Microworlds

UNITAS OPPOSITORUM: THE PROSE OF JORGE LUIS BORGES

I admit that this essay is a very subjective review of Borges’s fiction. If someone asked me why I am stressing the subjective aspect of this piece of criticism, I would be hard-pressed to give a conclusive answer. Perhaps because I have been trying for years to enter the territory in which the Argentinian’s best work was created, although I went by quite another road. Therefore his work is very close to me. At the same time it is foreign to me, for I know from my own experience the traps into which he has sometimes fallen in his writing, and I cannot always approve of his literary methods.

Nothing could be simpler than to list Borges’s best stories. These are: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard — Author of the Quixote,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” and “Three Versions of Judas.”

I justify my preference in the following way: each of the stories mentioned has a double-decker, perverse, but logically perfect structure. Viewed superficially, they are fictionalized paradoxes of the Greek type (Zeno’s, for instance[13]).

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges bases the story on the idea of reversing our concepts of “idea” and “reality.” Borges suggests that a secret society has created a new world where the mind creates its own external objects, and the only external objects are those created by the mind.

In “The Lottery in Babylon” Borges contrasts two mutually exclusive explanations of the universe: (statistical) chance, and (total) determinism. Usually we consider these notions incompatible. Borges tells of a world system based upon a lottery, and reconciles two cosmological explanations without destroying the logical bases of each system.

“Pierre Menard — Author of the Quixote,” on the other hand, is a satire on the uniqueness of the act of artistic creation, logically driven to its utmost point. (In this story Pierre Menard seeks to rewrite “Don Quixote” precisely — without copying it. The story shows the paradoxes behind the idea that art is created necessarily and uniquely. Borges reduces the idea ad absurdum.)

Finally, “Three Versions of Judas” is a logically improvable heresy.[14] Borges builds a fictitiously heterodox system of Christian dogmatics in which he “proves” that Judas not Jesus was the Christ. In its “radicalism” this fictitious heresy surpasses all historical types of heresy.

In each story we can find the same kind of method: Borges transforms a firmly established part of some cultural system by means of the terms of the system itself. In the fields of religious belief, in ontology, in literary theory, the author “continues” what mankind has “only begun to make.” Using this tour d’adresse Borges makes comical and absurd those things which we revere because of their current cultural value.

But when we look at Borges’s work only superficially we see the “comicallogical” effect alone. However, each of these tales has in addition another — wholly serious — hidden meaning. At base, his curious fantasy is, I claim, quite realistic. Only after some thought do you first note that the heterodoxy contained within “Judas,” for instance, might really be possible. Such a perfidious interpretation of the myth of the redemption, if historically not very plausible, is at least thinkable. I could say the same about “Lottery.” Under certain conditions even the reinterpretation of the notions of chaos and order shown here may be historically plausible. Both stories, diiferent as they may appear to be from one another, are hypotheses about the structure and attributes of existence. Because they are both borderline cases, isolated to one edge of the real paradigm corresponding to them, it was very unlikely that they would come true historically. Yet, considered from a logical point of view, they are totally “correct.” The author therefore has the courage to deal with the most valuable goals of mankind just as mankind himself does. The only difference is that Borges continues these combinatory operations to their utmost logical conclusions.

Borges’s best stories are constructed as tightly as mathematical proofs. It is impossible to refute them logically, however lunatic the stories’ premises may sound. Borges is successful because in any single case he never questions the implied premises of the model structure that he transforms. For instance, he pretends to believe (as some humanists do) that a truly brilliant work of art contains no trace of chance, but is indeed the result of some (higher) necessity. If one thinks that such a statement is generally true, it is possible, without contradicting logic, to claim that a masterpiece could be created, word for word, a second time, and quite independently from its first birth (as one can really do with mathematical proofs). We can only see the nonsense of such a procedure when we attack its very premises; but of course Borges is careful never to do this. He never creates a new, freely invented paradigm structure. He confines himself strictly to the initial axioms supplied by the cultural history of mankind. He is a mocking heretic of culture because he never transgresses its syntax. He only extends those structural operations that are, from a logical point of view, “in order,” i.e., they have never been seriously “tried out” because of historical extralogical reasons — but this is of course another matter altogether.

