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Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal Points

a

Lisa Block de Behar

a
Universidad de la Repblica. Montevideo

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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 70, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2005, 7 /16

Borges, the Aleph, and Other

Cardinal Points
Lisa Block de Behar
Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo

Translated by Alfred Mac Adam

1. Jorge Luis Borges,

Isidoro Acevedo,
Cuaderno San Martn
( 1929). Obra poetica .
Emece, Buenos Aires,
1977, p.95
2. Jorge Luis Borges,
Emma Zunz, Obras
completas . Emece,
Buenos Aires, 1974,
p.568.
3. Jorge Luis Borges,
Historia de la
eternidad (1936).
Emece, Buenos Aires,
1953.
4. Ernest Renan, Drames
Philosophiques .
Calmann-Levy Editeurs,
Paris, 1888, p.4.

Lisa Block de Behar, born in Montevideo, is the author of A Rhetoric of

Silence and Other Selected Writings, Dos medios entre dos medios, Una
palabra propiamente dicha, Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation,
and Obra selecta de Emir Rodrguez Monegal (Editorial Ayacucho), among
other works of literary criticism. Block de Behar was director of Communication Sciences, and now serves as the Chair of Communication Analysis at
the Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo.
Its true I know nothing about
him* except place names and dates:
frauds of language. Borges1
/

only the circumstances, the time, and

one or two proper names were false. Borges2
For Borges, even eternity has its history. His paradoxical title3 reconciles
the infinite and the ephemeral and derives from discontinuously
remembered antecedents. For example, Ernest Renan, in the Au lecteur
preface to Caliban, declares that Shakespeare est lhistorien de leternite.4 Renan recognized that Shakespeare depicted no nation, no specific
century, that he described instead human history, without concerning
himself de la couleur locale et de lexacte representation des costumes,
des moeurs.(Renan, p.4)

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2005 The Americas Society, Inc.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/08905760500111669

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

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As in a tale from The Thousand and One Nights, where genies appear
and disappear unexpectedly, the coming and going of camels in the
Koran, in Edward Gibbon, and in Borges and his critics illustrate that
same now-you-see-it-now-you-dont problematic. The same applies to
the ambiguity of a character who is both autochthonous and exotic,
depending on point of view. Perhaps perspective matters more in esthetic,
moral, or political geography than it does in actual maps:
What are East and West? If no one asks me, I know; if Im asked, I have no idea.5

In Borgess lecture on The Thousand and One Nights , he again asks

what these cardinal points are, calling into question the inertia of
definitions and the useless polemics that match them against one another.
Once again, in refuting the specificity of space and the arbitrariness of the
contraries that divide and distribute it, he makes use of the question that
disturbed Saint Augustine with regard to time, even though temporal
extremes are even less real than those of space.
The undefined geographic, spatial nature of the Orient, together with
other ambiguities, is one of the constants of Borgess work. The Orient
marks an origin, which is never singular, a two-pointed originality that
eschews generalizations and their patterns. Favored by that imprecision,
coincidences involving supposedly antagonistic terms are not lacking:
How are we to define the Orient */not the real Orient, which does not exist? I
would say that such notions as Orient and Occident are generalizations but that no
individual feels himself to be oriental. I suppose a man might feel himself to be
Persian, Hindu, Malayan, but not oriental. In the same way, no one feels himself to
be Latin American: We feel we are Argentine, Chilean, Oriental */that is,
Uruguayan.6

5. Jorge Luis Borges, Las

mil y una noches, Siete
noches p.57.
6. Jorge Luis Borges, Siete
noches , p.67.

