Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  From the foregoing examples it can be inferred that the main problem of the novel is causality. One kind of novel, the ponderous psychological variety, attempts to frame an intricate chain of motives similar to those of real life. This type, however, is not the most common. In the adventure novel, such cumbersome motivation is inappropriate; the same may be said for the short story and for those endless spectacles composed by Hollywood with silvery images of Joan Crawford, and read and reread in cities everywhere. They are governed by a very different order, both lucid and primi tive: the primeval clarity of magic.

  This ancient procedure, or ambition, has been reduced by Frazer to a convenient general law, the law of sympathy, which assumes that “things act on each other at a distance” through a secret sympathy, either because their form is similar (imitative or homeopathic magic) or because of a previous physical contact (contagious magic). An example of the second is Kenelm Digby’s ointment, which was applied not to the bandaged wound but to the offending weapon that inflicted it, leaving the wound, free of harsh and barbarous treatments, to heal itself. Of the first kind of magic there are numerous instances. The Indians of Nebraska donned creaking buffalo robes, horns, and manes, and day and night beat out a thunderous dance in order to round up buffalo. 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 often 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 laps so that their wombs will bear fruit. For the same reasons of semblance, among the ancient Hindus the yellow root of the curcuma plant was used to cure jaundice, and locally in Argentina, a tea made of net tles was used to cure hives. A complete list of these atrocious, or ridiculous, examples is impossible; 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 superstitious, there is a necessary link not only between a gunshot and a corpse but between a corpse and a tortured wax image or the prophetic smashing of a mirror or spilled salt or thirteen ominous people 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 dominación de los arabes en España, do not write that a king or caliph died, but that “he was delivered unto his final reward or prize” or that “he passed into the mercy of the All-Powerful,” 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 place or pointless in the overwhelming disorder of the real world, but not in a novel, which should be a rigorous scheme of attentions, echoes, and affinities. Every episode in a careful narrative is a premonition. Thus, in one of Chesterton’s phantasmagorias, a man suddenly pushes a stranger off 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 conspiracy consisting of a single man (aided by false beards, masks, and aliases) is darkly heralded by the couplet:

  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 shift of capital letters:

  The words are many, but the word is One.

  In a third story, the initial pattern—the passing mention of an Indian who throws his knife at another man and kills him—is the complete reverse of the plot: a man stabbed to death by his friend with an arrow beside the open window of a tower. A flying knife, a plunged arrow: these words have a long repercussion. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that the single preliminary mention of stage sets taints with a disquieting unreality the depictions of dawn, the pampas, and nightfall which Estanislao del Campo has worked into his Fausto. Such a teleology of words and episodes is also omnipresent in good films. At the beginning of The Showdown, a pair of adventurers plays a game of cards to win a prostitute, or a turn at her; at the end, one of them has gambled away the possession of the woman he really loves. The opening dialogue of Underworld concerns stool pigeons; the opening scene, a gunfight on an avenue: these details prefigure the whole plot. In Dishonored, there are recurring motifs: the sword, the kiss, the cat, betrayal, grapes, the piano. But the most perfect illustration of an autonomous orb of omens, confirmations, and monuments is Joyce’s preordained Ulysses. One need only examine Stuart Gilbert’s study or, in its absence, the vertiginous novel itself.

  I shall try to summarize the foregoing. I have described two causal procedures: the natural or incessant result of endless, uncontrollable causes and effects; and magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy. In the novel, I think that the only possible integrity lies in the latter. Let the former be left to psychological simulations.

  [1932] —Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

  The Total Library

  The fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues. In the first place, it’s a wonder how long it took mankind to think of the idea. Certain examples that Aristotle attributes to Democritus and Leucippus clearly prefigure it, but its belated inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its first exponent, Kurd Lasswitz. (Between Democritus of Abdera and Fechner of Leipzig flow—heavily laden—almost twenty-four centuries of European history.) Its correspondences are well known and varied: it is related to atomism and combinatory analysis, to typography and to chance. In his book The Race with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr. Theodor Wolff suggests that it is a derivation from, or a parody of, Ramon Llull’s thinking machine; I would add that it is a typographical avatar of that doctrine of the Eternal Return which, adopted by the Stoics or Blanqui, by the Pythagoreans or Nietzsche, eternally returns.

  The oldest glimpse of it is in the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I speak of the passage that expounds the cosmogony of Leucippus: the formation of the world by the fortuitous conjunction of atoms. The writer observes that the atoms required by this hypothesis are homogeneous and that their differences derive from position, 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 position.” In the treatise De generatione et corruptione, he attempts to bring the variety of visible things into accord with the simplicity 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 alphabet.

  Three hundred years pass, and Marcus Tullius Cicero composes an inconclusive, skeptical dialogue and ironically entitles it De natura deorum [On the Nature of the Gods]. In the second book, one of the speakers argues: “I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade himself that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.”69

  Cicero’s typographical image had a long life. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, it appears in an academic discourse by Pascal; Swift, at the beginning of the eighteenth, emphasizes it in the preamble to his indignant “Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul,” which is a museum of commonplaces, similar to Flaubert’s later Dictionnaire des idées recues.

  A century and a half later, three men support Democritus and refute Cicero. After such an enormous space of time, the vocabulary and the metaphors of the polemic have
changed. Huxley (who is one of these men) does not say that the “golden characters” would finally compose a Latin verse if they were thrown a sufficient number of times; he says that a half dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, pro duce all the books in the British Museum.70 Lewis Carroll (one of the other refuters) observes in the second part 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 possible 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 publishes 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 orthographic symbols, not the words of a language. The number of such elements—letters, spaces, brackets, suspension marks, numbers—is reduced and can be reduced even further. The alphabet could relinquish the q (which is completely superfluous), the x (which is an abbreviation), and all the capital letters. It could eliminate the algorithms in the decimal system of enumeration or reduce them to two, as in Leibniz’s binary notation. It could limit punctuation to the comma and the period. There would be no accents, as in Latin. By means of similar simplifications, Lasswitz arrives at twenty-five symbols (twenty-two letters, the space, the period, the comma), whose recombinations and repetitions encompass everything possible to express 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. (Wolff’s The Race with the Tortoise expounds the execution and the dimensions of that impossible enterprise.)

  Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Navalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat’s theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn’t publish, Urizen’s books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be mean ingless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal far ragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page.

  One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, 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 affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.

  [1939] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  A Fragment on Joyce

  Among the works I have not written and will not write (but which in some way, however mysterious and rudimentary, justify me) is a story eight or ten pages long whose profuse first draft is titled “Funes the Memorious,” and which in other, more chastened, versions is called “Ireneo Funes.” The protagonist of this doubly chimerical fiction is a typically wretched compadrito living in Fray Bentos or Junin around 1884. His mother irons clothes for a living; the problematic father is said to have been a tracker. Certainly the boy has the blood and the silence of an Indian. In childhood, he was expelled from primary school for having slavishly copied out two chapters, along with their illustrations, maps, vignettes, block letters, and even a corrigendum. . . . He dies before the age of twenty. He is incredibly idle: he spends virtually his entire life on a cot, his eyes fixed on the fig tree in the backyard, or on a spiderweb. 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 provides the explanation. The deceased was perhaps the only lucid man on earth. His perceptions and memory were infallible. We, at first glance, perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, every leaf and grape on a vine. He knew the shapes of the southernmost clouds in the sunrise of April 30, 1882, and he could compare 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 pneumonia, and his incommunicable life was the richest in the universe.

  My story's magical compadrito may be called a precursor of the coming race of supermen, a partial Zarathustra of the outskirts of Buenos Aires; indisputably, 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 speak of what Finnegans 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 indecipherably chaotic to the unprepared reader. Everyone knows that Stuart Gilbert, its official interpreter, has revealed that each of the novel's eighteen chapters corresponds 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 imperceptible and laborious correspondences had only to be announced for the world to honor the work's severe construction and classic discipline. Among these voluntary tics, the most widely praised has been the most meaningless: James Joyce's contacts with Homer, or (simply) with the Senator from the département du Jura, M. Victor Berard.

  Far more admirable, without a doubt, is the multitudinous diversity of styles. Like Shakespeare, like Quevedo, like Goethe, like no other writer, Joyce is less a man of letters than a literature. And, incredibly, he is a literature within the compass of a single volume. His writing is intense, as Goethe's never was; it is delicate, a virtue whose existence Quevedo did not suspect. I (like the rest of the universe) have not read Ulysses, but I read and happily reread certain scenes: the dialogue on Shakespeare, the Walpurgisnacht in the whorehouse, the questions and answers of the catechism: “They drank in jocoserious silence Epp's massproduct, the creature cocoa.” And, on another page: “A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost, his name moon-foaming, his eyeballs stars.” And on another: “Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled.”71

  Plenitude and indigence coexist in Joyce. Lacking the capacity 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 omnipotence that can without exaggeration or imprecision be likened to Hamlet or the Urn Burial. . . . Ulysses (as everyone knows) is the story of a single day, within the perimeter of a single city. In this voluntary limitation, it is legitimate to perceive something more than an Aristotelian elegance: it can legitimately be inferred that for Joyce every day was in some secret way the irreparable Day of Judgment; every place, Hell or Purgatory.

  [1941] —Translated by Esther Allen

  The Nothingness of Personality

  Intention.

  I want to tear down the exceptional preeminence now generally awarded to the self, and I pledge to be spurred on by concrete certainty, and not the caprice of an ideological ambush or a dazzling intellectual prank. I propose to prove that personality is a mirage mai
ntained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality. I want to apply to literature the consequences that issue from these premises, and erect upon them an aesthetic hostile to the psychologism inherited from the last century, sympathetic 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 slothful inability to gauge the proofs the writer adduces and a vague trust in the latter’s rectitude. But once the book has been closed and the reading has dispersed, little remains in his memory except a more or less arbitrary synthesis of the whole reading. To avoid this evident disadvantage, I will, in the following paragraphs, cast aside all strict and logical schemas, and amass a pile of examples.