Basically, Borges just does what he claims for the fictitious philosophers of his “Tlön” (in philosophy they “do not seek truth, only amazement”). He cultivates a fantastic philosophy, for the characters and settings in his stories are not discursive arguments, but just as much literary objects as the objects which appear in “normal” literature. This group of tales forces me to ask how we may distinguish a fictitious ontology (one that cannot be taken seriously) from a real (historically valid) philosophy. The answer to this question is shocking: no essential difference separates the two. Things are quite trivial: those ontological-philosophical concepts that some thinkers had, and that were preserved by mankind in her historical treasure trove of ideas, and that she therefore acknowledges as serious attempts to interpret and understand the world in one grand sweep — those ideas are our religions and philosophical systems.[15] But ideas that cannot present such a genealogical attestation and cannot show such an assimilation by the real history of mankind (and Borges’s cannot) are just “fictitious,” “freewheeling,” “privately invented” meaningful structures, and for no other reason than that mentioned above. Because of this, they can never be taken seriously as an interpretation of the world and existence. These stories cannot be refuted even when the most severe criteria are applied, but only because things happen to be so. To refute them, it would not be sufficient merely to show their absurd consequences. To refute them, it would be necessary to call into question the total syntax of human thought, and thinking in its ontological dimensions. Therefore, Borges’s work just confirms that no cultural necessity exists in our growth toward knowledge; for we often take that which has arisen by accident for what is necessary, and mistake the ephemeral for the eternal.

I’m not sure whether Borges would agree with my explication of his work, but I do fear that I have attributed more to him than he deserves, and that he has not written his best work with so serious an intent (in its semantic depths, not its comical-paradoxical surface, of course). Which means that I suspect that Borges “privately” has not seen the final point of his fictional chain of proof. This guess is based on a knowledge of all of his stories. By talking about his other stories, I pass onto the other, more dubious aspects of his work. Seen as a whole, his work is a universe of literature whose secondary, repetitious aspects diminish and slight his best efforts by their very neighborhood, because these aspects structurally debunk his best work. In Borges’s best stories one can find flashes such an intellectual power that they do not lose impact even after many rereadings. If at all, they are lessened only when one reads all of his stories at a sitting.

Only then do we notice the mechanism of their creative process. It is always dangerous, even fatal for the creator, when we see the invariant (debunking) structure, the algorithm of his creative power. God is a total mystery to us above all because it is on principle impossible for us — and will remain impossible for us — to understand or imitate exactly the structure of God’s act of creation.

Considered from a formal point of view, the creative method of Borges is very simple. It might be called unitas oppositorum, the unity of mutually exclusive opposites. What allegedly must be kept separate for all time (that which is considered irreconcilable) is joined before our very eyes, and without distorting logic. The structural content of nearly all of Borges’s stories is built up by this elegant and precise unity. Borges calls the one and the same the conflicting notions of the orthodox and the heretic, Judas and Jesus. Christ, betrayer and betrayed, the troglodytes and the immortals, chaos and order, the individual and the cosmos, the nobleman and the monster, good and evil, the unique and the repeated, etc. His literary game with its borderline meanings always begins where opposites repel one another with their inherent force; and it ends as soon as they are joined together. But we can see a trivial weakness in Borges’s work in the fact that there is always the same mechanism of conversion (or a closely related inversion). God the Almighty was wise enough never to repeat Himself in such a manner. We authors, his successors, shadows and apprentices, also mustn’t do it. Occasionally — but very rarely — the skeletal, paradigmatic structure of the transformations used in Borges’s fiction results in truly extraordinary things, as I have tried to show. But we always find this structure, invariably in the same form, once we have properly recognized and assessed it. Such repetition, which inevitably is already accompanied by an element of the unintentionally comical, is the most familiar and most general weakness in all of Borges’s fiction. For as good old Le Bon has already said in his work on humor, we always look disdainfully down upon the mechanic, for a mechanical process always lets the strange and surprising get away. It is simple to predict the future of a purely mechanical phenomenon. In its utmost depths, the structural topology of Borges’s work acknowledges its relationship with all mechanistic-determinist kinds of literature, including the mystery novel. The mystery novel always incorporates unequivocally the formula of Laplacean determinism.

The cause of his work’s “mechanistic” sickness is this, I think: from the beginning of his literary career, Borges has suffered from a lack of a free and rich imagination.[16] In the beginning he was a librarian, and he has remained one, although the most brilliant manifestation of one. He had to search in libraries for sources of inspiration, and he restricted himself wholly to cultural-mythical sources. They were deep, multifarious, rich sources — for they contain the total reservoir of the mythical thought of mankind.

But in our age they are on the decline, dying off as far as their power to interpret and explain a world undergoing further changes is concerned. In his paradigmatic structures, and even in his greatest achievements, Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago. Therefore he is forced to play with the sacral, the awe-inspiring, the sublime and the mysterious from our grandfathers. Only in rare cases does he succeed in continuing this game in a serious way. Only then does he break through the paradigmatically and culturally caused incarceration which is its limitation, and which is quite contrary to the freedom of artistic creation he strives for. He is one of the great men, but at the same time he is an epigone. Perhaps for the last time. He has lit up — given a paradoxical resurrection to — the treasures transmitted to us from the past. But he will not succeed in keeping them alive for any long period of time. Not because he has a second-rate mind, but because, I believe, such a resurrection of transitory things is in our time quite impossible. His work, admirable though it may be, is located in its entirety at an opposite pole from the direction of our fate. Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot “alloy” our world’s fate with his own work. He has explicated to us paradises and hells that remain forever closed to man. For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them.

Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner