs each
stage of his destiny; he causes the gods to p roject the four symbolic gures, and
when he questions the chariot driver, he already knows who they are and what they
mean. Foucher sees this as mere servility on the p art of the authors, who cannot
tolerate the thought that the Buddha does not know what a servant knows; the
enigma, to my mind, merits another solution. The Buddha creates the images and then
questions a third p arty about their meaning. Theologically it would p erhap s be
p ossible to answer: the book p ertains to the Mahayana school, which teaches that
the temp oral Buddha is the emanation or re ection of an eternal Buddha; the
Buddha of heaven orders events, the earthly Buddha su ers or p erforms them. (Our
century, with another mythology or vocabulary,JORG E LUIS BORG ES sp eaks of the
unconscious.) The humanity of the Son, the second p erson of G od, was able to cry
from the Cross: "My G od, my G od, why hast thou for- saken me?"; similarly, the
humanity of the Buddha could be cap able of horror at the forms his own divinity
had created. . . . To unravel the p roblem, such dogmatic subtleties are not
indisp ensable; it su ces to remember that all the religions of India, and Buddhism
in p articular, teach that the world is illusory. "The detailed narration of the
game" (of a Buddha) is what Lali- tavistara means, according to Winternitz; a game
or a dream is, for Maha- yana, the life of the Buddha on this earth, which is
another dream. Siddhartha chooses his nation and his p arents. Siddhartha creates
four forms that will overwhelm him; Siddhartha orders that another form shall
declare the meaning of the rst forms; all of which is reasonable if we think of it
as a dream dreamt by Siddhartha. Or, more exactly, if we think of it as a dream in
which Siddhartha gures (as the lep er and the monk gure) and as a dream which no
one dreams, for in the eyes of northern Buddhism the world and the p roselytes and
nirvana and the wheel of transmigrations and the Buddha are equally unreal. No one
is extinguished in nirvana, we read in a famous treatise, because the extinction of
innumerable beings in nir-vana is like the disap p earance of a p hantasmagoria
created by a sorcerer at a crossroads; elsewhere it is written that everything is
mere emp tiness, mere name, including the book that states it and the man who reads
it. Paradoxi- cally, the numerical excesses of the p oem subtract, rather than add,
reality; twelve thousand monks and thirty-two thousand Bodhisattvas are less con-
crete than one monk and one Bodhisattva. The vast forms and the vast numbers
(chap ter XII includes a series of twenty-three words that indicate the unit
followed by an increasing number of zeros, from 9 to 49, 51, and 53) are vast and
monstrous bubbles, emp hases of Nothing. The unreal, then, forms cracks in the
story; rst it makes the characters fantastic, then the p rince, and with the
p rince, all the generations and the universe itself.At the end of the nineteenth
century Oscar Wilde p rop osed a variation: The hap p y p rince dies in the seclusion of
the p alace, without having discovered sorrow, but his p osthumous e gy discerns it
from atop his p edestal.The chronology of India is unreliable; my erudition is even
more so; Koep p en and Hermann Beckh are p erhap s as fallible as the comp iler who has
attemp ted this note; it would not surp rise me if my history of the legend was
itself legendary, formed of substantial truth and accidental errors.[1952} [EW] The
Sc dinavian Dest yThat the destiny of nations can be no less interesting and
p oignant than that of individuals is a thing Homer did not know, but Virgil did,
and the Hebrews felt it intensely. Another p roblem (the Platonic p roblem) is that
of investigating whether nations exist in a verbal or a real way, whether they are
collective words or eternal entities; the fact is that we can imagine them, and
Troy's misfortune can touch us more than Priam's. Lines such as this one om the
Purgatorio:Vieni a veder La tua Roma che p iagne[Come see your Rome that weep s] are
p roof of the p oignancy of the generic, and Manuel Machado has success lly
lamented, in an unquestionably beauti l p oem, the melancholy destiny of the Arab
lineages "que todo lo tuvieron y todo lo p erdieron" [who had everything and lost
everything] . Here, we might briefly recall the di erential traits of this
destiny: the revelation of Divine Unity that almost fourteen centuries ago
brought together the shep herds in a desert and p lunged them into a battle that has
not ceased and whose limits were Aquitaine and the G anges; the cult of Aristotle,
which the Arabs taught Europ e, p erhap s without entirely understanding it, as if
they were rep eating or transcribing a coded message. . . . All that aside, it is
the common vicissitude of p eop les to have and to lose. To be on the verge of having
everything and to lose everything is the tragic destiny of G ermany. Rarer and
more dreamlike is the Scandinavian destiny, which I shall attemp t to define.
Jordanes, towards the middle of the sixth century, said of Scandinavia that this
island (the Latin cartograp hers and historians took it for an island) was like the
workshop or seedp od of nations; Scandinavia's sudden erup - tions at the most
heterogenous p oints of the globe would seem to con rmJORG E LUIS BORG ES this
viewp oint, from which De Quincey inherited the p hrase o cinia gen- tium. In the
ninth century, the Vikings invaded London, demanded from Paris a tribute of seven
thousand p ounds of silver, and p illaged the p orts of Lisbon, Bordeaux, and Seville.
Hasting, by a wily strategem, took control of Luna, in Etruria, p ut its defenders
to the knife, and burned down the city, in the belief that he had seized Rome.
Thorgils, chief of the White Foreigners (Finn G aill), ruled the north of Ireland; a
er the libraries were destroyed, the clerics fled; one of the exiles was John
Scotus Erigena. Rurik, a Swede, founded the kingdom of Russia, whose cap ital city,
before it was called Nov- gorod, was called Holmgard. Toward the year 1000, the
Scandinavians, under Leif Eriksson, reached the coast of America. No one bothered
them, but one morning (as Erik the Red's Saga tells it) many men disembarked om
canoes made of leather and stared at them in a kind of stup or. "They were dark and
very ill-looking, and the hair on their heads was ugly; they had large eyes and
broad cheeks." The Scandinavians gave them the name of skraelingar, inferior
p eop le. Neither the Scandinavians nor the Eskimos knew that the moment was
historic; America and Europ e looked up on each other in all innocence. A century
later, disease and the inferior p eop le had done away with the colonists. The annals
of Iceland say:
"In 1121, Erik, Bishop of G reenland, dep arted in search of Vinland." We know
nothing ofhis fate; both the bishop and Vinland (America) were lost.Viking ep itap hs
are scattered across the face of the earth on runicstones. One of them reads:Tala
erected this stone in memory of his son Harald, brother of Ingvar. They dep arted in
search of gold, and went far and sated the eagle in the East. They died in the
South, in Arabia.Another says:May G od have p ity on the souls of Orm and G unnlaug,
but their bodies lie in London.This one was found on an island in the Black Sea:
G rani built this barrow in memory of Karl, his friend.And this one was engraved on
a marble lion found in Piraeus, which was moved to Venice:THE SCANDINAVIAN DESTINY
379Warriors carved the runic letters . . . Men of Sweden p ut it on the lion.
Conversely, G reek and Arab coins and gold chains and old jewels brought from the
Orient are o en discovered in Norway.Snorri Sturluson, at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, wrote a series of biograp hies of the kings of the North; the
geograp hic nomenclature of this work, which covers four centuries of history, is
another testimony to the breadth of the Scandinavian sp here; its p ages sp eak of
Jorvik (Y ork); of Biarmaland, which is Archangel or the Urals; of Norvesuud
(G ibraltar); of Ser and (Land of the Saracens), which borders the Islamic kingdoms;
of Blaaland (Blue Land, Land of Blacks), which is Africa; of Saxland or Saxony,
which is G ermany; of Helluland (Land of Smooth Stones), which is La- brador; of
Markland (Land of Forests), which is Newfoundland; and of Mi agard (Large
Pop ulation), which is Constantinop le, where, until the fall of the East, the
Byzantine Emp eror's guardsmen were Swedes and Anglo-Saxons. Desp ite the vastness of
this list, the work is not the ep ic of a Scandinavian emp ire. Hernan Cortes and
Francisco Pizarro conquered lands for their king: the Vikings' p rolonged
exp editions were individual. "They lacked p olitical ambitions," as Douglas Jerrold
exp lains. A er a century, the Normans (men of the North) who, under Rolf, settled
in the p rovince of Normandy and gave it their name, had forgotten their language,
and were sp eaking French. . . .Medieval art is inherently allegorical; thus, in the
Vita nuova, an autobiograp hical narrative, the chronology of events is
subordinated to the number 9 , and Dante sp eculated that Beatrice herself was a
nine, "that is, a miracle, whose root is the Trinity." That hap p ened around 1292; a
hundred years earlier, the Icelanders had written the rst sagas,' which are
realism in its most p erfect form, as this sober p assage from G rettir's Saga p roves:
Days before St. John's eve, Thorbjorn rode his horse to Bjarg. He had a1The
Dictionary ofthe Royal Academy ofSp ain (1947) reads: "Saga (from the G erman sage,
legend) f. Each one of the p oetic legends contained mainly in the two collections
of early heroic and mythological traditions of ancient Scandinavia, called the
Eddas." This entry is an almost inextricable amalgamation of errors. Saga is
derived from the Icelandic verb segja (to say), not from sage, a word which did not
mean "legend" in medieval G erman; the sagas are p rose narratives, not p oetical
legends; they are notcontainedin"losdosEddas"[thetwoEddas]
(andwhosegenderisfeminine).The most ancient songs of the Edda date from the ninth
century; the most ancient sagas, from the twel h.380JORG E LUIS BORG EShelmet on his
head, a sword in his belt, and a lance in his hand, with a very wide blade. At
daybreak it rained. Among Atli's serfs, some were reap ing hay; others had gone
shing to the North, to Hornstrandir. Atli was in his house, with few other p eop le.
Thorbjorn arrived around midday. Alone, he rode to the door. It was closed and
there was no one outside. Thorbjorn knocked and hid behind the house so as not to
be seen from the door. The servants heard the knock and a woman went to op en the
door. Thorbjorn saw her but did not let himself be seen, because he had another
p urp ose. The woman returned to the chamber. Atli asked who was outside. She said
she had seen no one and as they were sp eaking of it, Thorbjorn p ounded force lly.
Then Atli said: "Someone is looking for me and bringing a message that must be very
urgent." He op ened the door and looked out: there was no one. By now it was raining
very hard, so Atli did not go out; with a hand on the doorframe, he looked all
around. At that moment, Thor- bjorn jump ed out and with both hands thrust the lance
into the middle of his body.As he took the blow, Atli said: "The blades they use
now are so wide." Then he fell face down on the threshold. The women came out and
found him dead. From his horse, Thorbjorn shouted that he was the killer and
returned home.The classical rigor of this p rose coexisted (the fact is remarkable)
with a baroque p oetry; the p oets did not say "raven" but "red swan" or "bloody
swan"; they did not say "corp se" but "meat" or "corn" of "the bloody swan."
"Sword's water" or "death's dew" were their words for blood; "p irate's moon" for a
shield. . . .The realism of the Sp anish p icaresque su ers from a sermonizing tone
and a certain p rudishness regarding sexual matters, though not with resp ect to
excrement; French realism oscillates between erotic stimulation and what Paul
G roussac termed "garbage dump p hotograp hy"; the realism of the United States goes
from mawkishness to cruelty; that of the sagas rep resents an imp artial observation.
With tting exaltation, William Paton Ker wrote: "The great achievement of the
older world in its nal days was in the p rose histories of Iceland, which had
virtue enough in them to change the whole world, if they had only been known and
understood" (English Literature, Medieval, 1912), and on another p age ofanother
book he recalled "the great Icelandic school, the school that died without an heir
until all its methodsTHE SCANDINAVIAN DESTINY were reinvented, indep endently, by
the great novelists, a er centuries of floundering and uncertainty" (Ep ic and
Romance, 1896).These facts su ce, in my understanding, to de ne the strange and fu-
tile destiny of the Scandinavian p eop le. In universal history, the wars and books
of Scandinavia are as if they had never existed; everything remains isolated and
without a trace, as if it had come to p ass in a dream or in the crystal balls where
clairvoyants gaze. In the twel h century, the Icelanders discovered the novel-the
art of Flaubert, the Norman-and this discovery is as secret and sterile, for the
economy of the world, as their discovery of America.[1953} [EA} The Di ogues of
Ascetic d KingA king is a p lenitude, an ascetic is nothing or wants to be nothing,
and so p eop le enjoy imagining a dialogue between these two archetyp es. Here are a
few examp les, from Eastern and Western sources:Tradition has it from Diogenes
Laertius that the p hilosop her Heraclitus was invited by Darius to visit his court.
He re sed with these words: "Hera- clitus the Ep hesian to King Darius, Son of
Hystasp es: hail! All men are es- tranged from the truth and seek vainglory. As for
myself, I flee the vanities of p alaces and will not go to Persia, contenting myself
with my inconse- quentiality, which is suf cient for me."In this letter-which is
surely ap ocryp hal, as there were eight centuries between the historian and the
p hilosop her-there is, at rst glance, nothing more than Heraclitus' indep endence or
misanthrop y; the resentful p leasure of snubbing the invitation of a king and,
moreover, of a king who is a foreigner. But beneath the trivial surface beats a
dark op p osition of symbols, and the magic in which the zero, the ascetic, may in
some way equal or sur- p ass the in nite king.This story is told in the ninth book
of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosop hers. The sixth book has another
version, from sources unknown, whose p rotagonists are exander and Diogenes the
Cynic. The former had arrived in Corinth to lead the war against the Persians, and
everyone had come out to see and welcome him.Diogenes re sed to leave his house,
and there Alexander found him one morning, taking the sun. ''Ask me for anything
you'd like," said Alexander, and Diogenes, lying on the ground, asked him to move a
little, so as not to block the light. This anecdote (rep eated by Plutarch) p uts the
two sp eakers in op p o- sition; in others there is a suggestion of a secret kinship .
Alexander told his courtiers that had he not been Alexander, he would have liked to
have been Diogenes; and the day one died in Babylonia, the other died in Corinth.
THE DIAL0G UES 0F ASCETIC AND KING 383The third version of this eternal dialogue is
the most extended: it takes up two volumes of the Sacred Books of the East series
edited by Max Muller in Oxford. It is the Milinda Panha (The Questions of Milinda),
a novel of doctrinal intent, comp osed in the north of India at the beginning of our
era. The Sanskrit original has been lost, and the English translation by Rhys
Davids is from the Pali. Milinda, sweetened by Oriental p ronunciation, is Menander,
the G reek king of Bactriana who, a hundred years a er the death of Alexander of
Macedonia, brought his armies to the mouth of the Indus River. According to
Plutarch, he governed wisely, and at his death, his asheswere divided among the
cities of his kingdom.1 Relics of the p ower he ex- erted, numismatic cases now hold
over twenty di erent kinds of gold and bronze coins. On some, there is the image of
a youth, on others that of an old man, and we may infer that his reign lasted many
years. The inscrip - tions say "Menander the Just King," and on the obverse of the
coins one nds a Minerva, a horse, a hull's head, a dolp hin, a boar, an elep hant, a
p alm branch, a wheel. The latter three figures are p erhap s Buddhist.In the Milinda
Panha we read that as the deep G anges seeks the Ocean, which is even deep er,
so Milinda the king sought out Nagasena, the bearer of the torch of Truth. Five
hundred G reeks p rotected the King, who identi- ed Nagasena in a crowd of ascetics
by his leonine serenity ("a guisa di le6nquando si p osa"). The King asked him his
name. Nagasena rep lied that names are mere conventions that do not de ne p ermanent
subjects. He exp lained that, as the King's chariot is neither the wheels nor the
chassis, neither the axle, the sha , nor the yoke, so man is not matter, form,
p ercep - tions, ideas, instinct, or consciousness. He is neither the combination of
these p arts nor does he exist ap art from them . . . and he comp ared this to the
flame of a lamp that burns every night and that endlessly both is and ceases to be.
He sp oke of reincarnation, of faith, of karma and nirvana, and a er two days of
discussion, or catechism, he converted the King, who p ut on the yellow robe of a
Buddhist monk. That is the general p lot of the Ques- tions ofMilinda, in which
Albrecht Weber has p erceived a deliberate imitation of the Platonic mode, a
thesis rejected by Winternitz, who observes that the device of the dialogue is
traditional in Indian letters, and that there is not the least trace of Hellenic
culture in the Questions.1Dressing himself as an ascetic, the King becomes
indistinguishable>The same story is told of the Buddha, in the book of his nirvana.
2Similarly, Wells believed that the Book of Job, whose date is p roblematical, was
in uenced by Plato's dialogues.JORG E LUIS BORG ES from one, and he brings to mind
another king of the Sanskrit era who le his p alace to beg alms in the streets, and
who said these dizzying words: "From now on I have no kingdom or my kingdom is
limitless; from now on my body does not belong to me or the whole earth belongs to
me."Five hundred years went by, and mankind devised another version of the in nite
dialogue, this time not in India, but in China.3 emp eror of the Han Dynasty
dreamed that a man of gold flew into his room, and his ministers exp lained that he
could only be the Buddha, who had achieved the Tao in Western lands. An emp eror of
the Liang Dynasty had p rotected that barbarian and his faith, and had founded
temp les and monasteries. The brahmin Boddhidharma, twenty-eighth p atriarch of
Indian Buddhism, had arrived (they say a er three years of wandering) at his p alace
in Nanking, in the south. The Emp eror enumerated all the p ious works he had
p erformed. Boddhidharma listened attentively, and then told him that all those
monasteries and temp les and cop ies of the sacred books were things of the world of
ap p earances, which is a long dream, and thus were of no consequence. G ood works, he
said, can lead to good retributions, but never to nirvana, which is the absolute
extinction of the will, not the consequence of an act. There is no sacred doctrine,
because nothing is sacred or fundamental in an illusory world. Events and beings
are momentary, and we can neither say whether they are or are not.The Emp eror then
asked who was the man who had sp oken in this manner, and Boddhidharma, loyal to his
nihilism, rep lied:"Nor do I know who I am."These words resonated for a long time in
Chinese memory. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel The
Dream of the Red Chamber has this curious p assage:He had been dreaming and then he
woke up . He found himself in the ruins of a temp le. On one side there was a beggar
dressed in the robe of a Taoist monk. He was lame and was killing eas. Hsiang-Lien
asked him who he was and what p lace they were in. The monk answered:"I don't know
who I am, nor where we are. I only know that the road is long."Hsiang-Lien
understood. He cut off his hair with his sword and followed the stranger.Jl follow
the text in Hackmann, Chinesische Philosop hie, 1927, p p . 257 and 269.THE DIAL0G UES
0F ASCETIC AND KING 385In the stories I have mentioned, the ascetic and the king
symbolize nothing and p lentitude, zero and in nity. More extreme symbols of that
contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical:
a god that dies. Adonis wounded by the boar of the moon goddess, Osiris thrown by
Set into the waters of the Nile, Tammuz carried off to the land from which he
cannot return, are all famous examp les of this fusion. No less p oignant is this,
which tells of the modest end of a god:In the court of Olaf Tryggvason, who had
been converted in England to the faith of Christ, an old man arrived one night,
dressed in a dark cap e and with the brim of his hat over his eyes. The King asked
him if he knew how to do anything; the stranger answered that he knew how to p lay
the harp and tell stories. He sang some ancient airs, told of G udrun and G unnar,
and then sp oke of the birth of Odin. He said that three Fates came, that the rst
two p ronounced great hap p iness, but the third, in a rage, said, "Y ou will not live
longer than that candle burning by your side." His p arents p ut the candle out so
that Odin would not die with it. Olaf Tryggvason didn't believe the story; the
stranger, insisting it was true, took out a candle and lit it. As the others
watched it burn, he said it was late and that he had to leave. When the candle was
consumed, they searched for him. A few step s from the King's house, Odin was
lying dead.Ap art from their greater or lesser virtues, these texts, scattered in
time and sp ace, suggest the p ossibility of a morp hology (to use G oethe's word) or
science of the fundamental forms of literature. I have occasionally sp eculated in
these p ages that all metap hors are variants of a small number of archetyp es;
p erhap s this p rop osition is also ap p licable to fables.{1953} {EW] A Defense of
Bouvard and PicuchetThe story of Bouvard and Pecuchet is decep tively simp le. Two
cop yists (whose age, like Alonso Quijano's, verges on y) forge a close friend-
ship : an inheritance allows them to leave their work and move to the country;
there they try their hand at agronomy, gardening, p utting up p reserves, anatomy,
archaeology, history, mnemonics, literature, hydrotherap y, sp iri- tualism,
gymnastics, p edagogy, veterinary medicine, p hilosop hy, and religion, and each of
these heterogeneous discip lines holds a disaster in store for them; a er twenty or
thirty years, disenchanted (as we shall see, the "action" takes p lace not in time
but in eternity), they ask a carp enter to build them a double writing stand, and
they set themselves to cop ying, as before.?For six years of his life, the final
years, Flaubert dedicated himself to the design and execution of this book, which
ultimately remained incomp lete, which G osse, so devout an admirer of Madame Bovary,
would deem an aberration, and which Remy de G ourmont considered the p rincip al work
of French literature, and almost of literature itself.Emile Faguet ("that greyish
Faguet," G erchunoff once called him) p ublished a monograp h in 1899 that has the
virtue of exhausting all the arguments against Bouvard and Pecuchet, which is a
convenience for the critical examination of the work. Flaubert, according to
Faguet, dreamed of an ep ic of human idiocy and (moved by memories of Pangloss and
Candide and p erhap s of Sancho and Quixote) sup erfluously endowed it with two
p rotagonists who do not comp lement or op p ose one another and whose duality is no
more than a verbal arti ce. Having created or p ostulated these nonenti- ties,
Flaubert makes them read an entire library so that they will not under-stand it.
Faguet denounces the p uerility of this game, and the danger, since Flaubert, in
order to come up with the reactions of his two imbeciles, read?I believe I detect
an ironic reference to Flaubert's own fate.A DEFENSE 0F B0UI'ARD ASD P CLiC ET 387
one thousand ve hundred treatises on agronomy, p edagogy, medicine, p hysics,
metap hysics, etc., in the aim of not understanding them. Faguet notes: "If one
stubbornly insists on reading from the p oint of view of a man who reads without
understanding, in a very short while one achieves the feat of understanding
absolutely nothing and being obtuse oneself." The fact is that more than ve years
of coexistence gradually transformed Flaubert into Pecuchet and Bouvard or (more
accurately) Pecuchet and Bouvard into Flaubert. The two characters are initially
two idiots, scorned and abused by the author, but in the eighth chap ter the famous
words occur: "Then a lamen- table faculty arose in their sp irits, that of seeing
stup idity and no longer being able to tolerate it." And: "They were saddened by
insigni cant things: the ad- vertisements in the newsp ap ers, the p ro le of a
bourgeois, a mindless remark overheard by chance." Flaubert, at this p oint,
reconciles himself with Bouvard and Pecuchet, G od with his creatures. This may
hap p en in every long, or sim- p ly living, work (Socrates becomes Plato; Peer G ynt,
Ibsen), but here we sur- p rise the moment in which the dreamer, to use a kindred
metap hor, notes that he is dreaming and that the forms of his dream are himself.The
first edition of Bouvard et PCcuchet ap p eared in March 1881. In Ap ril, Henry Ceard
attemp ted this de nition: "a kind of two-man Faust." In the Pleiade edition,
Dumesnil con rms: "The rst words of Faust's monologue, at the beginning of the
rst p art, are the entire p lot of Bouvard and PCcuchet." Those are the words in
which Faust dep lores having studied p hilosop hy, jurisp rudence, medicine, and
alas! theology, all in vain. In any case, Faguet had already written: "Bouvard and
PCcuchet is the story of a Faust who was also an idiot." We must keep that ep igram
in mind, for the whole intricate p olemic may in some way be read in it.Flaubert
declared that one of his aims was to p ass all modern ideas in review; his
detractors argue that the fact that the review is carried out by two imbeciles su
ces, in all rigor, to invalidate it. To infer the vanity of all religions,
sciences,
and arts from the mishap s of these two bu oons is nothing but an insolent
sop histry or a crude fallacy. The failures of Pecuchet do not entail a failure by
Newton.This conclusion is customarily refuted by a denial of its p remise. Di- geon
and Dumesnil invoke a p assage from Flaubert's close friend and disci- p le
Maup assant in which we read that Bouvard and Pecuchet are "two fairly lucid,
mediocre, and simp le minds." Dumesnil emp hasizes the adjective lucid, but the
testimony of Maup assant-or of Flaubert, if it could be found-will never be as
convincing as the text of the work itself, which ap - p ears to imp ose the term
"imbeciles."JORG E LUIS BORG ES The justi cation of Bouvard and PCcuchet, I would
venture to suggest, is of an aesthetic order, and has little or nothing to do with
the four gures and nineteen modes of the syllogism. Logical rigor is one thing and
the (now) almost instinctive tradition of p lacing essential words in the mouths of
simp letons and madmen is another. Let us not forget the reverence Islam p ays to
idiots, in the understanding that their souls have been snatched away from heaven;
let us not forget the p assages in Scrip ture where we read that G od hath chosen the
foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Or, if concrete examp les are
p referable, we might think of Chester- ton's Manalive, who is a visible mountain of
simp licity and an abyss of divine wisdom, or of John Scotus Erigena, who argued
that the best name for G od is nihilum (nothing) and that "he himself does not know
what he is, because he is not a what. . . ." The emp eror Montezuma said that fools
teach more than wise men because they dare to sp eak the truth; Piau- bert (who, in
the nal analysis, was not constructing a rigorous demonstration, a Destructio
Philosop horum, but a satire) may well have taken the p recaution of con ding his
nal doubts and most secret fears to two mental incomp etents.A deep er justi cation
may also be glimp sed. Haubert was a devotee of Sp encer; in the master's First
Princip les we read that the universe is un- knowable, for the clear and adequate
reason that to exp lain a fact is to relate it to another more general fact, a
p rocess that has no end,2 or that conducts us to a truth so general that we cannot
relate it to any other, that is, exp lain it. Science is a nite sp here that grows
in in nite sp ace; each new exp ansion makes it include a larger zone of the unknown,
but the unknown is inexhaustible. Haubert writes: "We still know almost nothing
and we would wish to divine the nal word that will never be revealed to us. The
frenzy for reaching a conclusion is the most sterile and disastrous of manias."
Art, of necessity, op erates by symbols; the largest sp here is a p oint in in nity;
two absurd cop yists can rep resent Flaubert, and also Schop enhauer and Newton.Taine
rep eatedly told Haubert that the subject of his novel demanded an eighteenth-
century p en, the concision and mordancy ( "le mordant") of a Jonathan Swi . Perhap s
he sp oke of Swi because in some way he felt the af nity between these two great,
sad writers. Both hated human stu- p idity with a minutious ferocity; both
documented that hatred with trivial p hrases and idiotic op inions comp iled across
the years; both wanted to de-2Agrip p a the Skep tic argued that any p roof demands a
p roof in its turn, and so on to in nity.A DEFENSE OF BOUVARD ND P{CUC/ILT 389
molish the ambitions of science. In the third p art of G ulliver, Swi describes a
grand and venerated academy whose individuals p rop ose that humanity abstain from
oral language so as not to wear out the lungs. Others so en marble for the
fabrication of p illows and p in-cushions; others asp ire to p rop agate a breed of
naked sheep , with no wool; others think to resolve the enigmas of the universe by
means of a wooden frame with iron handles that combines words at random, an
invention that goes against Llull's Ars magna. . . .Rene Descharmes has examined,
and rep roached, the chronology of Bouvard and ?ecuchet. The action requires about
forty years; the p rotagonists devote themselves to gymnastics at the age of
seventy-eight, the same year in which Pecuchet discovers love. The book is full of
events, yet time stands still: outside of the attemp ts and failures of the two
Fausts (or of the two-headed Faust), nothing hap p ens; the common vicissitudes of
life and fatality and chance are all absent. "The sup ernumeraries of the book's
outcome are those of its p reamble; no one travels, no one dies," observes Claude
Digeon. On another p age he concludes, "Flaubert's intellectual honesty p layed him
a terrible turn: it led him to overburden his p hilosop hical tale, to write it with
his novelist's p en."The negligences or disdains or liberties of the final Flaubert
have disconcerted the critics; I believe I see in them a symbol. The man who,
with Madame Bovary, forged the realist novel was also the rst to shatter it.
Chesterton, only yesterday, wrote: "The novel may well die with us." Flaubert
instinctively sensed that death, which is indeed taking p lace (is notUlysses, with
its map s and timetables and exactitudes the magni cent death throes of a genre?),
and in the fth chap ter of the work, he condemned the "statistical or ethnograp hic"
novels of Balzac and, by extension, of Zola. That is why the time of Bouvard and ?
ecuchet tends toward eternity; that is why the p rotagonists do not die and will go
on cop ying their anachronistic So isier near Caen, as unaware of 1914 as they were
of 1870; that is why the work looks back to the p arables of Voltaire and Swift and
the Orientals, and forward to those of Kafka.There is, p erhap s, another key. To
mock humanity's yearnings, Swift attributed them to p ygmies or ap es; Flaubert, to
two grotesque individuals. Obviously, if universal history is the history of
Bouvard and Pecuchet, everything it consists of is ridiculous and insignificant.
[19541 [EA} Flaubert d His Exemp lary DestinyIn an article intended to abolish or
discourage the cult of Flaubert in En- gland, John Middleton Murry observes that
there are two Flauberts: one, a large-boned, strap p ing man, lovable, rather simp le,
with the look and laugh of a rustic, who sp ent his life agonizing over the
intensive husbandry of half a dozen dissimilar volumes; the other, an incorp oreal
giant, a symbol, a battle cry, a banner. I must say that I do not understand this
op p osition; the Flaubert who agonized to p roduce a p recious and p arsimonious body
of work is identical to the Flaubert of legend and (if the four volumes of his
corresp ondence do not deceive us) of history. This Flaubert is more imp ortant
than the imp ortant literature he p remeditated and carried out, for he was the Adam
of a new sp ecies: the man of letters as p riest, ascetic, and almost martyr.
Antiquity, for reasons we shall examine, could not p roduce this gure. In the Ion
we read that the p oet is an "ethereal, winged, and sacred thing who can comp ose
nothing until he is insp ired, which is to say, mad." Such a doctrine ofthe sp irit
that bloweth where it listeth (John 3:8) was hostile to a p ersonal ap p reciation of
the p oet, who was reduced to a fleeting instrument of divinity. A Flaubert is
inconceivable in the G reek city-states, or in Rome; p erhap s the man who most
closely ap p roximated him was Pindar, the p riestly p oet who comp ared his odes to
p aved roads, a tide, gold and marble carvings, and buildings, and who felt and
embodied the dignity of the literary p rofession.To this "romantic" doctrine of
insp iration p rofessed by the classics,' one fact may be added: the general feeling
that Homer had already exhausted the p ossibilities of p oetry, or in any case had
discovered its utmost form, the1Its reverse is the "classic" doctrine of Poe, the
romantic, who makes the p oet's work an intellectual exercise.FLAUBERT AND HIS
EXEMPLARY DESTINY 391heroic p oem. Each night, exander of Macedonia p laced his
knife and his Iliad beneath his p illow, and Thomas De Quincey tells of an English
p astor who swore om the p ulp it "by the greatness of human su ering, by the
greatness of human asp irations, by the immortality of human creations, by the
Iliad, by the Odyssey! " The wrath of Achilles and the rigors of Ulysses' voyage
home are not universal themes, and p osterity based its hop es on that limitation. To
sup erimp ose the course and con guration of the Iliad on other p lots, invocation by
invocation, battle by battle, sup ernatural device by sup ernatural device, was the
highest asp iration of p oets for twenty centuries. It is very easy to make fun of
this, but not of the Aeneid, which was its fortunate result. (Lemp riere discreetly
includes Virgil among Homer's bene ciaries.) In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, a
devout follower of the glory of Rome, believed he had found in the Punic Wars the
durable subject of the ep ic p oem; in the sixteenth, Tasso chose the rst crusade,
to which he dedicated two works, or two versions of one work. The rst-the G eru-
salemme liberata-is famous; the other, the Conquistata, which attemp ts to stay
closer to the Iliad, is barely even a literary curiosity. In the Conquistata, the
emp hases of the original text are muted, an op eration which, when carried out on
an essentially emp hatic work, can amount to its destruction. Thus, in the Liberata
(VIII, 23), we read of a valiant, wounded man who still resists death:La vita no,
ma la virtu sostenta quel cadavere indomito eferoce[Not life, but valor sustained
the erce, indomitable corp se] In the revised version, hyp erbole and imp act
disap p ear:La vita no, ma la virtu sostentail cavaliere indomito eferoce[Not life,
but valor sustained the erce, indomitable cavalier] Milton, later, lives to
construct a heroic p oem. From childhood, p erhap s before ever writing a single
line, he knows himself to be dedicated to letters. He fears he was born too late
for the ep ic (too
distant from Homer, and from Adam) and in too cold a latitude, but he schools
himself in the art of versi cation for many years. He studies Hebrew, Aramaic,
Italian, French, G reek, and naturally, Latin. He comp oses Latin and G reek hexame-
ters and Tuscan hendecasyllables. He p ractices self-restraint, because he feels
that p rofligacy might waste his p oetic faculty. He writes, at the age of392 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESthirty-three, that the p oet ought himself to be a true p oem, "that is, a
com- p osition and p attern of the best and honourablest things," and that no one
unworthy of p raise himself should dare to sing high p raises of "heroic men or
famous cities." He knows that a book mankind will not let die is to emerge from his
p en, but its subject has yet to be revealed, and he seeks it in the Matiere de
Bretagne and in the two Testaments. On a casual scrap of p a- p er (today called the
Cambridge Manuscrip t) he notes down a hundred or so p ossible subjects. Finally he
chooses the fall of the angels and of man-a historical subject in that century,
though today we consider it symbolic and mythical.2Milton, Tasso, and Virgil
consecrated themselves to the comp osition of p oems; Flaubert was the first to
consecrate himself (and I use the word in its full etymological rigor) to the
creation of a p urely aesthetic work in p rose. In the history of literatures, p rose
is later than verse; this p aradox was a goad to Flaubert's ambition. "Prose was
born yesterday;' he wrote. "Verse is the form p ar excellence of the literatures of
antiquity. The combinations of metrics have been used up ; not so those of p rose."
And in another p assage: "The novel awaits its Homer."Milton's p oem encomp asses
Heaven, Hell, the world, and chaos, but remains an Iliad, an Iliad the size of the
universe; Flaubert did not wish to rep eat or surp ass a p rior model. He thought that
each thing can be said in only one way, and that the writer's obligation is to nd
that way. As classics and romantics waged thundering debates, Flaubert said that
his failures might di er but his successes were the same, because beauty is always
p recise, always right, and a good line by Boileau is a good line by Hugo. He be-
lieved in the p re-established harmony of the eup honious and the exact, and marveled
at the "inevitable relation between the right word and the musical word." This
sup erstitious idea of language would have made another writer devise a small
dialect of bad syntactical and p rosodical habits, but not Flaubert, whose
ndamental decency saved him from the risks of his doctrine. With sustained high-
mindedness, he p ursued the mot juste, which of2Let us follow the variations of a
Homeric trait across time. Helen of Troy, in the Iliad, weaves a tap estry, and what
she weaves are the battles and misadventures of the Trojan War. In the Aeneid, the
hero, a fugitive from the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and sees, in a temp le,
rep resentations of scenes from that war and, among the many images of warriors, his
own image as well. In the second G erusalemme, G odo edo receives the Egyp tian
ambassadors in a muraled p avilion whose p aintings rep resent his own battles. Of the
three versions, the last is the least felicitous.FLAUBERT AND HIS EXEMPLARY DESTINY
393course did not exclude the common word and which would later degenerate into
the vainglorious mot rare of the Symbolist salons.History has it that the famous
Lao Tzu wanted to live in secret, without a name; a similar will to be ignored and
a similar celebrity mark the destiny of Haubert. He wished to be absent from his
books, or barely, invisibly, there, like G od in his works; and it is a fact that if
we did not already know that one and the same p en wrote Salammbo and Madame Bovary,
we would not guess it. No less undeniable is the fact that to think of Haubert's
work is to think of Haubert, of the anxious, p ainstaking wor an and his lengthy
deliberations and imp enetrable dra s. Quixote and Sancho are more real than the
Sp anish soldier who invented them, but none of Haubert's creatures is as real as
Haubert. Those who claim that his Corresp ondence is his masterp iece can argue that
those virile volumes contain the face of his destiny.That destiny continues to be
exemp lary, as Byron's was for the roman- t i c s . T o a n i m i t a t i o n o f H
a u b e r t ' s t e c h n i q u e w e o w e T h e O l d W i v e s ' Ta l e a n d 0
p rima Basilio; his destiny has been rep eated, with mysterious magni cations and
variations, in Mallarme (whose ep igram "Everything in the world exists to end up in
a book" voices one of Haubert's convictions), in Moore, in Henry James, and in the
intricate and near-in nite Irishman who woveUlysses.{19541 {EA} A History of the T
goVicente Rossi, Carlos Vega, and Carlos Muzzio Saenz Pena, each a diligent
historian, have all investigated the origins of the tango. I must say that I
subscribe to all of their conclusions-as well as to others. There is also a history
of the tango that the cinema p eriodically divulges; according to this sentimental
version, the tango was born in the riverbank tenements of Buenos Aires (the Boca,
by virtue of the area's p hotogenic features); the up - p er classes rejected it at
rst but, around 1910, indoctrinated by the good examp le of Paris, nally threw
op en their doors to that interesting p roduct of the slums. This "from rags to
riches" Bildungsroman is by now a sort of in- contestable or p roverbial truth; my
memories (and I am over y) and my own informal inquiries by no means sup p ort such
a version.I have sp oken to Jose Saborido, who wrote "Felicia" and "La morocha" [The
Brunette] with Ernesto Poncio (who also wrote the tango "Don Juan"); to the
brothers ofVicente G reco, author of"La viruta" [The Wood- chip ] and "La tablada"
[The Wooden Board] ; to Nicolas Paredes (once the p olitical boss of Palermo), and to
a few gaucho ballad singers he knew. I let them talk; I carefully avoided
formulating questions that might suggest determined answers. The derivations of
the tango, the top ograp hy, and even the geograp hy they related were singularly
diverse: Saborido (a Uruguayan) p referred a Montevidean cradle on the east bank;
Poncio (from Retiro) op ted for Buenos Aires and for his own neighborhood; those
from the Southside docks invoked the Calle Chile; those from the northern p art of
town, the raucous Calle Temp le or the Calle Junin.In sp ite of the divergences I
have enumerated, which could be easilymultip lied by asking p eop le from La Plata or
from around Rosario, my ad- visers agree on one essential fact, that the tango was
born in the brothels. (And also on the date of its origins, which none felt was
much before 188oA HISTORY OF THE TANG O395or a er 1890.) The p rimitive
instrumentation of its earliest orchestras- p iano, ute, violin, and later the
concertina-con rms, with its extravagance, the evidence that the tango did not
arise from the riverbank slums where, as everyone knows, the six strings of the
guitar were suf cient. Other con rmations also abound-the lascivious movements, the
obvious connotations of certain titles ("EI choclo" [The Corn-cob] , "EIfierrazo"
[The Iron Rod] ), and what I observed as a boy in Palermo and, years later, in La
Chacarita and Boedo: that on the streetcorners p airs of men would dance, since the
women of the town would not want to take p art in such lewd de- bauchery. Evaristo
Carriego p ortrayed it in his Misas herejes [Heathen Masses] :En Ia calle, Ia buena
gente derrochasus guarangos decires mas lisonjeros,p orque al comp as de un tango,
que es "La morocha," lucen agiles cortes dos orilleros.[The gentlefolk on the
street lavish/their rude flattery,/because to the beat of a tango about a dark-eyed
girl,/two men from the slums dance light-footed step s in a lewd embrace.] On another
p age, with a wealth of p oignant details, Carriego dep icts a humble wedding p arty;
the groom's brother is in jail; two rowdy boys are itching for a ght, and the
neighborhood tough has to p aci them with threats; there is mistrust, ill feeling,
and horsep lay, butEl tio de Ia novia, que se ha creido obligado a jarse si el
baile tomabuen caracter, a rma, media ofendido: que no se admiten cortes, ni aun en
broma. Que, Ia modestia a un lado, no se la p ega ninguno de esos vivos . . .
seguramente.La casa sera p obre, nadie lo niega:todo lo que se quiera, p ero decente.
[The bride's uncle takes it up on himself/to see that the dancing stays p rop er
though festive./There'll be no slithering tangos here, he says,/ nothing
suggestive, not even in fun.//All modesty aside, not that these louts
would/understand, this house may be p oor-no denying that- /whatever you say,
but/one thing at least, it's resp ectable.] JORG E LUIS BORG ES The momentary glimp se
of the strict uncle, which the two stanzas cap - ture, highlights p eop le's first
reaction to the tango-"that rep tile from the brothel;' as Lugones would define it
with laconic contemp t (El Payador, 117). It took many years for the Northside to
comp el the tenements to adop t the tango-by then made resp ectable by Paris, of
course-and I am not sure that this has been comp letely success l. What was once a
devilish orgy is now a way of walking.The Fighting TangoThe sexual nature of the
tango has o en been noted, but not so its violence. Certainly both are modes or
manifestations of the same imp ulse; in all the languages I know, the word for "man"
connotes both sexual p otency and combative p otential, and the word virtus, Latin
for "courage," comes from vir, meaning "male." Similarly, an Afghan on a p age in
Kim states flatly-as if the two acts were essentially one-"When I was een, I had
shot my man and begot my man."To sp eak of the "fighting tango" is not strong
enough; I would say that the tango and the milonga directly exp ress a conviction
that p oets have o en tried to voice with words: that a ght can be a
celebration. In the famous History of the G oths that Jordanes wrote in the sixth
century, we read that Attila, before his defeat at Chalons, harangued his armies,
telling them that fortune had reserved for them "the joys of this battle"
("certaminis hu-jus gaudia"). The Iliad sp eaks of Achaeans for whom war was sweeter
than returning home in hollowed ship s to their beloved native land, and relates how
Paris, son of Priam, ran with rap id feet into battle like a stallion with flowing
mane in p ursuit of mares. In Beowulf-the Saxon ep ic that launched the G ermanic
literatures-the bard calls battle a "sweorda gelac" or "game of swords."
Scandinavian p oets of the eleventh century called it the "Vikings' feast." In the
early seventeenth century, Quevedo, in one of his ballads, called a duel a "dance
of swords"-almost the same as the anonymous Anglo-Saxon's "game of swords." In
his sp lendid evocation of the Battle of Waterloo, Hugo said that the soldiers,
realizing they were going to die in that festivity ("comp renant qu'ils allaient
mourir dans cette fete"), saluted their god (the Emp eror) standing amid the storm.
These examp les, recorded in the course of my random readings, could be e ortlessly
multip lied; in the Chanson de Roland or in Ariosto's vast p oem there are similar
p assages. Any of those mentioned here-Quevedo'sA HISTORY OF THE TANG O397or the one
about Attila, let us say-are undeniably effective. All of them, nonetheless, su er
from the original sin of literariness: they are structures of words, forms made of
symbols. "Dance of swords," for examp le, invites us to link two dissimilar images
in order for "dance" to imbue "combat" with joy, but it does not sp eak directly to
our blood, does not recreate such joy in us. Schop enhauer ( Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung I, 52) has written that music is as near to us as the world itself;
without the world, without a common stock of memories summoned by language, there
would be no literature, but music does not need, could exist, without the world.
Music is will and p assion; the old tango, as music, immediately transmits that joy
of combat which G reek and G erman p oets, long ago, tried to exp ress in words.
Certain comp osers today strive for that heroic tone and sometimes conceive
comp etent milongas about the Bateria slums or the Barrio Alto, but their labors-
with deliberately old-fashioned lyrics and music-are exercises in nostalgia for
what once was, laments for what is now lost, intrinsically sad even when their
melody is joyful. They are to the rough and innocent milongas in Rossi's book
what Don Segundo Somb is to Martin Fierro or to Paulino Lucero.We read in one of
Oscar Wilde's dialogues that music reveals a p ersonal p ast which, until then, each
of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and
wrongs we did not commit. For myself, I confess that I cannot hear "El Marne" or
"Don Juan" without remembering in detail an ap ocryp hal p ast, simultaneously stoic
and orgiastic, in which I have challenged and fought, in the end to fall silently,
in an obscure knife ght. Perhap s this is the tango's mission: to give Argentines
the belief in a brave p ast, in having met the demands of honor and bravery.A
Partial MysteryHaving accep ted the tango's comp ensatory function, we still have a
small mystery to resolve. South America's indep endence was, to a great extent, an
Argentine enterp rise. Argentine men fought in battles all over the continent: in
Maip u, in Ayacucho, in Junin. Then came the civil wars, the war in Brazil, the
camp aigns against Rosas and Urquizas, the war in Paraguay, the frontier war with
the Indians. . . . Our military p ast is p op ulous, but, indis- p utably, though
Argentines consider themselves brave, they do not identi with that p ast (desp ite
the bias in schools in favor of the study of history), but rather with the vast
generic gures of the G aucho and the Hoodlum. IfJORG E LUIS BORG ES I am not
mistaken, this instinctual p aradox has an exp lanation: the Argen- tine nds his
symbol in the gaucho and not the soldier because the courage ascribed to the former
by oral tradition is not in the service of a cause but rather is p ure. The gaucho
and the hoodlum are seen as rebels; Argentines, unlike North Americans and most
Europ eans, do not identi with the state. This can be attributed to the fact that
the state is an inconceivable abstraction.? The Argentine is an individual, not a
citizen; to him, ap horisms such as Hegel's "The State is the reality of the moral
idea" are sinister jokes. Films made in Hollywood rep eatedly intend for us to
admire the case of a man (usually a newsp ap er rep orter) who befriends a criminal in
order to turn him in to the p olice; Argentines, for whom friendship is a p assion
and the p olice a ma a, consider such a "hero" to be an incomp rehensible scoundrel.
Along with Don Quixote, the Argentine feels that "up there, each man will have to
answer for his own sins" and that "an honest man should not be the hangmen of
others, with whom he has nothing to do" (DonQuixote I, 22). When faced, more than
once, with the emp ty symmetries of Sp anish style, I have thought that we differ
irredeemably from Sp ain; these lines from the Quixote are enough to convince me of
my error. They are the secret, quiet symbol of an af nity. One night in Argentine
literature con- rms this a nity, that desp erate night when a rural p olice sergeant
exclaimed he would not commit the crime of killing a brave man and began to ght
against his own soldiers, together with the deserter Martin Fierro.The LyricsUneven
in quality, as they consp icuously p roceed from hundreds and thousands of
diversely insp ired or merely industrious p ens, the lyrics of the tango, after half
a century, now constitute an almost imp enetrable corp us p oeticum which historians
of Argentine literature will read or, in any case, defend. Pop ular culture, when
the p eop le no longer understand it, when the years have made it antiquated, gains
the nostalgic veneration of scholars and validates p olemics and glossaries. By
1990, the susp icion or certainty may arise that the true p oetry of our time is not
in Banchs' La Urna [The Urn] or Mastronardi's Luz de p rovincia [ Provincial Light]
but rather those imp erfect p ieces conserved in the songbook El alma que canta [The
Singing1The state is imp ersonal; the Argentine thinks only in terms of p ersonal
relationship s. For him, therefore, stealing p ublic monies is not a crime. I am
stating the fact, not justi ing or condoning it.A HISTORY OF THE TANG O399Soul] .
Such a conjecture is melancholy. A culp able negligence has kep t me from acquiring
and studying this chaotic rep ertory, but I am not unac- quainted with its variety
and the growing comp ass of its themes. At the beginning the tango had no lyrics,
or else they were obscene and hap hazard. Some were rustic-"Y o soy la el comp a
era/del noblegauchop orteno" [I am the girlfriend, ever true/of the noble dockside
city gaucho ] -because their comp osers sought a p op ular avor, but the low life and
the slums were not p oetic material, then. Others, like the related dance, the
milonga,> were jolly, showy fanfare: "En el tango soy tan taura/que cuando hago un
doble corte/ corre la vozp ar el Norte/si es que me encuentro en el Sur" [When I
tango I'm so tough/that, when I whirl a double cut/word reaches the Northside/if I
'm dancing in the South ] . Later, the genre chronicled, like certain French natu-
ralist novels or certain Hogarth engravings, the local p erils of the "harlot's
p rogress": "Luego fuiste la amiguita/de un viejo boticario/y el hijo de un
comisario/todo el vento te sac6" [Next you became the mistress/of an old
p harmacist/and the p olice chief's son/knocked the wind out of your sails] . Still
later, the dep lorable gentri cation of rough or rundown neighborhoods, like
"Puente Alsina,/?d6nde esta ese malevaje?'' [Puente Alsina,/where are all your
hooligans?] or "?D6nde estan aquellos hombres y esas chinas,/ vinchas rajas y
chambergos que Requena conoci6?/?D6nde esta mi Villa Cresp o de otros tiemp os?/Se
vinieron los judios, Triunvirato se acab6" [Where are those men and their
gals/those red bandannas and slouch hats that Re- quena once knew?/Where's the
Villa Cresp o I used to know?/Then Jews moved in and the Triumvirato moved on] .
From early on, the woes of secret or sentimental love had kep t the p ens busy: "?No
te acordas que conmigo/te p usistes un sombrero/y aquel cintur6n de cuero/que a otra
mina la afane?'' [Remember when, with me/you wore that hat, and more,/around your
waist that leather belt/I'd swip ed from another broad?] . Tangos of guilt, tangos of
hatred, tangos of sarcasm and bitterness, were written, di cult to transcribe and
even to remember. All sides of city life began entering the tango; the low life and
the slums were not its only subjects. In the p reface to his Satires, Juvenal wrote
memorably that everything which moved men- desire, fear, anger, carnal p leasure,
intrigues, hap p iness-would be the subject of his book; with excusable
exaggeration, we might ap p ly his famous,Y o soy del barrio del Alto,/soy del barrio
del Retiro.!Y o soy aquel que no miro!con quien tengo que p elear,/y a quien en
milonguear,/ninguno se p uso a tiro. [I'm from the Barrio del Alto,/from the Retiro,
I am./I'm the man who barely notices/whomever I have to fight,/or whomever I
milonga,/nobody fools with me.] 400 JORG E LUIS BORG ES"quidquid agunt homines" to the
whole of tango lyrics. We might also say that these lyrics form a vast, unconnected
comedie humaine of Buenos Aires life. At the end of the eighteenth century, Wolf
wrote that the Iliad was a series of songs and rhap sodies before it became an
ep ic; this knowledge may allow for the p rop hecy that, in time, tango lyrics will
form a long civic p oem, or will suggest to some ambitious p erson the writing of
that p oem.Andrew
Fletcher's similar statement is well known: "If they let me write all a nation's
ballads, I don't care who writes the laws"; the dictum suggests that common or
traditional p oetry can in uence feelings and dictate conduct. The Argentine
tango, if we ap p ly this conjecture, might ap p ear as a mirror of our reality and, at
the same time, a mentor or model with a certain malignant influence. The first
milongas and tangos might have been foolish, or at least slip shod, but they were
heroic and hap p y. The later tango is resentful, dep lores with sentimental excess
one's miseries, and celebrates shamelessly the misfortunes of others.Around 1926, I
remember blaming the Italians (p articularly the G e- noese in the Boca) for the
tango's decline. In that myth, or fantasy, of our "native" tango corrup ted by
"foreigners," I now see a clear symp tom of certain nationalist heresies that
later devastated the world-coming from the foreigners, of course. It was not the
concertina, which I once ridiculed as contemp tible, nor the hardworking comp osers
who made the tango what it is, but the whole rep ublic. Those old "natives" who
engendered the tango, moreover, were named Bevilacqua, G reco, de Bassi. . . .Some
may object to my denigration of today's tango, arguing that the transition from
boldness or swagger to sadness is not necessarily a bad thing and might even be a
sign of maturity. My imagined adversary might well add that the innocent, brave
Ascasubi is to the p laintive Hernandez what the rst tango is to the latest and
that no one-save, p erhap s, Jorge Luis Barges-has dared to infer from this
diminished hap p iness that Martin Fierro is inferior to Paulino Lucero. The answer
is easy: the di erence is not only in its hedonistic tone but in its moral tone as
well. In the everyday tango of Buenos Aires-the tango of family gatherings and
resp ectable tearooms-there is a trivial vulgarity, a taste of infamy that the tango
of the knife and the brothel never even susp ected.Musically, the tango is p robably
not imp ortant; its only imp ortance is what we give it. This reflection is correct,
but p erhap s ap p lies to everything. To our own death, for examp le, or to the woman
who rejects us. . . . The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it
still guards, as doesA HISTORY OF THE TANG O 401all that is truth l, a secret.
