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Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal PointsLisa Block de Behar

a

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Borges, the Aleph, and OtherCardinal Points

Lisa Block de Behar

Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo

Translated by Alfred Mac Adam

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,

andObra selecta de Emir Rodrguez Monegal(Editorial Ayacucho), among

other works of literary criticism. Block de Behar was director of Commu-

nication 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 discontinuouslyremembered antecedents. For example, Ernest Renan, in the Au lecteur

preface to Caliban, declares that Shakespeare est lhistorien de leter-

nite.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)

2. Jorge Luis Borges,

Emma Zunz, Obras

completas. Emece,

Buenos Aires, 1974,

p.568.


Historia de laeternidad (1936).

Emece, Buenos Aires,

1953.

4. Ernest Renan, Drames

Philosophiques.

Calmann-Levy Editeurs,

Paris, 1888, p.4.


Isidoro Acevedo,

Cuaderno San Martn

(1929). Obra poetica.

Emece, Buenos Aires,

1977, p.95

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

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

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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

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

6. Jorge Luis Borges, Siete

noches, p.67.

7. Edward Said,

Orientalism . Vintage

Books: New York, 1979,

p.267.

5. Jorge Luis Borges, Las

mil y una noches, Siete

noches p.57.

8 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

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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 thatthe 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 todistance it from specific geographic circumstances and bring it meta-

phorically 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 avox 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 ofutopia, 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 anddomestic 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 sphere 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.

10. Pierre Macherey, Borges

et le recit fictive, Pour

une theorie de la

production litteraire,

Paris, 1966. Quoted in

Enrique Pezzoni, lector deBorges: 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.

9. Roland Barthes, Pierre

Loti: Aziyade,El grado

cero de la escritura

seguido de Nuevos

ensayos crticos, Mexico,

1973, pp.238/240.

Borges, the Aleph, and Other Cardinal Points 9

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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 Borgesassign to the archetypes has been suspended, the advances of technolo-

gical progress no longer address the habits of a static body but of one in

motion, subjected to the incongruities of accelerated spaces, lespace-

vitesse,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 solitarysilhouettes 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 writingsopening a place(a space

and an origin), at the same time that it displaces or suppresses it.Mallarmesays 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 sciencefiction 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.

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

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.


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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 themise en abimeand the Platonic cave, where the shadowsof 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 mihrab17, 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.


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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 consecu-

tiveness of discourse orders the vertige de la notation22: 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 chaoticenumeration. 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

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.

23. Ibidem .

22. Roland Barthes, Leffet

du reel, In R. Barthes, R.

Bersani, Ph. Hamon, M.

Riffaterre, I. Watt,

Litterature et Realite,

Paris, 1982, p.86.


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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 introdu-cing 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 alibrary 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 ofThe

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.

25. Franc Schuerewegen, All

is False(Balzac),

Poetique 1333 , Fevrier,

2003, Paris, pp.3/13.

24. Henrquez Urena had

contributed to an issue

ofSur seeking to

vindicate Borges, edited

by JoseBianco. 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 sentin, according to Edgardo

Cozarinsky, works of

nationalist tendency

linked to the deplorable

international tendencies

of 1942.


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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 defictio-

nalizing it or elevating it to a second degree, have probably inspired the

boutades of John Barth: [Borgess] ficciones are not only footnotes toimaginary 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 outSeuils(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

disputablehors-texteor into its equally disputable margins.

Genettes book is relevant here not only because of that observation butbecause it was in 1985 and in Montevideo when I showed him a little-

known 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 thezaguan, 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 ofzaguanes, 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 rechercheor more vulgar, of a

poetics based, according to his own words, on the discovery of hiddenmeanings 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 likecamelofor 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

26. John Barth,The Friday

Book: Essays and Other

Nonfiction. New York,

1984, p.74.

27. Gerard Genette,

Metalepse. Paris, 2004.


Palabras finales.

(Prologo breve y

discutidor), Antologa

de la moderna poesa

uruguaya. Buenos Aires,

1927.


Eplogo, El Aleph,

Obras Completas, p.629.

30. Alphons Knauth,

Literaturlabor: la muse

au point; Fur eine neue

Philology, Reinbach-

Merzbach, 1986.


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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 andother 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 ofThe History

of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empirean assertion that is false*/the

absence of camels in theKoran. 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

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 ofBorges 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 notpart. . . 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

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.

31. Arthur Koestler,The Act

of Creation. London,

1964.


8/10/2019 the Aleph

11/11

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 Jabes

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 Orientwhere 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

world. In the shadows of the zaguan, the perfumes of a tree-lined street or

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, withoutnaming it, names it:

How to define the South? The easy temptation would be to define it by old houses,

by the arches ofzaguanes, 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.

37. Emir Rodrguez

Monegal, Jorge Luis

Borges: a Literary

Biography. New York,

1978, p.168.


advenimiento de Buenos

Aires, Crtica, BuenosAires, November 30,

1956: in Borges: textos

recobrados 1956/1986.

2003.


mapa secreto, Crtica,

Buenos Aires, October

20, 1956, in Textos

recobrados.


the Aleph

Documents

Transcript of the Aleph