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[University of California]
On: 12 March 2007
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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 70, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2005, 7 /16
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
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
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.
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
/
11
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
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
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.
/
14
15
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
16
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