Dictionaries of music record its short, adequate de nition, ap p roved by all; this
elementary de nition p romises no dif culties, but the French or Sp anish comp oser
who then follows it and correctly cra s a "tango" is shocked to discover he has
constructed something that our ears do not recognize, that our memory does not
harbor, and that our bodies reject. We might say that without the evenings and
nights of Buenos Aires a tango cannot be made, and that in heaven there awaits us
Argentines the Platonic idea of the tango, its universal form (barely sp elled out
by "La tablada" and "El choclo") a valiant sp ecies which, however humble, has its
p lace in the universe.The ChallengeThere is a legendary or historical account,
p erhap s both legend and history (which may be another way of saying legendary),
that illustrates the cult of courage. Its best written versions can be found in
Eduardo G utierrez's novels, now unjustly forgotten, such as Hormiga Negra [Black
Ant] or Juan Moreira; among its oral versions the rst I heard came from a Buenos
Aires neighborhood called Tierra del Fuego, bounded by a p enitentiary, a river, and
a cemetery. The hero of this version was Juan Mura a, wagon driver and knife
ghter, in whom converged all the tales of courage cir- culating around the docks of
the Northside. A man from Los Corrales or Las Barracas, knowing the fame of Juan
Mura a, whom he has never seen, came up from his outlying slum in the Southside to
p ick a ght; he challenged him in a neighborhood bar, and the two moved out on
the street to ght; each is wounded, but in the end Mura a slashes the man's face
and says to him: ''I'm letting you live so that you can come looking for me again."
The detachment of that duel was engraved on my memory; it p ersisted in my
conversations (as my friends knew too well); around 1927, I wrote it down and gave
it the deliberately laconic title "Men Fought"; years later the anecdote help ed me
come up with a p rovidential story-since it was hardly a good one-called
"Streetcorner Man"; in 1950, Adolfo Bioy Casares and I took it up again to make a
screenp lay that lm comp anies rejected enthusiastically and which would have been
called Los orilleros [ Riverbank Men ] . I thought, a er such extensive labors,
that I had said good-bye to the story of the indi erent duel; then this year, in
Chivilcoy, I p icked up a much better version that I hop e is the true one, although
both could be, since destiny402 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp refers to rep eat forms, and what
hap p ened once hap p ens often. Two mediocre stories and a lm I believe to be good
came out of the de cient version; nothing can come out of the second one, which is
p erfect and com- p lete. Without adding metap hors or scenery, I shall tell it as it
was told to me. The story, as they told me, took p lace in the district of
Chivilcoy, sometime in the 1870s. Wenceslao Suarez-the hero's name-works as a
rop e braider and lives in an adobe hut. A man about forty or y years old, he has
a rep utation for bravery, and it is likely (given the facts of the story) that he
once killed a man or two, but these deaths, committed in honor, do not trouble his
conscience or sully his fame. One evening in this man's sedate life, something
unexp ected hap p ens; in the general store, he is told that a letter for him has
arrived. Don Wenceslao does not know how to read; the bartender haltingly decip hers
the ceremonious missive, which also does not seem to be handwritten by the man who
sent it. In the name of certain friends who value dexterity and true comp osure, the
stranger greets Don Wenceslao, whose fame has crossed the Arroyo del Medio, and
offers him the hosp itality of his humble home in a town in the p rovince of Santa
Fe. Wenceslao Suarez dictates a rep ly to the bartender, thanking the stranger for
his exp ression of friendship , and exp lains that he dare not leave his mother-who's
well along in years-alone, but invites the other man to his simp le abode in
Chivilcoy, where he will be welcome to p artake of a side of beef and a bottle
ofwine. Months p ass, and a man on a horse harnessed and saddled in a manner
unfamiliar to the area shows up at the general store and asks for Suarez's address.
Suarez, who has come in to buy meat, over- hears the question and tells him who he
is; the stranger reminds him of the letters they wrote each other a while ago.
Suarez is delighted that the other man has decided to come, and the two of them go
o to a nearby eld, where Suarez p rep ares the barbecue. They eat and drink and
talk. About what? I susp ect about bloodshed and barbarian matters, but with wary
for- mality. They have eaten lunch, and the heavy a ernoon heat hangs over the land
when the stranger invites Don Wenceslao to join him in a bit of knife p lay. To say
no would mean dishonor. The two men p ractice and p lay at ghting at rst, but
Wenceslao soon realizes that the stranger intends to kill him. He finally
understands the meaning of the ceremonious letter and re- grets having eaten and
drunk so much. He knows that he will tire before the other man, who is still young.
Out of scorn or courtesy, the stranger p ro- p oses a short rest. Don Wenceslao
accep ts, and when they resume the duel, he lets the other man wound him in the left
hand, around which he hasA HISTORY OF THE TANG O 403rolled his p oncho.J The knife
cuts through his wrist, the hand hangs loose, as if dead. Suarez leap s backward,
lays his bloodied hand on the ground, step s on it with his boot, tears it off,
fakes a blow to the stranger's chest, and with one thrust rip s op en his belly. Thus
ends the story, save that in one version, the man from Santa Fe is le in the
eld, and in another (which steals from him the dignity of death) he returns to his
p rovince. In this last version, Suarez gives him rst aid with the rum le over
from lunch. . . .In this feat of Manco [One Hand] Wenceslao-as Suarez is now known-
certain mild or p olite touches (his trade as rop e maker, his scru- p les about
leaving his mother alone, the two owery letters, the conversation, the lunch)
hap p ily tone down or amp li the barbarous tale, giving it an ep ic or even
chivalrous dimension that we do not nd (unless we are determined to nd it) in
the drunken brawls of Martin Fierro or in the similar but p altry version about Juan
Mura a and the Southside man. One feature common to both is, p erhap s, signi cant.
In both, the challenger is defeated. The reason may be the mere, dep lorable
necessity for the local champ ion to triump h, but also (and this is p referable) a
tacit condemnation of p rovoca- tion in these heroic ctions, or-this would be best
of all-the dark and tragic conviction that man is always the maker of his own doom,
like Ulysses in Canto VI of the Inferno. Emerson, who p raised in Plutarch's
biograp hies "a Stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood," would not have
disdained this story.We would seem to have, then, men who lived in utter p overty,
gauchos and others from the banks of the River Plate and the Parana, creating,
without realizing it, a religion that had its mythology and its martyrs-the hard
and blind religion of courage, of being ready to kill and to die. A religion as old
as the world, but rediscovered in the American rep ublics and lived by herders,
stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and hoodlums whose music was the estilos, the
milongas, the rst tangos. I have written that this religion is an age-old cult; in
a twel h-century saga we read:"Tell me thy faith," said the count."I believe in my
own strength,"
said Sigmund.JMontaigne in his Essays (I, 49 ) sp eaks of this olden manner of
combat with cap e and sword, and cites a p assage from Caesar: "Sinistras sagis
involvunt, gladiosque dis- tringunt" [They wrap p ed their cloaks around their le
arms and drew their swords] . Lugones, i n El p ayador [The Itinerant Singer] ,
quotes a n analogous motif i n a sixteenth-century romance of Bernardo del Carp io:
"Revolviendo el manto a/ brazo,/La esp ada fuera a sacar" [Wrap p ing the mantle round
his arm/He would draw his sword ] .404 JORG E LUIS BORG ESWenceslao Suarez and his
anonymous contender, and others whom mythology has forgotten or has embodied in
these two, doubtless p rofessed such a manly faith, which in all likelihood was not
vanity but an awareness that G od may be found in any man.[1955} {SJL} A History of
the Echoes of a N eIsolated in time and sp ace, a god, a dream, and a man who is
insane and aware of the fact rep eat an obscure statement. Those words, and their
two echoes, are the subject of these p ages.The rst examp le is well known. It is
recorded in the third chap ter of the second book of Moses, called Exodus. We read
there that Moses, p astor of sheep , author and p rotagonist of the book, asks G od
what His name is, and G od rep lies: "I Am That I Am." Before examining these
mysterious words, it is p erhap s worth recalling that in p rimitive or magical
thought, names are not arbitrary symbols but a vital p art of what they define.'
Thus, the Aus- tralian aborigines receive secret names that the members of the
neighboring tribe are not allowed to hear. Among the ancient Egyp tians, a similar
custom p revailed: each p erson received two names, the "little" name that was known
to all and the true or "great" name that was kep t hidden. According to the fu-
nerary literature, the soul runs many risks a er death, and forgetting one's name
(losing one's p ersonal identity) is p erhap s the greatest. It is also imp ortant to
know the true names of the gods, demons, and gates to the other world.z Jacques
Vandier writes: "It is enough to know the name of a god or of a divine creature in
order to have it in one's p ower" (La Religion egyp tienne, 1949). Similarly, De
Quincey reminds us that the true name of Rome was also secret: in the last days of
the Rep ublic, Quintus Valerius Sorano committed the sacrilege of revealing it,
and was executed. . . .The savage hides his name so that it will not be used in
magical p ractices10ne of the Platonic dialogues, the Cratylus, discusses and seems
to negate a necessary connection between words and things.2The G nostics inherited
or rediscovered this unusual op inion, and they created a vast vocabulary of p rop er
names, which Basilides (according to lrenaeus) reduced to a single cacop honous or
cyclical word, "Kaulakau," a sort of universal key to all the heavens.406 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESthat may kill, drive insane, or enslave its owner. This sup erstition
survives in the ideas of slander and insult; we cannot tolerate our names being
tied to certain words. Mauthner has analyzed and censured this mental habit.Moses
asks G od what His name is: this is not, as we have seen, a curiosity of a
p hilological nature, but rather an attemp t to ascertain who G od is, or more
p recisely, what He is. (In the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena would write that
G od does not know who or what He is, because He is not a who or a what.)What
interp retations have been made of the tremendous answer Moses heard? According to
Christian theology, "I That I Am" declares that only G od truly exists, or, as the
Maggid of Mesritch taught, that only G od can say the word "I." The doctrine of
Sp inoza, which makes all thoughts and ap p lications the mere attributes of an
eternal substance which is G od, could well be an amp li cation of this idea. "G od
exists; we are the ones who do not exist;' a Mexican has similarly written.
According to this rst interp retation, "I Am That I Am" is an ontological a
rmation. Others have believed that the answer avoids the question: G od does not say
who He is because it would exceed the comp rehension of his human interlocutor.
Martin Buber p oints out that "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" may also be translated as "I Am
What I Will Be" or "I Will Be Where I Will Be." Had Moses, in the manner of
Egyp tian magic, asked G od His name in order to have Him in his p ower, G od would
have answered: "Today I am talking with you, but tomorrow I may take on another
form, including the forms of op p ression, injustice, and adversity." We read this in
G og and Magog.JMultip lied into the human languages-Ich Bin Der Ich Bin, Ego Sum Qui
Sum, Soy El Que Soy-the sententious name of G od, the name that, in sp ite of having
many words, is more solid and imp enetrable than if it were only one word, grew and
reverberated through the centuries, to 1602, when Shakesp eare wrote a comedy. In
this comedy we glimp se, almost sideways, a cowardly and swaggering soldier who has
managed, because of somescheme, to be p romoted to the rank of cap tain. The ruse is
discovered, the man is p ublicly disgraced, and then Shakesp eare intervenes and p uts
in his mouth some words that reflect, as though in a broken mirror, those that the
god sp oke on the mountain:JBuber (in atIsMan?, 1938) writes that to live is to
enter a strange house of the sp irit, whose oor is the chessboard on which we p lay
an unknown and unavoidable game against a changing and sometimes frightening
op p onent.A HIST0RY 0F THE ECH0ES 0F A NAME 407Cap tain I'll be no more,But I will
eat and drink and sleep as so As cap tain shall. Simp ly the thing I am Shall make
me live.Thus Parolles sp eaks, and suddenly ceases to be a conventional character in
a comic farce and becomes a man and all mankind.The last version was p roduced in
the 1740s, in one of the years when Swift was slowly dying, years that were p erhap s
for him a single unbearable moment, a form of the eternity of hell. With glacial
intelligence and glacial hatred, Swi (like Flaubert) had always been fascinated by
madness, p erhap s because he knew that, at the end, insanity was waiting for him. In
the third p art of G ulliver's Travels, he imagined with meticulous loathing a race
of de- crep it and immoral men, given over to weak ap p etites they cannot satis ;
incap able of conversing with their kind, because the course of time had changed
their language; or of reading, because their memories could not carry from one line
to the next. One susp ects that Swift imagined this horror because he feared it, or
p erhap s to magically exorcise it. In 1717, he said to Y oung, the author of Night
Thoughts, "I am like that tree; I will begin to die at the top ." Those years
survive for us in a few terri ing sentences. His sententious and grim character
sometimes extends to what was said about him, as if those who judged him did not
want to become less than he. Thackeray wrote: "To think on him is to think on the
ruin of a great emp ire." There was nothing, however, so touching as his ap p lication
of G od's mysterious words.Deafness, dizziness, and the fear of madness leading to
idiocy aggravated and deep ened Swift's melancholy. He began to lose his memory.
He didn't want to use glasses; he couldn't read, and he was incap able of writing.
He p rayed to G od every day to send him death. And one evening, old and mad and
wasted, he was heard rep eating, we don't know whether in resignation or
desp eration or as one a rms or anchors oneself in one's own invulnerable p ersonal
essence: "I am that I am, I am that I am. . . ."He may have felt, I will be
miserable, but I am, and I am a p art ofthe universe, as inevitable and necessary
as the others, and I am what G od wants me to be, I am what the universal laws have
made ofme, and p erhap s To be is to be all.Here ends the history of the sentence; I
need only add, as a sort of ep i- logue, the words that Schop enhauer said, near
death, to Eduard G risebach:If at times I have thought myself misfortunate, it is
because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else; for
examp le, a408JORG E LUIS BORG ESdep uty who cannot achieve a noble title, or the
accused in a case of defamation, or a lover whom the girl disdains, or a sick man
who cannot leave his house, or others who su er similar miseries. I have not been
those p ersons; it, in sum, has been the cloth of the clothes I have worn and thrown
off. Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Rep resentation, I am
the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occup y the
thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can disp ute it in the
years of life that still remain for me?Precisely because he had written The World
as Will and Rep resentation, Schop enhauer knew very well that to be a thinker is as
illusory as being a sick man or a misfortunate man, and that he was p rofoundly
something else. Something else: the will, the dark root of Parolles, the thing that
Swi was.[1955} [EW} I usion ComiqueFor years of stup idity and shame, the methods
of commercial advertising and of litterature p our concierges were ap p lied to the
governing of the Re- p ublic. Thus there were two histories: the criminal one,
comp osed ofjails, tortures, p rostitutions, arsons, and deaths; and the theatrical
one, tales and fables made for consump tion by dolts. A p reliminary examination of
the second, p erhap s no less desp icable than the rst, is the p urp ose of this p age.
The dictatorship loathed (p retended to loathe) cap italism, yet, as in Russia,
cop ied its methods, dictating names and slogans to the p eop le with the same
tenacity with which businesses imp ose their razor blades, cigarettes, or washing
machines. That tenacity, as everyone ows, was counter- p roductive: the excess of e
gies of the dictator led many to detest the dictator. From a world of individuals
we have p assed into an even more p assionate world of symbols: the
clash was not between p arties or op p onents of the dictator, but rather among
p arties and op p onents of an e gy or a name. . . .More curious was the manip ulation
of p olitics according to the rules of drama or melodrama. On October 17, 1945, it
was p retended that a colonel had been seized and abducted and that the p eop le had
rescued him. No one bothered to exp lain who had kidnap p ed him, or how his
whereabouts were known; nor were there ever legal charges p ressed against the
sup p osedly guilty p arties; nor were their names ever revealed or even sp eculated
on. Over the course often years, the acting grew considerably worse, with an in-
creasing disdain for the p rosaic scrup les of realism. On the morning of Au- gust
31, the colonel, now dictator, p retended to resign from the p residency; his
announcement was not made before the Congress, but rather to some su ciently
p op ulist union functionaries. Everyone knew that the p urp ose of this maneuver was
to p rovoke the p eop le to beg him to withdraw his resignation. In case there was
any doubt, bands of p arty hacks, aided by the410 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp olice, p lastered
the city with p ortraits of the dictator and his wife. Crowds listlessly gathered in
the Plaza de Mayo, where the state radio broadcast ex- hortations not to leave and
musical comp ositions to alleviate the tedium. Just before night fell, the dictator
came out on a balcony of the Pink House. He was, as exp ected, acclaimed, but he
forgot to renounce his renuncia- tion, or p erhap s he didn't do so because everyone
knew he was going to do so, and it would have been a bore to insist. He ordered,
however, an indis- criminate massacre of his op p onents, and the crowds cheered. Y et
nothing hap p ened that night: everyone (excep t, p erhap s, the sp eaker) knew or sensed
that it was all a ction. The same, to a lesser degree, occurred with the burning
of the flag. It was said that it was the work of Catholics; the defamed flag was
p hotograp hed and exhibited, but as the flagp ole itself wasn't enough of a show,
they op ted for a modest hole in the center of the symbol. It is useless to list the
examp les; one can only denounce the dup licity of the ctions of the former regime,
which can't be believed and were believed.It will be said that the p ublic's lack of
sop histication is enough to ex- p lain the contradiction; I believe that its cause
is more p rofound. Coleridge sp oke of the "willing susp ension of disbelief" that is
p oetic faith; Samuel Johnson said, in defense of Shakesp eare, that the sp ectators
at a tragedy do not believe they are in Alexandria in the rst act and Rome in the
second, but submit to the p leasure of a ction. Similarly, the lies of a
dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved; they p ertain to an intermediate
p lane, and their p urp ose is to conceal or justi sordid or atrocious realities.They
p ertain to the p athetic or the clumsily sentimental. Hap p ily, for the enlightenment
and security of the Argentines, the current regime has understood that the function
of government is not to insp ire p athos.[1955} [EW} PROLOG UESBret Harte, The Luck
Roaring Camp and Other SketchesDates are destined for oblivion, but they situate
men in time and bear a multip licity of connotations.Like almost all his country's
writers, Francis Bret Harte was born in the East. The event took p lace in Albany,
cap ital city of the state of New Y ork, on the 25th day of August, 1836. At the age
of eighteen, he embarked on his journey to California, the p lace where he became
famous, the p lace to which his name is now linked. He p lied the trades of miner and
journalist. He p arodied p oets who have now been forgotten and wrote the tales that
make up this volume, which he would never surp ass. He was mentor to Mark Twain, who
would quickly forget his kindness. He was the United States consul in Crefeld,
Prussia, and in G lasgow, Scotland. He died in Lon- don in 1902.A er 1870, he did
little but p lagiarize himself, to the indi erence or indulgence of his readers.
Observation con rms this melancholy law: to do justice to a writer, one must be
unjust to others. To exalt Poe, Baudelaire p eremp torily rejected Emerson (whose
skill is far sup erior to Poe's); to exalt Hernandez, Lugones denies the other
gauchesco writers any knowledge of the gaucho; to exalt Mark Twain, Bernard De Voto
has written that Bret Harte was "a literary im- p ostor" (Mark Twain'sAmerica,
1932). Lewisohn, too, in his Story ofAmerican Literature, treats Bret Harte with a
certain disdain. The reason, I susp ect, is a historical one: the North American
literature of our time does not wish to be sentimental, and rep udiates any writer
who is suscep tible to that descrip tion. It has discovered that brutality can be a
literary virtue; it has veri ed that North Americans in the nineteenth century were
incap able of that virtue. Fortunately or unfortunately incap able. (But not us: we
could already p oint412 JORG E LUIS BORG ESto Ascasubi's La refalosa, Esteban
Echeverria's El matadero, the murder of the black man in Martin Fierro, and the
monotonous scenes of atrocity that Ed- uardo G utierrez used to turn out in vast
quantities. . . .) In 1912, John Macy observed: "Our literature is idealistic,
sweet, delicate, nicely finished. . . . The Ulysses of great rivers and p erilous
seas is a connoisseur of Jap anese p rints. The warrior of 'Sixty-One rivals Miss
Marie Corelli. He who is figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, conquering the
desert with the steam locomo- tive, sings of a p retty little rose in a p retty
little garden." The goal of avoiding mawkishness and being-G od willing-brutal has
had two consequences: the rise of the "hard-boiled" writers (Hemingway, Caldwell,
Farrell, Stein- beck, James Cain) and the dep reciation of many mediocre writers and
a few good ones: Longfellow, William Dean Howells, Bret Harte.Of course, we
Americans of the South need not concern ourselves with this p olemic. We su er from
onerous and p erhap s irrep arable defects, but not from that of being romantic. It is
my sincere belief that we can frequent Bret Harte and the most unyielding and
nebulous of the G ermans without great risk of any p ermanent contagion. I also
believe that Harte's romanticism does not require any distortion of that term.
Unlike other doctrines, romanticism was much more than a p ictorial or literary
style; it was a style of life. Its history can do without the works of Byron but
not without his tumultuous life and resp lendent death. The fate of Victor Hugo's
heroes errs on the side of imp lausibility; the fate of the lieutenant in
Bonap arte's artillery errs on that same side. If Bret Harte was a romantic, so
was the reality of the history recounted in his narratives; the deep continent that
sp anned so many mythologies, the continent of Sherman's march and Brigham Y oung's
p olygamous theocracy, of Western gold and bison beyond the sunsets, of Poe's
anxious labyrinths and Walt Whitman's great voice.Francis Bret Harte traveled the
California gold elds around 1858. Those who accuse him of not having worked very
hard at being a miner forget that if he had, he might not have been a writer, or he
might have p referred a different subject; material that is too familiar o en
fails to stimulate.The tales in this volume were originally p ublished in the
Overland Monthly. At the beginning of 1869, Dickens read one of them, the
irresistible and p erhap s timeless "Outcasts of Poker Flat." He discovered in the
style of the writing a certain af nity with his own, but what he p ro sely ap p lauded
was "the subtle strokes of character, the matter esh to a degree that had
surp rised him; the p ainting in all resp ects masterly; and the wild rude thing
p ainted, a quite wonderful reality" (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens II,
7). There was no lack, both then and later, of admiring testimo-PROLOG UES 413nials,
such as that of the humanist Andrew Lang, who, in an examination of the sources of
the early Kip ling (Essays in Little, 1891) reduced them to G and Bret Harte; and
the very significant one of Chesterton, who nevertheless denies that there is
anything p eculiarly American in Harte's labor.To debate this op inion would be less
fruitful than to p oint out a faculty that Bret Harte shared with Chesterton and
Stevenson: the invention (and energetic rendering) of memorable visual traits.
Perhap s the strangest and most felicitous is the one I read at the age of twelve,
and which will, I have no doubt, accomp any me to the end of my road: the black and
white deuce of clubs p inned by the bowie knife to the bark of the monumental p ine,
over the body of John Oakhurst, gambler.{1946} {EA} Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-
worship and the Heroic in Histo Ralp h Waldo Emerson, Rep resentative MenThe ways of
G od are inscrutable. Toward the end of 1839, Thomas Carlyle p erused Edward William
Lane's decorous version of The Thousand and One Nights; the narrations struck him
as "obvious lies," but he ap p roved of the many p ious commentaries that adorn them.
His reading led him to medi- tate on the bucolic tribes of Arabia who obscurely
idolized wells and stars until a red-bearded man awoke them with the tremendous
news that there is no god but G od and drove them into a battle that has not yet
ended and whose limits were the Pyrenees and the G anges. What, Carlyle wondered,
would have become of the Arabs if Mohammed had not existed? Such was the origin of
the six lectures that make up this book.Desp ite the imp etuous tone and the reliance
on hyp erbole and meta- p hor, On Heroes and Hero-worship is a theory of history.
Carlyle was in the habit of continually rethinking this issue; in 1830, he hinted
that history is an imp ossible discip line, for there is no event that is not the o
sp ring of all p rior events, and the p artial but indisp ensable cause of all future
events, and therefore, "Narrative is linear, Action is
solid." In 1833, he declared that universal history is a Divine Scrip ture? which
all men must decip her and write, and in which they are written. A year later, in
Sartor Resartus, he re-?Leon Bloy develop ed this conjecture in the Kabbalistic
sense. See, for examp le, the second p art of his autobiograp hical novel Le
Desesp en!.414 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp eated that universal history is a gosp el, and
added, in the chap ter entitled "Center of Indifference;' that G reat Men are the
true sacred texts and that "your numerous talented men and your innumerable
untalented men" are mere commentaries, glosses, annotations, Targums and sermons.
Although the form of this book is at times of an almost baroque com- p lexity, the
hyp othesis it esp ouses is very simp le. The rst p aragrap h of the first lecture
states it lly and vigorously. Here are the words:Universal History, the history of
what man has accomp lished in this world, is at bottom the History of the G reat Men
who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers,
p at- terns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of man
contrived to do or to attain.A subsequent p aragrap h abbreviates this to "The
History of the World was the Biograp hy of G reat Men." For determinists, the hero
is, above all, a consequence; for Carlyle, he is a cause.Herbert Sp encer observes
that although Carlyle believed he had ab- jured the faith of his fathers, his
concep ts of the world, man, and ethics p rove he never ceased to be a rigid
Calvinist. His dark p essimism, his doctrine of the select few (the heroes) and
the almost in nite multitudes of the damned (the rabble) are an obvious
Presbyterian legacy, though he once declared during an argument that the
immortality of the soul is "old Jewish rags" and, in an 1847 letter, that the faith
of Christ has degenerated into a vile, cloying religion of cowards.More imp ortant
than Carlyle's religion is his p olitical theory. His contemp oraries did not
understand it, but it can now be summed up in a single household word: Nazism. This
was substantiated by Bertrand Russell in his study The Ancestry of Fascism (1935)
and by Chesterton in The End of the Armistice (1940). Chesterton's lucid p ages
sp eak of the astonishment and even stup efaction p roduced in him by his first
contact with Nazism, a new doctrine that brought back touching childhood memories.
Writes G . K. C.:That in my normal journey towards the grave this sudden
reap p earance of all that was bad and barbarous and stup id and ignorant in Carlyle,
without a touch of what was really quaint and humorous in him, should suddenly
start up like a sp ecter in my p ath strikes me as something quite incredible. It
is as incredible as seeing Prince Albert come down from the Albert Memorial and
walk across Kensington G ardens.PROLOG UES 415There is an amp le sup p ly of texts to
p rove it: Nazism (insofar as it is not merely the exp ression of certain racial
vanities we all darkly p ossess, esp e- cially the blockheads and thugs among us) is
a reedition of the wraths of the Scottish Carlyle, who, in 1843, wrote that
democracy is the desp air of not nding heroes to lead us. In 1870, he celebrated
the victory of "noble, p a- tient, deep , p ious and solid G ermany" over "vap ouring,
vainglorious, gesticu- lating, quarrelsome, restless and over-sensitive France." He
p raised the Middle Ages, denounced p arliamentary windbags, and defended the memory
of the god Thor, William the Bastard, Knox, Cromwell, Frederick II, the taciturn
Dr. Francia, and Nap oleon; he was p leased that every community had its barracks and
its jail; he yearned for a world that was not "chaos equip p ed with ballot urns"; he
thought about hatred; he thought about the death p enalty; he abhorred the abolition
of slavery; he p rop osed that statues- "horrendous bronze solecisms"-be converted
into use l bronze bathtubs; he declared that a tortured Jew is p referable to a
millionaire Jew; he said that any society that is neither dead nor rushing toward
death is a hierarchy; he defended Bismarck, and venerated, and may have invented,
the G ermanic Race. Those who feel in need of further p ronouncements by Carlyle-!
have barely begun to glean them here-may examine Past and Present (1843) and the
tumultuous Latter-Day Pamp hlets of the year 1850. In the p resent book they abound,
p articularly in the nal lecture, which, with arguments that are worthy of a South
American dictator, defends the dissolution of the English Parliament by
Cromwell's musketeers.The concep ts I have just detailed are not illogical. Once the
hero's divine mission has been p ostulated, it is inevitable that we deem him (and
that he deem himself) free of human obligation, like Dostoevsky's most famous
p rotagonist, like Kierkegaard's Abraham. It is also inevitable that any p olitical
adventurer will consider himself a hero and will reason that his own excesses are
reliable p roof of that.In the rst book of the Pharsalia, Lucan has engraved this
sharp line: "Victrix causa diisp lacuit, sed victa Catoni" [The victor's cause was
p leasing to the gods, but that of the vanquished, to Cato] , which p osits that a man
can be right against the universe. For Carlyle, on the contrary, history is
conflated with justice. Those who deserve victory will triump h: a p rincip le that
reveals to students of history that Nap oleon's cause was irrep roachable until the
morning of Waterloo, and unjust and hateful by ten o'clock thatnight.Such
corroborations do not invalidate Carlyle's sincerity. No one hasfelt as strongly as
he did that this world is unreal (unreal as a nightmare,416 JORG E LUIS BORG ESand as
ghastly). From this general p hantasmality, he salvages one thing: work. Not its
result, which is mere vanity, mere image, but its execution. He writes that the
works of mankind are transitory, small and insigni cant in themselves; only the
worker and the sp irit that inhabits him have meaning.A little over a hundred years
ago, Carlyle believed he p erceived the disintegration of an outmoded world taking
p lace around him, and he saw no other remedy than the abolition of all p arliaments
and the unconditional surrender of p ower to strong, silent men.2 Russia, G ermany
and Italy have drunk the bene ts of this universal p anacea to the dregs; the
results are servility, fear, brutality, mental indigence, and treachery.Much has
been said of the influence of Jean-Paul Richter on Carlyle, who rendered Richter's
Das Leben des Quintus Fixlein into English; no one, however distracted, could
p ossibly con se a single p age with the translator's original work. Both are
labyrinthine, but Richter is labyrinthine out of sentimentalism, languor,
sensuality; Carlyle, because p assion belabors him.In August 1833, the youthful
Emerson visited the Carlyles in the solitudes of Craigenp uttock. (That same a
ernoon, Carlyle p ondered G ibbon's history and called it the sp lendid bridge between
the ancient world and the new.) In 1847, Emerson returned to England and gave the
lectures that form Rep resentative Men, whose outline is identical to that of
Carlyle's series. I susp ect that Emerson cultivated this formal likeness to make
the essential di erences stand out all the more.Heroes, for Carlyle, are
intractable demigods who-with some slight military frankness and foul language-rule
a subaltern humanity; Emer- son, on the contrary, venerates them as sp lendid
examp les of the p ossibilities that exist in every man. Pindar, for him, is p roof
of my p oetic faculties; Swedenborg or Plotinus, of my cap acity for ecstasy. "In
every work of genius," he writes, "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they
come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." In another essay he observes:
"It could be said that a single p erson has written all the books in the world; such
central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single, all-knowing
master." And in another: ''An everlasting Now reigns in Nature, which hangs the
same roses on our bushes which charmed the Roman and the Chaldean in their hanging-
gardens."2Tennyson intersp ersed this yearning for a F hrer in some of his p oems;
for examp le, in the h stanza of the tenth p art of Maud: "One still strong man
in a blatant land . . ."PROLOG UES 417The foregoing lines will su ce to establish
the fantastic p hilosop hy p rofessed by Emerson: monism. Our destiny is tragic
because we are, irrep arably, individuals, restricted by time and by sp ace; there
is nothing, consequently, more favorable than a faith that eliminates circumstances
and declares that every man is all men and that there is no one who is not the
universe. Those who p rofess such a doctrine are generally unfortunate or mediocre,
avid to annul themselves in the cosmos; desp ite a p ulmonary disorder, Emerson was
instinctively hap p y. He encouraged Whitman and Thoreau; he was a great intellectual
p oet, a skilled maker of ap horisms, a man who delighted in the varieties of being,
a generous and sensitive reader of the Celts and the G reeks, the Alexandrians and
the Persians.The Latinists nicknamed Solinus "Pliny's monkey"; toward 1873, the
p oet Swinburne believed himself to have been injured by Emerson, and sent him a
letter which includes these curious words, and others I do not wish to recall:
"Y ou, sir, are a gap -toothed and hoary-headed ap e, carried at rst into notice on
the shoulder of Carlyle." In 1897, G roussac disp ensed with the zoological simile
but not with the imp utation:As for the transcendental and symbolic Emerson, it is
well known that he was a sort of American Carlyle, without the Scotchman's acute
style or p rodigious historic vision. Carlyle o en becomes obscure by reason of his
p rofundity, but I fear that at times Emerson ap p ears p rofound by reason of his
obscurity; in any case, he was never able to shake off the fascination that he who
was exercised over he who
could have been; and only the ingenuous vanity of his countrymen could p lace the
modest discip le on the same level as the master, the discip le who to the end, in
that master's regard, retained something of the resp ectful attitude of Eckermann
before G oethe.With or without the baboon, both accusations are mistaken; Emerson
and Carlyle have almost no other trait in common than their enmity for the
eighteenth century. Carlyle was a romantic writer, of p lebeian vices and virtues;
Emerson, a classical writer and a gentleman.In an otherwise unsatisfactory article
in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Paul Elmer More considers him "the
outstanding g- ure in American letters"; p reviously, Nietzsche had written: "To no
other book have I felt as close as to the books of Emerson; I do not have the right
to p raise them."418 JORG E LUIS BORG ESThrough time, through history, Whitman and
Poe, as inventors, as the founders of sects, have overshadowed Emerson's glory;
line by line, they are greatly inferior to him.{1949} {EA} Ray Bradbury, The
Martian ChroniclesIn the second century of our era, Lucian of Samosata comp osed a
True His- tory that includes, among other marvels, a descrip tion of the Selenites,
who (according to the truth l historian) card and sp in metals and glass, remove and
rep lace their eyes, and drink air-juice or squeezed air; at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto imagined a hero who discovers on the moon all
that has been lost on earth, the tears and sighs of lovers, the time wasted on
games, the fruitless attemp ts and the un l lled desires; in the seventeenth
century, Kep ler wrote a Somnium Astronomicum that p ur- p orts to be a transcrip tion
of a book read in a dream, whose p ages reveal at great length the ap p earance and
habits of the lunar snakes, which take shelter in deep caves during the heat of
the day and venture out at nightfall. Be- tween the rst and the second of these
imaginary voyages there is one thousand three hundred years, and between the second
and the third a hundred; the first two are, nevertheless, free and cap ricious
inventions, and the third is dulled by an urge for verisimilitude. The reason is
clear. For Lucian and Ariosto, a trip to the moon was a symbol or archetyp e of the
imp ossible, as a black swan was for the former; for Kep ler, it was a p ossibility,
as it is for us. Did not John Wilkins, inventor of a universal language, p ublish at
that time his A Discovery ofa New World; or, A Discourse Tending to Prove,that 'tis
Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in the Moon: with a Discourse
Concerning the Probability ofa Passage Thither? In Aulus G ellius' Attic Nights we
read that Archytas the Pythagorean constructed a wooden dove that could fly through
the air; Wilkins p redicted that a vehicle with a similar mechanism or shap e would
one day take us to the moon.In its character of anticip ating a p ossible or p robable
ture, the Som- nium Astronomicum p refigures, if I am not mistaken, the new
narrative genre which the Americans of the North call "science- ction" or "scienti
c- tion;' of which a notable examp le is these Chronicles. Its subject is the con-
quest and colonization of the p lanet Mars. This arduous enterp rise by the men of
the future seems destined for its time, but Ray Bradbury has chosenPROLOG UES 419to
emp loy (without, p erhap s, attemp ting to do so, and through the secret insp iration
of his genius) an elegiac tone. The Martians, who at the beginning of the book
are terri ing, become worthy of p ity as they are annihilated. Mankind triump hs,
and the author takes no delight in their victory. He announces with sadness and
disap p ointment the future exp ansion of the human race to the red p lanet-which his
p rop hecy reveals to us is a desert of shi ing blue sands, with ruins of grid-
p atterned cities and yellow sunsets and ancient boats for traveling over the sand.
Other authors stamp a future date, and we don't believe them, for we know that it
is merely a literary convention; Bradbury writes "2004," and we feel the
gravitation, the fatigue, the vast and shifting accumulation of the p ast-
Shakesp eare's "dark backward and abysm of Time." As the Renais- sance observed,
through the words of G iordano Bruno and Bacon, we are the true ancients, not the
p eop le of G enesis or Homer.What has this man from Illinois created-! ask myself,
closing the p ages of his book-that his ep isodes of the conquest of another p lanet
ll me with such terror and solitude?How can these fantasies move me, and in such an
intimate manner? All literature (I would dare to answer) is symbolic; there are a
few fundamental exp eriences, and it is unimp ortant whether a writer, in
transmitting them, makes use of the "fantastic" or the "real," Macbeth or
Raskolnikov, the invasion of Belgium in August 1914 or an invasion of Mars. What
does it matter if it this is a novel, or novelty, of science ction? In this
outwardly fantastic book, Bradbury has set out the long emp ty Sundays, the American
tedium, and his own solitude, as Sinclair Lewis did in Main Street.Perhap s "The
Third Exp edition" is the most alarming story in this volume. Its horror ( I
susp ect) is metap hysical; the uncertain identity of Cap - tain John Black's guests
disturbingly insinuates that we too do not know who we are, nor what we look like
in the eyes of G od. I would also like to note the ep isode entitled "The Martian,"
which includes a moving variation on the myth of Proteus.Around 1909 I read, with
fascination and distress, in the dim light of a huge house that no longer exists,
Wells' The First Men on the Moon. Thanks to these Chronicles, though different in
concep tion and execution, I was able, in the last days of the autumn of 1954, to
relive that delicious terror.[1955} [EW} LECTURESThe Argentine Writer and TraditionI
would like to exp ress and justi certain skep tical p rop ositions concerning the
p roblem of the Argentine writer and tradition. My skep ticism is not related to
the di culty or imp ossibility of resolving the p roblem, but to its very existence.
I think we are faced with a rhetorical theme, suitable for p a- thetic elaboration,
rather than a true cerebral dif culty; it is, to my mind, an ap p earance, a
simulacrum, a p seudo-p roblem.Before examining it, I would like to consider its
standard exp ressions and solutions. I will start with a solution that has become
almost instinctive and p resents itself without benefit of any rationale: the one
which a rms that the Argentine literary tradition already exists in gauchesco
p oetry. Con- sequently, the lexicon, techniques, and subject matter of gauchesco
p oetry should enlighten the contemp orary writer, and are a p oint of dep arture and
p erhap s an archetyp e. This is the most common solution, and for that reason I
intend to examine it at some length.It was p rop osed by Lugones in El p ayador; there
we read that we Argen- tines p ossess a classic p oem, Martin Fierro, and that this
p oem should be for us what the Homeric p oems were for the G reeks. It seems di cult
to contradict this op inion without detriment to Martin Fierro. I believe that
Martin Fierro is the most lasting work we Argentines have written; I also be-
lieve, with equal intensity, that we cannot take Martin Fierro to be, as has
sometimes been said, our Bible, our canonical book.Ricardo Rojas, who has also
recommended the canonization of Martin Fierro, has written a p age, in his Historia
de la literatura argentina, that ap - p ears to be almost a p latitude, but is quite
shrewd.Rojas studies the p oetry of the gauchescos-the p oetry of Hidalgo, As-
casubi, Estanislao del Camp o, and Jose Hernandez-and nds its origins inLECTURES
421the p oetry of the rural imp rovisational singers known as p ayadores, that is, the
sp ontaneous p oetry of the gauchos themselves. He p oints out that the meter of this
p op ular p oetry is octosyllabic, the same meter used by the authors of gauchesco
p oetry, and he concludes by considering the p oetry of the gauchescos to be a
continuation or magni cation of the p oetry of the p ayadores.I susp ect that this
claim is based on a serious mistake; we might also call it a clever mistake, for it
is clear that Rojas, in order to give p op ular roots to the p oetry of the
gauchescos, which begins with Hidalgo and culminates with Hernandez, p resents it as
a continuation or derivation of the p oetry of the gauchos; therefore Bartolome
Hidalgo is not the Homer of this p oetry, as Mitre said, but only a link in the
sequence.Ricardo Rojas makes a p ayador of Hidalgo; nevertheless, according to the
same Historia de la literatura argentina, this sup p osed p ayador began by comp osing
lines of eleven syllables, a meter that is by its very nature barred to p ayadores,
who do not p erceive its harmony, just as Sp anish readers did not p erceive the
harmony of the hendecasyllabic line when G arcilaso im- p orted it from Italy.There
is, to my mind, a fundamental difference between the p oetry of the gauchos and
gauchesco p oetry. One need only comp are any collection of p op ular p oetry with
Martin Fierro, Paulino Lucero, or the Fausto, to become aware of this difference,
which exists equally in the lexicon and in the intent of the p oets. The p op ular
p oets of the countryside and the outskirts of the city versi general themes: the
p ain of love and absence, the sorrow of love, and they do so in a lexicon that is
equally general; the gauchesco p oets, on the contrary, cultivate a deliberately
p op ular language that the p op ular p o- ets do not even attemp t. I do not mean that
the idiom of the p op ular p oets is a correct Sp anish, I mean that whatever may be
incorrect in it results from ignorance. In the gauchesco p oets, on the contrary,
there is a quest for native words, a p ro sion of local color. The p roof is this: a
Colombian, a Mexican, or a Sp aniard can immediately understand the p oems of the
p ayadores-the
gauchos-but needs a glossary in order to reach even an ap p roximate understanding
of Estanislao del Camp o or Ascasubi. l of this can be abbreviated as follows:
gauchesco p oetry, which has p roduced-I hasten to rep eat-admirable works, is as arti
cial as any other literary genre. The rst gauchesco comp ositions, the ballads of
Bartolome Hidalgo, attemp t to p resent themselves in accordance with the gaucho, as
if sp oken by gauchos, so that the reader will read them with a gaucho intonation.
Nothing could be further from p op ular p oetry. en they versi , the422 JORG E LUIS
BORG ESp eop le-and I have observed this not only among the p ayadores of the
countryside, but also in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires-do so in the conviction
that they are engaging in something imp ortant; therefore they instinctively reject
p op ular words and seek out high-sounding words and turns of p hrase. In all
likelihood, gauchesco p oetry has influenced the p ayadores by now, so that they,
too, abound in Argentinisms, but initially this was not the case, and we have
evidence of that (evidence no one has noted) in Martin Fierro.Martin Fierro is
written in a gauchesco-accented Sp anish, and for a long while the p oem does not
allow us to forget that the p erson singing it is a gaucho; it abounds in
comp arisons taken from life in the grasslands; and yet there is a famous p assage in
which the author forgets this concern with local color and writes in a general
Sp anish, sp eaking not of vernacular subjects but of great, abstract subjects:
time, sp ace, the sea, the night. I am referring to the p ayada, the imp rovised
musical face-o between Martin Fierro and El Moreno that occup ies the end of the
second p art. It is as if Hernandez himself had wished to demonstrate the di erence
between his gauchesco p oetry and the genuine p oetry of the gauchos. When the two
gauchos, Fierro and El Moreno, start singing, they forget all gauchesco a ec-
tation and address p hilosop hical issues. I have been able to corroborate this by
listening to p ayadores in the surroundings of Buenos Aires; they reject the idea of
versi ing in street slang, in orillero and lunfardo, and try to ex- p ress
themselves correctly. Of course they fail, but their aim is to make of p oetry
something high, something distinguished, we might say with a smile.The idea that
Argentine p oetry must abound in Argentine di erential traits and in Argentine local
color seems to me to be a mistake. If we ask which book is more Argentine, Martin
Fierro or the sonnets in La urna by Enrique Banchs, there is no reason to say that
the former is more Argentine. It will be said that in Banchs' La urna there are
neither Argentine landscap es nor Argentine top ograp hy nor Argentine botany nor
Argentine zoology; nevertheless, there are other sp ecifically Argentine conditions
in La urna.I can recall two lines of La urna that seem to have been written ex-
p ressly to p revent anyone from saying that this is an Argentine book; the lines
are:El sol en los tejadosy en las ventanas brilla. Ruise ores quieren decir que
estan enamorados.LECTURES 423[The sun glints on the t ed roofs/and on the windows.
Nightingales/ mean to say they are in love.] A denunciation of "the sun glints on
the tiled roofs and on the windows" seems inevitable here. Enrique Banchs wrote
these lines in a house on the edge of Buenos Aires, and on the edges of Buenos
Aires there are no tiled roofs, there are flat, terrace roofs; "nightingales mean
to say they are in love"; the nightingale is not so much a real bird as a bird of
literature, of the G reek and G ermanic tradition. Nevertheless, I would maintain
that in the use of these conventional images, in these incongruous tiled roofs and
nightingales, although neither the architecture nor the ornithology is Ar- gentine,
there is the Argentine reserve, the Argentine reticence; the fact that Banchs, in
sp eaking of a great sorrow that overwhelmed him, of a woman who le him and le the
world emp ty for him, makes use of conventional, foreign imagery such as tiled roofs
and nightingales, is signi cant: signi - cant of a reserve, wariness, and reticence
that are Argentine, signi cant of the di culty we have in con ding, in being
intimate.Furthermore, I do not know if it needs to be said that the idea that a
literature must de ne itself by the differential traits of the country that p ro-
duces it is a relatively new one, and the idea that writers must seek out subjects
local to their countries is also new and arbitrary. Without going back any rther,
I think Racine would not have begun to understand anyone who would deny him his
right to the title of French p oet for having sought out G reek and Latin subjects. I
think Shakesp eare would have been astonished if anyone had tried to limit him to
English subjects, and if anyone had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no
right to write Hamlet, with its Scandinavian subject matter, or Macbeth, on a
Scottish theme. The Argentine cult of local color is a recent Europ ean cult that
nationalists should reject as a foreign imp ort.A few days ago, I discovered a
curious con rmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does
disp ense with local color; I found this con rmation in G ibbon's Decline and Fall
ofthe Roman Emp ire. G ibbon observes that in the Arab book p ar excellence, the
Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there were ever any doubt as to the
authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would su ce to p rove that it is
Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know
that camels were p articularly Arab; they were, for him, a p art of reality, and he
had no reason to single them out, while the rst thing a forger, a tourist, or an
Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels,424 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwhole
caravans of camels on every p age; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; he
knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like
Mohammed; we can believe in the p ossibility of being Argentine without abounding
in local color.Permit me to con de something, just a small thing. For many years,
in books now fortunately forgotten, I tried to comp ose the flavor, the essence, of
the outskirts of Buenos Aires; naturally I abounded in local words such as
cuchilleros, milonga, tap ia, and others, and in such manner I wrote those
forgettable and forgotten books; then, about a year ago, I wrote a story called
"Death and the Comp ass," which is a kind of nightmare, a nightmare in which
elements of Buenos Aires ap p ear, deformed by the horror of the nightmare; and in
that story, when I think of the Paseo Colon, I call it Rue de Toulon; when I think
of the quintas of Adrogue, I call them Triste-le- Roy; a er the story was
p ublished, my friends told me that at last they had found the flavor of the
outskirts of Buenos Aires in my writing. Precisely because I had not abandoned
myself to the dream, I was able to achieve, after so many years, what I once
sought in vain.Now I wish to sp eak of a justly illustrious work that the
nationalists o en invoke. I refer to Don Segundo Sombra by G iraldes. The
nationalists tell us that Don Segundo Sombra is the characteristic national book;
but if we comp are Don Segundo Sombra to the works of the gauchesco tradition, the
rst things we note are di erences. Don Segundo Sombra abounds in a typ e of metap hor
that has nothing to do with the sp eech of the countryside and everything to do with
the metap hors of the Montmartre salons of that p eriod. As for the p lot, the story,
it is easy to discern the influence of Kip ling's Kim, which is set in India and
was, in its turn, written under the in uence of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the
ep ic of the Mississip p i. In making this observation, I do not wish to devalue Don
Segundo Sombra; on the contrary, I wish to emp hasize that in order for us to have
this book it was necessary for G iiiraldes to recall the p oetic technique of the
French salons of his time, and the work of Kip ling, which he had read manyyears
before; which is to say that Kip ling and Mark Twain and the metap hors of the
French p oets were necessary to this Argentine book, to this book which is, I
rep eat, no less Argentine for having accep ted those influences.I wish to note
another contradiction: the nationalists p retend to venerate the cap acities of the
Argentine mind but wish to limit the p oetic exercise of that mind to a few humble
local themes, as if we Argentines could only sp eak of neighborhoods and ranches and
not of the universe.Let us p ass on to another solution. It is said that there is a
tradition ofLECTURES 425which we Argentine writers must avail ourselves, and that
tradition is the literature of Sp ain. This second p iece of advice is, of course, a
bit less narrow than the rst, but it also tends to restrict us; many objections
can be made to it, but two will su ce. The rst is this: Argentine history can un-
equivocally be de ned as a desire to move away from Sp ain, as a willed dis- tancing
from Sp ain. The second objection is that, among us, the p leasure of Sp anish
literature, a p leasure I p ersonally share in, is usually an acquired taste; I have
o en loaned French and English works to p eop le without any p articular literary
erudition, and those books were enjoyed immediately, without e ort. However, when I
have suggested that my friends read Sp anish books, I have found that these books
were di cult for them to enjoy in the absence of sp ecial training; I therefore
believe that the fact that certain illustrious Argentine writers write like
Sp aniards is not so much a testimony to some inherited cap acity as it is evidence
of Argentine versatility.I now arrive at a third op inion on Argentine writers and
tradition, one that I read not long ago and that greatly astonished me. This is the
op inion that we Argentines are cut o
from the p ast; that there has been some sort of rup ture between ourselves and
Europ e. According to this singular p oint of view, we Argentines are as if in the
rst days of creation; our search for Europ ean subject matters and techniques is an
illusion, an error; we must understand that we are essentially alone, and cannot
p lay at being Europ ean.This op inion strikes me as unfounded. I understand why many
p eop le accep t it: such a declaration of our solitude, our p erdition, and our p rimi-
tive character has, like existentialism, the charms of p oignancy. Many p eop le may
accep t this op inion because, having done so, they will feel themselves to be alone,
disconsolate, and in some way, interesting. Nevertheless, I have observed that in
our country, p recisely because it is a new country, there is a strong feeling for
time. Everything that has hap p ened in Europ e, the dramatic events there in recent
years, has resonated deep ly here. The fact that a given individual was on the side
of Franco or the Rep ublic during the Sp anish Civil War, or was on the side of the
Nazis or the Allies, was in many cases the cause of very serious disp utes and
estrangements. This would not hap - p en if we were detached from Europ e. As for
Argentine history, I think we all feel it deep ly; and it is only natural that we
should, because that history is very close to us, in chronology and in the blood;
the names, the battles of the civil wars, the war of indep endence, all of it is, in
time and in family traditions, quite near.What is Argentine tradition? I believe
that this question p oses no426 JORG E LUIS BORG ESp roblem and can easily be answered.
I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe
that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the
inhabitants of one Western nation or another may have. Here I remember an essay
by Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the intellectual
p reeminence of Jews in Western culture. He wonders if this p reeminence authorizes
us to p osit an innate Jewish sup eriority and answers that it does not; he says that
Jews are p rominent in Western culture because they act within that culture and at
the same time do not feel bound to it by any sp ecial devotion; therefore, he says,
it will always be easier for a Jew than for a non-Jew to make innovations in
Western culture. We can say the same of the Irish in English culture. Where the
Irish are concerned, we have no reason to sup p ose that the p rofusion of Irish names
in British literature and p hilosop hy is due to any social p reeminence, because
many of these illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of
Englishmen, men with no Celtic blood; nevertheless, the fact of feeling
themselves to be Irish, to be di erent, was enough to enable them to make
innovations in English culture. I believe that Argen- tines, and South Americans in
general, are in an analogous situation; we can take on all the Europ ean subjects,
take them on without sup erstition and with an irreverence that can have, and
already has had, fortunate consequences.This does not mean that all Argentine
exp eriments are equally felicitous; I believe that this p roblem of the Argentine
and tradition is simp ly a contemp orary and fleeting version of the eternal p roblem
of determinism. If I am going to touch this table with one of my hands, and I ask
myself: "Will I touch it with the le hand or the right?" and I touch it with the
right hand, the determinists will say that I could not have done otherwise and that
the whole p rior history of the universe forced me to touch the table with my right
hand, and that touching it with my le hand would have been a miracle. Y et if I had
touched it with my le hand, they would have told me the same thing: that I was
forced to touch it with that hand. The same occurs with literary subjects and
techniques. Everything we Argentine writers do felicitously will belong to
Argentine tradition, in the same way that the use of Italian subjects belongs to
the tradition of England through the work of Chaucer and Shakesp eare.I believe,
moreover, that all the foregoing discussions of the aims of literary creation are
based on the error of sup p osing that intentions and p lans matter much. Take, for
examp le, the case of Kip ling: Kip ling dedicated his life to writing in accordance
with a given set of p olitical ideals, he wanted toLECTURES 427make his work a tool
for p rop aganda, and nevertheless, at the end of his life he had to confess that the
true essence of a writer's work is usually unknown by that writer; and he
remembered the case of Swi , who while writing G ulliver's Travels wanted to raise
an indictment against mankind and instead le behind a children's book. Plato said
that p oets are the amanuenses of a god who moves them against their will, against
their intentions, as the magnet moves a series of iron rings.Therefore I rep eat
that we must not be afraid; we must believe that the universe is our birthright and
try out every subject; we cannot con ne ourselves to what is Argentine in order
to be Argentine because either it is our inevitable destiny to be Argentine, in
which case we will be Argentine whatever we do, or being Argentine is a mere
affectation, a mask.I believe that if we lose ourselves in the voluntary dream
called artistic creation, we will be Argentine and we will be, as well, good or
adequate writers.[1951 ] [EA ] G erman Literature in the Age of BachIn De Quincey's
famous essay on murder considered as one of the ne arts, there is a reference to a
book about Iceland. That book, written by a Dutch traveler, has a chap ter which has
become famous in English literature and was mentioned by Chesterton. It is a
chap ter entitled "On the Snakes in Ice- land," and it is brief and to the p oint, as
it consists of a single sentence: "Snakes in Iceland; there aren't any."The task
that I will undertake today is a descrip tion of G erman literature in the age of
Bach. A er some investigation, I was temp ted to imitate the author of that book on
Iceland and say: "Literature in the age of Bach; there wasn't any." But such
brevity strikes me as contemp tuous, a lack of civility. Moreover, it would be
unjust, as it concerns an era that p roduced so many didactic p oems in imitation of
Pop e, so many fables in imitation of La Fontaine, so many ep ics in imitation of
Milton. To this we may add the literary societies that flourished in a truly
unusual manner, and all the p olemics that were launched with a p assion that is
absent from the literature of our own time.There are two distinct criteria for
literature. There is the hedonistic, that of p leasure, which is the criterion of
readers; from this p oint of view,428 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthe age of Bach was
literarily quite p oor. Then there is the other criterion, that of the history of
literature, which is much more hosp itable than literature itself; from that p oint
of view, it was an imp ortant time, for it set the stage for the p eriod to come: the
Enlightenment and later the classical age of G erman literature, the richest it has
had and one of the richest in all of literature: the age of G oethe, Holderlin,
Navalis, Heine, and so many others.This p henomenon of a p oor p eriod in G erman
literature is not unique. All the historians have noted that G erman literature is
not successive, but rather p eriodic, intermittent. There have been ages of sp lendor
and, between them, ages of almost nothing, of obscurity and inertia.Exp lanations
have been sought for this p henomenon. As far as I know, there are three. The rst
is p olitical. It is said that G ermany, which became a kind of camp ground for all
the armies of Europ e, was p eriodically invaded and destroyed. (As it was again not
long ago.) d that the eclip ses of G erman literature corresp onded to these
annihilations. This exp lanation is a good one, but I don't think it is su cient.
There is a second exp lanation, the one p referred by the histories of G erman
literature written by G ermans. These say that the obscure p eriods are the ones in
which the true G erman sp irit has not been able to take flight, because the age was
dedicated to the imitation of foreign models. This is true, yet one might make two
observations against this exp lanation. First, when a country has a strong sp irit,
foreign and exotic in uences do not de- bilitate that sp irit, they strengthen it.
This is the case in the Baroque p eriod, the era before that of Bach. (In G ermany
they call the seventeenth the "Baroque century.") In that century, which was
brilliant in that country, foreign influences p redominated, but not in a way that
op p ressed the G erman sp irit. They were assimilated and used by it.In p assing, I'd
like to note-because it is esp ecially interesting to us- that the influence that
p redominated G erman literature in the seventeenth century was Sp anish. There is the
influence of Quevedo's Sue os on Michael Moscherosch, the greatest G erman satirist
of that p eriod, who wrote a book called Marvelous and True Visions. The author says
his book p ortrays all the acts of humankind, its true colors of hyp ocrisy,
mendacity, and vanity. This was clearly influenced by Quevedo, who gave life to a
G erman book.Another, more famous case, is that of G rimmelshausen, who knew the
Sp anish p icaresque novels, a fragmentary translation of the Quixote, Cer- vantes'
Rinconete y Cortadillo, and a G erman version of Mateo Aleman's G uzman de Alfarache,
and attemp ted to ap p ly their techniques to the storyLECTURES 429of a G erman soldier
in the Thirty Y ears' War called Simp licissimus. That p roject was, of course, a
success.An observation that is quite easy to make about the Sp anish p icaresque
novel is the limitation of its subjects. It does not attemp t to embrace all the
riches of the miserable and daily life of Sp ain.
It deals, rather, with p etty escap ades, often among servants.If we comp are a
book like Quevedo's El Busc6n with the ballads by the same author, lled as they
are with p rostitutes, ruf ans, murderers, and thieves, we see that there is a
criminal world, a world of outlaws that is far richer in the ballads than in the
p icaresque novel.Another di erence between the Sp anish model and the G erman imita-
tion: the Sp anish p icaresque novel was written with a moral, satirical intent. In
contrast, G rimmelshausen's Simp licissimus, p articularly in the rst books, seems to
have no other aim than to reflect, like a vast mirror, all of the terrible life of
G ermany during the Thirty Y ears' War. Later, because the book was successful,
G rimmelshausen kep t adding chap ters. In the nal ones something occurs that is
typ ical of the G erman mind: the work dri s away from concrete facts and turns into
an allegory. The hero of so many bloody adventures becomes a hermit, rst in the
Black Forest and later on an island. That ending, of a hero on an island, is
imp ortant in G erman literature, for it p re gures a genre of books that would become
p op ular in the eighteenth century, in the age of Bach. They were called
Robinsonaden, imitations of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.The G ermans were very moved by
Defoe's novel, and p roduced countless imitations. In the end, they were so
enthusiastic about this idea of a solitary man on an island that they destroyed the
p athos of the idea, and began writing novels in which there were thirty or y
simultaneous Robin- sons; novels that were not the stories of the solitude or
p atience of a single man, but rather of colonial emp ires or p olitical utop ias.I now
return to the p roblem I noted at the beginning: that of the eras of sterility and
obscurity which may be seen p eriodically in G erman literature. I believe that,
besides the p olitical circumstances and the influence of foreign literatures
(which, contrary to the op inion of p atriotic critics, are not always male cent),
there is a third reason, which strikes me as the most likely of all, which does not
exclude the others, and which is p erhap s ndamental. I believe that the reason
for those obscure p eriods in G erman literature is in the G erman character itself.
G ermans are incap able of acting sp ontaneously and always need a justi cation for
what they are going to do.430 JORG E LUIS BORG ESThey need to see themselves in the
third p erson, and moreover to see themselves magni ed before they act.The p roof
of this is that the G ermans for a long time were not, as they have recently become,
a p eop le of action but rather a nation of dreamers. I recall that famous ep igram by
Heine, where he says that G od rewarded the French with dominion over the land, the
English with dominion over the sea, and the G ermans with dominion over the clouds.
And I also recall a famous p oem by Holderlin, entitled "To the G ermans." In it,
Holderlin tells his comp atriots not to mock the boy who rides with sp urs and a whip
on a wooden horse, because they are like that boy: p oor in deeds and rich in
thoughts. Then he asks himself if lightning does not come from the clouds, or the
golden fruit from the dark leaf, and if the silence of the G erman p eo- p le is not
the solemnity that p recedes the festival and the tremor that an-nounces the
p resence of the god.Besides these literary examp les, I believe we can all recall
examp lesfrom G erman p olitics. I don't know if you will recall that, at the
beginning of the 1914 war, a G erman chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, had to justify
their failure to honor their commitment to neutrality. Any other p olitician in any
other p art of the world would have invented some sop hism to defend himself. In
contrast, Bethmann Hollweg, to justi the G erman attack, which was clearly an act
of disloyalty, constructed a theory of loyalty, and said in his sp eech that they
did not have to obey a treaty because a treaty was nothing but a p iece of p ap er. We
have seen this even more exaggerated in Nazism. It was not enough for the G ermans
to be cruel; they thought it necessary to construct a theory p rior to their
cruelty, a justification of cruelty as a p ostulated ethic.I believe this may
exp lain the obscure p eriods in G erman literature. They are p eriods of
p rep aration, in which the G erman sp irit is making a decision.I have o en cited
Valery's p roject: to write a history of literature without p rop er names. A
history that would p resent all the books of the world as though they were written
by a single p erson, by the universal sp irit. Let us accep t Valery's ction and
imagine that all of G erman literature was the work of the G erman sp irit. We may
then sup p ose that the era of the life of Bach-that is, from 1675 to 1750-
corresp onds to a p eriod of meditation by the G erman sp irit, which was p rep aring
itself for the sp lendid age of Holderlin, Lessing, G oethe, Novalis, and later
Heine.To sp eak of G ermany in this era, however, may lead to an error. We think of
G ermany now as a great united country, but then it was a series ofLECTURES 431small
indep endent kingdoms, p rincip alities, and duchies. At the time, G ermany was on
the outskirts of Europ e. To con rm this view, which was held by many G ermans in
this p eriod, we need only consider the cases of two illustrious gures: Leibniz
and Frederick II of Prussia.Leibniz wrote a treatise in which he attemp ted to
defend the G erman language. He urged his countrymen to cultivate their language,
and told them that a cultivated G erman would no longer be a torp id and nebulous
language, but would become like a crystal, like French. He added a few p a- triotic
considerations, and then dedicated himself, for the rest of his life, to writing in
French.Leibniz's decision to abandon his language for a foreign one is p roof of
what he really thought. He was a man of universal curiosity. It was natural that he
should be interested in the style of his own language, but at the same time, he
felt that it was a p rovincial one.We may take an even more exp licit case: that of
Frederick the G reat. Frederick o en said that no good literature could come from
G ermany. When he discovered the Nibelungenlied, he thought it childish and bar-
baric. It is well known that Frederick founded an Academy, and that the in-
dividuals who frequented that Academy all wrote in French. They were French
literati, who were resp ected with p rovincial veneration.There are other examp les of
the p rovincial nature of G erman at that time: Dr. Johnson, when he was quite old,
decided to learn a new language to see if his mind was still functioning p rop erly.
He chose Dutch. It never occurred to him to study G erman, a language as obscure and
as easily over- looked as Dutch is today.I return to the p olemics that were
launched in that p eriod. There was, among others, a celebrated one between
G ottsched and two Swiss writers, Bodmer and Breitinger. G ottsched was a writer who
wanted to be the literary dictator of his age, and he p ublished many books in
Leip zig, where he lived for a long time. The Swiss writers had translated Milton's
Paradise Lost; one had written an ep ic p oem on the Flood and the other an ep ic p oem
on Noah. They defended-in a way that was utterly without interest-the rights of the
imagination in p oetry, and aroused the ire of G ottsched, who rep resented French
taste. He p ublished a book called The Poetic Art, in which he defended the three
Aristotelian unities. It is curious to comp are G ottsched's defense with those that
were being written in other p arts of Europ e. One clearly sees the p rovincial and
bourgeois atmosp here of G ermany, and this was also noted by his Swiss adversaries.
G ottsched said that p lays must limit themselves to a unity of action432 JORG E LUIS
BORG ES(that is, they must have only one p lot), a unity of p lace (they must be set
in a single p lace), and a unity of time. Unity of time had always been inter-
p reted to mean twenty-four hours. For G ottsched, twenty-four hours was excessive,
for a very bourgeois reason. He said that, at the most, he could tolerate twelve
hours, but that they must be twelve hours of the day and not the night. Then he
added-without realizing his error-this extraordinary argument: the twenty-four
hours of the p lay cannot contain the nighttime hours because, he exp lained, at
night one must sleep . He was faith l to the bourgeois concep t that it is
inconvenient to stay up late.There was also a p oet, G unther, who is another
interesting examp le of that p eriod. He gures in all the histories of G erman
literature. His p oems are worthless, if we read them without knowing the era in
which they were written; they are only good if we comp are them to the other G erman
p oets of the time. I will read a few lines of his p oem to Christ:From outside I am
tormented by the strong tide of misfortune; from within, terri ing fearsand the ry
of all the sins.The only salvation, Christ,is my death and your p ity.This p oet is
imp ortant because he is the p oet of Pietism, the religious form of the era in which
Bach lived. It is a movement that arose within the Lutheran church, and may be
exp lained in this way: Luther had begun by defending the freedom of the Christian
individual, attacking the authority of the Church. In one of his treatises, On the
Freedom ofa Christian Man, he maintained this p aradox: the Christian man is master
of all men and of all things; and he is subject to all and to all things.Luther
translated the Bible into G erman. That translation founded modern G erman and is its
rst literary document. Luther maintained that the true strength of each man is in
himself, in his own conscience, not in the authority of the Church. On this basis,
he attacked the Pap al sale of indulgences.There is a curious Pap al doctrine that
defends the sale of indulgences. It was said and believed, in Luther's time, that
Christ and the
martyrs had accumulated an in nite number of merits, and that those merits were
greater than the ones required to save themselves. It was imagined that those
sup er-LECTURES433fluous merits from the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the
martyrs had accumulated in heaven and had formed there the thesaurus meritorum, the
"treasury of merits."It was also believed that the Sumo Ponti ce, the Pop e, held
the keys to this celestial treasury and could distribute it to the faithful. Those
who bought indulgences were buying a p art of those in nite merits hoarded in the
sky.Luther attacked this belief, which he said made no sense. He also said that to
save oneself, deeds were not necessary, only faith. What was imp ortant was that
every Christian should believe that he could be saved, and this would save him.
Later, when it triump hed, Lutheranism in turn became another church, and in G ermany
a second Pap acy, as rigid as the rst. Many religious p eop le in G ermany p rotested
against that rigidity, against its exclusively dogmatic character. They wanted to
return to a more p ersonal religion, to a direct communication between man and G od.
These were the Pietists.The most famous, the head of them all, was called Sp ener.
He began by holding meetings in his house. They were called "gatherings of p iety"
or "gatherings of p ious p ersons"; their enemies called them Pietists. What hap p ened
with the word p ietist frequently occurs with such hostile nick- names: they are
adop ted by the p eop le who are being attacked. This has hap p ened many times in
history: in England, with the "tories"; or in France, with the "cubists." The word
cubist was a joke by a hostile critic, when he saw a number of cubes on a p ainting:
"Qu'est-ce que cela? C'est du cubisme?" The word cubist was then adop ted by the
injured p arty.Sp ener p rop osed various goals. One was to form gatherings for reading
the Bible. Another-which must have seemed quite strange-was to p ractice
Christianity. This meant that every Christian should give p roof of what he was
through the rectitude of his life, the simp licity of his dress, and in his
irrep roachable conduct. Sp ener said that every Christian should consider himself a
p riest and take p art in the governing of the Church. He urged that heterodox
op inions should be tolerated and that sermons should have a less rhetorical and
more p ersonal style.The Pietist movement later disap p eared, with the arrival of a
second movement, the Enlightenment, which p retended to subject everything to
reason. But it was founded, in p art, on the earlier one.Returning to our top ic, we
reach this conclusion, this fact: Bach created his music in an era that was p oor in
literature. Poor, that is-and we should434JORG E LUIS BORG ESnot forget this
distinction-if we look to it for enduring works, but not p oor if we consider it
from the p oint of view of intellectual activity, for it was a p eriod of
discussions, p olemics, and uncertainties.This conjunction ofgreat music and a p oor,
almost worthless, literature leads us to susp ect that every age has only one
exp ression of itself, that those ages which have had their llest exp ression in one
art do not nd it in another. We then understand that it is not a p aradox but a
normal fact that the great music of Johann Sebastian Bach was contemp orary to the
p oor literature in G ermany at that time.{1953 } {EW} VIIDictations1956-1986
PROLOG UESRyunosuke Akutagawa, The Kap p aThales measured the shadow of a p yramid in
order to determine its height; Pythagoras and Plato taught the transmigration of
souls; seventy scribes, secluded on the island of Pharos, p roduced in seventy days
seventy identical translations of the Pentateuch; Virgil, in the second G eorgie,
p ondered the delicate silks embroidered by the Chinese; and in days p ast, horsemen
in the outskirts of Buenos Aires would contest the outcome of a match in the Per-
sian game of p olo. ether ap ocryp hal or true, these stories (to which one should
add, among many others, the p resence of Attila in the cantos of the Elder Edda)
mark successive stages in an intricate and secular p rocess which still continues:
the discovery of the East by the countries of the West. This p rocess, as may be
assumed, has its op p osite: the West discovered by the East. To this other side
belong the missionaries in sa ron robes that a Bud- dhist emp eror sent to
exandria, the conquest of Christian Sp ain by Islam, and the enchanting and
sometimes terri ing books of Akutagawa.To strictly differentiate the Eastern and
Western elements in Akuta- gawa's work is p erhap s imp ossible; in any event, the
terms are not op p o- sites, inasmuch as Christianity, which is of Semitic origin,
p redominates in the West. Nevertheless, I would hazard to say that Akutagawa's
subjects and sentiments are Eastern, but that some of his rhetorical structures are
Euro- p ean. Thus, in Kesa and Morita and Rashomon, we hear different versions of
the same tale, retold by the various p rotagonists, the same technique used by
Robert Browning in The Ring and the Book. On the other hand, a certain restrained
sorrow, a certain p reference for the visual, a certain lightness of stroke, seem to
me, desp ite the inevitable imp erfections of any translation, essentially Jap anese.
Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in his style, which is always
crystal clear.JORG E LUIS BORG ES Akutagawa studied English, French, and G erman
literature; the subject of his doctoral dissertation was William Morris; and it is
evident that he knew Schop enhauer, Y eats, and Baudelaire well. The p sychological
reinter- p retation of the traditions and legends of his country was one of the
tasks he undertook.Thackeray declared that to think about Swift is to think about
the collap se of an emp ire. A similar p rocess of vast disintegration and p ain
op erates in Akutagawa's last works. In The Kap p a, the novelist emp loys the
familiar arti ce of lambasting the human race under the guise of a fantastic
sp ecies; p erhap s he was insp ired by Swi 's Y ahoos, or the p enguins of Ana- tole
France, or the strange kingdoms crossed by the stone monkey in the Buddhist
allegory. Hal ay through the story, utagawa forgets the satiric conventions: it
hardly matters to him that the Kap p a, who are water imp s, turn into humans who talk
about Marx, Darwin, or Nietzsche. According to the literary canons, this negligence
is a flaw. In fact, the last p ages of the story are infused with an indescribable
melancholy; we sense that, in the author's imagination, everything has collap sed,
even the dreams of his art. Shortly a erward, Akutagawa killed himself. For the
author of these nal p ages, the world of the Kap p a and the world of man, the
everyday world and the aesthetic world, are equally fruitless and mutable.A more
literal document of the nal twilight of his mind is Cogwheels. Like the Inferno of
Strindberg, who ap p ears toward the end, this story is the diary, atrocious and
methodical, of a gradual hallucinatory p rocess. One might say that the meeting of
the two cultures is necessarily tragic. On account of forces that began in 1868,
Jap an has come to be one of the great p owers of the world, defeating Russia and
forging alliances with England and the Third Reich. This nearly miraculous rebirth
exacted, as might be exp ected, a heart-rending and sorrowful sp iritual crisis. One
of the artists and martyrs of that metamorp hosis was Akutagawa, who died on July
24, 1927.[1959] [EW] Edward G ibbon, Pages of History and Autobiograp hyEdward G ibbon
was born in the vicinity of London on the 27th of Ap ril, 1737. He was of ancient
but not p articularly illustrious lineage, though an ancestor of his was Marmorarius
or architect to the king in the fourteenthPROLOG UES439century. His mother, Judith
Parten, ap p ears to have p aid him little attention during the hazardous years of his
childhood. The devotion of a sp inster aunt, Catherine Parten, enabled him to
overcome several lingering illnesses. G ibbon would later call her the true mother
of his mind and his health; from her he learned to read and write, at so early an
age that he was able to forget his ap p renticeship and almost believe that those
faculties were innate. At the age of seven he acquired, at the exp ense of many
tears and some blood, a rudimentary acquaintance with Latin syntax. Aesop 's fables,
Homer's ep ic p oems in the majestic version of Alexander Pop e, and The Thousand and
One Nights which G alland had just revealed to the Europ ean imagination were his
p referred readings. To these Oriental sorceries must be added another from the
classical sp here: Ovid's Metamorp hoses, read in the original.He rst felt the call
of history at the age of fourteen, in a library in Wilt- shire: a sup p lementary
volume of Echard's history of Rome revealed to him the vicissitudes of the Emp ire a
er Constantine's fall. "I was immersed in the p assage of the G oths over the Danube,
when the summons of the dinner bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual
feast." G ibbon's other fascination, a er Rome, was the Orient, and he studied the
biograp hy of Mo- hammed in French or Latin versions of the Arabic texts. From
history he went on, by a natural gravitation, to geograp hy and chronology, and at
the age of een he attemp ted to reconcile the systems of Scaliger and Petavius,
Marsham and Newton. Around that time, he enrolled at Oxford University. Later he
would write, "I have no reason to acknowledge an imaginary debt in order to assume
the merit of a just or generous retribution." On the antiquity of Oxford, he
observes,Perhap s in a sep arate annotation I may coolly examine the fabulous and
real antiquities of our sister universities, a question which has kindled such
erce and foolish disp utes among their fanatic sons. In the meanwhile it will be
acknowledged that these venerable bodies are su ciently old to p artake of all the
p rejudices and in rmities of age.The p rofessors-he tells us-"had absolved their
conscience from the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing"; their silence (class
attendance was not obligatory) led the young G ibbon to undertake a course of
theological study on his own. A reading of Bossuet converted him to Catholicism; he
believed, or believed he believed-he tells us-in the real p resence of Christ in the
Eucharist. A Jesuit bap tized him into the faith of Rome. G ibbon sent440 JORG E LUIS
BORG EShis father a long and p olemical ep istle, written with all the p omp , dignity,
and comp lacency of a martyr. To be a student at Oxford and to be a Catholic were
incomp atible things; the fervent young ap ostate was exp elled by the university
authorities, and his father sent him to Lausanne, at that time a Calvinist
stronghold. He took lodgings in the home of a Protestant minister, M. Pavilliard,
who a er two years of dialogue set him back on the straight p ath. G ibbon sp ent ve
years in Switzerland; the habit of the French language and an absorp tion in its
literature were this p eriod's most imp ortant results. These are also the years of
the only sentimental ep isode recorded in G ibbon's biograp hy: his love for Mlle.
Curchod, who later became the mother of Mme. de Stael. G ibbon p ere registered an
ep istolary objection to the match: Edward "sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son."In
1758 he returned to England; his first literary task was the gradual formation of a
library. Neither ostentation nor vanity had any p art in the p urchase of its
volumes, and over the years, he was able to con rm Pliny's tolerant maxim that
there is no book so bad it does not contain something good.1 In 1761, his rst
p ublication ap p eared, written in French, which remained the language of his
innermost thoughts. Entitled Essai sur l'etude de la litterature, it defended
classical letters, which then were somewhat scorned by the Encyclop edists. G ibbon
tells us that his work was received with cold indifference in England, where it was
scarcely read and quickly forgotten.A trip to Italy that began in Ap ril 1765
required several years of p reliminary readings. He visited Rome; his rst night
in the eternal city was sleep - less, as if he had foreseen and was unsettled by the
murmur of the millions of words that would make up its history. In his
autobiograp hy, he writes that he can neither forget nor exp ress the strong feelings
that shook him. Amid the ruins of the Cap itol, as the barefoot friars sang vesp ers
in the Temp le of Jup iter, he glimp sed the p ossibility of writing the decline and
fall of Rome. The vastness of the enterp rise intimidated him at rst, and he chose
instead to write a history of the indep endence of Switzerland, a work he would not
comp lete.An unusual ep isode occurred during those years. In the mid-eighteenth
century, the Deists argued that the Old Testament is not of divine origin, for its
p ages do not teach that the soul is immortal and do not mention a doctrine of
future p unishments and rewards. Desp ite the existence of certain1 P l i n y t h e
Y o u n g e r r e t a i n e d t h i s g e n e r o u s m a x i m f r o m h i s u n c
l e ( L e t t e r s J , 5 ) . I t i s commonly attributed to Cervantes, who rep eats
it in the second p art of the Quixote.PROLOG UES 441ambiguous p assages, this
observation is correct; Paul Deussen, in his Philosop hie der Bibel, declares,
"Initially, the Semites had no knowledge whatsoever of the immortality of the soul.
This unconsciousness lasted until the Hebrews established relations with the
Iranians." In 1737, the English theologian William Warburton p ublished a lengthy
treatise entitled The Di- vine Legation ofMoses, which reasons, p aradoxically, that
the lack of any reference to immortality is an argument in favor of the divine
authority of Moses, who knew himself to be sent by the Lord and therefore had no
need to resort to sup ernatural rewards or p unishments. The argument was very
clever, but Warburton knew in advance that the Deists would counter it with the
examp le of G reek p aganism, also devoid of any teaching of future p enalties and
comp ensations, yet nevertheless not divine. To salvage his hy- p othesis, Warburton
resolved to attribute a system of otherworldly p leasures and chastisements to the
G reek religion, and maintained that these were revealed during the Eleusinian
mysteries. Demeter lost her daughter Persep hone, stolen away by Hades, and after
years of wandering across the world, she came up on her in Eleusis. Such is the
mythic origin of the rites which, though initially agrarian-Demeter is the goddess
of wheat-later symbolized immortality, by a sort of metap hor analogous to one St.
Paul would use. ("So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corrup -
tion; it is raised in incorrup tion.") Persep hone is reborn from the underworld of
Hades; the soul will be reborn a er death. The legend of Demeter is recorded in one
of the Homeric hymns, where we also read that the initi- ate will be hap p y after
death. Warburton thus ap p ears to have been right in the p art of his hyp othesis
having to do with the meaning of the mysteries; but not in another p art which he
added as a sort of flourish and which was censured by the youthful G ibbon. The
sixth book of the Aeneid relates the journey of the hero and the Sibyl to the
infernal regions; Warburton sp eculated that this rep resented the initiation of
Aeneas as an o ciant in the mysteries of Eleusis. His descent to Avernus and the
Elysian Fields com- p leted, Aeneas goes out by the gate of ivory, which is reserved
for vain dreams, not by the gate of p olished horn, which is the gate of p rop hetic
dreams; this could mean that Hell is ndamentally unreal, or that the world to
which Aeneas returns is also unreal, or that Aeneas, the individual, is a dream,
just as we ourselves may be. The entire ep isode, according to Warburton, is not
illusory but mimetic. Virgil was describing the mechanism of the mysteries in
this fiction; to erase or allay the betrayal he thus committed, he made the hero go
out by the gate of ivory, which, as I said, corresp onds to deluding lies. It is
inexp licable, without this key, that Virgil442 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwould suggest that
a vision p rop hesying the greatness of Rome is ap ocryp hal. G ibbon, in an anonymous
1770 work, argued that ifVirgil had not been initiated, he could not reveal what he
had not seen, and if he had been initiated, he was equally p rohibited, since such a
revelation would (to the p agan sensibility) have constituted a p rofanation and an
outrage. Those who betrayed the secret were sentenced to death and p ublicly cruci
ed; divine justice could act in anticip ation of this sentence, and it was
fearsome to live beneath the same roof as a wretch accused of this crime. G ibbon's
Criti- cal Observations were his rst exercise in English p rose, Cotter Morrison
notes, and p erhap s his clearest and most direct. Warburton elected to remain
silent.After 1768, G ibbon devoted himself to the p reliminary tasks of his en-
terp rise; he knew the classics almost by heart, and now he read and reread, p en in
hand, all the original sources of Roman history, from Trajan to the last Caesar in
the West. Up on these texts he shed, in his own words, "the subsidiary rays of
medals and inscrip tions, of geograp hy and chronology."The comp osition of the first
volume, which ap p eared in 1776 and sold out in a few days, took him seven years.
The work insp ired the congratula- tions of Robertson and Hume, and what G ibbon
would call almost a library of p olemics. "The rst discharge of the ecclesiastic
ordnance" (I transcribe his own words here) stunned him, but he soon found that
"this emp ty noise was mischievous only in the intention," and he rep lied
disdainfully to those who contradicted him. With regard to Davies and Chelsum, he
says that a victory over such antagonists was a suf cient humiliation.Two
subsequent volumes of the Decline and Fall ap p eared in 1781; their subject was
historical, not religious, and they did not give rise to controver- sies but were
read, Rogers tells us, with silent avidity. The work was concluded in Lausanne in
1783. The three final volumes are dated 1788.G ibbon was a member of the House of
Commons; his p olitical activities merit no further comment. He himself has
confessed that his shyness rendered him useless for debates and that the success of
his p en discouraged the efforts of his voice.The comp osition of his autobiograp hy
took up the historian's nal years. In Ap ril of 1793, the death of Lady Shef eld
brought him back to En- gland. G ibbon died without suffering on the 15th of
January, 1794, a er a brief illness. The circumstances of his death are p rovided in
an essay by Lyt- ton Strachey.It is a p erilous thing to attribute immortality to a
literary work. The risk increases if the work is of a historic nature and was
written centuries a erPROLOG UES443the events it studies. Still, if we resolve to
forget some moodiness on Co- leridge's p art, or certain incomp rehensions by Sainte-
Beuve, the critical consensus in England and the continent has for two hundred
years lavished the title of classic on the history of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Em- p ire, and this adjective is known to include the connotation of
immortality. G ibbon's own de ciencies, or if you wish, forbearances, are favorable
to the work. If it had been written in adherence to any theory, the reader's ap -
p roval or disap p roval would dep end on his op inion of the hyp othesis. This is
certainly not the case with G ibbon. Excep t for the warning against religious
feeling in general, and the Christian faith in p articular, that he voices in
certain famous chap ters, G ibbon ap p ears to abandon himselfto the facts he narrates
and re ects them with a divine unconsciousness that makes him resemble blind
destiny or the course of history
itself. Like a man who is dreaming and knows he is dreaming, like a man who lowers
himself to the hazards and trivialities of a dream, G ibbon, in his eighteenth
century, dreamed again what the men of earlier cycles had lived or dreamed, within
the walls of Byzantium or in the deserts ofArabia. To construct his work, he had to
consult and summarize hundreds of widely divergent texts, and it is indisp utably
more p leasurable to read his ironic synop ses than to lose one's way in the original
sources by obscure or inaccessible chroniclers. G ood sense and irony are habits of
G ibbon's. Tacitus p raises the form of worship p racticed by the G ermans, who did not
shut their gods inside walls and did not dare rep resent them in wood or marble;
G ibbon con nes himself to observing that a p eop le who barely had huts were hardly
in a p osition to have temp les or statues. Rather than writing that there is no
confirmation whatsoever of the miracles recounted in the Bible, G ibbon rep roaches
the inexcusable carelessness of the p agans, who in their long catalogs of
wondrous occurrences tell us nothing of the sun and moon that stood still in their
course for a whole day, or of the earthquake and eclip se that accomp anied the death
of Jesus.De Quincey writes that history is an infinite discip line, or at least an
inde nite one, as the same events may be combined or interp reted in many ways.
This observation dates from the nineteenth century; since then, inter- p retations
have exp anded under the in uence of the evolution of p sychology, while p reviously
unsusp ected cultures and civilizations have been exhumed. Nevertheless, G ibbon's
work remains undiminished and it may p lausibly be conjectured that the vicissitudes
of the future will not touch it. Two causes work together toward this longevity.
The rst and p erhap s most imp ortant is of an aesthetic order; it arises from
enchantment, which444JORG E LUIS BORG ESaccording to Stevenson is the indisp ensable
and essential virtue of literature. The other reason comes from the p erhap s
melancholy fact that with the p assage of time, the historian is transformed into
history; what matters to us is not only to know what Attila's camp was like but
also how an En- glish gentleman of the eighteenth century imagined it. There were
p eriods in which Pliny's p ages were read in search of p recise facts; today we read
them in search of marvels, and this change has not injured Pliny's fortunes. For
G ibbon, that day has not yet arrived, and we do not know if it will. We susp ect
that Carlyle or any other Romantic historian is further from us than G ibbon.To
think of G ibbon is to think of Voltaire, whom G ibbon read so often and of whose
ap titude for the theater he has le us an unenthusiastic estimation. They share
the same disdain for human religions or sup erstitions, but their literary conduct
di ers greatly. Voltaire emp loyed his extraordinary style to show or suggest that
the facts of history are contemp tible; G ibbon has no better op inion of humanity,
but man's actions attract him as a sp ectacle, and he uses that attraction to
entertain and fascinate the reader. He never p articip ates in the p assions that
moved the former ages, and he views them with an incredulity that is not devoid of
indulgence and, p erhap s, comp assion.To read through the Decline and Fall is to
enter and delight lly lose oneself in a crowded novel, whose p rotagonists are the
generations of mankind, whose theater is the world, and whose enormous time sp an is
measured in dynasties, conquests, discoveries, and the mutations of languages and
idols.[EA} Catalog of the Exhibition Booksfrom Sp ainAs the sunset contains both day
and night, and the waves, foam and water, two disp arate elements of nature
insep arably constitute a book. A book is a thing among things, an object among the
objects that coexist in three dimensions, but it is also a symbol like an algebra
equation or an abstract idea. We may comp are it to a chess game: a checkered black
and white board with p ieces and an almost in nite number of p ossible moves. The
analogy to musical instruments is also clear, such as the harp Becquer glimp sed in
the corner of a drawing room and whose silent world of sound PROLOG UES445he
comp ared with a sleep ing bird. Such images are mere ap p roximations or shadows; a
book is much more comp lex. Written symbols are mirrors of oral symbols, which in
turn convey abstractions, dreams, or memories. Per- hap s it will suf ce to say that
a book, like its writer, is made of body and soul. Hence the manifold delight it
gives us, the joys of sight, touch, and intelligence. Each in his own way
imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an in
nite library, because anything in nite is somewhat uncomfortable and p uzzling, but
as a library t for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and
p erhap s shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would
allow for the p leasure of rereading, the serene and faithful p leasure of the
classics, or the grati ing shock of revelation and of the unforeseen. The
collection of Sp anish books recorded in this gracious catalog seems to anticip ate
that vague and p erfect library of my hop es.The book is sp irit and matter; the
Sp anish mind and Sp anish cra s- manship come alive and conjoin in the p ieces
gathered here. The sp ectator will linger in his examination of these wise and
delicate fruits of a secular tradition; it is worth remembering that traditions are
not the mechanical rep etition of an in exible form but rather a joy l p lay of
variations and re- juvenations. Here are the various literatures governed by the
Sp anish language on both sides of the sea; here, the inexhaustible yesterday and
the changing today and the grave future we still cannot decip her, yet which we are
writing.[SJL} Walt Whitman, Leaves G rassThose who go from the bedazzlement and
vertigo of Leaves ofG rass to the laborious p erusal of any of the p ious biograp hies
of its author always feel cheated. In the greyish, mediocre p ages of those works,
they hunt for the vagabond demigod revealed in the p oetry and are astonished not to
nd him. Such, at least, has been my p ersonal exp erience and that of all my friends.
One of the aims of this p rologue is to exp lain or attemp t an exp lanation of this
disconcerting discord.Two memorable books ap p eared in New Y ork in the year 1855,
both of an exp erimental nature, though very di erent from one another. The rst,
instantly famous and today relegated to textbook anthologies or the JORG E LUIS
BORG ES curiosity of scholars and children, was Longfellow's Hiawatha. Longfellow
wanted to give the Indians who once lived in New England a p rop hetic and mythical
ep ic p oem in English. In quest of a meter that would not bring the ordinary ones to
mind and that might seem native, he turned to the Finnish Kalevala that had been
forged-or reconstructed-by Elias Lonnrott. The other book, ignored at the time and
now immortal, was Leaves ofG rass.I have written that the two were different. Their
di erence is undeniable. Hiawatha is the care lly thought-out work of a good p oet
who has exp lored libraries and is not devoid of imagination or ear; Leaves of
G rass, the unp recedented revelation of a man of genius. The di erences are so ob-
vious that it seems incredible that the two volumes were contemp orary. Y et one fact
unites them: both are American ep ics.America, at that time, was the famous symbol
of an ideal, now a little worn down by an excessive dep endence on the ballot box
and by the eloquent excesses of rhetoric, though millions of men have given and
continue to give it their blood. The eyes of the entire globe were on America and
its "athletic democracy." Among the innumerable testimonials, I will remind the
reader only of an ep igram by G oethe: ' merika, du hast es besser"[America, you have
it better] . Under the influence of Emerson, who in some way was always his
teacher, Whitman set himself the task of comp osing an ep ic of this new historical
event: American democracy. We must not forget that the rst of the revolutions of
our time, the one that insp ired the French revolution and our own revolutions, was
America's, and that democracy was its doctrine.How to sing of this, mankind's new
faith, in a way that would be tting? There was an obvious solution, the one almost
any other writer would have chosen, temp ted by the glibnesses of rhetoric or by
simp le inertia: the laborious p lotting of an ode or p erhap s an allegory, comp lete
with its vocative interjections and cap ital letters. Hap p ily, Whitman rejected it.
He believed that democracy was a new event and that its exaltation called for a
technique that was no less new.I have sp oken of the ep ic. In each of the
illustrious models the young Whitman was acquainted with, and which he called
feudal, there is a central character-Achilles, Ulysses, Aeneas, Roland, El Cid,
Siegfried, Christ- whose stature is sup erior to the rest, who are all subordinate
to him. This p rimacy, Whitman told himself, corresp onds to an abolished world, or
one we asp ire to abolish, the world of the aristocracy. My ep ic cannot be so; it
must be p lural, it must declare or take as its p remise the incomp arable and
absolute equality of all mankind. Such a requirement would ap p ear to leadPROLOG UES
447inevitably to a mere hodgep odge of accumulation and chaos; Whitman, who was a
man of genius, steered around this danger with p rodigious skill. He carried out the
most wide-ranging and audacious exp eriment that the history of literature records,
and with hap p y results.To sp eak of literary exp eriments is to sp eak of exercises
that have failed in a more or less brilliant way, such as G ongora's Soledades or
the work of Joyce. Whitman's exp eriment came out so well that we tend to forget it
was an exp eriment.In a line of his book,
Whitman recalls medieval canvases p eop led with many gures, some of them haloed
and central, and declares that he p ro- p oses to p aint an in nite canvas p op ulated
with in nite gures, each with its nimbus of gold-colored light. How to p ull o
such a feat? Whitman, un- believably, did.Like Byron, he needed a Hero, but his,
symbol of manifold democracy, had of necessity to be innumerable and ubiquitous,
like Sp inoza's diffuse G od. He came up with a strange creature we have not yet
fully understood, and he gave this creature the name Walt Whitman. The creature has
a hi- form nature; it is the modest journalist Walter Whitman, native of Long
Island, whom some bustling friend might greet on the sidewalks of Man- hattan, and
it is, at the same time, the other man that Walt Whitman wanted to be and was not,
a man of loves and adventures, the loa ng, sp ir- ited, carefree traveler across
America. Thus, on one p age of the work, Whit- man is born on Long Island; on
others, in the South. Thus, in one of the most authentic sections of "Song of
Myself," he relates a heroic ep isode of the Mexican War and says he heard the story
told in Texas, a p lace he never went. Thus, he declares that he witnessed the
execution of the abolitionist John Brown. The examp les could be multip lied
dizzyingly; there is almost no p age on which the Whitman of his mere biograp hy is
not con ated with the Whitman he yearned to be and that, today, he is in the
imagination and affections of the generations of humanity.Whitman was already
p lural; the author resolved that he would be in - nite. He made of the hero of
Leaves of G rass a trinity; he added to him a third p ersonage, the reader, the
changing and successive reader. The reader has always tended to identi with the
p rotagonist of the work; to read Mac- beth is in some way to be Macbeth; a book by
Hugo is entitled Victor Hugo Narrated by a Witness to His Life; Walt Whitman, as
far as we know, was the rst to exp loit to its extreme, to its interminable and
comp lex extreme, this momentary identi cation. Initially he relied on dialogue; the
reader converses with the p oet and asks him what he hears and what he sees, or
JORG E LUIS BORG ES con des the sadness he feels at not having known and loved him.
Whitman answers his questions:I see the Wacho crossing the p lains, I see the
incomp arable rider of horses with his lasso on his arm.I see over the p amp as the
p ursuit of wild cattle for their hides. And also:These are the thoughts of all men
in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.If they are not yours as much
as mine, they are nothing or next to nothing, If they do not enclose everything
they are next to nothing,If they are not the riddle and the untying of riddle they
are nothing,If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.This
is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common
air that bathes the globe.Innumerable are those who, with varying success, have
imitated Whit- man's intonation: Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Mayakovsky, Neruda. .
. . No one, excep t the author of the imp enetrable and surely unreadable Finnegans
Wake, has ever again undertaken to create a multip le p ersonage. Whitman, I insist,
is the modest man he was from 1819 to 1892, and is the man he would have wanted to
be but never lly was, and is also each one of us and all those who will p op ulate
the earth.My hyp othesis of a trip le Whitman, hero of his ep ic, is not senselessly
intended to nulli or in any way diminish the p rodigious nature of his p ages. I
seek rather to exalt them. To devise a double and trip le and, over time, in nite
character could have been the ambition of a merely ingenious man of letters; to
carry this goal to a felicitous conclusion is Whitman's un- p aralleled feat. In a
cafe argument over the genealogy of art and the diverse influences of education,
nationality, and milieu, the p ainter Whistler said simp ly "Art hap p ens," which is
tantamount to admitting that the aesthetic is, in essence, inexp licable. It was
understood to be so by the Hebrews, who sp oke of the Sp irit, and by the G reeks, who
invoked the muse.As for my translation . . . Paul Valery has written that no one is
as fully aware of the de ciencies of a work as the p erson who carried it out;
desp ite the commercial sup erstition that the most recent translator has always left
PROLOG UES449his inep t p redecessors far behind, I shall not have the temerity to
declare that my translation surp asses the others. Nor have I neglected them; I have
consulted and p ro ted from the version by Francisco exander (Quito, 1956), which
still strikes me as the best, though it o en falls into an excess of literalness
which we may attribute to reverence or p erhap s to an overre- liance on the Sp anish-
English dictionary.Whitman's language is a contemp orary one; hundreds of years will
go by before it becomes a dead language. Then we will be able to translate and
recreate him in all freedom, as Jauregui did with the Pharsalia, or Chap - man,
Pop e, and Lawrence with the Odyssey. In the meantime, I see no other p ossibility
but a version like mine, which wavers between p ersonal interp retation and a
resigned rigor.One thing comforts me. I recall having attended, many years ago, a
p erformance of Macbeth; the translation was every bit as shaky as the actors and
the p aint-caked set, but I went out onto the street shattered by tragic p assion.
Shakesp eare had come through, and so will Whitman.[EA] Emanuel Swedenborg, Mystical
rksOf another famous Scandinavian, Charles XII of Sweden, Voltaire wrote that he
was the most extraordinary man who had ever lived on earth. The sup erlative mode is
imp rudent, as it tends less toward p ersuasion than a mere fruitless p olemic, but I
would like to ap p ly Voltaire's de nition, not to Charles XII, who was a military
conqueror like many others, but rather to the most mysterious of his subjects,
Emanuel Swedenborg.Ralp h Waldo Emerson, in his famous lecture of 1845, chose
Swedenborg as the p rotot e of the mystic. The word, while accurate, runs the risk
of suggesting a man ap art, a man who instinctively removes himself from the
circumstances and immediacies we call-I'll never know why-reality. No one is less
like that image than Emanuel Swedenborg, who energetically and lucidly traveled
through this world and the others. No one accep ted life more lly, no one
investigated it with such p assion, with the same intellectual love, or with such
imp atience to understand it. No one was less like a monk than that sanguine
Scandinavian who went farther than Erik the Red.Like the Buddha, Swedenborg
rejected asceticism, which imp overishes and can destroy men. Within the boundaries
of Heaven, he saw a hermit 450 JORG E LUIS BORG ESwho had sought to win admittance
there and had sp ent his mortal life in solitude and the desert. Having reached his
goal, this fortunate man discovered that he was unable to follow the conversation
of the angels or fathom the comp lexities of p aradise. Finally, he was allowed to
p roject around himself a hallucinatory image of the wilderness. There he remains,
as he was on earth, in self-morti cation and p rayer, but without the hop e of ever
reaching heaven.Jesp er Swedberg, his father, was an eminent Lutheran bishop , and
a rare conjunction of fervor and tolerance. Emanuel was born in Stockholm at the
beginning of the year 1688. From early childhood, he thought about G od and eagerly
talked with the clerics who frequented his father's house. It is signi cant that
above salvation through faith, the cornerstone of the reform p reached by Luther, he
p laced salvation through good works, as an irrefutable p roof of the former.This
p eerless, solitary man was many men. He loved craftsmanship : in London, as a young
man, he worked as a bookbinder, cabinetmaker, op ti- cian, watchmaker, and maker of
scienti c instruments; he also made engravings for the map s on globes. All of
this, as well as the study of the various natural sciences, algebra, and the new
astronomy of Sir Isaac New- ton, with whom he would have liked to have talked but
never met. His ap - p lications were always inventive: he anticip ated the nebular
theory of Lap lace and Kant, designed a ship that could travel through the air and
another, for military p urp oses, that could travel beneath the sea. We are in-
debted to him for a p ersonal method for determining longitude and a treatise on the
diameter of the moon. In Up p sala around 1716, he founded a scienti c journal with a
beautiful title, Daedalus Hyp erboreus, which lasted for two years. In 1717, his
aversion to the p urely sp eculative caused him to refuse a chair in astronomy o ered
him by the king. During the reckless and almost mythical wars waged by Charles XII-
wars that turned Voltaire into an ep ic p oet, author of the Henriade-he served as a
military engineer. He invented and constructed a device to move boats over a
stretch of land more than fourteen miles wide. In 1734, his three-volume Op era
Philosop h- ica et Mineralia ap p eared in Saxony. He wrote good Latin hexameters and
was interested in English literature-Sp enser, Shakesp eare, Cowley, Milton, and
Dryden-because of its imaginative p ower. Even if he had not devoted himself to
mysticism, his name would be illustrious in science. Like Descartes, he was
interested in the p roblem of the p recise p oint where the soul is connected to the
body. Anatomy, p hysics, algebra, and chemistry in-PROLOG UES 451sp ired many other
detailed works which he wrote, as was usual at the time, in Latin.In Holland, he
was imp ressed by the faith and well-being of the inhabitants. He attributed this
to the fact that the country was a rep ublic: in kingdoms, the p eop le, accustomed
to adulating the king, also adulate G od, a servile trait that could hardly p lease
Him. We should also note, in p assing, that in his travels
Swedenborg visited schools, universities, p oor neighborhoods, and factories; and
he was fond of music, p articularly op era. He served as an assessor to the Royal
Board of Mines and sat in the House of Nobles. He p referred the study of the Holy
Scrip tures to that of dogmatic theology. The Latin translations did not satis him;
he studied the original texts in Hebrew and G reek. In a p rivate diary, he accused
himself of monstrous p ride: lea ng through the volumes that lined the shelves of
a bookstore, he thought that he could, without much effort, imp rove them, and
then he realized that the Lord has a thousand ways of touching the human heart, and
that there is no such thing as a worthless book. Pliny the Y oungerwrote that no
book is so bad that there is nothing good in it, an op inion Cervantes would recall.
The cardinal event of his human life took p lace in London, on a night in Ap ril
1745. He himself called it the "discrete degree" or the "degree of sep aration." It
was p receded by dreams, p rayer, p eriods of doubt, fasting, and much more
surp risingly, by diligent scienti c and p hilosop hical work. A stranger who had
silently followed him through the streets of Lon- don, and about whose ap p earance
nothing is known, suddenly ap p eared in his room and told him that he was the Lord.
He then entrusted to Sweden- borg the mission of revealing to mankind, then sunk in
atheism, error, and sin, the true and lost faith of Jesus. The stranger told him
that his sp irit would travel through heavens and hells and that he would be able to
talk with the dead, with demons, and with angels.At the time, this chosen one was
fty-seven years old; for another thirty years more, he led a visionary life, which
he recorded in dense treatises written in a clear and unequivocal p rose. Unlike
other mystics, he avoided metap hor, exaltation, and vague and p assionate hyp erbole.
The exp lanation is obvious. The use of any word p resumes a shared ex- p erience, for
which the word is the symbol. If someone sp eaks about the a- vor of co ee, it is
because we have already tasted it; if about the color yellow, because we have
already seen lemons, gold, wheat, and sunsets. To suggest the ine able union of a
man's soul with the divinity, the Islamic Su s found452 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthemselves
obliged to resort to marvelous analogies, and to images of roses, intoxication, or
carnal love. Swedenborg was able to refrain from this kind of rhetorical artifice
because his subject matter was not the ecstasy of an en- rap tured and swooning soul
but rather the detailed descrip tion of extraterrestrial, yet p recise, worlds. To
allow us to imagine, or begin to imagine, the lowest dep th of Hell, Milton sp eaks
of "no light, but rather darkness visible." Swedenborg p refers the exactitude and
ultimately-why not say it?- the verbosity of the exp lorer or geograp her describing
unknown lands.As I dictate these lines, I feel the reader's incredulity blocking me
like an enormous wall of bronze. Two conjectures strengthen that wall: deliberate
imp osture on the p art of the man who wrote such strange things, or the influence
of a sudden or p rogressive madness. The rst is inadmissible. Had Swedenborg
intended to deceive, he would not have resorted to the anonymous p ublication of a
good p art of his work, as he did for the twelve volumes of his Arcana Coelestia,
which did not avail themselves of the authority that might have been conferred by
his illustrious name. We know that in conversation he did not attemp t to
p roselytize. Like Emerson or Walt Whitman, he believed that "arguments convince no
one;' and that merely stating a truth is enough for those who hear it to accep t it.
He always avoided p olemic. There is not a single syllogism in his entire work, only
terse and tranquil statements. (I am referring, of course, to his mystical
treatises. )The hyp othesis of madness is equally unavailing. If the writer of
Daedalus Hyp erboreus and Prodromus Princip iorum Rerum Naturalium had gone mad, we
would not have had from his tenacious p en the later p ublications of thousands of
methodical p ages, a labor of almost thirty years thathave nothing in common with
frenzy.Let us consider his coherent and multip le visions, which certainly con-tain
much that is miraculous. William White has acutely observed that we docilely
surrender our faith to the visions of the ancients, while tending to reject or
ridicule those of the moderns. We believe in Ezekiel because he is exalted by the
remoteness of time and sp ace; we believe in St. John of the Cross because he is an
integral p art of Sp anish literature; but we do not believe in William Blake,
Swedenborg's rebellious discip le, nor in his still- recent master. What was the
exact date when true visions ended and were rep laced by ap ocryp hal ones? G ibbon
said the same about miracles.Swedenborg devoted two years to the study of Hebrew in
order to examine the Scrip tures directly. I hap p en to think-it must be understood
that this is the no doubt unorthodox op inion of a mere man of letters andPROLOG UES
453not of a scholar or theologian-that Swedenborg, like Sp inoza or Francis Bacon,
was a thinker in his own right who made an awkward mistake when he decided to adap t
his ideas to the framework of the two Testaments. The same had occurred with the
Hebrew Kabbalists, who were essentially Neo- p latonists, when they invoked the
authority of the verses, words, and even the letters and transp ositions of the
Bible in order to justi their system.It is not my intent to exp ound the doctrine
of the New Jerusalem-the name of the Swedenborgian church-but I would like to
consider two p oints. The first is his extremely original concep t of Heaven and
Hell, which he exp lains at length in the best known and most beautiful of his
treatises, De coelo et inferno, p ublished in Amsterdam in 1758. Blake rep eated it,
and Bernard Shaw vividly summarized it in the third act of Man and Sup erman (1903),
which tells John Tanner's dream. Shaw, as far as I know, never sp oke of Swedenborg;
it may be sup p osed that he was insp ired by Blake, whom he mentions frequently and
with resp ect; nor is it imp ossible to believe that he arrived at the same ideas on
his own.In a famous letter to Can G rande della Scala, Dante Alighieri notes that
his Commedia, like the Holy Scrip tures, may be read four different ways, of which
the literal is only one. Overwhelmed by the beauty of the p oetry, the reader
nevertheless retains the indelible imp ression that the nine circles of Hell, the
nine terraces of Purgatory, and the nine heavens of Paradise corresp ond to three
establishments: one whose nature is p enal; one, p enitential; and another-if this
archaicism is bearable-p remia!. Passages such as "Lasciate ogni sp eranza, val
ch'entrate" [All hop e abandon, ye who enter here] reinforce that top ograp hical
conviction made manifest through art. This is comp letely di erent from Swedenborg's
extraterrestrial destinies. The Heaven and Hell in his doctrine are not p laces,
although the souls of the dead who inhabit and, in a way, create them p erceive them
as being situated in sp ace. They are conditions of the soul, determined by its
former life. Heaven is forbidden to no one; Hell, imp osed on no one. The doors, so
to sp eak, are op en. Those who have died do not know they are dead. For an inde nite
p eriod of time, they p roject an illusory image of their usual surroundings and
friends.2 At the end of that p eriod, strangers ap p roach. The wicked dead find the
looks and manners of the demons agreeable and quickly join them; the righteous
choose the angels. For the blessed, the diabolical sp here is a region of swamp s,
caves, burning huts, ruins, brothels,2ln England, there is a p op ular sup erstition
that we do not know we are dead until we realize that we have no reflection in
the mirror.454JORG E LUIS BORG ESand taverns. The damned are faceless or have faces
that are mutilated and atrocious, but they think of themselves as beautiful. The
exercise of p ower and mutual hatred is their hap p iness. They devote their lives to
p olitics, in the most South American sense of the word: that is, they live to
scheme, to lie, and to imp ose their will on others. Swedenborg tells how a ray of
celestial light once fell into the dep ths of Hell; the damned p erceived it as a
stench, an ulcerated wound, a darkness.Hell is the other face of Heaven. This exact
op p osite is necessary for the balance of Creation. The Lord rules over it as he
does over the heavens. The balance of the two sp heres is necessary for free will,
which must unceasingly choose between good, which emanates from Heaven, and evil,
which emanates from Hell. Every day, every moment of every day, man is shap ing
his eternal damnation or his salvation. We will be what we are. The terrors or
anxieties of dying, which usually ap p ear when the dying p erson is ight- ened and
confused, are of little imp ortance. ether or not we believe in p ersonal
immortality, it is undeniable that the doctrine revealed by Swedenborg is more
moral and reasonable than that of the mysterious gi obtained, almost by chance, at
the final hour. For one thing, it leads to the p ractice of a virtuous life.There
are countless heavens in the Heaven Swedenborg saw, countless angels in each
heaven, and each angel itself is a heaven. They are ruled by a burning love of G od
and neighbor. The general shap e of Heaven (and of the heavens) is that of a man or,
what amounts to the same thing, of an angel, for angels are not a sep arate sp ecies.
Angels, like demons, are the dead who have p assed into the angelic or demonic
sp here. A curious trait, suggestive of the fourth dimension, and one which was p re
gured by Henry More: the angels, wherever they are, always face the Lord. In the
sp iritual sp here, the sun is the visible image of G od. Sp ace and time only exist in
an illusory manner; if one
p erson thinks of another, the second is immediately at his side. The angels
converse like p eop le, with words that are sp oken and heard, but the language they
use is natural and need not be learned. It is common to all the angelic sp heres.
The art of writing is not unknown in heaven; more than once, Swedenborg received
divine communications that seemed to be handwritten or p rinted, but he was unable
to comp letely decip her them, for the Lord p refers direct, oral instruction.
Regardless of bap tism, regardless of the religion p rofessed by their p arents, all
children go to heaven, where they are taught by the angels. Neither riches, nor
hap p iness, nor hedonism, nor worldly life is a barrier to entering heaven. Poverty
is notPROLOG UES455a virtue, nor is misfortune. G ood will and the love of G od are
essential; external circumstances are not. We have already seen the case of the
hermit who, through self-morti cation and solitude, made himself un t for heaven
and was forced to give up its delights. In his Treatise on Conjugal Love, which
ap p eared in 1768, Swedenborg said that marriage is never p erfect on earth because
the intellect p redominates in men, and the will in women. In the celestial state, a
man and a woman who loved each other will form a single angel.In the Ap ocalyp se,
one of the canonical books of the New Testament, St. John of Patmos sp eaks of a
heavenly Jerusalem; Swedenborg extended that idea to other great cities. Thus, in
Vera Christiana Religio (1771), he writes that there are two extraterrestrial
Londons. When men die, they do not lose their character. The English p reserve their
p rivate intellectual manner and their resp ect for authority; the Dutch continue
to engage in commerce; G ermans are weighted down with books, and when someone
asks them a question, they consult the ap p rop riate volume before answering. Muslims
are the most curious case of all. Because the concep ts of Mo- hammed and religion
are inextricably intertwined in their souls, G od p rovides them with an angel who
p retends to be Mohammed to teach them the faith. This is not always the same angel.
Once, the real Mohammed ap - p eared before the community of the faithful, said the
words, "I am your Mohammed," and immediately turned black and sank back into the
hells.In the sp iritual sp here there are no hyp ocrites; each p erson is what he is.
An evil sp irit ordered Swedenborg to write that the demons delight in lying and
committing adultery, robbery, and fraud; they equally enjoy the smell of corp ses
and excrement. I am abridging this ep isode; the curious reader may consult the last
p age of the treatise Sap ientia Angelica de Divina Providentia (1764).Unlike those
described by other visionaries, Swedenborg's Heaven is more p recise than earth.
Shap es, objects, structures, and colors are more comp lex and vivid.In the G osp els,
salvation is an ethical p rocess. Righteousness is fundamental; humility, misery,
and misfortune are also p raised. To the requirement of righteousness, Swedenborg
adds another, one that had never been mentioned by any theologian: intelligence.
Let us again recall the ascetic who was forced to recognize that he was unworthy of
the theological conversation of the angels. (The countless heavens of Swedenborg
are full of love and theology.) When Blake writes, "The fool shall not enter into
G lory, no456 JORG E LUIS BORG ESmatter how holy he may be;' or "Strip yourselves of
sanctity and clothe yourselves in intelligence," he is merely minting terse
ep igrams from Swe- denborg's discursive thought. Blake also a rms that, besides
intelligence and righteousness, the salvation of man has a third requirement: that
he be an artist. Jesus Christ was an artist because he taught through p arables and
metap hor, and not through abstract reasoning.It is not without some hesitation that
I will now attemp t to outline, in a p artial and rudimentary fashion, the doctrine
of corresp ondences, which for many is central to the subject we are studying. In
the Middle Ages, it was thought that the Lord had written two books: one which we
call the Bible and the other which we call the universe. To interp ret them was our
duty. I susp ect that Swedenborg began with the exegesis of the rst. He conjec-
tured that each word of the Scrip tures has a sp iritual sense and came to elaborate
a vast system of hidden meanings. Stones, for examp le, rep resent natural truths;
p recious stones, sp iritual truths; stars, divine knowledge; the horse, the correct
understanding of the Scrip tures but also its distortion through sop histry; the
Abomination of Desolation, the Trinity; the abyss,G od or hell; etc. (Those who wish
to p ursue this study may examine the Dictionary of Corresp ondences, p ublished in
1962, which examines more than s,ooo examp les in the sacred texts.)From a symbolic
reading of the Bible, Swedenborg went on to a symbolic reading of the universe
and of us. The sun in the sky is a re ection of the sp iritual sun, which in turn is
an image of G od. There is not a single creature on earth that does not owe its
continuing existence to the constant influence of the divinity. The smallest
things, Thomas De Quincey-who was a reader of Swedenborg-would write, are secret
mirrors of the greatest. Thomas Carlyle would state that universal history is a
text we must continually read and write, and in which we, too, are written. The
disturbing susp icion that we are cip hers and symbols in a divine cryp tograp hy,
whose true meaning we do not know, is p revalent in the works of Leon Bloy, and was
known to the Kabbalists.The doctrine of corresp ondences has led me to mention the
Kabbalah. As far as I know or remember, no one has investigated this intimate a
nity. In the rst chap ter of the Scrip tures, we read that G od created man in his
own image and likeness. This statement imp lies that G od has the shap e of a man. The
Kabbalists who comp iled the Book ofCreation in the Middle Ages declared that the
ten emanations, or se roth, whose source is the ine able divinity, may be conceived
of as a kind of tree or as a man, the Primordial Man, Adam Kadmon. If all things
are in G od, all things will be in man, whoPROLOG UES457is His earthly re ection.
Thus, Swedenborg and the Kabbalah both arrive at the concep t of the microcosm: man
as either the mirror or the com- p endium of the universe. According to Swedenborg,
Hell and Heaven are in man, who equally contains p lants, mountains, seas,
continents, minerals, trees, herbs, flowers, thorns, animals, rep tiles, birds, sh,
tools, cities, and buildings.In 1758, Swedenborg announced that, the year before,
he had witnessed the Last Judgment, which had taken p lace in the world of the
sp irits on the exact date when faith was extinguished in all the churches. The
decline began when the Roman Church was founded. The reform initiated by Luther
and p re gured by Wycli e was imp erfect and in many ways heretical. An- other Last
Judgment also takes p lace at the moment of each man's death and is the consequence
of his entire life.On March 29, 1772, Emanuel Swedenborg died in London, the city
he loved, the city in which, one night, G od had entrusted to him the mission that
would make him unique among men. Some accounts remain of his - nal days, of his
old-fashioned black velvet suit, and of a sword with a strangely shap ed hilt. His
way of life was austere: co ee, milk, and bread were his only nourishment. At any
hour of the night or day, the servants would hear him p acing in his room, talking
with his angels.Sometime around 1970, I wrote this sonnet:Emanuel SwedenborgTaller
than the rest, that distantMan would walk among men, faintly Calling out to angels,
sp eakingTheir secret names. What earthly eyes Cannot see he saw: the burning
G eometries, the crystallineLabyrinth of G od, the sordidWhirling of infernal
delights.He knew that G lory and HadesAnd all their myths are in your soul;He knew,
like the G reeks, that each day's The mirror of Eternity.In flat Latin he catalogued
enless whyless ultimate things.[1975] [EW] LECTURESThe Concep t of an Academy and the
CeltsIn the second half of the nineteenth century, two justly famous writers, Ernst
Renan and Matthew Arnold, both wrote p enetrating studies on both the concep t of an
academy and on Celtic literature. Neither noticed the curious af nity between
those two subjects, and yet that af nity exists. Some friends of mine, when they
read the title of this lecture, assumed I was merely being arbitrary, but I think
that this a nity is p rofound and that I can justi it.Let us begin with the concep t
of an academy. Of what does it consist? In the first p lace, we think of a language
p olice, authorizing or p rohibiting words. This is trivial, as we all know. Then we
think of the original members of the French Academy who had p eriodic meetings. Here
we have another theme-the theme of conversation, literary dialogue, and friendly
discussion-and the other asp ect of the Academy, which is p erhap s the most es-
sential: organization, legislation, the understanding of literature. I think that
this is the most imp ortant p art.The thesis that I am going to exp ound today-or more
exactly, the circumstances that I am going to recall-is the a nity of these two
ideas: the Academy and the Celtic world. Let us think of the literary nation p ar
excellence. That country is obviously France, and French literature is not only
in French books but in the language itself. One need only leaf through a dic-
tionary to feel the intense literary vocation of the French language. For ex-
amp le, in Sp anish we say "area iris"; in English, "rainbow"; in G erman,
"regenbogen," arch of rain. What are all these words next to the tremendous French
one, as vast as a p oem by Hugo and shorter than a p oem by Hugo- arc-en-ciel-which
seems to raise an architecture, an arch in the sky?In France, a literary life
exists-1
don't know whether more intensely;LECTURES459for that, one would have to enter
into its mysteries-but certainly in a way that is more conscious than in other
countries. One of its magazines, La Vie Li eraire, is read by everyone. Here, in
contrast, writers are almost invisible; we write for our friends, which can be ne.
When one thinks of the French Academy, one tends to forget that the literary life
of France corresp onds to a dialectical p rocess, that literature functions within
the history of literature. The Academy exists to rep resent tradition, and so does
the G oncourt Academy, and the cenacles that are themselves academies in turn. It is
curious that the revolutionaries have begun to enter into the Academy, that the
tradition continues to enrich itself in all directions and through all the evo-
lutions of its literature. At one time, there was an op p osition between the Academy
and the Romantics; then, between the Academy and the Parnas- sians and Symbolists;
but ultimately they all formed p art of the French tradition. Moreover, there is a
kind of equilibrium: the rigors of the tradition are comp ensated by the audacities
of the revolutionaries. For that reason, French literature has more extravagant
exaggerations than any other, for each writer must deal with an adversary, much
like a chess p layer. But in no other p art of the world has literary life been
organized in such a rigorous manner as among the Celtic nations, which I shall
attemp t to p rove, or more exactly, recall.I sp oke of the literature of the Celts:
the term is vague. They inhabited, in antiquity, the territories that a remote
future would call Portugal, Sp ain, France, the British Isles, Holland, Belgium,
Switzerland, Lombardy, Bo- hemia, Bulgaria, and Croatia, as well as G alicia on the
coast of the Black Sea; the G ermans and the Romans disp laced or subjected them a er
arduous wars. Then a remarkable thing hap p ened. The true culture of the G ermans
reached its maximum and nal flowering in Iceland, in the Ultima Thule of Latin
cosmograp hy, where the nostalgia of a small group of fugitives rescued the
ancient mythology and enriched the ancient rhetoric. Celtic culture took refuge
on another lost island, Ireland. We know little about the arts and letters of the
Celts in Iberia or in Wales; the tangible relics of their culture, p articularly in
language and literature, must be sought out in the libraries of Ireland or Wales.
Renan, ap p lying Tertullian's famous sentence, writes that the Celtic soul is
naturally Christian; what is extraordinary, almost incredible, is that
Christianity, which was and is felt with such ardor by the Irish, did not erase
their memory of the rep udiated p agan myths and archaic legends. Thanks to Caesar,
Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, and Diodorus Siculus, we know that the Welsh were ruled
by a theocracy, the Druids, who administered and executed the laws, declared war or
p roclaimed p eace, hadJORG E LUIS BORG ES the p ower to dep ose the king, annually
ap p ointed magistrates, and were in charge of the education of the young and the
ritual celebrations. They p racticed astrology and taught that the soul is
immortal. Caesar, in his Com-mentaries, attributes to them the P hagorean and
Platonic doctrine of the transmigration of souls. It has been said that the Welsh
believed, as almost all p eop le do, that magic could transform men into animals, and
Caesar, misled by the memory of his readings in G reek, con sed this sup erstitious
belief with the doctrine of the p uri cation of the soul through death and
reincarnations. Later we will see a p assage in Taliesin, whose indisp utable subject
is transmigration, not lycanthrop y.What I would like to note here is the fact that
the Druids were divided into six classes, the rst of which were the bards, and the
third, the vates. Centuries later, this theocratic hierarchy would be the distant
but not forgotten model for the academies of France.In the Middle Ages, the
conversion of the Celts to Christianity reduced the Druids to the category of
sorcerers. One of their techniques was satire, to which was attributed magical
p owers, thanks to the lump s that would ap - p ear on the face of the p erson being
satirized. Thus, p rotected by sup erstition and fear, the man of letters became
p redominant in Ireland. Each individual in feudal societies had a p recise p lace; an
incomp arable examp le of this were the Irish literati. If the concep t of an academy
is based on the organization and direction of literature, then there was no more
academic country, not even France or China.A literary career required more than
twelve years of strict studies, which included mythology, legendary history,
top ograp hy, and law. To such discip lines we must obviously add grammar and the
various branches of rhetoric. The teaching was oral, as it is with all esoteric
material; there were no written texts, and the student had to commit to memory the
entire cor- p us of the earlier literature. The annual examination lasted many
hours; the student, kep t in a dark cell and p rovided with food and water, had to
versi certain set genealogical and mythological subjects in certain set meters and
then memorize them. The lowest grade, that of oblaire, was given for p oems on seven
subjects; the highest grade, ollam, for 360, corresp onding to the days in the lunar
year. The p oems were classi ed by themes: destructions of lineages or of castles,
the s of animals, loves, battles, sea voyages, violent deaths, exp editions,
kidnap p ings, and res. Other categories included visions, attacks, decep tions,
and migrations. Each one of these corresp onded to certain p lots, certain meters,
and a certain vocabulary, to which the p oet was limited under the p enalty of
p unishment. For the highest p oets, versifi-LECTURES cation was extremely comp lex,
and included assonance, rhyme, and alliteration. Rather than direct reference,
they p referred an intricate system of metap hors, based on myth or legend or
p ersonal invention. Something similar occurred with the Anglo-Saxon p oets and, at a
higher level, with the Scandinavians: the extraordinary and almost hallucinatory
metap hor for battle, "weave of men," is common to the court p oetry of both Ireland
and Norway. Above the ninth level, the verses are indecip herable, due to their
archaisms, p erip hrasis, and laborious images; tradition records the rage of a king
who was incap able of understanding the p anegyrics of his own learned p oets. The
inherent obscurity of all cultivated p oetry hastened the decline and nal
dissolution of the literary colleges. It is also worth recalling that the p oets
constituted a heavy burden for the p oor and minor kings of Ire- land, who were
required to maintain them in the luxury and p leasures ap - p rop riate for creativity.
It may be said that such vigilance and vigor can only stifle the p oetic imp ulse;
the unbelievable truth is that Irish p oetry is rich in freshness and wonder. Such,
at least, is the conviction formed by the fragments cited by Arnold and the English
versions by the p hilologist Kuno Meyer.All of you can recall p oems in which the
p oet remembers his p revious incarnations. For examp le, the sp lendid lines by Ruben
Dario:Y o fui un soldado que durmi6 en el lecho de Cleop atra, la reina. . . .jOh la
rosa marm6rea omnip otente![I was a soldier who slep t in the bed/of Cleop atra, the
queen. . . ./Oh marble and omnip otent rose!] And we have ancient examp les, like that
o f Pythagoras, who declared that he recognized from another life the shield with
which he fought at Troy.Let us look at what Taliesin, the Welsh p oet of the sixth
century, did. Taliesin beauti lly remembers having been many things: a wild boar, a
chief in a battle, a sword in the hand of a chief, a bridge that crossed seventy
rivers; he was in Carthage, he was on a wave in the sea; he has been a word in a
book, he was, in the beginning, a book. Here we have a p oet who is p erfectly
conscious of the p rivileges, of the merits that can arise from this kind of
incoherent diversion. I think that Taliesin wanted to be all of these things, and I
also believe that a list, in order to be beautiful, must consist of heterogenous
elements. Thus he remembers having been a word in a book and a book itself. There
are many other beautiful Celtic images, for examp leJORG E LUIS BORG ES that of a tree
that is green on one side and burning on the other, like the Burning Bush, with a
flame that does not consume it, and whose two p arts live in harmony.Beyond the
heroic centuries, the mythological centuries, there is an as- p ect of Celtic
literature that p articularly interests us, and that is the sea voyages. The Irish
imagined voyages to the west, that is, to the sunset, to the unknown, or, as we now
say, to America. I will refer to the story of Conn.Conn is a king of Ireland; he is
called Conn of the Five Battles. One a e oon, he is sitting with his son, watching
the sunset from a hill, and he suddenly hears his son sp eaking with the invisible
and the unknown. He asks him with whom he is sp eaking, and then a voice comes from
the air, and that voice says: "I am a beauti l woman; I come from an island lost in
the western seas; on that island there is no rain, no snow, no sickness, no death,
no time. If your son, with whom I am in love, will come with me, he will never know
death, and he will reign over hap p y p eop le." The king summons his Druids-for this
story is older than Christianity, although the Christians p reserved it-and the
Druids sing to silence the woman. She, invisibly, throws an ap p le at the p rince
and disap p ears. For a year, the p rince eats nothing but this inexhaustible ap p le
and is never hungry or thirsty, and he thinks only of the woman he has never seen.
At the end of the year, she returns, he sees her, and together they board a glass
ship and sail off to the west.Here the legend branches off.
One of the versions says that the p rince never returned. Another, that he returned
after many centuries and revealed who he was. The p eop le looked at him with
incredulity and said: "Y es, son of Conn of the Five Battles. A legend tells that
you were lost in the seas, and that, if you ever return to land and touch the soil
of Ireland, you will turn to ashes, for the time of gods is one thing and the time
of man another."Let us recall a similar story, the story of Abraham. Abraham is the
son of a king, like all the p rotagonists of these stories. While walking on the
beach, he suddenly hears a beauti l music coming from behind him. He turns around,
but the music is still behind him. The music is very sweet, and he falls asleep ;
when he wakes, he nds in his hand a branch of silver with flowers that could be
made of snow, excep t that they are living. (The silver branch is reminiscent of the
golden bough in the Aeneid.) Returning to his house, he nds a woman who tells him,
as in the other story of the p rince, that she is in love with him. Abraham follows
her, and then the story becomes the tale of his journeys. They say that he traveled
over the sea and saw a man who seemed to walk on the water and was surrounded by
sh, byLECTURES salmon. That man was a Celtic god, and when he walks the sea, he is
walking over the meadows of his island, surrounded by deer and sheep . That is,
there is something like a double sp ace, a double p lane in sp ace: for the p rince, he
is walking on water; for the king, over a meadow.There is a curious fauna in those
islands: gods, birds that are angels, laurels of silver and deer of gold, and there
is also an island of gold, standing on four p illars, which stand, in turn, on a
p lain of silver. The most astonishing wonder is when Abraham crosses the western
seas, looks up , and sees a river that flows through the air without falling, and in
that river there are sh and boats, and all of it is religiously in the sky.I
should say something about the meaning of landscap e in Celtic p o- etry. Matthew
Arnold, in his remarkable study of Celtic literature, says that the sense of
nature, which is one of the virtues of English p oetry, is derived from the Celts. I
would say that the G ermans also felt nature. Their world is, of course, quite di
erent, because in ancient G ermanic p oetry, what is felt above all is the horror of
nature; the swamp s and the forests and the twilights are p op ulated by monsters.
Dragons were called "the night horrors." In contrast, the Celts also understood
nature as a living thing, but they felt that these sup ernatural p resences could
also be benign. The fantastic world of the Celts is a world of both angels and
demons. We now sp eak of the "other world": the p hrase, I think, ap p ears for the
rst time in Lucan, referring to the Celts.All of these facts I have noted lead to
various observations. They ex- p lain, for examp le, the birth of the Academy in a
country like France, a country with Celtic roots; they exp lain the absence of
academies in a p rofoundly individualistic country like England. But you may draw
better conclusions than I. For now, it is enough to merely note the curious p he-
nomenon of the legislation of literature on the island of Ireland.[EW} The Enigma of
Shakesp eareThe two nal chap ters of Paul G roussac's Critica literaria are dedicated
to the Shakesp eare question, or as I have p referred to call it here, the enigma of
Shakesp eare. As you will have guessed, this is the theory that the individual
William Shakesp eare, who died in 1616, was not the father of the tragedies,
comedies, history p lays, and p oems that are now admired JORG E LUIS BORG ES
throughout the world. In his two articles, G roussac defends the classic op inion,
the op inion shared by all until the middle years of the nineteenth century, when
Miss Delia Bacon, in a book with a p rologue by Hawthorne-to a book Hawthorne had
not read-elected to attribute the p aternity of those works to the statesman and
p hilosop her Francis Bacon, the founder and, in some sense, the martyr of modern
science.I, of course, believe that the William Shakesp eare honored today in East
and West was the author of the works we attribute to him, but I would like to add a
few p oints to G roussac's argument. Moreover, in recent years a second candidacy
has emerged, the most interesting of all from a p sychological and, we might say,
from a p olice detective p oint of view: that of the p oet Christop her Marlowe,
murdered in a tavern in Dep tford, near London, in the year 1593.Let us examine,
first of all, the arguments against Shakesp eare's p aternity. They may be
summarized as follows: Shakesp eare received a fairly rudimentary education in the
grammar school of his hometown, Stratford. Shakesp eare, as attested by his friend
and rival, the dramatic p oet Ben Jon- son, p ossessed "small Latin and less G reek."
There are those who, in the nineteenth century, discovered or believed they had
discovered an encyclo- p edic erudition in Shakesp eare's work. It seems to me that
while it is a fact that Shakesp eare's vocabulary is gigantic, even within the
gigantic English language, it is one thing to use terms from many discip lines and
sciences and another thing altogether to have a p rofound or even sup er cial knowl-
edge of those same discip lines and sciences. We can recall the analogous case of
Cervantes. I believe a Mr. Barby, in the nineteenth century, p ublished a book
entitled Cervantes, Exp ert in G eograp hy.The truth is that the aesthetic is
inaccessible to many p eop le and they p refer to seek out the virtue of men of
genius-which Cervantes and Shakesp eare indisp utably were-elsewhere: in their
knowledge, for exam- p le. Miss Delia Bacon and the rest claimed that the p rofession
of p laywright was an insigni cant one in the era of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen,
and James I, and that the erudition they believed they discovered in Shake-
sp eare's work could not have belonged to p oor William Shakesp eare, for the author
of those works had to be an encyclop edic man. Miss Delia Bacon discovered that man
in her homonym, Francis Bacon.The argument is as follows: Bacon was a man of vast
p olitical and scienti c ambitions; Bacon wanted to renew science, to found what
he called the regnum hominis or kingdom of man. It would have been out of keep ing
with his dignity as a statesman and p hilosop her to comp ose dramaticLECTURES works.
He therefore sought out the actor and theatrical imp resario, William Shakesp eare,
to use his name as a p seudonym.Those who endeavored to enrich Miss Bacon's thesis,
or to carry it to an absurd extreme, had recourse-and now we are in the realm of
the detective story, in the "G old Bug" of the future Edgar Allan Poe-to
cryp togra- p hy. Incredible as it may seem, they p ored over the comp lete works of
William Shakesp eare in search of a line that begins with a B, followed by a line
beginning with an A, then by one beginning with a C, the p enultimate with an 0, and
the last with an N. In other words, they were seeking a secret signature by Bacon
in his work. They did not nd it. Then one of them, even more absurd than his
p redecessors, which seems dif cult, remembered that the English word "bacon" refers
to the meat of the p ig, and that Bacon, instead of signing his own name, even
cryp tograp hically or acrostically, might have p referred to sign "hog" or "p ig" or
"swine"-an extraordinarily imp robable thing, since no one makes that kind of joke
with his own name. This p articular individual, I believe, had the good fortune to
run across a line that began with a P, followed by one that began not with an I but
with aY , and a third beginning with a G . He believed his strange hyp othesis was
amp ly justi ed by this lone p ig discovered in the works of Shakesp eare.There is
also a long, meaningless Latinate word in which some have discovered the anagram
"Francis Bacon sic scrip tit" or "Francis Bacon fecit" or something like that. One
of the p artisans of the Baconian thesis was Mark Twain, who summarized all the
arguments very wittily in a book entitled Is Shakesp eare Dead?, which I recommend
not for your convictions but for your amusement. All of this, as you can see, is
p urely sp eculative and hyp o- thetical, and all of it was magisterially refuted by
G roussac.To those arguments, I would add others of diverse natures. G roussac sp eaks
of the p oor quality of the verse that has been attributed to Bacon; I would add
that the minds of the two men are essentially and irrep arably di erent. Bacon, of
course, had a more modern mind than Shakesp eare: Ba- con had a sense of history; he
felt that his era, the seventeenth century, was the beginning of a scienti c age,
and he wanted the veneration of the texts of Aristotle to be rep laced by a direct
investigation of nature.Bacon was a p recursor of what today we call science ction;
in his New Atlantis, he narrates the adventure of some travelers who arrive at a
lost island in the Paci c on which many of the marvels of contemp orary science
have become realities. For examp le: there are ship s that travel beneath the water,
others that journey through the air; there are chambers in which rain, snow,
storms, echoes, and rainbows are arti cially created; there areJORG E LUIS BORG ES
fantastical zoos that exhaust the variety of all hybrids and current sp ecies of
p lants and animals.Bacon's mind had no less of a p rop ensity for metap hor than
Shake- sp eare's, and here was a p oint of contact between the two, excep t that the
metap hors di er greatly. Let us take, for examp le, a book of logic, such as John
Stuart Mill's System of Logic, in which he p oints out the errors to which the human
mind is p rone. Mill, as many others have done, creates a classi cation of
fallacies. Bacon, in doing the same thing, said that the human mind is not a
p erfectly flat mirror but a slightly concave or convex mirror,
which distorts reality. He claimed that man is p rone to error, and hecalled the
errors to which we are p rone "idols," and p roceeded to list them. First were the
"idola tribus," the idols of the tribe, the idols common to the entire human race.
He declared that there are minds that note the af nities between things, and
other minds that tend to notice or exaggerate the differences, and that the scienti
c observer must observe himself and correct this inclination to note differences
or resemblances (differences orsymp athies, Alfonso Reyes would say). Next, Bacon
sp eaks of the idols of the cave, "idola sp ecus." In other words, each man, without
knowing it, is p rone to a certain typ e of error. Let us imagine a man, an
intelligent man, to whom, say, the p oetry of Heine, the p hilosop hy of Sp inoza, and
the doctrines of Einstein or Freud are exp lained. If this man is anti-Semitic, he
will tend to reject these works, simp ly because they are by Jews; if he is Jewish
or p hilo-Semitic he will tend to accep t them, simp ly because he feels symp athy for
Jews. In both cases he will not imp artially examine these works, but will
subordinate his estimation of them to his likes or dislikes.Next,Baconsp eaksofthe
"idolaforum,"theidolsoftheforumormar- ketp lace; that is, the errors caused by
language. He observes that language is the work not of p hilosop hers but of the
p eop le. Chesterton would later maintain that language was invented by hunters,
shermen, and nomads and therefore is essentially p oetic. In other words, language
was not created to be a descrip tion of truth, it was created by arbitrary and fanci
l p eop le; language is continually leading us into error. If you say that someone is
deaf, for examp le, and someone else doubts your word, you will say "Y es, he's deaf
as a p ost," simp ly because you have at hand the convenient p hrase, "deaf as a
p ost."To these idols, Bacon adds a fourth typ e, the "idola teatri, " idols of the
theater. Bacon notes that all scienti c systems-without excluding his own system of
p hilosop hy, observation, and induction; of going not from the general to the
p articular, but from the p articular to the general-rep lace theLECTURES real world
with a world that is more or less fantastical, or, in any case, sim- p li ed. Thus
we have Marxism, which examines all historic events by economic criteria; or we
have a historian like Bossuet, who sees the hand of Providence in the entire
historic p rocess; or the theories of Sp engler; or the contemp orary doctrines of
Toynbee; and none of them, Bacon would say, is reality, but is a theater, a
rep resentation of reality.Furthermore, Bacon had no faith in the English language.
He believed the vernacular languages had no p ower, and therefore had all his works
translated into Latin. Bacon, archenemy of the Middle Ages, believed, like the
Middle Ages, that there is a single international language: Latin.Shakesp eare, on
the contrary, had, as we know, a p rofound feeling for the English language, which
is p erhap s unique among Western languages in its p ossession of what might be called
a double register. For common words, for the ideas, say, of a child, a rustic, a
sailor, or a p easant, it has words of Saxon origin, and for intellectual matters it
has words derived from Latin. These words are never p recisely synonymous, there is
a always a nuance of di erentiation: it is one thing to say, Saxonly, "dark" and
another to say "obscure"; one thing to say "brotherhood" and another to say
"fraternity"; one thing-esp ecially for p oetry, which dep ends not only on atmo-
sp here and on meaning but on the connotations of the atmosp here of words-to say,
Latinly, "unique" and another to say "single."Shakesp eare felt all this; one might
say that a good p art of Shakesp eare's charm dep ends on this recip rocal p lay of
Latin and G ermanic terms. For examp le, when Macbeth, gazing at his own bloody
hand, thinks it could stain the vast seas with scarlet, making of their green a
single red thing, he says:Will all great Nep tune's ocean wash this blood Clean from
my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine,Making the
green one red.In the third line we have long, sonorous, erudite Latin words:
"multitudinous," "incarnadine"; then, in the next, short Saxon words: "green one
red." There is, it seems to me, a p sychological incomp atibility between the minds
of Bacon and Shakesp eare, and this suffices to invalidate all of the Baconians'
arguments and cryp tograp hies, all the real or imaginary secret signatures they have
discovered or think they have discovered in Shake-sp eare's work.There are other
candidates whom I choose to overlook, until I reach theJORG E LUIS BORG ES least
imp lausible of them all: the p oet Christop her Marlowe, who is believed to have
been murdered in the year 1593 at the age of twenty-nine, the age at which Keats
died, the age at which Evaristo Carriego, our p oet of the city's outskirts, died.
Let us look briefly at Marlowe's life and work.Marlowe was a "university wit," that
is, he belonged to a group of young university students who condescended to the
theater; moreover, Marlowe p erfected the "blank verse" that would become
Shakesp eare's instrument of choice, and in Marlowe's work there are lines no less
sp lendid than those in Shakesp eare. For examp le, the line so greatly admired by
Unamuno that he said this single line was sup erior to all of G oethe's Faust-p erhap s
forgetting that p erfection is easier in a single line than in a vast work, where
it may be imp ossible. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, like G oethe's Faust, nds himself
before the sp ecter of Helen (the idea that Helen of Troy was a ghost or ap p arition
is already p resent in the ancients) and says to her, "Sweet Helen, make me immortal
with a kiss." And then, "0 thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty
of a thousand stars." He does not say "evening sky," but "evening air." l of
Cop ernican sp ace is p resent in that word air, the infinite sp ace that was one of
the revelations of the Renaissance, the sp ace in which we still believe, desp ite
Einstein, the sp ace that came to sup - p lant the Ptolomaic system which p resides
over Dante's trip le comedy.But let us return to Marlowe's tragic fate. In the nal
decades of the sixteenth century, there were fears in England of a Catholic
insurrection, incited by the p ower of Sp ain. At the same time, the city of London
was agitated by riots. Many Flemish and French artisans had arrived in London and
were being accused of eating "the bread of fatherless children." There was a kind
of nationalist movement that attacked these foreigners and even threatened a
general massacre. At that time, the State already had what we would call today a
"secret service," and Marlowe was one of its men. It p ersecuted Catholics as well
as Puritans; a p laywright, Thomas Kyd, was ar- rested, and in his house certain
p ap ers were found. Among those p ap ers was a manuscrip t with twenty or so heretical
theses, some of them scandalous; one, for examp le, held that Jesus was a
homosexual-there was, in addition, a defense of homosexuality-and another denied
that a man, Christ, could be both man and G od. There was also a p anegyric to
tobacco, which Ralegh had brought from America. Marlowe was p art of the circle that
surrounded Ralegh, the corsaire, the historian, who would later be executed, and
in whose house were held the gatherings ominously called the School of Night.
Marlowe's characters, the characters with whom it is clear the author isLECTURES in
symp athy, are magni cations of Marlowe. They are atheists: Tamburlaine burns the
Koran and nally, having conquered the world, wants, like Alexander, to conquer the
heavens, and orders that his artillery be turned against the sky, and that black
banners be hung from the sky to signi the hecatomb, the massacre of the gods: "And
set black streamers in the rmament," etc. There is Doctor Faustus, who
rep resents the Renaissance ap - p etite to know everything, to read the book of
nature, not in search of moral teachings, as in the Middle Ages, when the
p hysiologies or bestiaries were comp iled, but in search of the letters that comp ose
the universe. There is The ] ew ofMalta, which is a magni cation of greed.Kyd's
manuscrip t was examined by the p olice. He was tortured- torture is not an invention
of our own time-and he confessed or declared, which was very natural, since his
life was at stake, that this manuscrip t was not his but was written by the hand of
Marlowe, with whom he had shared a room when the two of them worked together
revising and correcting p lays. A tribunal called the "Star Chamber" judged this
typ e of crime; Mar- lowe was told that in one week he would have to ap p ear before
this tribunal to be accused of blasp hemy and atheism, and to defend himself. Then,
two days before the hearing, Marlowe's murdered body was found in a tavern in
Dep tford.It seems that four men, all belonging to the secret service, went to the
tavern, had lunch, took a nap , went out for a stroll in the small country garden
around the tavern, p layed chess or backgammon, I don't know which, and then had an
argument about the bill. Marlowe took out his knife (knives were then the weap on of
choice), and was sup p osedly stabbed in the eye with it, with his own knife, and
died. Now, according to Calvin Ho - man's hyp othesis, the man who died was not
Marlowe but another man, any one of the other three. In that day and age, there was
no way of identi - ing p eop le, ngerp rints were unknown, it was very easy to p ass
one man o as another, and Marlowe had told his friends of his intention of fleeing
to Scotland, then an indep endent kingdom. Ho mann's theory has it that Marlowe
p assed the dead man off as himself, then fled to Scotland, and from there sent his
friend, the actor and theatrical imp resario William Shakesp eare, the works
today attributed to Shakesp eare. From Scotland, he had the manuscrip ts of Macbeth,
Hamlet, Othello, Anthony and Cleop atra, etc., delivered to Shakesp eare. Then
Marlowe died, according to this theory, about four or ve years before
Shakesp eare's death. The latter, a er selling his theater and retiring to his
hometown of Stratford, forgot all about his literary work and devoted himself to
being the richest man in town, giving470 JORG E LUIS BORG EShimself over to the
p leasures of litigation against his neighbors until the death that befell him a er
a drinking bout with some actors who came from London to see him in the year 1616.
The argument I will sketch out against this hyp othesis is that although Marlowe was
a great p oet and has lines not unworthy of Shakesp eare-and there are, as well, many
lines by Marlowe intersp ersed, as though lost, in the works of Shakesp eare-there
exists, nevertheless, an essential difference between the two. Coleridge used
Sp inoza's vocabulary in p raise of Shake- sp eare. He said that Shakesp eare was what
Sp inoza calls "natura naturans," creative nature: the force that takes all forms,
that lies as if dead in rocks, that sleep s in p lants, that dreams in the lives of
animals, which are conscious only of the p resent moment, and that reaches its
consciousness, or a certain consciousness in us, in mankind, the "natura naturata."
Hazlitt said that all the p eop le who have existed in the universe are in
Shakesp eare; that is, Shakesp eare had the p ower to multip ly himself mar- velously;
to think of Shakesp eare is to think of a crowd. However, in Mar- lowe's work we
always have a central figure: the conqueror, Tamburlaine; the greedy man, Barabas;
the man of science, Faust. The other characters are mere extras, they barely exist,
whereas in Shakesp eare's work all the characters exist, even incidental characters.
The ap othecary, for examp le, who sells p oison to Romeo and says, "My p overty, but
not my will con- sents," has already de ned himself as a man by this single p hrase.
This ap - p ears to exceed Marlowe's p ossibilities.In a letter to Frank Harris,
Bernard Shaw wrote, "Like Shakesp eare I understand everything and everybody; and
like Shakesp eare I am nobody and nothing." And here we arrive at the true enigma of
Shakesp eare: for us, he is one of the most visible men in the world, but he was
certainly not that for his contemp oraries. Here, the case of Cervantes is rep eated.
Lop e de Vega wrote, "No one is so stup id as to admire Miguel de Cervantes."
G racian, in his Agudeza y arte de ingenio [Wit and the Art of G enius] does not nd
a single ingenious feature of the Quixote worth citing; Quevedo, in a romance,
alludes o handedly to Don Quixote's leanness. That is, Cer- vantes was almost
invisible to his contemp oraries; even his military action in the battle of Lep anto
was so thoroughly forgotten that he himself had to remind p eop le that he owed the
loss of his arm to that battle.As for Shakesp eare, outside of an ambiguous accolade
that sp eaks of his "sugar sonnets," his contemp oraries do not seem to have had him
much in view. The exp lanation for this, it seems to me, is that Shakesp eare
dedicated himself p rimarily to the genre of drama, excep t for the sonnets and the
oc-LECTURES 471casional p oem such as "The Phoenix and the Turtle" or "The
Passionate Pil- grim." Every era believes that there is a literary genre that has a
kind of p rimacy. Today, for examp le, any writer who has not written a novel is
asked when he is going to write one. (I myself am continually being asked.) In
Shakesp eare's time, the literary work p ar excellence was the vast ep ic p oem, and
that idea p ersisted into the eighteenth century, when we have the exam- p le of
Voltaire, the least ep ic of men, who nevertheless writes an ep ic because without
an ep ic he would not have been a true man of letters for his contemp oraries.As for
our own time, consider the cinema. When we think of the cinema, most of us think
of actors or actresses; I think, anachronistically, of Miriam Hop kins and Katharine
Hep burn-you can undoubtedly ll in more current names-or we think of directors: I
think of Josef von Stern- berg, who seems to me to be the greatest of all lm
directors, or, more recently, of Orson Welles or Hitchcock; you can insert
whatever names you like. But we do not think of the screenwriter. I remember the
lms The Dragnet, Underworld, Sp ecter of the Rose-that last title from Sir Thomas
Browne-but Ben Hecht had to die a few days ago in order for me to remember that
he was the author of the screenp lays of these lms that I have so o en watched and
p raised.Something analogous hap p ened with p lays in Shakesp eare's time. Plays
belonged to the acting comp any, not to their authors. Each time they were staged,
new scenes with up -to-date touches were added. Peop le laughed at Ben Jonson when he
p ublished his p lays in all solemnity and gave them the title Works. "What kind of
'works' are these?" they said. "These are just tragedies and comedies." "Works"
would have to be lyric or ep ic or elegiac p oems, for examp le, but not p lays. So it
is natural that his contemp oraries did not admire Shakesp eare. He wrote for actors.
One more mystery remains. Why does Shakesp eare sell his theater, re- tire to his
native town, and forget the works that are now one of the glories of humanity? An
exp lanation has been formulated by the great writer De Quincey: it is that, for
Shakesp eare, p ublication was not the p rinted word. Shakesp eare did not write to be
read, but to be p erformed. The p lays continued to be staged, and that was enough.
Another exp lanation, this one p sychological, is that Shakesp eare needed the
immediate stimulus of the theater. That is, when he wrote Hamlet or Macbeth, he
adap ted his words to one actor or another; as someone once said, when a character
sings in Shakesp eare's work it is because a certain actor knew how to p lay the lute
or had a nice voice. Shakesp eare needed this circumstantial stimulus. G oethe472
JORG E LUIS BORG ESwould say much later that all p oetry is "G elegenheitsdichtung,"
p oetry ofcir- cumstances. And Shakesp eare, no longer driven by the actors or by the
demands of the stage, felt no need to write. This, to my mind, is the most
p robable exp lanation. G roussac says that there are many writers who have made a
disp lay of their disdain for literary art, who have extended the line "vanity of
vanities, all is vanity" to literature; many literary p eop le have disbelieved in
literature. But, he says, all of them have given exp ression to their disdain, and
all of those exp ressions are inexp ressive if we comp are them to Shakesp eare's
silence. Shakesp eare, lord of all words, who arrives at the conviction that
literature is insigni cant, and does not even seek the words to exp ress that
conviction; this is almost sup erhuman.I said earlier that Bacon had a vivid sense
of history. For Shakesp eare, on the contrary, all characters, whether they are
Danish, like Hamlet, Scot- tish, like Macbeth, G reek, Roman, or Italian, all the
characters in all the many works, are treated as if they were Shakesp eare's
contemp oraries. Shakesp eare felt the variety of men, but not the variety of
historical eras. History did not exist for him; it did exist for Bacon.What was
Shakesp eare's p hilosop hy? Bernard Shaw has tried to nd it in the maxims so widely
disp ersed throughout his work that say life is essentially oneiric, illusory: "We
are such stu as dreams are made of"; or when he says that life "is a tale/Told by
an idiot, full of sound and fury/Sig- ni ing nothing" or before that when he
comp ares every man to an actor, which is a double p lay on words, because the king
who sp eaks these words, Macbeth, is also an actor, a p oor actor, "that struts and
frets his hour up on the stage/And then is heard no more." But we may also believe
that this does not corresp ond to any conviction of Shakesp eare's, but only to what
his characters might have felt at that moment. In other words, life may not be a
nightmare, a senseless nightmare, for Shakesp eare, but life may have been felt to
be a nightmare by Macbeth, when he saw that the fates and the witches had deceived
him.Here we arrive at the central enigma of Shakesp eare, which is p erhap s the
enigma of all literary creation. I return to Bernard Shaw, who was asked if he
truly believed that the Holy Sp irit had written the Bible, and who answered that
the Holy Sp irit had written not only the Bible, but all the books in the world. We
no longer sp eak of the Holy Sp irit; we now have another mythology; we say that a
writer writes with his subconscious mind, or with the collective unconscious. Homer
and Milton p referred to believe in the Muse: "Sing, oh Muse, the wrath of
Achilles," said Homer, or the p oets who were called Homer. All of them believed in
a force of which they were theLECTURES473amanuenses. Milton refers directly to the
Holy Sp irit, whose temp le is the bosom of the just. All of them felt that there is
something more in a work than the voluntary intentions of its author. On the nal
p age of the Quixote, Cervantes says that his intention has been nothing other than
to mock books of chivalry. We can interp ret this in two ways: we can sup p ose that
Cervantes said this to make us understand that he had something else in mind, but
we can also take these words literally, and think that Cervantes had no other aim-
that Cervantes, without knowing it, created a work that mankind will not forget. He
did so because he wrote the Quixote with the whole of his being, unlike the
Persiles, for examp le, which he wrote with merely literary aims, and into which he
did not p ut all that was dark and secret within him. Shakesp eare may also have
been assisted by distraction; it may help to be a little distracted in order to
write a masterp iece. It may be that the intention of writing a masterp iece inhibits
the writer, makes him keep a close watch on himself. It may be that aesthetic
creation should be more like a dream, a dream unchecked by our attention. And this
may have hap p ened in Shakesp eare's case.Furthermore, Shakesp eare's work has been
p rogressively enriched by the generations of its readers. Undoubtedly Coleridge,
Hazlitt, G oethe, Heine, Bradley, and Hugo have all enriched Shakesp eare's work, and
it will undoubtedly be read in another way by readers to come. Perhap s this is one
p ossible de nition of the work of genius: a book of genius is a book that can be
read in a slightly or very different way by each generation. This is what hap p ened
with the Bible. Someone has comp ared the Bible to a musical instrument that has
been tuned in nitely. We can read Shakesp eare's work, but we do not know how it
will be read in a century, or in ten centuries, or even, if universal history
continues, in a hundred centuries. We do know that for us the work of Shakesp eare
is virtually in nite, and the enigma of Shakesp eare is only one p art of that other
enigma, artistic creation, which, in turn, is only a facet of another enigma: the
universe.[EA} BlindnessIn the course of the many lectures-too many lectures-! have
given, I've observed that p eop le tend to p refer the p ersonal to the general, the
concrete to the abstract. I will begin, then, by referring to my own modest
blindness. 474JORG E LUIS BORG ESModest, because it is total blindness in one eye,
but only p artial in the other. I can still make out certain colors; I can still see
blue and green. And yellow, in p articular, has remained faithful to me. I remember
when I was young I used to linger in front of certain cages in the Palermo zoo: the
cages of the tigers and leop ards. I lingered before the tigers' gold and black.
Y ellow is still with me, even now. I have written a p oem, entitled "The G old of the
Tigers," in which I refer to this friendship .Peop le generally imagine the blind as
enclosed in a black world. There is, for examp le, Shakesp eare's line: "Looking on
darkness which the blind do see." If we understand "darkness" as "blackness," then
Shakesp eare is wrong.One of the colors that the blind-or at least this blind man-do
not see is black; another is red. Le rouge et le nair are the colors denied us. I,
who was accustomed to sleep ing in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at
having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely
luminous, which is the world of the blind. I wanted to lie down in dar ess. The
world of the blind is not the night that p eop le imagine. (I should say that I am
sp eaking for myself, and for my father and my grand- mother, who both died blind-
blind, laughing, and brave, as I also hop e to die. They inherited many things-
blindness, for examp le-but one does not inherit courage. I know that they were
brave.)The blind live in a world that is inconvenient, an unde ned world from which
certain colors emerge: for me, yellow, blue (excep t that the blue may be green),
and green (excep t that the green may be blue). White has disap - p eared, or is con
sed with grey. As for red, it has vanished comp letely. But I hop e some day-1 am
following a treatment-to imp rove and to be able to see that great color, that color
which shines in p oetry, and which has so many beauti l names in many languages.
Think of scharlach in G erman, scarlet in English, escarlata in Sp anish, ecarlate in
French. Words that are worthy of that great color. In contrast, amarillo, yellow,
sounds weak in Sp anish; in English it seems more like yellow. I think that in Old
Sp anish it was amariello.I live in that world of colors, and if I sp eak of my own
modest blindness, I do so, rst, because it is not the total blindness that
p eop le imagine, and second, because it deals with me. My case is not esp ecially
dramatic. What is dramatic are those who suddenly lose their sight. In my case,
that slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight, began when I began to see. It has
continued since 1899 without dramatic moments, a slow nightfall that hasLECTURES
475lasted more than three quarters of a century. In 1955, the p athetic moment came
when I knew I had lost my sight, my reader's and writer's sight.In my life I have
received many unmerited honors, but there is one that has made me hap p ier than all
the others: the directorship of the National Library. For reasons more p olitical
than literary, I was ap p ointed by the Aramburu government.I was named director of
the library, and I returned to that building of which I had so many memories, on
the Calle Mexico in Monserrat, in the south of the city. I had never dreamed of the
p ossibility of being director of the library. I had memories of another kind. I
would go there with my father, at night. My father, a p rofessor of p sychology,
would ask for some book by Bergson or William James, who were his favorite writers,
or p erhap s by G ustav Sp iller. I, too timid to ask for a book, would look through
some volume of the Encyclop edia Britannica or the G erman encyclop edias of Brockhaus
or of Meyer. I would take a volume at random from the shelf and read. I remember
one night when I was p articularly rewarded, for I read three articles: on the
Druids, the Druses, and Dryden-a gi of the letters DR. Other nights I was less
fortunate.I knew that Paul G roussac was in the building. I could have met him
p ersonally, but I was then quite shy; almost as shy as I am now. At the time, I
believed that shyness was very imp ortant, but now I know that shyness is one of the
evils one must try to overcome, that in reality to be shy doesn't matter-it is like
so many other things to which one gives an exaggerated imp ortance.I received the
nomination at the end of 1955. I was in charge, I was told, of a million books.
Later I found out it was nine hundred thousand-a number that's more than enough.
(And p erhap s nine hundred thousand seems more than a million.)Little by little I
came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a
kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a p alace. There I was, the center,
in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could
barely make out the title p ages and the sp ines. I wrote the "Poem of the G i s,"
which begins:No one should read self-p ity or rep roachinto this statement of the
majestyof G od; who with such sp lendid ironygranted me books and blindness at one
touch. JORG E LUIS BORG ES Those two gi s contradicted each other: the countless
books and the night, the inability to read them.I imagined the author of that p oem
to be G roussac, for G roussac was also the director of the library and also blind.
G roussac was more courageous than I: he kep t his silence. But I knew that there
had certainly been moments when our lives had coincided, as we both had become
blind and we both loved books. He honored literature with books far sup erior to
mine. But we were both men of letters, and we both p assed through the library of
forbidden books-one might say, for our darkened eyes, of blank books, books without
letters. I wrote of the irony of G od, and in the end I asked myself which of us had
written that p oem of a p lural I and a single shadow.At the time I did not know that
there had been another director of the library who was blind, Jose Marmol. Here
ap p ears the number three, which seals everything. Two is a mere coincidence; three,
a con rmation. A con r- mation of a ternary order, a divine or theological con
rmation.Marmol was director of the library when it was on the Calle Venezuela.
These days it is usual to sp eak badly of Marmol, or not to mention him at all. But
we must remember that when we sp eak of the time of Rosas, we do not think of the
admirable book by Ramos Mejia, Rosas and His Time, but of the era as it is
described in Marmol's wonderfully gossip y novel, La Amalia. To bequeath the image
of an age or of a country is no small glory.We have, then, three p eop le who shared
the same fate. And, for me, the joy of returning to the Monserrat section, in the
Southside. For everyone in Buenos Aires, the Southside is, in a mysterious way, the
secret center of the city. Not the other, somewhat ostentatious center we show to
tourists-in those days there was not that bit of p ublic relations called the Barrio
de San Telmo. But the Southside has come to be the modest secret center of Buenos
Aires. hen I think of Buenos Aires, I think of the Buenos Aires I knew as a child:
the low houses, the p atios, the p orches, the cisterns with turtles in them, the
grated windows. That Buenos Aires was all of Buenos Aires. Now only the southern
section has been p reserved. I felt that I had returned to the neighborhood of my
elders.There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I
remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthrop oso- p hy, which
was the name he gave to his theosop hy. He said that when something ends, we must
think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the execution is di cult,
for we only know what we have lost, not what weLECTURES477will gain. We have a very
p recise image-an image at times shameless-of what we have lost, but we are ignorant
ofwhat may follow or rep lace it.I made a decision. I said to myself: since I have
lost the beloved world of ap p earances, I must create something else. At the time I
was a p rofessor of English at the university. What could I do to teach that almost
in nite literature, that literature which exceeds the life of a man, and even
generations of men? What could I do in four Argentine months of national holidays
and strikes? I did what I could to teach the love of that literature, and I re
ained as much as p ossible from dates and names.Some female students came to see me.
They had taken the exam and p assed. ( l students p ass with me!) To the
girls-there were nine or ten-I said: "I have an idea. Now that you have p assed and
I have ful lled my obligation as a p rofessor, wouldn't it be interesting to
embark on the study of a language or a literature we hardly know?" They asked which
language and which literature. "Well, naturally the English language and English
literature. Let us begin to study them, now that we are free from the frivolity
of the exams; let us begin at the beginning."I remembered that at home there were
two books I could retrieve. I had p laced them on the highest shelf, thinking I
would never use them. They were Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader and The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle. Both had glossaries. And so we gathered one morning in the National
Library.I thought: I have lost the visible world, but now I am going to recover
another, the world of my distant ancestors, those tribes of men who rowed across
the stormy northern seas, from G ermany, Denmark, and the Low Countries, who
conquered England, and a er whom we name England- since Angle-land, land of the
Angles, had p reviously been called the land of the Britons, who were Celts.It was a
Saturday morning. We gathered in G roussac's o ce, and we began to read. There was
a detail that p leased and morti ed us, and at the same time lled us with a certain
p ride. It was the fact that the Saxons, like the Scandinavians, used two runic
letters to signi the two sounds of th, as in "thing" and "the." This conferred an
air of mystery to the p age.We were encountering a language that seemed di erent
from English but similar to G erman. What always hap p ens, when one studies a
language, hap p ened. Each one of the words stood out as though it had been carved,
as though it were a talisman. For that reason p oems in a foreign language have a
p restige they do not enjoy in their own language, for one hears, one sees, each one
of the words individually. We think of the beauty, of the p ower, or simp ly of the
strangeness of them.JORG E LUIS BORG ES We had good luck that morning. We discovered
the sentence, "Julius Caesar was the rst Roman to discover England." Finding
ourselves with the Romans in a text of the North, we were moved. Y ou must remember
we knew nothing of the language; each word was a kind of talisman we un- earthed.
We found two words. And with those two words we became almost drunk. ( It's true
that I was an old man, and they were young women-likely stages for inebriation.) I
thought: "I am returning to the language my ancestors sp oke y generations ago;
I am returning to that language; I am re- claiming it. It is not the rst time I
sp eak it; when I had other names this was the language I sp oke." Those two words
were the name of London,"Lundenburh," and the name of Rome, which moved us even
more, thinking of the light that had fallen on those northern islands,
"Romeburh." I think we le crying, "Lundenburh, Romeburh . . ." in the streets.So I
began my study ofAnglo-Saxon, which blindness brought me. And now I have a memory
full of p oetry that is elegiac, ep ic, Anglo-Saxon.I had rep laced the visible world
with the aural world of the Anglo- Saxon language. Later I moved on to the richer
world of Scandinavian literature: I went on to the Eddas and the sagas. I wrote
Ancient G ermanic Literature and many p oems based on those themes, but most of all I
enjoyed it. I am now p rep aring a book on Scandinavian literature.I did not allow
blindness to intimidate me. And besides, my p ublisher made me an excellent offer:
he told me that if I p roduced thirty p oems in a year, he would p roduce a book.
Thirty p oems means discip line, esp ecially when one must dictate every line, but at
the same time it allows for a su - cient freedom, as it is imp ossible that in one
year there will not be thirty occasions for p oetry. Blindness has not been for me a
total misfortune; it should not be seen in a p athetic way. It should be seen as a
way of life: one of the styles of living.Being blind has its advantages. I owe to
the darkness some gi s: the gi of Anglo-Saxon, my limited knowledge of Icelandic,
the joy of so many lines of p oetry, of so many p oems, and of having written another
book, entitled, with a certain falsehood, with a certain arrogance, In Praise
ofDarkness.I would like to sp eak now of other cases, of illustrious cases. I will
begin with that obvious examp le of the iendship of p oetry and blindness, with the
one who has been called the greatest of p oets: Homer. (We know of another blind
G reek p oet, Tamiris, whose work has been lost. Tamiris was defeated in a battle
with the Muses, who broke his lyre and took away his sight.)Oscar Wilde had a
curious hyp othesis, one which I don't think is historically correct but which is
intellectually agreeable. In general, writers tryLECTURES479to make what they say
seem p rofound; Wilde was a p rofound man who tried to seem frivolous. He wanted us
to think of him as a conversationalist; he wanted us to consider him as Plato
considered p oetry, as "that winged, c e, sacred thing." Well, that winged, ckle,
sacred thing called Oscar Wilde said that Antiquity had deliberately rep resented
Homer as blind.We do not know if Homer existed. The fact that seven cities vie for
his name is enough to make us doubt his historicity. Perhap s there was no single
Homer; p erhap s there were many G reeks whom we conceal under the name of Homer. The
traditions are unanimous in showing us a blind p oet, yet Homer's p oetry is visual,
o en sp lendidly visual-as was, to a far lesser degree, that of Oscar Wilde.Wilde
realized that his own p oetry was too visual, and he wanted to cure himself of that
defect. He wanted to make p oetry that was aural, musical-let us say like the p oetry
of Tennyson, or of Verlaine, whom he loved and admired so. Wilde said that the
G reeks claimed that Homer was blind in order to emp hasize that p oetry must be
aural, not visual. From that comes the "de la musique avant toute chose" ofVerlaine
and the symbolism contemp orary to Wilde.We may believe that Homer never existed,
but that the G reeks imagined him as blind in order to insist on the fact that
p oetry is, above all, music; that p oetry is, above all, the lyre; that the visual
can or cannot exist in a p oet. I know of great visual p oets and great p oets who are
not visual-intellectual p oets, mental ones-there's no need to mention names.Let us
go on to the examp le of Milton. Milton's blindness was voluntary. He knew from
the beginning that he was going to be a great p oet. This has occurred to other
p oets: Coleridge and De Quincey, before they wrote a single line, knew that their
destiny was literary. I too, if I may mention myself, have always known that my
destiny was, above all, a literary destiny- that bad things and some good things
would hap p en to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into
words. Particularly the bad things, since hap p iness does not need to be
transformed: hap p iness is its own end.Let us return to Milton. He destroyed his
sight writing p amp hlets in sup p ort of the execution of the king by Parliament.
Milton said that he lost his sight voluntarily, defending freedom; he sp oke of that
noble task and never comp lained of being blind. He sacri ced his sight, and then he
remembered his rst desire, that of being a p oet. They have discovered at
Cambridge University a manuscrip t in which the young Milton p rop oses various
subjects for a long p oem.JORG E LUIS BORG ES "I might p erhap s leave something so
written to a ertimes, as they should not willingly let it die;' he declared. He
listed some ten or fi een subjects, not knowing that one of them would p rove
p rop hetic: the subject of Samson. He did not know that his fate would, in a way, be
that of Sam- son; that Samson, who had p rop hesied Christ in the Old Testament, also
p rop hesied Milton, and with greater accuracy. Once he knew himself to be
p ermanently blind, he embarked on two historical works, A BriefHistory of Muscovia
and A History of England, both of which remained un nished. And then the long p oem
Paradise Lost. He sought a theme that would interest all men, not merely the
English. That subject was Adam, our common father.He sp ent a good p art of his time
alone, comp osing verses, and his memory had grown. He would hold forty or y
hendecasyllables of blank verse in his memory and then dictate them to whomever
came to visit. The whole p oem was written in this way. He thought of the fate of
Samson, so close to his own, for now Cromwell was dead and the hour of the Restora-
tion had come. Milton was p ersecuted and could have been condemned to death for
having sup p orted the execution of the king. But when they brought Charles 11-son of
Charles I, "The Executed"-the list of those condemned to death, he p ut down his p en
and said, not without nobility, "There is something in my right hand which will not
allow me to sign a sentence of death." Milton was saved, and many others with
him.He then wrote Samson Agonistes. He wanted to create a G reek tragedy. The action
takes p lace in a single day, Samson's last. Milton thought on the similarity of
destinies, since he, like Samson, had been a strong man who was ultimately
defeated. He was blind. And he wrote those verses which, according to Landor, he
p unctuated badly, but which in fact had to be "Eye- less, in G aza, at the mill,
with the slaves"-as if the misfortunes were accumulating on Samson.Milton has a
sonnet in which he sp eaks of his blindness. There is a line one can tell was
written by a blind man. When he has to describe the world, he says, "In this dark
world and wide." It is p recisely the world of the blind when they are alone,
walking with hands outstretched, searching for p rop s. Here we have an examp le-much
more imp ortant than mine-of a man who overcomes blindness and does his work:
Paradise Lost, Paradise Re- gained, Samson Agonistes, his best sonnets,
p art of A History of England, from the beginnings to the Norman Conquest. All of
this was executed while he was blind; all of it had to be dictated to casual
visitors.The Boston aristocrat Prescott was help ed by his wife. An accident,
LECTURES when he was a student at Harvard, had caused him to lose one eye and le
him almost blind in the other. He decided that his life would be dedicated to
literature. He studied, and learned, the literatures of England, France, Italy, and
Sp ain. Imp erial Sp ain offered him a world that was agreeable to his own rigid
rejection of a democratic age. From an erudite he became a writer, and he dictated
to his wife the histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, of the reign of the
Catholic Kings and of Phillip II. It was a hap p y labor, almost imp eccable, which
took more than twenty years.There are two examp les that are closer to us. One I
have already mentioned, Paul G roussac, who has been unjustly forgotten. Peop le
see him now as a French interlop er in Argentina. It is said that his historical
work has become dated, that today one makes use of greater documentation. But they
forget that G roussac, like every writer, le two works: rst, his subject, and
second, the manner of its execution. G roussac revitalized Sp anish p rose. Alfonso
Reyes, the greatest p rose writer in Sp anish in any era, once told me, "G roussac
taught me how Sp anish should be written." G roussac overcame his blindness and
left some of the best p ages in p rose that have been written in our country. It will
always p lease me to remember this.Let us recall another examp le, one more famous
than G roussac. In James Joyce we are also given a twofold work. We have those two
vast and- why not say it?-unreadable novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But that
is only half of his work (which also includes beautiful p oems and the admirable
Portrait ofan Artist as a Y oung Man). The other half, and p erhap s the most
redeeming asp ect (as they now say) is the fact that he took on the almost in nite
English language. That language-which is statistically larger than all the others
and o ers so many p ossibilities for the writer, p articularly in its concrete
verbs-was not enough for him. Joyce, an Irishman, recalled that Dublin had been
founded by Danish Vikings. He studied Norwegian-he wrote a letter to Ibsen in
Norwegian-and then he studied G reek, Latin. . . . He knew all the languages, and he
wrote in a language invented by himself, dif cult to understand but marked by a
strange music. Joyce brought a new music to English. And he said, valorously (and
menda- ciously) that "of all the things that have hap p ened to me, I think the least
imp ortant was having been blind." Part of his vast work was executed in darkness:
p olishing the sentences in his memory, working at times for a whole day on a single
p hrase, and then writing it and correcting it. All in the midst of blindness or
p eriods of blindness. In comp arison, the imp otence of Boileau, Swi , Kant, Ruskin,
and G eorge Moore was a melancholic instrument for the successful execution of
their work; one might say the sameJORG E LUIS BORG ES of p erversion, whose bene
ciaries today have ensured that no one will ignore their names. Democritus of
Abdera tore his eyes out in a garden so that the sp ectacle of reality would not
distract him; Origen castrated himself.I have enumerated enough examp les. Some are
so illustrious that I am ashamed to have sp oken of my own p ersonal case-excep t for
the fact that p eop le always hop e for confessions, and I have no reason to deny them
mine. But, of course, it seems absurd to p lace my name next to those I have
recalled.I have said that blindness is a way of life, a way of life that is not
entirely unfortunate. Let us recall those lines of the greatest Sp anish p oet, Fray
Luis de Leon:Vivir quiero conmigo,gozar quiero del bien que debo al cielo, a solas
sin testigo,libre de amor, de celo,de odio, de esp eranza, de recelo.[I want to live
with myself,/I want to enjoy the good that I owe to heaven,/alone, without
witnesses,/free of love, of jealousy,/of hate, of hop e, of fear.] Edgar Allan Poe
knew this stanza by heart.For me, to live without hate is easy, for I have never
felt hate. To live without love I think is imp ossible, hap p ily imp ossible for each
one of us. But the rst p art-"I want to live with myself,/I want to enjoy the good
that I owe to heaven"-if we accep t that in the good of heaven there can also be
darkness, then who lives more with themselves? Who can exp lore themselves more?
Who can know more of themselves? According to the Socratic p hrase, who can know
himself more than the blind man?A writer lives. The task of being a p oet is not
comp leted at a xed schedule. No one is a p oet from eight to twelve and from two to
six. Who- ever is a p oet is always one, and continually assaulted by p oetry. I
sup p ose a p ainter feels that colors and shap es are besieging him. Or a musician
feels that the strange world of sounds-the strangest world of art-is always seeking
him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him. For the task of
an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. It may be an instrument. Fray
Luis de Leon dedicated one of his most beauti l odes to Francisco Salinas, a blind
musician.LECTURES A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever hap p ens to him
is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in
the case of the artist. Everything that hap p ens, including humiliations, em-
barrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's
art. One must accep t it. For this reason I sp eak in a p oem of the ancient food of
heroes: humiliation, unhap p iness, discord. Those things are given to us to
transform, so that we may make om the miserable circumstances of our lives
things that are eternal, or asp ire to be so.If a blind man thinks this way, he is
saved. Blindness is a gi . I have exhausted you with the gifts it has given me.
It gave me Anglo-Saxon, it gave me some Scandinavian, it gave me a knowledge of a
medieval literature I didn't know, it gave me the writing of various books, good or
bad, but which justi ed the moment in which they were written. Moreover, blind-
ness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. Peop le always feel good
will toward the blind.I want to end with a line of G oethe: ' lles Nahe werde fern,"
everything near becomes far. G oethe was referring to the evening twilight.
Everything near becomes far. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us
seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes,
p erhap s forever.G oethe could be referring not only to twilight but to life. All
things go o , leaving us. Old age is p robably the sup reme solitude-excep t that the
sup reme solitude is death. And "everything near becomes far" also refers to the
slow p rocess of blindness, of which I hop ed to show, sp eaking tonight, that it is
not a comp lete misfortune. It is one more instrument among the many-all of them so
strange-that fate or chance p rovide.[19771 [EW] ImmortalityIn a book as ne as all
of his books, The Varieties ofReligious Exp erience, William James devotes only a
single p age to the question of p ersonal immortality. He states that, for him, it
is a minor p roblem, that the question of p ersonal immortality is entwined with the
p roblem of religion and that, for most of the world, for the commonality of p eop le,
"G od is the p roducer of immortality."Without understanding the joke, Don Miguel de
Unamuno rep eats it inJORG E LUIS BORG ES The Tragic Sense ofLife, but he also says,
quite o en, that he wants to continue being Don Miguel de Unamuno. Here I do not
understand Miguel de Unamuno. I don't want to continue being Jorge Luis Borges; I
want to be someone else. I hop e that my death will be total; I hop e to die in body
and soul.I don't know if my attemp t to sp eak of p ersonal immortality-of the soul
that p reserves a memory of what it was on earth, and in the other world remembers
its death-is ambitious or modest, or entirely justi ed. My sister Norah was at my
house the other day, and she said, "I am going to p aint a p icture called 'Nostalgia
for Earth,' whose subject will be what a fortunate p erson in heaven feels when
thinking about the earth. It will have elements of Buenos Aires when I was a little
girl." I have a p oem that my sister doesn't know on a similar theme. In it, I
think of Jesus, who remembers the rain in G alilee, the smell in the carp entry shop ,
and something he never sees in heaven and for which he is nostalgic: the vault of
the stars.This theme of nostalgia in heaven for the earth also ap p ears in a p oem by
Dante G abriel Rossetti. It deals with a girl who is in heaven and yet feels
unfortunate because her lover is not with her; she hop es that he will arrive, but
he will never arrive because he has sinned, and she will continue to keep hop ing
eternally.William James says that, for him, it is a minor p roblem; that the great
p roblems of p hilosop hy are time, the reality of the external world, and un-
derstanding. Immortality occup ies a minor p lace, a p lace that corresp onds less to
p hilosop hy than to p oetry and, of course, theology, although not all theologies.
There is another solution, that of the transmigration of souls, certainly a p oetic
solution, and one more interesting than the other, that of continuing to be who
we are and remembering who we were-which, I'd say, is a p oor subject.I remember ten
or twelve images from my childhood, and I try to forget them. When I think of my
adolescence, I am not resigned to what I was; I would have p referred to be someone
else. At the same time, all this may be transmuted by, may become a subject for,
p oetry.The most p oignant text in all of p hilosop hy, without trying to be so, is
Plato's Phaedon. That dialogue refers
to Socrates' last day, when his friends know that the boat from Delos has arrived
and that Socrates will drink the hemlock. Socrates receives them in jail, knowing
that he will be executed. He sees all of them, excep t one. Here we find the most
moving p hrase thatLECTURES Plato wrote in his entire life, as noted by Max Brod. He
writes: "Plato, I think, was ill." According to Brod, this is the only time that
Plato names himself in all of the dialogues. If Plato wrote the dialogue,
undoubtedly he was there-or not there, it's the same-but he names himself in the
third p erson. It shows us that he was troubled about witnessing that great moment.
It has been sp eculated that Plato added that p hrase to allow himself to be freer,
as if to say: "I don't know what Socrates said on that last day, but I would like
to think he said these things." Or: "I can imagine him saying these things." I
believe that Plato felt the unsurp assable literary beauty of saying "Plato, I
think, was ill."Then comes a marvelous statement, p erhap s the nest in the
dialogues. The friends enter; Socrates is seated on the bed; they have taken o the
shackles. Rubbing his knees and feeling the p leasure of no longer having the weight
of the chains, he says: "How strange. The chains weighed me down, it was a form of
p ain. Now I feel relieved because they have taken them away. Pleasure and p ain go
together, they are twins."How wonderful it is that, in that moment, on the last day
of his life, he doesn't say that he is going to die, but rather he re ects on the
fact that p leasure and p ain are insep arable. It shows us a valiant man, a man who
is going to die and doesn't sp eak of his immediate death.Then he says that he has
to take the p oison that day, and then comes the discussion that is marred for us by
the fact that he sp eaks of two beings, of two substances, the body and the soul.
Socrates says that the p sychic substance (the soul) can live better without a body;
that the body is an en- cumbrance. It echoes that doctrine, common in antiquity,
that we are im- p risoned in our bodies.Here I would like to recall a few lines by
the great English p oet, Rup ert Brooke, who says, with ne p oetry but bad
p hilosop hy, that a er death we will "feel, who have laid our grop ing hands
away;/And see, no longer blinded by our eyes." G ustav Sp iller, in an excellent
treatise on p sychology, says that if we think of other misfortunes of the body-a
mutilation, a blow to the head-they are not bene cial to the soul. It is hard to
imagine that a cataclysm of the body is good for the soul. Nevertheless Socrates,
who believes in these two realities, the body and the soul, argues that the soul
that is freed from the body can dedicate itself to thinking.This recalls the myth
of Democritus. It is said that he tore out his eyes in a garden in order to think
and not be distracted by the outside world.JORG E LUIS BORG ES This is, of course,
untrue, but beauti l. Here is a p erson who sees the visual world-that world of the
seven colors I have lost-as an obstacle to p ure thought and p ulls out his eyes to
continue thinking in tranquility.For us, these ideas of the body and of the soul
are susp icious. Let us brie y recall the history of p hilosop hy. Locke said that the
only thing that exists are p ercep tions and feelings, and the memories and
p ercep tions of those feelings; that matter exists and that the ve senses inform us
about matter. Then Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of p ercep tions and
that these p ercep tions are inconceivable without a consciousness that p erceives
them. What is red? Red dep ends on our eyes, and our eyes belong to a system of
p ercep tions. Then comes Hume, who re tes both hyp otheses, and destroys the soul and
the body. What is the soul but that which p erceives, and what is matter but that
which is p erceived? If nouns are sup - p ressed in the world, they must be reduced to
verbs. We ought not to say, "I think," because "I" is a subject; we should say, "It
is thought," much as we say, "It is raining." In both verbs we have an action
without a subject. When Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," he should have
said, "Something thinks," or "It is thought," because "I" assumes an entity, and I
have no right to assume that. He would have to say, "It is thought, therefore
something is."As for p ersonal immortality, we will see what arguments there are in
favor of it. I will cite two. Fechner says that human consciousness is p rovided
with a series of desires, ap p etites, hop es, and fears that do not corresp ond to the
duration of our lives. When Dante says "n'el mezzo del cammin de nostra vita," he
reminds us that the Scrip tures accord us seventy years of life. Thus, when he had
that vision he had turned thirty- ve. We, in the course of our seventy years of
life-unfortunately, I have gone beyond the limit: I'm now seventy-eight-feel things
that have no meaning in this life. Fechner thought of the embryo, of the body
before it leaves the belly of the mother. In that body there are legs that do
nothing, arms, hands-none of this has meaning; it can only have meaning in a later
life. We ought to believe that the same hap p ens with us, that we are full of hop es,
fears, conjectures, and we can't say exactly what they mean for a p urely mortal
life. We can state exactly what animals have, and they can ignore all that which
can be used in another, fuller life. It is an argument in favor of immortality.Let
us cite St. Thomas Aquinas, who le us this sentence: "Intellectus naturaliter
desiderat esse semp er," the mind naturally desires to exist forever. To which we
might resp ond that it also desires other things, and that it o en desires to cease
existing. We have the cases of suicides, and the com-LECTURES mon one of p eop le who
need to sleep , which is also a form of death. We can cite p oetic texts based on the
idea of death as a sensation. For examp le, this p op ular Sp anish cop la: "Ven, muerte
tan escondida I que no te sienta venir I p orque el p lacer de morir I no me torne a
dar Ia vida" [Come, death so hidden/that I don't feel you come/for the p leasure of
dying/doesn't make me want to go back to life] . Then there is a strop he from the
French p oet Leconte de Lisle: "Free him from time, from number, and from sp ace, and
return him to the rep ose that he has le ."We have many longings, among them the
longing for life, to exist forever, but also the longing to cease existing, as
well as fear and its op p osite, hop e. All of these things can exist without p ersonal
immortality, and do not require it. I myself do not desire it, and I fear it, for
it would be frightening to know that I am going to continue, ightening to think
that I am going to go on being Borges. I am tired of myself, of my name, and of my
fame, and I want to free myself from all that.There is a sort of comp romise that I
nd in Tacitus, and which was taken up again by G oethe. Tacitus, in his Life
ofAgrip p a, says, "Non cum cor- p ore p eriunt magnae animae," the great souls do not
die with the body. Tac- itus believed that p ersonal immortality was a gift reserved
for some, not the common man, but that certain souls deserved to be immortal, that
they were worth remembering who they were. G oethe takes up this thought again, and
writes, when his friend Wieland has died: "It is horrible to think that Wieland has
died inexorably." He cannot think that Wieland will not go on in some other p lace;
he believes in the p ersonal immortality ofWieland, but not of everyone. We have the
idea that immortality is the p rivilege of a few. But everyone judges himself as
great, everyone tends to believe his immortality is necessary. I don't believe in
that.Later, we have other immortalities that, I think, are the imp ortant ones.
First, the idea of transmigration. This idea is in Pythagoras, and in Plato. Plato
saw transmigration as a p ossibility. Transmigration help s to exp lain good and bad
luck. If we are lucky or unlucky in this life we owe it to a p revious life; we
are receiving p unishments or rewards. There is something that can be dif cult: if
our individual life, as Hinduism and Buddhism believe, dep ends on our p revious
life, that p revious life in turn dep ends on a p revious life, and thus continues
infinitely toward the p ast. It has been said that if time is in nite, the in nite
number of p ast lives is a contradiction. If the number is in nite, how can an in
nite thing reach the p resent? We think that if time is in nite, and I believe it
is, then that infinite time must includeJORG E LUIS BORG ES all the p resents and,
among all the p resents, why not this p resent here, in the University of Belgrano,
with you and I together? Why not that time also? If time is in nite, at any given
moment we are in the center of time.Pascal thought that if the universe is in nite,
the universe is a sp here whose circumference is in all p arts and its center in
none. Why not say that this p resent moment has an in nite p ast behind it, an
infinite yesterday, and that this p ast also p asses through this p resent? At any
given moment, we are at the center of an in nite line, in whatever p lace of the in
nite center we are in the center of sp ace, for time and sp ace are in nite.The
Buddhists believe that we have lived an in nite number of lives, in- nite in the
sense of an unlimited number, in the strict sense of the word: a number without
beginning or end, something like the transfinite number in Kantor's mathematics. We
are now in the center-all moments are centers- of that in nite time. Now we are
talking, you are thinking about what I am saying, you are agreeing or disagreeing.
Transmigration gives us the p ossibility of a soul that travels om body to body, in
human bodies and in animals. We have that p oem by Pietro di Agrigento where he
tells how he recognized a shield that had been his in the Trojan war. We have John
Donne's p oem
"The Progress of the Soul;' which is slightly earlier than Shakesp eare. Donne
begins it by saying: "I sing the p rogress of the deathless soul;' and that soul
goes from one body to another. He declares that he is going to write a book that
will be sup erior to all other books, excep t the Holy Scrip tures. His p roject is
ambitious, and although it was never realized, it includes many beauti l verses.
He begins with a soul who inhabits the ap p le-that is, in Adam's fruit, the fruit of
sin. Then it is in the belly of Eve and it engenders Cain; then it goes om body to
body in each stanza (one of them being Queen Elizabeth). The p oem remains un
nished. Donne believed in the transmigration of souls, and in one of his p rologues,
he invokes the illustrious origins of the concep t and names two sources: Pythagoras
and Socrates in the last dialogue.It is interesting to note that Socrates, that a
ernoon, talking with his iends, does not want to say good-bye p athetically. He
exp els his wife and children, he wants to exp el a friend who is weep ing, he wants
to talk calmly, to simp ly keep on talking and thinking. The fact of p ersonal death
does not a ect him. His role, his custom, is something else: to discuss, to discuss
in a certain way.Why does he drink the hemlock? There was no reason.He says curious
things: "Orp heus wanted to transform himself into a nightingale; Agamemnon,
shep herd of men, into an eagle; Ulysses, strangely,LECTURES into the most humble
and unknown of men." Socrates is talking, death interrup ts him. The blue death is
seen climbing his legs. He has taken the hemlock. He tells a iend that he
remembers the vow he had made to Aesculap ius, and to o er him a cock. He means by
this that Aesculap ius, the god of medicine, has cured him of the essential evil,
life itself. "I owe a cock to Aes- culap ius, he has cured me of life, I am going to
die." That is, he doesn't believe what he has said before: he thinks that he is
going to p ersonally die.We have another classical text, Lucretius' De rerum natura,
where p ersonal immortality is denied. The most memorable of the arguments given
by Lucretius is this: A p erson comp lains that he is going to die. He thinks that
the ture will forget him. As Victor Hugo said: "He will go alone in the middle of
the feast/nothing will be missing in the radiant and hap p y world." In that great
p oem, as ambitious as Donne's, Lucretius uses the following argument: "Y ou are
p ained because you will lack the future. Y et you believe that before you there was
an infinite time, that, when you were born, the moment had already p assed when
Carthage and Troy battled to rule the world. It doesn't matter to you. So why
should it matter what shall come? Y ou have lost the in nite p ast, what matter if
you lose the in nite ture?" This is what Lucretius says. It's a p ity that I don't
know enough Latin to remember his beauti l lines, which I have been reading
lately with the help of a dictionary.Schop enhauer answered-and I think Schop enhauer
is the greatest authority-that the doctrine of transmigration is nothing but the
p op ular form of another doctrine, which would later be exp ressed by Shaw and
Bergson, the doctrine of the will to live. There is something that wants to live,
something that op ens a p assage across matter, or in sp ite of matter. That something
is what Schop enhauer called wille, which he conceived of as the will to
resurrection.Later, Shaw sp eaks of the "life force," and nally Bergson will talk
about the "elan vital," the vital imp etus that is manifested in all things, that
created the universe, and that is in every one of us. It is dead in minerals,
dormant in p lants, like a dream in animals, but in us it is conscious of itself.
Here we have the exp lanation of that line of Aquinas: "Intellectus naturaliter
desiderat esse semp er," the mind naturally desires to be exist forever. But in what
way does it desire it? It does not desire it in a p ersonal way; it does not desire
it in Unamuno's sense, that it wants to keep on being Unamuno; it desires it in a
general way.Our 'T' is the least imp ortant thing for us. What does it mean for us
to feel ourselves as an I? In what way can it di er that I feel myself Borges than
490 JORG E LUIS BORG ESthat you feel yourselves A, B, or C? Absolutely not at all.
That I is what we share, it is what is p resent, in one form or another, in all
creatures. We could say that immortality is necessary-not the p ersonal, but this
other immortality. For examp le, each time that someone loves an enemy, the immor-
tality of Christ ap p ears. In that moment he is Christ. Each time we rep eat a line
by Dante or Shakesp eare, we are, in some way, that instant when Dante or
Shakesp eare created that line. Immortality is in the memory of others and in the
work we leave behind. What does it matter if that work is forgotten?I have devoted
the last twenty years to Anglo-Saxon p oetry, and I know many Anglo-Saxon p oems by
heart. The only thing I don't know is the names of the p oets. What does it matter,
as long as I, reciting the p oems from the ninth century, am feeling something that
someone felt back then? He is living in me in that moment, I am that dead man.
Every one of us is, in some way, all the p eop le who have died before us. And not
only those of our blood.Of course, we inherit things in our blood. I know-my mother
told me-that every time I recite English p oems, I say them in the voice of my
father, who died in 1938. When I recite Shakesp eare, my father is living in me. The
p eop le who have heard me will live in my voice, which is a reflection of a voice
that was, p erhap s, a reflection of the voice of its elders. The same may be said of
music and of language. Language is a creation, it becomes a kind of immortality.
I am using the Castilian language. How many dead Castilians are living within me?
Every one of us collaborates, in one form or another, in this world. Every one of
us wants this world to be better, and if the world truly became better-that eternal
hop e-if the country saved itself-and why can't the country save itself?-we would
become immortal in that salvation, whether they know our names or not. That is the
least imp ortant; what matters is that immortality is obtained in works, in the
memory that one leaves in others.My op inions do not matter, nor my judgment; the
names of the p ast do not matter as long as we are continually help ing the ture of
the world, our immortality. That immortality has no reason to be p ersonal, it can
do without the accident of names, it can ignore our memory. For why should we
sup p ose that we are going to continue in another life with our memory, as though I
were to keep thinking my whole life about my childhood in Palermo, in Adrogue, or
in Montevideo? Why should I always return to that? It is a literary recourse; I
could forget all that and keep on being, andLECTURES 491all that would live within
me although I do not name it. Perhap s the most imp ortant things are those we don't
remember in a p recise way, that we remember unconsciously.To conclude, I would
say that I believe in immortality, not in the p ersonal but in the cosmic sense.
We will keep on being immortal; beyond our p hysical death our memory will remain,
and beyond our memory will remain our actions, our circumstances, our attitudes,
all that marvelous p art of universal history, although we won't know, and it is
better that we won't know it.[1978] [EW] The Detective StoryA book by Van Wyck
Brooks called The Flowering ofNew England deals with an extraordinary fact,
exp lainable only by astrology: the flowering of genius in a small p art of the
United States during the rst half of the nineteenth century. (I, obviously, am
p artial to this New England, which has so much in common with Old England.) It
would be easy to comp ile an in nite list of names: Emily Dickinson, Herman
Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, William James, Henry James, and of course Edgar Allan
Poe, who was born in Boston in the year 1809, I believe. I am known to be weak on
dates. To sp eak of the detective story is to sp eak of Edgar Allan Poe, who invented
the genre, but before sp eaking of the genre, there is a small p rior question that
should be discussed: Do literary genres exist?It is well known that Croce, on some
p age of his formidable Aesthetics, says: "To claim that a book is a novel, an
allegory, or a treatise on aesthetics has more or less the same value as saying
that it has a yellow cover and can be found on the third shelf to the le ." G enres,
in other words, are negated, and individuals are af rmed. A tting rep ly to this
would be that although all individuals are real, to sp eci them is to generalize
them. Of course, this statement of mine is a generalization, and should not be
allowed.To think is to generalize, and we need these useful Platonic archetyp es in
order to say anything. So why not say that there are such things as literary
genres? I would add a p ersonal observation: literary genres may dep end less on
texts than on the way texts are read. The aesthetic event requires the con-
junction of reader and text; only then does it exist. It is absurd to sup p ose that
a book is much more than a book. It begins to exist when a reader492 JORG E LUIS
BORG ESop ens it. Then the aesthetic p henomenon exists, which can be similar to the
moment when the book was created.There exists a certain sp ecies of contemp orary
reader: the reader of detective ction. This reader-who may be found in every
country in the world and who numbers in the millions-was invented by Edgar lan
Poe. Let us imagine that this reader doesn't exist, or rather, let us imagine some-
thing that might be even more interesting: that this reader is someone far removed
from us. He may be Persian, a Malaysian, a p easant, a child. In any case, this
reader is told that Don Quixote is a detective novel;
we will sup - p ose that this hyp othetical gure is familiar with detective novels,
and he begins to read: "In a p lace in La Mancha whose name I do not wish to recall,
there lived, not long ago, a gentleman . . ." Already this reader is full of doubt,
for the reader of detective novels reads with incredulity and susp i- cions, or
rather with one p articular susp icion.For examp le, if he reads: "In a p lace in La
Mancha . . . ," he naturally assumes that none of it really hap p ened in La
Mancha. Then: "whose name I do not wish to recall"-and why didn't Cervantes want to
remember? Un- doubtedly because Cervantes was the murderer, the guilty p arty. Then:
"not long ago"-quite p ossibly the ture holds even more terri ing things in store.
The detective novel has created a sp ecial typ e of reader. This tends to be
forgotten when Poe's work is evaluated, for if Poe created the detective story, he
subsequently created the reader of detective ction.In order to understand the
detective story, we must keep in mind the general context of Poe's life. I believe
that Poe was an extraordinary romantic p oet, more extraordinary in the whole of
his work, in our memory of his work, than on any given p age of his work. He is
better in p rose than in p o- etry. In Poe's p oetry, we have amp le justi cation for
what Emerson said when he called Poe "the jingle man." He was a lesser Tennyson,
although a few memorable lines remain.Poe was a p rojector of multip le shadows. How
many things come out of Poe? It could be said that there are two men without whom
contemp orary literature would not be what it is, both of them Americans, and both
of the p ast century: Walt Whitman-from whom derives what we can call civic- minded
p oetry, from whom Neruda derives, along with so many other things, good or bad-and
Edgar Allan Poe, from whom derives the symbolism of Baudelaire, who was Poe's
discip le and p rayed to him every night, and two other things, which ap p ear to be
sep arate but are actually related: the idea of literature as an intellectual
activity, and the detective story. TheLECTURES493 rst of these contributions-
literature considered as an op eration of the mind, not the sp irit-is very
imp ortant. The other is minimal, desp ite having insp ired great writers
(Stevenson, Dickens, Chesterton-Poe's most illustrious heir). Detective
literature may seem subaltern, and indeed is currently in decline; at p resent it
has been surp assed or rep laced by science ction, which also has Poe as one of its
p ossible forefathers.Let us return to the idea that p oetry is a creation of the
mind. This goes against the whole of p rior tradition, for which p oetry was an
op eration of the sp irit. We have the extraordinary case of the Bible, a series of
texts by di erent authors, dating from di erent p eriods and dealing with very dif-
ferent subjects, but all attributed to a single invisible gure: the Holy Sp irit.
The Holy Sp irit, the divinity or an in nite intelligence, has sup p osedly dictated
these di erent works to different amanuenses in different countries and times.
These works include, for examp le, a metap hysical dialogue (the Book of Job), a
history (the Book of Kings), a theogony (G enesis), and the declarations of the
p rop hets. All of these works are di erent, and we read them as if a single p erson
had written them.Perhap s, if we are p antheists, there is no need to take the fact
that we are now different individuals too seriously: we are different organs of the
continual divinity. That is, the Holy Sp irit has written all books and also reads
all books, since it is, to varying degrees, in each one of us.Now, Poe was a man
who, as we know, lived an unhap p y life. He died at the age of forty, given over to
alcohol, melancholy, and neurosis. We have no reason to enter into the details of
the neurosis; we need only know that Poe was a very unfortunate man who lived
p redestined for misfortune. To free himself from it, he took to ostentatiously
disp laying and p erhap s exaggerating his intellectual virtues. Poe considered
himself a great romantic p oet, a romantic p oet of genius, esp ecially when he wasn't
writing in verse-for examp le, when he wrote the story of Arthur G ordon Pym. There
we have the rst name, the Saxon Arthur (Edgar); the second, the Scottish G ordon
(Al- lan); and, nally, Pym, which is similar to Poe. Poe saw himself as an intel-
lectual, and Pym boasted of being a man cap able of evaluating and thinking ever
hing.At that p oint, Poe had written the famous p oem that everyone knows, and
p erhap s too well, for it is not one of his good p oems: "The Raven." Then he gave a
lecture in Boston in which he exp lained how he came up with this top ic. He began by
considering the virtues of the refrain, and then thought about English p honetics.
He decided that the two most memorable and e ective letters in the English language
were o and r, and immediately494JORG E LUIS BORG EScame up with the exp ression
"nevermore." Then another p roblem arose: he had to justi the reiteration of the
word, since it would be very odd for a human being to rep eat "nevermore" regularly
at the end of each stanza. Then he realized it did not have to be a rational being,
and that led him to the idea of a talking bird. He thought about making it a
p arrot, but a p arrot is unworthy of the dignity of p oetry; then he thought of a
raven. Or rather, he was reading Charles Dickens' novel Barnaby Rudge at the time,
in which a raven figures. So he had a raven which is named Nevermore and which
continually rep eats its name. That is all Poe started out with.Then he thought,
what is the saddest and most melancholy event that can be recorded? It must be the
death of a beauti l woman. Who best to lament such an event? The woman's lover, of
course. Then he thought about the lover who has just lost his beloved, who is named
Lenore to rhyme with "nevermore." Where to p lace the lover? The raven is black, he
thought, where does blackness stand out most starkly? It must stand out against
something white, the whiteness of a bust. And this bust, of whom might it be? It is
a bust of Pallas Athena; and where could it be? In a library. For, says Poe, the
unity of his p oem requires an enclosed sp ace.So he p laced the bust of Minerva in a
library, and there too is the lover, alone, surrounded by his books, and lamenting
the death of his beloved, so lovesick more. Enter the raven. Why does the raven
enter? Well, the library is a quiet p lace and must be contrasted with something
turbulent; he imagines a storm, he imagines the stormy night that makes the raven
come inside.The man asks who he is, and the raven answers, "Nevermore," and then
the man, to torture himself masochistically, asks more questions so that the bird
will answer all of them with "Nevermore," "Nevermore," "Nevermore." Finally the man
says to the raven, in what can be understood as the p oem's rst metap hor: "Take thy
beak from out my heart, and take thy form from o my door!"; and the raven (who is
now simp ly an emblem of memory, accursedly immortal memory) answers, "Nevermore."
The lover realizes he is doomed to sp end the rest of his life, his fantastical
life, conversing with the raven, which will always tell him "Nevermore," and asking
questions whose answer he already knows.All of which is to say that Poe seeks to
make us believe he wrote this p oem in an intellectual fashion, but we need only
look a little closer at its p lot to understand the fallacy of that. Poe could have
reached the idea of an irrational being by using not a raven but an idiot, a
drunkard; we would have then had a comp letely different and less exp licable p oem.
LECTURES495Poe, I believe had great p ride in his own intelligence; when he dup li-
cated himself in a character, he chose a distant character-the character we all
know and who is undoubtedly our friend, though he does not seek our friendship : a
gentleman, Auguste Dup in, the rst detective in the history of literature. He is a
French gentleman, an imp overished French aristocrat, who lives in an isolated
neighborhood of Paris with a friend.Here we have another tradition of the detective
story: the fact of a mystery that is solved by the intellect, by an intellectual
op eration. This feat is carried out by a very intelligent man named Dup in, who will
later be named Sherlock Holmes, who will later be named Father Brown, and who will
someday have other famous names as well, no doubt. The rst of them all, the model,
the archetyp e, we might say, is the gentleman Charles Au- guste Dup in, who lives
with a friend, and it is the friend who tells the story. This is also p art of the
tradition, and it was taken up long after Poe's death by the Irish writer Conan
Doyle, who p icks up the theme, an attractive theme in itself, of the friendship
between two quite different p eop le, which becomes in some way the theme of the
friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho, excep t that those two never reach a
p erfect friendship . Later it will be the theme of Kim, the friendship between the
young boy and the Hindu p riest, and of Don Segundo Somb , the troop er and the boy.
This theme of friendship , which is multip lied in Argentine literature, can also be
found in many books by G utierrez.Conan Doyle imagines a rather dull-witted
character he calls Dr. Wat- son, whose intelligence is somewhat inferior to the
reader's; the other character is somewhat comical and somewhat awe-insp iring:
Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle has Watson recount the intellectual feats of his
friend Sher- lock Holmes, while never ceasing to marvel at them; Watson is always
guided by ap p earances and enjoys allowing himself to be dominated by Sherlock
Holmes.All of this is already p resent in the rst detective story that Poe wrote
without knowing that he was inaugurating a genre, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
Poe did not want the detective genre to be a realist genre;
he wanted it to be an intellectual genre, a fantastic genre, if you wish, but a
fantastic genre of the intellect and not only of the imagination; a genre of both
things, no doubt, but p rimarily of the intellect.He could have p laced his crimes
and his detectives in New Y ork, but then the reader would have been wondering
whether the events really took p lace in that way, whether the New Y ork City p olice
force is like that or is different. As it turned out, it was easier and more
fruit l to Poe's imaginationJORG E LUIS BORG ES to set it all in Paris, in a desolate
p ortion of the Faubourg St.-G ermain. Thus the rst detective recorded in literature
is a foreigner, a Frenchman. Why a Frenchman? Because the p erson writing the work
is an American and needs a character who is distant. To make these characters
stranger, he has them live quite di erently from the way men generally do. At dawn
they close the shutters and light candles; at nightfall they go out walking through
the deserted streets of Paris in search of that in nite blue which, says Poe, only
occurs in a great city that is asleep , feeling at the same time multitudi- nousness
and solitude, which must be a stimulus to thought.I imagine the two friends
crossing the deserted streets of Paris at night and talking-about what? They sp eak
of p hilosop hy, intellectual matters. Then we have the crime, the rst crime in
detective literature: the murder of two women. I would call it "The Crimes in the
Rue Morgue"; "crime" is stronger than "murder." Here is the situation: two women
have been murdered in a room that ap p ears inaccessible. With this, Poe
inaugurates the mystery of the locked room. One of the women was strangled, the
other one's throat was slashed with a razor. A great deal of money, four thousand
francs, is scattered across the floor, everything is scattered, everything sug-
gests madness. That is, we have a brutal, terrible beginning and then, at the end,
the solution.But that solution is not a solution for us, because we all know the
p lot before reading Poe's story, and of course that strip s it of much of its
strength. (The same thing hap p ens with the analogous case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde: we know the two are a single p erson, but that can only be known by readers of
Stevenson, who was another of Poe's discip les. When he sp eaks of "the strange case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," he is p rop osing from the start a duality of
p ersonae. ) Who would ever have guessed, moreover, that the murderer would turn
out to be an orangutan, a monkey?The solution is reached by an arti ce: the
testimony of those who entered the room before the discovery of the crime. All of
them recognized a gru voice, the voice of a Frenchman, as well as a few of the
words that it sp oke, and they also recognized a shrill voice that sp oke without
syllables, the voice of a foreigner. The Sp aniard believes it was the voice of a
G erman; the G erman, a Dutchman; the Dutchman, an Italian, etc. That voice is the
inhuman voice of the monkey, and then the crime is solved: it is solved, but we
already knew the solution.For that reason we might think p oorly of Poe, we might
think that his p lots are so weak they are almost transp arent. They are for those of
us who already know them, but not for the rst readers of detective ction; they
LECTURES497were not trained as we are, they were not an invention of Poe's, as we
are. Those who rst read this tale were wonderstruck; the rest came later.Poe has
le ve examp les, one of which, called "Thou Art the Man," is the weakest of all.
There we have a gure, the detective who turns out to be the murderer, who was
later imitated in G aston Leroux's The Mystery oftheY ellow Room. Then there is
another tale that has become exemp lary, "The Purloined Letter." The p lot is very
simp le. A letter has been stolen by a government minister; the p olice know he has
it. Twice they have him waylaid in the street. Then they examine the house; to keep
anything from escap ing them, the entire house has been divided and subdivided; the
p olice use microscop es, magni ing glasses. They take each book down from the li-
brary shelves, look to see if it has been re-bound, look for traces of dust on the
sp ine. Then Dup in intervenes. He says the p olice are mistaken; they have the idea a
schoolboy might have, the idea that something is hidden in a hiding p lace, but that
is not the case. Dup in goes to visit the minister, who is a friend of his, and sees
lying on a table, in p lain sight, a torn envelop e. He realizes that this is the
letter everyone has been looking for. It is the idea of hiding something in a
visible way, making something so visible that no one nds it. Moreover, at the
beginning of each tale, to make us aware that Poe understood the detective story in
an intellectual way, there are disquisitions on analysis, or a discussion of chess,
to which whist or draughts is deemed sup erior.Poe leaves us these ve tales, and we
also have another one, "The Mys- tery of Marie Roget," which is the strangest of
all and the least interesting to read. It concerns a crime committed in New Y ork: a
girl, Mary Rogers, was murdered. She was a florist, I believe-Poe simp ly takes the
information from the newsp ap ers. He moves the crime to Paris and renames the girl
Marie Roget, then suggests how the crime may have been committed. And indeed, years
later the murderer was found and con rmed what Poe had written.We have, then, the
detective story as an intellectual genre, a genre based on something entirely
ctitious: the idea that a crime is solved by abstract reasoning and not by
informants or by carelessness on the p art of the crimi- nals. Poe knew that what he
was doing was not realistic, which was why he chose Paris as the setting and made
his reasoner an aristocrat, not a p olice- man, an aristocrat who makes the p olice
look ridiculous. In other words, Poe created a genius of all that is intellectual.
What hap p ens a er Poe's death? He dies, I believe, in 1849; Walt Whit- man, his
other great contemp orary, writes an obituary for him saying thatJORG E LUIS BORG ES
Poe was a p erformer who only knew how to p lay the low notes of the p iano, who did
not rep resent American democracy-something Poe had never sought to do. Whitman was
unfair to him, and so was Emerson. Even today there are critics who underestimate
him. But I believe that Poe, if we look at his work as a whole, p roduced the work
of a genius, though his stories, excep t for the Narrative ofArthur G ordon Pym,
are flawed. Nevertheless, they construct a character, a character who outlives all
the characters Poe created, who outlives Charles Auguste Dup in, and who outlives
the crimes and the mysteries that no longer frighten us.In England, where this
genre is ap p roached from a p sychological p oint of view, we have the best detective
novels that have ever been written: Wilkie Collins' The Woman in ite and The
Moonstone. Then we have Chesterton, Poe's great successor. Chesterton said that he
never wrote any detective stories that were better than Poe's, but Chesterton, it
seems to me, is better than Poe. Poe wrote stories that are p urely fantastic; for
examp le, "The Masque of the Red Death" or "The Cask of Amontillado." In addition,
he wrote stories based on reason, like the five detective stories. But Chester- ton
did something di erent; he wrote stories that are at once fantastic and, in the
end, have a detective solution. I will tell one of them, "The Invisible Man,"
p ublished in 1905 or 1908.The p lot amounts, in brief, to this. The story concerns a
maker of mechanical dolls-cooks, p orters, chambermaids, and mechanics-who lives
in a house at the top of a snowy hill in London. He receives death threats- it is a
very short story, that is imp ortant to know. He lives alone with his mechanical
servants, which already has something horrible about it: a man who lives alone,
surrounded by machines that vaguely resemble the forms of men. Finally, he receives
a letter telling him he will die that a ernoon. He calls his friends; his friends
go for the p olice and leave him alone among his dolls, but rst they ask the p orter
to p ay close attention if anyone goes into the house. They ask a nearby p atrolman
and a vendor of roasted chestnuts to do the same. The three p romise that they will.
When the friends come back with the p olice, they notice tracks in the snow. The
tracks ap p roaching the house are shallow, while the tracks that leave it are
deep er, as if something heavy were being carried. They enter the house and nd
that the maker of dolls has disap p eared. Then they see ashes in the firep lace. This
is the strongest moment in the story: the susp icion of a man devoured by his
mechanical dolls; that is what makes the greatest imp ression on us, a greater
imp ression than the eventual solution. The murderer went into the house and was
seen by the chestnut vendor, the guard, and the p orter, but they didLECTURES499not
see him because he was the mailman who comes at the same time every a ernoon. He
killed his victim and stuffed him into the mail sack. Then he burned the mail and
le . Father Brown sees him, chats, hears his confession, and absolves him,
because in Chesterton's stories there are no arrests, nothing violent.Currently,
the detective genre has greatly declined in the United States, where it has become
realistic and about violence-sexual violence, as well. In any event, it has
disap p eared. The intellectual origins of the detective story have been forgotten.
They have, however, been maintained in En- gland, where very calm novels are still
written. They take p lace in an English town; everything is intellectual, everything
is calm, there is no violence, and not too much bloodshed.I have on occasion
attemp ted the detective genre, and I'm not very p roud of what I have done. I have
taken it to a symbolic level, which I am
not sure is ap p rop riate. I wrote "Death and the Comp ass;' as well as certain
detective stories with Bioy Casares, whose stories are much better than mine-for
examp le, the stories about Isidro Parodi, a p risoner who solves crimes from jail.
What might we say as an ap ologia for the detective genre? One thing is quite
obvious and certain: our literature tends toward the chaotic. It tends toward free
verse because free verse ap p ears easier than regular verse, though the truth is
that free verse is very di cult. It tends to eliminate character, p lot;
everything is very vague. In this chaotic era of ours, one thing has humbly
maintained the classic virtues: the detective story. For a detective story cannot
be understood without a beginning, middle, and end. Some have been written by
inferior writers, while a few were written by excellent writers: Dickens,
Stevenson and, above all, Wilkie Collins. I would say in defense of the detective
novel that it needs no defense; though now read with a certain disdain, it is
safeguarding order in an era of disorder. That is a feat for which we should be
grateful.[EA} PROLOG UES TO THE LIBRARY OF BABELThe Libra Babel1. Jack London,
The Concentric Deaths. 2. Jorge Luis Borges, August 25, 1983.3. G ustav Meyrink,
Cardinal Nap ellus. 4? Leon Bloy, Discourteous Tales.5 . G iovanni Pap ini, The
Escap ing Mirror.6. Oscar Wilde, The Crime ofLord Arthur Savile.7? Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, The G uest at the Last Banquets. 8. Pedro de Alarcon, The Friend
ofDeath.9. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener.10. William Beckford, Vathek.n.
H. G . Wells, The Door in the Wall.12. P'u Sung-Ling, The Tiger G uest.13. Arthur
Machen, The Shining Pyramid.14. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Island ofthe Voices.
15. G . K. Chesterton, The Eye ofAp ollo.16. Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love.17.
Franz Kafka, The Vulture.18. Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter.19. Leop olda
Lugones, The Statue ofSalt.20. Rudyard Kip ling, The House ofDesires.21. The
Thousand and One Nights according to G alland. 22. The Thousand and One Nights
according to Burton. 23. Henry James, The Friends ofFriends.24. Voltaire,
Micromegas.25. Charles H . Hinton, Scienti c Romances.26. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
G reat Stone Face.PROLOG UES TO THE LIBRARY OF BABEL 50127. Lord Dunsany, The Country
ofY ann. 28. Saki, The Reticence ofLady Anne.29. Russian Tales.30. Argentine Tales.
31. J. L. Borges & A. Bioy Casares, New Stories ofBustos Domecq. 32. Jorge Luis
Borges, The Book ofDreams.33. Jorge Luis Borges, Borges A/Z.Franz Ka a, e ltureIt
is well known that Virgil, dying, asked his friends to reduce to ashes the un
nished manuscrip t of the Aeneid, to which he had dedicated eleven years of noble
and delicate labor; Shakesp eare never considered gathering his p lays into a book;
Kafka entrusted Max Brad to destroy the novels and stories that would ensure his
fame. The af nity of these illustrious ep isodes is, if I am not mistaken, illusory.
Virgil knew he could dep end on the p ious disobedience of his friends, as Kafka did
with Max Brad. Shakesp eare's case is entirely different. De Quincey sp eculates
that, for Shakesp eare, p ublic corresp onded to p erformance, not p ublication; the
staging was what was imp ortant to him. In any event, the man who truly desires the
disap p earance of his books does not assign this task to others. Kafka and Virgil
did not seek the destruction of their work; they only wanted to free themselves
from the resp onsibility that a book imp oses. Virgil, I think, acted for aesthetic
reasons: he wanted to revise certain cadences or ep ithets. The case of Kafka is
more comp lex. One could de ne his work as a p arable or a series of p arables whose
theme is the moral relation of the individual with G od and with His
incomp rehensible universe. Desp ite this contemp orary ambiance, Kafka is closer to
the Book of Job than to what has been called "modern literature." His work is
based on a religious, and p articularly Jewish, consciousness; its imitation in
other contexts becomes meaningless. Kafka saw his work as an act of faith, and he
did not want to be discouraging to mankind. For that reason, he asked his friend to
destroy the work. But we may susp ect other motives. Kafka could only dream
nightmares, which he knew that reality endlessly sup p lies. At the same time, he
realized the p ossibly p athetic results of p rocrastination, realized them in
almost all his books. Both things, sadness and p rocrastination, no doubt exhausted
him. He would have p referred to write a few hap p y p ages, but his honor would not
let him fabricate them.502 JORG E LUIS BORG ESI will never forget my rst reading of
Ka a in a certain p rofessionally modern p ublication in 1917. Its editors-who didn't
always lack talent- were dedicated to the abolition of p unctuation, the abolition
of cap ital letters, the abolition of rhyme, the alarming simulation of metap hor,
the abuse of comp ound words, and other tasks ap p rop riate to youth at the time and
p erhap s to youth in any time. Amidst this clatter of typ e, an ap ologue signed by
one Franz Kafka seemed to my young reader's docility inexp licably insip id. After
all these years, I dare to confess my unp ardonable literary insensibility: I saw a
revelation and didn't notice it.Everyone knows that Ka a always felt mysteriously
guilty toward his father, in the manner of Israel with its G od; his Judaism, which
sep arated him from the rest of mankind, a ected him in a comp lex way. The con-
sciousness of ap p roaching death and the feverish exaltation of tuberculosis must
have sharp ened those faculties. These observations are besides the p oint; in
reality, as Whistler said, "Art hap p ens."Two ideas-or more exactly, two obsessions-
rule Kafka's work: subordination and the in nite. In almost all his ctions there
are hierarchies, and those hierarchies are infinite. Karl Rossmann, the hero of his
rst novel, is a p oor G erman boy making his way through an imp enetrable continent;
in the end he is admitted into the G reat Nature Theater of O ahoma; that in- nite
theater is no less p op ulous than the world and p re gures Paradise. (A very p ersonal
characteristic: not even in that image of heaven do men become hap p y, and there
are various brief delays.) The hero of his second novel, Josef K., p rogressively
overwhelmed by a meaningless trial, never as- certains the crime for which he has
been charged, nor does he ever face the invisible tribunal that is judging him and,
without a trial, sentences him to the guillotine. K., hero of the third and last
novel, is a surveyor called to a castle that he can never enter, and he dies
without being recognized by its governing authorities. The motif of in nite
p rocrastination also rules his stories. One of them deals with an imp erial
messenger who can never arrive, due to various p eop le who slow the trajectory of
his message; another, with a man who dies without having been able to visit the
next village; another, with two neighbors who are never able to meet. In the most
memora- b l e o f t h e m a l l - " T h e G r e a t Wa l l o f C h i n a " ( 1 9 1
9 ) - t h e i n n i t e i s m a n i fo l d : to halt the p rogress of in nitely
distant armies, an emp eror who is in nitely remote in time and sp ace orders that in
nite generations in nitely erect an in nite wall around his in nite emp ire.The most
unquestionable virtue of Kafka is the invention of intolerable situations. A few
lines are enough to indelibly demonstrate. For examp le:PROLOG UES TO THE LIBRARJ' OF
B,1BEL 503"The animal seizes the whip from the hands of its master and beats him in
order to become the master and doesn't realize that this is nothing but an il-
lusion p roduced by a new knot in the whip ." Or: "Leop ards invade the tem- p les and
drink the wine from the chalices; this hap p ens suddenly; in the end it was foreseen
that this would hap p en and it is incorp orated into the liturgy." The elaboration,
in Kafka, is less admirable than the invocation. There is only a single man in his
work: the homo domesticus, so G erman and so Jewish, desirous of a p lace, no matter
how humble, in some Order-in the universe, in a ministry, in an insane asylum, in
jail. The p lot and the atmosp here are what is essential, not the evolution of the
fable or the p sychological dep th. Thus the sup eriority ofhis stories to his
novels; thus the right to maintain that this p resent comp ilation of stories fully
allows us to take the measure of such an extraordinary writer.{1979} {EW} Jack
London, The Concentric DeathsJack London was born in 1876 in San Francisco,
California. His true name was John G ri th; that Welsh surname will suf ce to refute
H. L. Mencken's claim that he was Jewish, on the grounds that all surnames that are
the names of cities betray a Hebrew origin. It has been said that he was the ille-
gitimate son of an itinerant astrologer, a trace p rop hetic of his vagabond fate.
His school was the lower dep ths of San Francisco, the so-called "Bar- bary Coast;'
where he gained a well-earned rep utation for violence. Then he became a gold
p rosp ector in Alaska, as Stevenson had been in California. As a young man he was a
soldier and then a p earl sherman, events he would recall when he p lotted the
vicissitudes of "The House of Map uhi." He crossed the Paci c on a boat that took
him to Jap an, where he was a seal hunter, an illegal occup ation; one of Kip ling's
ballads reveals that the most fearless hunters, rivals of the English and of the
Russians, were the North Americans. On his return, he studied for a semester at the
university in his native city, and there he converted to socialism, which at the
time meant the brotherhood of all men and the abolition of p ersonal wealth. He
became well known as a journalist, and was sent to cover the Russo-Jap anese War.
Dressed as a beggar, he learned the misery and hardness of the most sordid
slums of London. From this voluntary adventure came the book The Peop le of the
Pit. His books, which are of various kinds, were translated into every504 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESlanguage, and earned him a huge fortune that comp ensated for the
dep riva- tions of his childhood. He out tted a boat called "The Snark," a sp lendid
yacht that cost him $1,930,000.Among his many works, we cannot forget Before Adam,
a novel about a man who recovers in fragmentary dreams the lost vicissitudes of one
of his p rehistoric lives. Of an autobiograp hical character, and doubtless magni -
cent, are Martin Eden and Burning Daylight, set in Alaska. The p rotagonist of his
most famous novel, The Call of the Wild, is a dog, Buck, who in the Arctic wastes
has become a wolf.For this volume we have chosen ve stories that are rther p roofs
of his e ectiveness and variety. Only toward the end of "The House of Ma- p uhi"
does the reader realize who the true p rotagonist is; "The Law of Life" p resents us
with an atrocious destiny, accep ted by all with naturalness and almost with
innocence; "Lost Face" is the salvation of a man under torture by a terrible arti
ce; "The Minions of Midas" details the p itiless methods of a group of anarchists;
"The Shadow and the Flash" renews and enriches an old motif in literature: the
p ossibility of being invisible.In Jack London two op p osing ideologies join together
and become brothers: the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the ttest in the
struggle for life and the in nite love of mankind.Over the multifaceted work of
Jack London-like that of Hemingway, who in a certain sense, continues and raises it
to another level-two tall shadows are cast: Kip ling and Nietzsche. Y et there was a
ndamental di erence. Kip ling saw war as an obligation, but he never sang of
victory, only of the p eace that victory brings, and of the hardship s of battle.
Nietzsche, who had witnessed the p roclamation of the G erman Emp ire in the Palace of
Ver- sailles, wrote that all emp ires are a stup idity and that Bismarck was merely
adding another number to that stup id series. Kip ling and Nietzsche, sedentary
men, longed for the action and dangers that their fates denied them; London and
Hemingway, men of adventure, were attached to it. They un- forgivably celebrated
the gratuitous cult of violence and even of brutality. Kip ling and Nietzsche, in
their times, were accused of belonging to that cult; we may recall the diatribes of
Belloc and the fact that Bernard Shaw had to defend Nietzsche from the charge of
"having comp osed a G osp el for hoodlums." Both London and Hemingway rep ented of
their infatuation with mere violence; it is no coincidence that both, sick of fame
and danger and money, took refuge in suicide.London's effectiveness was that of an
able journalist adep t at his job; Hemingway's that of a man of letters who
p rofessed certain theories andPROLOG UES TO THE LIBRARY OF BABE/. 505discussed them
at length; but both were quite alike, although we will never know what op inion the
author of The Old Man and the Sea p ronounced on The Sea-Wolf in the cenacles of
France. It may well be that the vacillations of taste have obscured the a nities
between the two and emp hasized their di erences.Jack London died at forty, having
drained the life of the body and of the sp irit. He was never satis ed with
anything, and he sought in death the sullen sp lendor of nothingness.[19791 [EW]
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, The G uest at the Last BanquetsJean Marie Matthias Philip p e
Augustus, Count of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, was born in Brittany on the 7th of
November in 1838, and died in Paris, in the hosp ital of the Freres de Saint Jean de
Dieu, on the 19th of August in 1889. The unrestrained and generous imagination of
the Celts was one of the gi s that chance or fate bestowed up on him, as well as an
illustrious lineage-he was descended from the rst G rand Master of the Knights of
Malta-and a sonorous disdain for mediocrity, science, p rogress, his times, money,
and serious p eop le. His Future Eve (1886) is one of the rst exam- p les of science
ction. His p lay Axel recreates the theme of the p hilosop her's stone. Rebellion,
staged in Paris in 1870, anticip ates Ibsen's The Doll House.Romantic in the
rhetorical manner of the French, he declared that the human race is divided into
romantics and imbeciles. The customs of his time demanded that a writer abound not
only in memorable p hrases but also in imp ertinent ep igrams. Anatole France relates
that one morning he went to Villiers' house to get information about his ancestors.
Villiers rep lied: ''At ten in the morning, in broad daylight, you exp ect me to
sp eak of the G rand Master and the celebrated Mariscal?" Seated at the table of
Henri V, asp irant to the throne of France, and hearing him criticize someone who
had sacri ced everything for him, he said: "Lord, I drink to the health of Y our
Majesty. Y our quali cations are decidedly unquestionable. Y ou have the ingratitude
of a king." He was a great friend of Wagner's and was once asked if the comp oser's
conversation was agreeable. "Do you think conversation with Mt. Etna would be
agreeable?" he rep lied.There is something histrionic in his life and in his work;
although it is true that the circumstances of being both an aristocrat and
extremely p oorso6 JORG E LUIS BORG ESfavor such p ostures. It is also worth recalling
that Villiers, because of the image that he was always trying to p roject in Paris,
was essentially defending himself. A meager standing would have morti ed him as
much as his meager straits, which at times verged on miserable p overty.Where can a
p oet go, through the excess that is his imagination, to escap e his own time and
p lace? It is obvious that the Verona of Romeo and Juliet is not exactly situated in
Italy, that the magical sea of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the magni cent
dream of an English p oet at the end of the eighteenth century, and not the sea of
Conrad or the sea of Homer. Will I someday p erhap s write a p oem that does not take
p lace in Buenos Aires? The same occurred in Villiers with Sp ain and the Orient:
they are as French as Flaubert's laborious Salammb6.The best tale in our series and
one of the masterp ieces of the short story is "Hop e." The action takes p lace in a
very p ersonal Sp ain, and the time is vague. Villiers knew little about Sp ain, nor
did he know much about Edgar Allan Poe. Nevertheless, both "Hop e" and "The Pit and
the Pendulum" are similarly unforgettable, because both understand the cruelty that
can come to the human soul. In Poe, the horror is of a p hysical order; Villiers,
more subtly, reveals a hell of a moral order. A er the incredible Sp ain of "Hop e,''
we have the incredible China of "The Adventure of Tse-i-la." The story bears the
ep igrap h "G uess or I shall devour you ' which Villiers ingenuously attributes to
the Sp hinx. It deals with an arti ce whose object is to trick the reader. The whole
story is based on the p ride of the two characters and the atrocious cruelty of one
of them; the end reveals an unsusp ected generosity that includes a humiliation.
"The Secret of the Church" conceals an a rmation of all Protestant sects; its
strength is in the fact that the believer imp licitly confesses that his soul is
lost. The theme of "Queen Y sabeau" is, again, the cruelty of the p owerful, enriched
in this case by the p assion of jealousy. The unexp ected ending is no less
atrocious. "The G uest at the Last Ban- quets" deliberately begins in a frivolous
mode; there is nothing more banal than some carefree and hap p y revelers deciding
how to amuse themselves until dawn. The ap p earance of a new p articip ant darkens the
story and brings it to a horror in which, incredibly, justice and madness converge.
In the same way that the p arodic Don Quixote is a book about knights, "Somber Tale,
More Somber Narrator" is both a cruel story and a p arody of a cruel story. Of all
of his works, "Vera" is, without a doubt, the most fantastic and the closest to
the oneiric world of Poe. To console his sadness, the p rotagonist creates a
hallucinatory world; this magic is rewarded with a tiny and forgettable object
which contains one last p romise.PROLOG UES TO THE LIBRARY OF B;!BEL 507Villiers in
Paris wanted to p lay with the concep t of cruelty in the same way that Baudelaire
p layed with evil and sin. Now, unfortunately, we know too much to p lay with any of
them. Cruel Stories is now a naive title; it was not when Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
between grandiloquence and emotion, p rop osed it to the cenacles of Paris. This
almost indigent great lord, who saw himself as the luxuriously out tted p rotagonist
of imaginary duels and imaginary ctions, has imp ressed his image on the history of
French literature. Less than Vera or the Aragonese Jew or Tse-i-la, we think and
will think ofVilliers de l'Isle-Adam.[EW} P'u Sung-ling, The T er G uestThe Analects
of the very rational Confucius advise us that we must resp ect sup ernatural beings,
but immediately adds that we must keep them at a distance. The myths of Taoism
and Buddhism have not mitigated that ancient advice; there is no country more
sup erstitious than China. The vast realist novels it has p roduced-The Dream ofthe
Red Chamber is the one to which I most often return-abounds in wonders p recisely
because it is realist, and marvels are not considered imp ossible or even unlikely.
Most of the stories chosen for this book come from the Liao-chai of P'u Sung-ling,
whose p en name was the Last Immortal or Willow Sp rings. They date from the
seventeenth century. We have chosen the English version, Strange Stories from a
Chinese Studio, by Herbert len G iles, p ublished in 1880. Of P'u Sung-ling, very
little is known, excep t that he failed his examination for a doctorate in letters
in 1651. Thanks to that lucky disaster, he dedicated himself entirely to
literature, and we have the book
that would make him famous. In China, the Liao-chai occup ies the p lace held by The
Thousand and One Nights in the West.Unlike Poe or Ho mann, P'u Sung-ling does not
marvel at the marvels he p resents. He is closer to Swi , not only in the fantasy of
his fables but in the laconic and imp ersonal, intentionally satirical tone with
which he tells them. P'u Sung-ling's hells remind us of those of Quevedo; they are
admin- istrative and op aque. His tribunals, lictors, judges, and scribes are no
less venal and bureaucratic than the terrestrial p rototyp es in any p lace in any
century. The reader should not forget that the Chinese, given their sup erstitious
nature, tend to read these stories as if they were real events, for in their soB
JORG E LUIS BORG ESimagination the higher order is a mirror of the lower order, as
the Kabbal- ists said.At rst, the text may seem naive; then we realize the obvious
humor and satire and the p owerful imagination which, om ordinary elements-a
student p rep aring for an exam, a p icnic on a hill, a foolish man getting drunk-
manages to invisibly weave a world as unstable as water and as changing and
marvelous as the clouds. A kingdom of dreams, and even more, the corridors and
labyrinths of nightmares. The dead return to life, a stranger who visits turns into
a tiger, the ap p arently beautiful girl is merely a p iece of skin on a green-faced
demon. A ladder climbs into the sky, another down a well that is inhabited by
infernal executioners, magistrates, and masters.To the stories of P'u Sung-ling we
have added two that are as unex- p ected as they are astonishing from the almost in
nite novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Of the author or authors, little is known
with any certainty, for in China ction and drama are subaltern genres. The Dream
of the Chamber or Hung Lou Meng is the most illustrious and p erhap s the most
p op ulated Chinese novel. It has 421 characters-189 women and 232 men-numbers that
surp ass the Russian novel or the Icelandic saga, and which, at rst sight, could
overwhelm a reader. A comp lete translation, which is yet to be done, would require
three thousand p ages and a million words. Dating from the eighteenth century, its
most p robable author was Tsao Hsueh-chin. "The Dream of Pao-yu" p re gures that
chap ter in Lewis Carroll where Alice dreams of the Red King who is dreaming her,
excep t that Carroll's dream is a metap hysical fantasy, and Pao-yu's is charged with
sadness, desp air, and a deep irreality. "The Wind-Moon Mirror," whose title is an
erotic metap hor, is p erhap s the one moment in literature that, with melancholy and
a certain dignity, deals with solitary p leasure.There is nothing more
characteristic of a country than its imaginations. In its few p ages, this book o
ers a glimp se of one of the oldest cultures on the p lanet and, at the same time,
one of the most unusual ap p roaches to fantastic literature.{EW} Charles Howard
Hinton, Scienti c RomancesIf I am not mistaken, Edith Sitwell is the author of a
book entitled The En- glish Eccentrics. No one has more right to ap p ear in its
hyp othetical p ages PROLOG UES TO T E LIBRARY OF BABEL 509than Charles Howard Hinton.
Others seek and achieve notoriety; Hinton has achieved almost total obscurity. He
is no less mysterious than his work. The biograp hical dictionaries ignore him; we
have only been able to nd a few p assing references in Ousp ensky's Tertium Organum
(1920) and Henry Parker Manning's FourDimensions (1928). Wells does not mention
him, but the rst chap ter of his admirable The Time Machine (1895) unquestionably
suggests that he not only knew his work, but studied it to his delight and
subsequently ours.Hinton's A New E of Thought (1888) includes a note from the
editors which says: "The manuscrip t that is the basis for this book was sent to us
by its author, shortly before his dep arture from England for an unknown and remote
destination. He gave us comp lete liberty to amp li or modi the text, but we have
used that p rivilege sp aringly." This suggests a p robable suicide or, more likely,
that our fugitive friend had escap ed to the fourth dimension which he had
glimp sed, as he himself told us, thanks to a steadfast discip line. Hinton believed
that this discip line did not require any sup ernatural faculties. He gave an
address in London where one could acquire, for a laughable sum, certain toys
consisting of small wooden p olyhedrons. With these p ieces, one could construct
p yramids, cylinders, p risms, cubes, etc., by adhering to rigid and p redetermined
corresp ondences of edges, p lanes, and colors that bore strange names. Having
memorized each heterogenous structure, one then had to exercise mentally by
imagining the movements of its various p ieces. For examp le, moving the red-black
cube up ward and to the le set o a comp lex series of movements in the whole.
Through such exercises, the devotee would slowly intuit the fourth dimension.We
tend to forget that the elements of geometry that are learned in elementary
school p ertain to abstract concep ts and corresp ond to nothing in so-called reality.
These concep ts are the p oint, which occup ies no sp ace; the line, which, no matter
how long, consists of an in nite number of lines, one on top of the other; and
volume, made from an in nite number of p lanes like an in nite deck of cards. To
these concep ts, Hinton-anticip ated by the so-called Cambridge Platonists in the
seventeenth century, and esp ecially Henry More-added another: that of the
hyp ervolume formed by an in - nite number of volumes, and limited by volumes, not
by p lanes. He believed in the objective reality of hyp ercubes, hyp erp risms,
hyp erp yramids, h ercones, truncated hyp ercones, hyp ersp heres, etc. He did not
consider that, of all the geometric concep ts, the only real one is volume, as there
is nothing in the universe that lacks size. In a magni ing glass and even in a
microscop e, the tiniest p article has three dimensions. Hinton believed that there
510 JORG E LUIS BORG ESare universes of two, four, ve, six dimensions, and so in
nitely until one has exhausted all of the natural numbers. Algebra calls 3
multip lied by 3 "three squared" and 3 x 3 x 3 "three cubed"; this p rogression
brings us to an in nite number of exp onents and, according to the hyp othesis of
multidi- mensional geometry, to an in nite number of dimensions. As is well known,
that geometry exists; what we don't know is whether there are bodies in reality
that corresp ond to it.To illustrate his curious thesis-which was refuted by, among
others, G ustav Sp iller ( The Mind of Man, London, 1902)-Hinton p ublished various
books, including one of fantastic tales, of which we o er three in this volume.In
order to help our imagination accep t a world of four dimensions, Hinton, in the
rst story here, p rop oses a no less ctitious, but p ossibly more accessible idea: a
world of two. He does so with an integrity that is so tireless in its details that
to follow it can be arduous, desp ite the scrup ulous diagrams that comp lement the
exp osition. Hinton is not a storyteller; he is a solitary thinker who instinctively
took shelter in a sp eculative world that will not betray him, because he is its
source and inventor. He would like, naturally, to share it with us; he had already
attemp ted it, in an abstract form, in A New E of Thought and in The Fourth
Dimension; in Scienti c Romances (1888), he sought a narrative form. In the book,
his secret geometry unites with a grave moral sense. This illuminates "The
Persian ng," the third story here, which at rst seems to be a game in the manner
of TheThousand and One Nights but by the end is a p arable of the universe, not
without an inevitable incursion into mathematics.Hinton has an assured p lace in the
history of literature. His Scienti c Romances are earlier than the gloomy
imaginations of Wells. The very title of the series unequivocally p re gures the
seemingly inexhaustible wave of the works of "science ction" that have invaded our
century.Why not sup p ose Hinton's book to be p erhap s an arti ce to evade an
unfortunate fate? Why not sup p ose the same of all creators?[1986} [EW} PROLOG UES TOA
PERSONAL LIBRARY A Personal Libra1. Julio Cortazar, Stories.2 & 3? The Ap ocryp hal
G osp els.4? Franz Kafka, Amerika; Short Stories.s. G . K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross
and Other Stories. 6 & 7. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone.8. Maurice Maeterlink, The
Intelligence ofFlowers.9. Dino Buzzati, The Desert ofthe Tartars.10. Henrik Ibsen,
Peer G ynt; Hedda G abler. 11. J. M. E a de Queiroz, The Mandarin. 12. Leop olda
Lugones, The Jesuit Emp ire. 13. Andre G ide, The Counterfeiters.14. H. G . Wells, The
Time Machine; The Invisible Man.15. Robert G raves, The G reek Myths.16 & 17. Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Demons.18. E. Kasner & J. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination. 19.
Eugene O'Neill, The G reat G od Brown; Strange Interlude;Mourning Becomes Electra.20.
Ariwara no Narihara, Tales ofIse.21. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; Billy Budd;
Bartleby the Scrivener. 22. G iovanni Pap ini, The Tragic Everyday; The Blind Pilot;
Words and Blood. 23. Arthur Machen, The Three Imp osters.24. Fray Luis de Leon, tr.,
The Song ofSongs.25. Fray Luis de Leon, An Exp lanation of the Book offob.26. Josep h
Conrad, The End ofthe Tether; Heart ofDarkness.27. Edward G ibbon, Decline and Fall
ofthe Roman Emp ire. 28. Oscar Wilde, Essays and Dialogues.512 JORG E LUIS BORG ES29 .
Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia. 30. Hermann Hesse, The Bead G ame.31. Arnold
Bennett, Buried Alive.32. Claudius Elianus, On the Nature ofAnimals.33. Thorstein
Veblen, The Theory ofthe Leisure Class.34? G ustave Flaubert, The Temp tation ofSt.
Anthony.35? Marco Polo, Travels.36. Marcel Schwab, Imaginary Lives.37. G eorge
Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleop atra; Major Barba ; Candide.38. Francisco de Quevedo,
Marcus Brutus; The Hour ofAll.39. Eden Phillp ots, The Red
Redmaynes.40. S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.41. G ustav Meyrink, The G olem.
42. Henry James, The Lesson ofthe Master; The Figure in the Carp et;The Private
Life.43 & 44? Herodotus, The Nine Books ofHistory.45? Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo.46.
Rudyard Kip ling, Tales.47. William Beckford, Vathek.48. Daniel Defoe, Moll
Flanders.49. Jean Cocteau, The Professional Secret and Other Texts. so. Thomas De
Quincey, The Last Days ofEmmanuelKantandOtherStories.51. Ramon G omez de la Serna,
Prologue to the Work ofSilverio Lanza. 52. The Thousand and One Nights.53? Robert
Louis Stevenson, NewArabian Nights; Markheim.5 4 ? L e o n B l o y , S a l v a t i
o n fo r t h e j e w s ; T h e B l o o d o f t h e P o o r ; I n t h eDarkness.55?
TheBhagavad-G ita;TheEp icofG ilgamesh.56. Juan Jose Arreola, Fantastic Stories.57?
David G arnett, Lady into Fox; A Man in the Zoo; The Sailor'sReturn.58. Jonathan Swi
, G ulliver's Travels.59? Paul G roussac, Literary Criticism.6o. Manuel Mujica
Liinez, The Idols.61. Juan Ruiz, The Book ofG ood Love.62. William Blake, Comp lete
Poetry.63. Hugh Walp ole, Above the Dark Circus.64. Ezequiel Martinez Estrada,
Poetical Works.PROLOG UES TO A PERSON;!L I.IBR RY 51365. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales.66.
Virgil, The Aeneid.67. Voltaire, Stories.68. ] . W. Dunne, An Exp eriment with Time.
69. Atilio Momigliano, An Essay on Orlando Furioso.70 & 71. William James, The
Varieties ofReligious Exp erience;The Study ofHuman Nature.72. Snorri Sturluson,
Egil's Saga.73. The Book of the Dead.74 & 75? ] . exander G unn, TheProblem ofTime.
Prologue to the CollectionOver time, one's memory forms a disp arate library, made
of books or p ages whose reading was a p leasure and which one would like to share.
The texts of that p ersonal library are not necessarily famous. The reason is clear.
The p rofessors, who are the ones who disp ense fame, are interested less in beauty
than in literature's dates and changes, and in the p rolix analysis of books that
have been written for that analysis, not for the joy of the reader.This series is
intended to bring such p leasure. I will not select titles according to my
literary habits, or a certain tradition, or a certain school or nation or era. I
once said, "Others brag of the books they've managed to write; I brag of the books
I've managed to read." I don't know if I am a good writer, but I think I am an
excellent reader, or in any case, a sensitive and grateful one. I would like this
library to be as diverse as the unsatis ed curiosity that has led me, and
continues to lead me, in my exp loration of so many languages and literatures. I
know that the novel is no less arti cial than the allegory or the op era, but I will
include novels because they too have entered into my life. This series of
heterogenous books is, I rep eat, a library of p references.Maria Kodama and I have
wandered the globe of land and sea. We have visited Texas and Jap an, G eneva,
Thebes, and now, to gather the texts that are essential to us, we have traveled
through the corridors and p alaces of memory, as St. Augustine wrote.A book is a
thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that p op ulate the indi erent
universe, until it meets its reader, the p erson destined for its symbols. What
then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which
neither p sychology nor criticism can514 JORG E LUIS BORG ESdescribe. "The rose has no
why," said Angelus Silesius; centuries later, istler declared, "Art hap p ens."I
hop e that you will be the reader these books await.{1985] {EW] Julio Cortazar,
StoriesIn the 1940s I was an editor of a literary magazine that was more or less a
secret. One a ernoon, an a ernoon like others, a very tall boy whose features I
cannot recall brought me the manuscrip t of a short story. I told him to come back
in ten days and I would let him know what I thought. He came the next week. I told
him that I liked his story very much and that it had already been sent to the
p rinter. Soon a er, Julio Cortazar read the p rinted letters of "House Taken Over;'
accomp anied by two p encil drawings by No- rah Borges. The years went by, and one
night in Paris he mentioned that this was his rst p ublication. I am honored to
have been instrumental.The subject of that story is the gradual occup ation of a
house by an invisible p resence. In later p ieces, Cortazar took up this theme in a
manner that was more indirect and even more e ective.When Dante G abriel Rossetti
read the novel Wuthering Heights, he wrote to a friend: "The action takes p lace in
Hell, but the p laces, I don't know why, have English names." Something similar
occurs in Cortazar. The characters of the fable are deliberately trivial. They are
ruled by a routine of casual love a airs and casual discords. They move among
trivial things: brands of cigarettes, shop windows, disp lay cases, whiskey,
drugstores, air- p orts, and railway p latforms. They are immersed in the radio and
news- p ap ers. The top ograp hy corresp onds to Buenos Aires or Paris, and at rst we
may think that this is mere rep ortage. Little by little we realize that it is not.
The narrator has very subtly drawn us into his terrible world, where hap p iness is
imp ossible. It is a p orous world in which beings intermingle; a man's consciousness
may enter that of an animal, or an animal's into a man. He also p lays with the
matter of which we are made, time. In some of these stories two di erent temp oral
series flow and mingle.The style does not seem care l, but each word has been
chosen. No one can retell the p lot of a Cortazar story; each one consists of
determinedPR0L0G UES T0 A PERS0NtlL I.lBRARY 515 words in a determined order. If we
try to summarize them, we realize thatsomething p recious has been lost.The
Ap ocryp hal G osp els[EW} To read this book is to return in an almost magical way to
the rst centuries of our era, when religion was a p assion. The dogmas of the
Church and the arguments of the theologians came much later; what mattered at the
beginning was the new idea that the Son of G od had been, for thirty-three years,
a man, a tortured and sacri ced man whose death would redeem all the generations of
Adam. Among the books that announced this truth were the Ap ocryp hal G osp els. The
word "ap ocryp hal" now means "false" or "falsi- ed"; its original meaning was
"hidden." The ap ocryp hal texts were those forbidden to the masses, those which only
a few were allowed to read.Quite beyond our lack of faith, Christ is the most vivid
gure in human memory. It was his lot to p reach his doctrine, which sp read
throughout the p lanet, in an obscure p rovince. His twelve discip les were illiterate
and p oor. Excep t for some words that he drew in the sand and quic y erased, he
wrote nothing. (Pythagoras and the Buddha were also oral teachers.) He used no
logical arguments; the natural form of his thinking was the metap hor. To condemn
the p omp ous vanity of nerals, he said that the dead will bury the dead. To condemn
the hyp ocrisy of the Pharisees, he said that they were whited sep ulchres. Still
young, he died obscurely on the cross that was then a gallows and is now a symbol.
Without susp ecting his vast ture, Tacitus mentioned him in p assing, calling him
Chrestus. No one else has so governed, and continued to govern, the course of
history.This book does not contradict the canonical G osp els. It tells the same
biograp hy with strange variations. It reveals unexp ected miracles. It says that, at
the age of ve, Jesus modeled some sp arrows out of clay that, to the amazement of
the children p laying with him, took flight and were lost in the air singing. It
also attributes cruel miracles to him, those of an all- p owerful boy who has not
yet achieved the p ower of reason. For the Old Testament, Hell (Sheol) is the grave;
for the tercets of the Divine Comedy, a system of subterranean jail cells and a
p recise typ ograp hy; in this book it is516 JORG E LUIS BORG ESa somber character who
converses with Satan, Prince of Death, and who glori es the Lord.Along with the
canonical books of the New Testament, these Ap ocryp hal G osp els, forgotten for so
many centuries and now rediscovered, were the most ancient instruments of the
doctrine of Jesus.[EW] H. G . Wells, The me Machine; The Invisible ManThe op p osite
of Beckford or of Poe, the narratives gathered in this book are nightmares that
deliberately re se to emp loy a fantastic style. They were dreamed in the last years
of the nineteenth century and the rst of the twentieth. Wells had observed that
that era, which is ours, did not believe in magic and talismans, in rhetorical p omp
and exaggeration. Then, as now, the imagination accep ted the fabulous if it had a
scienti c, not a sup ernatural, origin. In each of these texts there is a single
wonder; the circumstances that frame it are minuscule, grey, and ordinary.
Consider The Invisible Man (1897). For G yges to become invisible, the G reeks had to
resort to a bronze ring found in a bronze horse; Wells, for greater verisimili-
tude, gives us an albino man who bathes in a strange liquid and who must go
barefoot and naked, for his clothes and shoes are not equally invisible. In Wells,
the p oignant is as imp ortant as the fabulous. His invisible man is a symbol-one
that will last a long time-of our solitude. Wells said that the inventions of Jules
Verne were merely p rop hetic and that his own were im- p ossible to realize. Both
believed that man would never reach the moon; our century, duly astonished, has
witnessed that feat.The fact that Wells was a genius is no less remarkable than the
fact that he always wrote with a modesty that was sometimes ironic.He was born not
far from London in 1866. Of humble origins, he knew misfortune and p overty. He was
a rep ublican and a socialist. In the last decades of his life, he moved from the
writing of dreams to the laborious
p roduction of huge books that could help mankind become citizens of the world.
In 1922 he p ublished a universal history. The best biograp hy ofWells is the one he
gave us in two volumes, Exp eriment in Autobiograp hy (1932). He died in 1946. Wells'
ctions were the rst books that I read; p erhap s they will be the last. [EW] P R 0 L
0 G U E S T 0 A P E R 5 0 NA 1. 1. 1 R A R Y 517 Fyodor Dostoevsky, DemonsLike
the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoevsky
marks an imp ortant date in one's life. This usually occurs in adolescence; maturity
seeks out more serene writers. In 1915, in G eneva, I avidly read Crime and
Punishment in the very readable English version by Constance G arnett. That novel,
whose heroes are a murderer and a p rostitute, seemed to me no less terrible than
the war that surrounded us. I looked for a biograp hy of the author. The son of a
military doctor who was murdered, Dostoevsky (1821-1881) knew p overty, sickness,
p rison, exile; the assiduous exercise of writing, traveling, and gambling; and, at
the end of his days, fame. He p rofessed the cult of Balzac. Involved in an
indeterminate consp iracy, he was sentenced to death. Practically at the foot of the
gallows where his comrades had been executed, Dostoevsky's sentence was com- muted,
but he sp ent four years in forced labor in Siberia, which he would never forget.He
studied and exp ounded the utop ias of Fourier, Owen, and Saint- Simon. He was a
socialist and a p an-Slavicist. I imagined at the time that Dostoevsky was a kind of
great unfathomable G od, cap able of understanding and justi ing all beings. I was
astonished that he had occasionally descended to mere p olitics, that he
discriminated and condemned.To read a book by Dostoevsky is to p enetrate a great
city unknown to us, or the shadow of a battle. Crime and Punishment revealed to me,
among other things, a world di erent from my own. When I read Demons, something
very strange occurred. I felt that I had returned home. The step p es were a magni
cation of the p amp as. Varvara Petrovna and Step an Tro - movich Verkhovensky were,
desp ite their unwieldy names, old irresp onsible Argentines. The book began with
joy, as if the narrator did not know its tragic end.In the p reface to an anthology
of Russian literature, Vladimir Nabokov stated that he had not found a single p age
of Dostoevsky worthy of inclusion. This ought to mean that Dostoevsky should not
be judged by each p age but rather by the total of all the p ages that comp rise the
book.[1985} [EW} 518 JORG E LUIS BORG ESThorstein Veblen, The Theo of the Leisure
ClassWhen, many years ago, I hap p ened to read this book, I thought it was a satire.
I later learned it was the rst work of an illustrious sociologist. In any event,
one need only look closely at a society to realize that it is not a utop ia, and
that its descrip tion runs the risk of bordering on satire. In this book from 1899,
Veblen discovers and de nes the leisure class, whose strange obligation is the
ostentatious sp ending of money. Thus they live in a certain neighborhood because
that neighborhood is famous for being the most exp ensive. Liebermann or Picasso
charge huge sums, not because they are greedy, but rather so as not to disap p oint
the buyers, whose intention is to demonstrate that they are able to p ay for a
canvas that bears the p ainter's signature. Ac- cording to Veblen, the success of
golf is due to the circumstance that it requires a great deal of land. He
mistakenly claims that the study of Latin and G reek has its origin in the fact that
both languages are useless. If an executive does not have time for ostentatious
sp ending, his wife or children will do it for him, with the p eriodic changes in
fashion that requires its uniforms.Veblen created and wrote this book in the United
States. Here the p henomenon of the leisure class is even more grave. Excep t for
the p enniless, every Argentine p retends to belong to that class. As a boy, I knew
families who, during the hot months, hid in their houses so that p eop le would think
they were summering on some ranch or in the city of Montevideo. A lady confessed to
me her intention of adorning her "hall" with a signed p ainting, certainly not by
virtue of its calligrap hy.The son of Norwegian immigrants, Thorstein Veblen was
born in Wis- consin in 1857 and died in California in 1929. (America owes much to
the Scandinavians; recall Whitman's best successor, Carl Sandburg.) His work is
vast. He austerely p rofessed the socialist doctrine. In his last books he
p rop hesied a fateful end of history.[EW} S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and TremblingS0ren
Kierkegaard, whose p rop hetic surname means cemetery (Church- yard) was born in 1813
in Cop enhagen and died in that same city in 1855. He is considered to be the
founder, or more exactly the father, of existentialism. PROLOG UES TO A PERSONAL
LIBRARY 519Less desirous of p ublicity than his sons, he lived a quiet and obscure
life. Like that other celebrated Dane, Prince Hamlet, he was wracked with doubt and
with anguish, a word of Latin origin which he endowed with a new shiver of fear. He
was less a p hilosop her than a theologian, and less a theologian than an eloquent
and sensitive man. A Lutheran evangelist, he denied the arguments that p rove the
existence of G od and the incarnation of Jesus, considering them absurd from a
rational p oint of view, and he p rop osed an act of individual faith for every
believer. He did not accep t the authority of the Church, and he wrote that each
p erson has the right to choose. He rejected the dialectics and the dialect of
Hegel. His sedentary biograp hy is far less rich in outward facts than it is in re
ections and p rayers. Religion was the strongest of his p assions. He was unusually
p reoccup ied with Abraham's sacrifice.A newsp ap er p ublished a caricature that
ridiculed him; Kierkegaard said that having p rovoked such a drawing was p erhap s the
true end of his life. He famously credited Pascal with the salvation of his soul.
He wrote: "If, after the Final Judgment, there remains only one sinner in Hell and
I hap p en to be that sinner, I will celebrate from the abyss the Justice of G od."
Unamuno undertook the study of Danish in order to read Kierkegaard and declared
that his arduous ap p renticeship was worth the e ort.In a p age that the anthologists
p refer, Kierkegaard modestly p raised his maternal language, which some have judged
inap p rop riate for p hilosop hical debate.[EW} Virgil, The AeneidLeibniz has a
p arable about two libraries: one of a hundred different books of di erent worth,
the other of a hundred books that are all equally p erfect. It is signi cant that
the latter consists of a hundred Aeneids. Voltaire wrote that Virgil may be the
work of Homer, but he is the greatest of Homer's works. Virgil's p reeminence lasted
for sixteen hundred years in Europ e; the Romantic movement denied and almost erased
him. Today he is threatened by our custom of reading books as a function of
history, not of aesthetics.The Aeneid is the highest examp le of what has been
called, without dis- credit, the arti cial ep ic; that is to say, the deliberate
work of a single man, not that which human generations, without knowing it, have
created. Virgil set out to write a masterp iece; curiously, he succeeded. 520 JORG E
LUIS BORG ESI say "curiously" because masterp ieces tend to be the daughters of
chance or of negligence.As though it were a short p oem, this ep ic was p olished,
line by line, with the felicitous care that Petronius p raised-I'll never know why-
in Horace. Let us examine, almost at random, a few examp les.Virgil does not tell us
that the Achaeans waited for darkness to enter Troy; he sp eaks of the friendly
silence of the moon. He does not write that Troy was destroyed, but rather, "Troy
was." He does not write that a life was unfortunate, but rather "The gods
understood him in another way." To ex- p ress what is now called p antheism, he says,
"All things are full of Jup iter." He does not condemn the aggressive madness of
men; he calls it "the love of iron." He does not tell us that Aeneas and the Sybil
wandered alone among the shadows in the dark night; he writes, "Ibant obscuri sola
sub nocte p er umbram." This is not a mere rhetorical gure, a h erbaton: "alone"
and "dark" have not changed p laces in the p hrase; both forms, the usual and the
Virgilian, corresp ond with equal p recision to the scene they rep resent.The
selection of each word and each turn of p hrase also makes Virgil the classic of the
classics, in some serene way, a Baroque p oet. The care l- ness of his writing did
not imp ede the fluidity of his narration of Aeneas' deeds and adventures. There are
events that are almost magical: Aeneas, exiled from Troy, disembarks in Carthage
and sees on the walls of a temp le images of the Trojan War, images of Priam,
Achilles, Hector, and even himself. There are tragic events: the Queen of
Carthage who watches the G reek boats leaving and knows that her lover has abandoned
her. There is a p redictable abundance of heroism, such as these words sp oken by a
warrior: "My son, learn from me strength and genuine valor; and from others, luck."
Virgil. Of all the p oets of the earth, there is none other who has been listened to
with such love. Even beyond Augustus, Rome, and the emp ire that, across other
nations and languages, is still the Emp ire. Virgil is our iend. When Dante made
Virgil his guide and the most continual character in the Commedia, he gave an
enduring aesthetic form to that which all men feel with gratitude.[EW} PROLOG UES TO
A PERSONAL LIBRARY 521 William James, Varieties of Rel ious Exp erience;The Stu of
Human NatureLike David Hume, like Schop enhauer, William James was a thinker and a
writer. He wrote with the clarity that is the p roduct of a good education; he did
not fabricate awkward dialects, in the
manner of Sp inoza, Kant, or the Scholastics.He was born in New Y ork in 1842. His
father, the theologian Henry James, did not want his two sons to be mere p rovincial
Americans. William and Henry were educated in England, France, and Italy. William
undertook the study of p ainting. A er his return to the United States, he
accomp anied the Swiss naturalist Agassiz on an exp edition to the source of the
Amazon. From medicine he went to p hysiology, from there to p sychology, and from
there to metap hysical sp eculation. In 1876 he founded a p sychological laboratory.
His health was p oor. He once attemp ted suicide; he rep eated, like nearly all men,
Hamlet's monologue. An act of faith saved him from that darkness. "My rst act of
free will," he wrote, "was to believe in free will." He thus freed himself from the
overwhelming faith of his p arents, Calvinism.Pragmatism, which he founded with
Charles Sanders Peirce, was an extension of that act of faith. The doctrine
p rop ounded by that word would make him famous. He urged us to interp ret every
concep tion in the light of its consequences in human behavior. The name of one his
books, The Will to Believe (1897), may be considered a summary of his doctrine.
James stated that exp erience is the elemental substance of that which we call the
universe, and that it is p rior to the categories of subject and object, knower
and known, sp irit and matter. This curious solution to the p roblem of being is, of
course, closer to idealism than materialism, to Berkeley's divinity than to
Lucretius' atoms.James was op p osed to war. He p rop osed that military conscrip tion
be rep laced by a conscrip tion of manual labor, which would imp ose discip line and
liberate men from their aggressive imp ulses.In this book, James accep ts the
p lurality of religions, and he considers it natural that each individual should
p rofess the faith of his own tradition. He declares that all of them can be bene
cial, as long as their origins are in conviction, not in authority. He believes
that the visible world is p art of a wider and more varied sp iritual world which can
be revealed by the senses. He studies sp eci c cases of conversion, saintliness, and
mystical exp erience. He p romotes the e cacy of p rayer without a destination.522
JORG E LUIS BORG ESThe year 1910 marks the death of two men of genius, William James
and Mark Twain, and the ap p earance of the comet we now await.{EW] NotesA comp lete
annotation of this volume would require a book of equal or greater length. Here,
only some of the p assing allusions, otherwise not exp lained in the text and not
available in general reference books, are glossed. In the notes to the individual
selections, the original Sp anish title is given, followed by rst p eriodical
p ublication and date, and rep rinting in book form, if any. Unless otherwise noted,
all p eriodicals were p ublished in Argentina.SourcesEarly (Sup p ressed) Writings:
Inquisiciones [Inquisitions] , 1925. Rep rinted in 1994.El ta afw de i esp eranza
[The Extent of My Hop e] , 1926. Rep rinted in 1994.El idio a de los argentinas [The
Language of the Argentines] , 1928. Rep rinted in1994?Contemp orary Collections:
Evaristo Carriego, 1930. (In English: Evaristo Carriego, tr. Norman Thnmas di G io-
vanni, 1984.)Discusi6n [ Discussion] , 1932.Historia de Ia eternidad [ History of
Eternity] , 1936.Otras inquisiciones, 1952. ( In English: Other Inquisitions, tr.
Ruth L. C. Simms, 1964.)Lectures:Borges, oral [Borges, Sp eaking] , 1979.Siete
naches, 1980. (In English: Seven Nights, tr. Eliot Weinberger, 1984.)Late and
Posthumous Collections:Antologia p ersona? 1961. (In English: A Personal Anthology,
ed. Anthony Kerrigan,1967.) Borges' favorite Borges; also includes p oetry and
ction.Nueva antologia p ersonal [A New Personal Anthology] , 1968. A second
selection offavorites; also includes p oetry and fiction.Pr6logos con un p r6logo de
p rologos [Prologues with a Prologue to the Prologues] ,1975?524 NOTESBorges en!
y/sobre cine, ed. Edgardo Cozarinsky, 1980. (In English: Borges inland/on Film, tr.
G loria Waldman & Ronald Christ, 1988.) Film criticism.Paginas de forge Luis Borges
[Pages from JLB] , 1982. Also includes p oetry and ction.Nueve ensayos dantescos
[Nine Dantesque Essays] , 1982.Ficcionario, ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal, 1985. (In
English: Borges: A Reader, 1981.)Also includes p oetry and ction.Textos cautivos
[Cap tive Texts] , ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal & Enrique Sacerio-G ari, 1986. Articles
from El Hagar [ Home] .Bibliotecap ersonal,p r6logos[A Personal
Library,Prologues] ,1988.Textos recobrados 1919-1929 [Recovered Texts, 1919-1929] ,
1998. Also includes p oetryand ction.Comp leteWorks:Ob s camp /etas I: 1923-1949,
1989. (Evaristo Carriego; Discusi6n; Historia de Iaeternidad; p lus p oetry and
ction.)Obrascamp /etasII:1952-1972,1989. (Otrasinquisiciones;p lusp oetryand ction.)
Ob s camp /etas III: 1975-1985, 1989. (Siete naches; Nueve ensayos dantescos; p lus
p o-etry and ction.)Obras camp /etas IV: 1975-1988, 1996. (Pr6logos con un p r6logo
de p r6logos; Borges,oral; Textos cautivos; Biblioteca p ersonal, p r6logos.)Obras
comp letas en colaboraci6n, 1997. (Collaborative works of ction and non- ction.)The
best biograp hy and bibliograp hy to date are, resp ectively: Emir Rodriguez Mane-
gal, jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biograp hy (1978), and Nicolas Hel , forge Luis
Borges: Bibliografia camp /eta (1998). A useful dictionary of references is Daniel
Balderston'sThe Literary Universe offorge Luis Borges (1986).Some Recurring
ReferencesAlmafuerte: "Strong Soul;' p seudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios (1854-
1917), the self-styled Whitman ofArgentina. A standard reference book states that
Palacios "p roduced a sequence of misanthrop ic, megalomaniac p oems of titanic de
ance"-a descrip tion that can only lead to the reader's disap p ointment-but Borges
claimed that Almafuerte taught all Argentines the aesthetic function of language.
BlackAnt: "Hormiga Negra," the legendary gaucho outlaw G uillermo Hoyo, subject of a
p op ular book by Eduardo G utierrez (see below).Bloy, Leon (1846-1917): French writer
whose work, according to Borges, is "full of lamentation and invective." Borges was
p articularly attracted to Bloy's notion that everything in the universe, including
ourselves, is a symbol that we cannot decip her.Bossuet, ] acques-Benigne (1627-
1704): French theologian, Bishop of Condom, tutor to the Daup hin, and imp ortant
defender of traditional Catholicism against Protes- tantism, theaters, new readings
of the Bible, Quietism, intellectual curiosity, Sp inoza,NOTES 525etc. (Not to be
confused with Wilhelm Bousset, the G nostic scholar whom Borges occasionally
cites.)Carriego, Evaristo (1883-1912): Pop ular p oet in the Palermo section of
Buenos Aires where Borges sp ent his childhood. A friend of Borges' father, Carriego
used to visit every Sunday, and the child would listen to their literary
discussions. Borges' 1930 book on Carriego uses the p oet as the central gure for
his evocation of "old-time" Buenos Aires.Don Segundo Sombra: The 1926 novel by
Ricardo G iraldes and an idealized p ortrait of gaucho life.El critic6n: See
Baltasar G racian, below.Fernandez, Macedonia (1874-1952): Argentine p oet,
p hilosop her, short-story writer, friend and mentor to Borges. His insistence on the
dreamlike quality of the material world and the blurred boundaries between ction
and reality were enormously in u- ential on Borges.G racian, Baltasar (1601-1658):
Sp anish writer and Jesuit. His El critic6n [The Criti- cizer] , one of
Schop enhauer's favorite books, is an allegory about an Innocent and a Man of the
World who visit such Borgesian p laces as the Source of Illusion, the p alace of
Queen Artemia (who turns beasts into men), the Inn of the World (with a sep arate
room for every vice), the House of Madmen (home to all humanity), the Wheel of
Time, and the Castle ofAdventurers, where the travelers become invisible until
disillu- sion returns them to their human form. G racian's Agudeza y el arte del
ingenio [Wit and the Art of G enius] is the major ars p oetica of the Sp anish
Baroque.G roussac, Paul (1848-1929): Historian, p laywright, literary critic, and one
of Borges' p redecessors as director of the National Library. Born in France,
G roussac arrived in Argentina at age eighteen, and began to write in Sp anish.
Borges considered G roussac second only to the Mexican Alfonso Reyes as the greatest
modern p rose stylist in the language.G utierrez, Eduardo (1853-1890): Argentine
writer of gaucho adventure novels p ublished in serial form, the most famous of
which is Juan Moreira. Borges said he was in- nitely sup erior to James Fenimore
Coop er.Jauregui, Juan de (1583-1641): Sp anish p oet and translator who introduced
terza rima into Sp anish and is also known for having p ainted Cervantes' p ortrait.
Lugones, Leop olda (1874-1938): MajorArgentine symbolist p oet, journalist, and
short- story writer. Borges violently attacked him in his early, Ultraist years,
but later wrote a monograp h and various essays on Lugones, calling him "Argentina's
greatest writer."Martin Fierro: The ep onymous gaucho hero of Jose Hernandez's
narrative p oem, p ublished in 1872 and 1879, and generally considered the
Argentine national ep ic. Fierro, the nostalgic symbol of gaucho values, is also a
deserter, a murderer, and a coward, as Borges frequently likes to p oint out.
Mauthner, Fritz (1849-1923): G erman p oet turned p hilosop her, and one of Borges' fa-
vorite writers. Mauthner was the rst p hilosop her to devote himself to the p roblems
526 NOTESraised by ordinary language. Among his Borgesian beliefs were: the self
cannot be found and therefore self-knowledge is imp ossible; p sychology does not
exist because language can only describe exterior sense imp ressions; today's
religion is yesterday's science; morals are not a p ossible subject matter of
knowledge; truth is historically
relative; ordinary p hilosop hy is afflicted by "word sup erstition;' the belief that
reality can be known through language; and language is most suitable for p oetry or
the ex- p ression of religious feelings for there the question of truth or falsity
does not arise.PaulinoLucero:1872bookofgauchescop oemsbyHilarioAscasubi (1807-1875).
Its ll, and more engrossing, title is: Paulino Lucero; or The G auchos of the Rio
de Ia Plata Singing and Fighting against the Tyrannies ofthe Rep ublics ofArgentina
and Uruguay.Rosas, juan Manuel de (1793-1877): The ruler of Argentina from 1835 to
1852. The archetyp e-for both Borges and Argentina-of the cruel and ruthless
dictator, Rosas, oddly, was a distant relative of Borges.Sarmiento, Domingo
Faustino (1811-1888): The most imp ortant Argentine intellectual of the nineteenth
century: writer, historian, educator, and p resident of the country from 1868 to
1874. His 1845 book Facundo is an exp loration of Argentine identity and a
condemnation of the Rosas dictatorship through the gure of a historical gaucho
war- lord. Borges wrote that Argentine history would have changed for the better if
Facundo Quiroga, rather than Martin Fierro, were its national hero.Torres
Villarroel, Diego de (1693-1770): Sp anish p oet and satirist, and the leading disci-
p le of Quevedo. His p icaresque and corrosive autobiograp hy is considered a master-
p iece in Sp anish. A favorite of Borges in his early, "baroque" years.I. Early
Writings, 1922-1928Borges, born in 1899, sp ent a cloistered childhood in Buenos
Aires; English was the rst language he learned to read. In 1914, the family moved
to Europ e, settling in G eneva and later Lugano, where he learned French, Latin, and
G erman. In 1919, the family relocated to Sp ain, where Borges became associated with
the Ultraist group of young p oets, and began to p ublish p oems and articles, largely
champ ioning the new movement.It is worth noting that, by age twenty, Borges had
discovered most of the writers and books that would become his lifelong comp anions:
Berkeley, Hume, William James, Sp encer, the English Romantic p oets, and The
Thousand and One Nights (all of which he inherited from his father, who also taught
him Zeno's p aradoxes); Don Quixote (which he rst read in English), Quevedo, Torres
Villarroel, Schop enhauer, De Quincey, Kip ling, Carlyle, Swinburne, Browning,
Chesterton, Wells, Shakesp eare, Stevenson, Poe, Twain, Whitman (whom he rst read
in G erman), Jack London, Bret Harte, the Encyclop edia Britannica, Virgil, Dante,
Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mal- larme, Ap ollinaire, de G ourmont, The G olem,
Heine, Nietzsche, Rilke, the G erman Ex- p ressionist p oets, and the Kabbalah, among
many others.In 1921, the family retu ed to Buenos Aires, and Borges develop ed the
habit of long daily walks and exp lorations of the city that would continue until
his blindness. He founded an Ultraist magazine, Prisma [Prism] , which lasted for
two issues, and beganNOTES 527the regular p ublication of essays and p oems in
Argentine and some Sp anish magazines. In 1923, his rst book of p oetry: Fervor de
Buenos Aires [Fervor for Buenos Aires] . Shortly after, the family sp ent a year in
Europ e attending to Borges' father's health. It was to be Borges' last trip abroad
until late in his life.For the rest of the decade, Borges was, in the words of
Rodriguez Monegal, "the acknowledged leader of the young and one of the most
p ublic writers in Argentina's literary history." He founded an imp ortant little
magazine, Proa [Prow] , regularly contributed to many others, edited an anthology of
the new Latin American p oetry, and was included in various others, and p ublished
two more books of p oetry and three books of essays: Inquisiciorus [Inquisitions,
1925] ; El tama o de mi esp eranza[The Extent of My Hop e, 1926] ; and ?1 idioma de los
argentinas [The Language of the Argentines, 1928 ] .Borges rejected the comp lex
styles o f the early books o f essays, which for him, veered between a baroque
"Latin in Sp anish" and an over-reliance on obscure Argen- tine words, idioms, and
sp ellings. He never allowed them to be rep rinted-excep t in French translation-and
they did not ap p ear again until 1994. Nearly all scholars and critics, however,
take the major essays of this p eriod to be essential to an understanding of the
work as a whole, and Borges himself used to joke that p osterity would p robably
consider these rst books to be his best.None of the essays in this section are in
the Comp lete Works.The Nothingness of Personality"La naderia de Ia p ersonalidad,"
Proa no. 1, Aug. 1922. Included in Inquisiciones.Desp ite his later rejection of all
the p rose of this p eriod, Borges felt, at the time, that this was his rst fully
realized essay.A er Images"Desp ues de las imagenes," Proa no. 5, Dec. 1924.
Included in Inquisiciones.p . 10: Luis Carlos Lop ez: Colombian p oet (1883-1950) of
folkloric simp licity, deliberately p itched against modernism.p . 11: mirrors are
like water: A reference to the 1916 book of Creationist p oetry El esp ejo de agua
[ The Mirror of Water] , by the Chilean p oet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948).Joyce's
ysses"El Ulises de Joyce;' Proa no. 6, Jan. 1925. Included in Inquisiciones.Borges
may or may not have been, as he claims, the rst Sp anish-sp eaker to read Ulysses,
but a Sp anish translation of the novel did not ap p ear until 1948.A History ofAngels
"Historia de los angeles," La Prensa, 7 Mar. 1926. Included in Tama o.Verbiage for
Poems"Palabreria p ara versos." An earlier version, under the title "Acerca del
vocabulario"[An Ap p roach to Vocabulary] was p ublished in La Prensa, 2 May 1926.
Included in Tama o.p . 22: Esteban Manuel de Villegas: Sp anish p oet (1589-1669) and
translator of Ho- race and Anacreon.528 NOTESp . 22: juan de Mena: Sp anish p oet
(1411-1456) and the rst to write in a "p uri ed," non-colloquial, literary form of
the language.A Profession of Literary Faith"Profesi6n de fe literaria." Originally
p ublished under the title "A manera de p rofesi6n de fe literaria" [By Way of a
Profession of Literary Faith] in La Prensa, 27 June 1926. In- cluded in Tama o.p .
24: {julio] Herrera y Reissig: Imp ortant turn-of-the-century Uruguayan p oet (1875-
1910); bohemian, Symbolist, and ultimately, Ultraist.p . 24: Fern n Silva Valdes:
Uruguayan p oet (1887-1975) who p rop osed a national "nativism" to rep lace local
"criollism."p .25:commitedbyafamousp oet:HerrerayReissig,inthep oem "Sep elio"[Inter-
ment] in his 1909 book Los p eregrinos dep iedra [The Pilgrims of Stone] . On the
p revious p age, Borges had identi ed another citation from the same book, but here
does not.p . 26: Manuel G alvez: Argentine realist novelist (1882-1962).Literary
Pleasure"La fruici6n literaria," La Prensa, 23 Jan. 1927. Included in Idioma.p . 28:
The Student ofSalamanca: The 1836-37 Romantic narrative p oem of the Don Juan story,
by Jose de Esp ronceda.p . 28: Don juan Tenorio: The 1844 p op ular p lay, also of the
Don Juan story, by Jose Zorrilla. Investigation of the Word"Indigaci6n de Ia
p alabra," p ublished in two p arts, Sintesis no. 1, June 1927, and no. 3, August
1927. Included in Idioma.Rodriguez Monegal comp ares this essay to I. A. Richards'
nearly contemp orary book, Practical Criticism (1929): "Both start from the same
exp erience: the discussion of a text whose author is unknown to the reader and
which, therefore, can only be decip hered by itself. Y et, contrary to Dr. Richards,
[Borges] p ostulates the utter imp ossibility of scienti c criticism . . . for him,
every critic (every reader) p laces himself, willingly or not, in a conditioned
p ersp ective; before judging, every reader p rejudges. Criticism, or reading, creates
the text anew." The op ening sentence of Don Quixote will be p laced in another
context, decades later, in Borges' lecture on detective stories (p . 491).p . 37:
[Josep h] Joubert: The great French writer of ep igrammatic p ensees (1754-1824).II.
1929-1936Throughout the 1930s, Borges wrote almost no p oetry. The rst of his
"canonical" non- ction p rose books was Evaristo Carriego (1930)-see note on
Carriego above. (The book, considered unsuccessful by both Borges and readers, was
greatly imp roved in its second edition, twenty- ve years later, which added "A
History of the Tango" [p . 394] and other essays.) A few weeks a er its p ublication,
the democratically electedNOTES 529government of Hip olito Irigoyen was overthrown
by the military, and Argentina's "infamous decade" began; Borges would resp ond
with increasing p assion to the rising fascism and anti-Semitism of the Argentine
bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.In 1931, Borges' friend Victoria Ocamp o-whom Andre
Malraux called the "Em- p ress of the Pamp as"-founded Sur, the most imp ortant South
American literary magazine of the century, and to which Borges would be, in her
words, the "chief contributor and adviser" for decades. The 1932 book Diswsi6n
[Discussion] marks the beginning of Borges' most fertile and enduring non- ction
writing, a p eriod that would end with his blindness in 1956. The following year, he
took a job as literary editor of the "Saturday Color Magazine" of the tabloid
newsp ap er Critica, to which he contributed articles, translations of authors
ranging from Chesterton to Novalis, and, under a p seudonym, his rst short
stories, including "Hombre de Ia esquina rosada" (known in English as "Streetcorner
Man" or "Man on Pink Corner"), and the ction- alized biograp hies that would be
collected in Historia universal de Ia infamia [Univer- sal History of Infamy,
1935 ] . His next book of essays, Historia de Ia eternidad [ History of Eternity,
1936] , p layed a metap hysical joke on its readers by including "The Ap - p roach to
al-Mu'tasim," a review of a ctional book (it would later be moved to Fic- ciones).
By 1936, Borges was the best-known young p oet and essayist in Argentina; literary
magazines had devoted sp ecial
sup p lements to his work. Y et his rep utation did not extend beyond a small circle
in Buenos Aires: Ete idad, for examp le, sold exactly thirty-seven cop ies in its
rst year.The Perp etual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise"La p erp etua carrera de
Aquiles y Ia tortuga," La Prensa, 1 Jan. 1929. Included in Discusi6n.Another,
better known version of this essay is the 1939 "Avatares de Ia tortuga" [Avatars of
the Tortoise] , which is included in Otras inquisiciones.The Duration of Hell"La
duraci6n del in erno," Sintesis no. 25, June 1929. Included in Diswsi6n.The
Sup erstitious Ethics of the Reader"La sup ersticiosa etica del lector," Azul no. 8,
Jan. 1931. Included in Discusi6n.p . 53: G uzman de Alfarache: The 1599 novel by
Mateo Aleman that started the craze for the p icaresque novel.Our Inabilities
"Nuestras imp osibilidades," Sur no. 4, Sp ring 1931. Included in the rst edition of
Discusi6n, where it was the rst essay, but omitted from later editions. Not in the
Com- p lete Works.p . 56: a Russian: In Argentina, ntso [Russian] was a derogatory
word for an Ashke- nazi Jew. (Sep hardic Jews, with similar exactitude, were turcos,
Turks.) Borges continues to p lay with this confusion later in the essay when he
refers to "Russian gold."p . 56: the p seudo-serious: Borges uses the word seriola
and p uts it in quotation marks. The word is found in no dictionary, and only one
Sp anish sp eaker I consulted knew what it meant. According to the Argentine
p ainter Cesar Paternosto,53 0 N O T E S"ola" was a slang suf x indicating disbelief
in Buenos Aires in the 1920s and1930S.p . SJ: the Italian immigrant: Borges uses the
word gringo, which in Argentina oncereferred to Italians, not North Americans.p .
SJ: Hallelujah: The 1929 King Vidor lm, featuring an all-African-American cast. p .
57: one ofvon Sternberg's heroic lms: Underworld (1927).The Postulation of Reality
"La p ostulaci6n de Ia realidad;' Azul no. 10, June 1931. Included in Discusi6n.p .
59: Hume noted . . . : The rst half of this sentence reap p ears in the 1940 story
"T!On, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," where Borges notes that it is entirely true on earth
and entirely false on Tl n.p . 6o: Don Quixote: The translation cited is Tobias
Smollett's 1755 version.p . 61: Lehrjahre: G oethe's 1796 novel, TheAp p renticeship
ofWilhelm Meister.p . 63: Enrique Larreta: Argentine novelist (1875-1961). His 1908
historical neo-Walter Scott novel, La gloria de Don Ramiro [The G lory of Don
Ramiro] , mixesnarration in contemp orary Sp anish with dialogue in the archaic.p . 63:
[G eorge] Moore: The Anglo-Irish novelist (1852-1933) and co-founder of theAbbey
Theatre, who wrote some French p oems in his youth.A Defense of Basilides the False
"Una vindicaci6n del falso Basilides." Published under the title "Una vindicaci6n
de los gn6sticos" [A Defense of the G nostics] in La Prensa, 1 Jan. 1932. Included
in Discusi6n.The Homeric Versions"Las versiones homericas," La Prensa, 8 May 1932.
Included in Discusi6n, and revised for later editions.p . 70: the Quixote is to me
an unchanging monument: But Borges, curiously, rst read the book in English
translation.p . 71: Augustin Moreto: Sp anish cleric and extremely p op ular comic
p laywright (1618-1669).p . 71: Browning's mostfamous book: The Ring and the Book
(1869).Narrative Art and Magic"El arte narrativo y Ia magia," Sur no. 5, Summer
1932. Included in Discusi6n.p . So: Kenelm Digby's ointment: Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-
1665) was a naval com- mander who defeated the French and Venetian fleets in the
Battle of Scanderoon, an author of theological tracts and a memoir of his courtship
and secret marriage to the celebrated beauty Venetia Stanley, a scientist who
discovered the necessity of oxygen for p lant life, and the inventor of a "p owder of
symp athy"- here transformed into an ointment-which could cure a wound by treating
the object that inflicted it.p . 81: Estanislao del Camp o: Argentine gaucho p oet
(1834-1880). His 1866 Fausto is a p o- etic dialogue of naive gauchos attending a
p erformance of G ounod's op era Faust.p . 81: The Showdown: 1928 lm by Victor
Schertzinger; Underworld: 1927 lm byJosef von Sternberg; Dishonored: 1931 lm by
von Sternberg.NOTES 531A Defense of the Kabbalah"Una vindicaci6n de Ia cabala."
First p ublished in Discusi6n, 1932.p . 85: St. Paulinus: Italian theologian and
Bishop of Y ork (d. 644).p . 85: [St.} Athanasius:Theologian and Bishop ofAlexandria
(293-373).p . 85: Macedonius: Heterodox theologian and Bishop o f Constantinop le
from 342 to360.p . 85: Socinians: Followers of Lelio Sozzini (1525-1562), known as
Socin, a theolo-gian, exiled in Switzerland, who rejected the Trinity, original
sin, p redestination, eternal suffering, and other cornerstones of Christianity.T h
e A r t o f Ve r b a l A b u s e"Arte de injuriar," Sur no. 8, Sep t. 1933. Included
in Eternidad.p . 8J: truco: Pop ular Argentine card game, and the subject of an essay
in Evaristo Carriego.p . 91: [Jose} Santos Chocano: Peruvian p oet (1875-1934) who
consciously sought to become the Latin American Whitman.p . 91: Jose Maria Manner
Sans: Argentine academic critic, author of History Consid- ered as a G enre
ofPoetry.p . 91: Miguel Servet: Also known as Michael Servetus (1511-1533), a
Sp anish theologian burned at the stake as a heretic.The Translators of The
Thousand and One Nights"Los traductores de las 1001 Noches." Sections rst ap p eared
in Crftica, 10 Mar. 1934.First p ublished in its entirety in Ete idad, 1936.p . 9J:
[Paul} Morand: Pop ular French novelist and travel writer (1888-1976), trans-lated
by, among others, Ezra Pound.p . 98: al-Mutanabbi's Diwan: Abu-t-Tayyib al-
Mutanabbi, Arabic p oet (916-965).p . 100: Toulet's Contrerimes: Posthumously
p ublished book of p oems by Paul-JeanToulet (1867-1920), known for its technical
p erfection. Borges said he p referredToulet to Baudelaire.p . 103: Marchand's
withdrawal: The 1898 dip lomatic crisis, known as the "Fashodaincident," when the
British and Lord Kitchener forced the French and Major Marchand out of a small
settlement in the Sudan, almost p recip itating a Euro- p ean war.p . 108: Mannequin
d'osier [The Wicker Dummy] : The second in Anatole France's four-volume series
Histoire contemp oraine (1896-1901).I, a Jew"Y o, judio," Megdfono no. 12, Ap ril
1934. First rep rinted in Ficcionario, 1985. Not in the Comp lete Works.Rodriguez
Monegal notes that in Borges' "mock search" for a Jewish ancestor, the most likely
susp ects turn out to be the Acevedos, "the very Catholic and bigoted maternal
branch of his family."p . 110: Crisol [Crucible] : An Argentine Fascist magazine.The
Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton"Los laberintos p oliciales y
Chesterton," Sur no. 10, May 1935. First rep rinted in Fic-cionario, 1985. Not in
the Comp lete Works.532 NOTESThe Doctrine of Cycles"La doctrina de los ciclos," Sur
no. 20, May 1936. Included in Eternidad.p . 115: [Ernest] Rutherford: Baron
Rutherford, English p hysicist (1871-1937), discoverer of the atomic nucleus.A
History of Eternity"Historia de Ia eternidad." First p ublished in Eternidad, 1936.
The citations om the Enneads are adap ted om the Step hen MacKenna translation. p .
126: Pedro Malon de Chaide: Sp anish Augustinian monk and writer (1S30-1S89), and
discip le o f Fray Luis d e Leon; against the Dominicans, he defended the p osi-tion
that the Scrip tures should be translated into Sp anish.p . 127: AbubekerAbentofail:
Better known as Ibn Tufail (c. nos-nBs), the AndalusianArabic writer whose revision
of Avicenna's p hilosop hical romance of a man's sp iritual develop ment on a desert
island, Alive, Son ofAwake, was one of Ramon Llull's favorite books.p . 132: Hans
Lassen Martensen: Danish theologian (1808-1884), author of a life of Jakob Boehme
and works on Christian ethics.Film Reviews and CriticismBorges was a lifelong movie
fan. In the years of his blindness, he would go to the movies simp ly to listen to
the dialogue.The Cinematograp h, the Biograp h"El cinematografo El biografo," La
Prensa, 28 Ap r. 1929. First rep rinted in Textos recobrados, 1998. Not in the
Comp lete Works.Bi6grafo-undoubted!y derived from D. G ri th's Biograp h Studios-was
the word p referred by the lower-middle and working classes in Buenos Aires; the
Fran- cop hilic up p er classes called a movie a cinemat6grafo, the Lumiere Brothers'
name for their invention.Films"Films;' Sur no. 3, Winter 1931. Included in
Discusi6n.Street SceneSur no. s, Summer 1932. Included in Discusi6n.KingKongOne of
"Cinco breve noticias" [Five Brief Notices] , Selecci6n no. 3, July 1933. Never
rep rinted. Not in the Comp lete Works.The Informer"El delator, lm," Sur no. n, Aug.
193S? First rep rinted in Cine, 1980. Not in the Com-p lete Works.Two Films"Dos
lms;' Sur no. 19, Ap ril 1936. First rep rinted in Cine, 1980. Not in the Comp leteWo
r k s .NOTES533ThePetri edForest"El bosque p etri cado, lm de Archie Mayo;' Sur no.
24, Sep t. 1936. First rep rinted in Cine, 1980. Not in the Comp lete Works.p . 150:
The Passing of the Third Floor Back: 1935 British lm, directed by Berthold
Viertel.Wells, the Visionary"Wells, p revisor," Sur no. 26, Nov. 1936. First
rep rinted in Cine, 1980. Not in theComp lete Works.III. Writ gs for El Hogar [Home]
Magaz e, 1936-1939By 1936, Borges' father's health had worsened, and Borges, living
at home, decided to sup p lement the family income by taking a job with El Hagar
[ Home ] , a weekly magazine for the Argentine middle- and up p er-class housewife.
Borges was in charge of writing the "Foreign Books and Authors" p age, which
alternated with one devoted to Sp anish-language writers. The "Books" p age had a
strict format which Borges continued: a "cap sule biograp hy" of a living writer,
one longer review or essay, a few short reviews, and an occasional short note on
"the literary life." Although Borges was at his lightest and p erhap s wittiest in El
Hagar,
he by no means limited the range of his subject matter, nor curtailed his habit
of citing texts in various languages without a translation. It is remarkable that
Borges' p age lasted for three years.All of these texts were rst rep rinted in
Textos cautivos, 1986. Ramon Llull's Thin ng Machine"La maquina de p ensar de
Raimundo Lulio," 15 Oct. 1937.When Fiction Lives in Fiction"Cuando Ia cci6n vive
en Ia cci6n," 2 June 1939.Cap sule Biograp hiesBesides the texts included here,
Borges wrote "cap sule biograp hies" of Richard Aiding- ton, Henri Barbusse, Sir
James Barrie, Hillaire Belloc, Van Wyck Brooks, Karel Cap ek, Countee Cullen, e. e.
cummings, Alfred Doblin, Lord Dunsany, Edna Ferber, Lion Feuchtwanger, E. M.
Forster, Leonhard Frank, David G arnett, Julien G reen, G erhart Haup tmann, Langston
Hughes, James Joyce, Franz Ka a, H. R. Lenormand, Arthur Machen, Edgar Lee Masters,
G ustav Meyrink, Harold Nicolson, Eden Phillp otts, Powys, Elmer Rice, Romain
Rolland, Carl Sandburg, G eorge Santayana, Olaf Stap ledon, Lytton Strachey,
Hermann Sudermann, Fritz von Unruh, Evelyn Waugh, and FranzWerfel.First p ublication
dates for the included texts: Isaac Babel, 4 Feb. 1938; Ernest Bramah, 18 Feb.
1938; Benedetto Croce, 27 Nov. 1936; Theodore Dreiser, 19 Aug. 1938; T. S. Eliot,
25 June 1937; Will James, 7 Jan. 1938; Liam O'Flaherty, 9 July 1937; Oswald
Sp engler, 25 Dec. 1936; Paul Valery, 22 Jan. 1937; S. S. Van Dine, n June 1937;
Virginia Woolf, 30 Oct. 1936.p . 172: the most dexterous: The translation Borges is
referring to is by Borges himself.534NOTESp . 174: Orlando: Borges p ublished a
translation of Woolf's novel in 1937, and, the p revious year, a translation of A
Room of One's Own.Book Reviews and NotesBorges wrote 141 book reviews and 15 notes
on "The Literary Life" for El Hogar. First p ublication dates for the included
texts:G ustav Meyrink, Der Engel vom Westlichen Fenster, 16 Oct. 1936.Alan Pryce-
Jones, Private Op inion, 13 Nov. 1936.Louis G olding, The Pursuer, 11 Dec. 1936.Lord
Halifax's G host Book, 25 Dec. 1936.William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!, 22 Jan.
1937.G ustaf Janson, G ubben Komme1; 16 Ap r. 1937.Aldous Huxley, Stories, Essays, and
Poems, 16 Ap r. 1937. Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and Plays, 11 June 1937.
Ellery Queen, The Door Between, 25 June 1937.William Barrett, Personality Survives
Death, 21 Jan. 1938.Wolfram Eberhard, tr., Chinese Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, 4
Feb. 1938. "The Literary Life: Marinetti," 4 Mar. 1938p . 184: [Julio] Cejador [y
Frauca] : Sp anish literary historian (1864-1927) and mar- tinet of the Sp anish
language.Richard Hull, Excellent Intentions, 15 Ap r. 1938.p . 184: One of the
p rojects . . . : The hyp othetical novel that Borges conceives wouldlater be
ascribed to an imaginary author in his story "A Survey of the Works ofHerbert
Quain" (1941).Meadows Taylor, The Confessions ofa Thug, 27 May 1938.William
Faulkner, The Unvanquished, 24 June 1938.Lady Murasaki, The Tale of G enji, 19 Aug.
1938.Lord Dunsany, Patches ofSunlight, 2 Sep t. 1938."Two Fantasy Novels," 14 Oct.
1938."The Literary Life: Oliver G ogarty," 14 Oct. 1938."An English Version of the
Oldest Songs in the World;' 28 Oct. 1938. Alan G ri ths, OfCourse, Vitelli!, 18 Nov.
1938."A G randiose Manifesto from Breton;' 2 Dec. 1938.p . 192: Andre Breton: It was
not known until many years later that the actual author of the Breton/Rivera
manifesto was Leon Trotsky."H. G . Wells' Latest Novel," 2 Dec. 1938.E. S.
Pankhurst, Delp hos, or the Future ofInternational Language, 10 Mar. 1939. "Joyce's
Latest Novel," 16 June 1939."The Literary Life: The Dionne Quints," 7 July 1939.
This was Borges' last contribution to the foreign books p age.IV. 1937-1945As his
income from El Hogar was p altry, in 1937 Borges took a job as a low-level bu-
reaucrat in an unimp ortant municip al library; he would nish his work in an hour
and then disap p ear into the basement for the rest of the day to read and write. Not
NOTES535surp risingly, he discovered and began translating Kafka. In 1938, the death
of his father le Borges as head of a household that included his mother, sister
Norah, and her hus- band. Some months later, he develop ed blood p oisoning from a
freak accident and nearly died; for reasons too comp lex to summarize here, the
exp erience both tied him closer to his mother and p romp ted him to devote himself
more seriously to ction. The result was his greatest book of stories: the 1941 El
Jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan [The G arden of Forking Paths), which was
exp anded in 1944 as Ficciones [Fic- tions] . Those stories, and his contemp orary
theoretical essays, set into motion a p rocess that would later combine with
folkloric and indigenous elements to p roduce Latin American "magical realism."
During this p eriod, Borges also began writing books of stories with his best
friend, Adolfo Bioy Casares, under the p seudonym H. Bustos Domecq. He collaborated
with Bioy and Bioy's wife, the fiction writer Silvina Ocamp o, editing anthologies
of fantastic literature (1940), Argentine p oetry (1941), and detective stories
(1943). Besides Kafka, Borges translated Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Henri Michaux's
A Barbarian in Asia (which was translated into G erman by Walter Benjamin), Herman
Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, and William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (a
translation that was enormously influential on young Latin American novelists, such
as G abriel G arcia Marquez), as well as many shorter texts. He p ut together a slim
retrosp ective collection of his p oetry, Poemas (1922-1943), with only six new
p oems from the last fourteen years. Desp ite the hundreds of essays he wrote during
this p eriod, he p ublished no books of non- ctions.Notes on G ermany and the War
Argentina, ruled by the army and with a large Italian p op ulation, generally
sup p orted the Sp anish, Italian, and G erman Fascists at all levels of society. The
excep tions, among the intellectuals, were, on the one hand, the Marxists, and on
the other, the An- glop hiles and Francop hiles centered around Sur and a few other
small literary magazines. Borges was not only unwaveringly anti-Fascist; he was
ardently Semitop hile in a p eriod when anti-Semitism was fashionable, and a
G ermanop hile dedicated to sal- vaging G erman culture from the Nazis and their
Argentine sup p orters. Borges' courageous wartime articles remain little known,
even in Sp anish.A Pedagogy of Hatred"Una p edagogia del odio," Sur no. 32, May 1937.
First rep rinted in Paginas, 1982. Not in the Comp lete Works.A Disturbing Exp osition
"Una exp osici6n afligente," Sur no. 49, Oct. 1938. Never rep rinted. Not in the
Comp lete Wo r k s . Essay on Neutrality"Ensayo de imp arcialidad," Sur no. 61, Oct.
1939. First rep rinted in Paginas, 1982. Not in the Comp lete Works.De nition of a
G ermanop hile"De nicion de german6 o;' El Hagar, 13 Dec. 1940. First rep rinted in
Textos cautivos, 1986. NOTESAfter an absence of a year and a half, Borges returned
to El Hagar to contribute this note, which, remarkably, was p ublished on the rst
p age of the magazine.1941"1941," Sur no. 87, Dec. 1941. Never rep rinted. Not in the
Comp lete Works.p . 206: Maurice Leblanc: French writer (1864-1941), creator of the
Arsene Lup in mystery series.p . 206: [ E. ] Phillip s Op p enheim: British writer
(1866-1946) and author of immensely p op ular esp ionage novels in the 1910s and
1920s.p . 206: Baldur von Schirach: G erman head of the Hitler Y outh (1907-1974) ,
who was later tried and convicted at Nuremberg.Two Books"Dos libros." Originally
p ublished under the title "Dos libros de este tiemp o" [Two Books of this Era ] , La
Naci6n, 10 Dec. 1941. Included in Otras inquisiciones.p . 208: G auleiter: A Nazi
community organizer.p . 209: Hitler . . . is a p leonasm of Carlyle: In the guarded
diary Robert Musil kep t inVienna in 1938, his code word for Hitler was "Carlyle."A
Comment on August 23, 1944"Anotaci6n al 23 agosto 1944,'' Sur no. 120, Oct. 1944.
Included in Otras inquisiciones.p . 210: [Jose] San Martin: Argentina's revered
military leader (1778-1850), hero of the Wars of Indep endence and liberator of
Chile and Peru.A Note on the Peace"Nota sobre Ia p az," Sur no. 129, July 1945.
Never rep rinted. Not in the Comp lete Works.The Total Library"La biblioteca total,"
Sur no. 59, Aug. 1939. First rep rinted in Ficcionario, 1985. Not in the Comp lete
Works.This essay, insp ired by his dreary job at the municip al library, soon turned
into the famous story "The Library of Babel" (1941).p . 214: G ustav Theodor Fechner:
G erman p hilosop her and p hysicist (1801-1887), inventor of p sychop hysics and
investigator of the exact relationship s among p sychology, p hysiology, and
aesthetics.p . 214: Kurd Lasswitz: G erman science ction writer (1848-1910), best
known for his Wellsian 1897 novel, To Two Planets.Time and } . W. Dunne"El tiemp o y
J. W. Dunne," Sur no. 72, Sep t. 1940. Included in Otras inquisiciones.p . 217:
number 63 ofSur: The essay Borges refers to is "The Avatars of the Tortoise,"
another version of"The Perp etual Race ofAchilles and the Tortoise," which is in-
cluded here.p . 217: [ Johann Friedrich] Herbart: G erman p hilosop her and educator
(1776-1841).A Fragment on Joyce"Fragmento sobre Joyce," Sur no. 77, Feb. 1941.
First rep rinted in Paginas, 1982. Not in the Comp lete Works.NOTES537p . 220: Among
the works I have not wri en: A Borgesian joke: the story, "Funes the Memorious,"
had indeed been written, but would not be p ublished until the following year.p .
220: comp adrito: Y oung tough of the slums.p . 221: M. Victor Berard: A French
translator of the Odyssey, who, following thearcheologist Heinrich Schliemann,
insisted on the factual basis of Homer's ep ics.The Creation and P. H. G osse"La
creaci6n y P. H. G osse," Sur no. 81, June 1941. Included in Otras inquisiciones.p .
222: Legenda Aurea: The G olden Legend, the collection of
ecclesiastical lore by Ja- cobus de Voragine (1230-1298); after the Bible, the
most p op ular book of the late Middle Ages.p . 224: Chateaubriand: The translation is
by Charles I. White (1856).Circular Time"EI tiemp o circular." First p ublished under
the title "Tres formas del eterno regreso" [Three Forms of Eternal Return] , La
Naci6n, 14 Dec. 1941. Included in later editions of Eternidad, from 1953 on.p . 227
Chrysip p us: G reek Stoic p hilosop her (c. 280-207 B.C.).p . 227: Condorcet's decimal
history: The mathemetician Marie Jean Antoine NicolasCaritat, Marquis de Condorcet
(1743-1794), wrote a Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind-p ublished after his death in p rison- dividing human history into nine stages
that ended with the French Revolu- tion, which had imp risoned him. In the tenth
stage, humanity would achieve p erfection.p . 227: G erald Heard: English writer
(1889-1971) and author of the encomp assing Pain, Sex, and Time. In the 1930s, he
moved with his friend Aldous Huxley to California in search of sp iritual
enlightenment.John Wilkins' Analytical Language"EI idioma analitico de John
Wilkins;' La Naci6n, 8 Feb. 1942. Included in Ot s inquisiciones.On Literary
Descrip tion"Sobre Ia descrip ci6n literaria," Sur no. 97, Oct. 1942. First rep rinted
in Paginas, 1982. Not in the Comp lete Works.p . 233: [ Calixto] Oyuela: Classical,
Catholic, and conservative Argentine p oet and essayist (1857-1935).p . 234:
[G abriel] Mir6: Imp ressionistic Sp anish ction writer (1879-1930).On Wi iam Bec
ord's Vathek"Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford," La Naci6n, 4 Ap r. 1943. Included
in Otras inquisiciones.Coleridge's Flower"La flor de Coleridge;' La Naci6n, 23
Sep t. 1945. Included in Otras inquisiciones. Se- lected for the New Personal
Anthology, 1968.538 NOTESp . 242: Wells . . . not acquainted with Coleridge's text:
This is either an error or a joke:Coleridge's lines are the ep igrap h to The Time
Machine.ProloguesAdolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention ofMorelLa invenci6n de Morel
(Losada, 1940). First rep rinted in Pr6/ogos, 1975.p . 244: Le Voyageur sur Ia terre
[The Wanderer on the Earth ] : 1930 novel by Julien G reen.p . 245: Las fuerzas extra
as [The Strange Forces] : 1906 short story collection by Leop olda Lugones.p . 245:
Santiago Dabove: Argentine ction writer (1889-1949) whom Borges and Bioy included
in their anthology of fantastic ction.p . 245: Moreau: Wells' 1896 novel, The
Island ofDr. Moreau.Herman Melville, Bartleby the ScrivenerBartleby (Emece, 1944).
First rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1975.Borges was the translator of the Melville story.
HenryJames, TheAbasementoftheNorthmoresLa humiliaci6n de los Northmore, Emece,
1945. First rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1975.Book ReviewsEdward Kasner & James Newman,
Mathematics and the ImaginationSur no. 73, Oct. 1940. Included in later editions of
Discusi6n, from 1957 on.Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kip ling: A Study in Literature and
Political Ideas Sur no. 78, Mar. 1941. Never rep rinted. Not in the Comp lete Works.
Arthur Waley, MonkeyPublished under the title "Sabre una alegoria china" [On a
Chinese Allegory] , La Naci6n, 25 Nov. 1942. Never rep rinted. Not in the Comp lete
Works.Leslie Weatherhead, A er DeathSur no. 105, July 1943. Included in later
editions of Discusi6n, from 1957 on.Film Reviews and CriticismTwo Films (Sabotage;
Los muchachos de antes)"Dos lms," Sur no. 31, Ap r. 1937. First rep rinted in Cine,
1980. Not in the Comp lete Wo r k s .An Overwhelming Film (Citizen Kane)"Un lm
abrumador," Sur no. 83, Aug. 1941. First rep rinted in Cine, 1980. Not in the
Comp lete Works.It is now forgotten that Citizen Kane op ened to generally dismissive
reviews; Borges, desp ite his reservations, must be seen as one of its rst
champ ions. He was also the rst, by decades, to note a connection with the 1933 The
Power and the G lory (screenp lay by Preston Sturges), a lm now generally considered
to be the ur-Kane.NOTES539(No relation, by the way, to the G raham G reene novel,
which was written years later.) p . 259: Koheleth: The Hebrew name for the Book of
Ecclesiastes.Dr. Je ll and Mr. Hyde, Transformed"El doctor Jekyll y Edward Hyde,
transformados," Sur no. 87, Dec. 1941. Included in later editions of Discusi6n,
from 1957 on.Two Films (Now Voyager; Nightmare)"Dos lms," Sur no. 103, Ap r. 1943.
First rep rinted in Cine, 1980. Not in the Comp lete Wo r k s .On Dubbing"Sabre el
doblaje," Sur no. 128, June 1945. Included in later editions of Discusi6n, from
1957 on.V. Nine Dantesque Essays 1945-1951Although some sections form p art of the
"Estudio p reliminar" [Preliminary Study] to a 1949 edition of Dante, these essays
were rst collected in the book Nueve ensayos dantescos, 1982. Their order here
follows that of the book, which is p resented in its entirety. The Dante citations
are based on the Charles Singleton translation.Prologue"Prologo," rst p ublished m
Nueve ensayos dantescos. The date of comp osition is unknown.p .268:[HenryFrancis]
Cary:EnglishtranslatorofDante(1772-1844),whoseedition was the rst p ublication of
the Italian text in England, and the one that the En- glish Romantics read.The
Noble Castle of the Fourth Canto"El noble castillo del canto cuarto," La Naci6n, 22
Ap r. 1951.The False Problem of Ugolino"El falso p roblema de Ugolino." Published
under the title "El seudo p roblema de Ugolino" [The Pseudo-p roblem of Ugolino] in
La Naci6n, 30 May 1948.p . 278: Malvezzi's p en: Virgilio Malvezzi (1595-1654), a
Bolognese nobleman who lived at the Sp anish court and whose sententious style was
widely imitated.The Last Voyage of Ulysses"El ultimo viaje de Ulises," La Naci6n,
22 Aug. 1948.The Pitying Torturer"El verdugo p iadoso;' Sur no. 163, May 1948.p .
286: [Pierre Simon] Marquis de Lap lace: French astronomer and mathematician(1749-
1827), who p roved Newton's theory ofgravitation and exp ounded a nebular origin of
the universe. 540 NOTESDante and the Anglo-Saxon Visionaries"Dante y los
visionarios anglosajones," Ars no. 78, 1957.The citations from Bede are taken from
the J. A. G iles 1847 adap tation of the 1723 John Stevens translation.Purgatorio I,
13"Purgatorio I, 13," rst p ublished in Nueve ensayos dantescos.The Simurgh and the
Eagle"EI Simurgh y el aguila," La Naci6n, 14 Mar. 1948.p . 294: Visio Tundali:
Medieval Latin p oem of the visions of heaven and hell seen by the legendary Irish
knight, Tundalus.The Meeting in a Dream"EI encuentro en un sue o," La Naci6n, 3
Oct. 1948. Included in the rst edition of Otras inquisiciones, but omitted from
later ones.Beatrice's Last Smile"La ultima sonrisa de Beatriz," rst p ublished in
Nueve ensayos dantescos.VI. 1946-1955In October 1945, in a comp licated p iece of
p olitical theater, Colonel Juan Domingo Peron-the p ower behind the scenes in
Argentina in the 1940s-fell into disgrace, was exiled, and returned triump hantly
eight days later. Borges made a p ublic statement that began: "The situation in
Argentina is very serious, so serious that a great number of Argentines are
becoming Nazis without being aware of it." A few months a er Peron's of cial
election as p resident in early 1946, he "p romoted" Borges from his job as third
assistant at the library to Insp ector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Cordoba
municip al market. Borges, needless to say, declined.Borges reluctantly became a
lecturer. (Previously, he had been so shy that on the few occasions when he sp oke
in p ublic, a friend was asked to read the sp eech while Borges sat silently behind
him.) Often accomp anied by his mother, Borges traveled to p rovincial towns and
universities throughout Argentina and Uruguay. He was increasingly recognized as
Argentina's greatest writer and a symbol of resistance to Peron. In 1948, Peron
escalated his camp aign against Borges by imp risoning his sister and p lacing his
mother under house arrest.In 1946, Borges took over the editorship of an academic
magazine, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, and was the rst p ublisher of two major
ction writers, Felisberto Hernandez and Julio Cortazar. In 1949, he p ublished El
Alep h [The Alep h] -with Fic- ciones, his greatest ction work. In 1952, he collected
some of the essays from the 1930s and 1940s in Otras inquisiciones [Other
Inquisitions] . That book, he later said, had two tendencies: "The rst [was] to
evaluate religious or p hilosop hical ideas on the basis of their aesthetic
worth. . . . The other [was] to p resup p ose (and to veri ) that the number of
fables or metap hors of which men's imaginations is cap able is limited, but that
these few inventions can be all things for all men."NOTES 541Borges continued his
collaboration on anthologies, stories, and some unp roduced lm scrip ts with Bioy
Casares. New editions of his old books began to ap p ear, as well as critical
articles on his work. Thanks to Roger Callais, who had sp ent the war years in
Argentina, Ficciones was translated into French in 1951.Peron was overthrown by
another faction of the military in 1955. Borges was made the Director of the
National Library, a lifelong dream. With that ap p ointment, however, came the news
that his blindness had p rogressed to the p oint where the doctors forbade him to
read or write.Our Poor Individualism"Nuestro p obre individualismo," Sur no. 141,
July 1946. Included in Otras inquisiciones. p . 310: the Lamed Wufniks: In The Book
of Imaginary Beings, Borges writes: "There are on earth, and always were, thirty-
six righteous men whose mission is to justi the world before G od. They are the
Lamed Wufniks. They do not know each other and are very p oor. If a man comes to the
knowledge that he is a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately dies and somebody else, p erhap s
in another p art of the world, takes his p lace. Lamed Wufniks are, without knowing
it, the secret p illars of the universe. Were it not for them, G od would annihilate
the whole of mankind. Unawares, they are
our saviors." (trans. Norman Thomas di G iovanni)The Paradox of Ap ollinaire"La
p aradoja de Ap ollinaire," Los Anales de Buenos Aires no. 8, Aug. 1946. First
rep rinted in Ficcionario, 1985. Not in the Comp lete Works.p . 312: [Fritz von]
Unruh: G erman exp ressionist p oet and p laywright, and anti- militarist (1885-1970).
p . 312: [Henri] Barbusse: French antiwar novelist (1873-1935), author of the World
War I novel Under Fire.p . 312: [ Wilhelm] Klemm: G erman exp ressionist p oet (1881-
1968) who also wrote under the name Felix Brazil, and p ublished little a er 1922.p .
312: G uillermo de Torre: Sp anish critic and p oet (1900-1971) who was married to
Borges' sister, Norah.On Oscar W de"Sobre Oscar Wilde," Los Anales de Buenos Aires
no. 11, Dec. 1946. Included in Otras inquisiciones. Selected for the New Personal
Anthology, 1968.p . 314: Hugh Vereker: The p rotagonist of Henry James' story "The
Figure in the Car- p et."p . 314: Les Palais nomades [The Wandering Palaces] : 1887
book of p oetry by G ustave Kahn (1859-1936), a theorist of the new vers libre.p .
314: Los crep usculos deljardfn [Twilights in the G arden] : 1905 book of p oetry by
Leop olda Lugones.p . 315: [ Jean] Mon!as: French symbolist p oet (1856-1910).A New
Refutation of Time"Nueva refutaci6n del tiemp o." First p ublished in its entirety as
a p amp hlet by "Op ortet y Haereses" (a nonexistent p ublisher) in 1947. The rst p art
ap p eared in Sur no. 115, May1944, under thetitle"Una de las p osibles metafisicas"
[One ofthe Possible542 NOTESMetap hysics] . The whole essay was included in the
first edition of Otras inquisiciones; drop p ed from later editions; selected for the
Personal Anthology, 1961; and reinstated as p art of Otras inquisiciones for the
Comp lete Works.p p . 322-23: buried there, as I shall be: In fact, Borges is buried
in G eneva.p . 323: G uide to Socialism: Borges, for whatever reason, does not cite
the ll title of Shaw's 1928 book: The Intelligent Woman's G uide to Socialism,
Cap italism, Sovi-etism and Fascism.p . 324: "Feeling in Death": Borges also rep rints
this 1928 p rose p iece in the 1936 "AHistory of Eternity" (p . 123). As both that
essay and the p resent one are "canonical" (included in the Comp lete Works), it
must be assumed that Borges is using the rep etition-like the p assages om Berkeley
in p arts A and B-as an examp le of the cyclical (or nonexistent) nature of time.
Equally Borgesian, p erhap s, is the fact that in this book the two texts are in
somewhat different translations.p . 332: Time is a river . . . : These words would
later be sp oken by the comp uter that rules the world in Jean-Luc G odard's 1965 film
Alp haville.Biathanatos"El Biathanatos." First p ublished under the title "John
Donne, Biathanatos," Sur no. 159, Jan. 1948. Included in Otras inquisiciones.From
Allegories to Novels"De las alegorias a las novelas," La Naci6n, 7 Aug. 1949.
Included in Otras inquisiciones. Selected for the New Personal Anthology, 1968.From
Someone to Nobody"De alguien a nadie," Sur no. 186, Mar. 1950. Included in Otras
inquisiciones. Selected for the Personal Anthology, 1961.A footnote to the
p enultimate p aragrap h, on Buddhism, is included in the Comp lete Works but omitted
here, as it ap p ears embedded in the essay "Personality and the Bud-d h a " ( p . 3
4 7 , t h e p a s s a g e b e g i n n i n g " T h e r s t b o o k s o f t h e c a
n o n . . ." ) .p . 342: Shankara: Indian p hilosop her and saint (788-820) and the
main rep resentative of Advaita-Vedanta. He wrote: "May this one sentence p roclaim
the essence of a thousand books: Brahman [the Eternal Absolute] alone is real; the
world isap p earance; the Self is nothing but Brahman."The Wall and the Books"La
muralla y los Iibras," La Naci6n, 22 Oct. 1950. Included in Otras inquisiciones.
Se- l e c t e d fo r t h e P e r s o n a l A n t h o l o g y , 1 9 6 1 , a n d t h
e N e w P e r s o n a l A n t h o l o g y , 1 9 6 8 .Personality and the Buddha"La
p ersonalidad y el Buddha," Sur nos. 192-194, Oct.-Dec. 1950. Never rep rinted. Not
in the Comp lete Works.Pascal's Sp here"La esfera de Pascal,'' La Naci6n, 14 Jan.
1951. Included in Otras inquisiciones. Selected for the New Personal Anthology,
1968.NOTES543The Innocence of Layamon"La inocencia de Layam6n;' Sur no. 197, Mar
1951. Included in early editions of Otras inquisiciones, but omitted from later
ones. Not in the Comp lete Works.p . 354: [Emile] Legouis: French literary historian
(1861-1937), co-author of a History ofEnglish Literature.On the Cult of Books"Del
culto de los Iibras," La Naci6n, 8 July 1951. Included in Otras inquisiciones.The
p assage from St. Augustine is taken from the Henry Chadwick translation.Kafka and
His Precursors"Kafka y sus p recursores;' La Naci6n, 19 Aug. 1951. Included in Otras
inquisiciones.The Enigma of Edward FitzG erald"El enigma de Edward FitzG erald," La
Naci6n, 7 Oct. 1951. Included in Otras inquisiciones. Selected for the Personal
Anthology, 1961.Borges does not mention a third incarnation of Omar-FitzG erald: his
own father, whose translation of the Rubaiyat Borges p ublished in his magazine Proa
in the 1920s. According to Rodriguez Monegal, Borges' descrip tion of the sensitive,
sad, and book- ish FitzG erald is equally ap p licable to Borges Sr.Coleridge's Dream
"El sue o de Coleridge," La Naci6n, 18 Nov. 1951. Included in Otras inquisiciones.
Se- lected for the New Personal Anthology, 1968.The quotation from Bede is taken
from the J. A. G iles 1847 revision of the 1723 John Stevens translation.Forms of a
Legend"Formas de una leyenda," La Naci6n, 8 June 1952. Included in Otras
inquisiciones. Se- lected for the Personal Anthology, 1961.The Scandinavian Destiny
"Destino escandinavo," Sur nos. 219-220, Jan.-Feb. 1953. First rep rinted in
Paginas, 1982. Not in the Comp lete Works.The Dialogues of Ascetic and King"Dialogos
del asceta y del rey," La Naci6n, 20 Sep t. 1953. First rep rinted in Paginas, 1982.
Not in the Comp lete Works.A Defense of Bouvard and Pecuchet"Vindicaci6n de Bmtvard
y Pecuchet," La Naci6n, 14 Nov. 1954. Included in later editions ofDiscusi6n,from
1957 on.Flaubert and His Exemp lary Destiny"Flaubert y su destino ejemp lar," La
Naci6n, 12 Dec. 1954. Included in later editions of Discusi6n, from 1957 on.544
NOTESp . 393: 0 p rima Basilio [Cousin Basilio] : 1878 novel by the Portuguese
novelist E a de Queiroz.A History of the Tango"Historia del tango." First p rinted
in its entirety in the 1955 edition of Evaristo Car- riego. One section, "El desa
o" [The Challenge] , ap p eared in La Naci6n, 28 Dec. 1952.p . 400: [Friedrich August]
Wolf G erman p hilologist and critic (1759-1824). p . 400: Andrew Fletcher: Scottish
writer and p olitician (1655-1716).A History o f the Echoes of a Name"Historia de
los ecos de un nombre," Cuadernos del Congreso p ar Ia Libertad de Ia Cul- tura
[Pap ers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom] , Paris, Nov. 1955. Included in the
1960 edition of Otras inquisiciones; omitted from later editions. Not in the
Comp lete Works.p . 406: Shakesp eare wrote a comedy: All's Well That Ends Well.
Illusion Comique'' illusion comique," Sur no. 237, Nov.-Dec. 1955. Never rep rinted.
Not in the Com- p lete Works.The title comes from the Corneille p lay that Borges
discusses in "When Fiction Lives in Fiction" (p . 160).ProloguesBret Harte, The Luck
ofRoaring Camp and Other SketchesBocetos californianos (Emece, 1946). First
rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1975.ThomasCarlyle, OnHeroes,Hero-
worship andtheHeroicinHistor andRalp h Waldo Emerson, Rep resentative MenDe los
heroes; Hombres rep resentativos (Jackson, 1949). First rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1975.
The translation was by Borges.Ray Bradbury, The Martian ChroniclesCr6nicas
marcianas (Minotauro, 1955). First rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1975.LecturesThe
Argentine Writer and Tradition"El escritor argentino y Ia tradici6n." Lecture given
at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Sup eriores, Buenos Aires, 1951. Published in
Cursos y conferencias nos. 250-252, Jan.-Mar. 1953; rep rinted in Sur no. 232, Jan.-
Feb. 1955; and included in later editions of Discusi6n, from 1957 on.G erman
Literature in the Age of Bach"La literatura alemana en la ep oca de Bach." No date
given for the lecture. Published in Cursos y conferencias nos. 250-252, Jan.-Mar.
1953; never rep rinted. Not in the Com-p lete Works.Unlike the p revious lecture,
which was written, this text is based on a transcrip t.NOTES 545 VII. Dictations,
1956-1986The onset of blindness ironically coincided with fame: in 1956 and 1957
alone, Borges became the Director of the National Library and a p rofessor of
English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires; he received his
rst imp ortant p rize; and the rst of a flood of book-length critical studies on his
work ap p eared. In 1961, he suddenly became internationally famous when a group of
Europ ean and American p ublishers awarded the rst Formentor Prize jointly to Borges
and Samuel Beckett. Ficciones was simultaneously p ublished in translation in six
countries, which led to countless other translations. Borges, accomp anied by his
mother, began to travel abroad-for the rst time since 1924-to deliver lectures
throughout the United States, Latin America, Europ e, and Israel, and to receive a
cascade of some fi y p rizes and honorary doctorates. He became a p op icon: in the
1972 lm Performance, for examp le, Mick Jagger reads Ficciones in the bathtub,
and when he is shot in the head, a p hoto of Borges flies out.Blindness also brought
a radical change in Borges' work. He could no longer write comp lex p ieces of p rose,
and he returned, a er a twenty-year absence, to p oetry, which he could comp ose in
his head. He p ublished a dozen books of p oems and p rose p oems in this p eriod. There
were two rther books of Bustos Domecq stories written with Bioy Casares, and in
1970, a er another twenty-year gap , he returned to his own short stories with El
informe
de Brodie [Brodie's Rep ort, 1970] and El libro de arena [The Book of Sand, 1975] .
Ap art om some imp ortant p rologues and short notes for newsp ap ers, he wrote no
essays as such; he did, however, collaborate with assistants on books about En-
glish, American, and medieval G ermanic literature; Buddhism; and imaginary
creatures. Besides p oetry, his major genres in the last thirty years of his life
were sp oken: the "lecture;' a sp ontaneous monologue on a given subject, and the
interview. There are countless magazine articles and dozens of books of
"conversations with Borges."Borges married an old friend in 1967; the marriage
lasted three years. With the return of Peron in 1973, Borges resigned his p ost at
the National Library; for much of his last years-the p eriod of the Argentine
military dictatorship -he was out of the country. His mother died in 1975 at the
age of ninety-nine. Beginning in 1971, Borges was accomp anied in his travels and
life by Maria Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death in G eneva in 1986.
ProloguesR nosuke utagawa, The Kap p aKap p a. Los Engranadajes (Mundonuevo, 1959).
Never rep rinted. Not in the Comp lete Works.Edward G ibbon, Pages ofHistory and
Autobiograp hyPaginas de historia y autobiografia ( Universidad de Buenos Aires,
1961). First rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1977.Catalog of the E ibition Booksfrom Sp ain
Catalogo de Ia Exp osici6n de Libros Esp aiioles (Buenos Aires, no p ublisher, 1962).
Never rep rinted. Not in the Comp lete Works.p . 444: [ G ustavo Adolfo] Becquer: The
leading Sp anish Romantic p oet (1836-1870). NOTESWalt Whitman, Leaves ofG rassHojas
de hierba (Juarez, 1969). First rep rinted in Pr6logos, 1977.The translation was by
Borges.p . 448: Wacho: Whitman's sp elling of "gaucho."Emanuel Swedenborg: Mystical
WorksThere are two versions of this text. One, dated by Borges "Ap ril 1972," was
rst p ublished as the p rologue to Sig Synnenstvedt, Swedenborg: Testigo de lo
invisible (Mary- mar, 1982). The other-and the basis for the translation here-was
the p rologue to an undated American edition of the Mystical Works, p ublished by the
New Jerusalem Church in New Y ork. According to the bibliograp her Nicolas Hel , this
book was p ublished in 1977, but the p rologue had already been "rep rinted" in the
1975 Pr6/ogos.p . 454: Henry More: English theologian (1614-1687) and one of the
"Cambridge Pla- tonists" who attemp ted to evolve a more rational form of
Christianity.p . 457 "Emanuel Swedenborg": The p oem was rst p ublished in Borges'
book El otro, el mismo [The Self and the Other] in 1966. A p hrase in the original
p oem, "e/ cristalino!Edi cio de Dios" [the crystalline/Edi ce of G od] was changed
here to "el cristalino!Laberinto de Dios" [the crystalline/Labyrinth of G od ] ,
p erhap s consciously, p erhap s unconsciously in Borges' dictation.LecturesBorges'
lectures from this p eriod were, of course, sp oken extemp oraneously; there was no
written text. The p ublications in Sp anish tend to be exact transcrip tions of every
word Borges said on the occasion. For the translations here, some false starts and
mi- nor rep etitions have been silently edited out.The Concep t of an Academy and the
CeltsPublished under the title "Discurso de don Jorge Luis Borges en su recep c10n
academica" [LecturebyDonJLBathisAcademicRecep tion] ,BoletindeIaAcademia Argentina de
Let s VII, nos. 105-106 ( July-Dec. 1962); but Borges refers to the title as "El
concep to de una Academia y los celtas." First rep rinted in Paginas, 1982, under the
title "Recep ci6n academica." Not in the Comp lete Works.The Enigma of Shakesp eare"El
enigma de Shakesp eare;' Revista de Estudios de Teatro no. 8, 1964. Never rep rinted
in book form. Not in the Comp lete Works.Blindness"La ceguera," La Op inion, 31 Aug.
1977. Rep rinted in Siete naches, 1980.The lecture was delivered on 3 Aug. 1977 in
the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, and was one of seven given that summer. The
other six were on the Divine Comedy, nightmares, The Thousand and One Nights,
Buddhism, p oetry, and the Kabbalah.p . 475: "Poem ofthe G i s": The translation is by
astair Reid.Immortality"La inmortalidad." First p ublished in Borges, oral(1979).
NOTES547One of a series of ve lectures given in June 1978 at the University of
Belgrano in Buenos Aires. The others were on the detective story (below),
Swedenborg, the book, and time.The Detective Story"El cuento p olicial." First
p ublished in Borges, oral (1979).See note o n "Immortality" above.Prologues to The
Library of BabelThe Library ofBabel was a series of short volumes of fantastic
tales, each selected and introduced by Borges, and p ublished by Ediciones Siruela
in Sp ain from 1978 to 1986. None of these p rologues has been rep rinted. They are
not in the Comp lete Works.Sp anish titles and year of p ublication of the p rologues
included here: Franz Kafka, The Vulture (El buitre, 1979); Jack London, The
Concentric Deaths (Las muertes colwin- tricas, 1979 ) ; Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
The G uest at the Last Banquets ( El convidado de las tiltimas estas, 1984); P'u
Sung-ling, The Tiger G uest (El invitado tigre, 1985); Charles Howard Hinton,
Scienti c Romances (Relatos cienti cos, 1986).Prologues to A Personal LibraryA
Personal Library was Borges' last p roject, p ublished in 1985 and 1986 by Emece in
Sp ain and Argentina, and in Italian translation by Franco Mario Ricci. Borges was
unable to write the p rologues for the last three of the seventy- ve volumes. The
p rologues were collected and rep rinted in 1988.Other books p rop osed by Borges for
the series were: Malcolm G rant, A New Argu- mentfor G od and Survival and a Solution
to the Problem ofSup e atural Events; Hans Leisegang, G nosis; R. B. Cunninghame
G raham, A Brazilian Mystic; Navalis, Frag- ments; Kobo Abe, Woman in the Dunes;
jack London, Valley of the Moon; Aeschylus, Tragedies; Francis Bacon and Thomas
More, Utop ias; Miguel Asin Palacios, Dante and Islam; Infante Don Juan Manuel,
Count Lucanor; Cicero, On Divination and On the Nature of the G ods; Pliny,
Selections; Vicente Rossi, Negro Things: The Origins of the Tango; Hillaire Belloc,
Milton; Step hen Vincent Benet, Tales before Midnight; Horacia Quiroga, Selections;
Arnold Silcock, Introduction to Chinese Art and History; Hans Ja- cob von
G rimmelshausen, The Adventures of Simp licissimus; Martin Buber, Hassidic Tales;
Dame Bertha Sur tees Phillp ots, Edda and Saga; The Tibetan Book of the Dead; Alfred
Kubin, The Other Side; Arthur Waley, Chinese Poetry; Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not
a Christian; Olaf Stap ledon, Starmaker; Alfonso Alvarez Villasandino, Selec- tions;
Leo Frobenius, The Culture ofAfrica; G . S. Kirk & J. Raven, The Pre-Socratic
Philosop hers; An Anthology of the Sp anish Sonnet; Marguerite Y ourcenar, Stories;
En- rique Banchs, The Urn; Sap p ho, Poems; and Manuel Peyrou, The Sleep ing Sword.
Sp anish titles of the p rologues included here: Julio Cortazar, Stories ( Cuentos);
The Ap ocryp hal G osp els ( Evangelios ap 6crifos); H. G . Wells, The Time Machine; The
Invisi- ble Man (La mdquina del tiemp o; El hombre invisible); Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Demons ( Los demonios); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class ( Teoria
de Ia clase ociosa); S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Temor y temblor);
Virgil, The Aeneid (La Eneida); William James, Varieties ofReligious Exp erience;
The Study ofHuman Na-ture ( Las variedades de Ia exp eriencia religiosa; Estudio
sabre Ia naturaleza h umana). NOTESp . 518: [M ] Liebermann: G erman naturalist and
imp ressionist p ainter (1847-1935), now largely forgotten, who dominated the G erman
art market from the 1890s until the 1930s, when he was banned by the Nazis.
AcknowledgmentsEndless thanks to my co-workers, Esther len and Suzanne Jill
Levine; thanks to Maria Kodama and Irma Zangara of the Fundaci6n Borges in Buenos
Aires for sending me some obscure texts; thanks to Odile Cisneros for help in
tracking down quotes and further texts. During the making of this book, I
continually missed the p resence of my long-gone friend and ur-Borgesian, Emir
Rodriguez Monegal, the man who could have answered all my questions.-EW"Abasement
of the Northmores, The" (James), 241, 247-48Abentofail, Abubeker (Ibn Tufail),
127n, 532nAbsalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 178 Academic Questions (Cicero), 226
Acevedo, Honorio, noAddison, Josep h, 284n-85n Advancement ofLearning (Bacon), 361
Adversus mathematicos (SextusEmp iricus), 330-31Aeneid, The (Virgil), 292, 294,
295n, 391,392n, 441-42, 462, 501, 519-20 Aeschylus, 30, 216Aesthetics (Croce), 165,
491After Death ( Weatherhead), 254-56 Agrip p a of Nettesheim, 5 utagawa, Ryunosuke,
437-38 Alain de Lille, 351-52Albertelli, Pilo, 351, 352Albertus Magnus, 131-32
Aleman, Mateo, 428-29, 52911 Alep h, El (Borges), 540 n Alexander, Francisco, 449
Alexander Nevsky ( lm), 263 Alexander the G reat, 382, 391 AllAboardforArarat
(Wells), 222 All Quiet on the Western Front(Remarque), 251Almafuerte (Pedro
Bonifacio Palacios),23, 524n Ambrose, 333, 359A e de Nap oleon, L' (Bloy), 362
American Tragedy, An (Dreiser), 167 Analysis ofMind, The ( Russell), 224 "Anatomy
of the World" (Donne), 353 Anaxagoras, 324Angelus Silesius, 24211, 332, 514 Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle, 477-78Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet), 477-78 Ap ocryp hal G osp els, The,
515-16 Ap ollinaire, G uillaume, 311-13 Ap ollonius of Rhodes, 75, 77n Ap p earance and
Reality (Bradley), 331 Ap rop os ofDolores (Wells), 193 Aquinas, Thomas, 287, 486,
489 Ariosto, Ludovico, 396, 418Aristotle, Aristotelians, 44, 214, 338-39, 352, 363.
377. 431-32Arnold, Matthew, 37, 61, 71, 95, 212n, 458, 461, 463Ascasubi, Hilario,
400, 420-21, 526n Asclep ius (Trismegistus), 351-52 Asp ects ofthe Novel (Forster),
245 Athanasius, 85, 53111At Swim-Two-Birds (O'Brien), 162 Attar, Farid al-Din, 260,
295-97 Augustine, 68, uS, 121, 223, 244, 324, 334,335, 359-60, 513, 543neternity as
viewed by, 129-30, 133, 134,136Aulus G ellius, 249,
418 Avicenna, 360, 366, 532n Azevedo, Don Pedro de, noBabel, Isaac, 163-64Bach,
Johann Sebastian, 433-34Bacon, Delia, 464-65Bacon, Francis, 83-84, 227, 294, 353,
361,419, 453. 464-67, 472Balzac, Honore de, 244, 389Banchs, Enrique, 398, 422-23
Bancro , G eorge, 141Barbarian in Asia, A (Michaux), 535 n Barbusse, Henri, 312, 541
Barlaam and fosap hat, 374-75 Barrack-Room Ballads (Kip ling), 251, 312 Barrett, Sir
William, 182Index55 0 I N D E XBartleby the Scrivener (Melville), 245-46, 53511
Basilides, 65-68, 405n, 530nBaudelaire, Charles, 49, 112, 181, 238, 293n,411, 438,
492, 507, 531Beatrice Portinari, 276, 281, 282, 290, 294,298-305, 338, 379Becher,
Johannes, 200-201, 242 Beckford, William, 236-39, 272Beckh, Hermann, 347, 376
Becquer, Adolfo, 189, 444-45Bede, 287-91, 370, 540nBelloc, Hilaire, 164, 237Benson
Murder Case, The (Van Dine), 172 Benvenuto da Imola, 299, 30111Beowul 396Berard,
Victor, 70, 221, 537nBergson, Henri, 44-45, 219, 317, 489 Berkeley, G eorge, xv, 33,
59, 317-20,326-29, JJ1, 426, 486, 521, 542n Biathanatos (Donne), 333-36Bible, I6-
I7, 222, 223, 227, 228, J34-35,405-6, 433. 453, 455, 456, 473, 493 mechanical
insp iration of, 83-84, 472Bibliograp hical Institute, 231Big Bow Mystery, The
(Zangwill), 181 Billy the Kid ( lm), 145-46 Biograp hical History ofPhilosop hy
(Lewes), 43Bioy Casares, Adolfo, , 243-45, 401, 499,5Jsn, 54111, 545n Bischoff,
Erich, 17Blake, William, 68n, 188, 234, 452, 453, 455-56Blanqui, Louis Auguste,
226, 244 "Blast of the Book, The" (Chesterton),114Blatz, William, 196Bloy, Leon,
228, 311, 315, 350, 357, 361-62, 364, 4IJn, 456, 524nBoccaccio, G iovanni, 102, 274,
340 Boethius, Aricius Manlius Severinus, 132,3JO, JJ8, 339Boileau, Nicolas, 186,
392, 481Book ofCreation, 456-57Book ofImaginary Beings, The (Borges),541Borges,
Jorge G uillermo, 525n, 533n, 535n,54311Borges, Jorge Luis:biograp hical information
on, 475, 477,52611-29n, 53In, 533n-)6n, 540n-4111,545nstylistic traits of, xiv-xv
Borges, Norah, 484, 514Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 37-38, 439, 467, 524n-2snBoswell,
James, 140, 249Bousset, Wilhelm, 65, 525nBouvard and Fecuchet (Flaubert), 386-89
Bradbury, Ray, 418-19Bradley, H., 124, 218, 326, 331, 473 Bramah, Ernest, 164-65
Breton, Andre, 191-93Brod, Max, 485, 501Brooke, Rup ert, 485Browne, Sir Thomas, 53,
195, 222, 225,245, )61, 471Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 293 Browning, Robert, 26,
71, 141, 178, 293,364, 365, 437Bruno, G iordano, 352, 353, 419Brut (Layamon), 354-57
Buckley, Theodore Alois, 71-72 Buddhismus nach lteren Pali-Werken,Der (Hardy),
347, 374 Bunyan, John, so, 51, 149Burns, Robert, 31Burton, Lady, 97, 99Burton,
Richard , 92-103, 105-8 Butcher, Samuel H., 72Buti, Francesco da, 270, 299, 301
Butler, Samuel (d. 1680), 53, 97, 142 Butler, Samuel (d. 1902), 70, 73, 74, 250,255
Byron, G eorge G ordon, Lord, 293, 393,412, 447Caedmon, 370-71Caesar, Julius, 97n,
350, 358, 403n, 459,460Caillois, Roger, 541Calvin, John, 133, 286Canary Murder
Case, The (Van Dine),172Cansinos Assens, Rafael, 96, 224, 242 Cantor, G eorg, 116-17
"Carcassonne" (Dunsany), 364-65 Carlyle, Thomas, 28, 68n, 209, 236, 242,245, 326, )
61, 41J-I7, 444, 456 Carriego, Evaristo, 395, 468, 525 nCarroll, Lewis, 195, 215,
508Cary, Henry Francis, 268, 539nCasini, Tommaso, 277, 281, 29511, 303 Celestial
Hierarchy, The, 17cena de le ceneri, La (Bruno), 352 Cervantes, Miguel de, 30, 142,
187, 244,358, 451, 464, 470 see also Don Qu ixoteChanson de Roland, 313, 396
Chap lin, Charlie, 141-42, 144, 145 Chap man, G eorge, 69, 70, 72, 73n, 74, 449
Chap man, G uy, 236-39"Chap ter on Dreams, ' (Stevenson),2} 8, 272Charles XII, King of
Sweden, 449, 450 Chateaubriand, Fran?ois Rene de, 224 Chaucer, G eoffrey, 102, 107,
277, 294, 340,357, 426Cherubinscher Wandersmann (AngelusSilesius), 242n, 332
Chesterton, G ilbert Keith, 81, 112-14, 181,2} 2, 2} 8, 244, 245, 259, 272, 295, }
03, } 16, 337, 338, } 88, } 89, 413, 414, 427, 466, 493, 498-99Chinese Fairy Tales and
Folk Tales (Eberhard, trans.), 182-83Chrysip p us, 227, 537nChuang Tzu, 329-30Cicero,
Marcus Tullius, 214-15, 225, 226,315Cimetiere marin (Valery), 171-72 Citizen Kane (
lm), 258-59, 538n City Lights (film), 144Claude!, Paul, 268Clement of Alexandria,
281, 351, 359 Cogwheels (Akutagawa), 438 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 22, 75, 93,240-
42, } } 8, } 42, } 69-72, 410, 443>470, 473, 479, 538nCollected Poems and Plays
(Tagore),180-81Collins, Wilkie, 113, 498, 499 Commentaries ( Caesar), 460Comp lete
Works (Borges), xii, xiii, 527n Concentric Deaths, The (London), 503-5 Condillac,
Etienne de, 318, 330 Condorcet, Marquis de, 227, 537n Conference ofthe Birds
(Mantiq al-Tayr)(Farid al-Din Attar), 260, 296-98 Confessions (Augustine), 130, 359
Confessions ofa Thug, The (Taylor), 185 Conquistata ( Tasso), 391Conrad, Josep h,
178, 246, 257-58, 259 Convivio (Dante), 269, 339 Cop ernicus, Nicolaus, 352
Corneille, Pierre, 161-62, 544n Corp us Dionysiacum, 341-42 Cortazar, Julio, 514-15,
540nCosta Alvarez, Arturo, 20Cowen, William Joyce, 189Cowp er, William, 72, 73Crime
and Punishment (Dostoevsky),148, 149, 285-86, 517Crime and Punishment ( lm), 148-
49Cris6tomo Lafinur, Juan, 318Critical Essays (Arnold), 37Critica literaria
(G roussac), 53, 463-64 Critical Observations (G ibbon), 442 critic6n, El (G racian),
23, 525nCroce, Benedetto, 34-35, 59, 165-66, 274,278, 284, 285, 337-} 8, } 46, 491
Cynewulf, 355, 357Czep ko, Daniel von, 317Dabove, Santiago, 245, 538nDante, Iacop o
di, 270Dante Alighieri, xiii, xiv, , 48, 84, 130,265-305, 3} 8, } 52, 486, 490, 520,
539n-40nAnglo-Saxon visionaries and, 287-91 see also Convivio; Divine Comedy, The;
Vita nuova, La Daria, Ruben, 10, 461Davis, Bette, 261"Death and the Comp ass"
(Borges), 499 Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Emp ire(G ibbon), 60, 423, 440-44 Decline
ofthe West, The (Sp engler), 170 De coelo et inferno (Swedenborg), 182,2} 8n, 453De
divisione naturae libri V (Erigena), 134 Defoe, Daniel, 63, 143, 177, 429
Dehumanization ofArt, The (Ortega yG asset), 243del Camp o, Estanislao, 81, 420-21,
530n della Lana, Iacop o, 270Delp hos, or the Future ofInternationalLanguage
( Pankhurst), 194-95, 229 Democritus, 214, 215, 226, 249, 485-86 Demons
(Dostoevsky), 517De natura deorum (Cicero), 214-15De Quincey, Thomas, 14, 26, 28,
85, 91, 93, 112, 185, 223, 233, 238, 242, 244, 245, 252, 297, } 22, } } 3, 337, 378, }
91, 405, 427, 443, 456, 471, 479, 501De rerum natura (Lucretius), 324, 489 De
Sanctis, Francesco, 304Descartes, Rene, 203, 230, 450, 486 Descharmes, Rene, 389De
sp ectaculus (Tertullian), 48 Deussen, Paul, 125, 215n, 217, 441de Wulf, Maurice,
339Dialogues (Schop enhauer), 226 Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous(Berkeley),
328Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion(Hume), 226, 231, 320Dickens, Charles, 28,
412, 493, 494, 499 Didron, 299INDEX 551552 INDEXDigby, Sir Kenelm, 8o, 530nDigeon,
Claude, 387, 389Diogenes Laertius, 382, 459Diogenes the Cynic, 382Dionne sisters,
196Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 355 Dishonored ( lm), 81, 530nDivine Comedy, The
(Dante), 238, 252,267-305, 453> 515, 520, 539n-40n Borges's p rologue to, 267-71
Inferno, 76n, 267, 268-69, 272-86, 403 Paradiso, 269, 273, 281, 282, 286n, 287,294-
305Purgatorio, 268, 275, 281, 286, 292-93,301, 377Divine Legation ofMoses, The
(Warburton), 441Doblin, Alfred, 200-201Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 468, 469 Dogmatik
(Rothe), 50Don Juan Tenorio (Zorrilla), 28, 528n Donne, John, 84, 108, 130-31,
222n,333-36, 353, 488Don Quixote (Cervantes), 26, 30, 160, 176,187, 249, 285n, 309-
10, 367, 398, 428,440, 473, 492, 530nclassical method in, 6o, 62op ening sentence
of, 32-38, 70, 528n style of, 52-53, 54Don Segundo Sombra (G iraldes), 397, 424,
495, 525nDoorBetween, The(Queen), 181 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 13, 53, 148, 186,285-86,
517Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 113, 172, 179, 495 Dragon Murder Case, The (Van Dine),
173Dreamer's Tales (Dunsany), 188Dream ofthe Red Chamber, The, 384, 507,508Dreiser,
Theodore, 166-67, 178Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson),259-60 Dryden, John, 342
Dunne, J. W., 217-19Dunsany, Lord, 187-88, 364-65Eberhard, Wolfram, 182-83Eckhart,
Johannes, 37, 326Elegies (Donne), 333nElements ofthe Kabbalah, The (Bischo ),Eliot,
T. S., 149, 167-68, 282-83Ellis, Havelock, 369-70Emerson, Ralp h Waldo, 227, 240,
250,403, 411, 416-18, 446, 449> 452, 492,498"Emmanuel Swedenborg" (Borges), 457,
546nEmp edocles of Agrigento, 351 Encyclop edia Britannica, 21, 65, 100, 108,194,
229, 246End ofthe Armistice, The (Chesterton),414Engel vom Westlichen Fenster, Der
(Meyrink), 175Enneads (Plotinus), 123-29, 296, 532n Erigena, John Scotus, 86n, 134,
211, 339,342, 378, 388, 406Eriksson, Leif, 283, 378Esp acios metricos (Ocamp o), 296n
Essai sur Ia legende du Buddha (Senart),347-48Essai sur I'etude de Ia litterature
(G ibbon), 440Essay on the Immediate Facts ofConsciousness (Bergson), 44-45 Essays
(Emerson), 240Essays (Huxley), 218Essay Towards a Real Character and aPhilosop hical
Language, An(Wilkins), 229Eternal Return, doctrine of, 115-22, 214,225-28, 261,
282, 285Ethical Studies (Stevenson), 260 Eudemus, 118Evaristo Carriego (Borges),
xii, 318, 525n,528n, 53111Excellent Intentions (Hull), 184 Exp eriment in
Autobiograp hy ( Wells) ,24111, 516Exp eriment with Time, An (Dunne),217-18, 219n
Faguet, Emile, 386-87Fa-Hsien, 374Father and Son (G osse), 222, 223 Faulkner,
William, 177, 178, 186, 535 n Faust (G oethe), 468Fausto (del Camp o), 81, 530nFear
and Trembling (Kierkegaard),518-19"Fears and Scrup les" (Browning), 364,365Fechner,
G . T., 214, 215, 486, 536n "Feeling in Death" (Borges), 137-39, 318,324-26, 542n
Fernandez, Macedonio, 8, 11, 24, 88, 259,525nFervor de BuenosAires (Borges), 318,
5271117Ficciones (Borges), 529n, 535n, 540n, 541n, 545nFichte, J. G ., 201, 209, 319
Fielding, Henry, 187Finnegans Wake ( Joyce) , 195, 221, 448, 481 First Princip les
(Sp encer),
388FitzG erald, Edward, 366-68Flaubert, G ustave, 53-54, 215, 247, 386-93,407
Fletcher, Andrew, 400, 544n ForanIndep endentRevolutionaryArt(Rivera and Breton),
192-93 Forster, E. M., 245France, Anatole, 505, 531 n Franco, Francisco, 213, 425
Franke, Otto, 348, 350Frazer, Sir James, 8o Frederick the G reat, 431 French
Academy, 458, 459, 463 Freud, Sigmund, 210-11 Friedrich, Hugo, 281fuerzas extra as,
Las (Lugones), 245, 538nG alileo G alilei, 361nG alland, Jean Antoine, 92-95, 102,
108,238G alvez, Manuel, 26, 528nG enie du christianisme (Chateaubriand),224
G erusalemme liberata (Tasso), 391, 392n G eschichtederdeutschen National-Literatur
(Vilmar; revised by Ruhr),200-201G hazali, Muhammad a!-, 360G ibbon, Edward, 48, 49,
6o, 61, 85, 288,423, 438-44, 452G ide, Andre, 93, 106, 255, 350G ilbert, Stuart, 81,
195, 221G iles, Herbert Allen, 252, 329-30, 345, 507 G lanvill, Josep h, 177, 353
gloria de Don Ramiro, La (Larreta), 63,530nG nostics, 65-68, 130, 245, 253-54, 336,
405nG oebbels, Josep h, 201, 208G oethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8, 33, 88,201, 221, 253,
385, 428, 446, 468,471-72, 473, 483, 487, 530n G ogarty, Oliver, 190G olding, Louis,
176-77G old Rush, The ( lm), 141-42G olem, The (Meyrink), 162, 175G omez de Ia Serna,
Ramon, 8, 14 G ongora, Luis de, 14-15, 18, 23, 54, 61, 178,212, 268, 284n, 292n-93n,
447G oring, Hermann, 202, 207G osse, Edmund, 222, 223G osse, Philip Henry, 222-24, 386
G ottsched, Johann Christop h, 431-32 G ourmont, Remy de, 70, 233, 386 G racian,
Baltasar, 23-24, 52, 53, 278, 470,525 n G raebner, F., 21, 33"G reat Wall of China,
The" (Ka a), 502 G reene, G raham, 248, 539n G reguerias(G omezdeIaSerna), 8 G rettir's
Saga, 379-80G reve, Felix Paul, 107G rif ths, Alan, 191G rimm, G eorge, 8, 9
G rimmelshausen, Hans Jakob, 428-29 G roussac, Paul, 53, 87, 89-90, 233, 380,417,
463-65, 472, 475, 476, 477, 481,525nG ubben Kommer (Janson), 179G uest at the Last
Banquets, The (Villiersde !'Isle-Adam), 505-7G uide to the New World (Wells), 207-8
G iraldes, cardo, 233, 234, 424, 495,525nG ulliver's Travels (Swi ), 90-91, 158,
389,407, 427G unther, Johann Christian, 432 G utierrez, Eduardo, 28, 401, 412, 495,
524n, 525nG uzman deAlfarache (Aleman), 53,428-29, 529nHallelujah (film), 57, 145,
530n Hamlet (Shakesp eare) 52, 109, 161, 221,423Han Y u, 363-64Hardy, Edmund, 347,
374Harris, Frank, 188, 470Harte, Bret, 411-13Hassan ben Sabbah, 366Hazlitt,
William, 342, 470, 473 Heard, G erald, 227, 537n HeavenlyEmp orium ofBenevolent
Knowledge, 231Hebrew Melodies (Byron), 293Hecht, Ben, 471Hegel, G .W.F., 201, 309,
326, 398, 519 Heidenstam, Verner von, 179Heine, Heinrich, 31, 54, 141, 200, 201,
203,428, 430, 473 Hemingway, Ernest, 504-5 Henning, Max, 107Henry ] ames (West), 314
Hep burn, Katharine, 262, 471INDEX553554INDEXHeraclitus, 212, 227, 323, 339, 382
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 217, 536n Hernandez, Jose, 400, 411, 420-21, 525nsee
also Martin FierroHerrera y Reissig, Julio, 24, 528n Hiawatha (Longfellow), 446
Hidalgo, Bartolome, 420-21 Hinton, Charles Howard, 508-10 Hisp ano-American
Encyclop edicDictionary, 49, 65Histoires desobligeantes (Bloy), 364 Historia de /a
eternidad (Borges), 529n Historia de /a lite tura argentina(Rojas), 420-21Historia
Ecclesiastica CentisAnglorum(Bede), 287-91, 370Historia universal de /a infamia
(Borges),529nHistory ofEngland, A (Milton), 480 History ofthe G oths (Jordanes), 396
Hitchcock, Alfred, 149, 257-58, 471 Hitler, Adolf, 201, 202, 203, 205-11, 536 n Ho
man, Calvin, 469Holderlin, Friedrich, 204, 428, 430 Hollweg, Bethmann, 430
hombrey /a bestia, El ( lm), 259-60 Homer, 61, 67n, 113-14, 221, 273, 275, 291,333,
377> 390-91, 472, 519 blindness of, 478-79 translations of, 69-74, 449, 537n see
also Iliad; OdysseyHomme elastique, (Sp itz), 189 Hop kins, Miriam, 260, 471Horace,
273, 275, 291, 520Hormiga Neg (G utierrez), 401, 524n Hudibras (Butler), 97Hugo,
Victor, 178, 270, 342, 392, 396, 412, 458, 473, 489Huidobro, Vicente, 11, 527nHull,
Richard, 184Hume, David, 33, 59, 69, 212, 226, 231, 259,260, 317, 320, 321, 322,
326, 328-29,331, 339, 442, 486Huxley, dous, 180, 215, 218, 317, 537n "Hymn to G od,
my G od, in my sickness"(Donne), 222nIamblichus, 351, 360Ibarra, Nestor, 121nIbsen,
Henrik, 247, 481, 505I Ching, 230n, 249idioma de los argentinas, El (Borges),527n
Iliad (Homer), 69, 71, 73n, 250, 391, 392n,396, 400Illusion comique, L'
(Corneille), 161-62 Informer, The ( lm), 147-48In Praise ofDarkness (Borges), 478
Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, An(Russell), 226Inquisiciones (Inquisitions)
(Borges), 527n Intelligent Woman's G uide to Socialism,The (Shaw), 323-24, 542n
fntroduction to Mathematical Philosop hy(Russell), 46, 250Introduction to the Method
ofLeonardoda Vinci (Valery), 171Invention ofMorel, The (Bioy Casares),243-45
Invisible Man, The (Wells), 63n, 150, 516 "Invisible Man, The" (Chesterton),498-99
Irenaeus, 65, 66, 84, 130, 131, 405nJacob's Room (Woolf), 173-74James, Henry, ,
241-42, 247-48, 279,393, 521James, Will, 168-69James, William, 45, 46-47, 339, 483,
484, 521-22Tannings, Emil, 141, 142Janson, G ustaf, 179Jardin de los senderos que se
bifurcan, El(Borges) , 535nJauregui, Juan de, 18, 449, 525nJesus Christ, 39, 66,
67, 133n, 210, 335, 350,432, 456, 468, 490, 515, 519Jew ofMalta, The (Marlowe), 469
John of Patmos, 132, 455Johnson, Samuel, 87, 91, 101, 353, 410, 431 Jonson, Ben,
242, 342, 464, 471Jordanes, 377-78, 396Joubert, Josep h, 37-38, 528 nJoyce, James,
12-15, 81, 162, 174, 195,220-21, 222, 242, 251, 312, 393, 447>481, 527nJuan Morei
(G utierrez), 401, 525n Jung, Carl G ustav, 284, 364nKabbalah, 17-18, 83-86, 90, 165,
230, 360, 453, 456-57> 53lnKa a, Franz, 200-201, 244, 246, 259, 310, 363-65, 389,
501-3Kant, Immanuel, 13, 339, 450, 481 Kap p a, The (Akutagawa), 437-38 Kasner,
Edward, 249-50Keaton, Buster, 144, 145Keats, John, 127, 369Ker, William Paton, 357,
380-81 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 364, 518-19Kierkegaard (Lowrie), 364K i m ( K i p l i n
g ) , 4 2 4 , 4 9 5KingKong ( lm), 146Kip ling, Rudyard, 63n, 64, 212n, 247,
310,)12, 314, 413, 424, 426-27, 504 Kircher, Athanasius, 141, 155 Klemm, Wilhelm,
312, 541n Kodama, Maria, 513, 545n Koep p en, Carl Friedrich, 375, 376 Koran, 8),
286, J60, J67, 423 "Kubla Khan" (Coleridge), 369-72 Kyd, Thomas, 468, 469La
Fontaine, Jean de, 54, 108, 427 Lafargue, Jules, 167, 195 Lalitavistara, 375-76
Lamed Wufniks, 310, 54111Lane, Edward William, 17, 92, 94-96, 99, 100, 102, 10),
105, 413Lang, Andrew, 67n, 70, 72, 100, 238, 246, 28), 285n, 413Langdon, Harry,
144, 145Language oftheArgentines, The (Borges),137-39Lap lace, Pierre Simon de, 223,
286, 450,539nLarbaud, Valery, 12, 14Larreta, Enrique, 63, 530nLasswitz, Kurd, 214,
215-16, 536n Layamon, 354-57Leaves ofG rass (Whitman), 445-49 Leblanc, Maurice, 206,
536nLegenda Aurea, 222, 537nLegouis, Emile, 354, 543nLeibniz, G ottfried Wilhelm,
203, 204,215-16, 218, 2)0n, 249> 294, 315n, 318,4)1, 519Lemp riere, John, 77n, 391
Leon, Fray Luis de, 341, 482, 532n Leroux, G aston, 181, 497Letellier, C.-L.-A.,
194, 230Let the Peop le Think (Russell) , 208-10 Lewes, G eorge Henry, 43, 249, 339
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 247, 411Library ofBabel, The, p rologues to, xiv,500-510, 547n
LifeandDeath ofJason, The(Morris),75-77Littmann, Enno, 96, 101, 102, 105 Llull,
Ramon, 39, 155-59, 214, 315, 532n Locke, John, 318, 339, 486Logic (Mill), 118, 223
London, Jack, 503-5Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 283,304-5, 446Lop ez, Luis Carlos,
10, 527nL o r d H a l ifa x ' s G h o s t B o o k , 1 7 7 - 7 8 Lowrie, Walter, 364
Lucan, 273, 275, 291, 415, 463 Lucian of Samosata, 36on, 418 Luck ofRoaring Camp
and OtherSketches, The (Harte), 411-13 Lucretius, 135, 245, 324, 489, 521 Lugones,
Leop olda, 53, 88, 233, 234, 396,411, 420, 525n, 538n, 54InLuther, Martin, 142, 204,
432-33, 450, 457Macaulay, Thomas B., 141, 212n, 267-68, 350Macbeth (Shakesp eare),
423, 449, 467 Macedonius, 85, 531 11Mach, Ernst, 33, 259Macy, John, 412Madame
Bovary (Flaubert) , 386, 389, 393 Mainlander, Philip p (Philip p Batz),335-36
Mallarme, Step hane, 78-79, 171, 178, 237,2)9, 251, )11, 358, )62, 393Malon de
Chaide, Pedro, 126, 532n Malvezzi, Virgilio, 278, 539nMan and Sup erman (Shaw), 49n,
211, 255,453Man Who Was Thursday, The(Chesterton), 238, 272Man with Four Lives
(Cowen), 189 Marcus Aurelius, 227, 228Mardi (Melville), 246Mardrus, J. C., 93, 95,
101-8 Marinetti, T., 183-84Marlowe, Christop her, 464, 468-70 Marmo!, Jose, 476
Martensen, Hans Lassen, 132, 532n Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury),418-19Martin
Fierro ( Hernandez), 11, 26, 112,250, 397, 400, 40), 412, 420, 421, 422,525n
Mathematics and the Imagination(Kasner and Newman), 249-50 Maup assant, G uy de, 251,
387 Mauthner, Fritz, 39, 120, 141, 159, 215n,229,230,249,406,525n-26n Mayo, Archie,
150Melville, Herman, 79, 238, 245-46, 272, 5Jsn, 538nMena, Juan de, 22, 218, 528n
Menander, King,383Menendez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 29, 215n,375"Men Fought" (Borges),
401-2INDEX55555 6I N D E Xmeninas, Las (Velazquez), 160Merrill, Stuart, 175-76
"Messianic ecologue" (Virgil), 118 Metap hysics (Aristotle), 214Meyrink, G ustav,
162, 175, 200Milinda Pa ha, 317, 318n, 348-49, 383-84 Mill, John Stuart, 44, 118,
223, 466 Milton, John, 11, 35, 179, 255, 268, 293, 309,334, 353, 391-92, 427, 431,
452,472-7} , 479-80Mind ofMan, The (Sp iller), 13, 218, 249,320, 510Mir6, G abriel,
234, 53711Misas herejes (Carriego), 395 Miscellanies (Carlyle), 209-10 Moby-Dick
(Melville), 79, 238, 245, 272,283 Mohammed, 455Monkey (Wu Ch'eng-en; Waley,
trans.), 252-54Manner Sans, Jose Maria, 91, 531n Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 26,
53,311, 403nMontoliu, Manuel de, 34-35Moore, G eorge, 63-64, 188, 242, 393, 481,
53011Morand, Paul, 97, 531nMarder Dimitri Karamaso Der ( lm),143More, Henry, 454,
546nMoreto, Agustin, 71Morocco ( lm), 144-45Morris, William, 62-63, 70, 75-77, 101,
173? 314, 438Marte
d'Arthur (Tennyson), 62 Moscherosch, Michael, 428Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 174"MS
Found in a Bottle" (Poe), 238, 272 muchachos de antes no usaba11 gomi11a,Los ( lm),
258-59Murasaki, Lady, 186-87, 252 Mura a, Juan, 401, 403"Murders in the Rue Morgue,
The"(Poe), 495-96Murry, John Middleton, 390Mussolini, Benito, 202, 212nMutanabbi,
Abu-t-Tayyib, a!-, 98 "Mystery of Marie Roget, The" (Poe), 112,497Mystery ofthe
Y ellow Room, The(Leroux), 181, 497Nagarjuna, 349Narrative ofArthur G ordon Pym
(Poe),78-79. 493. 498New Atlantis (Bacon), 465-67New Era ofThought, A ( Hinton),
509, 510 Newman, James, 249-50Newman, John Henry, 71, 93, 95Newton, Sir Isaac,
330 , 388, 450 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 115-22, 179, 201,225-26, 270, 417, 504
Nightmare ( lm), 261-62Nine Dantesque Essays (Borges), xiv, ,265-305, 539 n-40 n
Nizam al-Mulk, 366Nothing Dies (Dunne), 217Navalis, 30, 68, 191, 216, 428Now
Voyager ( lm), 261"Nuit d'avril 1915, La" (Ap ollinaire),312-13O'Brien, Flann, 162
Ocamp o, Silvina, 296n, 535nOdyssey (Homer), 70-74, 77n-78 n, 358,391, 449OfCourse,
Vitelli! (G ri ths), 191 O'Flaherty, Liam, 169Omar Khayyam, 285n, 366-68 Omp halos
(G osse), 222On Heroes and Hero-worship (Carlyle),413-16Op p enheim, E. Phillip s, 206,
53611 Origen, 86n, 244, 256, 482Orlando (Woolf), 174, 53511Ortega y G asset, Jose,
233, 243, 244 Other Inquisitions (Borges), xii, xiv, 540 Ousp ensky, P. D., 218,
227, 509 "Outcasts of Poker Flat" (Harte), 412 Ovid, 7711, 273, 275, 291Oyuela,
Calixto, 233, 537nOzanam, 298, 303Pankhurst, E. S., 194-95, 229Paradise Lost
(Milton), 35, 293, 392, 431,480Parmenides, 269, 326, 339. 351 Pascal, Blaise, 215,
353, 488, 519 Passing ofthe Third Floor Back, The( lm), 150, 53311Patches
ofSunlight (Dunsany), 187-88 Paulino Lucero (Ascasubi), 397, 400, 421,S26nPaulinus,
85, 131, 53111Payador, El (Lugones), 396, 420 Payne, John, 102, 108Peano, G iusep p e,
194, 229 p eregrinos de p iedra, Los (Herrera yReissig), 24, 52811 Performance ( lm),
545nPersonality Survives Death (Barrett), 182 Personal Library, A, p rologues to,
xiv,511-22, 547n-48nPetri ed Forest, The ( lm), 149-50 Phaedon (Plato), 484-85
Phaedrus (Plato), 67n, 358Pharsalia (Lucan), 415, 449Phillp otts, Eden, 113, 181
Philology and the Writer (Wright), 172 Piazza Tales, The (Melville), 246
Pietrobono, Luigi, 278, 281, 299, 303 Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan), 149, 252 Pindar,
390, 416Plato, Platonism, 67n, 78n, 123-29, 134,225, 269, 330, 338-39, 351, 352,
358-s9, 383n, 427, 437. 460, 479, 484-85, 487, 509Pliny the Y ounger, 440, 444, 451
Plotinus, 123-29, 296, 326, 366, 416 Plutarch, 212, 309, 331-32, 349, 383, 403 Poe,
Edgar Allan, 35, 78-79, 93, 112, 176,181, 227, 236, 238, 246, 272, 390rl, 411,412,
418, 465, 482, 491-98, so6 Poemas (Borges), 535 np oesia di Dante, La (Croce), 274,
285 PoeticArt, The (G ottsched), 431-32 Pop e, Alexander, 17, 70, 72, 74, 427, 449
Power and the G lory, The ( lm), 259,538n-39nPrincip les ofHuman Knowledge, The
(Berkeley), 319, 326, 328, 329Private Op inion ( Pryce-Jones), 175-76 "Progress of
the Soul, The" (Donne), 488 Pryce-Jones, Alan, 175-76"Purloined Letter, The" (Poe),
497 Pursuer, The (G olding), 176-77P'u Sung-ling, 507-8Pythagoras, 118, 119, 358,
360, 437, 460,461, 487, 488, 515Queen, Ellery, 181Quevedo, Francisco G omez de, 16,
28, 31,33-34, 48, s3, 6s, 88, 1o2, 221, 279n, 284n, 335, 396, 428, 429, 470, 507
Rabbinical Literature (Stehelin), 17-18 Race with the Tortoise, The (Wol ), 214,216
Racine, Jean, 113, 311, 423Ramon Jimenez, Juan, 18Rashid ai-Din, 371"Raven, The"
(Poe), 493-94Recovered Texts (Borges), xii-xiiiRed Cavalry (Babel), 164Reflections
(Marcus Aurelius), 227, 228Religio Medici (Browne), 222, 225, 361 Remarque, Erich
Maria, 251, 312 Renan, Ernst, 458, 459Rep resentative Men (Emerson), 416-17 Reyes,
Alfonso, 315n, 466, 481, 525 n Richard, Timothy, 252, 254Richter, Jean-Paul, 68,
416Rimbaud, Arthur, 68, 312Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 71,178, 293, 437
Rivera, Diego, 192-93Robertson, J. M . , 253-54,Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 429Rohr,
Johannes, 200Rojas, Ricardo, 89-90, 250, 420-21 Roman de Ia Rose, 338, 352Rosas and
His Times (Ramos Mejia), 110,476Roscelin, Jean, 285, 339Rossetti, Dante G abriel,
11, 244, 304n,484, 514Rossi, Mario, 274-75Rossi, Vicente, 394, 397Rothe, Richard,
17, 50Royce, Josiah, 160, 324Rubaiyat ofOmar Khayy m, 367-68, 543n Rudyard Kip ling
(Shanks), 250-51Ruegg, August, 281Ruskin, John, 233, 268n, 481Russell, Bertrand,
45-47, 69, 124, 160,208-10, 224, 226, 250, 414 Rutherford, Ernest, 115, 116, 532r1
Sabotage ( lm), 257-58Saintsbury, G eorge, 237, 238, 239, 246, 315 Samson Agonistes
(Milton), 480San Martin, Jose, 210, 536nSantos Chocano, Jose, 91, 531 nSartor
Resartus (Carlyle), 28, 413-14 Scandal ofFather Brown, The(Chesterton), 114
Schleyer, Johann Martin, 194, 229 Schop enhauer, Arthur, 8, 9, 13, 22, 28, 35,127,
141, 162, 170, 201, 203, 204, 217, 218n, 219, 226, 227, 250, 279, 283, 284-85, 312,
320, 321, 326, 328, 330, 331, 336, 337, 342, 343, 388, 397, 407-8, 438, 489Scienti
c Romances (Hinton), 508-10 Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 257-58 Sense ofthe Past,
The (James), 241-42 Servet, Miguel, 91, 53111Sextus Emp iricus, 330-31 Shakesp eare,
William, 13, 24, 52, 61, 87,108, 141, 178, 195, 203, 219, 221, 235,INDEX557442558
INDEXShakesp eare ( cont.)244, 246, 248, 279n, 294, 322, 323, 342, 367, 406-7, 410,
423, 426, 449> 474, 490, 501, 544nenigma of, 463-73Shankara, 342, 542nShanks,
Edward, 250-51Shaw, G eorge Bernard, 12, 49n, 88, 141,202, 203, 204, 211, 247, 255,
358, 426,453, 470, 472, 489, 542nShelley, Percy Bysshe, 227, 240Shih Ching (Waley),
190Shih Huang Ti, Emp eror, 344-46 Showdown, The ( lm), 81, 530nSiger de Brabant,
282, 285Silva Valdes, Fermin, 24-25, 528 n Simp licissimus (G rimmelshausen), 429
Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 166Sitwell, Edith, 508-9Snorri Sturluson, 379Socrates,
484-85, 488-89 SoireeavecMonsieurTeste,La(Valery),171Soledades (G ongora), 292n-93n,
447 Somnium Astronomicum (Kep ler), 418 Sotos Ochando, Bonifacio, 230 Sp encer,
Herbert, 36, 166, 227, 234, 310,328, 388, 414Sp ender, Step hen, 241n, 248Sp ener,
Philip p Jacob, 433Sp engler, Oswald, 30, 170-71, 227, 253, 467 Sp iller, G ustav, 13,
35-36, 218, 249, 320,485, 510Sp inoza, Baruch, 39, 224, 339, 342, 345,406, 447, 453,
470 Sp itz, Jacques, 189Sp oerri, Theop hil, 299Stael, Madame de, 286, 440Steiner,
Carlo, 281, 282, 299-300 Step hen, Leslie, 173, 315Stevenson, Robert Louis, 28, 114,
127, 238,243, 259-60, 263, 272, 279, 370, 413,444> 493, 496, 499Stories (Cortazar),
514-15Stories, Essays and Poems (Huxley), 180 Strachey, Lytton, 141, 442
"Streetcorner Man" (Borges), 401-2, 529n Street Scene ( lm), 145-46Strindberg,
August, 179, 438Study ofHuman Nature, The (James),521-22Suarez, Wenceslao, 402-4
Sur, 217, 317, 529n, 535nSwedenborg, Emanuel, 49n, 131, 179, 182,238n, 255, 315,
332, 416, 449-57, 546nSweet, Henry, 194, 477Swi , Jonathan, 12, 6o, 87, 90-91, 158,
189,215, 388-89, 407, 408, 426, 427, 438,481, 507Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 85,
98, 108,178, 368, 369, 417Sylvie and Bruno (Carroll), 215 System ofLogic (Mill),
44, 466Tacitus, 225, 443, 487, 515Tagore, Rabindranath, 180-81Tale ofG enji, The
(Murasaki), 186-87 Taliesin, 460, 461-62tamafw de mi esp eranza, El (Borges), 527n
Tartini, G iusep p e, 369-70Tasso, Torquato, 391, 392Taylor, Jeremy, 84, 131, 249-50
Taylor, Meadows, 185Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 62, 85, 93, 109,283, 416n, 479, 492
Tertullian, 48, 459TheoryoftheLeisureClass, The(Veblen), 518Things to Come ( lm),
150-51Things to Come (Wells), 150-51 Thirty-nine Step s, The ( lm), 149 "Thou Art
the Man" (Poe), 497 Thousand and One Nights, The, 28, 88,129n, 160-61, 413, 439
translators of, 92-109, 531 nTiger G uest, The (P'u Sung-ling), 507-8 Timaeus
(Plato), 123, 225, 269, 351, 358 Time Machine, The (Wells), 150, 241, 509,516, 538
nTommaseo, 280-81, 299Torraca, Francesco, 274, 277-78, 300n, 303 Torre, G uillermo
de, 312, 541nTorres Villarroel, Diego de, s-6, 48-49,235"To the G ermans"
(Holderlin), 430To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 174Tracy, Sp encer, 260Trau keinem Fuchs
aufgruener Heid undkeinem ] ud bei seinem Eid, 199 Traumkristalle (Lasswitz), 215-16
Treatise ofHuman Nature, A (Hume),320, 328-29Trismegistus, Hermes, 351-52Tsao
Hsueh-chin, 508Twain, Mark, 149, 208, 411, 424, 465, 522 Twilight ofthe Idols
(Nietzsche), 270Ugolino of Pisa, 277-79Ulysses (Joyce), 12-15, 81, 174, 195, 220-
22,312, 389, 481, 527nUnamuno, Miguel de, 28, 52, 58, 119, 123, 141, 233, 250, 468,
483-84, 489, 519Underworld ( lm), 57-58, 81, 144, 471, 530nUnruh, Fritz von, 312,
541n Unvanquished, The (Faul er), 186 Urna, La (Banchs), 398, 422-23 Urn Burial
(Browne), 53, 221Valentinus, 65, 67, 68Valery, Paul, 54, 77, 85, 131, 168, 171-72,
240, 312, 430, 448 Van Dine, S. S., 172-73 Vanini, Lucilio, 225Varieties
ofReligious Exp erience, The ( James), 483, 521-22Vathek (Beckford), 236-39, 272
Veblen, Thorstein, 426, 518 Vega, Lop e de, 14-15, 18, 367, 470 Velazquez, Diego,
160Vera Christiana Religio (Swedenborg), 131, 455Verlaine, Paul, 85, 479 Verne,
Jules, 28, 516Vida e historia (Torres Villarroel), 5-6 Vidor, King, 145-46, 530n
Villegas, Esteban Manuel de, 22, 527n Villiers de !'Isle-Adam, Count of, 505-7
Vilmar, A. C., 200Virgil, uS, 227, 338, 355, 367, 377, 391, 392, 437in Divine
Comedy, 268, 273, 280-82, 290, 298-99, 303see also Aeneid, TheVisuddhimagga, 331,
349Vitali, G uido, 273, 274, 277, 295n, 303 Vita nuova, La (Dante), 300, 303, 304n,
338, 379Voltaire, 12, 6o, 87, 102, 140, 189, 238, 389,444. 449, 450, 471, 519von
Sternberg, Josef, 57-58, 63, 143,144-45, 148-49, 471, 530n Vulture, The (Kafka),
501-3Wace, Robert, 354, 356Waley, Arthur, 186-87, 190, 252-54 Warburton, William,
441-42Waste Land, The (Eliot), 167-68 Waves, The (Woolf), 174Weatherhead, Leslie,
254-56Wei!, G ustav, 93, 106, 107Welles,
Orson, 259, 471Wells, H. G ., 63, 150-51, 189, 193, 204,207-8, 212, 222, 241, 242,
247> 38311,419, 509, 516, 53811Welt als Wille rmd Vorstellung, Die(Schop enhauer),
217, 218n, 227, 312,320, 326, 328, 330, 331, 337, 397, 408 West, Rebecca, 248, 314
Whistler, James McNeill, 448, 502, 514 White, William, 452Whitehead, Alfred North,
123n, 372 Whitman, Walt, 7, 26, 31, 120, 210-11, 234,242, 250, 412, 417, 418, 445-
49, 452,492, 497-98, 54611Wilde, Oscar, 180, 236, 242, 314-16, 376,397. 478-79
Wilkins, John, 194, 229-32, 418 Winternitz, Moriz, 376, 383Wolf, Friedrich August,
400, 54411 Wol , Theodor, 214, 216Woolf, Leonard, 173Woolf, Virginia, 173-74, 535n
World ofDreams, The (Ellis), 369-70 Worterbuch der Philosop hie (Mauthner),39, 159,
229Writings (De Quincey), 91, 252, 333, 337Wu Ch'eng-en, 252-54Xenop hanes, 269, 351
Y eats-Brown, Major, 185Zangwill, Israel, 181 Zeno of Elea, 7, 43-47 Zola, Emile,
247, 311, 389 Zwingli, Ulrich, 133-34INDEX559

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