Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  D. ) The priority of how over who. The amateurs I excoriated in section A are partial to the story of a jewel placed within the reach of fifteen men—that is, of fifteen names, because we know nothing about their characters—which then disappears into the heavy fist of one of them. They imagine that the act of ascertaining to which name the fist belongs is of considerable interest.

  E.) A reticence concerning death. Homer could relate that a sword severed the hand of Hypsenor and that the bloody hand rolled over the ground and that blood-red death and cruel fate seized his eyes; such displays are inappropriate in the detective story, whose glacial muses are hygiene, fallacy, and order.

  F.) A solution that is both necessary and marvelous. The former establishes that the problem 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 supernatural, whose use in this genre of fiction is slothful and felonious. Also prohibited are hypnotism, telepathic hallucinations, portents, elixirs with unknown effects, ingenious pseudoscientific tricks, and lucky charms. Chesterton always performs a tour de force by proposing a supernatural explanation and then replacing it, losing nothing, with one from this world.

  The Scandal of Father Brown, Chesterton’s most recent book (London, 1935), has suggested the aforementioned rules. Of the five series of chronicles of the little clergyman, this book is probably 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 premise of the former is exciting: it deals with a tattered supernatural book that causes the instantaneous disappearance of those who foolishly open it. Somebody announces over the telephone that he has the book in front of him and that he is about to open it; the frightened listener “hears a kind of silent explosion.” Another exploded character leaves a small hole in a pane of glass; another, a rip in a canvas; another, his abandoned wooden leg. The dénouement is good, but I am positive that the most devout readers correctly guessed it in the middle of page 73. There is an abundance of the characteristics typical of G. K.: for example, that gloomy masked man with the black gloves who turns out to be an aristocrat and a fierce opponent 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 Suicide Club and those of the now five-part saga of Father Brown?

  [1935] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  The First Wells

  Harris relates that when Oscar Wilde was asked about Wells, he called him “a scientific Jules Verne.” That was in 1899; it appears that Wilde thought less of defining Wells, or of annihilating him, than of changing the subject. Now the names H. G. Wells and Jules Verne have come to be incompatible. We all feel that this is true, but still it may be well to examine the intricate reasons on which our feeling is based.

  The most obvious reason is a technical one. Before Wells resigned himself to the role of a sociological spectator, he was an admirable storyteller, an heir to the concise style of Swift and Edgar Allan Poe; Verne was a pleasant and industrious journeyman. Verne wrote for adolescents; Wells, for all ages. There is another difference, which Wells himself once indicated: Verne’s stories deal with probable things (a submarine, a ship larger than those existing in 1872, the discovery of the South Pole, the talking picture, the crossing of Africa in a balloon, the craters of an extinguished volcano that lead to the center of the earth ); the short stories Wells wrote concern mere possibilities, if not impossible things (an invisible man, a flower that devours a man, a crystal egg that reflects the events on Mars, a man who returns from the future with a flower of the future, a man who returns from the other life with his heart on the right side, because he has been completely inverted, as in a mirror). I have read that Verne, scandalized by the license permitted by The First Men in the Moon, exclaimed indignantly, “Il inventé!”

  The reasons I have given seem valid enough, but they do not explain why Wells is infinitely superior to the author of Hector Servadac, and also to Rosney, Lytton, Robert Paltock, Cyrano, or any other precursor of his methods.26 Even his best plots do not adequately solve the problem. In long books the plot can be only a pretext, or a point of departure. It is important for the composition of the work, but not for the reader’s enjoyment of it. That is true of all genres; the best detective stories are not those with the best plots. (If plots were everything, the Quixote would not exist and Shaw would be inferior to O’Neill.) In my opinion, the excellence of Wells’s first novels—The Island of Dr. Moreau, for example, or The Invisible Man—has a deeper origin. Not only do they tell an ingenious story; but they tell a story symbolic of processes that are somehow inherent in all human destinies. The harassed invisible man who has to sleep as though his eyes were wide open because his eyelids do not exclude light is our solitude and our terror; the conventicle of seated monsters who mouth a servile creed in their night is the Vatican and is Lhasa. Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own traits and it is also a map of the world. And it must be ambiguous in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author; he must appear to be ignorant of all symbolism. Wells displayed that lucid innocence in his first fantastic exercises, which are to me the most admirable part of his admirable work.

  Those who say that art should not propagate doctrines usually refer to doctrines that are opposed to their own. Naturally this is not my own case; I gratefully profess almost all the doctrines of Wells, but I deplore his inserting them into his narratives. An heir of the British nominalists, Wells condemns our custom of speaking of the “tenacity of England” or the “intrigues of Prussia.” The arguments against that harmful mythology seem to be irreproachable, but not the fact of interpolating them into the story of Mr. Parham’s dream. As long as an author merely relates events or traces the slight deviations of a conscience, we can suppose him to be omniscient, we can confuse him with the universe or with God; but when he descends to the level of pure reason, we know he is fallible. Reality is inferred from events, not reasonings; we permit God to affirm I am that I am (Exodus 3:14), not to declare and analyze, like Hegel or Anselm, the argumentum ontologicum. God must not theologize; the writer must not invalidate with human arguments the momentary faith that art demands of us. There is another consideration: the author who shows aversion to a character seems not to understand him completely, seems to confess that the character is not inevitable for him. We distrust his intelligence, as we would distrust the intelligence of a God who maintained heavens and hells. God, Spinoza has written, does not hate anyone and does not love anyone (Ethics, 5, 17).

  Like Quevedo, like Voltaire, like Goethe, like some others, Wells is less a man of letters than a literature. He wrote garrulous books in which the gigantic felicity of Charles Dickens somehow reappears; he bestowed sociological parables with a lavish hand; he constructed encyclopedias, enlarged the possibilities of the novel, rewrote the Book of Job—”that great Hebrew imitation of the Platonic dialogue”; for our time, he wrote a very delightful autobiography without pride and without humility; he combated communism, Nazism, and Christianity; he debated (politely and mortally) with Belloc; he chronicled the past, chronicled the future, recorded real and imaginary lives. Of the vast and diversified library he left us, nothing has pleased me more than his narration of some atrocious miracles: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Plattner Story, The First Men in the Moon. They are the first books I read; perhaps they will be the last. I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extincti
on of the language in which they were written.

  The Biathanatos

  I owe to De Quincey (to whom my debt is so vast that to point out only one part of it may appear to repudiate or silence the others) my first notice of Biathanatos, a treatise composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the great poet John Donne,27 who left the manuscript 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 poet’s firstborn son gave the old manuscript to the press to save it from the fire. Biathanatos extends to about two hundred pages; 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 justifiable homicide; by parity of reason, suicide is open to distinctions of the same kind. Just as not every homicide is a murder, not every suicide is a mortal sin. Such is the apparent thesis of Biathanatos; this is declared by the subtitle (That Selfhomicide is not so Naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise), and is illustrated or overtaxed by a learned catalog of fabled or authentic examples, ranging from Homer,28 “who had written a thousand things, which no man else understood, and is said to have hanged himself because he understood not the fishermen’s riddle,” to the pelican, symbol of paternal love, and the bees, which, according to St. Ambrose’s Hexameron, put themselves to death “when they find themselves guilty of having broken any of their king’s Laws.” The catalog takes up three pages, and in them I note this vanity: the inclusion of obscure examples (“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 forcefully persuasive—Seneca, Themistocles, Cato—but which may have seemed too obvious.

  Epictetus (“Remember the essential thing: the door is open”) and Schopenhauer (“Is Hamlet’s soliloquy the meditation of a criminal?”) have defended suicide in copious pages; the foregone certainty that these defenders are in the right makes us read them negligently. That was my case with Biathanatos until I perceived, or thought I perceived, an implicit 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 crepuscular, called him to the task. The latter hypothesis strikes me as more likely: the hypothesis of a book which in order to say A says B, like a cryptogram, is artificial, but that of a work driven by an imperfect in tuition 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 possible or probable; that it is enough to explain Biathanatos is, naturally, ridiculous.

  In the third part of Biathanatos, Donne considers the voluntary deaths that are mentioned in the Scriptures; he dedicates more pages to Samson’s than to any other. He begins by establishing that this “exemplary man” is an emblem of Christ and that he seems to have served the Greeks as an archetype for Hercules. Francisco de Vitoria and the Jesuit Gregorio de Valencia did not wish to include him among suicides; Donne, to refute them, copies the last words he spoke, 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 pillars of the temple, was not guilty of the deaths of others nor of his own, but was obeying an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “like the sword that directs its blades by disposition of he who wields it” (The City of God I , 20). Donne, having proven that this conjecture is unwarranted, closes the chapter with a phrase from Benito Pererio, saying that Samson, in his manner of dying, as much as in anything else, was a type of Christ.

  Inverting Augustine’s thesis, the quietists believed that Samson “by the demon’s violence killed himself along with the Philistines” (Heterodoxos espanoles V, I, 8); Milton (Samson Agonistes) defended him against the charge of suicide; Donne, I suspect, saw in this casuistical problem no more than a metaphor or simulacrum of a death. The case of Samson did not matter 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 promoted to this authority: for St. Paul, Adam is the figure of He who was to come; for St. Augustine, Abel represents the death of the Savior, and his brother Seth the resurrection; for Quevedo, Job was a “prodigious design” for Christ. Donne perpetrated 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 chapter that speaks directly of Christ is not effusive. It does no more than evoke two passages of Scripture: the phrase “I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:15) and the curious expression, “He gave up the ghost,” that all four evangelists use to say “He died.” From these passages, 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 preached, while virtually in the throes of death, in the Whitehall Palace chapel.

  The stated aim of Biathanatos is to mitigate suicide; the fundamental aim, to indicate that Christ committed suicide.29 That, in demonstrating this hypothesis, Donne would find himself reduced to a verse from St. John and the repetition of the verb to expire, is an implausible and even incredible thing; he undoubtedly preferred not to insist on a blasphemous point. For the Christian, the life and death of Christ are the central event in the history of the world; the centuries before prepared for it, those after reflect it. Be fore Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, before the firmament separated 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 Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were extracted from nothingness in order to destroy him. Perhaps 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 Philipp Batz, known to the history of philosophy as Philipp Mainlander. He, like me, was an impassioned reader of Schopenhauer, under whose influence (and perhaps under that of the Gnostics) he imagined that we are fragments of a God 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 published his book Philosophy of Redemption. That same year he took his own life.

  [1948] Translated by Esther Allen

  Pascal

  My friends tell me that the thoughts of Pascal help them to think. Certainly there is nothing in the universe that does not serve as a stimulus to thought; but I have never seen in those memorable fragments a contribution to the problems, illusory or real, they undertake to solve. I have seen them instead as predicates of the subject Pascal, as traits or epithets of Pascal. Just as the definition “quintessence of dust” does not help us to understand men but to understand Prince Hamlet, so the definition “roseau pensant” does not help us to understand men but to understand one man, Pascal.

  Valéry, I believe, accuses Pascal of voluntary dramatization; the fact is that his book does not project the image of a doctrine or a dialectical process but of a poet lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there will not really be a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there will not be a where. Pascal mentions “the opinions of Copernicus” with disdain, but his work reflects the confusion of a theologian exiled from the orb of the Almagest and lost in the Copernican universe of Kepler and
Bruno. Pascal’s world is the world of Lucretius (and also the world of Spencer), but the infinity that enraptured the Roman awes the Frenchman. Of course the latter is looking for God, and the former proposes to free us from the fear of the gods.

  Pascal, they tell us, found God, but his manifestation of that joy is less eloquent than his manifestation of solitude, in which he had no equal. Let it suffice to recall the famous Fragment 207 of the Brunschvicg edition (Combien de royaumes nous ignorent!) and Fragment 205, in which he speaks of “the infinite immensity of spaces I do not know and which do not know me.” In the first one, the vast word royaumes and the disdainful final verb impress one physically. Once I thought that this exclamation was of biblical origin. I remember that I perused the Scriptures; I did not find the passage I was looking for, and which perhaps does not exist, but I did find its perfect opposite—the tremulous words of a man who knows himself to be naked to his entrails under God’s watchfulness. The Apostle Paul (I Corinthians 13:12) says: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

  Fragment 72 is also worthy of note. In the second paragraph Pascal asserts that nature (space) is “an infinite sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” Pascal could have found that sphere in Rabelais (III, 13), who attributes it to Hermes Trismegistus, or in the symbolical Roman de la Rose, which says that it is from Plato. But that is not important; the significant thing is that the metaphor Pascal uses to define space was used by those who preceded him (and by Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici) to define the divinity.30 The grandeur that affects Pascal is not the grandeur of the Creator, but that of the Creation.