Borges plays with the idea that Uruguay used to be called the Banda
Oriental (the oriental or eastern bank of the Ro de la Plata), that
Uruguayans are still called Orientales, to mock definitions, the nonsense
of arbitrary geographical or chronological differences, and in confusing
them, he nullifies them. He observes that in the Far East, no one feels hes
in the Far East, but that impression matters less to him than recognizing
that in Latin America, we Uruguayans feel ourselves to be orientales or
gauchos.
In Orientalism (1979), Edward Said criticizes Orientalist stereotypes
constructed in the West. He mentions Borges only once and even then
only in passing, without taking into account Borgess rejection of the
dichotomies Said himself does not hesitate to assume. Referring to Louis
Massignon* the last of the Orientalists, as hes been termed* Said says:
His essays . . . mystifying erudition and almost familiar personality
sometimes make him appear to be a scholar invented by Jorge Luis
Borges.7 In another book, Said makes a similar statement about
/

7. Edward Said,
Orientalism . Vintage
Books: New York, 1979,
p.267.

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Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal Points

Raymond Schwab, author of a book about the Oriental Renaissance,

saying he resembles Borges, if not also a character in one of Borgess
Ficciones.8 Setting aside the universalist charm of Borgess arguments,
those comparisons configure a paradigm that unintentionally undermines
the complaints of someone* Said* who makes accusations and then
practices the very vice he attacks. Exoticism within exoticism, or, as
Roland Barthes asked: But, where is the Orient?9, understanding that
the cultural image always fixes itself in the location of political power; in
1877, the Arab countries did not exist.
Enrique Pezzoni recounts an amusing error about the risks of the
mistaken translations of place names and their disorientations that
illustrates the spatial focus of this essay. In the translation into Spanish
of a commentary by Pierre Macherey, the translator, who appears not to
know the meaning of the French word boussole (compass), translates
the French translation of Death and the Compass as Death at La
Boussole, as if la boussole were a town.10
A minor, hardly literary detail. I take up the theme of space in order to
distance it from specific geographic circumstances and bring it metaphorically closer to the desert, because the desert symbolizes pure
extension and because other homonymous elements are at stake. It is
not odd that from the Latin errare, to wander, to set out on an
adventure and to get lost, there is only a semantic step to error. And
the desert favors it. The difference between the terms, like a vox in deserto
may not be heard but it is understood. Errors can happen in the desert or
anywhere else, but they arise more when distances come into play. This
leads, in part, to conflicts of identity and its definitions, which, in turn,
leads to the skepticism with which Borges notes or parodies them.
Space never stops being a topos (or two or more) that involves both the
redundancy of discourse about unfathomable extension, which humans
attempt to approach through fiction, science, or technology. From one
extreme to another, reflections on space cover a wide spectrum which does
not exclude the negation of space and its variations.
Contemporary thought studies entities that again negate space: The
mythical no place, the original meaning of utopia, has proliferated in
the most trivial no places,11 with less happy and less ideal traits than
those assigned by an illustrious tradition to its mythical antecedents. If
both distance and proximity are virtually irrelevant to familiar and
domestic technology, space is no longer all that important. Nevertheless,
that indifference is disturbing.
Concerned about the place of man in the cosmos, Pascal said that
nature is une sphe`re infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonference
nulle part. On more than one occasion, Borges translates and quotes that
phrase, one quoted before by, among others, Louis-Auguste Blanqui and
Jules Laforgue, both venerated equally by Borges. It should not shock us
/

8. Edward Said, Raymond

Schwab and the
Romance of Ideas, The
Word, the Text, and the
Critic . Harvard: 1983,
p.248.
9. Roland Barthes, Pierre
Loti: Aziyade, El grado
cero de la escritura
seguido de Nuevos
ensayos crticos , Mexico,
1973, pp.238 /240.
10. Pierre Macherey, Borges
et le recit fictive, Pour
une theorie de la
production litteraire ,
Paris, 1966. Quoted in
Enrique Pezzoni, lector de
Borges: lecciones de
literatura 1984 /1988 ,
compiled by Annick
Louis, Buenos Aires,
1999, p.55.
11. Marc Auge, Non-lieux:
Introduction a` une
anthropologie de la
surmodernite . Paris,
1992.

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10

that they all use the same quotation; it merely proves how quotable the
quotation is.
Perusing the notion of eternity, Borges, during the 1960s, again
questions the alternatives to the archetypes* to time, to movement and
its tremulous problem. In addition to recognizing the primordial
establishment of those eternal forms, he adds that they are alive, powerful,
and organic. While the transcendent dimension both Plato and Borges
assign to the archetypes has been suspended, the advances of technological progress no longer address the habits of a static body but of one in
motion, subjected to the incongruities of accelerated spaces, lespacevitesse,12 in which neither space nor velocity are opposed to each other,
just as the sufferings and contortions of Laocoon do not oppose the stone.
It is useful to reread13 Borgess story El Aleph from a similar
perspective, without rejecting allusions to the spheres, to the ubiquity of
the center, to the utopian circumferences, to the itineraries of a cosmic
environment, the Orientalisms du jour, the displacement or suppression
of some Arabism, and the caravans of wandering camels or their solitary
silhouettes that nomadically come and go.
In El Aleph, Borges imagines one more hypothesis related to the
problem of space, one that literature does not ignore: the spatialization of
place by the letter, and, conversely, the de-spatialization of place by the
letter, both of which occur in his fiction concomitantly. The Aleph, one
of the points in space where all other points coincide, was once fantastic.
No longer. Technology has turned the magic predictions of writing into
fact.
The story narrates the inevitability of writings opening a place (a space
and an origin), at the same time that it displaces or suppresses it.
Mallarme says the world exists to end up in a book, but through a letter it
will begin anew* the world or the book. Perhaps one of the mysteries of
writing is rooted in this oscillation: I wonder whether a short story
should be so ambitious,14 says Borges, shocked by the hermeneutic
derivations of his tale and the ambitious or ambivalent interpretations it
goes on inspiring.
He himself emphasized the diversity of the tales nature: fantastic,
satiric, allegorical, related to the most remote cosmogonies or to some
descriptive foreshadowings that omit the unrestrained technological
invention and the profuse show of hardware genres of the kind science
fiction usually floods us with. The importance of names, the strong
presence of Dante,15 in Borgess writing legitimized the valuable
conjectures of Roberto Paoli, for which Borges thanks him, in the same
way he thanked others for those unlooked-for gifts in critical
interpretation with regard to the story.
The realism of the frame narrative contrasts with the discovery of the
Aleph, and, to accentuate that contrast, Borges deploys all the narrative
devices that define fantastic literature.16 If time travel is only possible
/

12. Paul Virilio, LEspace

Critique . Paris, 1984,
p.174.
13. Lisa Block de Behar,
Rereading Borgess The
Aleph: On the Name of
a Place, a Word, and a
Letter, The New
Centennial Review, vol.4,
n.1, Spring 2004,
pp.169 /187.
14. Jorge Luis Borges, The
Aleph and Other Stories
(1933 /1969) . New York,
1970, p.264.
15. Roberto Paoli, Tre Saggi
su Borges . Rome, 1992,
p.27.
16. Borges gave a lecture on
this subject in
Montevideo in 1949. See:
Rodrguez Monegal,
Jorge Luis Borges y la
literatura fantastica,
Numero, Montevideo,
ano 1, n.5, pp.448 /454.
Or: CAS.Buffalo.edu/
rodriguez-monegal/
bibliografia/prensa/
artpren/numero/
num_05.htm#n3

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Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal Points

within the meanderings of a fiction that suspends the forward flow of

time, then in El Aleph the narrator describes a planetary voyage he takes
without moving. If the theme of the double is yet another of those devices,
in this case the procedure is not limited to an individual but a duplication
of the entire world; if the work within the work is typical of the fantastic
genre, in the story the Aleph in the basement configures a domestic
variation on the mise en abime and the Platonic cave, where the shadows
of the world are repeated unto infinity, creating an interior abyss, both
literal and major, in the space of the letter Aleph.
Set between the neighborhoods of Montserrat and San Telmo, an
unfashionable quarter of Buenos Aires, in a ramshackle house scheduled
for demolition, the story has little in common with the infrastructural
battery which has taken shape both in contemporary fiction and in our
very homes. In the story, the Aleph names an object and, ante litteram, it
appears as une lettre avant la lettre, a first letter prior to the others that
anticipate it, from fiction, the reality that the sophistications of computer
technology illustrate. It is so interesting to present that plural anteriority
that, taken in its most literal sense* and literalness is absolutely valid
here* it would be appropriate to analyze it starting with the manuscript
of El Aleph, an instance prior to the published text. In that previous,
almost inaccessible stage, where the writing of the manuscript constitutes
evidence, the dilemma of space and motion is in play: the mihrab 17, a
sacred place in the mosque, and aleph, the sacred letter in its place.
The narrative episodes in El Aleph are few in number. The narrator,
whose name is Borges and who has much in common with the author,
visits Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet, the cousin of the
deceased Beatriz Viterbo loved by the narrator, on the anniversary of her
death. The mourning visit does not cover up the sentimental and poetic
rivalry between Daneri and Borges. This narrative sparseness and the
minor interest of the theme contrast with a parody that mocks the literary
world of Buenos Aires at that time and with the revelation of a portentous
place in the basement of the house.
Through Daneri, the narrator-Borges hears about the Aleph and sees it
for the first time. Through its magic, through the magic of writing,
distances and differences, their dimensions and limits, disappear and
reappear, as in a mirage, but it is in that space where, paradoxically, the
authors hope resides.
Maurice Blanchot also understands that Ecrire, cest trouver ce point
because le seul acte decrire18 initiates utopia by means of a writing that
takes charge of space, suddenly an endangered species. Through the
prestidigitation of writing, which reminds us of the clever abilities of
Hermes, reality appears and disappears simultaneously, providing solid
arguments for that poetics of disappearance of which Borges was, from
the 1930s until the end of his days, an incontrovertible fabulator and
/

17. Block de Behar,

Rereading Borges,
p.184.
18. Maurice Blanchot,
Lespace litteraire , Paris,
1955, p.52, p.38.

11

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12

which the theories of the final decades of the 20th century examined from
different perspectives.
Le bet, maison du aleph, est toute la Creation.19 If through the act of
writing the narrator were to replicate Creation, beginning with Bet, which
signifies the house, in the Aleph within the house he sees the whole
universe:
I saw a small sphere . . . cosmic space was there, with no diminution of its size . . . I
saw the populous sea . . . I saw the multitudes of the New World . . . I saw a red
labyrinth (it was London) . . . I saw in a study in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe
between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly . . . 20

19. Annick de Souzenelle, La

lettre chemin de vie: Le
symbolisme de lettres
hebraiques , Paris, 1993.
20. Jorge Luis Borges, El
Aleph, El Aleph, Obras
completas , p.625.
21. J. Hillis Miller, On
Literature , London,
2002, p.19.
22. Roland Barthes, Leffet
du reel, In R. Barthes, R.
Bersani, Ph. Hamon, M.
Riffaterre, I. Watt,
Litterature et Realite ,
Paris, 1982, p.86.
23. Ibidem .

Blinded by a vision both familiar and out of the ordinary, the narrator
repeats I saw almost 40 times in that same passage, as if he were
affirming, through anaphora, truth through evidence. Often the illusion
that the text is a chronicle of real people and events, not a fictive
concoction, is reinforced by the use of real place names.21 If the
technique noted by Hillis Miller is indeed valid, the chronicle gets lost
both in the boundlessness of totality and in the smallness of the Aleph.
Instead of reinforcing leffet du reel, it dilutes the real by introducing
incredulity in that double, fantastic magnitude. The necessary consecutiveness of discourse orders the vertige de la notation 22: What my eyes
saw was simultaneous: What I shall transcribe is successive, because
language is successive. Something of it, however, I will include. (El
Aleph) In general terms, Barthes said that if description were not
subordinated to an esthetic, rhetorical, stylistic, or linguistic selection
toute vue serait inepuisable par le discours: il y aurait toujours un coin,
un detail, une inflexion despace ou de couleur a` rapporter.23
It was not necessary for the postscript to call into doubt the
authenticity of the Aleph. At the end of the story, the narrator confesses
he lied to Daneri when he denied hed seen the prodigy. The postscript is a
formality that prolongs the text until it reaches, by means of the carefully
included details of dated time, a different space, one in which convention
admits, as if it were true, the confirmation of a lie: As incredible as it may
seem, I think that there is (or was) another Aleph, I think the Aleph on
Garay Street was a false Aleph.
The device easily enters the category Leo Spitzer, in an essay from the
1940s, the same decade in which the story appears, called chaotic
enumeration. Spitzer included examples of the grandiose and majestic
vision of the All-Powerful, of Walt Whitman, of Daro, of Pedro Salinas,
and other poets who, using a medieval technique, appealed to the
modern. An accumulation of precise references establishes, because of the
convincing materiality of setting, the contradictory plausibility of a
cosmos in disorder, turning the inventory into an invention.
In the 1970 Dutton edition, Borges amuses himself recalling that a
journalist in Madrid had asked him if it were true that Buenos Aires

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Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal Points

13

possessed an Aleph. Borges answered that such an object could not exist
because, if it did, it would completely transform our idea of time,
astronomy, mathematics, and space. The reporter, disappointed when he
learned that it was merely one of Borgess inventions, shot back: I
thought it was true because you gave the name of the street. (The Aleph
and Other Stories, p. 264) Borges, knowing that the name was a means to
confer authenticity, declared that one of his favorite tricks was introducing into his stories the names of his friends* for the same reason.
Fascinated by the minute description of the Aleph and suddenly
incredulous because of the break introduced by the postscript, the reader
is left in doubt, not knowing if he should have any confidence in a tale
that seems to demand it or in the bad faith that depletes such confidence.
Despite his willing suspension of disbelief, the reader cannot forget what
he already knows and vacillates between observing the rules of the game
or flaunting them.
Among the sufficiently trustworthy references in the postscript is a
discovery by an illustrious philologist, Pedro Henrquez Urena24. In a
library in Santos (Brazil), he found a manuscript written by Captain
Richard Francis Burton. There Burton discussed a marvelous crystal
similar to the glassy Aleph, but Borges goes further in the postscript,
referring to similar mirrors in other works* in night number 242 of The
Thousand and One Nights, which Burton translated, in Spensers Fairie
Queen, and in other works. If the story includes a postscript which in part
demystifies it, in the same way but in reverse, Captain Burton enunciates
the non-existence of those mirrors, and, at the same time, their triviality.
Not All is true* dramatic or novelistic, nor its opposite. If the
narrators suspicion is double, the readers is nothing less.
No matter how precisely dated it is* Postscript of March 1, 1943*
the details formulated there assure no certainty. This is, in part, because
we hardly ever find postscripts to stories, though it is much rarer to find
Alephs in basements. Similar to prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and other
textual notes, the postscript is one of those spaces or discourses of truth
that in ending a writing, relate the space of writing to reality which, even
in quotation marks, is not subordinated to an evident regime of writing or
to a terminal reality. In the final passage, in that space of transition and
precision that is the postscript, where the text reaches its limits or abuts
non-textual space, a law of sincerity25 would seem to prevail.
However, constituted as the footnote to a fiction, taken literally, the
postscripted truth becomes a half truth, an agreement between sincerity
and insincerity that compromises the relationship between author and
reader, space and time, or its places and dates. The procedure recalls,
in part, the uncertainties of the classic paradox of the liar who speaks
the truth which, all too tragically, has concerned J.F. Lyotard and
contemporary philosophy.
/

24. Henrquez Urena had

contributed to an issue
of Sur seeking to
vindicate Borges, edited
by Jose Bianco. This took
place because the
National Literature Prize
was not given to Borges,
who had presented The
Garden of Forking Paths ,
which received only one
vote. The prizewinners,
today forgotten, had sent
in, according to Edgardo
Cozarinsky, works of
nationalist tendency
linked to the deplorable
international tendencies
of 1942.
25. Franc Schuerewegen, All
is False(Balzac),
Poetique 1333 , Fevrier,
2003, Paris, pp.3 /13.

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14

26. John Barth, The Friday

Book: Essays and Other
Nonfiction . New York,
1984, p.74.
27. Gerard Genette,
Metalepse . Paris, 2004.
28. Jorge Luis Borges,
Palabras finales.
(Prologo breve y
discutidor), Antologa
de la moderna poesa
uruguaya . Buenos Aires,
1927.
29. Jorge Luis Borges,
Eplogo, El Aleph ,
Obras Completas , p.629.
30. Alphons Knauth,
Literaturlabor: la muse
au point; Fur eine neue
Philology, ReinbachMerzbach, 1986.

By now, Borgess textual trickery is no longer disconcerting, that

transgression does not rarify the narrative universe any more than the
unusual object in the basement that constitutes the source of the tale and
which the postscript challenges. The texts witty use of the postscript,
which Borges and Bioy Casares have consecrated in fiction by defictionalizing it or elevating it to a second degree, have probably inspired the
boutades of John Barth: [Borgess] ficciones are not only footnotes to
imaginary texts, but postscripts to the real corpus of literature.26
Moreover, the theories Gerard Genette produced during the 1980s and
continues to develop,27 describe in detail those textual audacities whereby
Borges and Bioy extend fiction. But beyond Palimpsestes: La litterature au
second degre (1982), where Genette systematizes transtextual categories, I
would single out Seuils (1987). The title of his book plays on the name of
his publisher (Seuil), in an inscription that simultaneously speaks and
shows, folding over on itself in the margins, where the text slips into that
disputable hors-texte or into its equally disputable margins.
Genettes book is relevant here not only because of that observation but
because it was in 1985 and in Montevideo when I showed him a littleknown essay by Borges. Borges begins by addressing the reader: Who
dares to enter a book? and goes on from there to speculate about the
dubious thresholds (seuils) of the text. In those same circumstances,
Genette discovered the zaguan, a simultaneously private and public space,
along with the word that names it. He became acquainted with a place
where the street and the city enter the house, and with its sentimental
connotations. Of nostalgic evocation, it is a place typical of our
architecture, and it is not surprising that its translation is either difficult
or impossible. In the Final Words of a forgotten anthology of poetry,
during the 1920s, Borges celebrates the mystery of zaguanes, the threshold
of a house, metaphors for an intimacy at the edge of the street or the text:
What possible justification can I have about this zaguan ? None, except this river of
Oriental blood that flows in my bosom, none except the Oriental days in my
days.28

In the epilogue to El Aleph, dated 1949, Borges points out: The

works included in this book correspond to the fantastic genre.29 Might he
not be insinuating another example, more recherche or more vulgar, of a
poetics based, according to his own words, on the discovery of hidden
meanings that the affinities of sounds reveal in, for example: espacio and
esperanza, oro, oriente, and origen? Could it be one more example of
Alfons Knauths linking of philology and logophilia?30 Camello is too
much like camelo for a Spanish speaker not to notice the similarity and to
recover the jokes related to jorobar in a word the Dictionary of the Royal
Spanish Academy says means false news; phrase or discourse without
meaning; simulation, pretending, deceiving appearance. Above and
beyond the sober definitions in the dictionary, the joke could be

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Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal Points

15

legitimized by poetic means, following a logic of laughter Arthur Koestler

proposed in formulating a theory of creation based on humor and
consonance.31
The misgivings produced by the famous camel and Koran passage, its
disconcerting effect, the humorous remarks that attempt to resolve it, that
trou or gap or empty place, validate various hermeneutic maneuvers,
beyond nomenclatures and practices imposed by reception theory and
other related doctrines.
None of the suppositions I advance here seems sufficiently convincing
to take it for fact, but the fact is that Borges attributes to a rigorous
historian like Edward Gibbon and to the prestigious pages of The History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire an assertion that is false* the
absence of camels in the Koran. In the face of that absence, it is difficult to
stem the conjectural flow. That historical rigor allows for much freedom:
/

After all he knew very little about his characters. I suppose he had to imagine the
circumstances. He must have thought of himself as having created, in a sense, the
decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And he did it so wonderfully that I do not
care to accept any other explanations.32

31. Arthur Koestler, The Act

of Creation . London,
1964.
32. Jorge Luis Borges, The
Craft of Fiction .
Cambridge, 2000, p.116.
33. Jorge Luis Borges, Libro
de los suenos . Buenos
Aires, 1976, p.9.
34. Estanislao del Campo,
Fausto . Buenos Aires,
1946.
35. Jorge Luis Borges, La
poesa gauchesca,
Discusion , Obras
Completas , p.187.
36. Fernando Pessoa, [Um
criador de mitos], Obras
em prosa . Rio de Janeiro,
1986, p.84.

From the absence of camels to the proliferation of interpretations

provoked by that absence, perhaps it was one of Borgess intentions to
stimulate the continuity of that hermeneutic abundance in order not to
put a stop to the postulation of a problematic nationalism that is still alive
under other cultural masks. In any case, and to call a halt to the
suppositions that suspicion multiplies, we have to recognize that the
argument was convincing for decades, and numerous studies still refer to
it to support firm positions that did not require the double authority of
Borges and Gibbon to prove their hypotheses.
Even if the facts were not trustworthy, the results of their infidelity is
relevant, and despite lies, confirms the fact that, once a myth dominates a
community and its individuals, verification is superfluous. From the
unexpected conjunctions of the dreams that pass through the community
in the intimacy of the mind to the unconsciously understood ideas that
implicitly decide the comprehension of those who share a culture, myths
defend their uncertain margin: It is not improbable that mythologies and
religions have an analogous origin.33 Referring to Estanislao del Campos
Fausto,34 Borges declares that this example of poesa gauchesca is not
part . . . of Argentine reality, it belongs* like the tango, like truco, like
President Irigoyen* to Argentine mythology.35 He knew he contributed
to extending and consolidating that foundational mythology of an
identity and a nation, which needed it. He could have appropriated the
desire of Fernando Pessoa: I want to be a creator of myths, which is the
highest mystery a member of the human race can accomplish.36
The quiet suburban patios, the astute truco players in rose-colored
almacenes, the tango, and the contained violence in its stereotypical
/

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graphic representations, the savage gauchos wandering the interminable

pampa who then metamorphose into the compadritos or orilleros with
abbreviated shadows on the sidewalks out front, shaded by warm walls
and the florid tricks/ of a domestic mythology, are both national and
typical of Buenos Aires. Rodrguez Monegal points out this appropriation
of the city to a voice that founds it:
Buenos Aires had existed before Georgie discovered it, but very few of its writers
had taken the trouble of reinventing it so thoroughly and with such success.
From 1921 onward Buenos Aires became his as much as Manhattan was
Whitmans.37

If a single letter peut contenir le livre, lunivers, as Edmond Jabe`s

said, that letter would be an aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew and
sacred alphabet which, before articulation, names the breath necessary to
carry it out. In the manuscript that preceded the publication of El
Aleph, Aleph was a mihrab, a sacred space in the mosque that
disappeared from the story like the house on Garay Street, like the Orient
where this strange, literary topography began in order not to end in the
South. By substituting a sacred letter for a sacred place, the letter remains
in its place; the space and the writing appear assimilated by an identical
literary magic, founding a conceptual esthetic, a minimalist poetics that
allows, on a letter prior to letters, the vision of another world or the same
n, the perfumes of a tree-lined street or
world. In the shadows of the zagua
the honeysuckle of a hedge, in the low houses of the suburbs, Borges
glimpsed the universe in the way he envisioned the Orient from the South,
from a corner or a text where the question once again becomes cardinal
and the answer leads one to the beginning, the origin, and, without
naming it, names it:

37. Emir Rodrguez

Monegal, Jorge Luis
Borges: a Literary
Biography. New York,
1978, p.168.
38. Jorge Luis Borges, El
advenimiento de Buenos
Aires, Crtica , Buenos
Aires, November 30,
1956: in Borges: textos
recobrados 1956 /1986 .
2003.
39. Jorge Luis Borges, El
mapa secreto, Crtica ,
Buenos Aires, October
20, 1956, in Textos
recobrados .

How to define the South? The easy temptation would be to define it by old houses,
by the arches of zaguanes , by the gate behind which we imagine there are patios or
a single patio, but these things are scattered over the North and the West. Even so,
we can call them South, because the South is less a geographic category than a
sentimental category, less a category of maps than one of our emotions.38

If in the Aleph* which is an emblem of the astonishing and remote

disappearance of universal space within a letter, both figural and literal*
all points exist, the mihrab is in the Aleph and the Aleph in the mihrab.
Set down in the manuscript, they do not stand out in the story which,
published and public, hides the initial, symbolic combination.
Like a map, which is only a diagram, writing does not show the
intimate and secret city of our biographies,39 nor does it need to
mention camels or the Orient. Even if they were not true, those omissions
were the starting point for these reflections on literary fictions which
cipher hope, as Borges imagined, in the space of writing.
/